Brother Crow
an excerpt

(This is not the beginning of my NaNo novel. It is a bit of backstory somehwere around chapter three. And it is rough. Very rough.)

He took me back to his village of round huts built of sticks and mud. His people shunned me, an Esrian in their midst. My wounds festered, and my feverish rantings convinced them of my evil. The Hinradal sequestered me in his hut, fed me strange herbs and applied poultices to both the arrow wound and my shredded leg.

When I awoke from my illness at last, he told me I cried out in my sleep, words he did not understand sometimes. Sometimes I called out in his brother’s voice, chanting prayers to the spirits vanished in time. He confessed he thought I would join them, and there would be no more hope for his brother's spirit. He would be adrift on the wind, an eternity with no place to rest.

The other villagers shunned him for using me as a Tarsik, and he sent me to the shaman, deep under the mountains. In a cave where fire glinted off crystals, the shaman spoke to me in strange voices, and fed me herbs that made me forget, and some that made me remember. And he sent me back to the village with his sign, a string of stone beads wrapped with sinew around a feather, crow black. I was the Tarsik.

But I would not stay. The winter winds blew cold, and I flew south ahead of the gales that dumped white on the mud huts and the round, upturned faces of the children.

And in the spring, when I flew back to the village, it was gone. Esrians marched through the forests, horse and sword, and fire behind them. The Hinradal were gone, and I slipped past the enemy ranks, hidden from tree to tree, and flew south once more, over the mountains to the warm summer climes.

I drifted long over the dry plains of the southland, but never found the black-eyed villagers. And as the summer heat shifted, drying my skin till it cracked, something deep within me whispered Fly. Fly north. And I went.