Chapter Text
His mother hums when she works.
Weighted beneath layers of furs, there is an economy to her motion that is almost hypnotising; here, her long fingers, ungloved and gnarled like bulb-roots, strip the herbs he brings her, with an unhurried measure that speaks to practice. Here, a thin arm darts out to set the boiling pot on a bent iron trivet, while with her other hand she wets a cloth pink with old blood. She is not graceful, but there is a bitter beauty to her efficiency. When she turns, the beads of bone in her hair whisper together percussively.
And she sings to herself, some reaver-songs, some soft wordless nothing. Sometimes he feels he almost recognises the melody. Knelt on the stone of their cave, chewing slowly on a mouthful of mealy pemmican, Kegan watches the shudder of firelight play across his mother’s near-dance, and listens to her voice, and quiet, as it so rarely does, settles in his bones.
Along the shore, where the splintered-glass sea meets wind-driven snow, Kegan squats close to the ground, digging between rocks and ice, pulling some plants from their roots and flowers from their stems. He knows which bitten leaves staunch pain and which shades of green dispel a cough from a man’s lungs. He still feels clumsy and brutish, cold-stiff hands severing these living things.
Here, the wind whistles through snowdrifts and past his ears and kisses his cheeks with fresh powder. The village children don’t often play here this soon after snowfall, but sometimes, when the wind is right, it carries their laughter down to him like an offering; and sometimes–sometimes–there is distant music, flutes over drumbeats over chorused voices. Kegan stands on the shore, basket in hand and roseroot between his teeth, and tilts his head into the wind, but he can never quite follow the tune.
Someone is leaving the cave as he trudges back up the hill with the glare of the setting sun trailing behind him, sharp on the back of his neck and painting the hillside in shades of crystalline orange and pink. A man with a stark cut of a jaw leads a dark-haired girl through the footpath Kegan himself had made on his way down. When he sees Kegan approaching, he ushers the girl behind his legs, and Kegan can only see her in snapshots: clutching her wrist, rolling the joint experimentally, trying to peer around her father’s knees. As he passes, the man doesn’t so much as glance down to meet Kegan’s glare.
His mother doesn’t thank him. After she attends a patient, she always seems smaller, somehow, out of focus like something trapped beneath layers of ice. There is no motion left in her but a gentle swelling of her breath. In silence, he stokes the fire pit absently.
She speaks suddenly: his name, a blunt crack of lightning. He turns to her fully, straightened to his full height. (One day, she tells him, he will outgrow her, though she answers him with harsh silence when he asks her Was my father tall, too?)
She beckons him over with one willowy hand. He goes, not quite reluctantly.
“You went to the village,” she says, her fingertips clutching his jaw. The scrape on his cheek feels raw under her gaze, and his temples hot and swollen. Her tone had been quiet and forceless, but his hackles rise with the childish urge to fight back.
“I gathered the herbs you wanted,” he says. It isn’t an answer.
For a moment he feels unsteady and fragile, unsure of how she will react. Her eyes flicker between his; in the low light, they reflect blank and silvery like an animal, a mark of the magic under the surface.
But she only sighs, and cups his cheek in her hand, and when she swipes her thumb beneath his eye the pain fades by inches, eventually leaving only a faint itch.
His mother hums, softly, only a few notes, something lilting and gentle, something like–like he can almost half-remember–like a lullaby–but no sooner does the thought occur to him than she is dropping her hand and the memory is gone.
Kegan remembers this, now, when the blizzard lances through him and fills his head with noise. Shivering close to the wavering fire, touching the burnt side of his face, he holds the glass-edged memory of his mother like a flame in a storm. For all that she gave him and all that she didn’t, she filled the scant cracks in their home with music, and he hears it on the wind, and he hears it in his sleep. Though there is no village left–though he no longer recalls the way she’d said his name–alone in the snow, he hums along with her, tuneless and sweet, over the wind, over the sound of his own beating heart.