Isobel

by Chloe Garner

  Old man’s beard grew in some of the trees, and, out of habit, Allie collected what was in reach, snagging it where it grew long over the trail. She beat the snow out of it and put it into her leather pouch, ripping a mouthful off to chew as she rode.

  Mostly, as was often true, she was just alone with her thoughts. Any more, when that was true, she ended up motionlessly feeling out the muscle memory of drawing a bow and loosing an arrow, feeling the trajectory of it as part of her own physical awareness, hitting the target at the end of the lane. Always hitting the target. She watched arrows fly in her dreams.

  Just as the sun reached midday, Drest’s hillfort came into view. The hillside was almost clear of snow, as the fort lay in a strategic geography that kept the long sweep of grass down to a narrow stream open and grazeable through most of the winter. The same rocks that governed the wind provided a hard defensive side to the field of battle, should an army approach the hillfort; Drest would fill those rocks with archers, as it was much easier to get there from the hillfort than from below, and they would rain death on anyone approaching. Allie’s eyes constantly strayed to the pile of boulders and naked mountainside, finding the clefts where she would hide herself. They needed to be deep enough for a good draw, and a curve would be good to keep herself out of returning fire…

  A shepherd stopped her.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Aileen,” she answered. “I live with Rafa. I came to visit Kenna.”

  She’d decided weeks before that she would ask for Kenna. No one would think anything of it, and she would avoid attention she didn’t want. And stern looks from Gwen when her mother found out she’d sneaked out to see Aedan. In her mind it was always ‘when’, not ‘if’ her mother found out. Gwen was a master of finding Allie’s secrets.

  “It’s a bad season for traveling,” the shepherd said.

  “I don’t get much free time for visits when all of the boys are in training,” Allie answered. He grunted, then nodded.

  “I’ll find her,” he said. “Arthur will see to your horse.”

  He waved over a boy, maybe younger than Allie, then set off up the hill. Allie dismounted and allowed the boy to take the mare, folding her hands and starting at a slow walk up the hill, mostly waiting for Kenna.

  The girl came catapulting down the hillside only a few minutes later, slamming into Allie with open arms.

  “You came,” she crowed. “I bet Aedan you wouldn’t, but he said you would, that the freeze wouldn’t keep you, and neither would Gede.”

  “Aedan told you?” Allie asked with good humor. Kenna widened her eyes with a huge grin.

  “Girlie, he tells me everything.”

  This brought a flutter to Allie’s heart.

  “What does he say?” she asked. Kenna laughed her big, brash laugh and hugged Allie again. The girl would never be as tall as Allie would, but she made up for it in spirit.

  “Come inside, come inside. I have a broth for you, and we have so much to talk about.”

  Allie looked over her shoulder to make sure she knew where the boy called Arthur had taken her mount, then allowed Kenna to drag her back up the hill.

  “So is it true?” Kenna asked as Allie sipped hot broth out of an earthenware bowl.

  “Is what true?” she replied, still not sure what Aedan had told his sister. Kenna leaned in conspiratorially.

  “You’re learning to shoot a bow?”

  Allie let the bowl rest in her lap, reading Kenna’s face. She was so desperate to have someone to talk to about it. She bit her lip and nodded, unable to contain the grin that spread across her face in response to Kenna’s enthusiasm. Kenna rolled on her back, howling.

  “I couldn’t hardly believe it, the stories he comes back with, that you’d do it. He says Gede can’t catch you anymore, either.”

  Allie shook her head.

  “It never occurred to me to run, before.”

  Kenna stretched her eyes again.

  “Oh, you know I have been since I was wee. He forgets why he was angry, after a while, and let’s be honest here, he’s always angry, anyway.”

  “I can’t imagine living with him,” Allie said. Kenna nodded, the exuberance unfaded.

  “So what’s it like?”

  “What?”

  “Shooting.”

  “Oh.” She’d never thought to put the lean, elastic feel of it into words before. It was just a breath, drawn and released, then held until the arrow made solid, earthy contact with whatever was on the end of its arc. “It’s amazing.”

  Kenna grinned wider, almost doubled over her folded legs as she regarded Allie.

  “Aedan said he’d teach me, but there’s nowhere here where we wouldn’t get caught.”

  Allie nodded. Rafa’s school held a minimal population, even when the boys were there. Everyone had a purpose to the community, and there were no families. Many of Drest’s people would never leave the hillfort; they would be born, marry, raise families, and die there. It bustled, by comparison to the school, with flocks and crafting.

  “It is busy here.”

  “I don’t know how you don’t get bored, out there,” Kenna said.

  “You’ve been?” Allie asked, frowning as she tried to remember, but Kenna shook her head.

  “No, but all Aedan talks about is training and the food. It doesn’t seem anything else goes on, there.”

  Allie shrugged.

  “Ma always finds things to do, when she can find me.”

  Kenna laughed.

  “My ma, too. Fix this, clean that. Your husband is gonna be disappointed, girlie, if you don’t know how to make him a proper stew.”

  The hut’s door flap opened and Aedan bent over to fit through.

  “My girl came to see me, and I had to hear it from the stable boys talking about a horse?” he asked, raising his eyebrows at Kenna.

  “What? It wasn’t like I was going to get to talk to her, once you knew she was here.”

  “And just how long were you going to keep her a secret?”

  Kenna shrugged innocently.

  “I knew you’d hear eventually.”

  He dove on her and they wrestled for a minute, Kenna shrieking laughter. Allie twisted her mouth to the side and sipped at her broth again.

  “Get off, you lug. Or I’ll cheat.”

  “You always do cheat. Ow!”

  Aedan stood, rubbing the spot on his side where Kenna had pinched him, and grinned at Allie.

  “I wasn’t sure you were going to make it before midwinter.”

  She smiled.

  “I said I would.”

  He nodded gravely.

  “You did. I would hate to find you’re a liar. You’ve been practicing?”

  “Almost every day,” Allie said, hesitant to tell him about the range. It felt like her own secret, one with Isobel, which made it all the more dear. He nodded at her.

  “I can tell. And you’re taller, too.”

  “Am I?”

  “You are,” Kenna said. “You bloody great beasts. Ma always asks me what kind of a man in his right mind looks for a wife that he can’t pick up and carry over his shoulder?”

  “Oh, I can still do that,” Aedan said, stooping in front of Allie. Allie hastily found a safe place to put her bowl as he drove his shoulder into her stomach and lifted her. She squawked despite herself and Kenna laughed.

  “Best be careful with that one. I hear she’s feisty.”

  “In that case.”

  Aedan spun twice, then put her carefully back on her feet.

  “Have you eaten?” Kenna asked her brother.

  “No, I was out with the men chopping firewood.”

  “I’ll go see what they have at the main house,” she told him, twisting to laugh at Allie, then dashing away again.

  “Sorry about her,” Aedan said, watching her go. Allie hugged her shoulders.

  “She’s fun.”

  He nodded.

  “I miss her, you know, when I’m at
the school.” He grinned at the door with a sincerity that made Allie’s heart hurt. “She makes life colorful.”

  For the first time, Allie wondered what it would have been like to have an older brother who was a child alongside her, but then Aedan turned back to look at her and the thought vanished, forgotten.

  His eyes smiled at her and she turned her head away, shy.

  There was a long pause that Allie wasn’t sure if it was awkward or not, and then he came and sat on the low wooden bench by the fire. She let her knees fold and sat carefully next to him.

  “You’ve come,” he said. She nodded, pressing her lips and fighting a smile.

  “You look lovely,” he said and she turned away again.

  “How is Drude?”

  He laughed, a loud, coarse noise that felt familiar.

  “Practicing to be the king,” he said. “He holds a cup in the hall,” Aedan continued, holding his arm up over his head in a broad motion, “and he summons imaginary servants and commands imaginary armies, calling for wenches and mead.”

  “And suckling pigs,” Allie said, and Aedan laughed again, dropping his arm across her shoulders.

  “And suckling pigs. It drives Gede mad. Drest isn’t fond of it, either.”

  Allie smiled.

  “He’ll be a good king. His people will like him.”

  Aedan shrugged.

  “There’s more to it than that, of course, but we’ve got time. Drest is hale and stout as he ever was, and he isn’t ready to give up the throne as yet.”

  “Are you keeping up your practicing?” Allie asked. “If Rafa finds out I’ve been here, he’ll ask.”

  “You should tell him we have,” Aedan said with amusement.

  “But have you?” Allie asked.

  “Some here, some there, but I trust you’ll make a good account of us.”

  “I can’t lie to him,” Allie said. Aedan was playing with the loose hairs on the top of her head, sending shivers down her neck.

  “You’re an excellent liar,” he said. “I’ve seen it many a time when you were where you weren’t supposed to be, or weren’t where you were.”

  She laughed.

  “Sure, but I can’t lie to him. He always knows.”

  She felt Aedan nod.

  “That he does. A remarkable man. Drest is still furious that he won’t lead the warriors in battle.”

  “So war with Rome really is coming?” Allie asked, suddenly cold. She hunched her shoulders, and Aedan shifted her in closer against him.

  “It is,” he said, voice serious for the moment. “No one knows when, or who will break the treaty first, but we canna abide by them on our borders, and they canna abide by us at all.”

  “I want to kill a hundred of them,” she said. Aedan laughed, his chest dropping under her shoulder as he snorted silently.

  “I’ll kill a thousand of them for you.”

  “Oh, really?”

  He shifted, sitting up tall and turning to face her.

  “Aye. A thousand and more, and bring back their glittering armor and their iron spears and put them in a pile at your feet.”

  She sucked on the inside of her cheek.

  “I don’t think you could carry that much,” she said.

  “It’s figurative, lass. I’m wooing you, can’t you see?”

  She laughed.

  “Is that what you’re doing? I thought you were trying to figure out how to carry around an ox of spearheads and still play warrior.”

  “Now you sound like Kenna,” he said. “Difficult woman.”

  She stood and backed away, grinning.

  “You wouldn’t like it if I were easy.”

  He stood to follow, his grin mirroring hers.

  “No, I like a challenging hunt.”

  She found the wall of the hut, stone, like all of Drest’s outbuildings, and pressed her shoulders against it as Aedan got dangerously close.

  His breath was on her face and his fingers in her hair.

  Kenna chose that moment to return with supper.

  Allie rode back home that afternoon, racing a setting sun. She’d stayed too late and risked pushing her mount too hard to get back before the temperatures plummeted, but she couldn’t contain the glow in her chest from an afternoon with the siblings. She smiled at the white winter sky and breathed deep of the crisp, woodsy air, unwilling - unable - to find anything worth of her concern.

  The world was perfect.

  With the household stuck indoors for so many hours of the day and so much of the handicraft confined to the circle of firelight in the main room or pressed tight against the heating fires in the huts, it would have been easy to find the winter a dreary, waiting season. For Allie, it sped by with enthusiasm.

  She spent her days out in the naked woods, hunting feathers and herbs and roots and berries, sneaking away to practice archery or simply sit in a temple of her own body heat on a tree limb, letting her fancy take her. She imagined herself a woodland pixie, immune to cold and the needs of the body, instead flitting through an ephemeral existence and visiting her own version of justice on the wanderlusts who came to her woods. She was a fair pixie, if inconstant in her own way, and the young women of the region would speak of her in hushed whispers, how she would grant wishes and dreams.

  Other times she was a warrior with a lean, smooth body and wild hair matted with flowers. She would dash from tree to tree, invincible and terrifying, never where they expected her to be and always there exactly when she was needed, watching over the Caledd.

  Often, her thoughts turned to Aedan, to his twisted black hair and dark eyes, cracked fingernails and coarse hands. The way the skin of his palms felt against hers.

  She recognized she was being silly and girlish, and she might have resented it in herself if it hadn’t made her so happy.

  She had a few spectacular fights with Gwen over nothing, which unsettled her, but mostly the indoors portion of the winter was cozy. She spent less of it fletching arrows and stringing bows than normal, as all of her clothes simply stopped fitting, even as fast as she could re-fit them. By midwinter, she was able to see over Gwen’s head. Only Isobel, among the women, was still taller than Allie.

  She ate like a horse and spent her days living in dreams.

  It was a good time.

  The day of the midwinter festival finally arrived. Allie was more excited for it than she had been in years, solely because it meant that she would have reason to travel to Drest’s hillfort again that winter. They spent several weeks leading up to it in preparation, smoking meat and gathering greenery with which they would decorate the horses and mules. They rose in the darkness that morning to pack the horses and the mules by torchlight, and set off as the first stars began to vanish from the sky. Rafa led the procession and several of the horsemen took positions at the back, leaving everyone else free to wander as they saw fit, clustering in little groups to talk, or riding by themselves, enjoying the freedom of being outside.

  The horses churned the thigh-high snow to slush and made the trip easy, like a premonition of spring.

  Allie listened to the women from the kitchen speak about families and traditions long past, the fondness of their memories touching her again, as they often did. Gwen rode with her for a while, and they remembered the midwinter celebrations they had had before the Romans, just their family and the other two that lived in the mountain valley with them. Her brothers had been courting young women, the older two interested in women from other little hamlets and the youngest swooning over a girl that he had grown up with there in the valley. That last midwinter, there had been talk of little else. Allie hadn’t really been old enough to remember it clearly; she had a memory of a memory, shapes in the firelight and the smell of bacon grease.

  Gwen told her again how proud her father would have been at the woman she was becoming, then they rode in silence for a time before Gwen went to seek out one of the women who tended the sheep, her best friend since they had come north.

&nb
sp; Allie wanted to talk to her mother about Aedan, but didn’t know how to bring it up. She couldn’t wait to see Kenna, even if talking to the girl about her own brother wasn’t the most ideal situation.

  For a short time, Isobel ended up next to her.

  “It should be a good festival, this year,” she said. Allie nodded. The sky was clear as far as the horizon in every direction and though the temperature had actually dropped since that morning, there was no breeze to throw the stinging air against her face.

  “Drest will be trying to win support from the local tribes,” Isobel continued. “The gifts this year promise to be quite rich.”

  The elder clansmen would be a part of a gift-giving ceremony with Drest that Allie had never seen. Mostly, she surmised, it involved Drest making a public list of his preferred allies through the distribution of food, mead, and Roman-made weapons.

  Allie wasn’t used to being included in conversation about it, and she found herself without anything to say.

  “You have your own reasons for looking forward to this year’s celebration, in particular, though,” Isobel said after another moment. Allie glanced at her with alarm. Did she expect Allie to talk about it? Isobel laughed.

  “There’s no shame in it. Enjoy the time. There won’t be many years like this again for a while.”

  “That’s a dreary forecast,” Allie said.

  “Anyone who spends their life hoping that the spring will never pass is a fool,” Isobel answered. “Yours are a rugged people, Allie. Embrace that.”