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When Savage was young, Viscus handed him an infant.
He was given the same speech all the boys were given, when they held their first little brother in their arms. This child is of our blood and our tribe. This child is of your blood, and your line. This child is your responsibility, your life, your love. Give him what you have been given.
Give him what you have been given. Even at six years old, Savage knew that it did not mean all good things.
The baby’s name was Maul, red skin still damp from the birthing, and he opened his mouth and wailed with all his considerable strength. Savage smiled. It would be hard, he knew. His friends had been given brothers to care for, and whined about rocking them back to sleep or scraping out bone-marrow for them to suck on or changing diapers. But there were shy and furtive whispers of fun, of love, of holding a baby close to your chest and knowing that to them, you were the world.
He heaved little Maul up to his shoulder, warming his back with a hand, holding onto the blanket that had been draped around the baby’s arms before he’d fought it off. With the warmth of a brother’s hand, the infant’s cries slowed. With one more tiny, hiccuping sob, Maul cooed, his tiny hands flapping, and began to teethe at Savage’s shoulder.
“He likes you already, huh?” Malice laughed as Viscus turned for the speeder, a rare gift from the Sisters for his journeys out of the Holy City. “Well, I’ll show you how to get the marrow out of the bones, and the fat from the rancor cuts. He’ll want feeding soon. I’ll show you, but I won’t do it for you.”
Savage didn’t listen as Malice chattered on. He took hold of one of Maul’s tiny hands, and held on; mine, he thought. My brother. My family. My own.
They lived together, himself and Malice and Maul, but Mal was quite often gone; a young man was expected to go out with hunting or trading parties, once he came of age.
Maul was a loud, demanding, active child; always climbing, and falling off of, everything in the hut. Savage’s tiny carving bench- the knives all sheathed, thank the Sisters- was a constant temptation the moment Maul learned he could wiggle about on his belly, let alone once he was crawling. He was late to walk, loathe to give up his speed in crawling to learn a new, slow way to travel, and early to talk- to Savage. Aja, was his first word, as it often was. His second was up. “Up up up Aja up!” He would babble, tiny hands grasping at the ankles of Savage’s trousers until he was lifted, balanced on his brother’s hip. But to any other man of the village he went quiet and shy, hiding his face behind whatever he could reach.
“Isn’t he talking yet?” Animus, the headman, asked once. He eyed Maul- or, the horn-and-a-half that he could see as he hid behind Savage’s trouser leg- with disappointment.
“Yes,” Savage lilted, trying very hard to sound grown-up. “But only to me.”
A stranger came to their village.
Such a thing hadn’t happened in a thousand years. All the men were spoiling for a fight; the sound of spear-ends tapping impatiently on the ground rattled the dirt from the floors. The children weren’t allowed out of doors from the moment the alarm was sounded; Savage swept the floor around his workbench, watching Maul throw a tantrum in front of the locked door.
“Out, aja!” He sniffled and whined. “Out! Pa-lay out!” ‘Play’ was a new word for Maul. Savage had been quite proud and amused when Maul had figured it out; now, it was annoying him. He wished Mal would come back. Malice had been on guard duty when the alarm sounded- the bad alarm, the three-tone bell that meant there was some unknown threat. Savage had caught a glimpse of a black-clad figure, walking up the cliff-path, before he collected Maul- squalling and upset, forced to drop the rocks he had been playing with- and trooped indoors. He was aching for news.
Three quick knocks at the door.
Savage jumped.
It wasn’t Malice’s knock. It was the signal that there was an emergency, that the headman needed you to come out.
Maul quieted, for once in his young life. He stared up at Savage, burying his face in his brother’s leg as Savage reached for the latch.
The door swung open.
It wasn't the headman. Savage almost jumped back. Silhouetted in the light of the sunrise, Brother Viscus peered down at him, and then lower, to Maul- scrabbling to hide behind his elder brother, his protector.
Dread sank and pooled in Savage’s stomach. Never had he heard of the Sisters’ Voice coming to the door of a man’s hut. He saw, too, the steel and the sorrow in Viscus’ eyes. Leaning down, he grabbed little Maul by the waist, hoisting him up to his hip. The outraged crying of a moment ago had turned into silent terror, and he buried his face in Savage’s rough shirt. Savage clicked his tongue, petted Maul’s tiny horns, but still the toddler shook his head, not looking up.
“Ch-ch-ch-ch,” he clicked. “Hush-sh-sh.” Savage bounced his hip, knowing whatever the Sisters’ Voice needed him for, he couldn’t do it with a frightened baby.
He looked up. Viscus had his eyes clenched shut, and he opened and closed a fist at chest-height. Praying for strength.
“Come with me,” Viscus said, “and bring the child.”
.
It wasn’t anything like a Selection. The men weren’t lined neatly in the square, no Sister there to judge them. There was only a black-robed stranger, standing alone in the center of the village. Savage hefted Maul higher on his hip, the toddler’s horns still digging into his neck.
The stranger’s face was mostly covered. What little Savage could see under the hood was a bright, sickly white. Like the Sisters’.
A horrible feeling collected in the bottom of Savage’s gut. They don’t take children, he thought. The Sisters have never taken children. He clung to the thought, his gaze fixed on the looming figure, still as a statue, waiting for them to get closer.
“This is the child in question,” Viscus called. He was a little ways ahead of the boys- he had tried to hurry them, but between the still-crying toddler, and his own short stature, Savage could only move so fast. He tried, again, to get Maul to look up, humming a song for him, but he only dug his face harder into Savage’s shoulder.
The stranger’s head tilted, appearing to see the boys even through the thick fabric that kept his face concealed. Savage slowed his steps, feeling the stranger’s gaze slide over him with the same prickling discomfort as a sunburn, the heat of it seeping into his skin. Maul whined, digging his fingers into Savage’s arm.
“Is he walking yet?” The stranger’s voice was low, but oddly smooth, and there was an unpleasant smile at the corners of his mouth.
“I believe so.” Viscus answered.
“And talking?”
“So his brother claims.” Viscus looked back at Savage, who had stopped entirely, the strangeness and tension of the situation holding him in place. “Come here, child.”
For one mad moment, Savage thought of saying no; of running as fast as he could for the tree-line at the edge of the village, skidding himself down the cliffside. Viscus wouldn’t know their village well enough from his short visits to be able to follow, and the stranger knew nothing. Would the men of his own village be willing to keep them off of his trail?
Savage stepped forward, every step fighting against his instincts clamoring that he run away. Maul was heavy in his arms, but still and silent.
A clawlike hand drew from the drapes of the robe, reaching out. “Let me see him,” he commanded.
Savage stopped; somehow, standing still was worse than walking, but to take another step would bring him within reach.
“Why?” He said, before he could think better of it. “What-”
The hood raised, and the stranger’s eyes shone out. Savage’s voice died; they were cold, pitiless eyes, and Savage felt small before him.
“It speaks.” He said.
Viscus stepped next to Savage, one arm in front of the boys. “He means no disrespect. He is not worth your attention.”
Savage had a half-thought that he might be insulted by that, but he was still paralyzed by the stranger’s eyes in some horrible battle of wills. He knew he would lose. There was a looming power to this man, something burning and terrible in the heat of his gaze; Savage knew he was as insignificant as a fly. Still, he held on to his brother.
“Step aside.” The man snapped. Viscus stepped back, but stayed next to Savage. “Give me the child.”
Maul whimpered.
Savage held him closer, standing his ground; the shadow the stranger cast was long in the rising sun. His stomach hurt so badly; more than anything he wanted to run home, put Maul down to sleep for the day, and ask Malice to make him tcha and sing to him, like Savage was the baby of the house again. He wanted to shut his eyes, open them again, and discover that he was dreaming.
On the other end of the clearing, by the headman’s house, there was something of a commotion; Malice’s voice echoed across the square, along with other men’s. Viscus looked up; Savage did not, still caught in the stranger’s pale eyes. His resolve weakened, slowly; almost without realizing, he was compelled to lift one foot, and step closer. Once, and again, and they were in reach of the stranger’s pale, thin hands-
The weight on Savage’s hip shifted, and there was pain- he blinked, hard. Maul, at his shoulder, was kicking and clawing to get away. The toddler huffed and panted, his nose must have been too clogged to use his mouth for anything but breathing, as steady tears streamed down his face.
Savage planted his feet. With the greatest effort he’d exerted in his life, he tried to step backwards- the stranger watched him struggle, the shadow of a smirk on his face.
His back hit Viscus’ chest straight on. Savage cried out in surprise; the noise startled little Maul, who caught his breath and wailed. His small, sharp nails dug into Savage’s shoulder; not noticing, Savage clung to his baby brother ever tighter.
“No,” he whispered, not looking up at the stranger in black. “No, you can’t- you can’t take him.” He meant to sound strong. A declaration. It came out as a plea. “You can’t,” he insisted, feeling small and tired and petulant. “Isn’t there- isn’t there a way-” Tears streaked down his face, tracing the brown of his darkening markings. “Can’t you- take-” he choked on a sob. “Take me instead?”
For a moment, the stranger looked almost- interested. His eyes widened, and Savage shook with the most primal fear he’d ever felt; he summoned every strength he didn’t know he had, just to stay, just to not drop little Maul and run, far away, somewhere those eyes would never reach him.
Maul wrapped his small, pudgy arms around Savage’s arm, and the fear abated. He held on. Never, he thought, tears coursing down his face, pressing his fingers into Maul’s waist. Never, never, never...
The stranger laughed, low and cruel. “You? I was promised the child of Mother Talzin herself, and I am offered-”
“My lord,” Viscus interjected, “please. Take the child. The boy does not know what he speaks of.”
Savage’s face twisted in betrayal. The Sisters’ Voice himself wanted to give Maul away to this stranger? He felt like the moons had dropped out of the sky, toppling every balancing force on the planet. Viscus’ hand rested, solid and heavy, on the shoulder that Maul did not have his eyes buried in.
The stranger took one gliding step forward, and was within arm’s reach again. He reached out; his fingers were unsettlingly long, and too thin.
Viscus took Savage’s small hand in his own, and loosened his fingers from around his baby brother. Weeping too hard to see, Savage knocked his lips against his brother’s leftmost horn, bloodying his lip the first time, but managing one kiss good-bye.
The white hands touched Maul’s red skin, and he sucked in a breath and screamed; not the offended screech of a tantrum but a siren sound of real, physical danger. The long, loud noise stretched until it became a word- “Aja,” Maul cried, sobbing almost too hard to be understood, “Aja- aja- aja-”
The hands wrapped around his shoulders, and pulled. Savage gripped his brother’s waist as hard as he could with his remaining hand, and had to pull back, or be swatted by the pale man’s fingers. The robe stirred up the dust as the stranger turned, and the sunlight hit Savage straight in the face as his long shadow moved away, down towards the path, out of the village.
He wrapped his empty arms around his own chest, rocking and sobbing in absolute, wretched despair. “Please don’t hurt him,” he wept, “please, take me, take me instead, he’s just a baby, please don’t hurt him...”
Words failed him as he listened to Maul’s steady howl, crying out for his elder brother to help him, somehow, to take away what frightened him, and Savage’s hearts died in his chest knowing he could not go to him, would never comfort him again, would never be able to save him from this worst fear.
Maul’s small, shrill voice was undercut with one low hiss of “Silence,” as the stranger laid one hand flat on Maul’s back and- impossible sparks flew from his pale fingers into the toddler’s small body, and he jerked, fell still.
Savage’s voice cut out at the sickly crackling of lightning. His steady begging stopped, unable to continue as he held his breath, wondering why the world hadn’t stopped turning. Everything should have stopped, shouldn’t it, the moment his baby brother was taken from his arms?
In his silence, he could hear Viscus whispering in his ear, and he realized that the Sisters’ Voice, the holy man of twenty villages, had his arms around him, holding him in place even as he’d stopped struggling. “Don’t try to fight,” Viscus was saying, “I will not lose you, little one. Leave him be. I will not lose two children today.”
Savage fell back into Viscus’ arms, watching with dead eyes as the stranger strode down the cliffside path, the small blotch of red becoming harder and harder to see in his arms.
.
They held a wake.
A Nightbrother wake was almost always a rowdy, joyous occasion; a celebration of a man going to re-join the hunting-party of the Moon-Brothers, in the pale, cool world of the sky where there was neither love nor pain. The bonfire was lit all night and into the dawn, and the tejha flowed with the fervency of a mountain stream in spring; there were dances and songs to hide the tears of his loved ones...
But there was no way to make the funeral of an almost-two-year-old a joyous occasion.
The bonfire was high, but there were no songs; the tejha was passed to every man, even those under-age. What talk there was, was quiet, and in small groups of men who barely looked at one another.
Malice- who had struggled so hard against the men keeping him from going after the stranger that his arm had been wrenched from its socket- sat before the fire, too close to be comfortable, staring and crying in silence. And Savage- who, a few hours earlier, had wanted nothing more than to run to his brother’s embrace, could not look at him without a steady, nagging anger- why couldn’t you save him? He sat a few feet away from Malice, not looking at the sling holding his damaged arm.
He could feel the way the men of his village were looking at him- and, almost more pointedly, not looking at him. The boy who had failed in the most basic of responsibilities- to take care of his brother. Savage buried his head in his knees, and tried not to listen to the anxious whispering.
“What would it want with a Nightbrother child, anyways?”
“A slave, probably,” came the gruff voice of Riot, “we all know he comes from strong stock- sorry, Loathing-”
“Fuck off,” this was Loathing’s voice, slurred as usual with too much tejha, “don’t you talk about him like- like he was just that child’s sire, he was my-”
“But even outsiders know we’re a fighting people. It can’t just want to use him as labor- the boy can hardly even run yet- it has to want him as a fighter.”
“Or it’ll eat him.”
“Too small for eating.”
“Shut up, Riot.”
“I’m just saying.”
“It’s not his body it would eat, I think. It’ll steal his soul, to lengthen its life.”
“Steal the soul, use the empty husk as a scare-bird, to frighten its enemies...”
“Oh, Daunt, don’t. That’s gruesome.”
“Well, what else would it do with a soulless child? Send him back?”
“I got the closest to him,” Savage said. He didn’t mean to, but the words burst out. “I saw his eyes.”
The conversation stopped dead.
“It was like- it looked like-” Savage tried to find words for the cruel, hungry look in the stranger’s eyes, the way he looked at Savage’s brother like he was a doll, a pawn, prey... “He just wanted something to hurt.”
He put his head down, resting his forehead on his knees, leaving spots on his almost-outgrown trousers as he cried, again. Over and over he tried to think of something he could have done, some way his baby brother could be here again.
The knot of men dispersed, drifting away from the fire, into their homes in silent twos and threes.
.
His brother- Aja still tripping on his tongue even as he tried to grow up- left the village. Malice took Savage’s dark gold hands in his own scarlet ones, both striped with thin, ropey black, neither of their markings developed fully. “I have to go,” he said, looking him in the eyes, “this isn’t right, I can’t bear to see my family taken like this.”
Mal meant to go south, past the mountains to the river-basins, where the cities were. The traders said there were Zabrak women there, women that looked like real people, not the sickly-pale, wraith-thin things the Sisters were descended from.
It sounded like a dream to Savage. Women were horrors, things that came out of the night and took your family from you. Or maybe- he thought of a figure draped in black, a tiny boy who clambered up rocks and skinned his knees and never spoke to anyone but Savage; pale, clawlike hands wrapping around those red-skinned arms like talons of a sky-bird. Maybe there were people like them, with horns and markings, and then there were the Pale Ones, too tall and too thin, creatures of wavering noonlight and mirages over the plains. The Pale Ones were predators, and hunted them the way the Brothers hunted the rancors.
He considered the village, the way they stayed all in the same place for easy choosing, and wished that the Sisters would at least hunt them over the plains, instead of taking them from their nests in front of their children.
.
Viscus came again, and he almost ran and hid the moment the bike came into view. He stayed at the back of the crowd, trying not to cry, wondering who would be taken this time.
“Savage Opress?”
Called by name, with the crowd parting around him, he came forward. He had grown, a little, in the year since he had last seen Viscus, and he came up to most of the men’s shoulders.
There was a bundle of cloth in Viscus’ arms. Savage regarded it with dead-eyed suspicion.
The men dispersed a little, unnerved by the flat hatred in Savage’s eyes, knowing of his grief, his loneliness. His inability to save his baby brother.
Viscus knelt down. The bundle in his arms began to squirm.
“This child is of our blood,” he began, slow and somber, “and our tribe. This child is of your blood, and your line. This child is your responsibility, your life, your love.” Viscus shifted the baby to his elbow, and took Savage by the shoulder. “Give him what you have been given.”
Savage clenched his eyes shut, holding his breath to keep from crying. He didn’t want another child. He didn’t want another boy, crawling after him, layering over memories of little Maul.
He felt Viscus’ hand underneath his chin, tipping his head up, and opened his eyes. “His name,” Viscus said, folding back the cloth to reveal a small, pale yellow face, “is Feral.”
Savage considered the hut that he would have to go back to, now empty and echoing. His too-orderly workbench with the straight lines of tools undisturbed by tiny hands, the cooktop with enough meat for one and only one. He thought of brave, bold, shy, dramatic Maul, the child he couldn’t keep and couldn’t save, and tried to burn every moment of having him into his mind.
He took the bundle. The baby was light, and his eyelids fluttered as he breathed raggedly.
He pressed Feral’s warmth against his chest and let the tears fall.
.
The evening before he and Feral left for the Holy City, for the Trials, he knelt before the household altar, the tiny carved statues of the moon-dwellers and the hunting gods. Savage’s thick, calloused fingers, rough from years of work, rubbed at the cloth on which the statues, candles, and offerings sat. It was grey, and thin with age, with stains still spotting the edges where tiny Maul had spit up on it, as Savage rocked him through endless nights.
He remembered finding it, dropped at the spot where Maul had been playing that horrible morning, and thinking: Maul won’t sleep without this. He’s never in his life fallen asleep without this blanket. He must be screaming for it right now, right now... and weeping and weeping, unable to stop.
Feral’s blanket was folded smaller, set underneath a few candles. He’d finally given it up in his eighth year- but only after keeping it under his pillow a while- and they’d set the statue of Bhuti-nane, the younger brother, atop it. (Feral had never been given a baby. He was something of a special case, a little delayed, and by the time he’d really been ready for a child, the elders had passed them by. It suited them both fine, eternally stuck without a line, without a family. Alone. Savage the elder, Feral the younger. Like the moon-gods, like the hunters.)
Maul’s blanket was headed by the Death Sister, her carving marked in angry lines; Savage had ruined plenty of wood, trying to get those furious marks right without nicking her delicate features. He tried not to look at her, not wanting to tempt her gaze. But he twined the fabric around his fingertips, letting old grief fill him up like water, picturing a tiny baby boy, eager to learn, eager to play. Tears came to his eyes, and as he let them fall, he prayed.
Little one. Spirit of my child. Let us come home safe. Let your brothers come back from this safe. Keep the Sisters’ eyes from us and let your brothers live in peace... My baby. My own. Do not call us to join you yet...