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Renfri has imagined thrusting a blade between Stregobor’s ribs so many times that the reality is almost a letdown. There’s no kick of euphoria from the dagger into her hands, rushing up her arms into her brain, tingling in her belly and her toes. No weight is lifted from her, making her light enough to float.
This isn’t a surprise, exactly. For all that he’s darkened her sky for years, she knows he’s just a human, and his flesh parts like any human’s does. His blood smells the same in the musty market air. It’s just that maybe, somewhere deep inside, in the heart Stregobor would swear is deformed and calcified, she thought everything would change. The end, finally, of her personal eclipse.
She watches herself plunge the dagger into his chest as if in a hall of mirrors. Images on images, the world folding on itself, all those fantasies collapsing into a moment that’s over far too quickly as he falls. Her blood is rushing in her ears loudly enough to blur her senses, but she thinks the smugness leaves his face. She thinks fear replaces it, in the last moment of his life. Maybe that’s wishful thinking.
What she’s certain of is this: His voice cuts off. He hits the ground. She slits his throat, just to be sure of things; his blood flees, his heart stops, and she is free.
It will have to be enough.
This is what freedom is, she thinks an hour later, walking down a dusty road away from Blaviken, a lock of her hair sticky with blood and falling into her face. The air is fresh and clean now that she has some distance from the village. It’s the same air she smelled on her way in, but she grabs hold of it as if to prove something. Lungs filled as far as they can stretch, because she can fill them, and they’re hers.
After another mile, a family passes her, their mules loaded up with possessions. Rather than advising them to choose any other town, she gives a polite, neutral nod of greeting. But they double-take, eyes widening. The little boy tugs on his mother’s sleeve, staring at Renfri like she’s a monster. The mother shushes him, turns her face away, and hurries the others along.
For an insane moment, she wonders if they can see what she is. She never really believed Stregobor’s talk of internal mutations—it always struck her as an excuse to touch them on the inside, the Black Sun girls, and get his fingers wet with their blood. Yet sometimes she wonders if it’s the mutations she’s always felt like a growth inside her, bitter and hot and pulsing.
The day she turned ten, she tried to run away. The servants dragged her back before she’d gone a mile, and they wrestled her before her mother, mud on Renfri’s face and her captor’s blood beneath her fingernails. Her mother looked disappointed, lips pursed as she looked her over, the monstrous child the world had cursed her with. “If only you’d been a boy,” she said, and it was neither the first nor the last time Renfri heard those words.
A girl born under the Black Sun. It was the first part that mattered more than the second, she thought as a child. Sometimes she still thinks that.
The family is almost past, but the mother sneaks another horrified look. The little boy is still staring, neck craned back. She wants to scream at them to tell her what they see.
Then, as she turns her head, she feels the skin of her neck pull tight. She reaches up to touch, and her fingers come away tacky and red. There’s blood all over her face and throat, Stregobor’s blood, splattered across her skin, and she throws her head back and laughs. The laugh goes on and on; she couldn’t stop it if she tried.
The family hastens around the bend and out of sight.
It’s just Renfri and her voice, cracking and gasping as she runs out of breath. When she quiets at last, the birds pipe up again, filling the air with their call and response. Below is the rhythm of her boots, scuffing the packed dirt road.
Renfri hears water and follows it into the woods, where a stream tumbles between stones. She checks the area, strips, and wades in, keeping a dagger close to hand. The stream is surprisingly deep for its size—in places the water reaches midthigh. Carefully, she lowers herself to a crouch, hissing as the cold bites down. Then she takes a deep breath and ducks her head below the surface. With her eyes still open, she can watch the blood leave her skin in wispy spirals, coloring the water in the instant before the current whisks it away.
She surfaces and scrubs the caked blood from her skin. Then she wets her hair and combs her fingers through it, squeezing until the water runs clear. The stains on her clothes will have to wait; at least she wasn’t wearing white.
Renfri wedges herself between two boulders and tips her head back, staring at the overlapping leaves above.
Maybe she’ll learn a trade. Blacksmithing, say. Or she could hire herself out as a mercenary. Or teach swordplay. Is that possible for her? Could she make it possible? Soon Renfri will need to dress and keep walking, put as many miles as she can between herself and Blaviken before nightfall, but for now, she drifts, face and feet clear of the water, toes bare and wiggling and crosshatched by the sun.