Chapter 1 #2
I’m the opposite. I hate living in the Northlands, I hate the Collecting Day harvest, and I hate this time of year.
Each passing autumn day is another reminder that the Witch Collector is coming, and that Silver Hollow, with its rolling green hills and sun-washed flaxen fields, will soon be buried beneath winter’s suffocating frost.
Though I’m the spitting image of my mother, with our dark hair, tanned skin, and midnight-blue eyes, I like to imagine that I’m more like my father when it comes to living in the North.
He enjoyed telling me stories of his time on the southern coast—about the sun and the beach, and swimming in the waves.
He always spoke about it with such fondness.
Mother wipes a strand of gray hair from her brow and props elegant hands on her wide hips. “I know you’ll think I’m foolish,” she says, “but this will be a good day, my girl. I feel it in my bones.”
Mother’s witch’s marks are few, her magick simple. The swirls of her ability glisten under a fine sheen of cold sweat, faint silver etchings curving up the tawny skin of her slender neck.
Setting the cup of rainwater aside, I force a smile. My fingers are stiff with cold when I sign, “I am sure you are right. I should get to peeling.”
A beat later, I spin on my stool, turning away from her and those knowing eyes.
My smile vanishes as I light the candles that illuminate my work area.
I want to avoid this conversation. This confident speech happens every year, and every year the Witch Collector proves Mother’s intuition—or wishful thinking—wrong.
Still, I could never call my mother foolish for hoping for the best. Though a dreamer with her head in the stars, she’s the wisest person I’ve ever known. It’s just that this day is never good, and this year it might be worse than ever before.
Because of me.
I unlock the worktable drawer and retrieve our salvation.
The reason I’ve found such bravery for taking back our lives: Father’s old knife.
The God Knife, he called it, said to have been fashioned by an Eastland sorcerer from the broken rib of a long-dead god.
It had been missing since the winter after my sister was chosen to go to Winterhold, lost in the snow-covered fields the day Father’s heart stopped beating.
A few weeks ago, a group of farmers found the blade during harvest, half buried in the soil of a soon-to-be fallow field.
Warek—Finn and Hel’s father—recognized the knife by its unusual white granite hilt, strange black blade, and the amber stone set into the pommel.
He made sure the farmers returned the weapon to my mother.
“What’s so special about a God Knife?” I asked one night when I was still small enough to sit on Father’s knee. He carried that knife everywhere he went. There was no question that it was important.
He’d just come in from harvest. I still remember the way he smelled: like musk and field. I traced the green veins in his hand, following his dark witch’s marks—the marks of a reaper—that branched like black tree roots over his knotty knuckles.
“The God Knife is a god remnant,” he answered. “God bone, fashioned by the hand of Un Drallag the Sorcerer. It harkens to the soul of the god from whose body the bone was taken. It can kill anyone and anything, the blessed and the cursed, the forever living and the risen dead—even other gods.”
“Yet you keep it,” I’d signed, not understanding the depth of his words, or that they would one day change my world.
His only reply had been: “Yes, daughter. I keep it. Because I must.”
Like my many thoughts of Nephele, thoughts of my father are never far from my mind.
Why he went to the fields the day he died—alone and in the dead of winter—will forever remain a mystery, as will the question that might haunt me until my last breath: If the blade is so all-powerful, why didn’t he use it to save us?
To save Nephele? He had possession of the knife for years—a god killer, an immortal slayer, a divine weapon.
Never once did he use it against the Frost King.
Mother leans over my shoulder and unties her cloak as she studies the knife with a wary gleam in her eyes. The scent of cloves, fallen leaves, and smoky coldness floats from her skin and clothes.
“You’re sharpening that old thing?” she asks, her voice uneasy.
I sign an innocent reminder. “For the apples.”
She gives me a look. Mother never cared for Father’s tales of finding the God Knife along the Malorian seashore.
She always shushed him when I’d ask him to tell me the story.
Though she’s kept the blade hidden away since its rediscovery, just as Father would’ve wanted her to do, she still doesn’t believe in its myth. She claims the weapon holds no power.
But I believe it does. Because I feel it.
“Carry on, then.” Her voice is still edged with that same unnerved tone as she cocks a suspicious brow. “But we have far better knives for peeling apples, Raina.”
As she turns away, I hold the God Knife’s dull, black edge up to the candlelight. In truth, I need the blade sharp enough to penetrate thick leather and even thicker sinew, and I only trust one pair of hands to make sure it can. Unfortunately, those hands aren’t mine.
I have to get the knife to Finn. He usually works with iron mined near the Mondulak Range, certainly not bone, but his hands are the only ones I trust with this.
I just need an excuse for why taking the time to sharpen this knife is necessary, because Mother is right.
We have plenty of other blades for the day’s work.
I’ve no reason to be so focused on this one—none she’ll believe anyway.
And it’s not as if I can explain my plan.
Something tells me she wouldn’t be too keen to find out that her daughter plans to kidnap the Witch Collector at knifepoint today.
Mother hangs her cloak by the door and crosses to the hearth to pour a mug of mulled apple cider.
When she returns to my side, she watches over my shoulder as I position Father’s whetstone on a piece of oiled cloth.
She once said the knife isn’t made of bone.
After all, what bone is black as night and cold as ice?
But it’s bone. God bone. Not flint or steel. I’m sure of it. Something deep inside that old marrow vibrates with every pass across the whetstone, as though I’m slowly coaxing it back to life.
More sweat beads on my brow as I work, sliding the edge along the stone with careful measure. What if I damage it? Can god bone be damaged?
What really worries me is the obvious. What if the Witch Collector bests me today when I hold this blade to his throat?
Though I’ve prepared for weeks now, my hands still tremble at the thought of standing against him, enough that I falter in my work. Bone catches against stone and nicks my fingertip. I gasp and suck the wound.
Gods’ death. Only I would somehow accidentally kill myself with the very weapon that could save me.
“Raina, be careful.” Mother sets her mug aside and grabs my hand, studying the cut.
She touches my chin, tenderness softening her eyes.
“I know you consider this knife a connection to your father, but maybe Finn should have a look at the blade if you’re so determined to use it.
I’d prefer your beautiful hands intact.”
My pulse quickens. I’ve seen twenty-four winters, yet I feel like a child again. Like a little girl hiding something from her mother. But this is the perfect moment. I couldn’t have designed it any better if I’d tried.
“Finn is probably on his way to the shop,” I sign. “I will take it to him, and I will finish the apples before noon. I promise.”
“Go.” She smiles, though it seems to require great effort. “But don’t be long. The harvest supper won’t prepare itself.”
Relieved, I shove up from the stool, throw on my cloak, and wrap the knife in a piece of animal skin before heading toward the door.
“Raina,” Mother calls. I glance over my shoulder as she crosses the small distance between us.
“You try so hard to hide it,” she says, “yet a mother knows her child. Do not let your loathing of the Witch Collector and the Frost King lead you—or us—to trouble. If you’re going to promise me anything, promise me that. ”
A breath rushes from my lungs as her indigo eyes dart to the bundled knife in my hands, as if she knows my every intention, and guilt and shame squeeze my heart for what I’m about to do. What I must do.
I lean in, kiss her soft cheek, and lie anyway.
“I promise,” I sign, and slip into the cold, gray light of day.