“May I come?” he asked. He must have seen the look on my face, for before I could answer, he spoke again. “I wish only to observe and to hear your recommendations afterwards. I will start to teach tomorrow, but the cohort is yours to lead. I would not usurp that leadership, but I would like to see what your cohort can do. With your permission.”
I shrugged. “If you like.”
“I will meet you on the field.” He turned gracefully, striding across the hall to where Casyn stood with Kyan. Tice looked at me, one eyebrow cocked, but said nothing.
“They’re waiting,” I said.
On the field, we divided the women into more-or-less evenly matched pairs, based on height and weight. Each woman had her own wooden secca now. Casyn had been hard at work, forging real ones in the evenings. Dern stood back, under the trees, watching.
Freya and Rai had lost the draw. They walked onto the field to face off, each holding her secca close to her body. They circled each other. I watched them, conscious of Dern’s gaze, wondering what I should focus on. Freya had strong shoulders and arms from fishing. Rai, ten years her elder, stood half a head shorter but carried more muscle. I judged she outweighed the younger girl by twenty pounds.
Freya feinted first, and Rai stepped sideways, turning her body so that Freya had less of a target, moving backwards at the same time. Freya’s cut went wide. She turned quickly, but Rai had swung too and had her knife up, aimed for Freya’s unprotected left side. Freya twisted, not away from Rai, but towards her, bringing her secca up to catch Rai’s knife arm. The blade struck Rai’s forearm. A metal secca would have cut deeply. The wooden practice knife only bruised, but Freya struck with enough strength to force a grimace of pain from Rai. She did not drop the knife, but forced her arm down against the secca to push Freya off-balance. In the same motion, she tossed her knife sideways, caught it with her other hand, and had it up against Freya’s throat in an instant.
“Enough,” I said. They stepped apart, panting.
Rai rubbed her arm. “That hurt,” she said. She shook the arm to loosen the muscles. “But I’ve had worse from an angry ram,” she added, grinning at Freya.
“It would have hurt more had Freya held a real secca,” I said. I wanted to glance at Dern, to see what I could read in his face after this first demonstration, but I kept my eyes on Rai. I wondered if he could hear all we said. “You wouldn’t have been able to push back against her without driving it deeper into your arm. So while that was a good move now, you shouldn’t rely on it. Freya, what did you misjudge?”
“I didn’t expect her to push back,” she replied, pushing her hair back from her face. “But I suppose if the enemy wear leather, or have arm-guards, they just might. Although then I might not have gone for the arm.”
“Right,” I said. “Who is next?”
“Wait,” Tice said. “I have some things to add.”
“Of course,” I said hastily.
“Freya, your stance needs work,” she said bluntly. “If your left foot had been further back, you could have withstood the pressure without losing your balance so early. We can work on it.”
Freya blinked, then glanced at me. I kept my face impassive.
“Yes, all right,” she said after a moment, her voice flat. I knew her well enough now to know she took criticism too personally.
“I imagine many of us will need to perfect our stances,” I said. “A good observation, Tice. Who is next?”
Aline and Camy, both apprentices, took the field. Slight and wiry, neither had the advantage after three minutes of thrust and parry, and neither had landed a blow. I called a halt. They stopped with some reluctance.
“You’re fast,” I said, “both with the knife and on your feet. I think you’ve practiced together quite a bit?”
They looked at each other. “Every day,” Camy said.
“So you know what each other will do,” Tice said. “Are you practicing, or playing?”
“We’re practicing,” Aline protested. “Sometimes one of us adds a new move, something we’ve learned or want to try. We’re not children.”
“How you will do paired against someone taller or heavier will prove interesting.”
“That will be fun!” Aline said. “I bet we’re faster.” As she turned to leave the field, she made a move towards me with her knife. I jumped back.
“Aline!” I shouted. Tice moved forward, ready to take the secca, but I held up a hand. “Never do that again, to me or anyone,” I said, my voice still raised, “or I will take your secca and have you reassigned to another cohort. You say you’re not a child. Don’t act like one.”
She hung her head.
As they walked off the field, deflated, I turned to Tice. “Your comments are accurate,” I said very quietly, “but somewhat blunt. Perhaps you could be a bit gentler?”
“Their lives may depend on their knife skills. I see no point in being gentle. And they need to learn that you and I are in command. I would argue that blunt and calm is better than shouting, as you just did.”
I bit back an angry retort. Aline had startled me, and I had reacted. I thought of Dern watching. “You may be right. Shall we watch the next pair?” She nodded, turning away from me in a fluid motion, returning her focus to the field where two more women prepared to fight. Solid women, both of them, with the agility required to move up and down rocky hillsides or to maintain balance on a rocking boat. Tice moves so gracefully, I thought. She controls even the tiniest move of her body. Telling a story through dance requires such control. The rest of us have balance, strength, and speed, but our skills come from countering forces—waves or winds or the pull of the earth. Our enemies will have the same skills. Tice can teach us how the move of a thumb, the slightest turn of wrist, can change the odds and the outcome when we fight.
I signalled for the fighters to begin. With my new insight, I saw where a turn of a foot, or the angle of a thrust, needed not correction, but refinement. “Her balance is too far back. She needs to bring it forward, to the balls of her feet,” I murmured to Tice, pointing at one of the women.
“You’re right,” she said, surprised.
“I was thinking about why you move differently.” Just then, one woman stumbled backward, and the other had her pinned, knife at her throat, in a second. “Stop now,” I said to them. “Tice, tell them what you saw.”
We had little light left. I stole a look at Dern but could not read his expression. “We better do two pairs at once,” I said when Tice had finished her critique. “Tice, will you watch the next two? I’ll take Salle and Kelle.”
When we completed the round of pairings, I divided the women again, this time with as much disparity in size as I could find, then we watched and critiqued again. Tice tempered her comments a bit, and I tried to keep my voice calm.
By the end of the day, we had a rough evaluation of each woman’s skills. Dern had moved closer as the light faded but had said nothing.
Finally, in the deepening dusk, Tice and I both took a knife. As we circled, I again marvelled at her grace. Dern had likened her people to cats; I thought it an apt comparison.
I focused on Tice’s eyes and the muscles in her knife arm. When I saw her tense to strike, I slid sideways. I twisted up, striking at her, but she danced backwards, then pivoted and thrust at me again. Her secca brushed my arm. I stepped away from the thrust, my eyes on her face. For a heartbeat, neither of us moved, then I feinted left. As she turned just slightly, I changed direction, knifing upward towards her left side. She ducked, falling forward onto her hands, then springing up again. She moved so fast that by the time I had rebalanced and turned, she had her knife against my stomach. I held up my hands and dropped my secca, grinning. The cohort applauded.
I glanced over at Dern.
“Well done, both of you,” he said. “May I speak with you both, for a while?”
“Tonight?”
“I would prefer it.”
“Yes,” I said. “We can go to my mother’s ho
use. When should we meet in the morning?”
“Three hours after sunrise?”
I nodded then turned to the waiting women. “Meet here two-and-a-half hours after sunrise. Bring your knives. If you’re sore now, go soak it out in the baths. Sleep well tonight.” The women drifted away in pairs and small groups.
“They’ll all go to the baths,” I said to Tice. “I hope it doesn’t turn into a late evening, with lots of wine, or they’ll be useless in the morning.”
“You’re thinking like a leader already. I was just envying them the baths and the wine.”
“There is wine at my mother’s,” I said, “if you want it.”
“I would be glad of some,” Dern said.
My mother’s door, as usual, stood open to let in the evening breeze off the sea. When we arrived, my mother, Sara, Gille, and Casyn sat around the kitchen table. The lamp glowed softly, attracting moths to its flame.
“Mother,” I greeted her, “Dern and Tice and I need somewhere to talk. May we use your workroom? And may we have some wine, and some cheese and bread?”
“Yes, to all of that,” she said. “Tice, Dern, you are very welcome. You’ll need to bring in a third chair from the porch.” Dern went out to get the chair. Tice followed me to the kitchen cupboards. I handed her the wine flask and cups, pointing the way to the workroom. I put bread and cheese on a plate. In the workroom, I opened the shutters to let in the air and lit the lamp. Dern came in with the chair and closed the door. Tice poured wine for all of us. She held up one cup, its deep red glaze reflecting the lamplight. “I made these.”
“With great skill,” Dern observed. Tice inclined her head, acknowledging the compliment. “You are both women of many skills,” he said, looking steadily at me. The comment made me uncomfortable, and the confidence I had felt after he had praised us slipped away. I picked up my cup without meeting his eyes.
We sat sipping wine in silence. Dern leaned forward, helping himself to bread and cheese. In the flicker of the lamp, he looked older than I had first judged him to be, and very tired. Finally, he spoke. “Savour the wine, and remember it. This is Lestian wine. If we are not victorious when the battle comes, you may never taste it again.”
“What did you want to talk about?”
“Lena, you were chosen to lead these women for several reasons: for your ability in the practice ring; for your family connections—the women of Tirvan are accustomed to having your mother and your aunts as their leaders; for your depth of thought.” He paused. “But we also chose you to lead this cohort because you have shown that you can make a difficult decision, even when it affects you personally.” He held up his hand to prevent me from speaking. “You may need to do that again. You may need to send someone from the cohort—Freya, perhaps, or even Tice—into extreme danger, alone and to certain death. A single death might mean the saving of Tirvan, or of the Empire. I am not exaggerating.”
A chill ran through me. I stared at the wine-cup in my hands, my mind in turmoil. I thought of all the hours I had spent on Dovekie, reliving that evening. On the basis of that day, those decisions, Casyn appointed me to this task? What could he know of the recriminations, the fears that had haunted me since? “What if,” I said angrily, “I made that decision from cowardice? What if I did not go with Maya simply because I was too scared? What sort of leader would I be then?”
Dern leaned forward. “Is that true? Look me in the eye, now, here in this room with only the three of us and tell the truth.” He spoke gently, but with an undertone of command. I swallowed, looking at the floor. I didn’t want to answer him.
“Tell us,” he said, firmly.
I looked up and met his eyes. “No,” I whispered in a voice barely loudly enough to hear. I cleared my throat to try again. “It is a night thought, or a thought for the empty sea, nothing more.”
His gaze did not release me. “Then why did you let Maya go?”
“Because,” I hesitated, “all of us, in the village…” How could I say what I knew inside me? “We have been here so long…our history, what our foremothers built here…it matters. It matters more than one person. Or two people.”
Dern smiled slightly. I realized I had just passed a test. I could hear Tice breathing in the silent room. “Drink your wine,” he said gently. “We did not misjudge you.”
Tice put down her cup. “May I go? I understand why you wanted me here, but I think there are things you would say to Lena alone.”
I opened my mouth to object, but Dern nodded. “Sleep well, Tice.”
“Can we speak, tomorrow, before practice?” I asked, remembering my earlier idea and wanting to delay her departure.
“At the field?” she asked. I nodded. She said goodnight, closing the door carefully behind her.
“A perceptive woman,” Dern said, leaning back in his chair. As he reached for his wine cup, the lamplight accentuated the lines of fatigue around his eyes. “I am twenty-six. I chose the sea at twelve. Like you, I am from a fishing village—Serra, in the north. When I was sixteen my captain called me to him and told me he was sending me back to land. He sent me to Casyn, to learn to do what you must learn to do.” He took a drink of the wine. “I know what it is to send a friend to die. You can do it, Lena. Even now, when I first told you, your thoughts were not that you could not do this, but only that perhaps you would do it for the wrong reasons. When the doubts begin, come to me, Lena.”
Not likely, I thought.
“You need to talk them out, not to your cohort or your cohort-second or even your mother. I am here to teach your cohort, but I am also here to teach you, as Casyn taught me.”
As I pondered this, something that had been puzzling me at the edges of my consciousness came into focus. “Casyn doesn’t seem to be an average soldier. He taught you this...craft of secrecy…and now you are here to teach us. Why could Casyn not have taught us? Why is there such a concentration of expertise here in Tirvan? Is the Empire spending talent this generously on other villages?”
Dern smiled again. “Always thinking,” he said. “You are right, of course. I am primarily here to plan tactics with Casyn. We have learned things about the invasion plan in the past few months, and they need to be considered. Casyn is a master of this craft of secrecy, as you call it. The Emperor was unwilling to let him come to Tirvan, but he argued that he needed to have first-hand experience of what a woman’s village was capable of before he could make his final plans against Leste. I’m here to make him privy to our newest information, and to take him back, in a few weeks, to our command post.”
“What does he think us capable of, after his months here?”
“He believes you to be physically capable of as much as a group of men would have been, after only a few months training. But he believes you will fight much harder, and with more tenacity, because you’ll be defending your houses, your village, and your way of life. You said, a few minutes ago, that you belong here, that Tirvan is something more than the sum of its parts. Almost all of you feel the same way, in different degrees. You will fight for that feeling of place and belonging.” In his voice, I heard the same faint echo of regret that I had heard in Casyn’s voice, the night he first came to Tirvan.
“For what do you fight, Dern?” I asked softly.
“For the Empire, and for brotherhood, and because it is what we are trained for from the minute we leave our villages.” We sat in silence, sipping our wine. The lamp flickered in the night breeze.
I broke the silence. “What happens to boys, to men, who don’t make good soldiers? Who just want to farm or fish?”
“They can be medics, or cooks, or teach the little ones. If they insist, we let them go at sixteen. They work with horses or go to the farms and villas of the retired officers, to pick grapes and make hay. But they can’t come back to the women’s villages.”
“Not at all?”
“No. Not that they would likely want to. They pay a price for choosing not to serve the Empire. This village farms as well a
s fishes. You must know a bit about breeding horses, or cattle. What does your herdswoman do with colts that are weak around the quarters or ewe-necked? The empire needs men to be soldiers, not farmers. We need our sons to be strong, so we make sure that only those who serve the Empire father sons.”
Shaken, I drank the dregs of my wine. From our earliest childhood, we knew how our lives were structured and where the duty of both men and women lay. I had not considered, until tonight, that sacrifice underpinned that structure, that each of us paid some inestimable price for our calm and ordered existence. Until tonight, I had thought only of Maya, and of myself.
Dern stared upward at nothing, his lips tight, exhaustion or worry webbing his face. “I said too much.” He sounded apologetic. “Blame the wine.”
“It’s late,” I said. “And the Lestian wine is strong. I won’t repeat what was said here tonight.”
He nodded. “Thank you.” He gazed at me steadily for a minute before standing. “I sleep at Casyn’s cottage until my ship is in harbour. Would you point the way?” I took the lamp from the wall and opened the door. Darkness shadowed the outer room. We walked out onto the porch. A light still burned at the forge cottage: Casyn, bent over papers and maps, planning. Dern bade me a soft goodnight and set off, silent, on the gravel path. I blew out the lamp, setting it on a bench before turning in the opposite direction, downhill, to Tali’s house and bed.
Chapter Five
The day dawned hot, the air still and humid. As I washed in the morning light, at the open window of my room, I could hear Tali in the kitchen below me, talking to Pel. I brushed my hair back off my face, strapped my knife onto my belt, and went down for breakfast.
“Dessa was here last night,” Tali said. “She wants to borrow Dovekie while you’re not fishing. She said she would sail her herself and let her senior apprentices sail Curlew.”
I poured myself a mug of tea, considering. Both Freya and I now trained all day with Dern, and the village needed all the food it could stockpile. Reasonably, I could not refuse. “Can Pel go down to the harbour to tell her yes?”
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