Isobel

by Chloe Garner

  And then winter broke. It wasn’t a sudden, clear thing, and she could never be sure when the boys would actually start coming back. They would wait until they were as certain as they could be that they wouldn’t be caught out in a snow storm or deep snow, but by this point, they were always eager to be back, after a long winter of being cooped up indoors by the cold.

  Allie took to watching the path that lead to the rest of the world, each day hoping that she would be there when Aedan arrived.

  He should have been one of the first.

  He had kissed her.

  The morning after the midwinter festival, while her mind had been spinning and everything had been in a flurry of chaotic, under-slept activity.

  He had found her and kissed her.

  She hadn’t known what to think of it, that day, so she hadn’t, but as the days and weeks had passed, she’d grown more preoccupied with it. She wanted to see him again, even if she had no idea what she would say to him, and half suspected that she would run away and hide out of embarrassment or fear.

  But there were whole days where she could think of nothing but ways to create opportunities for it to happen again.

  And it drove her to distraction, waiting.

  Finally, the boys began trickling in.

  The winter hadn’t been that hard, but it hadn’t broken quickly, either, and the clans showed reasonable discretion, waiting until the boys would be safe for their trips. In the first two weeks after the first caravan of boys arrived, none came with the two or three men that would accompany the boys that came from further away, but Allie was still impatient.

  Aedan and Drude should have been two of the first.

  Especially if Aedan at all wanted to be there early.

  She grew more impatient at each passing day, and then she began to despair.

  What if he were staying away because he’d thought better of his interest in her? What if he were delaying seeing her because he didn’t want to?

  On a particularly fine day, Allie was sitting on the gate to the horse yard, enjoying the fair breeze on her legs when Rafa emerged from the main house. He saw her and came to lean on the gate next to her.

  “Waiting is hard,” he observed. She nodded.

  He watched the road with her for a while, his elbow resting on the wood planks, and Allie was surprised how comfortable she was, sharing space with him. There was no need to talk, no sense that she was disappointing him by not having something to say.

  “It’s going to be different this year,” Rafa said after a while.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because nothing can stay the same for very long,” he answered. “Not even here.”

  That was when she caught the hoofbeats. She sat up, straining to see the rider as soon as he crested the easy hill down the path, her heart rate picking up. Whoever it was was riding hard.

  There shouldn’t have been a reason to ride hard.

  She certainly couldn’t think of one.

  Aedan’s head and shoulders came into view, and then his horse’s head, and then his whole body, bouncing to the horse’s energetic canter. Allie sprung off the gate and ran to meet him. Aedan swung off of his horse without slowing, running the last few steps as the horse dragged to a stop and stood, blowing air. Allie had gotten too close and Aedan slammed into her, grabbing her with his spare arm and kissing her hard.

  “We’re going,” he said, out of breath, before she had had time to react.

  “What?”

  He grinned and put his fingers up into her hair.

  “We’re going. The Romans brought up an army that came north with the winter, and we’re going to war.”

  Allie blinked.

  “What?”

  He laughed.

  “I’m sorry. I had to see you. But we’re leaving today. I have to go.”

  He kissed her again, fast, hard, and distracted, then swung back up onto his horse with a whoop and the two of them were off again, the horse kicking its heels behind it with jittery excitement.

  “What?” Allie asked the empty space where Aedan had been.

  “What did he say?” Rafa asked gently.

  “He said they’re going,” Allie said, feeling emptied out. She heard Rafa swallow, then turned to see him nodding slowly.

  “Drest’s chest of silver must be empty, then,” he said.

  “What?”

  Rafa gave her a kind smile and put a hand on her back.

  “Men have all manner of reasons for going to war, but leaders do it for the spoils. And every time Drest pushes the Romans back because they underestimated your people yet again, the Romans have to pay for peace. Drest doesn’t want that land. He couldn’t possibly rule it. But he’ll sell it back to the Romans dearly.”

  “Why is he so excited?” Allie asked. Rafa’s eyes drifted from her to the path where Aedan had disappeared.

  “It’s the way of young men everywhere. They go off to their first war itching to prove themselves to each other. Full of energy and high hopes.”

  “Will he come back?” Allie asked. Rafa looked at her with compassion.

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why do they think it’s so great?” Allie asked.

  “They haven’t seen what you have, for one,” Rafa said. “But they also don’t have a ceremony, like you do, that says they’re not children any more. Young men go to war to come back men.”

  “What will happen?” Allie asked.

  “There will be a series of battles,” Rafa said. “Some of them will be bigger and some will be smaller. The farms by the wall will all get burnt down, and the clans will huddle up while Drest’s warband tries to keep the Romans back. If things go well, they’ll burn down the farms on the other side of the wall. Knock some holes in it and steal the livestock, drag it all back up here. In the end, Drest will win or he’ll lose. He’ll bring home another chest of silver and things will go back to the way they were, waiting for the Romans to come again, or the Romans will win and…” He took a breath and sighed. “And they’ll come make us all subjects to the empire.”

  Allie shuddered.

  “I’d rather die.”

  “It’s not that different, after,” Rafa told her. “During the war, lots of bad things happen, but after the Romans take over a place, it’s mostly like it was before, only everyone’s poorer.”

  “How do you know?” Allie asked. Rafa’s eyes grew distant.

  “I’ve done a lot of things, and seen a lot of things, Aileen. Isobel and I have traveled to places you can’t imagine.”

  “Why?”

  Rafa smiled.

  “Because nothing can stay the same for very long. Before too long, it’s time to move on to a new place.”

  “Why?”

  She realized with a jolt that she was pestering him, but he didn’t seem bothered. He took her question seriously. This was the fair treatment she had seen him give countless boys over the years, and yet she was surprised by it.

  “Different reasons every time.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” she said. He nodded.

  “I understand. I don’t anticipate leaving. Isobel is happy here. She likes being on this side of the wall.”

  “You two are perfect together,” Allie said, stunning herself. He smiled.

  “She saved me.”

  She was too shocked at her forwardness to answer, and they turned to look down the path again.

  “It’s going to be different, this year,” he said again after a moment, dropping his hand from her back. She nodded. She turned to watch him walk back toward the main house, holding in her curiosity until he had reached the doorway, but unable to keep the question back.

  “Rafa? What did she save you from?”

  He turned to look at her, his hand on the doorway.

  “From becoming a monster.”

  Allie’s second surprise of the spring came only a few days after Aedan had come to tell her that he was leaving for war. As the y
ounger boys came trickling in in larger and larger numbers, Kenna arrived.

  “What are you doing here?” Allie asked as the red head dropped off of her horse and came to hug Allie.

  “Glad to see you, too,” Kenna answered with a grin.

  “No,” Allie said, “I’m happy to see you, but why are you here?”

  Kenna sighed with exasperation.

  “The same reason everyone comes. To learn.”

  If there had been any place to sit down, Allie would have sat.

  “What?”

  “I’m not the only one, lass,” Kenna said. “There are more of us. They saw you with the bow, they saw you dance…” she shrugged. “They’ll come.”

  “What?” Allie asked, stupefied. “You told them?”

  “Just the ones I trust,” Kenna said. “None of us can figure out why we didn’t think of this earlier. Why is it that just the boys get to come here and learn?”

  Allie shook her head.

  “But you’ll all be in trouble.”

  “When has that ever stopped you?” Kenna asked.

  “But,” Allie sputtered. “Kenna, this is big. You just ran away from home.”

  “Ma knows where I am,” Kenna said. “And everyone else will, too, soon enough. I’m not hiding.”

  Allie gaped.

  “How many more?” she finally asked. Kenna winced her face, considering.

  “Five or six, at least. Maybe ten.”

  “Ten?”

  Kenna grinned.

  “You inspired us, gel. Be happy.”

  Allie shook her head, still too stunned to process.

  “Come on. Show me everything,” Kenna said, putting an arm up and over Allie’s shoulders and dragging her away toward the clear path to the training arena.

  Allie blinked quickly, letting herself be led.

  “What’s Isobel going to say?”

  “I won’t send them away.”

  “This is a sacred place,” Gede protested. Allie hid in the hallway, tucked against the doorframe, hoping no one came out of the room. If they did, she was cooked.

  “It is a sanctuary, and I will not send them away.”

  “Rafa.”

  “You heard her,” Rafa said.

  “You may not train them,” Gede said.

  There was a long, long silence, and even Allie felt the pressure of it from where she hid, then Rafa cleared his throat.

  “I had never considered it. We will feed them and give them shelter, but my responsibility is to the boys that the clans entrust to me.”

  “Well. Good.” Gede’s voice was different, chastened. Allie had never heard him like that before. “Their families will no doubt be here soon to collect them.”

  “No one will take them against their will,” Isobel said. Her voice was terrifying, even speaking to someone else, deadly calm. There was another very long silence, a different one, and Allie could feel Gede restraining himself from appealing to Rafa again.

  “I can’t control what the girls’ fathers are going to do,” Gede finally said.

  “Then we agree,” Isobel said, her voice a syrupy, cold temptation. “Since most of them are away at war with your king, it shouldn’t be that important.”

  “Your king, too,” Gede said. “Watch yourself.”

  “You didn’t come here to make threats to my wife,” Rafa said.

  “She’s more stubborn than even a Caledd woman,” Gede muttered.

  “You might be surprised,” Rafa said with humor.

  “You underestimate them,” Isobel said.

  “Our women are strong. They survive the winters, they raise our children, they manage livestock and butcher game. My own wife threw bulls, in her prime.” Gede’s wife had died in childbirth long before Allie had come north, but she’d heard that the woman had been tough as nails. “But they should be at home, learning to be wives.”

  “All the same, they are here, and I won’t interfere with it,” Isobel said.

  “We have reached an impasse,” Rafa said. “Unless you have anything to discuss…?”

  Allie scattered away from the door, making it to the common room before anyone saw her. Gwen looked up from where she was repairing clothes, and Allie suspected her mother knew exactly what she had been doing, but Gwen had been stunningly reticent with her opinions of what was going on with Kenna and the rest of the girls. Brietta was sitting by the fire, re-braiding the end of her hair after she’d had to pull a branch out of it earlier that day.

  “What did they say?” the girl asked, standing and hurrying to Allie. Allie made a hushing motion with her hand, and waited as she heard Gede storm by behind her. She stayed still as he passed the door, not wanting to draw any more attention than she could avoid.

  “Well?” Brietta hissed a moment later, impatient. While she wasn’t the most forward of the girls, she seemed to have the most invested in how Isobel and Rafa reacted to what they were doing. She had four little sisters, and she had confided in Allie that she wanted them to be able to come here, getting away from a clan leader who had strong opinions on the individual futures of the women in his clan. Brietta was promised to a merchant’s son in another clan, and, unless she could find another boy who would claim her at the womanhood ceremony, that was the destiny that she would likely live out.

  “It feels like I’m finally doing something because I chose it,” she had whispered one night just days after she had arrived. “I never dreamed it.”

  Allie looked over her shoulder now, making sure Gede hadn’t stopped behind her, then shook her head at Brietta.

  “They won’t send you home,” she whispered. Brietta grabbed Allie’s hands, her grip shaky.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “The rest of the girls are waiting for us.”

  Allie looked past Brietta to Gwen, who glanced up again. That couldn’t have possibly have been a twinkle in her mother’s eye, could it? Allie waited for a moment, then Gwen gave her the smallest of nods. Allie’s heart fluttered, and she spun, not sure what her face said. She and Brietta left the main house, hesitating outside as Gede rode away, then bolted for the tree line, scaling a pair of trees, hand over foot, to join the rest of the girls.

  One by one, the girls turned up with bows.

  Allie didn’t know where they were getting them, and she didn’t ask.

  Some of them had brothers who were training with Rafa, and it was a good bet that they had borrowed or stolen training bows from the younger boys, but the rest, Allie wondered, but she didn’t want to know too much.

  They spent their days sucking the last drops of opportunity out of the daylight. Long accustomed to work, the girls were eager to get out in the mornings, often carrying bread filched from the kitchens so they didn’t have to come in for breakfast. Allie still ate with Gwen in the very early dimness of dawn, but the rest of the girls ate in the general hall. A second set of boards, parallel to the boys’ table, had appeared after a few days. Again, Allie had not asked too many questions.

  The practice range Isobel had commissioned the year before saw good upkeep this year. As the girls took turns at the post, the rest worked the ground, pulling up plants and pushing over sapling trees when they weren’t looking for stray arrows. They eventually got up to two legitimate lanes, training two at a time.

  When their arms tired, they would climb, sitting up high above the ground and talk.

  This was the first time in her life that Allie had been surrounded by girls of her own age. A month into the summer, there were thirteen of them, and they would spend hours migrating high above the forest floor, talking and laughing and working out how to get through the canopy.

  Kenna was in her element, surrounded and in conversation, but Allie often found herself exhausted, run out of words and no longer interested in the other girls. She would sit up high in a tree, letting the cool air flow over her skin as the girls below buzzed like a new kind of insect.

  Many days, they ended up near the training arena, watching the boys pract
ice and picking up on the discipline and habits that Rafa taught. It was on one of these days, as Allie sat high in an oak tree that had been there since the land had been a sacred grove, that something about the noises below her changed. What had been a general harmony of conversation had a discordant pitch that drew her attention. Without changing her feet, she curled her back to where she could see the sound of the noise, recognizing Gede’s voice the moment she had brought her mind back from wandering.

  “Get down from there,” he was shouting. “Rafa, this is sacred ground. You should not tolerate them here.”

  The girls hissed at him, shifting in the tree branches as the boys came to stand at the arena wall to gawk at the exchange.

  “They don’t appear to be despoiling the soil at all,” Rafa said, snapping his fingers at the pair of boys who had been sparring, indicating that they had not been excused.

  “You have stretched my patience to the breaking point,” Gede snapped. Rafa ignored him, and the girls hissed some more.

  And then there was the sound of cracking wood, and a squeal of surprise. Allie jerked to the side to see Kenna tumbling through the branches and landing with a hard thump on the ground. Everyone froze for a moment, breaths held, and then Kenna grunted and pushed herself up on her hands.

  “Ow,” the girl complained. In a swift, angry motion, Gede snatched her by her hair and pulled her to her feet.

  “Enough,” the man said. “You’re coming home with me. Today.”

  “Gede,” Rafa warned. There was a rustling in the leaves as a more energetic, warm breeze stirred the forest and passed over Allie. She closed her eyes and drew a long breath of the clean air, then leaned out over her branch, feeling her body tip, tip, tip, with the inevitability of meeting the ground again. She swung downwards with an elastic energy, finding the next branch under her bare feet and only just using it to slow herself, pouring ever downwards, her body bunching and stretching with feline energy.

  She landed on the ground feet from where Kenna had fallen, hunched low, her bow slung across her back and her knees coiled just under her shoulders. Her fingers rested on the ground, just to feel it. She took another breath and looked up at Gede.