The Foretelling Read Online Free

howling that day. They saw that the Angel could not be stopped, not by arrows, not by the battles we fought, not by any dreams.
    Half of our people were lost in the fields, and those who came back were covered with blood. Our sisters left teeth and bone and flesh in that place where the grass was so tall men could easily hide, at least for a while. Until we were done with them.
    When the battle was over the silence reminded me of the silence that followed my dream. Our people were quick to depart from the dead of our enemies, leaving them to the wolves and the ravens. I alone got off my horse to look at the defeated, but I didn't find what I was searching for. A man with yellow eyes, like mine.
    By staying behind, I saw things our people turned away from when they rode away in victory. All around me were the faces of the fallen. They were our enemy, but their agony was a bitter thing to see, especially those who were still in our world, although barely. Blood ran from them and made black pools. I tried not to think of the creatures as human, but as something else, as beasts.
    All the same, when I walked through what was left of them, I felt something rising inside me. Our word for this is never used. It is a curse upon our own people when speaking of our enemies.
    Mercy.
    I chased away all the ravens, running after them until they took flight. Then I shouted the word we must never say aloud in the field of the dying. Before it was spoken, it burned my mouth.
    That is why it was forbidden. It hurt too much to say.
    After a battle, our people celebrated. We did not lose because we could not. Victory was not a matter of choice; it was a necessity, life itself. Losing meant our people would be gone, a drop of blood on the hard yellow ground. Disappeared.
    Our people painted their faces with cinnabar and ochre; they dressed in amulets and amber. They drank koumiss, the fermented mares’ milk that made them so dizzy even the wounded could remember how to laugh.
    That was how our people rid themselves of the memory of battle: the way men screamed like children, the way our people were cut to pieces when they fell from our sister-horses onto the ground. We forgot in a dreamworld of our own making; we drank and danced until the recent past was far away, and then, farther still.
    Sometimes after a war had been won there was a festival that men were brought to, those we had captured and had let live. But a girl could only go if she had killed three men in battle; that meant she was a woman as well as a warrior, ready to have a child. Babies grow into warriors, and that was who we were.
    Our Queen never went to the festival. She had no need for men; she already had her daughter. Not that she looked for me after the battle with the men from the ice country. A person didn't need the gift of prophecy to understand how she'd come to name me Rain, to mark the thousands of tears she might have cried the day the fifty cowards trapped her.
    All the same, the battle had been my first taste of war. I thought perhaps I might approach the Queen and ask for a blessing. That I might ask for guidance so that in the next battle I would slaughter as many men as came before me, fifty if possible, a hundred if I could, like a true Queen-to-be.
    When we returned to our city of tents, my mother went to the edge of the stream where we took our water in summer. I followed her. She was giving gratitude to the goddess. She was the Queen, but humble still.
    I was about to go forward when I saw that there was a woman standing in the shadow of the Queen. She was a slave from the north, with ropes of red hair, long-limbed and fair, forced into servitude by the enemy we had vanquished. The slave was covered with tattoos — not the blue-black lines we wore on our cheekbones and wrists to mark our blood and our battles. Every bit of her face and body was covered by red circles and swirls that could make you dizzy if you stared for too long, images that moved should