Entering the meeting hall was always a surreal experience. The oval, packed earth building looked larger on the inside than it did on the outside, and the sheer size of the enclosed space took a moment to adjust to. Sometimes I could almost forget the claustrophobic feeling I got whenever I stepped behind walls. There were probably near two thousand people all told who took shelter in the valley during the cold season and that lived in the mountains, and they could all fit in the meeting hall with supplies with room to spare, if needed.

There weren’t nearly that many people in the hall when Rawley and I entered, which made the space feel even bigger. Their conversations echoed slightly around us, but it wasn’t strong enough to make any words out. Cook fires provided light along with the savory smell of browning meat, but they weren’t strong enough to light up more than the area on the right, closest to the door. Glow stones made up the difference. They soaked up moonlight during the night and, as their name suggested, glowed during the day. Like small stars. Because you had to take them into shadow to really make out the effect, many people thought of them as reminders of the goddess’s power. The bigger the stone, the more it glowed, but most glow stones were the size of a fist and lit up a light blue radius of four feet. Most of the semi-rare stones found were placed in the meeting hall, so that people weren’t tripping over each other in the dark. It was one thing to appreciate and honor the goddess’s aspects, and another to be rendered useless from the cold and dark. The meeting hall was a good place to work on projects too large to fit in a tent. Men were working on repairing or making tents, others were sorting out supplies, cooking, or grinding down acorns into flour. A few were keeping an eye on children as they worked, but normally that was a job for older children until they were apprenticed. Women were only expected to do that work if they were still nursing or healers. I had heard more than one disparaging tribe member liken healers to men because of the amount of life in them and that they had to do men’s work out of necessity.

If there was a job that involved turning a raw resource into a usable product then a man was doing it. If not in the meeting hall, then out in one of the camps. A woman’s hand was better suited for the start and end of production, so that nothing was sullied or cursed by having too much life imbued into it. Women were expected to put the finishing touches on a project, for good luck and balance, if nothing else. No one wanted to draw the goddess’s ire because they made a tent or dress touched with a bit too much life. That’s why women were the hunters and men the cooks; why Father’s wife was a sheep herder and Old Spinner had spun their wool into thread and Lendra would take his thread to weave blankets and other necessities.

Huntresses and other groups of women were also doing their work in the hall. The huntresses’ area was to the far left of the door and it included a generous sweep of the floor on that side along with two curtained alcoves. Lone huntresses were the only ones to sleep in those alcoves, but Pack huntresses also gathered in the hall to talk and work when they wanted a reprieve from their tribe’s Pack tent or to meet with huntresses from other tribes. A few camp dogs lay at the feet of some of the huntresses.

In the far back of the hall was the raised mud work platform that the Grandmothers used to address the tribes during ceremonies and celebrations. The platform was decorated with a pine forest at night and the goddess’s eyes peering out from in between the branches. The two glow stones placed in her pupils made it impossible to forget the goddess’s gaze every time you looked toward the stage. A single pedestal rose up in the middle of the front part of the platform. I knew from past ceremonies that it held a larger version of Grandmother’s pale pine wood bowl perfectly. Three Grandmothers and a couple Echoes stood on the stage, looking like they consulting each other about the unexpected upcoming celebration. I hoped they weren’t planning anything elaborate.

Rawley carried me to one of the curtained off alcoves on the left side of the hall. I felt the eyes of several of the huntresses on us, but they kept quiet as Rawley walked past. Inside the alcove was a mini version of the huntress’s cave at Gabbler Shore along with spots for about thirty huntresses to sleep. Statues of the goddess were placed on every ledge and the back of the alcove had been sectioned off with furs into two enclosed places, so the lone huntresses could cleanse themselves in shadow, privately, if they wished. It felt a little eerie to sleep in a place with so many eyes of the goddess watching, but each statue was for a kill that was thought to be worthy of the goddess’s attention. Huntresses were some of the few who could draw her gaze and not have it be in misfortune or punishment. They would be too superstitious to take down any of the statues unless it was by decree of a Grandmother. The alcove was empty except for a napping huntress.

Rawley stopped at a bedroll about halfway into the alcove and pointed to the empty spot next to it. “You’ll sleep there. Once you get settled in, we’ll talk.”

She set me down and it only took me a handful of minutes to get my bedroll and pack situated to my liking. Rawley watched as I worked from her place on her bedroll, undoubtedly waiting for me to ask for help, but even though I knew her teachings and relief seemed to ease through my shoulders every time I looked at her, I couldn’t quite bring myself to say the words. I imagined her making a note to ask Fellen how she got me to accept help as I leaned back against the wall.

Rawley considered for a moment before she gestured to my hair. “May I?”

Nostalgia warmed my skin as, once again, I was reminded of when I was still recovering from my foot injury. Keeping my hair neat and untangled hadn’t been much of a priority then, just as it hadn’t been in Flickermark and the Statue Garden.

I nodded and turned so that she had better access to my hair. Her fingers were gentle as she began to work on a knot. She said, “I know Grandmother will share your story tomorrow, but I want to hear it in your words first.”

I had known that this moment was coming; that she would want to hear what happened from me. Just as I knew that I hadn’t yet told her about my mark’s blessing. It felt different to reveal the truth of it to her than it had with Fellen or Ressia. More risky. No matter how accepting and calm she might act, Rawley was still a huntress, and they, even more so than most, cared about the balance of life and death in a person. If she still thought I had too much life from my time as a healer’s apprentice in addition to learning I couldn’t die, she might abandon me.

But I wasn’t Gimlea anymore. And Grandmother might reveal the truth of it tomorrow, regardless.

“My mark doesn’t let me die. I’ll get right to the edge of it, to where I can feel the goddess’s gaze on me, before she looks away. That’s how I survived that foot infection and Flickermark.”

Rawley stilled, and the walls of the alcove started to press in around me. I could still feel her fingers in my hair, but they were as immobile as the statues around us, and I couldn’t know her thoughts from that. A small, stupid part of me was desperately pleading not to hear a single, certain word while another had to be repeatedly reminded that this time I wasn’t trapped. I wasn’t so weak that I couldn’t move.

Rawley tucked one of the pieces of hair she was holding behind my ear. “She keeps you in a state of dying?”

I swallowed and kept my voice as neutral as possible. “I think so.”

It wasn’t the full truth, but it wasn’t a lie either. I didn’t know if I would heal if I was left on my own or if the state I had been in when I stopped bleeding could really count as dying, but the way Rawley put it made sound like my blessing embraced the goddess’s aspect rather than rejected it. I wasn’t blind to the fact that the former might be tentatively accepted while the later might still end with me burning in a funeral pyre.

Rawley rested her forehead on the crown of my head. “Then the goddess was wise and generous to want to keep you so close.” She pulled back. “Tell me what happened after the bridge collapsed.”

I did. It took me a few words to stop my voice from shaking as relief and gratitude and a queasiness I didn’t want to identity swept through me. I gave her more detail about the development of the teamwork and rivalry between Fellen and I than I had with Grandmother. I still skipped over the flashback in the thin ravines though. Neither of us would have wanted to dig into the cause of it. I highlighted the different times I used the skills she taught me, such as when I got the bird with my sling. She stayed quiet as she listened and started working on my hair again—not giving any of her thoughts away.

When I finished talking about the Statue Garden, she held her silence for a moment longer before speaking, calm and measured. “I see. We’ll have to work on your navigation skills among other things. You were lucky to have Fellen with you.”

I pressed my lips together in frustrated acknowledgment. Without Fellen I would have had to have been more than lucky to find the exit tunnel even before we lost our supplies.

Rawley continued to fall into her mentor role. “And the whisper women? What did you learn of them during your time in the Statue Garden?”

“They kept their distance from us. I only saw them when they tended to the shamble men or returned from the tunnels.”

“And?”

I ground my teeth together. “And they were walking. I didn’t get to see much more than that.”

She flicked me in light rebuke. “You can learn a lot from someone’s walk. Did one of them have their head held high one day and lowered the next? Who always walked in the front? In the back? Who walked together and who walked apart? Did they wear anything special? Don’t forget the tracker’s attention to detail just because you’re not looking at a game trail.” She paused before continuing, “Tell me what you remember. In detail.”

I did my best. In my mind’s eye I found myself back in the healer’s tent that was mine, and mine alone. Then I pulled memory after memory scroll from the pot in an effort to give Rawley the detail she desired. In doing so, I realized a social order and details about individual whisper women and their relations I had only noted subconsciously before, but nothing that gave me drastic insight into their powers or the trails that awaited me to become one of their number.

Rawley pressed the exercise as far as it could go before letting it drop with the promise that we would do it again in the future. I was to observe the huntresses in the hall and report to Rawley all I discovered simply by watching them. She finished untangling my hair a short while later and, after braiding it into a plait for me, she rose and told me to rest.

I knew I should follow the napping huntress’s example, who hadn’t stirred the entire time we talked, but my eyes remained stubbornly open until Rawley checked back into the alcove an hour or so later. When she saw that I was awake she helped me to a spot in the huntress’s area near the wall. Then she retrieved a trap that she was making and settled next to me. She handed me a simple trap that needed repairing. I fiddled with it and watched with wide eyes as a group of huntresses gradually began to settle and do their work around Rawley, engaging her in easy conversation. I had always thought of my mentor as a loner, but it was clear as she introduced me to them that the four that came near were more than acquaintances. Two were from her old tribe, a sister pair, Keili and Veris. Both were Pack huntresses and outgoing, but Keili seemed to have more restraint than her older sister. The third was a petite Pack huntress with reddish brown long hair from the Branch clan who went by the name Crest. She didn’t seem to know what to do with me, but from the way she sat close and looked at Rawley, and Rawley smiled upon seeing her, they were lovers. That was a shock to realize, but given how little Rawley talked about herself, it was little wonder she hadn’t told her apprentice about the intimate details of her personal life. That wasn’t something I needed to know for her to fulfill her role as a mentor. The last huntress was also a shock to see—Nole. Apparently, she and Rawley had gotten to know each other better after Fellen and I got separated from the tribe.

I didn’t try to push myself to be part of the conversation, and after introductions and my first few short responses, the huntresses were content to keep talking among themselves. None of them seemed to known what the mark on my chin meant, though I noticed them mark it—probably placing me as someone with a blessed mark but for the wrong reason. I let them think it, knowing that Grandmother would fix their misconception tomorrow and I would no longer have the safety of anonymity.