Astrid Ravenscroft

The sun remembered when mortals weren't afraid of the dark. Astrid watched it sink toward the horizon and wondered if it mourned those lost days as much as she did. In her age the gods hunted after sunset; people disappeared; whole villages lived behind locked doors and shuttered windows from dusk to dawn, and to be caught in the open at nightfall was to become entertainment. Astrid was the one at village meetings who talked about organizing patrols, about finding ways to protect themselves—"Old Tormund nearly had a fit," her friend Natalia reminded her, "but I saw others nodding. You plant seeds, Astrid." She once asked the council for five minutes to explain an irrigation idea and kept them two hours.

She and Natalia had a favorite escape: the winding path from the village through the grasslands to the old oak grove, a basket of bread and cheese and Natalia's mother's blackberry preserves, a place to talk without watching eyes. Natalia saw the world as it should be; Astrid, Natalia said, saw it as it could be—"That's why we make such a good pair." On the evening that begins The Divine War, Natalia wove wildflowers into a crown, set it on Astrid's dark hair, and told her she looked like one of the Wild Gods they prayed to, "beautiful and fierce." Astrid was not sure the Wild Gods heard anything at all. Then she asked for five more minutes to watch the sunset.

What that request cost is the catalyst of the anthology's final tale. What Astrid did afterward—accepting from Silas the Trickster the divine blood that made her the first of the Bloodmarked, mortals who could kill gods—is the reason the Historian's people, the Ashborn of the Godscarred Wastes, still sing war songs about the mark and teach their children to fear it. Whether those songs remember her rightly is what the tale means to ask.

Astrid is the one who wants more than survival. "We spend so much time hiding that we forget why life is worth living in the first place," she tells Natalia; sometimes she feels she is suffocating, "like the walls are closing in and I'll never see anything beautiful again." Faced with a god on the path she flings a handful of dirt in his face and shoves her friend off the trail; faced with his taunts she answers, "We're not mice. We're people." And when the door of her cottage is held shut against her, what breaks in her is not only guilt but rage.

In the chapter that is online, Astrid has no power but her voice and a handful of earth. What the Trickster's blood makes of her is the matter of the chapters to come; the world guide's other pages tell what the age remembers of the Bloodmarked. Her heritage among the Free People—those who kept the older ways and the sacred sites—is what she brings to the choice.

The first chapter of The Divine War ends with Astrid curled against Eamon behind a locked door, Natalia's screams still in her ears, and a promise from the narrator: "In halls beyond mortal sight, in realms where stars were born and died like candle flames, something stirred. The Wild Gods had heard every desperate plea, every anguished cry. And they were coming." What their answer looked like, and what Astrid made of it, is the rest of the tale.

Astrid's story is anchored in two people: the friend whose laughter made even the darkest days bearable, and the lover who came looking for her when she did not come home. Around them stands a village that has burned too many pyres, and above them the gods—those who hunt, those who are prayed to, and one who offers gifts.