The firelight was a beautiful gold, and it was warm in the courtyard, but the woman sat alone there. No one in the hunting party had stayed to sit with her as she’d piled the sticks, they’d all gone ahead into the rest of the palace to be alone with their thoughts, or peeled off into the city to be distracted by someone else’s— and no one else had come down to join her here, even five, six hours later. People are staying away. She had overbuilt the fire a bit, and it was burning now large and frightening. Or maybe it was the great corpse of the nightmare-boar, dragged into the courtyard, that had frightened everyone away. Even entirely dead, it didn’t feel quite entirely dead. Even as the woman carved away at its pelt, even after she had separated its tusks, it felt every bit the menace it had been.

  Maybe it was the woman herself who had everyone frightened. She was a horrifying sight, sitting there. She was a mess. She was bruised from head to foot. She had deep lacerations on her face from where Ankaion’s elbows and knuckles had struck her, hard enough to tear flesh. She had his blood all over her clothing, and her arms and legs, and her cheek, and her brow. She hadn’t bothered trying to wash it off. It would never wash off. Not really. The servants had only bothered insisting just one time that she take a long, warm bath, that she more than deserved it. She had refused entirely, and not at all gently. She had told them that she was sick of their perfumes and lotions, and she had told this to herself as well, and she had stayed out

  here again with the pelt and the fire, under the Full Moon, silent. All she had asked was that Leto be let out of her room to come and curl up beside her, and the she-wolf had come and done just that, sleeping in the warm light.

  It hurt to breathe. Her ribcages ached horribly where Ankaion’s knee had smashed it. It hurt to move. Her fingers, she had feared that they’d been permanently mangled, bones splintered to nothing— though they had simply been pulled out of joint. A steeling of her resolve, one sharp jerk, and then another, and both her fingers were back now in their proper spots. They would be alright.

  Moving them was agony. It would be agony for quite some time.

  But she sat and worked hard upon the corpse just the same. She had already carved a new knife for herself from the ivory of the boar’s left tusk, with a deadly-sharp blade, and she had peeled off strips of its thick pelt to wrap the grip— and when the new knife was good and finished, she had taken the old knife, the gift from her mother with the silver edge and the moonstone handle, and she had buried it under a tree in the courtyard and sworn to herself that she would forget about. With her new knife, she had cut free enough of the boar’s pelt to use as a new headscarf to cover her hair, and she was laboring now to cut herself a matching set of new clothes to replace the ones the Half Moon had once helped her get. It was all getting too small, anyways. She was grown up, now, she didn’t need her mother or Her gifts anymore. Things for children.

  She glanced up at the Full Moon, but not with hatred or disdain. That was not the Half Moon up there, that was not her mother. And it didn’t matter now, anyways, any of that. She did not hate her mother, now. She didn’t have time to waste on such petty things. She did not hate her mother, no; no, she couldn’t be made to care about her mother at all anymore.

  It was time to let go. It was time to move on.

  “Tell Her that I have forgotten Her,” the woman commanded the Full Moon. “Tell Her to forget me.”

  Beside the Full Moon, she saw the new stars right as they appeared— almost as if an answer. A little over a dozen of them. Their form was immediately clear.

  It was the woman.

  Or no, it was someone like her— so very much like her that for a moment the woman truly thought that she was seeing herself up in the sky as stars, just dead stars. What it would look like if she failed. If she faced down the shadow and lost.

  Just as she had lost today.

  The only thing the Moon had ever really done wrong was to be wrong about her. Just like her birth parents, leaving her on the mountainside for not being the son they had wanted. The woman was not the daughter the Moon had wanted, she was never going to be. If there was one thing she had learned today, just one horrible thing, it was that the person she had been, the person that mother up there had shaped her into… that person was not enough. That was not the shape of death this greater world demanded. Ankaion had taught her that lesson, and she would not waste it. To face an enemy on a flat field at noon. To overwhelm them with force and fury, to leave them as nothing more than a quivering mass of what they had once been, helpless. To completely and utterly destroy them, straight to their face. That was the shape of death she would have to trim her tree into. If her mother hadn’t stopped her that night, if she’d been allowed to face the shadow then, as she was… those stars in the sky now would have been her.

  The only thing the Moon had ever really done wrong was to make her daughter weak.

  The woman wondered about that other young woman, whoever she was, wherever she was. She wondered about what had just happened to her, what it had been like. Had she been as helpless against the shadow as the woman had been today against Ankaion? Her body flooded immediately with shame and pathetic weakness as she thought back on it. How could she ever hope to face such a powerful force as the shadow if she could not face even just a simple, arrogant man?

  No. No, it would not go like that. Not for her. It would not go for her like it had gone for that new girl, up there. She would be no one’s victim, not again. She had already decided it, the moment she had sat down to start carving away at this pelt, and she was deciding it all over again now, a second time. She would make certain. She would find the shadow, and it would be him who ended up in the sky. She would put him up there herself, and the whole world would be able to look up and know that it was her who had triumphed, it was her who had been stronger, fiercer, the better warrior. A hero. Unstoppable. Tonight was the first night. This boar’s pelt, its tusks… these were the beginning.

  When pale-faced Meleager finally came down into the courtyard to be beside her, she had already finished with her new clothes and headscarf, and she was hard at work upon something else— whittling the boar’s right tusk, into what?— he couldn’t quite tell.

  For a moment, the Prince almost didn’t recognize her. He had become so accustomed to the light-brown fawn-pelt she’d always kept wrapped over her head or draped around her shoulders, soft and wide-eyed. But these new clothes, this new headscarf, they were the same cold black as the night itself, course with gnashing needle-fur, and where the fawn-pelt’s wide eyes had let just a bit of the light of the woman’s hair shine through, like its own curious gaze at the world, her new pelt let out no light at all. Up in the treetops, now, there would be nothing but the dead light of her own eyes to give her away. Even that light… somehow it felt as though she had been changed. “What are you making?” he asked quietly. “A new bow?”

  It was as good a first thing as any to say. It was better than all the things he didn’t want to say, he didn’t want to talk about anymore. The woman didn’t look at him as she answered. “No. A spear. A bow is a toy for children. A weapon for the weak.”

  “The weak?”— Meleager shook his head. “Your bow was hardly weak today.”

  “My bow was powerful because I am powerful,” muttered the woman, peeling away curl after curl of bone from the tusk, crafting the perfect shape for her hands to hold. “But I must become more powerful if I am going to…” she trailed off. “A spear is a weapon for the powerful. A weapon for heroes, for the brave. For the mighty.”

  Finally, she looked up at Meleager.

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  “You should know better than anyone.”

  He saw it in the shine of her eyes, what had happened in the forest. He saw himself killing his uncles, one after the other. He saw it in her eyes just as he had seen it in the trunks of the trees on the walk back, just as he had seen it in the fields of wheat and the houses and streets of Caledonia. He saw it in the deep circles under his own eyes in the reflection of his mother’s jewelry. He saw it in her sobbing and screaming and thrashing, he saw it in his father helpless to calm her. There was nowhere he didn’t see it.

  “The King and Queen have accepted the story of what happened in the forest,” he said. “All the other hunters have proudly attested to it except for Eurytion, who has simply stayed silent and spoken nothing in disagreement.”

  He walked around the fire and gently lowered himself to sit beside the woman and the wolf. He reached out to give the sleeping Leto a gentle stroke along the snout, and down the side of her neck.

  “When I was young…” he started. He stopped himself. And then again, he started. “When I was young, once, my uncles and I, we went hunting in the woods. Not too far from today. I couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old. I was using…”— he almost began to laugh, in spite of himself. “I was using a bow.”

  “My mother didn’t give me my first bow until I was fourteen,” said the woman, half-minded. “Up until then, I was hunting with just a knife and my quiet feet.”

  “All the more amazing, what you’ve managed to do with it,” said Meleager. “I had been hunting with a bow for maybe two or three years, and I was absolutely hopeless. More often than not, I would miss my target, and more often than that I wouldn’t be able to get off an arrow at all— I wouldn’t be able to nock it properly, or I’d fumble the string and drop it before even starting to draw, or my tiny arms would be too tired to really draw anyways and I’d just hiccup a shot a foot or two away from where I was standing. But my uncles, they didn’t mind. They took me along with them on all their hunting trips anyways. They were patient with me, young as I was. They taught me everything they could.”

  The woman had been much the same way starting out. She remembered her first few months with her own bow. She remembered the patience of the Moon, teaching her so many things, watching her fail over and over— and slowly and slowly, failing less and less. Meleager stared into the roaring fire, eyes watering from the heat, maybe.

  “They really loved me, my uncles,” he murmured. “And on that day, during our hunt, when I ran a little too far ahead and stumbled across a mountain-lion that had come down from the foothills…”

  The man gave a long sigh.

  “You should have seen the way Ankaion threw himself between me and that mountain-lion, like his body was worthless. It was such a simple thing, the way he did it. Things were so simple.”

  “He’s changed a great deal.”

  “Things have changed a great deal. Things have complicated themselves, nothing is so simple now as it was before, when I was a child. But oh…”— he laughed another laugh— “Oh, my mother— you cannot even begin to imagine how angry she was with us.”

  “For your uncles putting you in danger?”

  Meleager shook his head. “That’s what I had thought at first, too— but no, what she was really mad about… she was mad at Ankaion for protecting me like that.”

  For just a moment, the woman stopped her carving— “What?”— she must have heard wrong. That couldn’t have been what Meleager had really said. She couldn’t imagine any sort of mother being like that— not the old she-bear, not the Half Moon, not even whatever mother it was who had left her on the mountainside. Discarded her, sure enough, but angry at her for surviving?

  “It was only afterwards that it started to make any sense. As much sense as a thing like that could make, I mean. She took me to her chamber, in the farthest reaches of the highest palace, and she showed me something, and she tried to explain.”

  “Show you what? Explain what?”

  “Well…”

  Meleager frowned. He had promised her never to speak of it, that was the truth. And here he was no, pinned to the wall by that promise. He owed it to the woman, this story. But at the same time he could not shake away watching his mother dissolve as a person when he had told her what had happened to her brothers. Her screaming and sobbing, her thrashing. He would not forget that soon, any more than he would forget what it really was that had happened in the woods.

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t know.”

  “…fine then.”

  The woman went back to her carving. Meleager closed his eyes, held his head in his hands. “What I’m trying to say… bravery isn’t always what it seems. I’m not as brave as you think I am.”

  “You rush into danger with no fear of death.”

  “That isn’t bravery, it’s… I’m just never quite so frightened of anything as I ought to be. You did the braver thing today. Not once or twice but three whole times, you challenged a terrible danger without hesitation— but were you not afraid of it?”

  The woman paused for what seemed like a long time before answering. “I was,” she admitted. “I was afraid to hunt the boar, I became afraid of it when I saw it… and I was afraid of your uncle as well. I was afraid like my mothers raised me to be afraid, of snakes or Thunder. But I should not have been. Fear doesn’t suit me.”

  “…indeed,” supposed Meleager, and for a few moments he didn’t say anything more. He picked up a twig from beside where he sat and he played with it in his hands, back and forth. He peeled the bark from it. He snapped off little bits of it, the dead-end nubs. And when he was done with that, he took it and he tossed it right into the woman’s fire and he watched it slowly burn away into nothing.

  What a thing for him to do, he thought. What a thing.

  Finally, he spoke once. “I’m leaving on another journey tomorrow morning. I need to be traveling again.”

  The woman didn’t ask why. For so many things she didn’t understand about so many things, she understood this perfectly.

  “I’m not sure where I’m going. North, maybe. East is just the sea, and South are lands I have been to before. North is new to me, at least.”

  “I see.”

  “…will you come with me?”

  For a moment, the woman was shocked by the plainness of this. She might have expected him to dance around the question, or to try to get her to ask for herself if she could come along. Nearly all the people she had met so far away from the mountainside had been like that, always speaking near the edges of things, trying to get someone else to say what it was that they themselves were feeling. But Meleager, the first person she had met, he was not like any of those who had come after. He said what he meant.

  “I will come with you,” the woman nodded. She would have asked him if that was how he had wanted to maneuver things. The Prince had been kind to her. And he was strong, he was bold, he was brave. He would make a fine example for her for what she wanted to become; a fine stick to measure herself against. Already she had started to shape her new spear not at all unlike his own— the same knob at the end to decorate and balance it, the same cross-guard just below the point.

  “Thank you,” said Meleager, and he meant it. He was happy to have her along with him. He would have begged her, perhaps, if she had not immediately agreed. This was at least one thing that was good, now. One thing to feel a little better about. “Thank you,” he repeated, and he stood. “I will give you your room to be alone.”— and with that, he strode out of the courtyard, standing just a bit taller than he had been a minute before. The woman watched him go, and then she turned yet again to her carving.

  She resolved to herself that she was going to become like him. She was going to become stronger and stronger. She was going to become undefeatable. Indomitable. And when she finally did face the shadow, she would destroy him as easily as Meleager had destroyed his uncles, like nothing at all. She would become an unstoppable force of glory and combat.

  There would be no one, ever again, who would humiliate her. There would be no one, ever again, who would doubt her— who would stop her charge down the mountain; who would push down her bow. No one who would laugh at her. No one who would call her weak, or a coward. There would be no one, ever again, who would dispute her strength or worth, who would feel safe enough to challenge her for her rightly earned spoils. Her rightly earned glory.

  There would be no one, ever again, who would see fit to leave her to die on the mountainside. There would be no one ever again who didn’t want her.

  Three times now, tonight, she had decided this for herself, and so it was well and truly sealed in her heart. This was the shape of her future— this was the shape that the tree of death grown inside her would be pruned into. This would be the fruit it bore.

  It was time to let go. It was time to move on.

  The woman took her old clothes and her headscarf, and she tossed them into the fire. Then, without even waiting for them to burn, she untied the bow from her belt— undid the knot of the blanket of that baby from so long ago. It had been so long ago. It was another life— another person who had been standing there in the forest, holding that child, watching it die. It had not been her. She held the bow, in both hands, that her mother had given her. She stared at it. She leaned down her face to the wood, and she kissed it. She thanked it for everything that it had done in her hands. It was not the fault of the bow that hers had been the wrong hands to hold it— that it had been the wrong thing for her to hold. Her mother should have given her a spear with which to fight and kill, face to face instead of from up in the treetops. Armor to wear, instead of a headscarf to cover her shining hair. A great raging voice with which to roar, instead of silence and careful stillness.

  She tossed the bow onto the fire and watched it catch. She watched the fire devour the string, and slowly nibble away at the wood of the limbs. She watched her old clothes burn, and the fawn-pelt— and suddenly, her heart was sinking, she was frowning. It was not the Half Moon who had given her that pelt, was it? It was the old she-bear who had pinned down the fawn and waited, patient, for her to put an end to things.

  But no, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to let it matter. The woman rose and left her fire, with Leto sleeping soundly beside it. She went out from the courtyard, out from the palace entirely, and through the night city— past the lights of the windows, all the way down to the river running through the heart of Caledonia, and when she reached it, she stopped.

  She had long-since shed her name. She had shed her clothes. She had shed her knife, and her bow. All the things her mother the Moon had given her.

  She would shed, too, the boon her mother had given her— the ability to always be different. But she was not going to be different. She was not going to be made to be different, never again. She would stand tall beside all the heroes of this world and be acknowledged as likewise, equal in power, equal in glory. She would become the same as them, as she had always been meant to. All would look upon her, and they would know it to be so.

  But there was one last thing still left to shed.

  She unbuckled her belt, her enchanted belt, with the four gleaming pearls, all in a row. The final gift from the Moon.

  Unmatchable speed, when it should have been strength. It had failed to help her defeat the centaurs, even in a contest of running— and it had done nothing at all to help her fight them. It had failed to help her defeat Ankaion. She hadn’t so much as drawn blood from him. Feeble. Pathetic.

  What good had it ever done her?

  She hurled the belt into the river. She stood and she watched, as the current carried it away.