“You have always wondered about greatness, but you have never imagined it. Not for yourself, but for the imagining of yourself… But what use is the dream of a dream to anyone?” Wolf’s voice buzzed like a fletcher’s saw. He paced like his namesake in front of the three maidens the villagers had brought him. Their heads were bowed in reverence to his beyond-nature, his resemblance to a wild, divine thing. But there was no wolf’s skin upon his head and shoulders now. Before them stood a wolf’s soul in a man’s flesh. His flesh was, decidedly, not as compelling as his name, but his saffron colored eyes flashed with all of a wolf’s cunning.
He gave the blonde one among their number a sneer of displeasure when she glanced once at him and shivered before returning her blue eyes to her toes like a stutter-made-posture.
Wolf growled, “You are everything this place has to offer… and yet you are nothing. You’ve seen nothing. You’ve been nothing. You are moles on the backside of the world, a moment from my slice and your oblivion… My slice always makes beauty out of the world’s backside.”
The dark-eyed brunette shifted uncomfortably on the balls of her bare feet and she scratched at the back of one hand slowly, as if she figured he wouldn’t notice her nervousness. Wolf could smell it on her like sweat.
Wolf whispered, “You don’t even care what I’m saying, let alone understand it. It’s not your place to understand. It is your place to obey… Isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He stopped his pacing and stood in front of the redheaded girl in the middle and said, “Who among you will He choose? What basket does the apple picker pick when all His baskets are empty? This harvest is no ripened bounty… It is a formality.”
The redhead asked her toes, “Then why did Owl ready three of us, when one would suffice… Wolf?” Despite not moving, the other two girls stared out of the corner of their eyes at the copper-haired maiden, their lips parting in mirror symmetry to inaudibly gasp in horror at the unbidden words. Then, in tandem, their lashes played together and their dark, dilated pupils pushed up against their eyelids to regard Wolf almost coquettishly for reaction, anxious to witness his rumored wrath.
Wolf narrowed his eyes at the girl with hair like apples.
Then he smiled.
They told Rowena that it was chance, but she had been the only red haired baby of her birth year. She knew it was no accident that she was chosen for the offering. After she turned seventeen, she was actually relieved. Her whole life, she had agonized over chance. Maybe another family would come to her valley, towing along a redheaded girl of their own, born of the same cycle as her, and offer her a vain hope… But when the offering came and went and she was chosen for sacrifice, all her anxiety disappeared and resignation took root. She told herself she was even happy with the conviction of her fate.
She was treated to wine and food beyond her family’s standing. She ate her fill at the feet of Chieftain Raven and Chieftess Crow. She stood proud as they introduced the other two girls to her. Her chin was even level with the ground when she was stripped naked and borne before the whole village in parade. The other girls had wrapped their arms around their shoulders and shivered against the winter chill, but Rowena had only swayed in the wind like her mother’s drying roses, hanging from their hovel’s sill, waiting to die.
Death did not scare her. Few things did.
Her fear over leaving her family was only tempered by the promise that her relations would be paid after her exit from this world. Her sacrifice would guarantee her family’s well being for the next two generations, and prevent her little brother’s progeny from being entered into the offering themselves, no matter the scarcity of the village’s lot.
After the parade, she and the other two maidens were crowned in rosemary and pine needles; clothed in fine, cream-colored linens. Her feet were washed in warm, fragrant water; her nails clipped and painted with crushed shells and cornflower petals. Her hair was pinned into her crown, making an auburn wreath about her copper-sheathed skull.
Owl came into their tent and their attendants left their too-warm sanctuary. Owl took off her raptor claw headpiece and Rowena stared into the wide eyes of a strikingly beautiful woman, whose only outstanding feature was the shine playing off her bald head. Owl said in a low, quick voice, “He will only take one of you. His appetite is shallow. He will send the other two away, alive.”
The blonde and the brunette were shocked, but Rowena was not. The blonde managed a hopeful smile and the brunette wrung her hands with joy. But Rowena did not hope to live. She hoped He would choose her so that the other two would live. They did not share her resignation. They were not grateful that their families would be taken care of. They were not proud of their privilege. They were weak. Rowena would not be weak.
She had been born to die.
Owl met each of the girls’ gazes and smiled, but when her eyes met Rowena’s, her smile fell. Her voice was like the caress of fletching against lips as she said, “We never know of His choice. None return. Let history remain unimpeachable. Do not return here if you are sent away. Listen to His wish and go where He bids. His wishes are as history.”
“And our names?” the blonde asked.
“Leave them behind,” Owl said. “You will take new ones where he bids.”
“Should we get to choose new ones?” the brunette asked.
Owl was dismissive. She waved a hand like a limb of her inner nature and blinked slowly, purposefully. “I do not care what you do, Girl. Your futures are not of our design. You must follow the law of whatever master you come upon, and if you come upon none, you abide by your own rules.”
This news brightened the duo’s spirits considerably more, but Rowena was resolved. Muddling her resignation with doubt over her own fate only made her stomach clench with the unease of her first sixteen years.
She already had a purpose, and its design was not tangled up in agency, but in destiny. Order by definition. Not chaos in uncertainty.
She demanded in a low voice, “If none return, then how do you know the unchosen yet live?”
Owl stared at her, then only donned her raptor head piece and took them to the shaman’s longhouse where they were met with Wolf and his cryptic words and foreboding aura. When he smiled, for the first time, Rowena was frightened. She was scared that he was planning something for her that would keep her from her destined fate…
They were blindfolded and escorted out of the valley on foot. She and her accompaniment slipped along in silence for three days, making their way up the mountain along the only carved path gouged into its great, rocky side like a serpentine scar.
When her blindfold was cut from her face and she recovered from her momentary blindness, she discovered that she was the only maiden in the group. She did not know what had become of the others. The figures about her were adults covered in furs and scales and skins. For all she knew, her fellow maidens might have been among their number, having passed some unspoken test; given their true names.
Tears filled the corners of her eyes.
The truth made ice upon her cheeks.
Wolf had picked her.
There was no such thing as chance in the offering.
Did He even choose? Or was He a fabrication?
Her tribe, her village, her family…
Who was really to blame for her death?
What was it all for, this great sacrifice of hers?
Why was she chosen to die?
A hand touched her shoulder and pushed her gently toward the cliff's edge, where the top of the mountain curled on itself like a shepherd's hook. It was dark and the summit was cloaked in shy flurries of strength-sapping snow. She could not see anything beyond the precipice that kissed the tips of her painted toes. She felt weary and cold and the snow burned against her flesh, but she stood tall, like a branch had been lashed to her back.
She had convinced herself she was happy.
Now, she felt only defeat, and had to force herself not to betray that. She would leave with dignity then… as it was the only thing she had left.
The one holding her shoulder said in her ear, “I am Fox, Rowena. You will be remembered as a woman, and not as an animal. Know your spirit will return to us and be given a true name, like me. Rowena means red, but you are more than just color. You are more than man-flesh.”
“If I am more than man-flesh, I will return,” she whispered back. She didn’t care if she came back. She hated them all for not wanting her. She hated Wolf for choosing her to die. She hated that her death had nothing to do with wild divinity and everything to do with her being… not enough? She didn’t know why! She didn’t know what it was all for.
“You are more,” Fox reassured her, then gave her a nudge.
She could have fought. But then, what of her family?
Rowena spread her arms, kept her eyes open, and jumped.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
