Waiting to Begin, part 4
Jun. 23rd, 2010 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamcranverPart 1
Part 2
Part 3
Kitty slept with Lindsey three more times on the road to Kor. Every time, Cassadee peered at her the next morning with concern, her gaze as intense as if she were trying to spy into Kitty’s heart. Every time, Kitty thought that that heart was a little more whole. She was Kitty. She liked women, and that included having sex with them. Lindsey liked both men and women, and she slept with both of them—with Kitty, with Jessicka, with Patti, with Jimmy, with soldiers Kitty didn’t know. She was all right with this, and she felt, deep in her heart, that the Giver must have been all right with it, too, or she wouldn’t feel so happy about it.
Maybe she was supposed to feel like a scorned girl in a tale--all heartbroken, as Cassadee seemed to expect, or like she’d been corrupted by the loss of her chastity. It was hard to muster up any kind of shame, though, when the camp followers treated her more like one of them every day, when Lindsey and Jessicka swung companionable arms over her shoulders sometimes and talked about adventures they’d had, when even the leers and remarks of the less respectable men ceased to make her blush, and she talked with Jimmy and Steve and Jersey and Mike as easily as she would with any woman. She didn’t even know if Mother Phyllis would recognize her as Sister Jennifer, and she didn’t care either way. Even her anger was different—it had mostly gone away.
By the time they reached Kor, spring was in full bloom, and Kitty’d gotten better at mending and cooking than she’d been even at the Order. Somehow, it was more satisfying to work when you got paid and you liked the people you worked with. She hadn’t brought up her dream of being a fighter like Lindsey or Jessicka again. It had never seemed like the right time. Especially when she was with Lindsey. Anyway, she was in no hurry. It felt like she had all the time in the world.
Kor was much as Cassadee had described it: full of people, like the people you saw in towns everywhere, full of big buildings and paved streets and markets full of shouting vendors hawking their wares. Nothing you wouldn’t expect from a city, and yet, after ten years of nothing but the Order of Order, Kitty wanted to drink in every sight so deeply she would never forget any of them.
Patti laughed at her. “It won’t seem so shiny and new in a few years, mark my words,” she said.
“It’s not shiny and new now,” said Cassadee, but she still looked excited. “Come on, Patti, no one needs us for anything now! Can’t we go to the market and see what they have?”
Patti sighed, sounding long-suffering, but Kitty wasn’t fooled these days. Patti loved all of the women who worked under her, like a mother maybe, or an older sister. Maybe one day, Kitty hoped, she would love Kitty that way, too. She’d had a couple of mothers now, but she liked Patti better than both of them put together. “Come here,” said Patti to Cassadee, but when Cassadee hopped down and walked over to Patti’s cart, Patti looked at Kitty with a quizzical expression.
“What are you waiting for, Sister? A Queen’s Summons?”
Kitty walked over, not knowing precisely what to expect, and she was completely surprised when Patti reached out her hands and put one silver piece in Kitty’s hand and one in Cassadee’s. “Don’t think you’re so special,” she says. “Everyone gets a bit of coin—the prices on bread and milk were good back in that last village, so we’ve a little extra. And don’t spend it all on something silly!”
“We won’t,” Cassadee assured her, but Kitty just closed her hand around the coin. Three months ago, money wouldn’t have meant a thing to her—she wasn’t allowed to go anywhere to buy anything, and if she had bought anything, she wouldn’t have been allowed to keep it, and if she’d bought something Mother Phyllis didn’t approve of, she probably would have been punished for it, too. There was something wonderful to be said for holding a coin in your hand and knowing that whatever you bought with it was yours.
“Thank you,” she said as sincerely as she could to Patti, and Patti waved her thanks away with a dismissive gesture.
“Eh,” she said. “Everyone needs a day off every now and then.”
Kitty and Cassadee walked to the market hand in hand, the sun warm on their hair and on their faces, and Kitty felt as light-hearted and giddy as a child.
“What kind of job do you think we’ll get?” she asked. They had been travelling to town so long, it was easy to forget that they’d be travelling right back up as soon as they had a merchant caravan to guard. Easy to forget if you weren’t Kitty, anyway.
Cassadee shrugged, not looking terribly interested. “Whoever it is, we probably won’t get to see much of them. ‘Specially if they’ve got women traveling with them. For some reason, the wives tend to turn their noses up at us."
Kitty thought about how her mother would have reacted if she’d been in a wagon train with a group of rough, rowdy women, some of whom slept with multiple men and some of whom slept with women and all of whom drank and cursed and worshipped commoner gods, and thought, Yes, they do tend to do that.
“The men’ll probably leave us alone, though,” said Cassadee as if this were a bright side. “Merchant men are usually more interested in their stuff than in getting laid.”
“Where do you think we’ll go?” asked Kitty. She refused to let her spirits be dampened by Cassadee’s matter-of-fact manner.
“Hmm,” Cassadee said. “Probably north again. I hope south, though. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we got to go to the coast? I hear it’s beautiful. If you squint real hard from Blue Point, they say you can see a little bit of Par.”
“Which island?” Kitty had learned all 386 of them like the back of her hand once upon a time, when the nunnery had gotten a commission to copy an atlas.
Cassadee looked at her, a little confused. “I don’t know. The big one?”
Perhaps changing the subject was in order. “So what kind of things do they have in the marketplace here?”
This was a subject closer to Cassadee’s heart. “Oh, everything,” she said effusively. “Cloth from Kolfa—and you wouldn’t believe the cloth they’ve got there, light as anything and wears like iron—all kinds of treats, pastries and such, fresh fruit, buttons and needles and every color of thread you ever wanted—and if I remember right, there’s a man here with a booth makes a cheese pie you’ll be thinking about for the rest of your life.”
Kitty let Cassadee’s chatter fill up her head as she tried to picture the market.
The reality of it was so much bigger than she could ever have guessed. Hundreds of booths, literally hundreds, people everywhere, a thousand tantalizing snatches of bright color and mouth-watering smells every direction you turned.
Kitty stood at the Kolfa cloth booth with Cassadee for a while, admiring the textures and colors, but what she really wanted to do was wander. Cassadee saw this as soon as Kitty had thought it, and waved her away with a smile. “Go on, then, I’ll meet up with you later. If you get lost, just look for the clock tower! There’s a fountain underneath it—we can meet there when we’re done.”
The problem, thought Kitty, wasn’t going to be getting lost. The problem was going to be dragging herself back to the army’s train at the end of the day. Everything she’d ever wanted, surely it could be found here. A stand outside a blacksmith’s, selling armor and knives and nails—a fletcher’s, with so many arrows bristling with feathers that it seemed his little booth might take flight—a weaver with thick, warm-looking blankets in rich colors—flowers of every kind imaginable. Before she even knew what she was about, she’d spent the silver coin Patti had given her and two from her secret store on a small, well-used crossbow and a quiver of bolts. She hadn’t told the vendor who she was buying them for, and he hadn’t asked.
She spent another few coppers on a couple of the marvelous cheese pies Cassadee had mentioned, and if they weren’t good enough for her to remember the rest of her life, she certainly would think about them wistfully and longingly for many nights to come. She’d already spent more than she had meant to at this point, but when she saw a shoemaker hawking his wares, she couldn’t stop herself from buying a pair of tall, well-made boots. They would serve her a lot better in the camp than her old worn shoes did. In exchange for her old nun’s habit and another small handful of coppers from her store, she bought a pair of trousers and a shirt. The women of the camp thought nothing of trading skirts for trousers, so neither would she. Besides she needed more than the one worn dress to wear—it was getting rather shabby.
And then—a bookshop.
Kitty paused. She didn’t have the money for a book. It was ridiculous. And when would she have time to read it, anyway? And still she drew closer to the bookshop before she could persuade herself away from it.
The man behind the counter looked up at her, then back down at the book he was reading with a snort of disgust. She couldn’t blame him. She was sure she didn’t exactly exude an ability to pay for her purchases.
Whatever. She wasn’t here to buy, anyway, she was here to look, and rot the man if he thought she was there to steal or damage the books. After so long in the copyroom at the Order, Kitty thought she knew pretty well how to handle a book.
She didn’t even bother looking at the illuminated ones near the shop window. That was the sort you sold houses to buy—even her father wouldn’t have the money for one of them, or at least, he wouldn’t spend the money on it unless he really thought a particular book would enhance his reputation. Instead, she wondered over to the back of the store, where the odds and ends were kept. Half a dozen versions of the Book of Rule, she noticed, bound in various anthologies in order to fit your level of literacy or your profession. A fat volume of ancient Briopian verse, its cover torn; a green-bound book that, on closer examination, turned out to be a flowery, embellished form of the disgusting story Jimmy had told that first storytelling night, and—ah, what was this?
The bland brown cover had nothing on it. The text was small, and whichever scribe had copied the book out clearly hadn’t intended for it to be sold to the general public, because it was full of scribal abbreviations and all the words were run together. If Kitty hadn’t produced quite a few of those manuscripts herself, she wouldn’t have been able to read it. But she could read it, and she only had to read a few pages before she realized: it was a book of fairy stories. Well, some of them were about fairies. Others were about selkies, werewolves, unicorns, gods and goddesses Kitty had never heard of who presided over rivers and mountains and lakes. One was about tree spirits.
Kitty felt a cold prickle across the back of her neck and carefully set the book back where she had found it. “How much is this?” she called lightly to the owner.
Looking profoundly irritated, he bustled over towards her. “How much is what?” he snapped.
She tried her best to imitate her mother’s face when insulted by a lesser tradesman and said, “I’ll wager you don’t get much return business with an attitude like that.”
The man scowled, as if he suspected Kitty was trying somehow to trick him. “Just what is it you’d like to buy?”
She gestured grandly to the nondescript little book. “I thought that one might be interesting.”
Still scowling, the man picked up the book and glanced at a few of the pages. His expression slackened in surprise and not a little uneasiness, and he looked from Kitty to the book and then back again. “You want…this book?” At Kitty’s nod, he added doubtfully, “Can you read it?”
“Of course I can read it,” said Kitty scornfully. “Now, how much is it, and quick, before I take my purse elsewhere.” My empty, empty purse, she thought.
The man gave her a measuring look. “I don’t hold for this kind of thing. It must have ended up in some odds and ends batch by mistake.” Kitty wanted to ask him just what it was he didn’t hold for, but he didn’t seem to be done. “Now. If you want it, I can let you have it for…six coppers.”
Kitty was surprised at how low the price was, but she tried not to show it. She was down to her last few silvers, and there was no sense in wasting any more money than she was already doing. As much as she hated it sometimes, she was a merchant’s daughter. “That’s a laugh,” she said, and made as if to leave.
“Wait,” the man said. “Four. Take it for four. But you didn’t get it here.”
“As if I’d brag about setting foot in this place,” said Kitty, but she handed over the coppers and tucked the book into her bag. The man watched as she walked out, a beady-eyed, nervous look. A strange, unpleasant man, Kitty thought.
By the time she made it to the fountain, Cassadee was tapping her feet impatiently. “Come on, Kitty!” she said. “Don’t you want to see the merchants?” Apparently Cassadee’s disinterest in their new employers lasted only as long as said employers were abstractions; as people, they were as interesting as anyone.
To Kitty’s surprise, there was more than one company of merchants waiting with the camp while their heads finished negotiations with Morrissey. “That’s pretty usual,” Cassadee assured her. “A lot of the time the little ones will find a big one and pay to travel under their protection. Safety in numbers, you know?”
The “big one” this time was a Kolfan thread merchant who’d spent the last two years trying to sell thread and cloth to the Parians. He hadn’t had much luck, so he was heading back north. If Kitty were the Parians, she didn’t think she’d trade with him either; he had a sour kind of sneer, which made him look like the kind of person who didn’t like much of anyone. He certainly dressed nicely, though. It wasn’t much of a consolation to Cassadee, who really had let her hopes get up for a summer in the south.
The “little ones,” Norah told them in a hushed whisper, were, in order of size, a well-to-do grain merchant bringing early crops from the south coast up to Briopia, three money-changing brothers and their entourage, a little knot of Guild craftsmen who built musical instruments, and a Parian spice merchant. “And the best part is,” Norah said, “the spice merchant is a woman.”
So she was—a heavy, dark, woman named Jill Scott with a constant, unimpeachable businesslike expression belied only somewhat by the determined jut of her chin. From the moment Kitty laid eyes on her, she was certain that Madam Scott was like no merchant she had ever known, and as they started off up along the Central Road, she was proven right.
Where Kitty’s father and his business associates showed only enough interest in their own wares to know their quality and to sell them, Madam Scott knew every inch of the simple but beautiful, well-built covered wagon that housed her spices. She knew what plant each came from and what that plant looked like, she knew what spices suited each dish and what spices would make you sick if you mixed them and which ones would cure your cold if you put them in your soup. She knew how long to grind them if you wanted big flakes of spice flecking your bread and how long to grind them if you wanted a fine powder as soft as the Queen’s flour.
Where her father and his friends bragged of their acquaintances among the nobility and the things they acquired with their wealth, Madam Scott neither responded to boasts nor made any of her own. She spoke of the people she knew as friends, or at least as business associates, and if they gifted her with bushels of fine crocuses for saffron or rich lands, she certainly didn’t talk about it as far as Kitty could tell.
Which brought her to another thing. Kitty’s father wouldn’t have been caught dead talking with the guards he hired to protect his caravan, except maybe their chief. Madam ate around the fire with Kitty and Cassadee and Patti and the rest of the women almost every night, offering spices to perk up the food and telling stories about her adventures on the seas any time she was asked.
As if all of that weren’t strange enough, Madam Scott also practiced magic. Not huge, frightening things, calling storms from the sky or making things burst into flames, but little charms, figures drawn into the corks of her spice jars to keep them from breaking and their contents from rot.
“Isn’t that….” Swati was never especially sharp with Madam Scott, but her eyes were suspicious, and she exchanged an anxious look with Tanya.
“Isn’t what?” Madam Scott looked up from tracing a pattern onto a glass label jar with a small charred stick from the fire. Apparently, she said, that spell kept moisture out of the jars.
Swati gestured. “Isn’t all that…magic…fairy stuff? You know, evil?”
Madam Scott raised an eyebrow. “Magic is no more ‘fairy stuff’ than the rain or the sun.” She returned to her careful tracing. “You know,” she said casually, “there are many things which are neither good nor evil in themselves, but become good and evil depending on who uses them and why. Is a sword good or bad? Or fire?” She shrugged almost imperceptibly. “These aren’t the kind of questions that have right or wrong answers.”
“Whatever you say, Madam Scott,” said Swati, looking at her with uncertainty mixed with a kind of respect that had nothing to do with the other woman’s wealth or merchant status.
Madam Scott sighed and asked, “For pity’s sake, what would it take for you to call me Jill?”
Cassadee, who adored her, said that she still didn’t like women that way, but she might make an exception for Madam Scott—Jill, she corrected, starry-eyed. Kitty could understand that.
Interestingly, Jill never seemed to talk with Lindsey and Jessicka. Not in a cruel way, or as if she didn’t like them—she just didn’t seek them out the way she did the others. Lindsey and Jessicka, for their part, were quiet when Jill sat around the fire with them, watching her with a kind of hesitant curiosity. It made things awkward, a little, and it seemed to Kitty that she didn’t see them as often as she had before. She didn’t mind too much, though—they were still friendly with her, and now, when she wasn’t working, she had conversations with Jill to pass the time.
“Those two women,” she said softly to Kitty one day. “They’re warriors, correct?”
Kitty knew Jill already knew that—she couldn’t not—but she said, “Correct.” And then, though she’d never actually seen them fight anyone but some of their fellow soldiers when they got drunk and handsy, she said, “They’re very good.” It wasn’t a totally uninformed guess, Kitty figured, since Morrissey wouldn’t have hired them if they weren’t.
“Hmm,” Jill said. “It must be lonely, with only two of them.”
“They aren’t lonely!” Cassadee protested. “They’ve got Jimmy and Steve, and they’ve got us.”
“Of course.” Jill nodded calmly. “And I’m sure you’re a good friend to them, as they are to you. But it is so strange, the things that are considered men’s work and women’s work here, and I’ve found it very uncomfortable, sometimes, to be a woman in a job where people expect a man.”
“Are there women warriors in Par?” asked Kitty curiously.
Jill gave Kitty a quizzical look. “There are women everything in Par,” she said. Kitty would have asked more, fascinated by the bald statement, but suddenly there was shouting from the front of the caravan.
“To the wagons!” came Morrissey’s booming voice, and a flurry of arrows flew over Jill and Cassadee and Kitty to land in the dirt behind them.
“Oh, horsefucking rat spit,” said Cassadee, and she grabbed Kitty’s hand even as Jill ushered them into her covered wagon and locked its door behind them.
“Can you tell who it is?” asked Jill. Outside, a man screamed in pain, and Cassadee winced.
“I don’t--” she started. “It’s hard to tell. Brigands, probably.” She shrugged. “They’ll probably leave us alone. I mean, we’re in the littlest wagon here.”
Jill frowned. “Hmm. I wish I could tell whether they were clever brigands or stupid ones.”
What an odd thing to say when they were being shot at by strange men. “Why’s that?” asked Kitty.
“Because if they’re stupid,” Jill said, “they will run right past us and go for that ostentatious jackass with the expensive cloth panels on his wagon. If, however, they’re clever enough to take a deep breath and smell the spices here, they’ll realize that what I have in this little cart is worth more than the rest of the caravan put together.”
Kitty couldn’t help but stare. Fuck, fuck, Jill was right. If the brigands had half a brain, they’d realize that Jill’s wares were more expensive by the ounce than many a lord could afford. If Kitty’d had half a brain when she tasted the dishes Jill had seasoned, she would have realized it for herself.
“Giver have mercy,” she said, involuntarily reaching for the charm around her neck. Cassadee put a brave face on, but clearly she was frightened, and even Jill looked worried under her calm front. They were probably all thinking the same thing, thought Kitty. Three women alone, in a wagon full of expensive spices, unarmed….
A horse shrieked in agony outside, and Cassadee bit her lip and closed her eyes.
Well, piss on this, thought Kitty suddenly. She wasn’t unarmed. She still had the dagger she carried everywhere. She had her wits about her. And they had Jill’s cart.
“Madam Scott,” she said. Jill. Whoops. Worry about it later. “You have spices here to make people’s eyes burn, right?”
Jill raised her head, looking at Kitty approvingly. “I do. Cheap ones, even,” she added, sounding more merchantlike than Kitty had ever heard her.
“Well, all right then.” Kitty took a quick look around the wagon. Her eyes lighted on a wobbling wooden structure in the corner. “How fond are you of that rocking chair?”
“My mother can make me another one.” Jill stood, suddenly seeming so big that she could crush any brigand under her foot, and walked over to the rocking chair. “Here, Kitty,” she said, “help me.” Together, they picked the thing up and smashed it against the back wall of the wagon, once, twice, until its joints gave under the pressure and they could detach the runners on which it rocked. Each was as long as Kitty’s leg and as heavy as a bow. They’d work well as weapons.
Jill and Kitty each took a runner, and they hefted them in their hands, testing the weight and taking a few practice swings. Jill’s eyes met Kitty’s, and they shared a brief smile, but there wasn’t the time to congratulate themselves yet—the sound of the fighting seemed closer, louder, and Kitty felt a familiar thrill of tense fear in her chest. “They’re getting closer,” she said to Jill.
Jill nodded, her eyes on the wagon’s door. “Come here, Cassadee,” she said. Cassadee still looked scared enough to faint, but at least she’d mustered the courage to adopt a stubborn expression quite reminiscent of Jill’s and to stand up to walk over to her. “Here,” said Jill, handing her a little pot of something red. “Be careful, since there isn’t much in there. But even a little bit will have a man clawing at his eyes as if he would tear them out.” Cassadee took the pot, staring dubiously at it. She looked frighteningly young.
Kitty put an arm around her shoulder. “Hey, come on,” she said. “You’re the battle expert here. What do you and the others usually do?”
Cassadee shrugged uncomfortably. “They usually happen so fast I don’t have time to think about it. I hitch a ride with Patti or Swati and Thao or somebody and we all ride out to the outskirts of the battle. Couple of the women have bows, and we pick off the brigands as they ride toward the rest.”
“Well, all right,” said Kitty. “Think of it this way—this wagon’s not that big. They can only come at us one or two at a time, so just think of it as picking them off from here.”
“It’s not really the same when they’re right there,” Cassadee protested, but she seemed at least a little less frightened, so Kitty considered it a victory.
Outside, the sounds of battle were so close and loud that Kitty could pick out voices she knew, and she peeked out the tiny glass window in the corner of the caravan to see Jersey and Mike dodging arrows and slashing fiercely out at a masked bandit on a skinny black horse. She turned away from the window and tried to make her face as expressionless as possible. Cassadee didn’t need one more thing to worry about.
For what felt like eternity but was probably only a matter of minutes, they huddled in the wagon, listening to the progress of the fight and trying to judge how it went. “Perhaps,” Jill said under her breath, “these are stupid brigands, after all.”
Even as she finished speaking, something crashed against the left wall of the wagon—probably a man’s head, judging by the groan that slid down to the ground—and a rough voice called, “Shit! Let’s see what we can get in this one. Gotta be something, right?”
“Well done, Jill,” said Kitty with a glare, forgetting for a moment that she technically worked for her. Everyone knew you turned good fortune bad by commenting on it. Even Mother Phyllis had known that, for pity’s sake.
“You and your ridiculous superstitions,” muttered Jill, tightening her grip on her chair runner.
Kitty ignored her. Timing was everything in matters like this, and nothing good could come of being caught unawares at the wrong moment. She gripped her own runner, reached quickly to her belt to confirm that her knife was ready, and kept her eyes on the trembling door. Her heart was beating so hard, the corners of her vision throbbed, but her mind was as focused as it had ever been.
Jill’s wagon was well-made, every inch of it, and the door stood strong after a handful of assaults. The lock, however, was less sturdy. One of the brigands had clearly had the foresight to bring an axe or something strong enough to break it completely free of the door, and with a sickening crack, a bulky man pushed his way through.
She didn’t wait for Cassadee’s scream, or for the man’s own quick smile to turn into a smirk. She struck, as hard as she could. The man staggered back, clutching at his head, and she hit him again while two more men squeezed around him into the wagon.
Cassadee, evidently recovered from her fright moved quickly. She shouted, “Kitty, watch your eyes,” but Kitty didn’t need the warning to recognize the swift motion of Cassadee’s hand as she flung a red cloud of powder into the men’s eyes.
They shrieked in pain. Kitty met Jill’s eyes in an instant, and they moved as one—Jill hit the one on the left, her strike as solid as if she were chopping wood, and as he fell back, she pushed him out the door with her chair runner. Kitty, meanwhile, hit the other one with all her strength, and he fell to the floor.
The other brigands hesitated now, on the brink between anger and surprise, and Kitty took advantage of their uncertainty to slam the broken door on the man who stood on the threshold, smashing his fingers. With a roar of rage, he pulled the door aside, and two others behind him ripped it completely from its hinges, one of them shouting, “Here, men! It’s spices!”
Kitty struck the man holding the door a solid blow to his stomach, and while he bent over, bellowing in pain, Jill knocked him back so hard that he fell off the doorstep and onto the ground.
Having taken heart from the other women’s success, Cassadee seemed to have found her own courage, and she began to hurl things out of the door, barely missing Kitty and Jill in the process: heavy iron cooking pans, empty glass jars, a small table. Few of her missiles found targets, but they made the brigands around the door scatter back to avoid being hit, and Kitty shot the girl a quick smile.
One of the brigands, a tall, broad man with a nose that looked as if it had been broken a time or two, looked up from one of Cassadee’s shattered jars and glared at them with a rage that chilled some corner of Kitty’s heart.
“Fucking bitches,” the man said, drawing his sword as he stepped around his comrades, both standing and fallen. “I’m gonna gut you like the pigs you are.”
Jill swung her chair runner threateningly, and Cassadee chucked another jar at him. He ducked easily, his lip raised in a snarl, and Cassadee fell back, her boldness temporarily frozen. He continued to stalk towards them, his gaze single-minded and hateful.
Kitty had no idea what possessed her—only a vague notion of catching him off guard. Without thinking too much about it, she darted out the door, dodging the swings and the grasping hands of the men around her, and pulled her knife from her belt. The big man was startled for only a moment by her motion before the rage returned, and he swung his sword, but she was too fast for him. In one clean motion, she raised her knife and slashed at the man’s throat. Warm blood sprayed over her.
He swung again, weaker, and his comrades closed in around her, but their eyes were wide with horror, not anger.
“See if he guts anything,” said a familiar voice, and Kitty looked up to see Lindsey, atop Susan, her dappled gray mare, her sword drawn and already a rusty dark red with blood. Jessicka and Steve were flanking her, Jessicka with a loaded crossbow and Steve with a heavy war axe.
Time seemed to speed up, then: Jessicka shot a crossbow bolt into the man closest to Kitty, Lindsey urged Susan into the midst of the crowd of men, and suddenly they were all running, some jumping on horses, some just running until Kitty couldn’t see them anymore. Kitty just stood there, the blood cooling sticky on her face, while the man she had killed swayed and dropped his sword and fell where he stood.
The battle was over, then. The soldiers had fought the brigands off, and from the cheers coming from some of the men, Kitty imagined that they’d won without too much loss of property or life. That was good, she thought. If you were going to fight, it was best to win.
Somewhere, at some point, Jill came out of the wagon to wrap a blanket around Kitty’s shoulder and usher her back inside, as gentle as if she were Kitty’s mother. Inside, Cassadee smiled shakily at her, and Kitty found the calm to smile back, glad that all the fear was gone from Cassadee’s face now. “You were fantastic,” she said.
“Well, not like you,” said Cassadee. “Ocean Son, Kitty, where’d you learn how to fight?”
“Good question.”
It was Jessicka, standing in the gaping doorway with Steve and Lindsey by her side and looking down at Kitty with a cool, appraising gaze. “I’m guessing you didn’t learn that at the nunnery.” Her voice was dry, and something in it ruffled Kitty’s feathers the wrong way.
“You’d guess wrong, then,” she said, her voice sounding defiant to her own ears. It was the kind of retort that would have gotten her slapped back at the Order.
“What?” Steve said disbelievingly. “You joking me? That’s what those rich fancy nuns spend their time doing? Fighting?” Lindsey raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Well. No.” Kitty looked down, feeling suddenly disgusting, the dried blood itchy on her cheeks and in her eyebrows.
Cassadee reached out to grasp Kitty’s hand. “Come on,” she said softly. “I mean, you protected me. You and Jill,” she added, casting a grateful look in Jill’s direction. “Nobody’s angry or anything, we’re just confused.”
“Come on,” Lindsey echoed. “Let’s have the whole story.”
Perhaps it was the word “story” that set her off. “Do you know why I left the nunnery?”
Steve shrugged. Jessicka asked, “Didn’t you say all the other girls there were, I don’t know, duchesses and countesses or some shit, and you were just some merchant’s daughter and no one liked you?”
Kitty had to laugh at the bluntness. “Yeah. That’s all true. But that’s not why I left when I did. I left because the Mother of Order asked me to leave.”
“Yeah?” asked Steve, and Lindsey made a beckoning gesture, as if of encouragement. Jill leaned up against the wall of the wagon, watching Kitty with curious eyes.
“She asked me to leave, because….” She sighed. “All right. The thing about the Order is, there aren’t any men there, and it’s far away from any kind of town bigger than a handful of families. There’s not much by way of money there—some rich clothes, maybe, because a duchess can’t look like a pauper even when she’s a nun, and whatever else the Sisters sneak in, but it’s not some treasure hoard. People don’t always understand that, though—they think that since it’s full of women from rich families, that it must be full of terribly valuable things.”
She sighed. “Mostly, we get the kind of thieves who try to sneak in, and the cook chases them out with her rolling pin or the Mother of Order shames them into going away. But sometimes, there are groups of men who don’t care about the Giver’s curse and don’t mind braving stone walls. Ten years before my father sent me there, a group of twenty men broke in. They didn’t find any money, and they were so angry that they killed the Sister in charge of the storerooms. The King hanged them all along the side of the road as a warning but….” She shrugged.
“When the warning bell rang, we were all supposed to go hide in the cellar. There’s a secret room there—Mother Phyllis had it put in after the last attack. But I was out in the barn doing punishment work, and by the time I made it to the main building, they’d already knocked down the gates and were marching around, looking for…I don’t know. A pile of gold, or something.
Now, the thing about living in one place for so long—especially when you don’t get to go anywhere else—is that you know it like the back of your hand. At first, I just thought that I could find myself a good hiding place without leading them to the others in the cellar. But then I thought—from everything I heard, the brigands had totally torn the Order apart the last time—they’d ripped up the beds, torn open bags of feed and left them to rot, set things on fire, things like that. And I thought, ‘Why just let them do it?’”
“Why indeed?” asked Jill softly. Lindsey, Jessicka and Steve just stared at Kitty as if she was a riddle they couldn’t solve.
“And so….” Kitty shrugged. “It wasn’t really fighting at first, so much as knowing my territory. I lured a pair of them into the storeroom and locked them in. One of them investigated the kitchen by himself—I hid in the pantry and then hit him in the head with a pan, then I locked him in the pantry. That was how it went—I picked them off one by one, until they realized that they were losing men. Then…well, then it got harder. They got more alert, and they got angry.”
“What did you do?” Lindsey asked.
Kitty looked at her hands, remembering. “Then…then I thought I couldn’t do any more by myself, and I went to the others in the cellar, to get help.”
Steve snorted. “Yeah. Bet they were a great help.”
“You don’t understand,” Kitty said, feeling strangely defensive. “When you’re devoted to rules and order like that…I don’t know how many times Mother Phyllis told me, ‘You can’t expect to make order in the world if you can’t even order yourself.’ In the Book of Rule, there’s not a single woman who ever lifts a hand in violence. Not even in self-defense. That’s men’s work. I got Sister Sarah to sneak out and ride to the village for help, and I thought that was a pretty big accomplishment.”
“Fair enough,” said Jessicka, elbowing Steve in the side.
“The only problem was, trying to convince them to chase the men off—well, I did just what I was trying not to do, and drew the men to the cellar.”
“Shit,” breathed Cassadee.
“Right,” said Kitty. “I could hear them coming, yelling and ranting and cursing, and the rest of the Sisters were practically frightened out of their wits. Except for Mother Phyllis, who was pissed at me for leading the men to them. It wasn’t going to do any good to try and get them back into the secret room. Now, the stairs down to the cellar were rickety—they were very old, and no one went down into the cellar if they didn’t have to, it was so musty and dark down there, so they weren’t in good repair.
I didn’t have time to think too much about it, so I grabbed an old shovel from the corner and hit at one of the steps until it broke, right down the middle, and then I knocked both of the pieces down into the cellar. The other Sisters were burning a lamp, so I blew it out, and the room was completely dark.”
Lindsey began to smile. “They tripped in the dark, right? They couldn’t see the missing stair.”
Kitty met her eyes and returned the smile as best she could. “Right. And as they fell, I shoved them into the secret room. It was dark, but it was easy enough to tell the Sisters from the brigands in the dark, so if anyone tried to hit me, I hit him with the shovel and dragged him in. It was so much easier than I thought it’d be--it felt as natural as anything. Even after I locked them in and I realized that I’d left one outside—he’d hit his head when he fell, so he wasn’t fighting or anything—it didn’t frighten me. I just tied him up, and the rest of the Order and I went upstairs for Sister Sarah.
She brought the Queen’s Army, by the way, a whole squad of them. But by that point, there wasn’t much left for them to do. And then, well, by that point, as Mother Phyllis said, it was abundantly clear to everyone that I was no true Sister of Order.”
“Wait,” said Cassadee indignantly. “You saved them from brigands, men who might have done I don’t even know what, and they just kicked you out?”
She sounded as angry about it as Kitty had been at the time. But now, here, safe in Jill’s wagon, the injustice of it seemed unimportant, and she could look back on it with a calmer eye. “They already had problems with me,” she said. “I wasn’t neat enough, I wasn’t that obedient, and apparently I wasn’t as peaceful as one usually wants in a nunnery—it was never the right place for me. I’m glad they did it. I might not have had the courage to leave on my own.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jessicka said. “It seems to me that if there’s anything you’re lacking, it’s not courage.”
“No shit,” said Lindsey, and Steve nodded in agreement. There was silence for a long stretch. Kitty caught her breath and scratched dried blood off her face. The Order seemed like a lifetime ago, and her story seemed like just that to her—a story, about someone else, some other girl in some other not-quite-real time. It was hard to believe she’d ever been that angry, confused girl.
“Hey.” Lindsey’s voice broke in on her thoughts. “Those bandits back at the nunnery, did you kill any of them?”
“No.” Not that that had convinced Mother Phyllis of her inner feminine compassion or whatever.
“Well, you sure as shit killed that fellow whose throat you slit.” Lindsey’s eyes were so intense that Kitty almost felt their gaze as a physical pressure. “You all right with that?”
She shouldn’t be. Every life had a purpose under the Giver’s Rule, and to interfere with that was not only to violate her own place in the Rule but to stop someone else from fulfilling whatever the Giver had intended for them.
But what of Cassadee’s purpose? Or Jill’s? The Giver couldn’t look at their lives and say that they were worth less that of a man who had threatened to gut them like pigs, just for protecting Jill’s property. Maybe she shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t have killed him, but it had happened so fast, and the wagon was here, safe, with Cassadee and Jill unharmed, and in the grand scheme of the Rule, that couldn’t be so terribly wrong. ‘Repay a kindness with a kindness, and an injustice with justice,’ right? She couldn’t remember who’d told her that, but it sounded fair enough to her at that particular moment. I’m fine,” she said. “You’re safe, I’m safe, everyone’s safe and sound.” Something terrible occurred to her and she asked, “Everyone’s safe and sound, right?”
Lindsey grinned crookedly. “Sure. Patti knows how to get those that need it out of danger. Last I saw, Jenny and Tanya and Thao were gathering up their nursing stuff to help out the wounded, and all the rest were helping them.”
Kitty breathed a sigh of relief and leaned against Cassadee, who wrapped a comforting arm around her.
“My wagon has certainly seen better days,” said Jill with a sigh. “I hope your leader doesn’t expect full payment for guard services. Just because my rig is small doesn’t mean I should have to protect it myself.” She gingerly picked up a shard of broken glass from Cassadee’s spice jar and put it down with another sigh.
Kitty pulled her head out of Cassadee’s shoulder and said weakly, “We can help you clean it up,” though she hoped Jill didn’t need it cleaned in the near future. She didn’t feel up to much of anything at the moment.
“No sense in doing anything now,” Jill said. “Not while there are people who need fixing.”
Lindsey didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to the conversation, but she was still looking at Kitty with a curiously intense gaze. “Hey,” she said. “Didn’t you tell me and Jessicka once you wanted to be a fighter?”
What? The excitement of battle had worn off, taking any wits Kitty had used to tell her story along with it. She was exhausted and a little fuzzy, as if she’d just woken up from a deep sleep. “Yeah. Why?”
Jessicka gave Lindsey a sharp look before looking searchingly at Kitty, her mouth drawn into a thoughtful frown. “Huh. As far as projects go, a quiver of arrows is a shitload easier. Or a decorated shield.”
“Another woman warrior’s a lot more satisfying, though,” said Lindsey, and Kitty felt a weird burning in her throat that could have been either hope or vomit.
“Wait, what?” Steve said. He looked at Lindsey and Jessicka, then at Kitty, and then he made a protective gesture on his chest, exaggerated enough to be ironic. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”
Lindsey ignored him entirely, except for a dismissive gesture, keeping her eyes on Kitty. “Well. If you still want this kind of work, maybe we could help you a bit. Teach you fighting, see if Morrissey’ll take you on with the rest of us.”
“Oh, you get to be the one to talk to Morrissey,” Steve said. “He already thinks I’m a few slices short of a loaf.”
“That’s because you are, said Jessicka irritably.
“Hey!” said Lindsey sharply. “Give the girl a chance to answer. What do you say, Kitty? Do you still think you’d want it?” Though her voice was still sharp, her smile was hesitant, as if she didn’t know how she wanted Kitty to answer.
Kitty didn’t share her hesitation. “Yes,” she said, before a yawn split her face. She could barely keep her eyes open. “You think we could maybe start tomorrow, though?”
“Of course you can,” Jill said firmly. “No one can expect you to fight anymore today. Cassadee,” she added, “will Kitty be needed in setting up camp tonight?”
Cassadee still looked a little surprised, Kitty thought. “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, I’ll tell Patti about what happened. She won’t mind. We’ll probably need her to help with the nursing tomorrow, though.”
That was fine. Kitty had had to do more than one rotation in the infirmary back when she was still Sister Jennifer. Heh, imagine Sister Michele’s face if she saw Kitty now, getting ready to be a woman warrior, just like Moon Maiden. Imagine Mother Phyllis’ face if she heard Kitty thinking about Moon Maiden. Of course, if Mother Phyllis could hear her thinking, that’d make Mother Phyllis magic. Heh.
“I think she’s crossed over,” said Steve. “She’s got that goofy look.”
“She can sleep here tonight,” said Jill. “Anyone who has done the work she has today should not have to get up and go set up a tent, not while I am here and have a spare trundle bed with no one to use it.”
Lindsey nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said, and for just a second she and Jill looked startlingly alike. “She needs a rest.”
Gentle hands washed the blood from her face and hair and laid her in a soft box, making her feel like a pampered kitten. She was too far gone with exhaustion to figure out whose hands they were.
The few days that followed were a flurry of activity, and there was no time for Kitty to begin training with Lindsey and Jessicka. Repairs had to be done to a number of the merchants’ wagons, and there were fewer hands than usual to help with the repairs, since two had died and needed to be buried, some dozen were wounded, and half of the women were busy nursing them in the absence of a real healer. And throughout all the repairs and the nursing and the reassuring of spooked merchants, everyone still had to eat, clothes still got dirty—more so than usual, in fact—and there still had to be at least some people ready to fight in case they were hit with a second wave of brigands.
After that, though—well, after that, everything changed.
Lindsey and Jessicka, she discovered, trained most mornings while it was barely even light out and whenever they had a spare hour, since they had to be the sharpest and the strongest at all times to be accepted by the rest of the warriors. Lindsey was a soldier’s daughter, with a thousand drills for building upper-body strength and mastering control of a sword; Jessicka came from a family of fletchers, and knew how to shoot as well as anyone Kitty had ever seen or heard of. And for some reason, they—and occasionally Jimmy and Steve, who seemed unbelievably easy with the idea of adding a third woman warrior to the army, once they got over their laughter—were willing to train Kitty, to teach her everything they knew.
Convincing Morrissey was a good deal more difficult—the man hadn’t particularly wanted to take on Lindsey or Jessicka, Steve told her, but he’d had to, with more than half his force killed by Parian pirates. Now, though, they were more than sixty men strong, even with the two who’d been killed in the brigands’ raid, and Morrissey wasn’t likely to see the need to hire someone as a warrior when he’d been accustomed to giving her dirty laundry and criticism of her cooking.
The only way to do it, Lindsey told her firmly, was to do the job and do it well, before he’d even decided to pay her for it. And so for a torturous few weeks, she spent her mornings drilling, her afternoons cooking meals and scrubbing clothing, and her evenings riding patrols (and not just with Lindsey and Jessicka and Steve and Jimmy—the boss would never take her seriously if the other men didn’t, they said, and so Kitty had to ride around with Jersey and Mike and their friends on a borrowed carthorse, trying to look alert and fierce.) She had never been so tired in her life, and not even the promise of sex with Lindsey could keep her awake past sunset.
Finally, one day, just as the weather was changing from spring’s moist warmth to summer’s parching heat, Morrissey said to her over a breakfast fire, “Well, pay’s fifteen silvers a month, and if you drop your weapon and start crying in the first battle, I’ll drop you back down to laundry wench faster than you can spit.”
It wasn’t a very encouraging speech, but she got an advance on her pay, and with a little help from her friends, she had enough to buy a dark gray mare too young and frisky for plowing from a local farmer. She was a bit wild, especially for a rider without much experience, but she was a good horse for the money. Kitty called her Pearl.
Jimmy clapped her on the back when she rode Pearl back into camp, and Lindsey and Jessicka both congratulated her, but her reception around the camp followers’ fire was…well…
“I guess you think you’re too good for us now,” Norah said bluntly. “Fifteen silvers a month and all.”
Kitty stared at her in shock. Norah was quiet, but she and Kitty had always gotten along well. She would have expected an opening like that from Swati, the sharpness of whose tongue didn’t really have anything to do with how much she liked you or not, or from Tanya, who said what she thought and damn the consequences, but coming from Norah it hit like a kick in the gut. “Of course I don’t think that,” she said. “Why would I?”
“Yeah, why would you?” asked Jenny. “And while we’re at it, why would you want to hang around us doing women’s work when you can be a character in a Moon Maiden story?” She made a face, her nose wrinkling like she smelled something unpleasant.
Kitty was hurt, the sting all the sharper because she hadn’t seen it coming. “You never said anything like that about Lindsey or Jessicka.”
“’Cause they weren’t ever one of us,” Cassadee said solemnly, one corner of her mouth turned down.
And suddenly Kitty could see the hurt in her eyes, in the faces of all her friends as they looked at her around the fire, and she thought, it’s easy to leave when you don’t like the people or the life you’re leaving. When no one’s going to miss you.
She didn’t know if anything she could say would convince them that she admired them just as much now as she had when Patti had given her the job—more, now that she knew them and had washed out all her stupid notions of what being a camp follower said about your character. That she loved them. Whether she could fit all that into words or not, she had to try. “Cassadee,” she said, “I had three sisters. Not Sisters of Order, but my actual sisters. You knew that, right?”
Cassadee nodded, confused.
“Well, maybe you don’t know that if I had to choose between all three of them and you, I’d choose you any day of the week.” She looked around the fire, meeting each set of eyes one by one. “Any of you. I don’t know how you feel about me, but as for me, well, you’ve all been so good to me, better than my blood ever was, you’re like family to me, and that’s not going to change just ‘cause I got a raise and a different work schedule.”
Cassadee smiled at that, a sunny one with all her teeth. Swati rolled her eyes but grinned a little, and Jenny put her chin in her hands and looked thoughtfully at Kitty, her eyes warm. Even Norah smiled a bit, just a little tugging at the corners of her mouth.
Kitty knew then that it was going to be all right.
Part 5
Part 2
Part 3
Kitty slept with Lindsey three more times on the road to Kor. Every time, Cassadee peered at her the next morning with concern, her gaze as intense as if she were trying to spy into Kitty’s heart. Every time, Kitty thought that that heart was a little more whole. She was Kitty. She liked women, and that included having sex with them. Lindsey liked both men and women, and she slept with both of them—with Kitty, with Jessicka, with Patti, with Jimmy, with soldiers Kitty didn’t know. She was all right with this, and she felt, deep in her heart, that the Giver must have been all right with it, too, or she wouldn’t feel so happy about it.
Maybe she was supposed to feel like a scorned girl in a tale--all heartbroken, as Cassadee seemed to expect, or like she’d been corrupted by the loss of her chastity. It was hard to muster up any kind of shame, though, when the camp followers treated her more like one of them every day, when Lindsey and Jessicka swung companionable arms over her shoulders sometimes and talked about adventures they’d had, when even the leers and remarks of the less respectable men ceased to make her blush, and she talked with Jimmy and Steve and Jersey and Mike as easily as she would with any woman. She didn’t even know if Mother Phyllis would recognize her as Sister Jennifer, and she didn’t care either way. Even her anger was different—it had mostly gone away.
By the time they reached Kor, spring was in full bloom, and Kitty’d gotten better at mending and cooking than she’d been even at the Order. Somehow, it was more satisfying to work when you got paid and you liked the people you worked with. She hadn’t brought up her dream of being a fighter like Lindsey or Jessicka again. It had never seemed like the right time. Especially when she was with Lindsey. Anyway, she was in no hurry. It felt like she had all the time in the world.
Kor was much as Cassadee had described it: full of people, like the people you saw in towns everywhere, full of big buildings and paved streets and markets full of shouting vendors hawking their wares. Nothing you wouldn’t expect from a city, and yet, after ten years of nothing but the Order of Order, Kitty wanted to drink in every sight so deeply she would never forget any of them.
Patti laughed at her. “It won’t seem so shiny and new in a few years, mark my words,” she said.
“It’s not shiny and new now,” said Cassadee, but she still looked excited. “Come on, Patti, no one needs us for anything now! Can’t we go to the market and see what they have?”
Patti sighed, sounding long-suffering, but Kitty wasn’t fooled these days. Patti loved all of the women who worked under her, like a mother maybe, or an older sister. Maybe one day, Kitty hoped, she would love Kitty that way, too. She’d had a couple of mothers now, but she liked Patti better than both of them put together. “Come here,” said Patti to Cassadee, but when Cassadee hopped down and walked over to Patti’s cart, Patti looked at Kitty with a quizzical expression.
“What are you waiting for, Sister? A Queen’s Summons?”
Kitty walked over, not knowing precisely what to expect, and she was completely surprised when Patti reached out her hands and put one silver piece in Kitty’s hand and one in Cassadee’s. “Don’t think you’re so special,” she says. “Everyone gets a bit of coin—the prices on bread and milk were good back in that last village, so we’ve a little extra. And don’t spend it all on something silly!”
“We won’t,” Cassadee assured her, but Kitty just closed her hand around the coin. Three months ago, money wouldn’t have meant a thing to her—she wasn’t allowed to go anywhere to buy anything, and if she had bought anything, she wouldn’t have been allowed to keep it, and if she’d bought something Mother Phyllis didn’t approve of, she probably would have been punished for it, too. There was something wonderful to be said for holding a coin in your hand and knowing that whatever you bought with it was yours.
“Thank you,” she said as sincerely as she could to Patti, and Patti waved her thanks away with a dismissive gesture.
“Eh,” she said. “Everyone needs a day off every now and then.”
Kitty and Cassadee walked to the market hand in hand, the sun warm on their hair and on their faces, and Kitty felt as light-hearted and giddy as a child.
“What kind of job do you think we’ll get?” she asked. They had been travelling to town so long, it was easy to forget that they’d be travelling right back up as soon as they had a merchant caravan to guard. Easy to forget if you weren’t Kitty, anyway.
Cassadee shrugged, not looking terribly interested. “Whoever it is, we probably won’t get to see much of them. ‘Specially if they’ve got women traveling with them. For some reason, the wives tend to turn their noses up at us."
Kitty thought about how her mother would have reacted if she’d been in a wagon train with a group of rough, rowdy women, some of whom slept with multiple men and some of whom slept with women and all of whom drank and cursed and worshipped commoner gods, and thought, Yes, they do tend to do that.
“The men’ll probably leave us alone, though,” said Cassadee as if this were a bright side. “Merchant men are usually more interested in their stuff than in getting laid.”
“Where do you think we’ll go?” asked Kitty. She refused to let her spirits be dampened by Cassadee’s matter-of-fact manner.
“Hmm,” Cassadee said. “Probably north again. I hope south, though. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we got to go to the coast? I hear it’s beautiful. If you squint real hard from Blue Point, they say you can see a little bit of Par.”
“Which island?” Kitty had learned all 386 of them like the back of her hand once upon a time, when the nunnery had gotten a commission to copy an atlas.
Cassadee looked at her, a little confused. “I don’t know. The big one?”
Perhaps changing the subject was in order. “So what kind of things do they have in the marketplace here?”
This was a subject closer to Cassadee’s heart. “Oh, everything,” she said effusively. “Cloth from Kolfa—and you wouldn’t believe the cloth they’ve got there, light as anything and wears like iron—all kinds of treats, pastries and such, fresh fruit, buttons and needles and every color of thread you ever wanted—and if I remember right, there’s a man here with a booth makes a cheese pie you’ll be thinking about for the rest of your life.”
Kitty let Cassadee’s chatter fill up her head as she tried to picture the market.
The reality of it was so much bigger than she could ever have guessed. Hundreds of booths, literally hundreds, people everywhere, a thousand tantalizing snatches of bright color and mouth-watering smells every direction you turned.
Kitty stood at the Kolfa cloth booth with Cassadee for a while, admiring the textures and colors, but what she really wanted to do was wander. Cassadee saw this as soon as Kitty had thought it, and waved her away with a smile. “Go on, then, I’ll meet up with you later. If you get lost, just look for the clock tower! There’s a fountain underneath it—we can meet there when we’re done.”
The problem, thought Kitty, wasn’t going to be getting lost. The problem was going to be dragging herself back to the army’s train at the end of the day. Everything she’d ever wanted, surely it could be found here. A stand outside a blacksmith’s, selling armor and knives and nails—a fletcher’s, with so many arrows bristling with feathers that it seemed his little booth might take flight—a weaver with thick, warm-looking blankets in rich colors—flowers of every kind imaginable. Before she even knew what she was about, she’d spent the silver coin Patti had given her and two from her secret store on a small, well-used crossbow and a quiver of bolts. She hadn’t told the vendor who she was buying them for, and he hadn’t asked.
She spent another few coppers on a couple of the marvelous cheese pies Cassadee had mentioned, and if they weren’t good enough for her to remember the rest of her life, she certainly would think about them wistfully and longingly for many nights to come. She’d already spent more than she had meant to at this point, but when she saw a shoemaker hawking his wares, she couldn’t stop herself from buying a pair of tall, well-made boots. They would serve her a lot better in the camp than her old worn shoes did. In exchange for her old nun’s habit and another small handful of coppers from her store, she bought a pair of trousers and a shirt. The women of the camp thought nothing of trading skirts for trousers, so neither would she. Besides she needed more than the one worn dress to wear—it was getting rather shabby.
And then—a bookshop.
Kitty paused. She didn’t have the money for a book. It was ridiculous. And when would she have time to read it, anyway? And still she drew closer to the bookshop before she could persuade herself away from it.
The man behind the counter looked up at her, then back down at the book he was reading with a snort of disgust. She couldn’t blame him. She was sure she didn’t exactly exude an ability to pay for her purchases.
Whatever. She wasn’t here to buy, anyway, she was here to look, and rot the man if he thought she was there to steal or damage the books. After so long in the copyroom at the Order, Kitty thought she knew pretty well how to handle a book.
She didn’t even bother looking at the illuminated ones near the shop window. That was the sort you sold houses to buy—even her father wouldn’t have the money for one of them, or at least, he wouldn’t spend the money on it unless he really thought a particular book would enhance his reputation. Instead, she wondered over to the back of the store, where the odds and ends were kept. Half a dozen versions of the Book of Rule, she noticed, bound in various anthologies in order to fit your level of literacy or your profession. A fat volume of ancient Briopian verse, its cover torn; a green-bound book that, on closer examination, turned out to be a flowery, embellished form of the disgusting story Jimmy had told that first storytelling night, and—ah, what was this?
The bland brown cover had nothing on it. The text was small, and whichever scribe had copied the book out clearly hadn’t intended for it to be sold to the general public, because it was full of scribal abbreviations and all the words were run together. If Kitty hadn’t produced quite a few of those manuscripts herself, she wouldn’t have been able to read it. But she could read it, and she only had to read a few pages before she realized: it was a book of fairy stories. Well, some of them were about fairies. Others were about selkies, werewolves, unicorns, gods and goddesses Kitty had never heard of who presided over rivers and mountains and lakes. One was about tree spirits.
Kitty felt a cold prickle across the back of her neck and carefully set the book back where she had found it. “How much is this?” she called lightly to the owner.
Looking profoundly irritated, he bustled over towards her. “How much is what?” he snapped.
She tried her best to imitate her mother’s face when insulted by a lesser tradesman and said, “I’ll wager you don’t get much return business with an attitude like that.”
The man scowled, as if he suspected Kitty was trying somehow to trick him. “Just what is it you’d like to buy?”
She gestured grandly to the nondescript little book. “I thought that one might be interesting.”
Still scowling, the man picked up the book and glanced at a few of the pages. His expression slackened in surprise and not a little uneasiness, and he looked from Kitty to the book and then back again. “You want…this book?” At Kitty’s nod, he added doubtfully, “Can you read it?”
“Of course I can read it,” said Kitty scornfully. “Now, how much is it, and quick, before I take my purse elsewhere.” My empty, empty purse, she thought.
The man gave her a measuring look. “I don’t hold for this kind of thing. It must have ended up in some odds and ends batch by mistake.” Kitty wanted to ask him just what it was he didn’t hold for, but he didn’t seem to be done. “Now. If you want it, I can let you have it for…six coppers.”
Kitty was surprised at how low the price was, but she tried not to show it. She was down to her last few silvers, and there was no sense in wasting any more money than she was already doing. As much as she hated it sometimes, she was a merchant’s daughter. “That’s a laugh,” she said, and made as if to leave.
“Wait,” the man said. “Four. Take it for four. But you didn’t get it here.”
“As if I’d brag about setting foot in this place,” said Kitty, but she handed over the coppers and tucked the book into her bag. The man watched as she walked out, a beady-eyed, nervous look. A strange, unpleasant man, Kitty thought.
By the time she made it to the fountain, Cassadee was tapping her feet impatiently. “Come on, Kitty!” she said. “Don’t you want to see the merchants?” Apparently Cassadee’s disinterest in their new employers lasted only as long as said employers were abstractions; as people, they were as interesting as anyone.
To Kitty’s surprise, there was more than one company of merchants waiting with the camp while their heads finished negotiations with Morrissey. “That’s pretty usual,” Cassadee assured her. “A lot of the time the little ones will find a big one and pay to travel under their protection. Safety in numbers, you know?”
The “big one” this time was a Kolfan thread merchant who’d spent the last two years trying to sell thread and cloth to the Parians. He hadn’t had much luck, so he was heading back north. If Kitty were the Parians, she didn’t think she’d trade with him either; he had a sour kind of sneer, which made him look like the kind of person who didn’t like much of anyone. He certainly dressed nicely, though. It wasn’t much of a consolation to Cassadee, who really had let her hopes get up for a summer in the south.
The “little ones,” Norah told them in a hushed whisper, were, in order of size, a well-to-do grain merchant bringing early crops from the south coast up to Briopia, three money-changing brothers and their entourage, a little knot of Guild craftsmen who built musical instruments, and a Parian spice merchant. “And the best part is,” Norah said, “the spice merchant is a woman.”
So she was—a heavy, dark, woman named Jill Scott with a constant, unimpeachable businesslike expression belied only somewhat by the determined jut of her chin. From the moment Kitty laid eyes on her, she was certain that Madam Scott was like no merchant she had ever known, and as they started off up along the Central Road, she was proven right.
Where Kitty’s father and his business associates showed only enough interest in their own wares to know their quality and to sell them, Madam Scott knew every inch of the simple but beautiful, well-built covered wagon that housed her spices. She knew what plant each came from and what that plant looked like, she knew what spices suited each dish and what spices would make you sick if you mixed them and which ones would cure your cold if you put them in your soup. She knew how long to grind them if you wanted big flakes of spice flecking your bread and how long to grind them if you wanted a fine powder as soft as the Queen’s flour.
Where her father and his friends bragged of their acquaintances among the nobility and the things they acquired with their wealth, Madam Scott neither responded to boasts nor made any of her own. She spoke of the people she knew as friends, or at least as business associates, and if they gifted her with bushels of fine crocuses for saffron or rich lands, she certainly didn’t talk about it as far as Kitty could tell.
Which brought her to another thing. Kitty’s father wouldn’t have been caught dead talking with the guards he hired to protect his caravan, except maybe their chief. Madam ate around the fire with Kitty and Cassadee and Patti and the rest of the women almost every night, offering spices to perk up the food and telling stories about her adventures on the seas any time she was asked.
As if all of that weren’t strange enough, Madam Scott also practiced magic. Not huge, frightening things, calling storms from the sky or making things burst into flames, but little charms, figures drawn into the corks of her spice jars to keep them from breaking and their contents from rot.
“Isn’t that….” Swati was never especially sharp with Madam Scott, but her eyes were suspicious, and she exchanged an anxious look with Tanya.
“Isn’t what?” Madam Scott looked up from tracing a pattern onto a glass label jar with a small charred stick from the fire. Apparently, she said, that spell kept moisture out of the jars.
Swati gestured. “Isn’t all that…magic…fairy stuff? You know, evil?”
Madam Scott raised an eyebrow. “Magic is no more ‘fairy stuff’ than the rain or the sun.” She returned to her careful tracing. “You know,” she said casually, “there are many things which are neither good nor evil in themselves, but become good and evil depending on who uses them and why. Is a sword good or bad? Or fire?” She shrugged almost imperceptibly. “These aren’t the kind of questions that have right or wrong answers.”
“Whatever you say, Madam Scott,” said Swati, looking at her with uncertainty mixed with a kind of respect that had nothing to do with the other woman’s wealth or merchant status.
Madam Scott sighed and asked, “For pity’s sake, what would it take for you to call me Jill?”
Cassadee, who adored her, said that she still didn’t like women that way, but she might make an exception for Madam Scott—Jill, she corrected, starry-eyed. Kitty could understand that.
Interestingly, Jill never seemed to talk with Lindsey and Jessicka. Not in a cruel way, or as if she didn’t like them—she just didn’t seek them out the way she did the others. Lindsey and Jessicka, for their part, were quiet when Jill sat around the fire with them, watching her with a kind of hesitant curiosity. It made things awkward, a little, and it seemed to Kitty that she didn’t see them as often as she had before. She didn’t mind too much, though—they were still friendly with her, and now, when she wasn’t working, she had conversations with Jill to pass the time.
“Those two women,” she said softly to Kitty one day. “They’re warriors, correct?”
Kitty knew Jill already knew that—she couldn’t not—but she said, “Correct.” And then, though she’d never actually seen them fight anyone but some of their fellow soldiers when they got drunk and handsy, she said, “They’re very good.” It wasn’t a totally uninformed guess, Kitty figured, since Morrissey wouldn’t have hired them if they weren’t.
“Hmm,” Jill said. “It must be lonely, with only two of them.”
“They aren’t lonely!” Cassadee protested. “They’ve got Jimmy and Steve, and they’ve got us.”
“Of course.” Jill nodded calmly. “And I’m sure you’re a good friend to them, as they are to you. But it is so strange, the things that are considered men’s work and women’s work here, and I’ve found it very uncomfortable, sometimes, to be a woman in a job where people expect a man.”
“Are there women warriors in Par?” asked Kitty curiously.
Jill gave Kitty a quizzical look. “There are women everything in Par,” she said. Kitty would have asked more, fascinated by the bald statement, but suddenly there was shouting from the front of the caravan.
“To the wagons!” came Morrissey’s booming voice, and a flurry of arrows flew over Jill and Cassadee and Kitty to land in the dirt behind them.
“Oh, horsefucking rat spit,” said Cassadee, and she grabbed Kitty’s hand even as Jill ushered them into her covered wagon and locked its door behind them.
“Can you tell who it is?” asked Jill. Outside, a man screamed in pain, and Cassadee winced.
“I don’t--” she started. “It’s hard to tell. Brigands, probably.” She shrugged. “They’ll probably leave us alone. I mean, we’re in the littlest wagon here.”
Jill frowned. “Hmm. I wish I could tell whether they were clever brigands or stupid ones.”
What an odd thing to say when they were being shot at by strange men. “Why’s that?” asked Kitty.
“Because if they’re stupid,” Jill said, “they will run right past us and go for that ostentatious jackass with the expensive cloth panels on his wagon. If, however, they’re clever enough to take a deep breath and smell the spices here, they’ll realize that what I have in this little cart is worth more than the rest of the caravan put together.”
Kitty couldn’t help but stare. Fuck, fuck, Jill was right. If the brigands had half a brain, they’d realize that Jill’s wares were more expensive by the ounce than many a lord could afford. If Kitty’d had half a brain when she tasted the dishes Jill had seasoned, she would have realized it for herself.
“Giver have mercy,” she said, involuntarily reaching for the charm around her neck. Cassadee put a brave face on, but clearly she was frightened, and even Jill looked worried under her calm front. They were probably all thinking the same thing, thought Kitty. Three women alone, in a wagon full of expensive spices, unarmed….
A horse shrieked in agony outside, and Cassadee bit her lip and closed her eyes.
Well, piss on this, thought Kitty suddenly. She wasn’t unarmed. She still had the dagger she carried everywhere. She had her wits about her. And they had Jill’s cart.
“Madam Scott,” she said. Jill. Whoops. Worry about it later. “You have spices here to make people’s eyes burn, right?”
Jill raised her head, looking at Kitty approvingly. “I do. Cheap ones, even,” she added, sounding more merchantlike than Kitty had ever heard her.
“Well, all right then.” Kitty took a quick look around the wagon. Her eyes lighted on a wobbling wooden structure in the corner. “How fond are you of that rocking chair?”
“My mother can make me another one.” Jill stood, suddenly seeming so big that she could crush any brigand under her foot, and walked over to the rocking chair. “Here, Kitty,” she said, “help me.” Together, they picked the thing up and smashed it against the back wall of the wagon, once, twice, until its joints gave under the pressure and they could detach the runners on which it rocked. Each was as long as Kitty’s leg and as heavy as a bow. They’d work well as weapons.
Jill and Kitty each took a runner, and they hefted them in their hands, testing the weight and taking a few practice swings. Jill’s eyes met Kitty’s, and they shared a brief smile, but there wasn’t the time to congratulate themselves yet—the sound of the fighting seemed closer, louder, and Kitty felt a familiar thrill of tense fear in her chest. “They’re getting closer,” she said to Jill.
Jill nodded, her eyes on the wagon’s door. “Come here, Cassadee,” she said. Cassadee still looked scared enough to faint, but at least she’d mustered the courage to adopt a stubborn expression quite reminiscent of Jill’s and to stand up to walk over to her. “Here,” said Jill, handing her a little pot of something red. “Be careful, since there isn’t much in there. But even a little bit will have a man clawing at his eyes as if he would tear them out.” Cassadee took the pot, staring dubiously at it. She looked frighteningly young.
Kitty put an arm around her shoulder. “Hey, come on,” she said. “You’re the battle expert here. What do you and the others usually do?”
Cassadee shrugged uncomfortably. “They usually happen so fast I don’t have time to think about it. I hitch a ride with Patti or Swati and Thao or somebody and we all ride out to the outskirts of the battle. Couple of the women have bows, and we pick off the brigands as they ride toward the rest.”
“Well, all right,” said Kitty. “Think of it this way—this wagon’s not that big. They can only come at us one or two at a time, so just think of it as picking them off from here.”
“It’s not really the same when they’re right there,” Cassadee protested, but she seemed at least a little less frightened, so Kitty considered it a victory.
Outside, the sounds of battle were so close and loud that Kitty could pick out voices she knew, and she peeked out the tiny glass window in the corner of the caravan to see Jersey and Mike dodging arrows and slashing fiercely out at a masked bandit on a skinny black horse. She turned away from the window and tried to make her face as expressionless as possible. Cassadee didn’t need one more thing to worry about.
For what felt like eternity but was probably only a matter of minutes, they huddled in the wagon, listening to the progress of the fight and trying to judge how it went. “Perhaps,” Jill said under her breath, “these are stupid brigands, after all.”
Even as she finished speaking, something crashed against the left wall of the wagon—probably a man’s head, judging by the groan that slid down to the ground—and a rough voice called, “Shit! Let’s see what we can get in this one. Gotta be something, right?”
“Well done, Jill,” said Kitty with a glare, forgetting for a moment that she technically worked for her. Everyone knew you turned good fortune bad by commenting on it. Even Mother Phyllis had known that, for pity’s sake.
“You and your ridiculous superstitions,” muttered Jill, tightening her grip on her chair runner.
Kitty ignored her. Timing was everything in matters like this, and nothing good could come of being caught unawares at the wrong moment. She gripped her own runner, reached quickly to her belt to confirm that her knife was ready, and kept her eyes on the trembling door. Her heart was beating so hard, the corners of her vision throbbed, but her mind was as focused as it had ever been.
Jill’s wagon was well-made, every inch of it, and the door stood strong after a handful of assaults. The lock, however, was less sturdy. One of the brigands had clearly had the foresight to bring an axe or something strong enough to break it completely free of the door, and with a sickening crack, a bulky man pushed his way through.
She didn’t wait for Cassadee’s scream, or for the man’s own quick smile to turn into a smirk. She struck, as hard as she could. The man staggered back, clutching at his head, and she hit him again while two more men squeezed around him into the wagon.
Cassadee, evidently recovered from her fright moved quickly. She shouted, “Kitty, watch your eyes,” but Kitty didn’t need the warning to recognize the swift motion of Cassadee’s hand as she flung a red cloud of powder into the men’s eyes.
They shrieked in pain. Kitty met Jill’s eyes in an instant, and they moved as one—Jill hit the one on the left, her strike as solid as if she were chopping wood, and as he fell back, she pushed him out the door with her chair runner. Kitty, meanwhile, hit the other one with all her strength, and he fell to the floor.
The other brigands hesitated now, on the brink between anger and surprise, and Kitty took advantage of their uncertainty to slam the broken door on the man who stood on the threshold, smashing his fingers. With a roar of rage, he pulled the door aside, and two others behind him ripped it completely from its hinges, one of them shouting, “Here, men! It’s spices!”
Kitty struck the man holding the door a solid blow to his stomach, and while he bent over, bellowing in pain, Jill knocked him back so hard that he fell off the doorstep and onto the ground.
Having taken heart from the other women’s success, Cassadee seemed to have found her own courage, and she began to hurl things out of the door, barely missing Kitty and Jill in the process: heavy iron cooking pans, empty glass jars, a small table. Few of her missiles found targets, but they made the brigands around the door scatter back to avoid being hit, and Kitty shot the girl a quick smile.
One of the brigands, a tall, broad man with a nose that looked as if it had been broken a time or two, looked up from one of Cassadee’s shattered jars and glared at them with a rage that chilled some corner of Kitty’s heart.
“Fucking bitches,” the man said, drawing his sword as he stepped around his comrades, both standing and fallen. “I’m gonna gut you like the pigs you are.”
Jill swung her chair runner threateningly, and Cassadee chucked another jar at him. He ducked easily, his lip raised in a snarl, and Cassadee fell back, her boldness temporarily frozen. He continued to stalk towards them, his gaze single-minded and hateful.
Kitty had no idea what possessed her—only a vague notion of catching him off guard. Without thinking too much about it, she darted out the door, dodging the swings and the grasping hands of the men around her, and pulled her knife from her belt. The big man was startled for only a moment by her motion before the rage returned, and he swung his sword, but she was too fast for him. In one clean motion, she raised her knife and slashed at the man’s throat. Warm blood sprayed over her.
He swung again, weaker, and his comrades closed in around her, but their eyes were wide with horror, not anger.
“See if he guts anything,” said a familiar voice, and Kitty looked up to see Lindsey, atop Susan, her dappled gray mare, her sword drawn and already a rusty dark red with blood. Jessicka and Steve were flanking her, Jessicka with a loaded crossbow and Steve with a heavy war axe.
Time seemed to speed up, then: Jessicka shot a crossbow bolt into the man closest to Kitty, Lindsey urged Susan into the midst of the crowd of men, and suddenly they were all running, some jumping on horses, some just running until Kitty couldn’t see them anymore. Kitty just stood there, the blood cooling sticky on her face, while the man she had killed swayed and dropped his sword and fell where he stood.
The battle was over, then. The soldiers had fought the brigands off, and from the cheers coming from some of the men, Kitty imagined that they’d won without too much loss of property or life. That was good, she thought. If you were going to fight, it was best to win.
Somewhere, at some point, Jill came out of the wagon to wrap a blanket around Kitty’s shoulder and usher her back inside, as gentle as if she were Kitty’s mother. Inside, Cassadee smiled shakily at her, and Kitty found the calm to smile back, glad that all the fear was gone from Cassadee’s face now. “You were fantastic,” she said.
“Well, not like you,” said Cassadee. “Ocean Son, Kitty, where’d you learn how to fight?”
“Good question.”
It was Jessicka, standing in the gaping doorway with Steve and Lindsey by her side and looking down at Kitty with a cool, appraising gaze. “I’m guessing you didn’t learn that at the nunnery.” Her voice was dry, and something in it ruffled Kitty’s feathers the wrong way.
“You’d guess wrong, then,” she said, her voice sounding defiant to her own ears. It was the kind of retort that would have gotten her slapped back at the Order.
“What?” Steve said disbelievingly. “You joking me? That’s what those rich fancy nuns spend their time doing? Fighting?” Lindsey raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Well. No.” Kitty looked down, feeling suddenly disgusting, the dried blood itchy on her cheeks and in her eyebrows.
Cassadee reached out to grasp Kitty’s hand. “Come on,” she said softly. “I mean, you protected me. You and Jill,” she added, casting a grateful look in Jill’s direction. “Nobody’s angry or anything, we’re just confused.”
“Come on,” Lindsey echoed. “Let’s have the whole story.”
Perhaps it was the word “story” that set her off. “Do you know why I left the nunnery?”
Steve shrugged. Jessicka asked, “Didn’t you say all the other girls there were, I don’t know, duchesses and countesses or some shit, and you were just some merchant’s daughter and no one liked you?”
Kitty had to laugh at the bluntness. “Yeah. That’s all true. But that’s not why I left when I did. I left because the Mother of Order asked me to leave.”
“Yeah?” asked Steve, and Lindsey made a beckoning gesture, as if of encouragement. Jill leaned up against the wall of the wagon, watching Kitty with curious eyes.
“She asked me to leave, because….” She sighed. “All right. The thing about the Order is, there aren’t any men there, and it’s far away from any kind of town bigger than a handful of families. There’s not much by way of money there—some rich clothes, maybe, because a duchess can’t look like a pauper even when she’s a nun, and whatever else the Sisters sneak in, but it’s not some treasure hoard. People don’t always understand that, though—they think that since it’s full of women from rich families, that it must be full of terribly valuable things.”
She sighed. “Mostly, we get the kind of thieves who try to sneak in, and the cook chases them out with her rolling pin or the Mother of Order shames them into going away. But sometimes, there are groups of men who don’t care about the Giver’s curse and don’t mind braving stone walls. Ten years before my father sent me there, a group of twenty men broke in. They didn’t find any money, and they were so angry that they killed the Sister in charge of the storerooms. The King hanged them all along the side of the road as a warning but….” She shrugged.
“When the warning bell rang, we were all supposed to go hide in the cellar. There’s a secret room there—Mother Phyllis had it put in after the last attack. But I was out in the barn doing punishment work, and by the time I made it to the main building, they’d already knocked down the gates and were marching around, looking for…I don’t know. A pile of gold, or something.
Now, the thing about living in one place for so long—especially when you don’t get to go anywhere else—is that you know it like the back of your hand. At first, I just thought that I could find myself a good hiding place without leading them to the others in the cellar. But then I thought—from everything I heard, the brigands had totally torn the Order apart the last time—they’d ripped up the beds, torn open bags of feed and left them to rot, set things on fire, things like that. And I thought, ‘Why just let them do it?’”
“Why indeed?” asked Jill softly. Lindsey, Jessicka and Steve just stared at Kitty as if she was a riddle they couldn’t solve.
“And so….” Kitty shrugged. “It wasn’t really fighting at first, so much as knowing my territory. I lured a pair of them into the storeroom and locked them in. One of them investigated the kitchen by himself—I hid in the pantry and then hit him in the head with a pan, then I locked him in the pantry. That was how it went—I picked them off one by one, until they realized that they were losing men. Then…well, then it got harder. They got more alert, and they got angry.”
“What did you do?” Lindsey asked.
Kitty looked at her hands, remembering. “Then…then I thought I couldn’t do any more by myself, and I went to the others in the cellar, to get help.”
Steve snorted. “Yeah. Bet they were a great help.”
“You don’t understand,” Kitty said, feeling strangely defensive. “When you’re devoted to rules and order like that…I don’t know how many times Mother Phyllis told me, ‘You can’t expect to make order in the world if you can’t even order yourself.’ In the Book of Rule, there’s not a single woman who ever lifts a hand in violence. Not even in self-defense. That’s men’s work. I got Sister Sarah to sneak out and ride to the village for help, and I thought that was a pretty big accomplishment.”
“Fair enough,” said Jessicka, elbowing Steve in the side.
“The only problem was, trying to convince them to chase the men off—well, I did just what I was trying not to do, and drew the men to the cellar.”
“Shit,” breathed Cassadee.
“Right,” said Kitty. “I could hear them coming, yelling and ranting and cursing, and the rest of the Sisters were practically frightened out of their wits. Except for Mother Phyllis, who was pissed at me for leading the men to them. It wasn’t going to do any good to try and get them back into the secret room. Now, the stairs down to the cellar were rickety—they were very old, and no one went down into the cellar if they didn’t have to, it was so musty and dark down there, so they weren’t in good repair.
I didn’t have time to think too much about it, so I grabbed an old shovel from the corner and hit at one of the steps until it broke, right down the middle, and then I knocked both of the pieces down into the cellar. The other Sisters were burning a lamp, so I blew it out, and the room was completely dark.”
Lindsey began to smile. “They tripped in the dark, right? They couldn’t see the missing stair.”
Kitty met her eyes and returned the smile as best she could. “Right. And as they fell, I shoved them into the secret room. It was dark, but it was easy enough to tell the Sisters from the brigands in the dark, so if anyone tried to hit me, I hit him with the shovel and dragged him in. It was so much easier than I thought it’d be--it felt as natural as anything. Even after I locked them in and I realized that I’d left one outside—he’d hit his head when he fell, so he wasn’t fighting or anything—it didn’t frighten me. I just tied him up, and the rest of the Order and I went upstairs for Sister Sarah.
She brought the Queen’s Army, by the way, a whole squad of them. But by that point, there wasn’t much left for them to do. And then, well, by that point, as Mother Phyllis said, it was abundantly clear to everyone that I was no true Sister of Order.”
“Wait,” said Cassadee indignantly. “You saved them from brigands, men who might have done I don’t even know what, and they just kicked you out?”
She sounded as angry about it as Kitty had been at the time. But now, here, safe in Jill’s wagon, the injustice of it seemed unimportant, and she could look back on it with a calmer eye. “They already had problems with me,” she said. “I wasn’t neat enough, I wasn’t that obedient, and apparently I wasn’t as peaceful as one usually wants in a nunnery—it was never the right place for me. I’m glad they did it. I might not have had the courage to leave on my own.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jessicka said. “It seems to me that if there’s anything you’re lacking, it’s not courage.”
“No shit,” said Lindsey, and Steve nodded in agreement. There was silence for a long stretch. Kitty caught her breath and scratched dried blood off her face. The Order seemed like a lifetime ago, and her story seemed like just that to her—a story, about someone else, some other girl in some other not-quite-real time. It was hard to believe she’d ever been that angry, confused girl.
“Hey.” Lindsey’s voice broke in on her thoughts. “Those bandits back at the nunnery, did you kill any of them?”
“No.” Not that that had convinced Mother Phyllis of her inner feminine compassion or whatever.
“Well, you sure as shit killed that fellow whose throat you slit.” Lindsey’s eyes were so intense that Kitty almost felt their gaze as a physical pressure. “You all right with that?”
She shouldn’t be. Every life had a purpose under the Giver’s Rule, and to interfere with that was not only to violate her own place in the Rule but to stop someone else from fulfilling whatever the Giver had intended for them.
But what of Cassadee’s purpose? Or Jill’s? The Giver couldn’t look at their lives and say that they were worth less that of a man who had threatened to gut them like pigs, just for protecting Jill’s property. Maybe she shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t have killed him, but it had happened so fast, and the wagon was here, safe, with Cassadee and Jill unharmed, and in the grand scheme of the Rule, that couldn’t be so terribly wrong. ‘Repay a kindness with a kindness, and an injustice with justice,’ right? She couldn’t remember who’d told her that, but it sounded fair enough to her at that particular moment. I’m fine,” she said. “You’re safe, I’m safe, everyone’s safe and sound.” Something terrible occurred to her and she asked, “Everyone’s safe and sound, right?”
Lindsey grinned crookedly. “Sure. Patti knows how to get those that need it out of danger. Last I saw, Jenny and Tanya and Thao were gathering up their nursing stuff to help out the wounded, and all the rest were helping them.”
Kitty breathed a sigh of relief and leaned against Cassadee, who wrapped a comforting arm around her.
“My wagon has certainly seen better days,” said Jill with a sigh. “I hope your leader doesn’t expect full payment for guard services. Just because my rig is small doesn’t mean I should have to protect it myself.” She gingerly picked up a shard of broken glass from Cassadee’s spice jar and put it down with another sigh.
Kitty pulled her head out of Cassadee’s shoulder and said weakly, “We can help you clean it up,” though she hoped Jill didn’t need it cleaned in the near future. She didn’t feel up to much of anything at the moment.
“No sense in doing anything now,” Jill said. “Not while there are people who need fixing.”
Lindsey didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to the conversation, but she was still looking at Kitty with a curiously intense gaze. “Hey,” she said. “Didn’t you tell me and Jessicka once you wanted to be a fighter?”
What? The excitement of battle had worn off, taking any wits Kitty had used to tell her story along with it. She was exhausted and a little fuzzy, as if she’d just woken up from a deep sleep. “Yeah. Why?”
Jessicka gave Lindsey a sharp look before looking searchingly at Kitty, her mouth drawn into a thoughtful frown. “Huh. As far as projects go, a quiver of arrows is a shitload easier. Or a decorated shield.”
“Another woman warrior’s a lot more satisfying, though,” said Lindsey, and Kitty felt a weird burning in her throat that could have been either hope or vomit.
“Wait, what?” Steve said. He looked at Lindsey and Jessicka, then at Kitty, and then he made a protective gesture on his chest, exaggerated enough to be ironic. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”
Lindsey ignored him entirely, except for a dismissive gesture, keeping her eyes on Kitty. “Well. If you still want this kind of work, maybe we could help you a bit. Teach you fighting, see if Morrissey’ll take you on with the rest of us.”
“Oh, you get to be the one to talk to Morrissey,” Steve said. “He already thinks I’m a few slices short of a loaf.”
“That’s because you are, said Jessicka irritably.
“Hey!” said Lindsey sharply. “Give the girl a chance to answer. What do you say, Kitty? Do you still think you’d want it?” Though her voice was still sharp, her smile was hesitant, as if she didn’t know how she wanted Kitty to answer.
Kitty didn’t share her hesitation. “Yes,” she said, before a yawn split her face. She could barely keep her eyes open. “You think we could maybe start tomorrow, though?”
“Of course you can,” Jill said firmly. “No one can expect you to fight anymore today. Cassadee,” she added, “will Kitty be needed in setting up camp tonight?”
Cassadee still looked a little surprised, Kitty thought. “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, I’ll tell Patti about what happened. She won’t mind. We’ll probably need her to help with the nursing tomorrow, though.”
That was fine. Kitty had had to do more than one rotation in the infirmary back when she was still Sister Jennifer. Heh, imagine Sister Michele’s face if she saw Kitty now, getting ready to be a woman warrior, just like Moon Maiden. Imagine Mother Phyllis’ face if she heard Kitty thinking about Moon Maiden. Of course, if Mother Phyllis could hear her thinking, that’d make Mother Phyllis magic. Heh.
“I think she’s crossed over,” said Steve. “She’s got that goofy look.”
“She can sleep here tonight,” said Jill. “Anyone who has done the work she has today should not have to get up and go set up a tent, not while I am here and have a spare trundle bed with no one to use it.”
Lindsey nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said, and for just a second she and Jill looked startlingly alike. “She needs a rest.”
Gentle hands washed the blood from her face and hair and laid her in a soft box, making her feel like a pampered kitten. She was too far gone with exhaustion to figure out whose hands they were.
The few days that followed were a flurry of activity, and there was no time for Kitty to begin training with Lindsey and Jessicka. Repairs had to be done to a number of the merchants’ wagons, and there were fewer hands than usual to help with the repairs, since two had died and needed to be buried, some dozen were wounded, and half of the women were busy nursing them in the absence of a real healer. And throughout all the repairs and the nursing and the reassuring of spooked merchants, everyone still had to eat, clothes still got dirty—more so than usual, in fact—and there still had to be at least some people ready to fight in case they were hit with a second wave of brigands.
After that, though—well, after that, everything changed.
Lindsey and Jessicka, she discovered, trained most mornings while it was barely even light out and whenever they had a spare hour, since they had to be the sharpest and the strongest at all times to be accepted by the rest of the warriors. Lindsey was a soldier’s daughter, with a thousand drills for building upper-body strength and mastering control of a sword; Jessicka came from a family of fletchers, and knew how to shoot as well as anyone Kitty had ever seen or heard of. And for some reason, they—and occasionally Jimmy and Steve, who seemed unbelievably easy with the idea of adding a third woman warrior to the army, once they got over their laughter—were willing to train Kitty, to teach her everything they knew.
Convincing Morrissey was a good deal more difficult—the man hadn’t particularly wanted to take on Lindsey or Jessicka, Steve told her, but he’d had to, with more than half his force killed by Parian pirates. Now, though, they were more than sixty men strong, even with the two who’d been killed in the brigands’ raid, and Morrissey wasn’t likely to see the need to hire someone as a warrior when he’d been accustomed to giving her dirty laundry and criticism of her cooking.
The only way to do it, Lindsey told her firmly, was to do the job and do it well, before he’d even decided to pay her for it. And so for a torturous few weeks, she spent her mornings drilling, her afternoons cooking meals and scrubbing clothing, and her evenings riding patrols (and not just with Lindsey and Jessicka and Steve and Jimmy—the boss would never take her seriously if the other men didn’t, they said, and so Kitty had to ride around with Jersey and Mike and their friends on a borrowed carthorse, trying to look alert and fierce.) She had never been so tired in her life, and not even the promise of sex with Lindsey could keep her awake past sunset.
Finally, one day, just as the weather was changing from spring’s moist warmth to summer’s parching heat, Morrissey said to her over a breakfast fire, “Well, pay’s fifteen silvers a month, and if you drop your weapon and start crying in the first battle, I’ll drop you back down to laundry wench faster than you can spit.”
It wasn’t a very encouraging speech, but she got an advance on her pay, and with a little help from her friends, she had enough to buy a dark gray mare too young and frisky for plowing from a local farmer. She was a bit wild, especially for a rider without much experience, but she was a good horse for the money. Kitty called her Pearl.
Jimmy clapped her on the back when she rode Pearl back into camp, and Lindsey and Jessicka both congratulated her, but her reception around the camp followers’ fire was…well…
“I guess you think you’re too good for us now,” Norah said bluntly. “Fifteen silvers a month and all.”
Kitty stared at her in shock. Norah was quiet, but she and Kitty had always gotten along well. She would have expected an opening like that from Swati, the sharpness of whose tongue didn’t really have anything to do with how much she liked you or not, or from Tanya, who said what she thought and damn the consequences, but coming from Norah it hit like a kick in the gut. “Of course I don’t think that,” she said. “Why would I?”
“Yeah, why would you?” asked Jenny. “And while we’re at it, why would you want to hang around us doing women’s work when you can be a character in a Moon Maiden story?” She made a face, her nose wrinkling like she smelled something unpleasant.
Kitty was hurt, the sting all the sharper because she hadn’t seen it coming. “You never said anything like that about Lindsey or Jessicka.”
“’Cause they weren’t ever one of us,” Cassadee said solemnly, one corner of her mouth turned down.
And suddenly Kitty could see the hurt in her eyes, in the faces of all her friends as they looked at her around the fire, and she thought, it’s easy to leave when you don’t like the people or the life you’re leaving. When no one’s going to miss you.
She didn’t know if anything she could say would convince them that she admired them just as much now as she had when Patti had given her the job—more, now that she knew them and had washed out all her stupid notions of what being a camp follower said about your character. That she loved them. Whether she could fit all that into words or not, she had to try. “Cassadee,” she said, “I had three sisters. Not Sisters of Order, but my actual sisters. You knew that, right?”
Cassadee nodded, confused.
“Well, maybe you don’t know that if I had to choose between all three of them and you, I’d choose you any day of the week.” She looked around the fire, meeting each set of eyes one by one. “Any of you. I don’t know how you feel about me, but as for me, well, you’ve all been so good to me, better than my blood ever was, you’re like family to me, and that’s not going to change just ‘cause I got a raise and a different work schedule.”
Cassadee smiled at that, a sunny one with all her teeth. Swati rolled her eyes but grinned a little, and Jenny put her chin in her hands and looked thoughtfully at Kitty, her eyes warm. Even Norah smiled a bit, just a little tugging at the corners of her mouth.
Kitty knew then that it was going to be all right.
Part 5