by Morgan Smith
I heard Einon yelling “Form line!” and someone bellowed “Swords up!” and then the world shifted forever as the raiders came up the hill.
They were laughing. I heard a hissing past my ear as Elen’s first arrow took out one of them, yet they were laughing still as they closed in. A big one, black-bearded and swinging a heavy-looking axe, locked eyes with me.
There was no battle-joy, a thing I’d heard of from the bards when they sang of heroes. Cowell had spoken to us of that kind of madness - the bloodlust, he’d called it - it did no one much good, to hear him tell it. We’d been told not to let our ignorant excitement take us beyond caution, and people had warned us, too, of the fear that is an ordinary warrior’s lot, and how we could not let it overpower us, but to use it, crafting it into an anger that could be sent into our sword-arms, to lend us strength.
No one had ever hinted to me that I might be bored, though.
It was as if the world had flattened, dampened down, and I was aware of a curious detachment, as if I were both there in fact, with my sword upraised, and then, as well, as if I were standing a little way off, judging someone else’s performance on the practice ground.
I saw, as if the world had suddenly slowed, that he was going to swing the weapon high and to the right, and I dodged sideways to his left, slicing my blade into his ribs, but there was no time to see if I had felled him. A tough-looking, fair-haired woman was right behind him and I watched as my sword slid around and up and into her unprotected gut, as if it knew what to do without me. Part of me marked her look of affronted surprise as she went down, and then I turned instinctively to see another fighter advancing from my left.
He was younger than the others, maybe only a couple of years my senior, really, and he, at least, wasn’t laughing anymore. He came at me warily, his shield up and his brow furrowed, and I thought he should be worried because I was still in that state of unnatural calm, save that now both my mind and my body knew what they were about and were weighing up the options. This was what I was meant to do, it was as easy as breathing, and I danced a little to his right and dropped my sword low.
It was my favourite trick on the practice ground, back then. You let the sword slip out of sight below the rim of your opponent’s shield and wheel it back up between the two of you, turning the blade to angle above their head and letting the momentum of the drop provide the additional power as it chops to your opponent’s neck. With practice it goes very fast, and I had had a lot of practice.
Easy-peasy. The blood gushed out, spraying me, my foe and Feargal, as well, who was not two feet away, just pulling his sword free from another of our attackers. I hadn’t known before how much blood a person could have in them.
It was over then, as suddenly as it had begun.
Roisean, whose father held the ports at Fencair, was excitedly describing Einon’s first fight. She’d been right behind him, bent on stepping in to protect him if need be, and was now unabashedly proud that his age and lack of inches had not hindered him at all. Guerin was calmly cleaning his sword, and Iain was guarding at swordpoint the one Istaran still alive.
I hadn’t killed the first one. He had fallen to Einon, who had, according to Roisean, managed first to dispatch the band’s leader by being much quicker and using a step-and-thrust move to duck under the man’s range and gut him quite efficiently. Turning, he’d seen the man I’d slashed at starting to get up again, and killed him before the bastard could struggle to his feet.
For a moment, as we saw that we - two dozen untried adolescents who were now blooded warriors at last - had vanquished our opponents, we were noisily exultant. We had proven ourselves. We were children no longer.
Slowly, though, a silence fell over us. Elen stood uncaring and still, as blood dripped from a shallow cut on her arm, and reality began to chill us in the warm spring air.
Baile…he lay unmoving in the sand. Part of his face was gone, and a strange part of me was transfixed, noting every detail, as if some important question lay in his wounds, one that could be answered and understood.
The troop captain had left the dead and dying on the beach and was riding hell for leather to us, but the damage was done. Elen was weeping openly, and we had all of us, even Roisean, grown very quietly grim. He could take his time, I thought, and tried to wipe some of the blood from my face.
There was, in the end, nothing we could say or do, nothing that could change things. The older troopers gave us rough praise and curt advice, the younger ones commiserated and warned us gently that this, too, was how our lives would be from now on, and gradually, the shock of it wore away and we felt only sadness.
Or so the others said. I stayed silent, because in the end, I realized once more my essential difference from them.
I felt nothing at all. Oh, I had liked Baile well enough. He had been funny and kind to animals and a little unwise in his speech, and I could see, in a remote sort of way, that things might a bit less amusing without him, but no tears came, no sense of regret or loss or sorrow touched me. I felt only a certain cold satisfaction that my attackers had not bested me and that, in the eyes of the world, I was a warrior in truth.
Chapter Eight
I never gave much thought to my appearance when I was young.
In the beginning, it was at least partly because no one cared whether I was clean or dirty, or taught me to care for this. At Gorsedd, I saw immediately that combed hair, regular washing and clean-ish clothes were important, and imitated the others, but focused as I was on simply fitting in, the implication that these things had more importance than just being like everyone else escaped me.
The first hints I had that I might be, on some level, likable in another way that had no relationship to me as a person, came in the few weeks leading up to my Goddess Night.
It’s likely the same, deep down, for every girl, no matter how pretty or plain she might be. Even quite old men felt free to comment on our approaching womanhood and the delights in store, although if they were very much older, it was considered crass and unmannerly to do this to our faces. The younger men, the boys we’d grown up with, they could be quite crude, but that became a more muted chorus after Nesta bloodied Daire’s nose when he detailed a rather imaginative scenario involving himself, Nesta, and a horse trough full of water.
I don’t know why it is that only girls have to be subjected to this. The boys saw it simply as their Goddess-given opportunity to get that one experience older men brag about, not but that a few of them hadn’t found a willing partner to lie with already. But there wasn’t the singling out, the marking out of any of them as less than men, once they’d been blooded in battle. Only we girls had this: one, last, publicly commented-on humiliation to be endured, before the world would accept us as fully adult.
The priestess who instructed us told us repeatedly that daughters were sacred. Daughters were the roots of the world, and precious to the Mother of All. When we had questions, her only answer was that this night was a Holy Mystery and that it was given only to us, the Goddess’ special and beloved daughters, to help us understand and to bear what life would bring.
It didn’t seem much of a gift. It felt like an unwelcome ordeal, to be honest, and I could not, for the life of me, see the point of it. But then, I had not even the tiniest belief in a Mother who looked out for Her children, although I could well imagine Her in Her more fearful and judgmental aspect as the Destroyer of Worlds.
They made us bathe in a sacred pool, which, as it was fed by streams of melting snow tumbling out of the mountains, was incredibly cold, even in high summer. We loosed our braids and twined flower garlands in our hair. We dressed in the long, white, sleeveless shifts that symbolized our state of transition and the Lady Ilona had made sure that the girls in her care, like me, were clad in the finest-woven bleached linen, so soft and delicately thin that we might easily have been naked.
We were walked in solemn procession to the sacred grove, the priests and priestesses repeating once more the th
ings they’d been drilling into us for weeks: to run free, to embrace the wildness within us, and to accept with gladness whatever the Goddess willed. Then the Reverend Mother, who had come over from Braide as a special courtesy to the ducal court, kissed each of us tenderly, blessed us with the ritual words, and they all departed.
There was food and sweet wines laid out for us on the grassy space in front of the shrine, and a few musicians were hidden among the trees, playing merry tunes as we drank and feasted our way out of girlhood. Out beyond the sacred grove, we knew, there were any number of young men, quite a few older ones, and probably some women, hoping they could run fast enough to catch the girl they wanted.
Holy words said that the Goddess chose for us. Holy words said that try as a man or woman might, only She determined the outcome. Holy words said that the Goddess gave us this night as a harbinger and a promise, for our lives hereafter. A gift of prescience, if one could read it aright.
There came a point where the music’s tempo subtly altered and it seemed as if everyone except for me felt things change, a movement of the spirit. They began to get up, to link arms and dance around the stone offering slab and then, one by one, to spin off into the woods around us. I knew instinctively that to be the last, to not at least appear to feel the Goddess-good that moved the other girls, was to be different, apart, and I could not afford that. I had been watchful, and I timed my behavior to be firmly among the middle lot - not too eager, not too much behindhand, just an ordinary girl with ordinary desires and ordinary hopes for the future.
Out in the forest, I could hear laughter and shrieks of merriment. We had been instructed to run, to make the boys chase us, and most of the girls were enjoying this as much as the boys were. There was enough moonlight to prevent all but the most unlucky of accidents, and these were hills and woods we knew well. It still seemed rather oddly innocent and a bit like a game.
So I ran. At some point, I thought at least one man chased me. I thought I knew who it was, too, and that thought was almost immediately followed by “Oh, please, not him” and I scrambled up a little rocky cleft and doubled back, sprinting further up into the hills. He did not follow, and it occurred to me that probably, he’d been after someone else, anyway.
At another point, I almost stepped on a girl I didn’t know, locked in furious embrace with one of the musicians who’d been providing our background entertainment earlier. They seemed neither to see or hear me and I ran on, until I tripped over a tree root and ripped my linen shift, and sat for a long moment thinking how stupid and pointless this entire affair was. No one appeared for me, no one gave chase, and I was stumbling around in the trees waiting - for what? For some idiot to carelessly have me, and then brag of it to his friends later?
It was tiring. I circled back, still hearing the echoing of laughter, although that was fading, too, as each girl paired off, and eventually, worn and depressed, I found myself back at the sacred grove.
Well, they had said the Goddess sent you a message about your life to come, what kind of life you could expect. If She spoke true through Her servants, then Her message to me was clear.
I could expect nothing in this life, nor in the hereafter.
I was of no account to Her, and, I decided, She was of no account to me. She could Be or not - it made no difference. I must find what I could in life, on my own and on my own terms. I picked up a handful of little cakes made from crushed hazelnuts and honey, filled a cup to the brim with wine, sat down defiantly on the offering stone and took a long, gulping drink to wash away the sourness of reality.
It was only after several minutes that I became aware that I was not alone.
He was standing at the edge of the clearing, as pale as stone in the moonlight, and as unmoving, watching me. The wine-cup slipped from my hand, and I felt, as if from very far off, the cold of the spilled wine soaking into my shift.
Guerin walked slowly across the clearing, his eyes on mine, till he stood not a hand’s breadth away. We never spoke; his hands drifted up to my shoulders and he slid the shift down, away from my neck and further, and I stood, unbidden, and let the cloth slip uselessly to the ground.
And then something unknown took hold of me and the Goddess’ power swept over both of us, spiraling wide and enveloping us into it and I felt, I believed, I knew, for one all too brief moment, that She was true, that I was loved, and that the world belonged as much to me as any other living thing.
I woke alone, in a cold dawn, on the offering stone, with only my stained, torn shift puddled on the ground to tell me I had not dreamed it all.
Chapter Nine
The old duke was dying.
Really dying this time, instead of the slow, by-fits-and-starts way he’d been managing for years. No, this time, he was sinking and sinking fast, and what had been blowhard boasting and grandiose plans for the last few years was suddenly coming back to punch us in the face.
The old man had steadfastly refused to name an heir, preferring to play off one contender to another. It’s a reasonable strategy: you can gain a lot of interesting insights and weed out the obviously useless ones, not to mention gauging how deep some of your own vassals’ loyalties run. But to make it worthwhile, you should probably choose someone before you succumb to that last, long sleep.
Ullien hadn’t done that: he’d just repeated the favouritism endlessly, jumping from one candidate to the next and then back again, and leaving us all guessing. It had become apparent that everyone else would, given the option, have chosen Lady Jessaine, who had managed, over the last twenty years or so, to make surprisingly few enemies, even during those times when her star had been in apparent ascendancy.
She behaved reasonably nicely to everyone, although not so nicely as to hint she was likely to be anyone’s pawn.
She had held her own lands and governed them well enough, and she had enough experience as a warrior to satisfy those who felt a strong sword arm was a prerequisite.
But then, in the late fall of last year, she’d caught a chill that would not abate. By Midwinter, she was gone, leaving only her brother Mael with as close a tie as to rival his cousin Einon’s claims.
And Mael was no Jessaine.
He ruled his own lands with a fist wrapped firmly around an iron cudgel, and he behaved with all the arrogance and blustery meanness his sister had so studiously avoided. Even so, there were many who claimed friendship with him.
I wondered how much of that friendship was really fear, though, because Mael made it plain that he would not brook even the mildest opposition.
You couldn’t disagree about so much as the weather with him, lest it come back to haunt you in the form of public insults, rumor-mongering, or, as in the case of his own brother-by-marriage, a trumped-up charge of treachery followed by a judicial duel where Mael acted as the duke’s champion, slew his wife’s kin, was rewarded by the gift of the dead man’s lands, and promptly turned the widow out, leaving her penniless and unprotected.
But for the majority of nobles and even many of the wealthier merchants, support for Mael was based on two things, and those two things eclipsed every other consideration.
It was support for things to remain as they were, with power and wealth concentrated at the top, and it was support for a strong leader.
Mael had benefitted from a system that rewarded those who already were in possession of that wealth and power with yet more wealth and power, and it seemed unlikely he would choose to alter that system. Moreover, one could not deny that Mael was a proven warrior, that he had more than his fair share of experience with invasions, pirates and rebels, and that if any strife or troubles came, he would face them head on and beat them into submission.
Against that, what could a fifteen year old boy put up as surety?
Had Jessaine lived, it’s likely we’d have knuckled under, bowed to the inevitable, and buried our hopes. She would probably not have rocked a boat she already sailed in, but she’d been aging and childless. It was even possible that sh
e might have designated Einon as her heir, if he lived quietly and loyally; she hadn’t seemed like Mael any more than we did.
But she was gone, and even before the duke was dead, the whispers and the rumors and the shifting alliances had begun. Those who had favoured Mael before the duke’s last illness were already developing noticeable struts, and a number of lesser folk were openly wooing his favour now. It was almost more than one could bear.
We weren’t fools. We knew that as long as Mael lived, Einon was at risk, whether he laid claim to the ducal honours or not. We knew that if we made any attempt to gain him power and failed, some of us would die, too.
Not Feargal: his wealth and connections protected him. A few soft words, a repentant apology, and a year or two staying quietly on his lands, and it was entirely likely that Mael would let it lie, at least for a few years. Not Nesta, either: she’d married an older Baron whose position and large number of followers made him well-nigh unassailable. He was utterly in love with Nesta, and though he perhaps favoured Mael’s candidacy himself, he was not prepared to lose her: whatever came, she’d be safe enough. Guerin, well, again, he had a father whose reputation and strong sword arm would keep his heir from any serious repercussions. It was a rare day when anyone would bet against the lords of Orleigh. My cousin Iain, too, was at no serious risk, I was certain. Lady Ilona was still a force to be reckoned with, and because of that, I also knew Meryn would be safe, no matter what came to me.
Indeed, when you thought about it, only a few of us were risking anything much. They all of them had families who would ward them, or else they were negligible enough that they could run off home and lie low till even Mael forgot just who was where on the fateful day. When you considered most of the likely outcomes, only Einon and I were risking death outright.
It had been the unspoken script beneath any plans we made. The old man couldn’t last forever and so, for the last year or more, we’d been watching and weighing, determining just who it was that would be our strongest, most likely adversary. We had, without quite putting it into words, determined our strategy, and I, as the most expendable person in the group, was at the heart of it.