[91st] The Reaping - District 7

"Brother." Freyja says.

The afternoon sun makes her hair glow a halo around her. It turns her skin translucent and her wrists blue. Eirik sits in a sling against her chest, sleeping.

Freyr looks up from the bearskin, his hands stained with ochre and linseed. He is weary from the hunt, battered from a predator's claws, but Freyja doesn't allow him the time to stand.

"It is you."

If Freyr is the heavy club, then Freyja is the winking knife; sharp and quick to the point. It has always been this way.

A trick. Freyr thinks. Freyja and her many wiles.

Because she is the keeper, not the releaser. Her sight extends to the gates, but they will only swing one way for her. Their bloodline has never produced a ferryer.

Even if she had seen something, or if something had been whispered to her, the ritual had already been done. It was over. The harvest sacrifice had been given the night before and the way the girl's blood had bubbled against the bay leaves meant that Death was appeased.

He had always been demanding, but never greedy. Not even in the cruelest year, when so many babes didn't make it and so many goats died, had he ever asked for a second.

"That is not your decision."

"Eirik spoke it."

Freyr looks at him, asleep in the linen with one small hand clutching his mother's hair.

"He cannot speak."

He's barely been crawling for a single summer.

"He can." Freyja says softly, fingers drifting to the child's cheek, "He can in the way that matters."

She must have brought him to the altar, to where the women spin and chant and use knives of bone to tell the future. She must have placed two objects in front of him, a stone and a berry, and told him to reach for the berry if it was Freyr, to the stone if it was anyone else.

And Eirik, clever child, clever survivor, would reach for the berry because he would not have been fed yet that morning.

See, Freyja would have said to the other seers, See how the King makes His decree.

And they would not argue. Not with her.

Even Freyr would not argue with his sister - he agreed to call Eirik nephew instead of son, he let Freyja take him as her own, burning the body of the woman who bore him and then returned to the pyre in spring.

"You would see me dead." Freyr questions, but there is no inflection to it. It is only a statement. "Your own brother."

Freyja's face is unreadable.

"I would see you deified."

Like Vargen. Raving and mad, but revered for eight years. They had been only children then.

Freyja smiles, as though she's heard his thoughts.

Eirik wakes and starts to cry.

They stand like aged dandelions in the square later, proud and tall, hair white and gleaming. The others are afraid of them. Freyr can taste it in the air.

He steps forward before the name has even been called. One of the Keepers eyes him, moves to stop him, hand on his baton like Freyr is just another boy trying to make a run for it.

"I am-"

"Freyr Forrester!"

He shines as though he's been doused in oil. The Keeper keeps his hand on his weapon but otherwise doesn't move.

Freyr can feel Freyja's hands around his forearm even though she's across the way from him, gathered with the other girls. Her fingers grip him in an icy manacle as he climbs the stairs, her nails dig in like talons until she draws blood.

Freyr looks down at his arm and there's nothing but an old scar.