War Maid's Choice

by David Weber

  Specially detailed squads followed behind the second line, decapitating downed ghouls. Quite a few of those theoretically dead ghouls showed a dangerous degree of fight when the cleanup squads closed in on them, but they were no match for their disciplined, organized, and uninjured enemies. The foggy morning was hideous with grunts, gasps, screams, blows, the thud of clubs on shields and flesh, the sounds of steel driving through sinew and bone, and a fresh wave of ghouls—this one more organized than the first—came sweeping out of the mist.

  “Axes!”

  The warcry went up to meet them, and now a fresh shout of “Bone Fists!” roared up from the second line, to join it. Screams of pure, wordless fury answered, and a new, better organized torrent of ghouls crashed into the shield wall.

  The new attack hit hard enough to actually stop the hradani in their tracks. They hunkered down behind their shields, bending their helmeted heads as if against the blast of a hurricane, and put all their strength, all their Rage, into simply holding their ground as that flood of squealing, yelping flesh and muscle hammered into them. For a moment Vaijon thought even a line of hradani was going to break, and at least a dozen men went down—none of them to rise this time, as throats were ripped out or they were dragged out of position into that whirlwind of war clubs and spears and rending claws—yet they held. They held, and the thick, powerful voice of Yurgazh Charkson of the Navahkan Bloody Swords rose over all that hideous clamor.

  “By the right flank...advance!” he thundered, and the battalion at the right end of his line responded instantly.

  “Stone Daggers—at the charge!” its commander bellowed, and the column slammed forward like Tomanāk’s own mace, hooking in from the flank to drive into the ghouls who had coalesced in front of Yurgazh’s battleline.

  The ghouls shrieked as that hammer blow crunched into them. They’d been so focused on the foes in front of them that they’d never seen the flank attack coming, and simple surprise would have been enough to rock them back on their heels. But there was more than surprise in that attack—there was razor-edged steel, there was fury...and there was the Rage.

  The charging column ground over the ghouls in front of it, cutting them down, trampling them underfoot, driving them before it, and panic replaced the ghouls’ savage determination. They began to fall back, and once the first of them gave ground, it became a retreat...and then a rout. They went pounding back the way they’d come, and the charging battalion started after them.

  “Halt!” Yurgazh bellowed, and in what would have startled any pre-Bahnak hradani commander more than anything else which had happened, the column obeyed instantly.

  “Stone Daggers, form front!” he continued. “Iron Axes, take the flank!”

  The Iron Axe battalion which had taken the initial brunt opened its ranks, allowing the Raven Talon battalion of the second line to pass through it while the Stone Daggers formed a new front rank. The Iron Axes filed to the right, settling into column formation to replace the Stone Daggers, and Vaijon’s mouth tightened as he realized at least twenty or thirty of them were down, wounded or dead. That was what happened when even hradani had to fight ghouls hand-to-hand, yet with the fog negating archery...

  “Advance!” Yurgazh commanded, and the hradani moved forward once again, closing in on the village where, hopefully, they would discover the bulk of the ghouls had already been dealt with.

  And where we may discover nothing of the sort, instead, Vaijon thought grimly. House-to-house is going to be really ugly if we haven’t, too, Unfortunately, there’s only one way to find out. And at least our lads are better suited for this kind of work than Trianal’s Sothōii are.

  It no longer even occurred to him to think of the hradani around him as anything except “our lads,” and the Hurgrum Chapter of the Order of Tomanāk moved forward with him as they followed.

  A bugle call sounded from somewhere in the mist ahead of them—a cavalry call, not an infantry one—and he heard fresh yelps and snarls and the sound of human warcries, faint with distance but growing in intensity as the first wave of fleeing ghouls encountered the waiting Sothōii.

  “At least they’ll be broken when they run into Trianal’s lot,” a voice said beside him, and he turned his head and looked at Yurgazh. The Bloody Sword general shook his head, his expression a strange alloy of battle fever, determination, and the icy control of the Rage. “I’d as soon not be taking this kind of knock myself, you understand,” he continued with a crooked smile, “but better us than the horse boys. Not their kind of fight, I don’t think.”

  “No,” Vaijon agreed, “but they’ll do their bit. In fact”—another bugle call sounded through the fog—“it sounds like they’re doing it right now.”

  “Never doubted it,” Yurgazh said simply. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve a battle to see to and a village to burn.”

  He jerked his head at his bugler, his standardbearer, and his runners, and the entire command group went forward at a trot behind his infantry.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Beg pardon, Milady.”

  Baroness Hanatha looked up from her cup of tea as the armsman stepped respectfully into the small breakfast parlor. She normally breakfasted alone when Tellian was away, but since Leeana had returned home to visit, she’d eaten with the two younger women each morning.

  “Yes, Mardor?” she said.

  “Beg pardon, Milady, but the Sergeant sent me to tell you there’s a courser arrived here at the castle.”

  “A courser?” Hanatha repeated, lowering her teacup and raising both eyebrows in surprise.

  “Yes, Milady. A mare. A big one, and she looks pretty...well, banged up, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

  “She’s been hurt?” Hanatha set down her cup with a snap, starting to climb urgently out of her chair. Her haste betrayed her so that she stumbled on her weakened leg, and Leeana came swiftly to her own feet, reaching for her mother’s elbow.

  “Oh, no, Milady!” The armsman shook his head quickly, his expression apologetic as Leanna caught the baroness’ weight and steadied her. “I’m sorry. I meant she’s been hurt bad sometime before, not now. She’s lost an eye and an ear, and she’s scarred pretty bad, too.”

  Hanatha’s eyes widened. Leeana still looked confused, but her mother nodded crisply to the armsman.

  “Where is she?” she asked.

  “Well, Milady, Sergeant Warblade didn’t want to leave her standing at the gate, nor she didn’t look like she was any too fond of that notion, her own self. So the Sergeant passed her through and she found her own way to the stables right smart. When I passed, she had her nose down in a bag of oats and seemed like she was doing pretty well.”

  “I see.” Hanatha straightened and picked up her cane, then looked at Leeana and Sharlassa. “Ladies, it sounds as if we have a visitor who’s come quite some way. I believe that as dutiful hostesses we ought to go and welcome her to Hill Guard, don’t you?”

  * * *

  Leeana was unprepared for the sight which greeted her as she followed her mother and Sharlassa into Hill Guard Castle’s spacious, meticulously neat stable yard.

  His stables were the pride of any Sothōii noble—or, for that matter, of any reasonably prosperous Sothōii yeoman—and Hill Guard’s had been rebuilt completely little more than fifteen years earlier. Faced with marble, made of fired brick with thick heat and cold-shedding walls, well ventilated and heated against the winter’s chill, and supplied with piped-in water, they’d also been made much loftier than most, which was fortunate, since they were currently home to no less than three coursers. The well drained, freshly washed down brick stable yard was just rough enough to provide a horse or courser with secure footing, and a large fountain at its center jetted water high into the air before it came tumbling back down into a circular marble catch basin in a musical smother of foam.

  That much was as familiar to Leeana as the palm of her own hand, but the huge chestnut mare standing beside the fountain, just finish
ing off the oats the stablemaster had offered her on her arrival, was something else. The distinctive Sothōii warhorses stood about fifteen hands in height, and the largest draft horse Leeana had ever seen stood no more than seventeen hands, or about five feet eight at the withers. Her father’s courser companion, Dathgar, on the other hand, stood twenty-one hands and two inches, a foot and a half taller than that, yet the mare in the stable yard was enormous even by courser standards. Courser mares averaged somewhat smaller than courser stallions, but this mare didn’t seem to have heard about that. She must stand almost a full hand taller even than Dathgar. Indeed, the only courser Leanna had ever seen who would have been taller than her was Bahzell Bahnakson’s Walsharno, who stood the next best thing to twenty-five hands.

  Yet it wasn’t just the mare’s size that took the eye. Her confirmation was breathtaking. No Sothōii could look at her and not see the perfect proportions, the perfect muscle balance, the fine shape of that proud head. Toragan Himself could not have crafted a more magnificent creature...which made her disfigurement all the more shocking. A line of startling white marred her coat’s smoothness, marking the scar where some long-ago claw or fang had ripped her flesh from the point of her left hip forward almost to her shoulder. Another ugly scar ran downward along her right knee and cannon, and a dozen other patches of white marked where other wounds—long healed, but obviously terrible—flawed her coat. Her right ear was only a stump, and her maimed right eye socket was empty.

  Whatever “unseemly choices” Leeana Hanathafressa might have made in her life, she was a Sothōii to her toenails, and her stomach twisted around her recent breakfast as she saw those scars, those long-ago wounds. They were more than simply confirmation of the terrible damage this courser had suffered; they were a desecration...and they were unforgivable.

  Yet even as she thought that, the mare raised her head, turning it sideways so that she could focus her remaining golden eye on the newcomers. No, not on all the newcomers, Leeana realized—on her.

  “This is an unexpected pleasure, Milady,” Hanatha said, leaning on her cane as she swept an abbreviated curtsy to the courser. “Welcome to Hill Guard, Gayrfressa.”

  Leeana’s eyebrows shot up Of course! She ought to have recognized who this courser had to be from those scars, from that missing ear and eye. Who could it have been but Gayrfressa, one of the only seven adults of the Warm Springs herd to survive Krahana’s attack...and Walsharno’s sister? And a worthy sister she was, Leeana reflected, trying to imagine what it must have taken for those seven surviving mares—none of the stallions had lived—to fight free of Krahana’s shardohn demons with the handful of foals they’d managed to save. And Gayrfressa had been the youngest, and the most savagely wounded and maimed, of them all. “Daughter of the Wind,” her name meant in Old Kontovaran, and the north wind itself should be proud to call her its own, Leeana thought, her own eyes burning as that big, intelligent eye considered her.

  Gayrfressa gazed at Leeana for another moment, then glided across the stable yard towards Hanatha. She moved with the impossible grace which no one who’d never seen a courser move would have believed was possible in something so massive and powerful. She stopped directly before the baroness, head turned aside so she could see her, and then leaned forward to just touch Hanatha’s hair with her nose. She exhaled gently, then raised her own head once again, and Hanatha smiled up at the huge creature towering over her.

  “You’re most welcome, Milady,” she said, “but I fear Dathgar and Gayrhalan are both stuck in Sothōfalas with Tellian and Hathan, and Walsharno is somewhere between there and here at the moment, so we have no one to translate for us.”

  Gayrfressa snorted and shook her head in obvious amusement. Then she looked away from Hanatha at Leeana once more, and the baroness cocked her own head. She looked at her daughter for a moment and then shrugged.

  “I think Gayrfressa’s business may be with you, love,” she said.

  “With me?” Leeana’s voice sounded entirely too much like a teenager’s on the pronoun for her own satisfaction, and her mother chuckled.

  “Well, she’s not being discourteous, but she’s also not looking at me at the moment, now is she? May I ask if I’m correct, Milady?”

  Gayrfressa looked back at Hanatha and then tossed her head in clear, unambiguous agreement. The baroness shrugged.

  “There you have it, Leeana. I would suggest that since Gayrfressa has clearly come quite some distance, it would only be courteous for you to see to the quality of our hospitality.” The baroness let her eyes sweep the watching stablehands and raised her voice ever so slightly. “In this, you act for me and for your father,” she said. “I’m certain you’ll be able to find any assistance you might require.”

  “I—” Leeana changed what she’d been about to say and bent her head in a respectful bow. “Of course, Milady.”

  “Good.” Hanatha let her gaze circle the stable yard one last time, then held out her free hand to Sharlassa. “Come with me, my dear. I’m sure some of that tea is still left. Until later, Milady.”

  She gave Gayrfressa another one of those half-curtsies, and then she and Sharlassa departed leaving Leeana nose to nose with the towering courser.

  * * *

  “Well, this is the first time I’ve had this problem in years,” Leeana murmured wryly as she stepped up onto the stool.

  She’d already checked and picked out Gayrfressa’s feet, noting in passing that it was time the courser was reshod. Now it was time to work down the mare’s coat with the dandy brush, starting at the poll, which posed a slight problem, since the top of Gayrfressa’s head was over ten feet off the ground. That was quite a reach, even for an overgrown war maid, hence the stool.

  Gayrfressa made an amused sound as Leeana lifted her mane to the far side to get it out of the way and began working the dandy brush down her neck. Coursers, like horses, spent a great deal of their time in the wild grooming one another, and they were cleverer about it than horses because of their greater intelligence. Nonetheless, they didn’t have hands, and on the occasions when an un-companioned courser came calling on the two-footed inhabitants of the Wind Plain, simple courtesy required those who did have hands to groom them properly and completely. Of course, Gayrfressa wasn’t leading a stabled existence, so it wouldn’t do to give her the complete rubbing down with body brush and scrubbing cloth Leanna gave Boots each day. Horses—or coursers—exposed to the elements needed a little grease and oil in their coat. On the other hand, Gayrfressa was a lot of mare to groom at all.

  “Oh, I don’t know as it was all that long ago...Ma’am.”

  Leeana looked over her shoulder and Doram Greenslope smiled at her. Greenslope had served in Hill Guard’s stables at least since the creation of the world. As a senior undergroom, he’d taught Tellian himself how to ride, and he’d become stablemaster years before Leeana was born. He’d taught her how to ride, as well, and schooled her rigorously in the care, treatment, respect, and courtesy to which any horse was entitled. Along the way, he’d also pulled a rambunctious girl child out from under various horses when she’d gone darting into their stalls, helped set the left arm one of those horses had broken, and—at least once that she could remember—hauled her out of the stable yard fountain after the gelding a six-year-old Leeana had been enthusiastically riding bareback decided to stop unexpectedly for a drink.

  Now he stepped up beside her with a polite bob of his snow-white head to Gayrfressa.

  “I seem to remember someone needing a ladder to groom Dathgar,” he went on to Leeana. “Yesterday, that was, or maybe the day before.”

  “Trust me, it was longer than that, Doram,” Leeana said, moving the dandy brush in long, sweeping strokes to break loose the sweat and dust clinging to Gayrfressa’s coat. The courser’s remaining ear moved and her eye half-closed in pleasure, and Leeana smiled. But then her smile dimmed, as she looked back at the stablemaster. “It was a lifetime ago,” she said softly.

  “Ah, now, t
hat’s a weighty thing, a lifetime,” Doram replied. “So far, mine’s been a mite better than three of yours...Ma’am.” He smiled. “And I’m planning on being around for quite a few more years, you understand, so maybe a lifetime’s just a bit longer than it might be seeming to someone your age.”

  “Maybe.” She shook her head, her eyes going back to the steadily moving brush. “But you can measure lifetimes in more than just years. There’s what you do with them, too.”

  “And you’ve gone and used yours up already?” The irony in the stablemaster’s voice pulled her gaze back around to him, and it was his turn to shake his head. “Seems to me you’ve time enough to be doing just about anything you choose to with your life...Leeana.”

  Tears blurred her vision for a moment. It was the first time in her life Doram Greenslope had ever addressed her simply by her name. No honorific, no “ma’am,” simply “Leeana.” He never would have dreamed of doing such a thing when she’d been heiress conveyant to Balthar...and how many “properly reared” Sothōii men would ever have called a war maid by her name at all, she wondered?

  “Was a time,” Greenslope continued, looking back up at Gayrfressa and reaching up to stroke the white blaze running down the mare’s forehead, “when you just about lived in this stable. Learned a lot about you when you did, and nothing I’ve ever seen or heard’s changed who you were. What you were, maybe, but what’s inside...that’s harder to change. Might be you’ve made some decisions I’d sooner a daughter of mine not make, but I’m one as spends a lot of time around horses—and coursers—and their riders, Young Leeana. Could be I’ve heard a thing or two passing between a certain wind rider I might name and his courser, or between him and his wind brother while they were seeing to their coursers together. And it might just be, you know,” he turned his head, meeting Leeana’s eyes levelly, “I’ve heard a story about why a certain young lady ran away from home that’s not so much like the ones I hear in town.”

  “I—”