Blackdog by K. V. Johansen

fear, made him almost angry, bewildered with it. What was worse, Holla felt the place watching him, all the living powers, the little demons and the greater who wandered the desert and the foothills, and the goddess Sera. She was aware, with something that felt very like anger and fear in equal measure, of Attalissa's presence. And of his own. It was as though he stood naked, while hostile people stared from somewhere behind his shoulder, never quite showing themselves.
    We should speak with the goddess Sera at her spring. We shouldn't trespass here unannounced.
    The Blackdog agreed that Attalissa must approach Sera at once.
    Holla-Sayan clenched his teeth. “Sera can wait. First we go tell my friends I'm back. Gaguush will want to know there are raiders in the mountains, and the sept-chiefs need to know. Remember—” Remember you're no goddess here. It wouldn't be usual at all for us to go to the spring, when I've only been gone a couple of days. I'll take you and show you later, tonight or tomorrow. That would be more natural. Remember you're a child. My child. Call me dog or even Holla out loud and I'll box your ears.
    She peered up at him, wide-eyed, and he scowled at his own guilty discomfort. She was not one of his cheerfully noisy nephews, who would weigh the threat as mostly jest and take it in stride. ‘Lissa had known nothing but too much respect and too little family. Otokas's memories did not tell him she had ever screamed with laughter or run yelling through the gardens with sheer childish joy, or talked back to the priestesses, sulked, or refused to go to bed. He remembered only the frustrated, near-silent tears, all the tantrums she had dared, when she was unable to act, to stop some fisher-drowning storm or turn an avalanche or drive the fever from an ailing sister. Poor brat.
    Had they even told her when her own mother died? The Blackdog did not remember that they had.
    What do I call you, then? And you never said what I should be called now. Stiff and cold, hiding unhappiness.
    Father? Papa? Sayan, not Papa, too close and personal. She was no utter orphan; she should be thinking of her own father as that, if she had ever been allowed to meet the man at all.
    Of course she had not. Attalissa never left the temple islet, and men were not permitted there.
    The Old Great Gods damn the lot of them.
    Father, I suppose.
    “Father.” She tried it out in a whisper.
    He did not think the faintness was all fear of the unknown, or of himself. An unhealthy pallor that was not mere weariness had crept over the girl's skin as they rode down the mountain.
    She was a human child; she should not be bound to a place like a god. Holla began to have the horrible conviction she was, and that no small magic or mere reassuring superstition, no piece of lakeshore shale, was going to help.
    There were mulberries growing along the wall of Mooshka Rost-vadim's caravanserai, newly leafed out, and black and pink starlings singing in them. Holla-Sayan rode through the gateway to be met with a whoop from young Bikkim Battu'um, whose swirling-horse tattoos in red and blue proclaimed him native Serakallashi.
    “Holla's back! Thought you weren't going to make it in time.”
    “I thought so too.”
    “You look terrible, you know. What's happened?”
    “Raiders have sacked Lissavakail. An army of raiders. You haven't heard?”
    That brought the rest running. They were Gaguush's gang of caravaneers. Mercenaries, some would call them, because they bound themselves to a loyalty for pay. Wanderers, but not godless; most, like him, carried some charm to tie them to their home, a pebble or carved god's symbol. They knew who they were, where they belonged, and so they could go anywhere.
    “Did a bit of sacking yourself, too,” Bikkim said, and tried to chuck the goddess under the chin, yelped at the force with which Holla struck his arm away. “Take it easy! I'm not going to eat her.”
    “My daughter,” Holla snapped, angry at his own