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Saarn was with Lovataar’s war band—at least, everyone said that Lovataar was its leader, though she acted as if she shouldn’t be—when word came that Ion had won the day in the regional capital. Their foe got the same word at the same time: it was obvious by the knife between the Daevite captain’s shoulder blades. Most of the common soldiers were already gone.
Given the option, few people wanted to die for a Daevite matriarch. Especially a dead one. All of a sudden, the Kalmaktama war band had no one to fight.
The battlefield was scarcely picked over when thoughts turned from relief to celebration. Everyone not needed to tend the slow-healing wounded or to stand sentry, it seemed, was digging in their packs for combs and jewelry and flutes and drums.
Saarn had gotten as far as the first one, and then she’d become stuck.
Her right arm was slow and clumsy, which was only to be expected: it had been severed that morning, and that afternoon she had found it again. She was lucky to be one of Ion’s people, able to make her own dead flesh live again, to bind her arm anew to her shoulder instead of having to leave it for the crows and the vultures. But she didn’t have his skill, or even Lovataar’s or Orok’s. One of them could have used any arm, any hunk of flesh, could have made it theirs and been able to fight or work or write with it; not Saarn, not just yet. She could feel the decay she’d thwarted still in her flesh—not like sepsis, she was already better than that, but like a deep all-encompassing bruise.
And holding her arms up and half-folded to try to comb and braid her hair only made it worse.
She growled at her own body, and heard steps behind her. Saarn turned to see Lovataar behind her, the sun in her hair.
Lovataar’s hair had been dark brown yesterday; now it was pale. Maybe that was Lovataar’s idea of festival dress. It wasn’t so difficult to change the color of one’s hair, once one could craft with flesh. Saarn herself had never bothered—she liked looking like Ion. But Lovataar changed hers often: light, dark, every color but the henna-bright red that the Daevas so admired. Now she had given herself hair the pale off-white of sunbleached linen—a southern thing, if not a Daevite thing.
Of course, if Saarn had seen the same color on a Kalmaktama woman or man, she would have compared it to bone. It wasn’t as if light hair was unheard of, in the north. Dark hair was more common, like Ion’s, like Saarn’s own, but no one ever said Orok didn’t look Adytite.
It made Lovataar look stranger that it was unbraided—loose and somehow clean and orderly as new-retted flax, though she’d been in the fighting with the rest of them and hadn’t, as far as Saarn knew, resorted to the river afterwards. (She had. She’d liked it, even, aside from the sting of the cold water on her right arm.)
“If you’re having trouble with your hair,” she said, slow and cautious, “I can help.”
Saarn couldn’t very well argue that she hadn’t been struggling, so she nodded and followed Lovataar into her tent.
On this campaign at least, Lovataar lived simply, aside from having a tent to herself—which she usually did, when she and Ion were apart. Aside from the living bone of the supports and the bedroll shoved up against the veins of a wall, it was empty.
Saarn bit her lip and passed her her own comb. Lovataar took it graciously as she settled behind her.
You have lovely hair, her mother would have said. You have Ion’s hair, the Adytite grandmothers back in the north might have. But Lovataar was silent as she teased the tangles from Saarn’s hair, starting from the edges with their split ends. She made no comment about those, either.
“Do you have rings?” Lovataar finally asked, and gently touched Saarn’s temples as if she might have thought she meant the ones for fingers or ears—the kind of jewelry Lovataar herself might wear, though today her fingers and ears were all bare.
“I didn’t take my jewelry to war,” she said. Lovataar hummed and went back to combing Saarn’s hair, even though all the tangles were gone.
It had made sense at the time. She hadn’t wanted to lose or break the first nice things she’d ever had to wear, and no one wore temple rings into battle. But now…
It wasn’t that people expected it of her. Ion might call her sister, but no one expected her to look like a great lady’s treasured child, or even a chieftain’s. Everyone in camp had seen her in rags and blood on the battlefield.
She just wished she had her temple rings. The rough set carved from reindeer antler, or the dented but still-shining old bronze ones a woman whose grandchildren all died before her pressed into her hands before she left for this war.
There was more jewelry in the camp than she’d expected. There would be still more once the dancing began tonight. And Saarn liked having rings in her hair.
From behind, Lovataar took her hand, pressed something skin-warm into it and withdrew.
“Will this do? Since you’re fond of serpents.”
They’re supposed to come in pairs, Saarn almost said. But Lovataar knew that, even if she’d never wear Kalmaktama temple rings in her own hair. She just wanted to know if this one would do before she made its mate.
And Lovataar’s soft tone…
In another woman’s voice Saarn might have called that shy, as odd as at it was to use that word of her brother’s Daevite lover.
Rather than follow that thought, Saarn studied the ring.
It was as wide across as her longest finger, wrought thin and delicate from living bone: a serpent with the rough-keeled scales of a viper, tail caught gently between its fangs. Light enough that it could be braided into her hair and not sewn to a band, just rough enough not to slip around. And beautiful.
“Yes,” she said. That felt inadequate, so she added, “It’s a good snake,” even though the words sounded childish in her own ears. It looked like the ones she’d been warned away from when she was young. (As if she wasn’t now.) A southern creature, like she had been and like Lovataar still was. Saarn ran her tongue over her teeth, pausing on her canines as her fingers returned to the serpent’s fangs.
The sound of quick-grown bone distracted her from the half-formed thought, and a moment later Saarn felt the second ring on her temple and her cheek as Lovataar began to braid her hair. Someone else might have compared the two to be certain they matched; not her. But Saarn thought Lovataar was right to be confident in her work. They felt the same to her too.
Where did Lovataar ever learn to braid hair? Great ladies never did their own, let alone anyone else’s. But Lovataar’s hands were gentle and precise. Over, under, around the ring, sure and careful. Just tight enough to be snug, and never enough to hurt.
Did she learn from one of the old women who treated Saarn as a stray grandchild, or was she judging the pressure by the effect on Saarn’s flesh? That was how Saarn would do it. But she found herself hoping that Lovataar had had a teacher. That she wasn’t always as much an outsider to the Kalmaktama as she sometimes seemed, here in the land where she had once ruled.
When Lovataar reached for the first serpent ring, Saarn was oddly reluctant to let go of it. She wondered if Lovataar was smiling behind her, as she felt the warmth of Saarn’s hand on the bone—but of course she didn’t turn to look. She kept her head still, as her mother would have wanted her to, while Lovataar fixed the ring in Saarn’s hair, while she twisted and pinned the ends of the braids.
Saarn knew when Lovataar was done only when she rose. She jumped up to follow her, rings tapping at her cheekbones as she did, and they almost collided. Lovataar laughed as she dodged, and then froze, as if she’d startled herself with the noise.
When she held out her hand to return Saarn’s comb, Saarn took it with one hand while she tucked the comb away with the other. She almost offered to return the favor—but there was music outside the tent already. The celebration had started, and anyway, she had no rings to braid into Lovataar’s hair.
Instead, she said, “You should come dance,” and Lovataar let Saarn pull her out of the tent and into the Kalmaktama.