The house smelled like smoke and iron, again.
Shrouded by darkness her face barely lit by the embers in the hearth she stood hunched over sharpening the knife that had no name. She would always say, a blade should earn its name in blood, not in service.
Valeska sat on the floor, legs crossed, tracing circles in the dust. The circles made snakes. When she giggled at them, Mylah’s eyes flashed toward her sharply, like she’d done something wrong just by laughing.
“Noise brings soldiers.” her mother said.
Valeska nodded, though there hadn’t been soldiers in days. Her stomach growled. She pressed her hand against it so it wouldn’t make another sound. On the table lay a loaf of bread, hard as stone. She looked at it the way children look at stars — wanting without hope.
Mylah noticed; she always saw, everything.
“No,” she said.
“You learn hunger before you learn strength.”
Valeska tried to nod again, but her mouth tasted like dust and something sad.
She wondered if strength tasted like bread when you weren’t allowed to eat it.
Outside, the wind slashed sand against the shutters like someone whispering secrets. Her mother’s hands never stopped moving — scrape, scrape, scrape — metal against stone. The sound filled the room the way fear fills silence.
“Why scrape knife?” Valeska asked half mimed with her small hands.
Mylah’s jaw tightened with irritation
“Because dull things die first.”
Valeska turned back to the floor, drawing the circles again. This time she made them close tighter, the snakes swallowed their tails.
Her mother paused the sharpening, just for a breath. In that quiet moment, the noises from the outskirts of the city gates. The marching of the Hollow; sounds of sobbing children, forced to leave their home to populate the Iron Reach nurseries.
Mylah scoffed, "You better not cry, when they take you"
Then the sound of striking metal began again, drowning out the march but not the hunger.
