Chapter Text

“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”

Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

壹.

There is no apple deep in the forest, little wolf, nor magic either. Only a girl, and she has been asleep these many thousands of years. How do you hope to wake her?

With love, Mother Danyao. I will wake her with the love of my people in my heart. We need her.

They say that two thousand years ago a girl with magic in her bones slipped into the Black Forest and never came back out. She had hair black as the grassland nights and skin white as her name: Yanshuang. Heavy frost. And when she left, she took all the magic with her.

They say that she was a weaver girl who sat at the loom for hours, braiding magic into the fabric of the world, and that when she met her lover, a handsome warrior from an enemy tribe, she set down her shuttle to walk the world by his side. But neither of them could leave their enmity for long. When he turned his blade against her, she broke her loom in anguish, and left this world for the Black Forest, that place away from place, that time away from time.

When she left, she left a magic apple in the woods, waiting for the daring and the brave. Or perhaps just the desperate, willing to risk stepping upon hallowed ground in search of what the apple promised: the answer to any question you asked. All you needed to do was take a bite and pay a price. The Mothers made up all sorts of stories: some said you must leave your spirit, and others said a mere trinket would do. Mother Danyao, his cousin’s grandmother, thought perhaps you needed to lay love at her feet, love of the truest kind.

Shuofeng Heye had a high threshold of belief for romantic notions of heroism, but even he had trouble swallowing this answer. “How do you give a dead girl true love?” he asked, grinning at his father, who was roasting fresh-caught goose over the pit. It was one of their fatter years, and the goose was hardy and heavy, and everyone was in good spirits.

Mother Danyao didn’t smile. She ran a comb through Suhe’s hair and pursed her lips a moment before saying, “I imagine it’s different for different people. For me, I would cook her a plentiful meal. I would make milk tea for her and set out platters of duck and venison seasoned from spices from across strait. I would weave her prayer mats of flowers so that she can witness spring in that changeless place.”

Heye’s father guffawed. “Old wives’ tales,” he said, pouring himself a bowl of liquor and drinking deeply from it. Heye watched his mother, though, and her brow was knit.

“What about you?” asked Suhe. He was chubby-cheeked still—even the prayers drawn across his face couldn’t hide that fact. “What would you lay down to show her you were true?”

“Nothing,” Heye said. “What could she give me that I don’t already have?” There were costs, of course, to being the son of the chief. Responsibilities. But he had first pick of the slaves they captured from the other clans, the first cuts of the deer they hunted, and someday he would inherit his father’s Giantsbane axe. There were lean years and there were fat years, but he couldn’t imagine that life wouldn’t always be like this. That he wouldn’t always be content.

Mother Danyao laughed. Around a mouthful of flatbread, she said, “Yours is the provenance of the young, little Heye. May you never know the pain of want.”

“Hear, hear!” his father roared. Those days, summers came early and lasted forever. They raised their mugs to the God of the Sky and prayed for cold to stay far away.

That was before the lean years turned into a lean decade. Before the black riders of House Muru and the silver knights of House Muyun swept the plains clean.

Before Clan Shuofeng scattered like a handful of loose sand.