Isobel

by Chloe Garner

  Gede sputtered.

  “Surely you can’t mean…”

  “War is sacred to us. If they are called to the battlefield, who am I to stand in their way?” Drest asked.

  “But to just send her out on her own…”

  “Who said that?” Drest asked. “Aedan is in my warband. She and her band of warrior women will join us.”

  Gede started to say something else, but Drest made a sharp motion with his hand.

  “Enough from you. I’ve said what I have to say, and I have more important things to do, now.”

  Allie turned to go, but Drude caught her eye. She turned back to Drest.

  “Why did you not come to see Drude while Isobel was caring for him?” she asked. The expression he gave her was foreign and terrifying. She watched him for a moment, waiting to see if he would answer, then pulled her mouth to the side. “You should have.”

  She couldn’t read Aedan’s face as she left. He walked with her back outside and they kept an even pace, step for step, back to the stony wall that overlooked the broad valley.

  “Why did you ask that?” he asked her, finally.

  “I needed to,” she answered. “He could have died.”

  “Not after we got back, though, right?” Aedan asked.

  “No. By the time you got back, he probably wouldn’t have, but he was that bad at first. His father should have come to see him. We weren’t that far away.”

  “You know, you’re a lot like Isobel,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  He laughed to himself, then shifted closer to her.

  “I don’t know. That she scares everyone.”

  “I’m not trying to be scary.”

  “Maybe she isn’t, either.”

  She laughed at that and leaned against him.

  “So what happens next?”

  He shook his head.

  “We pack, and when enough of the warriors are here… we go.”

  She watched horses and men as they went about the small, specific tasks that kept them busy through the day: tending weapons, tents, animals, fires, talking, moving from place to place. She nodded.

  “And then we go.”

  The fires were small at night, necessarily so, because they weren’t sure how far the Roman scouts would be ranging at this distance from Artair’s hillfort. It was the biggest of the Roman victories, deepest into Drest’s territory, and the first one that Drest wanted to take back. As was the way much of Caledd politics worked - Allie was learning - Artair was also Drude’s uncle, which made recovering his land much more important for Drest.

  There had been skirmishes, but at this point, Allie, Heather, and Brietta had only seen them from above. They were acting as scouts, finding Roman sentries and groups of soldiers and directing Drest and his warband to them. More than once, Allie had helped arranged an ambush, but so far, Drest had not agreed to any of the girls taking a shot at them.

  Heather and Brietta both seemed happy enough with this arrangement, but the Roman uniforms made Allie angry. They had made their wall, and they should stay behind it. What good was a wall if they just kept coming across it? They didn’t belong here, in the Caledd forests, and the forests seemed to reject them as vehemently as Allie did. Dark-skinned men with hideous, mis-proportioned faces, they squinted in the dark and had no control of their feet to speak of. They made noise wherever they went, and Allie barely even had to look for them to know where they were.

  She had snuck away one day to see Artair’s hillfort - to see what Roman occupation looked like, first-hand - and had been disgusted by it.

  There were maybe a hundred Romans living there, their hard-soled boots crushing all of the nearby grazing ground - what kind of idiots drove the food sources for the animals that far from their own encampment? - and they had begun constructing buildings around the hillfort, using the Caledd to do most of the labor. They were using stones from a creek and the hillside above it to pave a road coming down from the hillfort - the only way they were ever going to be able to walk about silently, Allie figured. She wondered for a moment what they had done to her family’s home, far to the south, with so much more time to destroy it.

  She’d told Drest what she’d seen, trying to impress on him the urgency of driving the Romans back south, and he’d laughed at her fervor.

  “Don’t worry, little one. We’ll kill as many of them as we can before they run away back to Rome.”

  She spent her evenings practicing, or out with Aedan, hunting.

  They were field-dressing a deer one late afternoon and she was grumbling, as usual, about how little there was to do.

  “What did you think was going to happen?” he asked.

  “Fighting,” she said, securing the leather thong around the deer’s feet and hefting her side of the carrying stick they had tied it to. She heard him grunt behind her.

  “It was like this last year,” he said. “Drest and the older men like to be careful, but eventually the Romans will figure out we’re out here and start sending real power out to try to beat us.”

  “And Drest will just send us up into the trees again,” Allie said. Aedan laughed.

  “They never see us coming. It’s boring because we’ve always got the advantage.”

  She snarled a little at that, but it wasn’t completely wrong.

  She shifted her bow across her back slightly to keep it out of the way of her knee, then frowned.

  “Do you smell that?” she asked.

  “What?” Aedan answered, stopping. She lowered the deer to the ground and glanced back at him. She looked at the tree canopy above, then pointed at a trunk.

  “There.”

  He nodded and followed her over, boosting her up into the lower branches. She scrambled higher, getting to the crossover point where the limbs of this tree met the limbs of the next, catching one with her foot and waiting as the swirl of river-valley wind made the trees ease one way and then the other, getting the feel of the way the wood and the air interacted, then she pushed herself across into the next tree and made her way on.

  Below, Aedan followed her on the ground, watching her for any sign. He drew the light sword he carried, though she thought it only made him more visible. His heavy war sword was back at the camp with the rest of their gear and the horses.

  She smelled smoke.

  And roasting meat.

  It was faint and came and went with the breeze, but it was there. The smell of men where it didn’t belong in open woods. She got close enough to see a pair of sentries leaning against a tree, drinking out of a pair of wooden cups. She looked down to let Aeden know where they were, and too late realized that there was another soldier sleeping against the tree she was in.

  The tall bushes in the clearing around the mostly-dead tree meant that Aedan wasn’t going to see him until…

  Now.

  The soldier jerked awake before Aedan noticed that the bushes weren’t empty, and in a chaos of motion, Aedan found himself standing empty-handed in front of the Roman soldier.

  Allie was in motion before she had fully realized what was happening, or what she was going to do about it, cascading down through the tree on the noise of the wind and a violent, instinctive fury. She landed behind the Roman, drawing the dagger she had carried since the previous midwinter festival and put her hand over the Roman’s face.

  With a sharp, clean motion, she bibbed him.

  Aedan was wide-eyed.

  “Come on, come on,” he said, waving. “We have to go.”

  She shook her head, indicating the direction of the sentries.

  “They’re going to find him and know we’re here. We have surprise on our side. We go now.”

  His eyes got wider.

  “What do you expect to do? We don’t even know how many there are.”

  She shook her head.

  “Two that way. Let’s go.”

  She was back up in the tree before he could stop her, scrambling through half-dead branches to get
to the next tree. They hadn’t made much noise, but she couldn’t be certain that the other two men hadn’t heard them. She kept going, signaling to Aedan frequently. When she had a good line on the two of them, she made a series of motions at Aedan. In the quickly-darkening evening, she was certain she saw him shake his head, but she pretended like she couldn’t tell, and stood, drawing an arrow and notching it. She glanced at Aedan again, who was motioning as expressively as he could, but again she pretended not to notice. She smiled to herself when she heard the heavy sigh that was almost loud enough for her to worry that he would give them away. She aimed at the man on the left, feeling the pull of the bow, the stretch of the string, the straight, potent power of the arrow, the arc that it would follow…

  She heard the twang of the bow below and matched it a fraction later, and there were two thumps as the shots landed.

  Neither man cried out, and Allie dropped down to land kneeling next to Aedan.

  “Okay. What’s next?” he asked. She grinned at him.

  “The camp is that way,” she pointed. “We need to ring it as fast as we can, find any scouts they have out, and kill them.”

  He nodded.

  “I won’t be able to see much longer.”

  “Just stay quiet,” she said. He grunted at her.

  “Can’t believe I’m taking orders from my wife.”

  “I won’t tell,” she teased. She finally felt functional, like she was doing what she was meant to do. The forest gave her shelter and hiddenness and betrayed her enemies. She felt invincible, climbing back up into the limbs overhead and making her way carefully through the trees, circling the camp up ahead.

  She got close enough, once, to see the fire they were tending, just an orange glow far off through the trees, but she shook her head. She might not have seen it from this distance on the ground, but they should have been doing more to guard the light. She wondered why they were out here, with the hillfort only six or seven hours away. It seemed like a bad idea; the only reason Drest and his warband were out in the open was because Drest wanted to make an effort to take the ground back.

  At the end, though, the questions of why or how were Drest’s problem. She was here for a very simple purpose, and any doubts she had had about whether or not she could do this were gone. She watched and listened, the last of the sun completely gone, now, catching another sentry by surprise and dropping down on him and using Gede’s knife to kill him.

  She left him where he stood, walking in toward the camp in the dark. The orange glow began to cast shadows between the trees, like a demonic dance, and she stayed low, her soft-skinned shoes finding firm or mossy surfaces amidst the dead branches and leaves from the previous fall. The forest consumed too much water for much of it to say crunchy for long, but noise was noise, and she didn’t have a path to work with that went in the direction she wanted.

  It took her a long time to get close enough to see them. She sat behind a thick bush and watched them for a while, as the five men left in the camp talked to each other and prepared to sleep. She was concerned that they would check in on the sentries, or expect them to come back, and she didn’t want them to scatter or arm themselves before she had a chance at them.

  Five men.

  It should have seemed irrational, impossible, even, for her to confront them, but it never even occurred to her to doubt the decision she never actively made. She made her way up through a tree to a point maybe fifteen feet above the camp and found good, solid branch points for her feet, locking her knee against another limb, then drew an arrow and lined up a shot.

  And breathed.

  The first man went down with a soft groan, and she had the second shot away before the others had processed what had happened. The third was tricky. They were moving, looking for her, and for a moment she had difficulty picking which of them was the right one to target. The bowstring hummed again, and she slung it back over her shoulder, dropping directly onto the fourth man and ending him with the knife. Everything she had learned from Isobel about keeping men alive translated fluidly into how to kill them. The fifth man stared at her, transfixed for a moment, from across the fire. He had a sword drawn from long years of training that showed on his face, and in a moment he would charge at her. She pulled the bow slowly from across her shoulders, lining up the shot, and his eyes narrowed.

  Why wouldn’t they all carry bows? Their silly swords only worked on things they could reach, and for their vaunted skill with the spear, it was hardly a useful weapon when you had to react quickly.

  She drew the string taught and let the warm campfire air fill her. She put two arrows into the soldier before he had a chance to get around the fire.

  And then there was silence.

  Forest silence.

  The kind without human noises, but one filled with bugs and frog cries over the sporadic crack of firewood.

  She turned and startled backwards.

  The man was close enough that she should have been able to smell him, sword out and up, one strong, reflexive move from separating her neck from her shoulder. This was the combat she had no aptitude for, no defense against. She raised her hands, putting them in front of her face in an involuntary cringe, and then an arrowhead sprouted out of his chest and he staggered forward, nearly driving her into the fire. She skittered out of the way as he fell, squinting as Aedan entered the ring of light around the fire.

  “Will you not do that again?” he asked.

  “Miscount? No, I won’t do that again.”

  Aedan glowered at her, then drew his knife.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “That one’s still breathing,” he said.

  “I know,” she answered. “In the morning, he’s going to have to get up and go back to tell them what happened.”

  He looked around at the bodies of the soldiers around her.

  “You really are frightening.”

  Suddenly, it felt surreal.

  It had been surreal, the whole time, but in that moment, she was aware of it.

  What was she doing?

  “You have blood on your hands,” Aedan said. She looked at her palms. The blood there was black-red in the firelight and spattered up her wrists a long way. Aedan came to put his hands over hers. “Are you okay?”

  “I feel strange,” she said. He nodded.

  “First battle. Everyone reacts differently. We should go.”

  She checked her bow and her knife, looking around at the carnage she had caused with a feeling of standing outside of herself, then nodded, letting him lead her all the way back to Drest’s camp.

  The men toasted her that night. Drest broke open a clay vessel of mead and there was dancing in front of a daringly high fire. Laying in a tent later that night, Aedan asked her how she felt, again.

  “I don’t know how to feel,” she said.

  “The first time is different…” he said. “You’ve been quiet.”

  “I’m always quiet.”

  “You’re different.”

  The fire outside popped and she pulled herself back in from listening to the noises in the woods.

  “I am different,” she said. “They aren’t going to come here.” She felt quiet, deep down inside of herself, like it was a part of her, pulled out of the forests and slowly claiming her. “You understand? They aren’t going to.”

  He kissed her neck and made her feel human again. She smiled and rolled to face him, raising an eyebrow as she held her face out of range.

  “Next time, I wear woad.”

  Drest couldn’t stop her after that. His arguments failed and he seemed to be intrigued by her tactics and her spirit; he never forbade her to be a part of the raids, so she never actually defied him. Heather didn’t have the stomach for the bloodshed, and Allie never pushed her to be anything more than a scout, but Brietta went with her, keeping a safe distance, but never letting Allie go forward to meet the Romans from the treetops on her own. Allie heard her argue with Lyall more than once, and was grateful that
Aedan never seemed to object to her nature.

  Raid by raid, attack by attack, they sapped the Romans’ strength at Artair’s hillfort, until the last handful of them abandoned it at night one night in midsummer. The rest of the warband were sent with Brietta and Heather as scouts to look for any other large groups of Romans in the area, but Drest invited Allie and Aedan to join him as he went to see Artair on his first official visit to the reclaimed hillfort.

  Artair was waiting for them at the end of the abandoned roadwork, arms crossed, with his two brutish sons on either side, and he hugged Drest with joviality.

  “Welcome, welcome, friend,” Artair said. “Sima told me you would be here by midsummer, and here you are.”

  He took in Allie and Aedan after that, his great smile freezing after a moment as he took another look at Allie.

  “This is the one?” he asked.

  “I’m surprised you’ve heard of her,” Drude said. “Strange news does find its way, doesn’t it?”

  “Why wouldn’t I know of her?” Artair asked. “The Romans had a messenger come here late one afternoon and tell them that Broc’s hillfort needed reinforcements if they were to hold it. One of that lot came back the next morning with two arrows in him and said they’d been intercepted by a raving madwoman who came out of the trees. They’ve been talking about her all summer.” He looked at her again. “Not what I expected.”

  “She’s half faery, that one,” Drest said, “but she’s on our side.”

  Artair nodded, satisfied, and clapped an arm across Drest’s shoulders.

  “The women have brought out all the goods they hid away when the Romans came. Come celebrate with us.”

  Aedan leaned his shoulder against Allie. Broc’s stronghold had fallen to the Caledd weeks before. He grinned at her when she didn’t respond.

  “You’re going to have the best stories when we get back.”

  “Only if you’re there to tell them,” she said. He shoved her, and she elbowed him back, smiling despite herself as they followed Drest and Artair up the unfinished road to the hillfort. Allie fought the urge to walk in the grass.