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Doriath is unseasonably hot today, even for the usual glaring heat that California calls late September. Haleth pulls her shirt-collar open as she enters the bunkhouse, sweating, and ducks a little to survive the low doorway without suffering a clout to the head. When she was a girl, her father had promised her that she would be as tall as he was, once she was grown. It is impossible now to tell for certain if his prediction was accurate or not, but she is indeed taller than most men, broad-shouldered and sinewy, lithe and quiet as any hunting thing. She has been called beautiful, to both her face and to her back, but she cares little for that; she knows she does not look like her mother looked, nor how Thingol’s secret daughter looks, most radiant of all the radiant things kept in her father’s house. Haleth, last Chief of the Haladin, prefers to think of herself as something safer, something stronger, than beautiful.
Of the Haladin very few remain. Haleth is one of the youngest, even though she is scarcely sixteen. Her twin brother would have been even younger, even if he were not dead and trapped forever in the half-growth of childhood, loving and reckless and young, too young.
Her grandmother, who survived the massacre, lived long enough to disapprove of Haleth’s lack of a husband and children with which to propagate the Haladin blood. But Haleth has never longed for the weight of a child in her arms, or clinging about her knees; has never desired the feeling of another body in her bed. What good in children, if she cannot provide even for the Haladin that remain? What use a husband, if she does not want a child?
So you might be less lonely, her grandmother had said, her sharp eyes unexpectedly sad. And Haleth had climbed to her feet and beaten her dusty leather hat against her knee before she jammed it back atop her head; had pushed her tongue hard against the backs of her teeth as she tried to find words to fit.
Oh, Grandmother, she had said at last, as she leaned to kiss her on the cheek goodbye: I will be lonely until the day I die. There’s no husband that could fix that. It is like I lost a limb, all that time ago: what use a third arm, if it’s a leg I’m missing?
Her grandmother died, that winter. Thirty of their people died, that winter, elders and women and babes.
That spring, Haleth gathered the survivors, and began the long march South.
(If she breathed a prayer to her father, as she took those first steps—if she breathed a prayer to her grandmother, and her mother, and her brother—she knew that no one heard her.)
*
“Nebraska Territory,” she says now, sharp as anything, like she always is without trying. Her mother had called it her gift. Since it was a gift, she has always been proud of it, except when it made her brother cry.
But that was—a long, long time ago now, damn it. A—long time.
Wister, sprawled long and gangly against the foot of his cot as he chaws at whatever foul crud he wasted his wages on this time, sniffs loudly. “Aw, Hell,” he says, meditatively.
Haleth does not tell him to shut his trap, as her own private feelings run much the same way. But she does give him a warning frown, before she turns to survey the rest of her sorry band. There are eighteen of them, herself included: cattle-drivers, men call them, or cowboys. Haleth—privately, when she is very tired—calls them family, even though only ten are Haladin-born. Those ten are mainly boys she grew up with, all older than her, with only three having been full-grown when the yrch came.
Those ten are all that is left of the menfolk of her tribe, and they follow her—the girl who should have been their people’s story-keeper, who should have been one of their brides. The girl who they alone remember was a chief’s daughter once, with bone rings in her ears, and with a name that promised a future.
(With a brother, laughing at her side.)
Wister is tow-headed and blue-eyed, and he does not know the meaning of her name, but he follows her too.
*
(She has always been followed. First, by her foolish, inquisitive, hot-handed brother. Then, by her father’s friends, who turned to her when they saw her father was dead. Then, by the rest of her people, when crept back to stand amidst the ash and blackened bones that was all that remained of everything they loved. She had been a child yet, when she led her people from their long, green home, and did not look behind, and still: they followed her.)
(Haleth thinks of herself, sometimes, as a tall tree in a field, in the midst of a storm. People cannot help but come to her for shelter, no matter how she seems to call the lightning down.)
*
Thingol insists on using a translator in his dealings with most people, but not with Haleth. When she first arrived at his door, half-starved and grim and a girl only fourteen years old, followed by a ragged, wraith-like people, he had asked her her business only in Spanish, which his Frenchman translated into slightly accented English. Haleth, looking Thingol square in the eye, had responded in the Haladin tongue.
It had been that, Luthien told her later, laughing, that had made Thingol take a liking to her.
(She is friends with Luthien, inasmuch as Thingol allows Luthien to have friends. Inasmuch as Haleth allows friends for herself.
(Luthien had laughed, because that is who Luthien is, and Haleth had not, because that is who she is. They have an understanding, about these kinds of things. Luthien is curious about how it is to spend most of your life under the open sky, to sleep beneath stone and tree, to ford rivers and cross mountains. Haleth tells her only the good things, the kind things. She does not, in her turn, wonder what it is like, to reach womanhood without ever leaving your father’s house or seeing any lands other than where you were born. That is the kind of aching thinking she must be careful to do without.)
Thingol had taken a liking to her then, and had agreed to let the remainder of her people live on his land, under his protection. In turn, Haleth agreed to work with him. As a traveling cattle-driver, she is free to travel long distances and she is observant; she is armed; she and Thingol both know she is not entirely concerned with only the welfare of his property. Bauglir is building a railroad to cut the world in half; Bauglir is raising armies in the north. Bauglir has slaves, and those he could not enslave, he has left dead, dead, dead.
(She did not know Bauglir’s name until she met with Thingol. She has not gone a day since without it burning like swallowed poison in her throat.)
Bauglir is yet hidden, but his scouts and his patrols—those can bleed. Those can disappear, in the vast wilderness between California and Kansas.
And so: Nebraska. Thingol told her, today, that he has made a purchase of new livestock from a rancher in Nebraska Territory, and she and her band are to make their way to the ranch in time to beat the snow, spend winter there to care for the beasts, and then drive the herd south once the spring melt sets in. It will not be a pleasant journey, nor a pleasant winter; privately, Haleth had hoped to spend a few more weeks yet in sunny California, where her people have tentatively, at last, begun to thrive.
And yet: she had not argued. There are rumors coming in from the East; rumors about Bauglir, Thingol said. Something about fire, and murder.
Keep your ears and eyes open, Haleth, Thingol said, in his perfect English.
Haleth had nodded, and it was enough.
*
“When do we ride?” Asks Wachiwi, from the back of the room. There are cards in her hands; by the looks of the pile of oddments and coins on the table at her elbow, she was winning at whatever game Haleth interrupted. Wachiwi is one of only two other women in Haleth’s band, small and light footed where Haleth is tall and stubbornly-boned. She wears mannish trousers and a canvas coat, as Haleth does, but her neckerchiefs are bright, warm colors, and she wears her long, black hair in a thick braid. Her hair had been cut short, when Haleth first met her; in the years since they began taking quiet vengeance on Bauglir’s men in the wilds, she has stopped her mourning.
Haleth untucks her shirt, which is sticking with sweat, and fans herself with her hat.
“Tomorrow,” she says, almost apologetically. “First light, and making time as fast as we can; it’s late already to beat the snows. Thingol has supplies ready for us. We’ll be bunkering down for winter; save whatever money you haven’t wasted yet for warm clothes and socks, you hear?”
Wachiwi smiles, sweetly as a cat new-fed; her opponents at the card table look dismayed. Unmoving, Wister snorts.
“Spot of snow sounds mighty fine, about now,” he drawls. “Lord, it’s gettin’ hotter each year.”
“Mind you don’t regret your wishing,” Wachiwi calls, sweeping up her winnings. She stands, rolling her shoulders back. “Haleth, I’ll check the tack. And Pepper was needing shoeing, last I saw, but I think Henry was to have seen to that on Thursday, if you mind making certain?”
Haleth nods, and heads back to the door. She’ll sit and have a drink with her team tonight, but for now there’s work to be done. Provisions to distribute, gear to check and replace, a route to map.
Bullets to divvy out. Guns to oil.
*
We call them yrch, Haleth told Thingol, when she was fourteen and starving and too angry to be scared. They killed my mother, and my brother, and my father. They killed almost everyone, for no reason at all.
Thingol had leaned forward in his great chair, steeling his long fingers. He had dismissed Daeron; it was only the two of them in his great room, alone.
But they did not kill you, Thingol had said. Haleth had stared back at him, unblinking.
No.
Poor child. Do you wish they had?
Haleth had not flinched.
No. They are the ones who will wish they had.
*
Haleth, sixteen and sweating, emerging again into the searing sunlight, pulls her hat low, and her collar up. It will be a long road north and east, across unsettled land. Half of her heart is eager to be gone; it is the half she chooses to listen to now, as she strikes across the beaten dirt towards the stables. She does not smoke, but Wister does, and after even that short time in the bunkhouse the smell of strong tobacco is in her clothes, in her hair, inescapable.
So many things, inescapable.
It will be a hard winter.