Wind Rider's Oath wg-3

by David Weber

  “Anything that doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger,” Garlahna had replied with an oddly sympathetic chuckle. “That’s what they told me, anyway! And even if it weren’t true, it’s a matter of tradition.” She’d shrugged. “Personally, I always figured it was just our way of proving how much tougher than mere men we are.”

  “I’d rather have warm feet and let them sneer at me for being weak,” Leeana had muttered back.

  “Hush!” Garlahna had said, and Leeana had looked up to discover that they had just joined at least forty or fifty other war maids.

  At first, she’d assumed that mandatory morning calisthenics for everyone must be part of the same bizarre, self-mortifying philosophy which had denied her shoes. She certainly couldn’t think of any other reason for so many women, of all ages—she even saw Dalthys and Johlana among them—to be standing around semi-naked and barefooted in the icy predawn wind! It had taken her several shivering minutes of listening to scraps of other conversations to discover that most of them had chosen to be there. That they actually enjoyed these “brisk” morning workouts together.

  At that moment, Leeana had begun to seriously consider the possibility that all of those who insisted any woman had to be mad to choose to be a war maid were right.

  Unfortunately, unlike the lunatics who’d been there voluntarily, Leeana had had no choice. Nor, she’d discovered, had Garlahna. It didn’t seem to bother the other young woman particularly, but as Leeana’s “mentor,” she was expected to lead by example. Leeana suspected that it would have bothered her a great deal, if their roles had been reversed.

  She’d still been standing there, shivering as she looked woebegonely about herself in the gray half-light, when Erlis and another, younger, war maid with chestnut hair had come bounding energetically up. Erlis had a whistle, which she had immediately begun to blow with revolting vigor, and thus had begun what was quite possibly the most hideous single morning of Leeana Hanathafressa’s life.

  Leeana had always been an active girl. She’d ridden virtually every day of her life, from the time she could walk. She’d been an energetic hiker, and she and her maids had enjoyed swimming—at least when it was warm enough for the water not to turn them blue the instant they jumped into it. But she’d never been particularly interested in exercise for exercise’s own sake. For her, physical exertion had been a way to get from one point to another, or a secondary cost of doing something that she enjoyed.

  Erlis obviously came from a completely different tradition. It had been the first time Leeana had ever encountered a carefully planned exercise regimen, and she’d hated it. And not just because she’d been cold, miserable, and hungry, either. Leeana was accustomed to being good at what she did. She most emphatically was not accustomed to being clumsy or inept, and she’d felt both of those things as she attempted to emulate the war maids around her.

  It had lasted for a seeming eternity, but that had turned out to be just long enough to prepare her for an even more humiliating experience. At least the physical exertion had warmed her up, and it had also loosened up her muscles. Which was fortunate, since Erlis and the chestnut-haired woman, who turned out to be Ravlahn Thregafressa, had descended upon her for the promised “evaluation of her general physical skills.”

  By the time their exam—finally—came to a close, Leeana had concluded that she had no “general physical skills.” She’d done her best, and at least her examiners had maintained grave, nonjudgmental facades as she strove to meet their demands. But it had been evident to her that her life as an indolent aristocrat had left her woefully underequipped with the physical skills a war maid required. The only area in which she’d felt she’d performed with something approaching adequacy had been the sprints they required of her. She supposed that she’d done at least semi-adequately in the longer runs, as well, but that was about the best she could say.

  At least they’d released her in the end and allowed her to stagger off under Garlahna’s guidance, limping on her bruised-feeling, bare feet, to the mess hall for breakfast. Back home in Balthar, Leeana had normally made do with hot chocolate or tea, a croissant or two, butter, some honey, perhaps, and a few pieces of fruit, when it was in season. But here in Kalatha, she’d found herself devouring a third huge bowl of honey-laced porridge, and then wondering where she could find just a little bit more of it for dessert. To her amazement, she’d actually felt almost human again when she finished.

  Her relief had been brief, however. They’d given her a half-hour, or so, for breakfast to settle, and then Garlahna—that traitor she’d thought was becoming her friend—had borne her off to face Hundred Ravlahn in the training salle. The only real blessing had been that there’d been no one there besides Garlahna and Ravlahn to witness her fresh inadequacy.

  It hadn’t really been her fault, and she’d known it. She’d never been trained with a bow, although she was an excellent shot with the light crossbows with which Sothoii noblewomen hunted birds and small game. And however radical Tellian Bowmaster might have been, it would never have crossed his mind to have his daughter trained in swordsmanship, or in the most effective way to open someone’s belly with a dagger. Nor, for that matter, had it ever occurred to him to teach his only child the finer points of using a garrotte, or throwing a knife or throwing stars.

  Her abilities when it came to hand-to-hand combat without weapons had been even more rudimentary—not to say laughable—than her clumsy efforts with the various wooden training weapons with which Ravlahn had provided her. The one thing Leeana had been able to say with a certain forlorn pride at the end of two and a half grueling hours, was that she’d never stopped trying. Her efforts might simply have served to demonstrate that she was about as dangerous to another human being as a newborn kitten, but at least she’d tried. And, she thought miserably, she’d ended up with the bruises, the bloody nose, and the split lip to prove it, too.

  She’d hobbled off to the mess hall, still under Garlahna’s escort, in time for lunch. Which, she’d discovered, she’d needed at least as badly as she had breakfast. She’d ravened her way through three heaping servings of buttered potatoes, baked beans, and fried chicken and been wondering wistfully if she quite dared to ask for a fourth helping of the potatoes, when a youngish-looking woman in a neat gray gown came over to her and Garlahna.

  “Leeana?”

  “Yes?” Leeana had looked up from her mostly empty plate suspiciously, her spoon still clutched in her hand, and something about her expression had made the other woman smile.

  “I’m Lanitha,” she’d said.

  “Oh.” Leeana had lowered her spoon. “The archivist?”

  “That’s one way to put it,” Lanitha had agreed. “Personally, I prefer ’librarian,’ but I suppose my duties do make archivist a better fit, these days.” She’d grimaced. “I’m also, however, the principal of our town school here in Kalatha.”

  “Oh,” Leeana had said in a tone she’d belatedly realized might have been described as less than wildly enthusiastic.

  “I see you’ve been having an … interesting day,” Lanitha had observed, her voice wavering oddly while she tried not to smile. “I’ll try not to make things any more difficult for you than I have to. But I do need to get some feel for your scholastic abilities.”

  Leeana had hovered on the brink of asking her why, but she’d suppressed the question in time. She’d had no doubt she would discover the answer, probably sooner than she wanted to.

  “If you’re finished eating,” Lanitha had continued in a tone which, for all its politeness, had informed Leeana that she was finished eating, “why don’t you—and Garlahna, of course—come along with me? This shouldn’t take more than two or three hours.”

  “Of course,” Leeana had replied, with only a trace of glumness. Then she’d put her spoon down, given it a regretful pat, and followed Lanitha out of the mess hall.

  * * *

  Lanitha had been almost correct. In fact, her estimate of the time require
d had been only about an hour short. By the end of her examination, Leeana had felt as exhausted mentally as she’d already been physically, but at least this time she’d felt reasonably confident that she’d acquitted herself well. Her father might not have seen any reason to teach her to lop the heads off of enemies, but he and her mother had both actively aided and abetted her in the pursuit of an intellectual curiosity other nobles might have found most unbecoming in a mere daughter. Leeana spoke six languages—four of them fluently—and could read and write in two more. She had a formidable education in geography, history, and literature, and a practical knowledge of politics—at least as practiced at the highest level of the Kingdom—which was quite astounding in anyone her age, and especially in a daughter.

  In fact, the main reason Lanitha’s original time estimate had proved overly optimistic was that the archivist/teacher had become too interested in discussing things with the subject of her examination. In the end, she’d sent Leeana back off to the dining hall with Garlahna with the warning that she intended to request at least an hour or two of Leeana’s time each afternoon as an assistant instructor.

  Any temptation towards a swelled head which Leeana might have taken away with her had evaporated like snow in summer when she and Garlahna arrived almost twenty minutes late for her shift in the kitchen. The excuse that Lanitha had kept her longer than anticipated had done remarkably little to placate the head cook’s ire, and neither had the fact that Leeana had effectively no kitchen skills at all. It wasn’t exactly Leeana’s fault, but she hadn’t felt like explaining that she hadn’t acquired those skills because her parents had employed others to perform those menial tasks. Partly because she’d had a shrewd suspicion that the cook would not have responded well to the suggestion that her own skills were “menial” ones. But even more because Leeana had agreed that it was time she acquired them.

  That willingness to dig right in—enthusiastically, however ineptly—had turned the trick. She’d wondered if perhaps part of the cook’s prickliness had resulted from an expectation that someone who’d been so nobly born would have dismissed her assigned duties as beneath her. It had seemed as if some of the other war maids assigned to Leeana’s work crew had cherished some of the same suspicions, but if they had, their reservations had thawed quickly as her willingness sank in. She’d been restricted by her ignorance to more or less unskilled labor, but most of her fellow workers had paused in passing at least once to drop some little hint or encouragement upon her.

  That had helped, but by the time supper was finished, the tables were cleared and scrubbed, the pots and pans and dishes were washed, and the cooking utensils had been laid out in preparation for the breakfast crews, she’d been literally stumbling with exhaustion.

  She’d thought her ride from Balthar to Kalatha had been exhausting, and no doubt it had been. But the fatigue she’d felt then, even after that first hideous, sleepless night in the rain, was as nothing compared to what she felt now. She knew with absolute certainty that she had never been this tired in her entire life.

  She staggered out of the mess hall towards the dormitory, then shambled to a halt as she realized someone was standing in front of her. It took her a moment or two to focus, then she straightened her aching back as she recognized Mayor Yalith by the light of the lanterns above the mess hall entrance.

  “I won’t keep you long, Leeana,” the mayor said. She smiled, and her voice was gently compassionate and understanding. “I know all you really want to do at this moment is to go fall on your nose and stay there for as long as we’ll let you. It may be cold comfort, but just about every war maid has been where you are right now, and most of us survived the experience.

  “I just wanted to tell you three things before you go collapse.

  “First, I feel confident that you’re convinced you were an absolute and utter failure when Erlis and Ravlahn examined you today. Well, you weren’t.” Leeana blinked in fatigue-foggy disbelief, and Yalith smiled again. “Oh, I won’t say you thrilled them with your incredible prowess. But given your complete lack of training, you actually performed quite well. And both Erlis and Ravlahn feel you have considerable native ability, which they confidently expect to be able to nurture.

  “Second, Lanitha was very impressed by both your native intelligence and the education you’ve already received. There are several places where you can probably still use a little polishing, but for the most part, you’re already as well qualified—from the perspective of your knowledge, at least—to teach as any of our present teachers. Do try not to let that go to your head, dear,” the mayor added with a small chuckle.

  “And, third,” she said after a moment, in a noticeably different voice, “something happened yesterday which, to the best of my knowledge, has never happened before. Baron Tellian—” even now she did not permit herself the words “your father,” and Leeana’s eyes fell as she felt a pang of pain “— left something for you.”

  Leeana looked back up into the mayor’s face.

  “He left you the title to your horse, Leeana,” Yalith said quietly.

  Leeana blinked, unable to understand for a moment, but then her heart leapt and incredulous joy blossomed across her exhausted face.

  “It’s a princely gift,” the mayor continued. “To be perfectly honest, I was tempted to refuse it, because no one else in Kalatha has ever so much as ridden a horse half, or even a quarter, as good as that one, much less owned one. There’s an enormous amount of room for potential resentment in the gift he chose to bestow upon you, Leeana. I want you to be aware of that. But I didn’t refuse it in the end for two reasons. First, and I’d like to think most important, was the fact that I had no legal right to refuse it in someone else’s name, and I wasn’t prepared to violate the law. But, second, was the fact that Dame Kaeritha argued very strongly on your behalf. It speaks well of anyone that a champion of Tomanak should speak so forcefully on her behalf, and I think I’ve seen enough of Dame Kaeritha by now to know that however much she might like you, she would never have argued your case so vehemently if she hadn’t believed you truly deserved it.”

  “Oh, thank you—thank you, Mayor Yalith!” Leeana whispered, tears spangling her vision.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Yalith replied. “And don’t think that this won’t make problems of its own for you, even if—as I don’t expect for a moment—you should be so fortunate as to find that no one else in Kalatha resents your good luck. Baron Tellian left sufficient funds, also as a gift for you, to pay for your horse’s feed for at least several months. He did not—at Dame Kaeritha’s urging, I might add—leave funds to pay its stable fees. You will have to come up with some way to cover those expenses yourself.”

  Leeana looked at her, and Yalith shrugged.

  “Dame Kaeritha was there when I worried aloud about possible resentment. She said, and I think she was right, that if you have to work harder and longer than anyone else in Kalatha to keep him, it should go a long way towards defusing the inevitable resentment. And I imagine it will also make you appreciate the Baron’s gift even more.”

  She paused, her gaze level as she looked into Leeana’s face.

  “Do you understand all of that, Leeana?”

  “Yes, Mayor Yalith. I understand,” the exhausted young woman replied, jade-green eyes still glistening with tears of joy.

  “I believe you do,” the mayor said, and nodded in dismissal. She turned away herself, then paused and looked back over her shoulder.

  “You know,” she observed, “I’m not sure that it’s one I’d like to have received myself, but you could look upon Dame Kaeritha’s insistence that you earn your horse’s stabling fees as a rather profound sort of compliment, Leeana.”

  Leeana blinked at her, and Yalith chuckled.

  “Of course it is! She wouldn’t have wanted you to have the horse in the first place if she hadn’t felt you deserved it … and she obviously has immense faith in you. She must! If she didn’t, she never would have wished th
at much extra exhaustion off on you.”

  She smiled.

  “Goodnight, Leeana. Get some sleep … you’ll need it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It was a strange fog.

  It hung like a heavy, motionless curtain over the shallow valley between two isolated hills, frozen in place, yet with an odd, internal swirling movement. Although the spring night was cool, the fog was chill as ice and thick as death, and it ignored the stiff breeze that whispered across the endless miles of grass, as if no mere wind could touch it.

  There was no moon, and jewellike stars glittered and gleamed in a velvet sky clearer than crystal. Yet for all their beauty, their light seemed to sink into the fog, absorbed and deadened … devoured.

  The night sounds of the Wind Plain—the sighing song of wind, the counterpointing songs and hums of insects, the distant noise of a small stream chuckling to itself in the dark, the shrill squeaks of bats, and the occasional cry of some nocturnal bird—flowed over the grasslands. But all stopped short at the edge of the fog. None penetrated it, or crossed the unnatural barrier it erected.

  Then new sounds added themselves. Not loud ones. Hoofs thudding into the soft earth made little more noise than the creak of saddle leather, or the jingle of a bridle. A single rider came cantering out of the night, straight towards the eerie wall of fog. But the horseman slowed as he neared it. Not because he chose to, but because his mount balked. The horse slowed, tossing its head, then turned sideways. It fought the reins, ears flat, shaking its head and sunfishing while it whistled its protest.

  The rider swore and wrenched his mount’s head back around, trying to force it onward, but the horse planted its hooves, and when he drove in his spurs, it bucked wildly.

  The rider was no Sothoii. That much was obvious when he parted company with his saddle and went flying over the horse’s head. Yet however clumsy he might have been on horseback, he displayed an unnatural agility as he flew through the air. He tucked and rolled somehow in midair, twisting his body about, and landed on his booted feet with an impossible lightness. He didn’t even stumble, and his right hand flashed up and caught the bridle cheek strap before the startled horse could flinch away from him. There was a dreadful strength in that hand, and the horse whistled in panic, fighting vainly to wrench away from it. But the other hand came up, reaching not for the bridle, but for the horse’s throat. It closed, squeezing with that same hideous strength, and the horse’s whistle became a strangled sound of terror as it was pulled remorselessly to its knees.