Masters of Fantasy

by Bill Fawcett

  "Oh." Leeana looked down at her bare toes and actually wiggled. "I guess maybe you have a point," she admitted after a moment.

  The two of them stood on one of the main training salle's covered porches. The porch's plank flooring was rough and unfinished under Kaeritha's boots, and must have felt even more so to Leeana's bare feet. But the girl didn't seem to notice that. Nor did she appear aware of how the fine garments, rich embroidery, and semi-precious stones of a great baron's daughter had vanished forever.

  Kaeritha was. She'd anticipated changes, and she hadn't expected to find Leeana lounging about in the sorts of gowns her mother would have approved. But the leather breeches and smocks Leeana had favored as casual, get-your-hands-dirty clothing back home at Hill Guard Castle when her mother wasn't looking had also disappeared. Instead, she wore the garments the war maids called the chari and yathu, which together, Kaeritha had discovered, were the standard costume of the actual war maids.

  Kaeritha wondered what Leeana's parents would have had to say if they'd seen her at the moment. The chari was bad enough—a short, green kilt which fell barely halfway to her knees and would have been unutterably shocking to any properly reared Sothoii noblewoman. But the tightly laced yathu above it would have reduced that same properly reared Sothoii noblewoman to near hysteria.

  "There do seem to have been some changes in your appearance, though," she acknowledged with a smile. She cocked her head. "Are you comfortable with them?"

  " 'Comfortable' is such a . . . flexible word," Leeana said with a grimace. She reached up and slid an index finger under the shoulder strap of her yathu. "I've seen heavy draft harnesses that were probably more 'comfortable' for the horses wearing them! Besides," she grimaced again and withdrew her finger to indicate her bosom with a wave of her hand, "it's not as if I really need it."

  "Ha! You may think that now, girl, but I think your opinion will change in a year or two." She eyed the girl consideringly for a moment, then chuckled. "As a matter of fact, and bearing your height in mind, I expect you'll end up appreciating it even more than I would. And it probably won't take any 'year or two,' either, now that I think about it!"

  "Really?" Leeana looked at her quickly, then blushed and looked back down at her toes. But she also grinned, and Kaeritha shook her head.

  "I'd say the odds are in favor of it," she said judiciously. "I was never particularly . . . well endowed myself. I doubt I ever would have been, even if Mistress Sherath hadn't started working my backside off in the Morfintan mage academy's exercise salle when I was a year younger than you are now. But you're already taller than I am, and you're not done growing. I'd say you've still got a bit of filling out to do, and it looks to me like you're probably going to be built a lot like your mother. So wait a few years before you start complaining about the yathu."

  "If you say so, Dame Kaeritha," Leeana murmured obediently, and Kaeritha suppressed another chuckle.

  She didn't doubt that, at the moment, Leeana did find the yathu confining. For her own part, however, and speaking from personal experience, Kaeritha thoroughly appreciated and approved of that firm support for any reasonably endowed female human being expected to engage in brisk physical exercise. At the same time, she rather suspected that the war maids had chosen that particular form of support at least partly for its shock effect. A way to thumb their collective nose at the standards of feminine "propriety" which they had rejected.

  Under different circumstances, the yathu might almost have been described as a short, abbreviated—very abbreviated—bodice, but it wasn't boned and happened to be made out of fabric-lined, glove-supple leather. Whereas the main support of a regular bodice came from below, with little or no weight actually bearing on the shoulders, the yathu was equipped with shoulder straps which crossed on the wearer's shoulder blades. It was shorter, snugger, and stronger than any conventional "bodice" Kaeritha had ever seen, and it was short enough to allow its wearer to do things like crawling lithely and unobtrusively through the bushes without encumbrance. Which also made it ideal as standard wear when it was time for calisthenics or any other form of strenuous physical exercise.

  Whether the war maids' intentions had been solely to provide proper support or to combine that with a poke in respectable Sothoii society's eye, however, Kaeritha rather doubted that Baron Tellian—or Baroness Hanatha—would have approved of the yathu's undeniable brevity and snug fit . . . or of the way that their daughter's shapely form (and navel) were exposed for all the world to see.

  "Don't go fishing for compliments, young lady," she said now, her tone severe, and Leeana produced a sound suspiciously like a giggle.

  That giggle, and the girl's entire body language, did a great deal to reassure Kaeritha. Leeana had been called away from her morning calisthenics to speak with Kaeritha, and the war maids' physical training regimen was as demanding as any Kaeritha herself had ever experienced. It was certainly more rigorous than anything Leeana had ever experienced before leaving Balthar. Not that the girl had ever been indolent or lazy. But the war maids believed in pushing their new recruits—especially the probationary ones—hard. Partly, Kaeritha supposed, that was part of the training intended to make the difference between their old lives and their new ones clear on an emotional as well as an intellectual level. But it was also a testing process designed to identify the young women with the potential and mindset to become war maids.

  The great majority of those who went on to become the war maid community's warriors would serve as the light infantry, scouts, and guerrillas most Sothoii thought of whenever they thought about war maids at all. That combat style required speed and stamina more than sheer size or brute strength, and the physical training required to provide those qualities was demanding and unremitting. It had been Kaeritha's observation that most people—including most men, she thought sardonically—didn't much care to invest the focus and sweat required to maintain that high pitch of physical conditioning.

  From what she could see so far, it looked as if Leeana was actually enjoying it.

  "Are you happy, Leeana?" she asked quietly after a moment, and Leeana looked up quickly. Her smile disappeared, but she met Kaeritha's eyes steadily.

  "I don't know," she said frankly. "I've cried myself to sleep a night or two, if that's what you're asking." Her shoulders moved in what could have been called a shrug if it had been a little stronger. "I can't say I didn't expect that, though. And it's not because life here in Kalatha is so hard or because I'm not a baron's daughter anymore. It's because I'm not legally Father and Mother's daughter anymore. Does that make sense?"

  "Oh, yes, girl," Kaeritha said softly, and Leeana drew a deep breath.

  "But aside from missing Mother and Father—and being miserably homesick from time to time—I'm actually enjoying myself. So far, at least." Her smile returned. "Erlis—she's the Hundred in charge of physical training here in Kalatha—has been running me hard ever since I got here. Sometimes I just want to stop running long enough to drop dead from exhaustion, but I'm learning things about myself that I never knew before. And at least until she gets me brought up to a physical standard she finds acceptable, I'm excused from attending more 'traditional' classes."

  "Traditional classes?" Kaeritha repeated.

  "Oh, yes." Leeana's smile turned into a wry grin. "I have to admit that I'd hoped running away to the war maids would at least rescue me from the clutches of my tutors. Unfortunately, it turns out that the war maids require all of their members to be literate, and they 'strongly encourage' us to continue with additional education."

  "I see," Kaeritha said, hiding a smile of her own as she recalled the team of strong horses it had required to drag her into a classroom when she'd been Leeana's age.

  "What matters most, though," Leeana continued quietly, "is that by coming here I've done the most important thing. Father's enemies can't use me against him anymore, and I have the chance to be something besides an obedient little broodmare making babies for some fine stallion wh
o completely controls my life."

  "Then I'm glad you have the opportunity," Kaeritha said.

  "So am I. Really." Leeana nodded firmly as if to emphasize the mere words.

  "Good." Kaeritha rested one hand lightly on the girl's shoulder for a moment. "That was what I wanted to know before I leave for Quaysar."

  "Quaysar? You're going to visit the Voice?"

  There was something about the way Leeana asked the question that narrowed Kaeritha's eyes.

  "Yes. Why do you ask?"

  "No reason," Leeana said, just a bit too quickly. "It's just—" She broke off, hesitated, then shook her head. "It's just that I have this . . . uncomfortable feeling."

  "About what?" Kaeritha was careful to keep any suggestiveness out of her own tone.

  "About the Voice," Leeana said in a small voice, as if she were admitting to some heinous fault.

  "What sort of feeling? For that matter, why do you have any 'feelings' about her at all? I didn't think you'd even met her."

  "I haven't met her," Leeana admitted. "I guess you could say that what I've got is a 'secondhand feeling.' But I've talked to some of the other war maids about her. A lot."

  "You have?" Kaeritha's eyes narrowed. Her discussion with Yalith hadn't suggested that the Kalatha community was as heavily focused on the Voice as Leeana seemed to be implying.

  "Yes," the girl said. "And to be honest, Dame Kaeritha, it's the way they've been talking to me about her that worries me most."

  "Suppose you explain that," Kaeritha suggested. She stepped back and settled her posterior onto the porch's railing, leaning back against one of the upright roof supports and folding her arms across her chest. The morning sunlight was warm across her shoulders as she cocked her head.

  "You know I'm the most 'nobly born' person in Kalatha right now, right?" Leeana asked after a moment, and Kaeritha raised one eyebrow. The girl saw it and grimaced. "That's not an 'oh what a wonderful person I am' comment, Dame Kaeritha. What I meant to say is that even though I was only Father's daughter, not his real heir, I've seen a lot more sorts of political and aristocratic backbiting and maneuvering than most of the people here have."

  "All right," Kaeritha said slowly, nodding as Leeana paused. "I'll grant you that—on an aristocratic level, at least. Don't make the mistake of assuming that peasants can't be just as contentious. Or just as subtle about the way they go about biting each other's backs."

  "I won't. Or, at least, I don't think I will," Leeana replied. "But the thing is, Dame Kaeritha, that the way people here are talking about the Voice strikes me as, well, peculiar."

  "Why?"

  "First," Leeana said very seriously, her expression intent, "there's exactly which of the war maids seem to be doing most of the talking. It isn't the older ones, or the ones in the most senior positions—not people like Mayor Yalith, or Erlis, for example. And it isn't the very youngest ones, except in a sort of echoing kind of way."

  "What do you mean, 'echoing'?"

  "It's almost like there's an organized pattern," Leeana said, obviously choosing her words with care. "I think that's what drew my attention to it in the first place, really. There've been enough whispering campaigns organized against Father over the years for me to be automatically suspicious when I seem to be seeing the same thing somewhere else."

  "And you think that's what you're seeing here?"

  "I think it may be," Leeana said, nodding slowly. "It took a day or two for my suspicions to kick in, and the thing that made me start wondering in the first place was that I seemed to be hearing exactly the same sorts of things, in almost exactly the same sorts of words, from half a dozen or more people."

  Kaeritha's blue eyes narrowed even further, and Leeana nodded again.

  "It wasn't just a matter of people expressing the same general opinions, Dame Kaeritha. They were making the same arguments. And the way they were doing it—the way they were choosing their words, and who they were talking to—makes me think that it's an organized effort, not something that's happening spontaneously."

  It was an enormous loss to the Kingdom of the Sothoii in general that its invincible cultural bias against the possibility of female rulers had deprived the Barony of Balthar of Leeana Bowmaster as its liege, Kaeritha thought. She'd known from the outset that Leeana was keenly intelligent, but the brain behind those jade-green eyes was even better than she'd suspected. How many young women Leeana's age, the knight wondered, thrown into a world and facing a future so radically different from anything they had ever experienced before, would have had enough energy to spare to think analytically about what people around them were saying about anything, far less about someone as distant from her own immediate—and exhausting—experiences as the Voice of Quaysar?

  "Tell me more," she invited, still keeping her own voice as neutral as she could.

  "The thing that struck me most about what the war maids talking about the Voice were saying," Leeana continued obediently, "was that they all agreed that the new Voice had changed the policies of the old Voice. Changed them for the better, in the opinion of whoever was doing the talking, that was. I know you never actually discussed with me what took you to Kalatha in the first place, Dame Kaeritha, but I knew the sorts of research you'd asked Lord Brandark to do before you left. And—" she glanced away for a moment "—I heard Prince Bahzell and Father discussing it a little. So I know you're really concerned about the disputes between Lord Trisu and the war maids."

  Kaeritha frowned, and Leeana shook her head quickly.

  "I haven't discussed it with anyone here, Dame Kaeritha! I know you and Mayor Yalith talked about it—or talked about something, anyway—and if Tomanak sent you here, then it's certainly not my place to be blabbering away about it. But that's part of why what I was hearing bothered me, I think, because the same people who were talking about how much they approved of the Voice were talking about Trisu. And what they were saying was that the new Voice, unlike the old Voice, understood that the war maids couldn't put up with the way lords like Trisu were trying to turn the clock back. She understood that it was time the war maids stood up to people like him. That when someone pushed the war maids, the war maids had to push back—hard. Maybe even harder than they'd been pushed in the first place, since they had so little ground they could afford to surrender.

  "That was enough to get me started listening to the way they were saying things, not just what they were saying. And when I did, I realized they were suggesting, or even saying outright, in some cases, that it was the Voice, not Mayor Yalith or her Council, who'd really pulled Trisu up short."

  "They may believe that," Kaeritha said, forbearing any attempt to pretend Leeana hadn't accurately deduced her purpose in traveling to Kalatha, "but I've spoken to both the mayor and Lord Trisu. From the way both of them speak about the disputes—and about each other—the Voice has definitely played a secondary role, at most."

  She watched the girl carefully. There were some thoughts—and suspicions—which she wasn't prepared to share with anyone just yet. Besides, she was curious as to how closely this acute young woman's analysis would parallel her own.

  "That's just it," Leeana said. "From what they were saying, the Voice didn't charge right in and begin speaking in Lillinara's voice or anything like that. Instead, they were saying—bragging, almost—that she was too subtle and wise to be that openly 'confrontational' herself. They said it was because she had to maintain the 'neutrality' of her office as Voice. But I've seen and heard about too many 'subtle and wise' noblemen who adopted the same sort of tactics. As far as I can tell, most of them were only avoiding open confrontations so they could hide in the shadows better when it came time to plant a dagger in someone else's back. Either that, or they were setting someone else up to do what they wanted done for them. Preferably someone gullible enough that they could convince him the idea had been his own in the first place."

  "Are you suggesting that a Voice of Lillinara is doing that in this case?"

  "I'm
suggesting that it's possible," Leeana said, undeterred by the slight chill frosting Kaeritha's tone. "And that's not the only thing I think is possible. The way the war maids who seem to approve of the Voice are talking is also undercutting the authority of Mayor Yalith and the Town Council. Not directly, and not openly, maybe, but that's the effect it's having, and I don't think that's an accident. Every time they talk approvingly about how insightful the Voice is, and how clearly she sees what needs to be done, the implication is that without the Voice, Mayor Yalith and the Council wouldn't have seen how important it was to stand up to Trisu. I've seen that before, too. Not personally, but I did pay attention to my history lessons, Dame Kaeritha. I think this is an attempt to undermine the authority of the people who are supposed to be governing Kalatha. And I think the Voice is either actively involved in it herself, for some reason, or else that some third party is using her, as well."

  "I see." Kaeritha contemplated Leeana for several more moments, then shrugged. "Is there anything else?" she asked.

  "Well," Leeana said, and looked away again. She seemed uncomfortable for some reason, almost a bit flustered. "There's the fact that the ones I'm worried about seem to be actively recruiting from among the younger war maids. I think that's one reason I've heard so much about it in the relatively short time I've been here. The fact that I used to be Father's daughter—still am, really, until my probationary period is over—might make me more valuable in their eyes, and they might figure I'd be young and new enough to be easily impressed and convinced.

  "And," she turned to look back at Kaeritha, "some of the other things they've been saying about the Voice make me . . . uncomfortable."

  "Like what?" Kaeritha asked.

  "It's just . . . well, I suppose—" A faint flush of color brushed Leeana's cheeks. "I never expected to hear someone suggesting that a Voice of Lillinara would be so . . . promiscuous."