Chapter Text
The seas are restless, choppy and fraught with the rumblings of a storm that lingers in the burgeoning black clouds on the horizon. The other sailors (or whatever they may be, Tally still isn’t quite sure) seem to pay the skies no mind as it approaches, the clouds drawing closer and closer and the wind whipping the sail in a building frenzy.
She makes the mistake of asking one of them how they can remain so calm, a young woman barely older than Tally is herself with braided blonde hair and a scar cutting her cheek from lip to jaw. The girl scoffs, shakes her head and spares the horizon barely more than a cursory glance.
“No storm will touch us,” she says with a confidence that Tally can only wonder at.
These sailors, raiders, warriors - whatever they are - are clearly seasoned, clearly at home on the water and their every movement is practised, second nature in the way they navigate the currents. But the storm looms large and Tally knows all too well the damage that even the mildest of tempests can wreak.
She feels as though she has been travelling half her life by now although it can only have been a few months at most. Wandering feet have taken her halfway across the continent and then some. Searching - always searching - but for what, she doesn’t quite know.
Only rarely does she miss the life she left behind in the village. Her mother’s drawn and disapproving face, the elder village mothers so confused when Tally asked for their permission to leave, even Glory who was Tally’s best and only friend for so many years does not often cross her mind of late.
When the crew of the Windshear docked for supplies one rainy day in some dull little Frankish town by the coast, Tally saw more than just a loud and boisterous group of women, battle-scarred and vibrant, she saw opportunity.
Something pulled her towards those women and their curious ship, their round shields and polished axes. The way they sang together as they’d loaded their cargo and laughed and jostled amongst one another.
Tally had to ask their captain, a tall, dark skinned woman with intricately braided hair and a faintly terrifying gaze, three times, begging almost, before the woman agreed to give her passage to England with a huff and a palm full of the last of Tally’s coin.
The captain, Anacostia as she later introduced herself, was wholly unimpressed by Tally’s boundless enthusiasm for just about everything and anything and she made as much plain. When Tally somewhat sheepishly admitted to her that she had almost no experience with sailing, an hour after casting off to sea, Anacostia half threatened to throw her overboard.
A day later, when Tally Sees the storm approaching hours before it even begins to colour the skies, she tells their captain of what she has Seen and is silently vindicated by the newly appraising look that Anacostia grants her.
When the storm arrives the captain is expecting it and calls her warriors to attention, not a trace of worry amongst them, and as one they summon ancient songs to their tongues and sing out into the skies.
Just as the blond girl with the scar had said, the storm does not touch them or the Windshear and as they sing in brilliant, building harmony the storm simply - passes over them- and away.
Anacostia eyes Tally with a shrewd gaze and a silent question on her lips for the rest of the day.
Tally dreams on the voyage.
Sleep does not come easy, crammed in at the back of the ship as she is, surrounded on all sides by crates and the press of bodies sure and steady. When she eventually drifts away the dream swims behind her eyes in distorted, murky fragments that float up from the seabed in crusted ship-wreck shards.
The vision coalesces in smears of light and colour and Tally is no longer at sea. She stands in a barren field, dewy grass beneath the bare soles of her feet and a gloomy dawn washing the sky in bands of slate grey bleeding pale orange at the edges.
The field is a desolate plain stretching out as far as the eye can see but for the enormous tree rising before Tally, towering above and casting shadows that flicker and dance between straining rays of ashen sunlight.
Tally blinks, cranes her head back to look up at the tree and into branches that reach out into the sky like the gnarled, twisted hands of some ancient creature, reaching up to touch the sun where she hides.
A bird sits upon the outstretched fingers of one branch. A raven, she thinks, its head cocked and shrewd eyes trained firmly on her where she stands frozen in place. Tally tries to move forward, limbs heavy and leaden in the dreamscape and it’s like trying to swim through a tide of thick, viscous pitch.
The raven squawks loudly when she moves, and the moment her foot takes a single step forwards and crunches in the grass, it flies suddenly up into the air and rushes Tally in a flurry of black wings. Then as quickly as the raven had moved in the first place the image dissolves again like dregs of paint in swirling water and slips away fast.
Her eyes open again.
She’s flying now, soaring through stormy skies on great black feathered wings that move as though they were limbs of her very own. Lightning splits a distant horizon of roiling thunderhead clouds and when Tally looks down, she realises she’s at sea again.
The boat being tossed around on violent waves below is the same she distantly knows that her sleeping body still sits upon, but it hardly looks the same. The sail is ragged and torn in places and there’s a great, gaping hole rent through the hull. A terrible black maw that yawns open wide as bitter ocean water rushes in.
From so high above, the bodies rushing to and fro along the long deck of the ship seem like little more than insects to Tally in her winged body. Their panic, however, is palpable. The water rushes and rushes, churning around the ship in storm-tossed waves and Tally knows with bright and startling clarity that the ship is going to sink.
The storm rages and the sailors panic, and above it all Tally circles through the clouds on damp feathered wings. Another bolt of furious lightning rends the skies and illuminates the distant outline of pointed pitch-black sails on the horizon. The storm rises to a fever pitch and the hull of the ship below splits apart with an almighty crashing of thunder.
The waters churn and whip into a frenzy and the vessel and its sailors sink beneath hungry waves, their screams lost amongst the dread knell of a ravening storm.
Tally blinks her beady, borrowed eyes against the lashing rain and the world begins to dim, the thunder melting away in long, low rumbles that dissipate into an eerie silence.
Her eyes open again.
Now she stands on a small wooden dock by a wide and winding river and Tally gasps in pain as the acrid sting of smoke and fire hits her eyes and fills her nostrils.
Before her lies a small village of huts clustered together, a hill rising up behind them on the horizon, and it is being consumed whole by a ravaging inferno.
The roar of the flames is deafening and all around wooden huts crackle and burn. The smoke billows into the night air, thick and cloying. When she breathes in it fills her mouth and chokes her lungs until she’s bent double and heaving.
There is not a soul else to be found but herself and when she tries to move Tally finds her feet fixed to the dock beneath them. The fire rages and rages, on and on, the village burning down to ash and cinders before her eyes and she can do nothing but watch it die.
Tally could not say for how long she stays there. Time passes strangely as she watches the fire burn and die out into nothing. It could have been hours or days, the sky remains black and fathomless and the river runs ever onwards and unchanged.
Her trance is broken only when her ears prick up at a new sound. A rumbling, rolling, growl from up on the hillside where the longhall once stood, now little more than smoking rubble and remains.
Tally’s head moves slowly towards the sound and there at the top of the sloping path stands an enormous black wolf. Its wild eyes are pinpricks of brightest yellow-gold, its maw pulled back in a snarling, snapping growl with bloodied fangs.
Tally tries to step back but her feet do not move.
The wolf snaps its jaws as she flinches and then rears its head back to howl long and piercing into the blackened sky.
It begins to advance down the slope towards her and Tally wills her legs to move. This time when she steps backwards her body listens. The wolf springs towards her on paws too large, too quick to be natural, and Tally trips and tumbles backwards and down, down, into the river below.
Her eyes open again.
She’s back in the field. The sky is a baleful wash of black, rain pouring in sheets that freeze down to the bone and a battle rages around Tally in a cacophony of clashing metal and splintered shields.
She’s lying on her back on the ground, the mud soaking wet and running rust-red with blood, caking her fingers as she scrabbles in the dirt to get to her feet. She sinks her hands into the soft earth and pushes herself backwards, further and further until she hits something solid and unyielding.
The tree.
The enormous black alder tree with its skeletal branches, casting the battlefield in shadows that blot out the sun, rises behind Tally, solid and unmoving. She braces her scraped raw hands against the bark of the trunk and stands slowly. Her legs protest and as she looks down at herself, she finds she’s dressed in unfamiliar leather and mail, a gleaming, engraved sword strapped at her belt.
She hasn’t the time to wonder who the axe belongs to though, because in the next moment something large and solid throws itself at her bodily, pinning her to the tree and holding her there by her throat with one gloved hand.
The figure that looms over her wears black-dyed armour and an intricately carved helm and mail coif that obscures their face as they bear their weight down on Tally hard, the press of rough bark biting through the soaked wool of her trousers.
The figure snarls a hoarse, animal sound low in his throat and lunges. Tally barely sees the twisted blade of the knife, curved and hooked at one end, as it slashes across her vision in one fell swoop.
She feels it though.
She feels the blood first, a hot, wet trickle and then a gushing river that streams down her face from one hollowed out eye socket, rent open and bloody by that horrible blade.
Tally drops to her knees against the tree with a searing gasp of white-hot pain and clutches muddied hands to her face, feels the wound cutting from brow to cheek and screams into the din of battle still raging around them.
The world swims, sick and dizzy, as she cries her throat bloody and then it all goes black as the battlefield dissolves into nothing but red, red blood and sickly dark shadows.
Her eye opens again.
She’s on the dock again, but it’s different now.
The river runs black and red with shed blood and something oily and dark, twisting amongst the currents in tendrils. Shuttered faces pass beneath the waters, downstream, one after another and even obscured as they are, they feel oddly familiar to Tally.
She turns and the village is before her again. Its little wooden huts, rustic but homely, are painted in swirling sigils and decorated in simple fashion for the coming of the equinox. A great tree rises from the hillside above, bone charms and wicker runes hanging from its branches in ribbons, and the longhall behind it stands resolute.
Tally realises with a gasp that a dark-haired figure waits at the top of the rise seated atop a gleaming black horse, cloaked in furs and dressed in fine glittering chainmail. Even at a distance Tally fancies that her lone eye can pick out the stranger's own sea-jewelled blue gaze, her brow and cheeks daubed in blue-black pigment.
The stranger does not move and her mount remains eerily still as she looks down upon Tally on the dock. She waits but Tally does not know what for.
A crack of lightning splits the sky, and Tally cries out as a searing pain spears her body from crown to heel. She has to blink her eye closed tight against the white spots dancing in her vision.
When she opens it again, gone are the painted homes and decorations, the ancient tree and the longhall proud on the hill. All is burned to nothing but ash and cinder again. The sky roils black, and oil and pitch fall from the sky in sheets of rain that is not rain.
The horse shrieks in fear, but the stranger does not move.
Tally watches in horror as blood begins to drip from the woman’s eyes, her nose, her throat. The red runs down the pale column of her throat and her fine armour in rivulets. The red turns black and oily, tendrils clawing at her mouth and eyes, wrapping around her throat and squeezing.
The horse cries out again and rears onto its hind legs and Tally watches as the stranger tumbles backwards.
Tally wakes with a hoarse cry before the woman ever hits the ground and she heaves in lungfuls of fresh air and the smell of the trees gone gold for autumn.
“Hey! You good there new blood?”
The girl’s voice is far too loud in Tally’s ears and with it comes a hundred other sounds that rush back to her all at once. The wind in the sail, the water beneath their vessel, the call and chatter of a dozen women crammed in side by side.
Tally blinks against the sun, lower in the sky than it had been earlier and tries to find her voice.
“Fuck’s sake Bellweather, don’t yell at her,” calls the blonde girl to her friend, just as loudly while Tally winces.
“Yeah, um, yeah i’m fine,” she sounds weak and a little pathetic even to herself and the frown on Bellweather’s face says she thinks as much too but she only furrows her brow before speaking again.
“Good. Because we’re nearly home.”