Varetrix stumbled into the great hall and caught herself on the edge of a small table, panting. A fish head lay on the surface, staring at her. Her late mother’s jesters came right behind, hoping to win her favor now, undoubtedly.
“She didn’t even know who I was…” Varetrix muttered.
“Who, my… dear Chieftain?” one of them asked.
Who…?
Varetrix’s claws dug into the wood. They flew back as she flipped the table over.
“The bloody Witch! She comes and screws up everything; she kills…” Her breath caught. “And she doesn’t have the courtesy of knowing my name!”
“Oh, b-but that’s easy to solve. We’ll make her know it as she dies.”
Another one raised a clawed hand high. “And remember it in hell!”
Funny…
“That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”
The harpies bowed gracefully.
They’d been useful in helping her gather the army, and even encouraged her to take revenge…
Now she wondered how wise it was to keep them around.
“Is that what you told my mother?” She stared at the harpies, unamused. “Over, and over… are you telling me now that I shouldn’t hate Zaphyrix because of you? That all that bullshit with the lost castle…”
“Should we send flocks to reclaim it? Sooner or later—”
“No!” Spit flew from Varetrix’s mouth. “Are you stupid?! We are nothing—NOTHING!!!”
The army she spent months gathering had been crushed in a day. Her claws trembled as she remembered the magic snowstorm that brought them to heel. Only a fool couldn’t see that they’d been utterly defeated.
The harpies goggled at her obliviously.
Apparently, she was surrounded by fools.
She paced across the room. “Did my mother have a council? Something… anything, someone to help her—me—to get things done around here?”
“Us, of course—”
“Not you!” Varetrix dragged them out of the hall by the wings, one by one. “Find me someone with half a wit in this tribe!”
“And take this garbage, this filth, out of my hall!” She swept down and hurled slimy fish at them. She tried kicking a cask away, but her foot broke straight through, splashing her with stale beer. “Argh!”
“Should we—”
“GO!”
The harpies scurried away, but Varetrix doubted they’d come back with anything useful.
Servants came and went across her mother’s fortified compound. Granaries and lodgings emerged from the rocks, but it was otherwise isolated from the rest of the tribe. She’d spent most of her time in Bjornhavn and only visited the compound when she had to.
Varetrix left and walked down the treacherous, sinuous mountain paths—their streets—to clear her head and get a sense of what she was working with.
Dark holes sliced through the rocks along the way, gaps under the boulders.
I can’t believe those idiots…
Despite what she'd said before, though, she couldn’t bring herself to stop hating Zaphyrix.
She chose to listen to them—
A crooked claw touched her leg from below. Varetrix jumped back with a hiss.
The creature crawled back into the shadow.
“What the hell was that?” she muttered, and continued down the path.
Ahead, more raggedy creatures crawled into view.
She was about to hiss and bare her claws when she realized:
These were harpies.
“What…?”
Most of them were sickly and thin, frostbite eating away at their unfeathered parts.
She knew they were poor, but this went far deeper.
They followed her as she stepped back.
Varetrix flapped her wings, surging above the mountains, and for the first time she saw, or perhaps allowed herself to behold, the exact degree of her tribe’s century-long degradation. She swallowed. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
Did Zaphyrix know about this…?
Living in caves and crevices across the mountains, her people piled under whatever they could use as shelter from the harsh weather. Her old cottage in Bjornhavn was a palace compared to this, and the fish—the side hustle she used to supplement her income—seemed to be the only thing that kept them from eating their own eggs.
She wanted to snap her eyes shut and pretend she’d never seen anything, fly back to the hall, maybe ask the harpies for a joke, crack open a cask of beer—any distraction would’ve been better than facing the truth:
It was preferable to die in the south than to live like this. It seemed almost too late to change anything.
The tribe was rotting.
“I wouldn’t be much better then, would I…?” She wiped her eyes and scanned her surroundings.
Nothing—no gold, no gems, no clever scheme in ten thousand miles. Only the eastern sea and its warm currents.
Varetrix dove in toward the edge of the mountains and alighted on the cliff. Saltwater splashed against the rocks below.
The sea foamed in the distance when a massive whale surfaced, shooting a long water spear into the sky.
Whale oil was worth good money, aside from everything else one could extract from the beast. She grinned.
Closer still came a deep, guttural bellow. Like dark marbles under the sun, walrus colonies piled up on ice floes.
These too were worth something—ivory, blubber, hides, and even the whiskers if one was feeling creative.
Varetrix’s grin didn’t last long. Other sea giants existed too, but they all required tools and sheer physical fitness the harpies didn’t have. Not yet.
Except for fish. If they could organize and scale their production, going after bigger prey might’ve been possible eventually.
The impossible part would be getting permission to trade in Bjornhavn, now that it had a new gatekeeper…
The Witch of Winter wasn’t the pushover that she’d thought.
She glanced over her shoulder as feathers rustled behind.
The raggedy harpies had followed her like shadows, looking at her expectantly for answers.
But she had to try, for her tribe's sake, even if that meant putting herself at her nemesis’ mercy.
“We have to start somewhere, I guess…” Varetrix sighed and walked toward them. “Let’s get to bloody work.”