Work Text:
Ersa had sworn long ago that she wouldn’t be made to disappear by the will of small-minded men. Not behind the broken clan of her father, not behind the ownership of a husband, and not behind the role of a Carja palace slave. She might die, but she’d die unbroken with the surge of battle in her veins, showing every damn one of them that she wouldn’t submit.
She’d spent the last seven years showing it, over and over. Ever since the day she’d had enough, and bashed their father over the head one night while he was drunkenly beating on Erend again. She'd been eighteen and grown, but he’d been a half-grown gawky thing at fifteen, and she knew the bones of the arm that had been broken that night still ached in the cold and damp. Fortunate for Erend that the desert was rarely either.
They hadn’t stayed for him to wake up, if he ever did. Their clan name had never passed their lips again. Oseram who had left the Claim tended to not give a shit about a person’s clan–why else would they have left the iron-bound strictures of the ealdormen? So she didn’t know if even now a cruel justice waited for her, wanting to make her suffer deeply for killing her father. A woman raising her hand to a man in Cog Hollow? She’d burn for it.
Well. She’d killed plenty of Carja since, so if her first kill had been yet another miserable bastard looking to threaten and control and enslave, so be it.
As for now, there was more killing to be done. The fires of their war camp lit the night for the second time, and she hoped Jiran looked down from that palace and felt the icy touch of fear working its way down his spine, seeing just how many people had come for him. Seeing they’d arrived there and made camp and not attacked the next day, the casual contempt of an army on his doorstep poised to pounce at their leisure. Avad’s suggestion, that. Cunning, and from such a kind man, almost a little cruel.
Avad, with his words, his way of winning people, who’d won battles they never even had to fight and ended up with entire regiments and villages marching with them. A ragtag band of Oseram freebooters and Carja fugitives, turned into an army. Avad, who knew how to frighten his father, as he’d been frightened by Jiran.
They were here, this little band of freebooters that had been family for damn near four years now. Most of them were still here, anyway. Not Dervahl or Asera, and they were better for it. Not Harlund or Belda, and they were worse for it. Veterans of enough fights to treat tonight like any other night, matter of fact preparations for a battle in the morning, with the jokes and stories and the singing scrape of whetstones on steel to produce a razor’s edge. She eyed them, a leader judging their mood, and finding it solid and true. They’d stand fast, a pack of tough Oseram bastards finally given the chance to take their fight to where it belonged: Jiran, who’d cost far too many of them.
Asajuk was different. Always had been. The Banuk had stood out among that group of Oseram prisoners bound for the Sun Ring like a jay among crows last year. Had joined them, fought with them, been a brother to them. Claimed them as his werak, his clan. But there was always something different about him.
The others were singing a song, rowdy and fierce. Asajuk calmly sat on a boulder, looking at his face in a small hand-mirror in the firelight, putting his paint on and humming his own song to himself. He always did when he had a chance before a fight, and the white-blue-green wedges and triangles on the right half of his face were as familiar now to Ersa and the other Oseram as the feel of their armor.
Nothing like the delicate designs of the Carja that seemed to be all about show and vanity, and which she’d hated seeing every damn day in the palace. The ones she'd had to wear in order to slip away, loathing every moment. Avad wearing them–well, that was different. The rest of them? A bunch of gaudy fops. There was some purpose to the paint, some Banuk thing that she sensed lent him power. She’d never asked. Nobody ever asked much in their little war-clan, because they all understood they had things that bled too much when prodded.
Besides, the Oseram and Banuk seemed too much at odds, all that jawing about spirits and whatnot, whereas an Oseram believed in things you could see and hear and touch. But they’d become kin through battle and bloodshed. They sang that same song of steel.
She approached him. “I never did ask. What’s the face paint mean, Asajuk?”
He looked up at her, face kept carefully expressionless as the paints dried. “Why now? I thought you had no curiosity about it, or else you’d have asked a lot sooner.”
She gestured towards Meridian. “If not now, when?” Victory or annihilation. That was all they had left to them come dawn.
A half-smile crept into the left corner of his mouth, away from the paint. “It means to tell my friends and my enemies both that I’ve survived. I’ve prevailed. No matter what this world has thrown at me. And I’ll survive and prevail come dawn.”
She liked that. Looking at his face, she nodded, understanding. Oseram had nothing like that. What paint they had was rare, and always for a singular occasion. A woman got her husband’s clan-glyph painted on her forehead at the wedding, a mark of ownership. An ealdorman wore the clan-glyph at his father’s funeral to show his rise to take up that mantle. Master artificers had a design they wore upon being granted the rank and opening their own forge to show their status. There was delvers’ paint worn after a first successful delve, or a particularly memorable one to the clan. Those headed out of the Claim had a design for the leaving-feast, farewelled by friends and family to go seek adventure.
There had been no feast, no farewells, no wayfarers’ paint for her and Erend. Just the moonless night and the cold and the rain, and Erend doing his best to hold the pain in, as he always did. She’d learned to fight. He’d learned to take the blows.
Sometimes she could still see their father’s mark on him. Not a clan-glyph, but a claim nonetheless, something deeper, something dark, beneath the skin and close to the bones. Still hearing about what a stupid, useless boy he was, how he’d never amount to a thing, and how ashamed their father was that this was his heir. She’d stopped listening to the shit he spewed at her. Erend hadn’t. Twenty-two now and still thinking he was helpless and looking to her for cues, and she loved him but sometimes she wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled and demand that he stop listening to a man either dead to her or dead outright, stop talking about himself as an incapable big idiot. Stop making him keep living, little brother, damn you.
Survive. Prevail. What else mattered? Maybe she was more akin to Asajuk than she liked to admit. Looking at him, she had a notion. “You don’t have any black paint, do you?”
He shook his head. “Not a color we use. We embrace the blue light, Ersa, not the dark.” But he reached into his paint pouch, handing over a jar. “But here’s some base. If you can find black pigment, though, that’ll do.” He raised an eyebrow–still the left, as the right was drying yet. “What are you planning with it? Some signal thing?”
“Some signal thing,” she agreed, taking the jar of what looked like boar grease and giving him a nod of thanks.
In the Claim, the paint would have been machine grease and forge soot, the lifeblood of the Oseram. She was forged differently. Her flames were the night fires of a war camp, not the glowing heart of a furnace, or a forgewife’s hearth.
There was soot and char left from last night’s fire at the edge of the firepit. She scooped it up in her fingers, pouring it into the boar fat and mixing it until her fingers were dark as they’d often been as a palace slave.
They had laughed at her covered in dirt and muck, the proud Oseram who’d killed a Ravager and two Kestrels reduced to scooping pig shit. Embraced the sun and spotless silk and shining jewelry. An Oseram knew, though. Darkness meant toil and willingness to get down in the dirt. To do what it took. She’d survived. Endured. Done what it took, and she ripped their secrets out with teeth and claws as she left, and used them to gut Jiran’s Carja.
She’d wear the darkness with pride as she took Jiran down. Asajuk must have seen something in her expression, because he held out his mirror. She took it, looking at her face, trying to decide. Oseram had wayfarer and delver’s paints for facing danger, but no paint for war, for a battle like this. So she just let instinct guide her.
One swoop from her temple to the corner of her eye, rounding the eye and curve of cheekbone, and then continuing in a line down her cheek. Sort of like wayfarer’s paint, but leaner, starker, simpler. Nothing extensive that would distract or hide her face from Jiran or anyone else, only a promise and a declaration. We’ve journeyed far, and we’ve come to kick your ass. She’d face Jiran himself tomorrow like this, because she wouldn’t let anyone stand in her way. And she’d paint Erend and anyone else who wanted it with the same, and make Meridian’s defenders shit themselves.
Asajuk looked at her, and gave a slight nod. He didn’t ask what her paint meant, but she suspected he knew.