by David Weber
Like any Sothoii noble, male or female, she’d been thrown into a saddle about the same time she learned to stand up unassisted, and her horsemanship skills were beyond reproach. Her gelding, who rejoiced in a name even more highfaluting than “Dark War Cloud Rising,” answered perfectly amiably to “Boots,” and Kaeritha wondered if any Sothoii warhorse actually had to put up with its formal given name. However that might be, Boots (a bay brown who took his name from his black legs and the white stockings on his forelegs) was immaculately groomed, and his tack and saddle furniture were spotless, despite the wet and mud. Unfortunately, his rider was considerably less adept at others of the homey little chores involved in wilderness travel. At least she was willing, though, as Kaeritha had noted, and she took direction amazingly well for one of her exalted birth. All in all, Kaeritha was inclined to believe there was some sound metal in the girl.
And there had better be, the champion thought more grimly as she watched Leeana swing nimbly up into Boots’ saddle. Kaeritha found herself unable to do anything but respect Leeana’s motives, but the plain fact was that the girl couldn’t possibly have any realistic notion of how drastically her life was about to change. It was entirely possible that, assuming she survived the shock, she would find her new life more satisfying and fulfilling. Kaeritha hoped she would, but the gulf which yawned between the daughter of someone who was arguably the most powerful feudal magnate in an entire kingdom and one more anonymous war maid, despised by virtually everyone in the only world she’d ever known, was far deeper than a fall from the Wind Plain’s mighty ramparts might have been. Surviving that plunge would be a shattering experience—one fit to destroy any normal sheltered flower of noble femininity—however assiduously Leeana had tried to prepare herself for it ahead of time.
On the other hand, Kaeritha had never had all that much use for sheltered flowers of noble femininity. Was that the real reason she’d agreed to help the girl flee from the situation fate had trapped her into? A part of her wanted to think it was. And another part wanted to think she was doing this because it was the duty of any champion of Tomanak to rescue the helpless from persecution. Given Leeana’s scathing description of Rulth Blackhill and his reputation, it was impossible for Kaeritha to think of a marriage between him and the girl as anything but the rankest form of persecution, after all. “Marriage” or no, it would be no better than a case of legally sanctioned rape, and Tomanak, as the God of Justice, disapproved of persecution and rape, however they were sanctioned. Besides, Leeana was right; she did have a legal right to make this decision … if she could reach Kalatha.
Both of those reasons were real enough, she thought. But she also knew that at the heart of things was another, still deeper reason. The memory of a thirteen-year-old orphan who’d found herself trapped into another, even grimmer life … until she refused to accept that sentence.
For a moment, Dame Kaeritha’s sapphire-blue eyes were darker and deeper—and colder—than the waters of Belhadan Bay. Then the mood passed, and she shook herself like a dog, shaking off the water of memory, and gazed out through the cool, misty morning. The new-risen sun hovered directly in front of them, a huge, molten ball of gold, bisected by the hard, sharp line of the horizon. The morning mists rose to enfold it like steam from a forge, and the last of the previous day’s clouds were high-piled ramparts in the south, their peaks touched with the same golden glow, as the brisk northerly wind continued to sweep them away. The road was just as muddy as it had been, but the day was going to be truly glorious, and she felt an eagerness stirring within her. The eagerness to be off and doing once again.
“Are you ready, Lady Leeana?” she asked.
“Yes,” Leeana replied, urging Boots up beside Cloudy. Then she chuckled. Kaeritha cocked her head at the younger woman, and Leeana grinned. “I was just thinking that somehow it sounds more natural when you call me ’girl’ than when you call me ’Lady Leeana,’ “ she explained in answer to Kaeritha’s unspoken question.
“Does it?” Kaeritha snorted. “Maybe it’s the peasant in me coming back to the surface. On the other hand, it might not be such a bad thing if you started getting used to a certain absence of honorifics.”
She touched Cloudy very gently with a heel, and the mare started obediently forward. Leeana murmured something softly to Boots, and the gelding moved up at Cloudy’s shoulder and fell into step with the mare, as if the two horses were harnessed together.
“I know,” the girl said after several silent minutes. “That I should start getting used to it, I mean. Actually, I don’t think I’ll miss that anywhere near as much as I’ll miss having someone to draw my bath and brush my hair.” She held up a dirty hand and grimaced. “I’ve already discovered that there’s quite a gap between reality and bard’s tales. Or, at least, the bards seem to leave out some of the more unpleasant little details involved in ’adventures.’ And the difference between properly chaperoned hunting trips, with appropriate armsmen and servants along to look after my needs, and traveling light by myself has become rather painfully clear to me.”
“A few nights camping out by yourself in the rain will generally start to make that evident,” Kaeritha agreed. “And I notice you didn’t bring along a tent.”
“No,” Leeana said with another, more heartfelt grimace. “I had enough trouble getting my hands on a few days worth of trail rations without trying to bring along proper travel gear.” She shivered. “That first night was really unpleasant,” she admitted. “I never did get a fire started, and Boots needed my poncho worse than I did. He’d worked hard, and I didn’t have anything else to rug him with.”
“Hard to build a fire without dry wood,” Kaeritha observed, carefully hiding a deep pang of sympathy. She pictured Leeana—a pampered young noblewoman, however much she might have wanted and striven to be something else—all alone in a cold, rainy night without a tent or a fire, or even the protection of her poncho. The girl had been right to use it to protect her heated horse, instead, but it must have been the most wretched night of her entire existence.
“Yes, I found that out.” Leeana’s grin was remarkably free of self-pity. “By the next morning, I’d figured out what I’d done wrong, so I spent about an hour finding myself a nice, dead log and hacking half a saddlebag of dry heartwood out of it with my dagger.” She held up her right palm with a rueful chuckle, examining the fresh blisters which crossed it. “At least the exercise got me warmed up! And the next night, I had something dry to start the fire with. Heaven!”
She rolled her eyes so drolly Kaeritha had no choice but to laugh. Then she shook her head severely, returned her attention to the road, and asked Cloudy for a trot. The mare obliged, with the smooth gait which was steadily becoming addictive, and they moved off in a brisk, steady splatter of mud.
Yes, Kaeritha thought, treasuring green eyes that could laugh at their owner’s own wet, cold, undoubtedly frightened misery. Yes, there is sound metal in this one, thank Tomanak.
Chapter Fifteen
“Father isn’t far behind now.”
Kaeritha looked up from the breakfast fire. Leeana was standing beside the road, her raised arm hooked up across Boots’ withers while she stared back the way they’d come the day before. Her expression was tense, and she stood very still, only the fingers of her right hand moving as they caressed the thick, shaggy warmth of the gelding’s winter coat.
“What makes you so certain?” Kaeritha asked, for there’d been no question at all in the sober pronouncement.
“I could say it’s because I know he had to have missed me by the second morning and that it’s easy to guess he’s been pushing hard after me ever since,” the girl said. “But the truth is, I just know.” She turned and looked at Kaeritha. “I always know where he and Mother are,” she said simply.
Kaeritha chewed on that for a few moments, while she busied herself turning strips of bacon in her blackened camp skillet. Then she whipped the bacon out of the popping grease and spread it over their last slabs
of slightly stale bread. She dumped the grease into the flames and watched the fire sputter eagerly, then looked back up at Leeana.
The girl’s face was drawn, and Boots and Cloudy were both beginning to show the effect of the stiff pace they had set. Of course, Leeana and Boots had covered the same distance in twenty-four hours less than she and Cloudy had, but she’d been pushing hard herself ever since the girl caught up with her. However furious and worried he might be, Tellian was too levelheaded to risk riding in pursuit with only Hathan—the Lord Warden of the West Riding would be too juicy a target for the ill-intentioned to pass up—but he and his wind brother would be setting a crushing pace for the rest of his armsmen, and Kaeritha knew it.
“What do you mean, you know where they are?” she asked after a moment.
“I just do.” Leeana gave Boots one more caress, then stepped closer to Kaeritha and the fire and accepted her share of the bread and bacon. She took an appreciative bite of the humble repast and shrugged.
“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be mysterious about it—I just don’t know a good way to explain it. Mother says the Sight has always run in her family, all the way back to the Fall.” She shrugged again. “I don’t really know about that. It’s not as if there’ve been dozens of magi in our family, or anything like that. But I always know where they are, or if they’re unhappy … or hurt.” She shivered, her face suddenly drawn and old beyond its years. “Just like I knew when Moonshine went down and rolled across Mother.”
She stared at something only she could see for several seconds, then shook herself. She looked down at the bread and bacon in her hand, as if seeing them for the first time, and gave Kaeritha a smile that was somehow shy, almost embarrassed, before she raised the food and bit into it again.
“Do they always ’know’ where you are?” Kaeritha asked after moment.
“No.” Leeana shook her head. Then she paused. “Well, actually, I don’t know for certain about Mother. I know when I was a very little girl, she always seemed to know just when I was about to get into mischief, but I always just put that down to ’mommy magic.’ I do know Father doesn’t have any trace of whatever it is, though. If he did, I’d have gotten into trouble so many times in the last few years that I doubt I’d be able to sit in a saddle at all! I’d never have gotten away with running away in the first place, either. And I can tell from how unhappy and worried he feels right now that he doesn’t realize they’re no more than a few hours behind us.”
Her eyes darkened with the last sentence, and her voice was low. The thought of her father’s unhappiness and worry clearly distressed her.
“It’s not too late to change your mind, Leeana,” Kaeritha said quietly. The girl looked at her quickly, and the knight shrugged. “If he’s that close, all we have to do is sit here for a few hours. Or we can go on. From the map and directions your father’s steward gave me, Kalatha can’t be more than another two or three hours down the road. But the decision is yours.”
“Not anymore,” Leeana half-whispered. Her nostrils flared, and then she shook her head firmly. “It’s a decision I’ve already made, Dame Kaeritha. I can’t—won’t—change it now. Besides,” she managed a crooked smile, “he may be unhappy and worried, but those aren’t the only things he’s feeling. He knows where I’m going, and why.”
“He does? You’re certain of that?”
“Oh, I wasn’t foolish enough to leave any tear-spotted notes that might come to light sooner than I wanted,” Leeana said dryly. “Father is a wind rider, you know. If I hadn’t managed to buy at least a full day’s head start, he’d have forgotten about waiting for his bodyguards and he and Hathan would have come after me alone. And in that case, he’d have been certain to catch up with me, even on Boots.
“Since he didn’t, I have to assume I did manage to keep anyone from realizing I’d left long enough to get the start I needed. But Father isn’t an idiot, and he knows I’m not one, either. He must have figured out where I was going the instant someone finally realized I was missing, and he’s been coming after me ever since. But, you know, there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to catch me.”
She finished the last bite of her bread and bacon, then stood, looking across at Kaeritha, and this time her smile was gentle, almost tender.
“Like you, he’s afraid I’m making a terrible mistake, and he’s determined to keep me from doing it, if he can. But he knows why I’m doing it, too. And that’s why a part of him doesn’t want to catch me. Actually wants me to beat him to Kalatha. He knows as well as I do that the war maids are the only way I’ll avoid eventually being forced to become a pedigreed broodmare dropping foals for Blackhill … or someone. Mother was never that for him, and he knows I’ll never be that for anyone. He taught me to feel that way—to value myself that much—himself, and he knows that, too.”
“Which won’t prevent him from stopping you if he can,” Kaeritha said.
“No.” Leeana shook her head. “Silly, isn’t it? Here we both are—me, running away from him; him, chasing after me to bring me back, whether I want to come or not—and all of it because of how much we love each other.”
A tear glittered for an instant, but she wiped it briskly away and turned to busy herself tightening the girth on Boots’ saddle.
“Yes,” Kaeritha said softly, emptying the teapot over the fire’s embers and beginning to cover the ashes with dirt. “Yes, Leeana. Very silly indeed.”
* * *
“Soumeta is here, Mayor. She says she has an appointment.”
Yalith Tamilthfressa, Mayor of Kalatha, looked up from the paperwork on her desk with a grimace. Her assistant, Sharral Ahnlarfressa, stood in the door of her office, with a sour expression which was only too accurate a mirror of Yalith’s own emotions.
“What about Theretha?” Yalith asked. “Is she here, too?”
“Theretha?” Sharral shook her head. “It’s just Soumeta. And I checked your calendar. If she does have an appointment this morning, I didn’t write it down there.”
“Neither did anyone else,” Yalith sighed.
“In that case,” Sharral said grimly, “I’ll send her packing so fast her head will swim!”
She started to turn to go, but Yalith’s quick headshake stopped her.
“No,” the mayor said. “Oh, I’d love to turn you loose on her, Sharral, but I can’t quite do that.”
“Why not?” Sharral demanded.
“You know perfectly well why. As big a pain in the arse as she may be, she’s not exactly alone in her feelings, now is she?”
“Yalith,” Sharral said, dropping the formal title she normally used when addressing her old friend on official town business, “she’s only a Fifty. If you want her jerked up short for insubordination, I’m sure Balcartha would be delighted to take care of it for you.”
Yalith leaned back in her chair and smiled affectionately at her assistant. For all practical purposes, Sharral was her unofficial vice-mayor, really, although the town charter provided for no such office. They’d known one another since girlhood, although Yalith had been born in Kalatha and Sharral had been five years old when her mother became a war maid. Ahnlar Geramahnfressa had been luckier than some—Sharral had been an only child. It was always sticky, and often painful, when a woman with children sought out the war maids. It was unusual for a mother to become a war maid, because the war maids’ charter didn’t provide any legal basis for her to retain custody of, or even the right to visit, her children after she severed herself from her family. It was a very rare, or very desperate, mother who was prepared to risk losing all contact with her children, however intolerable her own life might seem.
Yet a surprising number of them were allowed to take their daughters with them. In most cases, Yalith thought, that said all that needed saying about the fathers of those children. Those men didn’t relinquish possession of their children out of gentleness and love; they did it because those children were merely daughters, not something as important as a son.
No wonder the women unfortunate enough to be married to them sought any escape they could find!
But however their wives might feel, Yalith often wondered how someone like Sharral felt when she thought about it. How did it feel to know that the man who’d sired you had cared less for you than he did for a pair of old shoes? Did you feel rejected, discarded as something unimportant and easily replaced? Or did you spend every morning thanking Lillinara that you’d escaped having anything to do with a parent who could feel that way about his own child? Yalith knew how she felt about anyone who could do that, but she also knew the mind and the heart could be cruelly unreasonable.
“If I thought I could turn Balcartha loose on her, I’d enjoy that even more than handing her over to you, Sharral,” the mayor said. “I’d really relish watching that, as a matter of fact. But it might look just a bit extreme to turn a Five Hundred—and the commander of the entire Town Guard, at that—loose on a mere Fifty. Not without clear provocation, at any rate.”
“Extreme!” Sharral sniffed. “Balcartha is the Guard commander, and Soumeta is one of her officers—one of her junior officers, Yalith. A junior officer who’s just lied to me in order to get in to see you without an appointment! That strikes me as a fair to middling offense against good discipline, and if Balcartha can’t rake Soumeta over the coals for something like that, then just exactly who can?”
“But that’s the point, isn’t it?” Yalith’s mouth quirked in something much too astringent to be called a smile. “Soumeta isn’t here just for herself, and she knows I know it. Besides, maybe she’s right.”
“And maybe she’s a dangerous, arrogant, hotheaded, prejudiced, trouble-making idiot with the morals of a mink in heat, the appetites of a preying mantis, and delusions of her own importance, too!”
“You don’t have to mince words with me after all these years, Sharral,” Yalith said with a harsh chuckle. “Tell me how you really feel about her.”