Isobel

by Chloe Garner

  Brietta made a show of being brave, but her arm trembled in Allie’s. She had asked Heather, once, what would happen to Brietta if Lyall died. Heather guessed she would go back home, having no child to keep her with Lyall’s kin. Allie thought that losing her husband was bad enough; having to go home made it worse than Allie could imagine.

  They took to horse as soon as Aedan said it was okay to leave, and the ride back to the school was quiet. Aedan seemed to be in a great mood and was smothering it for Brietta’s sake; Allie was disquieted at riding into the school as an outsider for the first time. Her special identity as one of the few who actually belonged there was one she’d never understood, before. Not until it wasn’t there, anymore.

  Brietta kept sighing.

  A very long ride later, as the sun was beginning to set, they crested the final gentle hill before the school. It was overwhelming, and Allie was glad that no one had known they were coming. She took the extra few minutes to compose herself as the herd of horses at the school finally announced them.

  Isobel was the first one to come outside, holding Brietta’s and Allie’s horses as they dismounted.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked Brietta.

  “I need to know,” Brietta answered. Isobel gave her a dry smile and put her hand on the mare’s nose as Brietta came to stand in front of her.

  “You’re welcome here, but you need to go home. He’s waiting for you.”

  Brietta made a noise that sounded like a cough, then she collapsed against Isobel, her whole body spasming with sobs.

  It struck Allie that she’d never seen anyone touch Isobel like that before.

  And then something else struck Allie.

  Kenna.

  “Seventeen,” Kenna said, chewing fast, but not keeping up as the story of her summer poured out. “Some of them, we had to keep out of sight when Gede was around. Some of them, their fathers actually came. Allie, we won this summer. We won.”

  Allie glanced at Aedan, overwhelmed at the girl’s enthusiasm and simply the volume of her words after a summer spoken at a whisper. He grinned, then continued to tear into his own meal. Allie picked at her food, unsure what to do with herself, between Kenna’s bubbling enthusiasm and Brietta’s vacancy.

  “We can stay for a few days,” Aedan had said. “You haven’t seen your ma since spring.”

  “How is Brietta going to get home?” Allie had asked.

  Some of the boys from Drest’s hillfort were still at the school, startlingly young boys with twiggish arms and legs and a propensity to shout, and Aedan said that Brietta could ride with them in the morning, and that Drest would see to it that she got the rest of the way home.

  “It will be okay,” Brietta had said.

  Allie hadn’t even considered how Heather would get back to her own home.

  She didn’t like how much she hadn’t thought about, and then listening to Kenna, she found herself feeling even more inadequate. Kenna had taken good care of the girls, better than Allie had, and the thoughts that went through the spunky girl’s mind were ones that never occurred to Allie.

  Finally, mid-sentence, Kenna stopped. Her eyes shot wide open.

  “Tell me everything,” she said.

  “What?” Allie asked. Kenna shook Brietta’s shoulder gently, and turned back to Allie.

  “Both of you. All three of you. Tell me everything.”

  Allie shrugged.

  “We didn’t win,” she said. Kenna looked slightly stunned.

  “Everyone said that things were going well,” she said. “The men who were coming back all talked about you. Lyall never stopped talking about you. Rafa had to make him go home. He was going to wait for you to come back.”

  “Why didn’t he?” Brietta asked.

  “His kin needed him,” Kenna said. “All the clans do. The men are all gone.”

  There was a moment of quiet at that, and then Brietta tipped her head toward Kenna.

  “Why didn’t you go?” she asked.

  “Work the fields?” Kenna asked, then hooted laughter. “Girlie, you’ve got me all wrong, there.”

  “No. With us.”

  This silenced Kenna, who finally shrugged.

  “Drest said he couldn’t let me. You, her, anyone else, but not me.”

  “Why not?” Allie asked, but the kind expression she got from Brietta indicated this was an ignorant question. Kenna shook herself and her eyes lit again.

  “So it wasn’t as glorious as they all said?”

  “It was,” Aedan said with a laugh. “You just have to learn to interpret what Allie says.”

  “What does that mean?” Kenna asked.

  “If there are Romans left standing, she thinks it’s a loss,” Brietta said. “Winter cut her off. She’d have chased them all the way to the sea.”

  Kenna howled and grabbed more bread as it went by.

  “That’s my girl,” she said, her cheeks stuffed with bread. “That’s my girl.”

  Allie hugged Brietta goodbye in the frosty cold of a fresh dawn.

  “I’ll see you at midwinter,” she said quietly. Brietta nodded.

  “Thank you,” she said, head nodding as if she had more to say, but couldn’t put words around it.

  “I’m glad you came, this summer,” Allie said. Brietta nodded a more direct agreement.

  “Yes. Me, as well.”

  Allie nodded, giving Brietta a moment to see if the other girl would say something, then going to get her sturdy mount from the man who had tacked the animal in the pre-dawn darkness.

  “You know…” Brietta said. “You know I’m coming back, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Next summer,” Brietta said. “I’m coming back.”

  Allie wanted to ask why, but knew that the question would have insulted her, if someone else had asked it, and bit it back, not wanting to insult Brietta.

  And yet, she still wanted to ask.

  It took her a moment to find something else to say.

  “Take good care of Lyall.”

  “I’m coming back,” Brietta said, more emphatically. “We aren’t done yet.”

  Allie nodded, overwhelmed and at a loss.

  “Yes. Okay.”

  They danced around the fire.

  And no one tried to stop them.

  Girls Allie didn’t recognize, following her like a myth.

  That spring, there were seven of them, blue-skinned, scattered among the warriors milling around the front field of Drest’s hillfort. Brietta stood with Allie atop the rocky promontory, watching the crowds.

  “Kenna did a good job, they say,” Brietta told her.

  Allie glanced at her, feeling nervous.

  “Really?”

  “Jinny said she was tough. Told them they had to live up to you.”

  Allie wanted to not understand what that meant, so she didn’t ask. She also didn’t ask how Jinny had gotten back, last year, after her brothers had sold her means of transport. There were only so many stories of sacrifice that she could bear to hear before it became overwhelming, though Brietta swore it was getting better.

  “Some of the mas, they tell their girls that if they do their chores and clean their plates, that they can fight with you, some day,” the blond girl had told her the night before as they sat in front of a roaring fire in Drest’s hall eating dinner. Allie found that terrifying. And secretly inspiring.

  Even more unsettling was Isobel’s appearance earlier that day. The woman hadn’t had much to say, but Allie had spent the entire afternoon bewildered, not knowing what expectations Isobel had, or why she might have come. Finally, as she had prepared to leave, she had nodded to Allie.

  “You’ve done well.”

  “You think they’ll be ready?” Allie asked Brietta now. Drest intended that she continue to lead the girls, and she was keenly feeling the twin pressures of risking girls’ lives at her command and disappointing the king. Brietta nodded with uncharacteristic confidence.

  “Th
ey will be.”

  And so they were.

  They spent the summer killing Romans.

  As Allie and her girls found opportunities to pester the outposts along the wall, late in the fall, the warriors made raids on Roman-held villages on the other side of it, taking small livestock and making merry pests of themselves.

  They were winning.

  And then, as the specter of winter began to loom, Drest made a full-out push, taking and holding towns and villages, barricading themselves in as the Romans had done north of the wall, setting clansmen as chieftains and lords. The Romans scattered, disorganized and dismayed before the Caledd bowmen and horsemen.

  And so it was that the Roman general called for an audience with the king.

  Rumors flew like swallows among the warbands, and few had any idea if the news they were hearing was simply a mis-directed echo of the gossip they had passed on days or hours earlier. As Allie sat with Aedan and a number of the girls, one of Drest’s advisors entered the hall they had chosen to occupy.

  “Drest would like to see you,” he said to Aedan. Aedan stood, and the warrior paused. “Her, too.”

  Allie ignored the furtive glances among the girls, standing to follow Aedan out of the main hall of the building and deeper into the personal quarters of the ruling family. Drest was there with the leaders of the other warbands and his closest advisors. The warrior who had come to get them took an open seat, leaving Allie and Aedan standing.

  “You know I’ve been called to meet with the Roman officers,” Drest said, looking up. Aedan nodded. Allie kept her thoughts to herself.

  “I want you to be there,” Drest said. Aedan nodded again. “Bocan will come with us as translator, and you will be a member of my guard.”

  Aedan agreed to this silently.

  “Is that safe?” Allie asked. Drest guffawed.

  “This is the third time I’ve done this, little one. The Romans know that I can bring peace, but any of us can bring war.”

  “That’s what this is?” Allie asked. “Peace?”

  Drest laughed.

  “Yes. An expensive one, thanks to you.”

  “We’re done?”

  He nodded, clapping one man on the back.

  “Yes. Next year, we get fat at home.”

  Allie was still wrestling with anger when he continued.

  “I want you to be there, as well,” he said. “In paint and your mask.”

  She frowned.

  “Why?”

  He grinned.

  “Because you frighten them.”

  In a few hours, and in much commotion, Allie found herself in the tents of a Roman general, more hideous than most Romans, his face frozen in a perpetual sneer. Aedan had made her promise not to draw attention.

  “And don’t kill anyone,” he’d said.

  “If they didn’t want me to kill anyone, they wouldn’t have invited me,” Allie sulked.

  “I mean it.”

  “So do I.”

  She wasn’t sure if he entirely trusted her or not, but he hadn’t said anything about the dagger strapped to her hip as she’d followed the rest of the band into the tents. The men wore furs and leathers, emphasizing their prosperity and magnifying their size. Allie wore just her strips of leather, privately mocking the Romans for how huddled they were against the late fall rains.

  She attracted stares from all sides as she stood, but she didn’t meet them. She didn’t pay much attention to the negotiation between Drest and the wrinkled Roman with his nose like a vulture and his skin like bad leather. At first, she was angry, but as she waited for the talks to be over, she came to respect the opportunity Drest had given her.

  There would be other wars.

  Rafa said there were always more wars.

  Next time, they would know who she was.

  It was a muddy, slushy return home. They stopped at the hillfort where the Romans had turned them back the summer before, making sure the last vestiges of Roman rule there were completely gone, and then making a short tour through a number of the rest of the villages and hillforts north of the wall. Drest handed out gifts with extravagance, and political things happened. Allie felt like a painted toy at a children’s midwinter game. She and Aedan spoke often of the future in their many hours.

  She didn’t know what would happen next.

  “I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said one evening as they sat in the quarters their host had offered them that night. Aedan shifted on the bed beside her, face showing a genuine concern. He had long run out of answers, and they both knew none of them were very good.

  He kissed her instead, and she lay against him.

  “I’ve never lived in a hillfort. Just for the winter, waiting for thaw and spring, I don’t know what to do. But to just… stay.”

  He nodded against the top of her head.

  “My beautiful forest pixie,” he murmured. “We won’t keep you locked away. I promise.”

  She closed her eyes in the smell of him, content for now. Living just on the edge of now, she managed, day by day, to avoid thinking about the roll of years that stretched before her back at her new home.

  This year, when they got back to the hillfort, Allie asked Brietta to ensure that all of the girls had the means to get home.

  “They’re Caledd,” Brietta had answered. Allie wasn’t sure what her face had said, but Brietta laughed. “They always find their way home.”

  “But they shouldn’t travel on their own,” Allie said, drawing another laugh from Brietta.

  “For someone who has stood atop the Roman wall, you talk like a girl who’s never left her own clan.”

  Allie had let it go, at that, watching hour by hour as the men trickled away, returning to home and family. In the third evening home, Allie was leaning by the front gate when a horse came flying out of the woods, off the path to Rafa’s school. She recognized the rider’s streak of red hair, short as it may have been, and grinned to herself, calling Aedan to the gate. Drude was with him, laughing in the middle of a story.

  Kenna threw herself off the horse before it came to a stop, and Allie’s heart shocked at the girl’s expression.

  “Kenna, what’s wrong?”

  Was it Gwen? Allie sprung at herself with fury that she hadn’t gone to see her mother as soon as they had gotten back.

  “They’re gone,” Kenna said breathlessly.

  “Who’s gone?” Drude asked.

  “Isobel. Rafa. They’re gone.”

  “What?” Allie asked. “Did you look for them?”

  “Their rooms are empty and their horses are gone.”

  “That can’t be right,” Aedan said. Kenna nodded, sucking air over chapped lips.

  “They just left.”

  “Where would they go?” Drude asked.

  “You’re sure,” Aedan said, steadying his sister. She nodded again.

  “The last of the boys left yesterday, and the girls. I was just staying one more day, myself. They packed everything up and were gone before anyone got up this morning.”

  “Who will run the school?” Allie asked, a chasm of lostness opening in her chest. The other three fell silent, staring at her.

  “You will,” Aedan said, finally.

  “They planned it,” Drude said softly, eyes away as if listening to a memory.

  “What?” Allie asked.

  “I should have paid more attention,” Aedan said. “I didn’t even wonder.”

  “What?” Allie asked again.

  “Yeah,” Kenna agreed.

  “What are you talking about?” Allie asked. Kenna looked like she was struggling to break some piece of news that was somehow more difficult than the fact that Allie had been abandoned by her invincible benefactors.

  “Allie, you’re a very wealthy woman.”

  “I’m what?” The words came out flat. How on earth could Kenna be thinking about something like that, now of all times? Kenna licked her lips again.

  “You didn’t know?”

&
nbsp; “Did you even go to your marriage ceremony?” Drude asked.

  Allie spun to face Aedan.

  “What are they talking about?”

  “At the ceremony,” Aedan said gently. “Rafa named you as his inheritor. At the time, I thought it was to give us political standing, but… With them gone, the school and any livestock and belongings are yours.”

  “They only took their personal things,” Kenna said, sounding stunned. “The two of you are going to replace them.”

  Allie shook her head.

  “No,”

  Aedan watched her, not arguing with her.

  “It works,” Drude said. Allie was shaking her head faster, but it didn’t sound like Drude was paying attention. “My champion doesn’t have to be here, but you do have to be close. For you to be the schoolmaster… No one is going to fight you, Aedan.”

  Aedan’s eyes flickered toward Drude, betraying just how important a point that was to him, but he was still focused on Allie. She shook her head faster yet, her hands waving at her sides.

  “No.”

  “Allie,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Allie,” he said again. “We’re going home. You’re going home.”

  She stopped, stunned like he had slapped her.

  Would it be the same?

  No.

  It would never be the same.

  But she was going home.

  Amanda

  The woman sat in the corner of the general’s tent, her feet propped up on an empty crate and her arms folded across her chest. Sanders was doing his best not to look back at her. He didn’t like having her behind him. Not when he was reporting her, like this.

  “Miss Isy, all due respect for your contributions, but you can’t do that,” the general said.

  “The men play cards,” she said. Sanders didn’t turn at her voice.

  “That’s a far cry from crossing the lines to heal them. You’re aiding and abetting our enemies. There’s a war on,” the general told her.