Still Water - Chapter 10
The world had always been one way. Until it wasn’t.
Chapter Ten
Cold Crow did not greet me right away. That should have warned me. When something was wrong—truly wrong—he never hurried. He let the world settle into the shape it was already taking, as if speed itself were a kind of denial. I noticed his absence only because the Island had begun to feel briefly, treacherously ordinary.
I became aware of movement behind me, down by the waterline. The Island women were already at their work. They moved among themselves without speaking, passing furs, lifting Morning Dew as if she weighed nothing, as if her weakness were something they had long since learned how to carry. No one looked toward me. No one asked me anything. I understood then that whatever was being done for her no longer required me.
The women went about it with a rhythm that brooked no interruption. When at last they turned away, taking her with them, the space she had occupied did not feel empty. It felt somehow in abeyance, as if something important had been set aside and not yet decided.
Beyond the shelters, near the narrow spit where the water pressed in on both sides, a small group of men worked in silence, setting stakes deeper into the wet earth, binding them with cord and reed. One stood slightly apart—not directing, not idle, but where the others’ movements seemed to settle before continuing. When a binding slipped, he stepped in, tightened it once, and stepped back again. Standing Reed, the Island chief, stood watching, intent, but never interfering.
Morning Dew had slept through most of the day. When she woke, she drank broth without gagging, and for a little while she could sit up on her own. One of the Island women smiled at me—not kindly, not cruelly, but as one might smile at a man who has done what he could and is now waiting to see whether it was enough. I held that smile as if it were a charm.
The Island women kept going about their usual work. Nets were repaired. Fish were split and laid out to dry. Children chased one another between shelters, their laughter sharp and startling after so many days of silent hunger. It would have been easy—dangerously easy—to believe that I had stepped sideways into a life that still made sense. But still, Cold Crow had not come.
Only then did I understand what had unsettled me from the start. The Island had settled around me with practiced ease, and I had been allowed—briefly—to rest inside that ease. But Morning Dew was no longer within my reach, and the one man who might tell me what that meant had not yet spoken. The space she had occupied was not just empty. It had been hollowed out.
When Cold Crow came at last, the sun was already dropping toward the trees. He walked beside a stranger, a young man whose feet were blistered and wrapped in bark strips, whose face was streaked with soot and tears that had dried there. He wore no paint. His hair was cut unevenly, hacked short with a dull blade. He was Island People, but only just. Something about him had already begun to come apart.
Cold Crow led him past the shelters, past the women and children, to the far edge of the clearing where the trees thickened, and the ground dipped. I followed at a distance, my chest tight with a knowledge I could not yet name.
We sat on stones arranged in a rough half-circle, a place I recognized dimly as one used for speaking of things that could not be unsaid.
The young man did not sit at first. He stood, swaying slightly, his eyes fixed on the ground.
“Speak,” Cold Crow said.
The scout swallowed. When he lifted his head, his eyes were bloodshot and unfocused, as if he had not slept since leaving whatever he had fled.
“They are gone,” he said.
The words landed without shape. Gone could mean many things.
Cold Crow waited.
“The River Mouth men,” the scout continued. “Those who stayed behind. They are all dead.”
At first, I had felt nothing. No heat, no pain, no shock. Just a widening emptiness, like a place inside me where sound refused to travel.
“How?” Cold Crow asked.
The scout spoke slowly now, haltingly, as if each word had to be lifted over an obstacle.
“They tried to stop a burn. The Strangers were cutting again, clearing the land near the bend where the marsh dries first. Your people went out at night. They killed a few. More came the next day. And the next.”
He rubbed his face with both hands, smearing the soot. “They fought well. The Strangers died as men die. But there were too many. There were always more.”
Cold Crow nodded once.
“They fell back toward the old winter ground,” the scout said. “They tried to draw them into the trees. It worked, at first. Then the Strangers set fire to everything.”
He stopped. His breathing hitched.
“There were no songs,” he said quietly. “No time.”
That was when it reached me. Not the deaths. Not even the manner of them. It was the absence of songs. I felt something inside me tear—not sharply, but with a slow, grinding pressure, like wood splitting under a wedge.
It hollowed me out more completely than any image could have. I tried to imagine the deaths without them, and my mind refused at first, as if this were a shape it could not hold.
Songs were how deaths were finished. A man didn’t truly die until his name had been spoken into the air and carried away. Without that, the death did not settle. It wandered. It pressed against the living.
I thought of old Black Reed, whose voice had cracked like bark splitting when he sang, and of Two Otters, who always forgot the third verse and laughed even as he tried again. I thought of the boys who had only just learned the opening lines, who had sung too loudly, too proudly, their voices climbing where they did not yet belong. They had died unheard.
I understood then why the scout’s eyes refused to settle. Why his words had snagged and torn on the way out. He hadn’t just brought news. He had carried unclosed deaths across the forest, and now they were loose among us.
The River Mouth People hadn’t been wiped away in a single blow. They had been unmade, layer by layer, until there was no one left to speak for them. No one to argue with the spirits. No one to remind the land that they had been here.
I felt a terrible, selfish relief rise in me then, and hated myself for it. I had not been there. I had not breathed smoke or heard the crack of burning trees or felt the ground shudder under feet that would not stop coming. I had not chosen whether to stand or run. I had not sung. I had escaped the last duty of belonging. The thought sat in me like a stone.
Cold Crow spoke again. “Did anyone escape?”
“One boy,” the scout said. “He ran into the marsh when the smoke got thick. I found him. He’s with the Island women now.”
Cold Crow dismissed the scout with a gesture. The young man backed away as if afraid to turn his back, then fled into the trees. We were alone.
For a long time, Cold Crow said nothing. Nor did I. The forest breathed around us. Somewhere, a raven called once, then went silent.
“They are all dead,” I said at last.
“Yes.”
“The hunters. The old men. The boys preparing to take their first deer.”
“Yes.”
“The River Mouth People,” I said, and felt the words buckle. “There is no one left.”
Cold Crow looked at me then, really looked, and did not soften his gaze.
“There is you.”
The anger came fast and wild. “I left.”
“You were sent away.”
“I left,” I said again. “I chose to.”
Cold Crow inclined his head slightly. “And because of that, you are alive.”
The words struck me like a blow. Alive. What did that mean now?
I tried to picture the camp as it had been: the central fire, the worn stones where the old women sat, the racks for drying fish. I tried to place myself in that memory and could not. The image slid away from me, untethered, like a skin boat without a frame.
“We exist no longer, the River Mouth People,” I said slowly. “Do we?”
Cold Crow did not answer right away. When he did, his voice was low.
“A band exists because its people speak its name to one another. When there is no one left to speak it, the name dies too.”
Something in my chest collapsed inward.
“Then what am I?” I asked.
The question did not feel like a need for understanding. It felt like hunger. From the time I could walk, I had known who I was because someone else had said it aloud. Son of. Nephew of. Belonging to. Even my failures had been shaped by that knowledge—I had failed as something. Now there was no one left who could speak my name into its proper place.
I tried to imagine returning to the River Mouth camp, though I knew it was gone. I imagined standing alone by the central fire, calling out into the trees. No one would answer. The land itself would not recognize me.
A man without a band could not marry. Could not carry on tradition. Could not avenge. Could not be avenged. He could be killed without consequence. Worse—he could live without meaning.
Even the Strangers, with all their burning and cutting, moved as part of something larger than themselves. They came in numbers that swallowed resistance. They replaced their dead without pause. They sang together, even if their songs were wrong.
I, who had been born into a people, now stood alone among others who were not mine. I wondered, with a sudden cold clarity, whether a man with no band was still human in any way at all.
Maybe that was what the spirits did when they were done with you. They did not always kill. Sometimes they simply loosened the ties until you fell out of the world unnoticed.
I thought of Morning Dew then—not as my wife, but as my last witness. If she died, there would be no one left who remembered me as something other than a body that had arrived by river. Cold Crow would, while he lived, but his days were growing short, I suddenly knew. The thought made it hard to breathe.
Cold Crow watched me carefully. “You are still breathing.”
“That isn’t what I mean.” My voice cracked. “If there is no band, there is no man. That’s what you taught me.”
“Yes.”
“So what does that make me?”
Cold Crow didn’t answer.
I stood abruptly, unable to sit any longer. The world felt tilted, unreal. I walked a few steps away, then stopped, pressing my palms against my eyes as if I could push the thought back into my skull.
A man without a band was not a man at all. He was a ghost whose mind it slipped to die. A mouth without a voice. A body the spirits no longer needed to notice. Even the Strangers belonged to something.
“I should not be here,” I said. “I should have died with them.”
Cold Crow’s voice was sharp. “Not so.”
I laughed then, harsh and broken. “Why not? What is left for me? I am not River Mouth. I am not Island. I am not a Spirit Talker. I am—”
“Folded,” Cold Crow said.
The word stopped me.
“You are folded,” he continued, more gently now. “Not erased.”
The word folded clung to me. I had seen animals fold themselves in winter—deer stepping deeper into cover, bears sealing themselves away, birds vanishing into places the eye could not follow. They were still alive, but only just. Waiting. Conserving. Was that what I had become?
I remembered my Spirit Talker training then, unbidden: how Cold Crow had taught me that spirits did not respond to force, only invitation. How one must bend, soften, make space. Seduce, he had said once, with a mouth that did not quite smile.
Folding was not surrender. Folding was a way of not tearing. But I had folded away from the spirits, not toward them.
I looked at Cold Crow and understood something that frightened me more than the deaths themselves. The spirits had not taken the River Mouth People because I had refused them. They had simply kept going without us.
“If I unfold,” I asked him slowly, “what happens then?”
Cold Crow didn’t answer.
In the distance, Morning Dew cried out again, her voice thin and sharp with pain. The world narrowed at once. Whatever I was—folded, broken, unfinished—I was still hers. For the moment, that was enough to keep me standing.
I turned back to him, shaking. “It feels like everything is ending.”
Cold Crow met my gaze steadily.
“Everything is always ending,” he said. “Beginning too, if not necessarily for us.”
The forest seemed to lean closer, listening.
I thought then—with a clarity so sharp it frightened me—that this was how my life would end. Not with fire. Not with song. Not even with blood. With knowledge.
The River Mouth People were gone. The forest was changing. The spirits were no longer bound to us by habit or fear or love. I stood at the edge of something that had already decided I was unnecessary.
I felt very small. Smaller even than the Strangers, who at least belonged to the future that was coming.
I opened my mouth to say something—I don’t know what—when the sound of running feet cut through the clearing. The timing felt obscene, as if the world, having taken everything else, now demanded my attention elsewhere.
Morning Dew’s cry reached us again, and whatever I had been about to become folded itself away again. Some endings, I understood dimly, were postponed rather than denied.
I said the name of my people aloud, once, under my breath. I had not meant to. It slipped out of me the way a breath slips out of a body that has already gone cold. I was standing a little apart from the others, near the edge of the clearing, where the ground sloped toward the water and the reeds whispered to themselves. No one was looking at me. No one was listening.
I said it again, more clearly this time. The sound fell flat. It did not carry. It did not return.
At the River Mouth, names always came back. Not as echoes—as answers. Someone would grunt, or shift, or spit into the fire. Someone would correct your pronunciation, or laugh, or tell you that you were saying it like a child. A name spoken among your people was never just sound—it breathed. But here, now, it had flopped and died.
I tried a different word then. The old word for we. The one that meant not just many, but bound—by blood, by hunger, by shared winters. My mouth shaped it properly. My tongue remembered. The wind did not.
It occurred to me, with a clarity that made me dizzy, that the word itself might now be wrong. That it might no longer refer to anything that existed. A word with no living referent. A tool with no way to grasp it.
I pressed my fingers into the damp earth until they ached, grounding myself in the feel of it. Soil was still soil. Water still ran downhill. The world had not ended. But something essential had gone quiet.
A man without a band is like a hand without a body. Still shaped like a hand. Still remembering what it once did. But useless, and faintly obscene, all the same. I did not say the name again.
Instead, I found myself making the old gesture without realizing it. Two fingers raised. Palm angled slightly inward. A movement meant to smooth the air, to invite attention without demand. I’d learned it as a boy, long before I knew what it was for—a way of letting the spirits notice you without startling them, like shifting your weight so a deer might look up but not bolt.
My hand froze halfway through. The realization struck me like a blow: if I finished it, something might have answered. I did not know what right I had anymore to be answered.
I lowered my hand slowly, as if sudden movement might tear something fragile. My heart hammered. For a moment, I thought I felt it—a pressure, a listening—and I held my breath until the sensation thinned and drifted away.
Spirit Talkers are taught to seduce the spirits, not command them. To make themselves pleasing. Interesting. Necessary. And they are taught, just as carefully, what jealousy looks like among unseen things. I had broken those rules once already. I could not risk breaking them again—not here, not now, not with Morning Dew’s life balanced on a breath I did not control.
The gesture left an ache in my fingers, as though something unfinished had lodged itself in the joints. I tucked my hands beneath my thighs and sat on them, like a chastened child.
Around me, the Island breathed. Fires snapped. Someone laughed softly and then stopped. Life went on, dense and indifferent. Beneath it all, like a drumbeat too slow to notice until it is gone, ran the certainty that whatever was coming could not be called back.
Before I could speak again, a woman ran toward us from the shelters. Her hair was loose, her face tight with urgency.
“The child is coming,” she said to Cold Crow. “But she’s bleeding,”
The world snapped back into motion. Morning Dew.
I forgot the dead. I forgot the band. I forgot even myself. I followed the woman without thought, my feet barely touching the ground.
As we reached the shelter, I heard Morning Dew cry out—not in fear, but in pain sharp enough to cut through everything else. The sound tore at me. She was alive. She was here. That had to be enough. For now.
* * *
Cold Crow sat where the Island’s ground rose slightly, just enough that the waterline could be seen over the shoulders of those standing below. He had chosen the place deliberately. From there, he could watch arrivals, departures, weather shifting across the lake. He could see without being seen.
I stood at the edge of that rise for a long time before he acknowledged me.
He didn’t look old to me then—not in the way of men bent by age or injury. He looked worn down into something narrower, pared to function. His hair, once black, had gone mostly white, but his back was straight, and his hands were steady where they rested on his knees. He was tracing a pattern in the dirt with the end of a bone awl, not marking anything recognizable, just following the movement of his own thought.
When he finally spoke, he did not say my name.
“You arrived late,” he said.
I nodded. There was no defense in me. Even my explanations felt like theft, as if time itself had already been spent and there was nothing left to bargain with.
“The river did not want us,” I said. “It kept folding back on itself.”
Cold Crow’s hand paused. He looked up then, directly at me, his eyes sharp as ever.
“You have begun to speak like someone who listens,” he said. “That may save you. Or it may not.”
He gestured for me to sit. I lowered myself onto the packed earth opposite him, careful not to cross into the space he had claimed. I had learned, long ago, that proximity to a Spirit Talker was not measured in steps but in attention. You could stand beside one and be distant. You could sit far away and intrude.
For a time, he said nothing. The Island continued around us. Women moved along the waterline, their hands busy with nets and baskets. Smoke drifted from a cooking pit, thin and blue. A child cried briefly and was hushed. Life, unremarkable and persistent, asserted itself with quiet insistence.
It struck me then that the Island did not feel like a place of refuge. It felt like a place that had learned how to endure.
“When a thing has been said often enough,” he said finally, “people begin to believe they understand it.”
He watched me as he spoke, as if measuring how far the words had gone.
“The men of the River Mouth are dead,” he said. “You know this. Everyone here knows this. What you may not yet have understood is that there will be no more telling of it.”
I felt my hands curl in my lap.
“No songs,” he went on. “No recounting of deeds. No tales of ancestors. No returning to the places where they once stood. The land they died on is taken by others, and even their names will thin.”
He leaned forward slightly.
“This is not because they were unworthy,” Cold Crow said. “It is because they were ended.”
The finality of that word settled more heavily than the scout’s first telling ever had.
“So when I speak of it now,” he said, “I am not bringing you news. I am telling you that what remains of them now rests only where memory is still alive.”
He held my gaze.
“And you,” he said, “are the last place it rests.”
A raven crossed the open space above us then, low and unhurried, its wings cutting the air with a sound like cloth being torn. It settled on the edge of a drying rack nearby, head cocked, watching without blinking.
I felt the old, foolish urge to look away, as if meeting its eye would invite something I could not refuse. I did not.
It stayed only a moment. Then it lifted again and was gone, leaving the space it had occupied no different from before—except that I could not convince myself it had been empty.
I nodded, because there was nothing else I could do.
“What you were told,” he said, “was not a rumor. It was not a warning. It was an ending.”
He looked at me directly then, not with pity, but with the steadiness he used when correcting an apprentice who had made a dangerous mistake.
“The River Mouth men did not scatter,” he went on. “They did not flee north or melt into other bands. They stood, because that is what they knew how to do. And when they were broken, there was no one left to remember them after.”
I felt something in my chest tighten, as if I had been holding myself upright with a cord that had just been cut.
“So when I tell you this now,” Cold Crow said, “I am not giving you news. I am telling you what the spirits already know.”
He placed his staff across his knees, a small, deliberate motion.
“There is no River Mouth band for you to return to,” he said. “Not in the forest. Not in memory. Not even as a shadow.”
I nodded, because there was nothing else I could do.
I waited for something in myself to break. For breath to leave me. For my body to rebel against the meaning of what I had heard. Nothing happened. I nodded once.
“Do you know more?” I asked.
Cold Crow resumed tracing the dirt. “They held where they could. They retreated when they could not. They fought when retreating failed.”
He did not look at me as he spoke. That, more than anything, made the words real. If he had watched me, I might have believed there was something left to witness.
“They killed many,” he went on. “Enough that the Strangers learned caution. But caution does not stop hunger. And it does not stop numbers.”
He shifted, finally meeting my eyes.
“The forest burned,” he said. “Again and again. Not all at once. Not like a storm. In bites.”
I thought of the sandal print by the river. Of the longhouses the wandering woman had spoken of. Of the village that had been alive one morning and ash by the next.
I found myself pressing my palm into the dirt beside me, as if I needed to anchor myself to something that had weight.
“They died knowing they had sent the women,” I said.
“Yes.”
“They died believing the women would be fed.”
“Yes.”
That was when the thing I had been holding apart from myself finally shifted. If there were no River Mouth men, then there was no River Mouth band. Not in the way that mattered. Bands were not made of memory alone. They were made of bodies, of shared hunger and shared killing, of voices that knew when to speak and when to be silent.
A man without a band was not a man waiting. He was something else.
“What am I now?” I asked.
Cold Crow studied me. “You are alive.”
“That is not an answer,” I said.
“It is the only one that matters,” He replied. “Until it doesn’t.”
I felt something thin and sharp move through me then—not grief, not yet. Something closer to vertigo.
“If there is no band,” I said slowly, “then there is no place for me to stand. A man belongs somewhere, or he becomes…nothing.”
Cold Crow smiled, but there was no warmth in it.
“You have always belonged halfway elsewhere,” he said. “Do not pretend that this is new.”
He watched my face closely as he said it, not for anger, but for deflection. I had learned that look during my training. The moment when a Spirit Talker decides whether a student is hearing words or only recognizing sounds.
“You did not fail because you loved her,” Cold Crow continued. “You failed because you believed love excused you from listening.”
I felt heat rise inside my chest. Not rage — something closer to humiliation.
“I listened,” I said. “I just chose not to answer.”
Cold Crow nodded. “That is exactly what I mean.”
He reached down and pressed his palm flat against the earth between us.
“The spirits are not like people,” he said. “They do not forgive being ignored. They grow curious. And curiosity, with them, is dangerous.”
I swallowed. I had been taught that once. I had set it aside.
“Tell me,” he said. “When was the last time you dreamed without waking up afraid?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again.
“That long?” he asked.
I said nothing.
He leaned back slightly. “You have already been marked by absence,” he said. “The question is whether you will let it hollow you, or shape you.”
I flinched, and he saw it.
“You trained,” he continued. “You listened. You learned the old songs even when your voice wanted to wander. You knew the rules, and you broke them carefully. You did not stop being what you were because you lay with a woman. You stopped because you wanted to forget what you heard when you were alone.”
I thought of the raven. Of the way it had watched without blinking.
“I did not choose this,” I said.
“No one does,” Cold Crow replied. “Choice is what we call it when there are still two paths visible.”
He leaned forward then, close enough that I could smell the bitter resin he used to keep insects from his skin.
“Tell me,” he said quietly. “What did you feel when the Island women took her from you?”
I hesitated. The answer rose in me immediately, but I did not trust it.
“I felt relieved,” I said finally. “And ashamed of that relief.”
Cold Crow nodded once. “Good. That means you are still listening.”
A shout rose from farther up the Island. A woman’s voice, sharp and urgent. Another answered. Feet moved quickly over the packed earth. I turned instinctively, but Cold Crow’s hand shot out and caught my wrist. His grip was firm, unyielding.
“Not yet,” he said. “If you go now, you will break in the wrong place.”
My heart began to pound. I could feel it in my throat, in my fingertips.
“She is laboring,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You knew this would happen,” I accused.
“I knew it might,” he corrected. “Spirits do not announce themselves. They circle.”
Another cry. Louder this time. A sound I recognized without having heard it often.
Cold Crow released me.
“Now,” he said.
I ran.
The shelter the Island women had taken Morning Dew to was set apart from the others, closer to the trees than the water. It wasn’t hidden, but it was clearly not meant for wandering. Two women stood at its entrance, their bodies angled outward, their expressions unreadable.
I slowed as I approached. Not from fear, but from instinct. There are thresholds that cannot be crossed without consequence.
One of the women looked at me then. Her hair was braided tightly against her skull, streaked with gray. Her eyes were steady.
“She lives,” she said. “For now.”
I nodded. My throat felt thick.
“You may sit,” she continued, gesturing to the ground nearby. “You may listen. You may not enter.”
“I understand,” I answered.
I sat.
The ground beneath me was hard-packed and warm from the sun. I pressed my fingers into it, feeling the grit lodge under my nails. It was ordinary dirt. Not the soft loam of the River Mouth, not the damp clay of the low banks. This soil held together. It had been walked on, worked, lived on.
I wondered how many births it had witnessed. How many deaths.
From inside the shelter came the low cadence of women speaking to one another. Not prayer. Instruction. Counting. Reassurance given without sentiment. I recognized the sound of it — the same tone used when butchering an animal too large for one person to manage alone.
Morning Dew cried out again, and this time the sound went through me like a hook. I started forward without thinking.
A hand closed on my shoulder. Not roughly. Firmly enough that resistance would have required intention.
The gray-haired woman did not look at me. “Sit,” she said again.
I obeyed.
I understood then that this was not exclusion. It was containment. They were keeping something from spilling.
I bowed my head and stared at the dust between my knees. I tried to remember the exact shape of Morning Dew’s face the first time she had laughed at me — not kindly, but with surprise, as if she hadn’t expected herself to. I was afraid that if I could not remember it clearly, she would already be gone.
Time ceased to behave as it should have. The sun shifted in the sky, but I could not say how far. Shadows lengthened, then shortened again. Voices rose and fell within the shelter, sometimes calm, sometimes edged with strain.
Morning Dew cried out once, sharply, and then not again for a long while.
I found myself counting my breaths. In. Out. In. Out. As if keeping rhythm might keep her anchored.
Cold Crow joined me without announcement. He did not sit close.
“She is strong,” he said.
“She is thin,” I answered.
“Yes.”
We fell silent again.
At some point—I could not say when—a woman emerged and handed me a bowl of water. I drank without tasting it.
Another emerged later and shook her head slightly. Not refusal. Not promise. Just motion.
“She is losing blood,” Cold Crow said softly.
I pressed my hands into my thighs until they hurt.
“What about the child?” I asked.
Cold Crow didn’t answer.
The scream, when it came, was short. Cut off too quickly. Something inside me went very still.
The women moved with renewed urgency then. Not frantic. Deliberate. As if they had crossed into a different part of the work.
Minutes passed. Or hours. I couldn’t tell.
Finally, the gray-haired woman returned. She didn’t sit. She didn’t soften her stance.
“The child was born without breath,” she said. “We could not call it back.”
I waited for the next words. They did not come at once.
“Morning Dew followed,” she said at last. “She bled too much. She did not linger.”
The world did not collapse. That surprised me.
Instead, it narrowed. The sounds of the Island receded, as if drawn down a long tunnel. I could see Cold Crow’s mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
I felt myself tip forward, hands catching the ground automatically. My body knew how to fall without injury. It had learned that skill young.
For a long time, I stayed like that. Knees and palms pressed into dirt that wasn’t mine.
When sound returned, it came unevenly. Cold Crow was speaking.
“…not taken as punishment,” he was saying. “Not given as a gift. This is not an exchange.”
I laughed then. A short, broken sound that startled even me.
“What do you know of exchange?” I asked hoarsely. “You trade pain for answers. You trade blood for attention. How is this different?”
Cold Crow did not bristle. He did not correct me.
“Because this was not asked for,” he said. “And because it did not come from you.”
I sat back on my heels. My chest hurt, as if something inside it were trying to tear free and could not find the seam.
“There is nothing left,” I said. “No wife. No child. No band.”
The words sounded thinner once they were spoken, as if they had already been stripped of something essential.
I had always known who I was by who stood beside me. By who would answer if I called out in the dark. Even when I trained with Cold Crow, even when I walked alone, I had carried the certainty that somewhere behind me, the band still existed. That if I turned back, there would be voices.
Now there was only the Island. And the Island wasn’t mine.
A man without a band was not a man traveling. He was a man stopped between places. Not dead. Not alive in any way that mattered.
A band wasn’t just who shared your fire. It was who knew how you breathed when you slept. Who could tell, from the way you shifted your weight, whether you were thinking of running or standing. A man learned himself by being watched, corrected, measured by others who had been doing the same thing since before he was born.
Without that watching, a man didn’t simply fade. He went wrong.
I had seen it once, long ago. A man whose band had scattered after sickness and fighting. He lingered at the edges of other camps, useful enough to be tolerated, never trusted enough to be invited in. He spoke too much, or not at all. He didn’t know when to stop eating. When he died, no one claimed him. His body was burned with the refuse, because no one could remember which spirits were his own.
I had thought then that he was weak. Now I understood that he had simply been alone too long.
I looked at my hands. They were steady. They had not forgotten how to cut, how to lift, how to kill. But those were only tools. Tools didn’t make a man.
A band named you, even when it did not speak your name aloud. Without it, I didn’t know what shape my life was supposed to take, or whether it still had one.
I thought, absurdly, of the spirits. Of how they were said to wander between worlds, never settling, never aging. I had once envied that. Now it seemed like punishment.
“If I walk into the forest,” I said slowly, “there is no one who will know what I am.”
Cold Crow didn’t contradict me.
“And if I stay,” I continued, “I will be remade into something I do not recognize.”
“Yes,” he said.
I laughed again, quietly. “Those are not good choices.”
“No,” he agreed. “But they are the only ones that still lead somewhere.”
Cold Crow crouched in front of me then, bringing his eyes level with mine.
“There is a path,” he said. “It is narrow. And it will cost you more than you have already given.”
I stared at him.
“You think I am afraid of cost?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I think you are afraid of being nothing.”
The truth of that struck deeper than any blow.
“If I ask,” I said slowly, “if I kneel and open myself—will they take me?”
Cold Crow considered this.
“They may,” he said. “Or they may make you wait. Or they may make you forget.”
“And if they refuse?”
“Then you will know,” he replied. “And knowing is better than drifting.”
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the Island felt farther away. As if I were already stepping out of it.
“Tell me what to do,” I said.
Cold Crow stood.
“First,” he said, “you will be purified. You will be made strange again to the spirits who once knew you far too well.”
He looked down at me.
“It will hurt.”
I nodded. Pain, at least, was something I understood.
To be continued…
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