Sara’s eyes met Gene’s. After a moment, she muttered, “Now that I look at you, there is a very little resemblance.”
“That must mean I learned something from him.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. If he were standing before me now, I might have put a blade into the back of his neck.”
Then Sara burst into a fit of laughter.
“He wouldn’t have waited for that, would he? He’d have slit my throat first. The longer you know a man with bad habits, the worse off you are. I should never have become entangled with him. But he’d been beside me since I was born. What could I have done?”
“Since you were born?”
Gene had supposed they came from the same homeland and had chosen its bird, Irko, as the emblem of their promise. Then he heard something wholly unexpected.
“He’s my elder brother. My real name is Sara Vendigate.”
“Your elder brother… You mean you’re his sister?”
Having assumed all along that she was his lover or wife, Gene was disconcerted to learn she was his sister. Sara seemed to guess, for she gave a little laugh at his expression.
“We call it a bonded brother. Garon and I are actually sixth-degree relatives, but a girl and boy of similar age among the close kin are paired as a bonded sister and brother and made to go everywhere together. Life is hard for children in the north. Wander around alone and another tribe will catch and eat you before you can blink.”
There was something affectionate in the way she said “Garon.” But her last words startled him.
“Eat you?”
“Yes. They don’t think of other tribes as people. Sometimes they eat their own tribespeople too. There’s almost nothing to eat there. The Billin devour everything useful.”
“What are Billin?”
“Ah, that’s right. You don’t know the Billin. Heh heh. When I think of it, the mere fact that you needn’t know what Billin are makes the south a paradise. The Billin are masters of the Black Mountain. Some call them spirits of lightning, but knowing the details won’t help you. Just think of them as devils. Tribes like ours that live around the Black Mountain are like the cows they keep. They squeeze everything from us, and when nothing more can be squeezed out, they eat us. Taking after them, the tribes eat one another too. There is no minimum trust, no line that must not be crossed between tribes. Weak people are given to the Billin so they won’t become a liability, and we rejoice that we have survived. That is the custom there. Irkonik is no different, of course. The only people one can trust to the end are parents, siblings, and one’s bonded brother or sister. No, sometimes even they can’t be trusted. In the end, all of us are food for the Billin. What great protection can food make by joining hands? We’re only pitiful sacrifices struggling so that someone else will be eaten first.”
Gene had often heard that northern customs were strange, but the more he heard, the further they exceeded anything he could imagine. Sara tilted her head, then looked at him again.
“Enough about the Billin. Bonded sisters and brothers grow up that way and mostly end up marrying. Their parents arrange the bond beforehand because that’s what they expect. So Garon and I were husband and wife too. From the time I was seventeen until I was twenty-three. Looking back now, it feels like the blink of an eye. I don’t even remember whether those were good days. We were bonded sister and brother far longer than we were husband and wife. Our married life ended when men from a neighboring tribe, enemies of Garon’s, carried me off.”
“Carried off? You were kidnapped? And that was the end?”
Gene found it difficult to imagine Beka, or Garon Vendigate, enduring the theft of his wife. Sara shrugged.
“Why? Does that sound absurd? A person taken in the Black Mountain is a sacrifice. There’s little chance of getting them back. The Billin are always hungry.”
“But you’re alive now.”
“Yes. Because Garon didn’t give up. Or rather, because the fellow who kidnapped me wanted a few more coins.”
Those who had abducted Sara had tried to sell her to one of Garon’s enemies, thinking it more profitable than using her as a sacrifice. Garon was already well known in the Black Mountain then, which also meant he had many enemies. Grudges accumulated over generations were common between the tribes and families around the Black Mountain. But as they dragged Sara about trying to strike a bargain, something unexpected occurred. They encountered mages from the School of Maedald who had come to hunt Billin, and offended them. They were wiped out.
“I was the only survivor because I was a captive. That wasn’t entirely good fortune either. Around the Black Mountain, the Maedald mages call us ‘children of the Billin.’ In other words, they think of us less as people than as the Billin’s lackeys. They used me like a captured laboratory animal, trying to discover how to drive the Billin back. They thought Billin magic ran in the blood of the children of the Billin. The sort of delusion outsiders often have. If we really were the Billin’s children, would the Billin be fathers who ate their own children? But mages are generally mad, so even that nonsense must have sounded plausible. Enough of that useless talk. They took me away, and I escaped through good luck. To be exact, one of the mages secretly let me go. I barely made it back to the Black Mountain, but discovered that a mage named Galbert, the one who’d captured me, was following. If I went home, my family would try to protect me, but what if the mages set Irkonik on fire? If I went on wandering, I’d soon be captured again. There was only one way to avoid them and protect my homeland.”
Sara had sought out a notorious slave-trading caravan that even mages hesitated to touch and sold herself to it. Then she had gone south with them. Becoming a slave was preferable to serving as material for the mages’ experiments, she said. She had never seen her homeland again. Nor had she had a chance to meet Garon. Hoping to make him abandon his search, she had hidden even the news of her escape from the mages. Then ten years passed. Sara had never imagined he would still be looking for her.
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