Waiting to Begin, part 3

[tamcranver]

Part 1
Part 2



In the morning, she and Cassadee caught a ride on a cart with Swati and Thao. They were something of a wonder to Kitty—Thao talked a lot, and Swati spoke only rarely, and the few things she said sounded ironic and completely uninterested in continuing the conversation. And yet, it was clear that they got along like bread and butter. Kitty silently told herself to ask Cassadee about them later, when the wagons stopped to water the horses.

The mid-afternoon stop, however, found Cassadee talking to a short soldier in shabby equipment, Swati and Thao standing by the water watching the horses, and Kitty alone in the cart. She was seriously considering whether she wanted to wade in after the horses—after four days on the road, no sense of rebellion could quell her disgust at the sweat and grime she felt accumulating in her hair and armpits and everywhere else—when a voice said from somewhere behind her, “You’re new, aren’t you?”

Kitty looked over her shoulder to see a woman, slender and dark-haired and clad in a black tunic over worn but well-cared-for leather armor. She felt her heart rise in her throat. Surely this was Jessicka. Or possibly Lindsey. She hadn’t seen them well enough in the dark to know one from the other. “Yes,” she said, her mouth dry.

The woman smiled. “I’m Lindsey.” She drew her horse close to the cart, close enough to reach out and clasp Kitty’s hand.

“Kitty,” Kitty managed.

Lindsey looked behind her and called, “Jessicka!” Another unfamiliar woman emerged from a cluster of men and horses, leading a sturdy-looking brown mare. She raised a hand in friendly greeting as she drew near Lindsey and Kitty.

Jessicka was a bit bigger than Lindsey, but with the same kind of dark-haired prettiness. Kitty didn’t know what she was expecting warrior women to look like, but it wasn’t like this—Lindsey and Jessicka looked like they could’ve been Sisters of Order, or farmwives, or any other kind of woman you met every day. Normal, except for the armor, and the bows on their backs and swords at their sides.

Introductions quickly dispensed with, Jessicka asked, “So, Kitty, why’d you sign on with this group, anyway?”

Unable to think especially clearly, Kitty answered, “I, uh. I needed a job.”

“You did?” Lindsey sounded…not skeptical, not really. Maybe just interested. At Kitty’s questioning look, she said, “Just. You sound, well, rich. Like you’ve been to school. And Patti said something about you being in the Order of Order?” She waited for Kitty to nod in response and then said, “Isn’t that where the nobility send their daughters?”

It was, not that that had ever done Kitty any good. “What are you asking me?”

“I think,” said Jessicka, “what my friend here is trying to get at is, why would you need a job? Haven’t you got a father somewhere paying for your bread and bed?”

Kitty drew herself up straight, her nervousness forgotten. “Not that it’s any business of yours, but spending the rest of my life in a nunnery or getting married to some sixty-year-old merchant didn’t appeal to me, and those are the only options my father’s money would buy me.”

“Fair enough,” said Lindsey easily. “So what is it that you want to do? I mean, given every option, which would you take?”

It was easy enough to answer, now that the possibility was presented to her. “I want to do what you do,” she said firmly.

Jessicka laughed, and Lindsey peered at Kitty as if she couldn’t quite figure her out. “Huh,” she said finally. “Well. Good luck with that, then. It’s not an easy path, Giver knows.”

“Can you even fight?” asked Jessicka.

Before Kitty could answer, the booming voice of the army’s leader shouted out, and suddenly the cluster of horses and men was moving rapidly. Lindsey and Jessicka exchanged glances before Lindsey turned to say, “Well, we’ll see you around, Kitty,” and the two of them rode off.

They were as good as their word. Two days later, a weedy man with bad hair rode up alongside the wagon while Swati and Thao were helping mend a broken axel on Patty’s cart. “Hey,” he said, low, looking at Kitty from under his brows in what might have been flirtation but looked vaguely sinister.

“Hello,” said Kitty warily. The men so far (save Morrissey, who’d taken a moment to look Kitty over and tell her not to get pregnant and run off) had mostly ignored her, and she was just fine with that.

Cassadee wrinkled her nose at the man. “This here’s Kitty,” she said. “She’s new, and if you scare her off before she’s even gotten to see a battle, Morrissey’ll tear your balls off with his bare hands.”

“I’m not gonna scare her,” said the man, still with his voice low and trying for smoothness. Did he really think talking like that won women’s hearts? “Just wanted to say hello, welcome her to the camp.” He reached out from his horse to put a hand on Kitty’s knee.

She scooted away on the wagon’s bench, out from under his hand, and pulled her skirt down instinctively, though it already covered her legs. “Don’t,” she said.

The man narrowed his eyes. “What, are you shy or something?” He turned his eyes to Cassadee again. “Heard she used to be a nun?”

“That’s right,” said Cassadee, “so she’s not interested in your dirty hands on her.”

“If you weren’t such a bitch,” the man said, “maybe you could get yourself a real man instead of them beardless little pukes.”

“Well, Rob,” came another voice from behind, “if you weren’t such a horse’s ass, maybe you could get a girl to look at you twice, and you wouldn’t have to go around harassing people.”

Kitty, Cassadee, and Rob all turned to see Lindsey and Jessicka riding up, looking at Rob with smiles that seemed to hide something sharp. Lindsey must have been the one to speak, because Jessicka cast a brief glance at her and said, “But then, that’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma, isn’t it? If he wasn’t a horse’s ass, he wouldn’t think to harass girls into fucking him—and if he didn’t harass girls into fucking him, maybe he wouldn’t be such a horse’s ass.”

Rob scowled. “You rotting cows!” He didn’t seem to think much of his chances against the two women, though, or else he decided that giving Kitty a hard time wasn’t worth the trouble, because he jerked his horse’s head around and went trotting off into the midst of a cluster of men. A few of their heads turned, looking disgustedly at Lindsey and Jessicka, but they simply smiled serenely and fell into an easy pace alongside the wagon.

“Thanks,” said Cassadee.

“Ah,” said Lindsey with a casual wave of her hand, “it looked like you had it under control. We just don’t like Rob.”

“That fucking rat turd,” Jessicka added, spitting on the ground.

“You see?” Lindsey met Kitty’s eyes with a smile, and Kitty felt a stirring of some altogether unfamiliar feeling, her heartbeat racing and her face suddenly warm.

Over the next few days, no one bothered Kitty again, and she only saw Lindsey and Jessicka from a distance, much to her regret. One night a week or so after the incident with Rob, though, the camp having been pitched and supper cooking in Patti and Tanya’s huge pots, the circle around the fire that Cassadee drew Kitty to looked a bit different.

Some of the usual women—Cassadee, Thao, Swati, and Jenny—were there, but so were Lindsey and Jessicka, as well as four men that Kitty had seen about the camp but couldn’t name. One looked like a string bean with uncombed hair, and one looked like a brick wall with a rather sinister-looking beard; these two sat next to Lindsey and Jessicka and looked at Kitty with amusement. Two of them were little more than boys, one tall and skinny and one short and skinny; these two seemed to be friends with Cassadee and greeted her and Kitty earnestly.

Tanya arrived shortly after Kitty and Cassadee had sat down, carrying her own bowl of stew. She looked around the fire before declaring, “This is a regular party, isn’t it?”

“Oh, every day’s a party for me, honey,” said String Bean, who, if Lindsey and Jessicka were to be believed, was actually named Jimmy Urine. Kitty had a hard time believing they weren’t having a joke at her expense there.

“Well, you might have invited me,” Tanya said tartly. “I think I deserve a little entertainment, don’t you?”

Brick Wall—Steve--snorted. “What did you have in mind?”

Tanya settled onto a large, flat rock and settled back, holding her bowl close to her chest. “I say we go around the circle. Ten people, ten stories, and they’d better be good ones.” She grinned and added, “Starting with someone else, of course, since everyone else here has had a chance to eat.”

Everyone else settled into their seats—some smiling, some looking thoughtful, but everyone seemed to know what was going on but Kitty. She hadn’t the faintest idea what she would say when it was her turn. What kind of stories did they want? When she was a little girl, her parents had told her bedtime stories, and at the Order, Mother Phyllis had read a bit from the Book of Rule every night, but she didn’t think that either of those was the kind of story they had in mind.

Jenny, who was sitting next to Tanya, said, “Well, if no one else wants to start….” The rest of the people around the fire urged her on, and she began.

She had a funny voice, kind of quavering and vulnerable but also a little haunting, and it seemed to wrap around every word she spoke, making everything she said more frightening than it had any right to be. It was a story about a man who’d been raised by a witch, who enchanted him to look like a deer, and the woman he fell in love with. Kitty thought maybe her mother had told her a version of it when she was a child, but it wasn’t as dark as the way Jenny was telling it.

At the end, both the man/deer and his true love drowned in a river, and when Jenny’s voice died away, everyone else sat in silence for a long moment. Kitty felt as if all the air had been sucked out of her lungs, like someone had hit her in the stomach. What was there to say to something so sad?

Finally, Steve said, “Fuck a duck, that was depressing.”

“No shit,” said Jimmy. “Rot and ruin, Jenny, I thought this was supposed to be a party.”

“I liked it,” Jessicka said, but everyone made dismissive gestures at her.

Jenny shrugged, looking wholly unperturbed by the group’s criticism. “You don’t like it,” she said, “you tell a better one.”

“Well, fine.” Jimmy stood up, adjusted his trousers, and proceeded to tell the most disgusting, vulgar story Kitty had ever heard, about a baker and his wife and the truly astounding number of people they managed to cheat on each other with. Kitty found herself laughing from time to time, but she felt ashamed of herself every time.

Steve apparently felt no such qualms, and he applauded heartily when Jimmy was finished. He then told a silly story about a farm boy in the big city that had everyone breathless with laughter when he was done.

One by one, they told stories—a happy one about a girl who rescued her parents from a wicked band of fairies, a sad one about a pair of young lovers whose parents caught them at it and killed the young man, a ridiculous (but apparently true) one from Thao about the time she was mistaken for the mayor’s daughter in Indburgh. Finally, only Lindsey and Kitty were left.

Lindsey gestured to Kitty as if to say, “Go ahead,” and Kitty said, still desperately trying to think of a decent story, said, “Oh, no, you can go first.”

Lindsey laughed, said, “All right, then,” and pursed her lips as her eyes searched the sky, looking thoughtful. “Right, right,” she finally said. “I’ve got one. You know what we haven’t had much of tonight? Stories about the gods. And since we’ve got a former nun here and all….” Kitty felt herself blush. “…I’ve got a good one for her. The one about Moon Maiden and Atlanta.”

Kitty wondered if she was supposed to know who either of those people—if they were even people at all—were. Nobody else looked confused, although Jessicka, who was looking at Lindsey with what looked like exasperation, rolled her eyes. “Moon Maiden?” she asked hesitantly, hoping she sounded encouraging and not like she was criticizing Lindsey’s story choice or anything.

“Sure,” said Lindsey easily. “Moon Maiden’s always good for a story.” Swati and Cassadee and Tanya nodded in agreement. Kitty shrugged. It didn’t really matter anyway who Moon Maiden was—she could probably figure it out from the story.

Something seemed to occur to Lindsey, and she narrowed her eyes. “Wait,” she said, sounding incredulous. “You…you don’t know who Moon Maiden is?” Several around the fire made scoffing noises, but Lindsey didn’t move her eyes from Kitty’s.

Kitty had nothing to say, so she just shook her head.

“Wait,” Cassadee objected, “how is that even possible? You were a nun!”

Jenny shook her head. “Oh, she’s just fooling around. Of course she knows.”

All eyes were on Kitty now, and she wanted to hide herself under the log she was sitting on. “I really don’t,” she said. “Who’s Moon Maiden?”

“Only the Rule Giver’s daughter,” said Thao with wide eyes. “The goddess of the moon?”

Kitty felt the word blasphemy rise to her lips, but she forced it down. That was Mother Phyllis or Sister Michele talking, not her. Instead, she said, “The Rule Giver doesn’t have any daughters. Or a wife, for that matter. He’s the only god. That’s what they taught us at the Order of Order, anyway.”

“You fucking kidding?” asked Jimmy. Kitty shook her head, and he let out a loud breath.

“How weird,” said Cassadee, sounded fascinated. “You know, Jersey said they don’t hold with Moon Maiden down south, but I figured...Jersey, you tell it!” She poked the short man next to her.

Jersey shrugged and said, “Yeah, no, I hadn’t heard of Moon Maiden ‘till I went to Briopia. But we still have Lady Life and the River Son and the Ocean Son. And I guess we have a few folks who go for the Great Mother.” Kitty suppressed a noise of shock at that—talk of the Great Mother was going past blasphemy and into heresy. Happily, Jersey didn’t notice as he continued, “But nobody who thinks Rule Giver’s all alone up there. I’ve never heard of that.”

Kitty felt embarrassed and irritated—with herself, for not knowing what they were talking about; with them, for looking at her like that when she was the former nun, for Giver’s sake, so didn’t it stand to reason that maybe her way was the right one?; and with Mother Phyllis, for stamping so hard on anything blasphemous that now Kitty had no idea how ordinary, everyday people worshipped. Well, as ordinary and everyday as mercenary armies usually were.

She was about to excuse herself and tell everyone she was too tired to tell a story when Lindsey raised up her hand and cut off the chatter with a gesture. “Well,” she said, “Now I really have to tell this story. I think you’ll like it, Kitty—Moon Maiden’s just our sort of goddess.”

Our sort. Kitty remembered Cassadee’s words of a few days ago, wrapped her cloak more tightly around herself against the cold of the night, and settled in to listen to Lindsey’s tale.

The story started before life had ever sprung up on earth—Lindsey said she’d better start at the beginning, just to get Kitty and Jersey caught up. Rule Giver and Lady Life had married, a wedding that lit up all of heaven, and when their wedding night was over, they had had four children: River Son, Ocean Son, Sun Maiden, and Moon Maiden.

Three of the children were dutiful toward their parents, marrying and populating the earth. The fourth was Moon Maiden. She came out only at night, when no one but the wolves and the owls was around. She swore to her parents that she would never marry, and instead she devoted herself to everything that women weren’t supposed to do—she learned blacksmith’s work, she built great ships and sailed them onto the sea like a Parian pirate, she forged her own sword and taught herself to fight. But her favorite thing of all was to hunt, her maidens by her side.

She never felt lack or loneliness until she met Atlanta, the swift-footed daughter of the king of Llor. Atlanta had run into the forest to escape her suitors, and as soon as Moon Maiden saw her, her heart melted like snow in the sun and every bit of her burned with passionate love.

When Lindsey got to this part in the story, her voice grew low and her eyes as she looked at Kitty were dark over the fire. Kitty felt an uncomfortable warmth in the pit of her stomach. What a silly story, she thought. Who’d ever heard about two maidens falling in love? She shot a glance around the fire. Steve was listening with a kind of amused smile, as if he’d heard the story before; Thao and Swati were leaning up against each other, looking profoundly content; Cassadee and Jersey and her other boy, Mike, were leaning forward to listen interestedly. Nobody seemed terribly shocked or upset.

At first, Atlanta refused Moon Maiden as she had refused all her suitors, but the forest life suited her, and she stayed to hunt with Moon Maiden and her company. Before long, she realized that no matter how fast a woman runs, she can never outrun love once it has crept into her heart, and she and Moon Maiden lived as lovers live.

The Prince of Kolfa, however, could not give up on his quest to wed Atlanta and gain the throne of Llor, so one day, in the morning when Moon Maiden was sleeping, he grabbed Atlanta from her bower and forced her onto a ship, to sail to an island off the south coast of Kolfa where none could find them until he had made their marriage complete.

When Moon Maiden awoke and found Atlanta gone, she wept and screamed and moaned. The stars asked her what was wrong, and when she told them, they said, “Why, Moon Maiden, listen to the birds! Can’t you hear? They’ve been telling you who has taken her, and where.”

When Moon Maiden heard that Atlanta had been kidnapped, she screamed in rage and pulled at the tides until the Prince’s ship was dashed on the rocks. Atlanta, who had been waiting for a chance to escape, jumped off the sinking ships and ran over the waves, so swiftly that only the toes of her shoes got wet. She ran so fast that before Moon Maiden had had time to dry her tears, Atlanta was holding her in her arms and kissing the tears away. They spent the rest of Atlanta’s life roaming together in the woods, and when at last Atlanta’s life gave out, Moon Maiden went to beg her father for favor—the first and last time she ever did so—and put Atlanta in the night sky as the brightest star, so that they could always be together.

Kitty had been lulled by Lindsey’s voice into a superficial calm, but when the story ended and Lindsey looked at her once more with a funny smile playing about the corners of her lips, she felt the strange warmth in her stomach again.

“Hey,” said Lindsey softly, “it’s your turn now.”

Kitty blinked. She couldn’t think. She felt like she had dreamed this exact moment before, and every breath she took felt familiar. How could she possibly be expected to make up a story now?

So she didn’t. She told a story about a little girl, the daughter of rich merchants who had aspirations of nobility—a daughter who constantly disappointed her father and mother by making too much noise, by running too fast and dirtying her dresses, by playing with her older brother’s swords. When her parents threatened her by telling her she would never meet a suitable husband if she acted like that, she told them she didn’t want a husband, anyway. And so they had sent her north, to the nunnery where the wealthy and noble sent their daughters, in hopes that the propriety and clean habits of the highest ladies in the land would grind the wildness out of their girl. It didn’t work. The girl had never truly had a place among them, a commoner among nobles, a wild child among women devoted to order. Finally, she had left, to discover a world more strange and frightening than she had expected, and to find a place in it where maybe, in time, she could fit.

When she finished, there was a long silence, and then Tanya said with brisk cheer, “And you were afraid you couldn’t tell a story!” She stood up, brushed off her skirts, and put a hand on Kitty’s shoulder. “Well! I think time got away from us a bit!” She pointed to the sky, where the moon had already passed through quite a bit of its journey across the sky, and said, “I think Moon Maiden there is telling me to get some sleep. Good night, everyone!”

People drifted away from the fire in ones and twos then. Cassadee left with her fellows in tow, though not before sending Kitty a questioning look, as if to ask whether she was all right. The answer was far too complicated to put into words, so Kitty waved her off with a smile. Jimmy and Steve gave Kitty knowing smirks and traded some silent, secret joke with Jessicka and Lindsey before chasing each other into the night like a pair of small boys.

Finally, it was only Jessicka and Lindsey and Kitty. “So,” said Jessicka when Jimmy and Steve were out of earshot, “What did you think of your first Moon Maiden story, Kitty?”

“It was….” Kitty found her mouth was dry, and she swallowed and licked at her lips before trying again. “Well. I’ve never heard a story like that before. That’s the kind of story you’d have had to do a penance or two for at the Order of Order.”

The other two women grinned. “I have a feeling,” said Lindsey, “that we probably wouldn’t have fit in too well at the Order of Order.” Stretching her arms above her head, she yawned and leaned back, resting her elbows on the ground, before saying, “Moon Maiden’s kind of our patron goddess. Jessicka’s and mine, I mean, but maybe some of the other women’s around here, too. You can see why, can’t you, even if this is the first you’ve heard of her?”

Kitty could. Once the unfamiliarity of the idea wore off—this “multiple gods” idea was the sort of thing that could send Mother Phyllis off on a rant against heresy that would last for hours—she suspected that she, too, might easily become a devotee of Moon Maiden, if not an actual worshipper. Whether she was a true goddess or not, the idea of someone brave and strong enough to defy the Rulegiver and live happily outside his plan for her…well, it gave Kitty a thrilling kind of hope. Even in the divine realm, she wasn’t alone.

“I’ve got a whole bunch of stories about her, if you ever want another,” Lindsey said. There was something to her voice that made Kitty think she was asking a question, and not about stories, either.

She let out a breath slowly, feeling the strange kind of wild disbelief that she’d felt when she chopped off her hair and started down the road away from the nunnery. “I don’t know what you meant,” she said slowly. “Telling me that story.”

Lindsey tightened her mouth into a thoughtful frown, and Jessicka stood up. “This is where I leave,” she said with a wry twist to her mouth. “You’ll let me know how it turns out, Lindsey?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You going to bed?”

“Shit no,” Jessicka said with a grin. “I’m grabbing my bow and doing a little archery practice. Between you two and your stories, I’ve got some repressed energy to work off.”

Her smile at Lindsey as she left was mischievous; her smile at Kitty was warm and strangely understanding. It seemed that everyone knew more than she did. Kitty only hoped she would be let in on the secret soon.

As soon as Jessicka was no longer even an outline of shadow in the darkness, Lindsey sighed and said, “Why do you think I told it to you?”

Kitty shrugged. “To shock me, maybe? I never really thought of myself as sheltered, but I guess I must seem that way to you.”

Lindsey shook her head, looking distressed. “No, no. Well, maybe a bit of the last part. I just thought—well, I suppose you don’t hear a lot of the stories about nunneries.”

“What?” Kitty didn’t quite know what she’d expected Lindsey to talk about, but it certainly wasn’t stories about nunneries.

Lindsey gave Kitty an embarrassed little smile and said, “As you can imagine, you hear a lot of dirty stories in this kind of work. And in all the stories about nunneries, well, either a man is sneaking in to service all the nuns or, well, since it’s only girls and women in there….” She shrugged demonstratively. “They service themselves. Or each other.” She began a gesture with one hand before abandoning it and wincing. “I thought, well, maybe you’d never heard of Moon Maiden, but that didn’t mean you’d never heard of the other thing. The thing that women can do with other women.”

“Hmm,” said Kitty, thinking of about a hundred different things at once. Suddenly, everything she’d thought the world was seemed less real, and things she’d never let herself imagine took on a new kind of vivid color. “I haven’t, but take it a step further. Just because I’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean I’ve never thought of it.”

“What?” said Lindsey with a confused, disbelieving laugh.

It was Kitty’s turn to smile now, and she said, “I didn’t think of love at all, any kind of love, in the Order. I mean, there were pretty girls, lots of them, but they usually either thought I was beneath them because my father wasn’t the lord of such and such or the baron of so and so, or they were too devoted to the Rule to ever think about even leaving and getting married, much less….” She had run out of words to describe what she was thinking. “I don’t even know what I’m talking about. What would two women even do? Could you even call it sex?”

“Yes,” Lindsey said firmly. She seemed to have regained the confidence she’d lost before. “You could definitely call it sex.”

“It’s so weird, though,” said Kitty. “Do people actually do that?”

Some of the light went out of Lindsey’s eyes, and she said, “You know Thao and Swati?”

Surprised at the apparent change of subject, Kitty could only nod.

“Swati was with Morrissey’s band when I joined five years ago. Thao came a couple years back, and from the moment the two of them met, it was like….” She seemed to search for the right words. “It was like a story, where two people meet, and right away, they just know.” She drew a little closer to Kitty, her dark eyes solemn. “It’s not…well, you know, when your preacher comes to town to talk about the Rule and tell all the girls to get married before they start getting too lustful, he never mentions the kind of sex that doesn’t involve men at all. But it’s different here, you know. It’s not like living in one of those towns, and I’m guessing it’s not like your nunnery, either.”

“No, not really,” said Kitty. “So. Should I take it that all…this,” she asked with a gesture that she hoped encompassed Lindsey, the story, the lonely quiet of the fire in the night, and the whole conversation, “is meant to teach me about what it is like?”

“Maybe,” said Lindsey, her expression growing warmer again. “Would you like me to?”

Kitty thought about the Rule and purity and her family. And then she thought about the years she had spent, not knowing quite who she was but knowing that she’d never find out as long as she was stuck being Sister Jennifer. So fuck the Rule and purity and her family. “Yes,” she said. “I would.”

Lindsey’s tent was larger than Kitty’s, but filled with things like armor and horse gear and whetstones and, of all things, a couple of little pots of paint or dye and a piece of wood with the outlines of a face painted on it. Lindsey shoved all of them aside and beckoned Kitty inside.

“Do you want anything to drink?” Lindsey asked as she freed her hair from the plain black ribbon that tied it back. “It’s nothing fancy, but I have a couple flasks of wine somewhere around here.”

Why not? “All right,” said Kitty. “That’d be really…nice.”

“Well, all right then,” Lindsey said with a grin, digging around in a couple of packs until she pulled out a small glass flask, the wine inside so dark a red that it was almost black. Lindsey took a long, slow swig of it before handing it to Kitty.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask for some water—all the wine they drank at the Order was heavily watered down. But then, you didn’t leave your name and your family and maybe even your god behind just to be the same person you’d always been, so she accepted the flask and drank deeply.

It was more intense than she’d expected, sour and fruity and with an aftertaste that burned at the back of her throat. She coughed, and Lindsey laughed softly, taking the flask from her and setting it on top of a wooden crate in the corner of the tent. “Slow,” she said. “Just take it slow.” Kitty felt her cheeks burning in embarrassment, and she reached up to wipe her mouth, but Lindsey’s hand, warm and strong, reached out to grab hers.

“I can take care of that for you,” she said. Kitty wanted to laugh—it was as silly and obvious a line as any that the ridiculous characters in Jimmy’s story would use. Something in Lindsey’s eyes stopped her, though. In the dim light of the moon shining through the tent’s thin oiled canvas, there was a kind of vulnerability in the other woman’s expression. Kitty swallowed the laugh and nodded, waiting with a funny, light tingling through her whole body in anticipation of whatever Lindsey would do next.

She leaned forward. The hand that wasn’t grasping Kitty’s reached up to brush imaginary drops of wine from Kitty’s mouth, her fingers so light and soft that Kitty could almost convince herself that they never really touched her face.

“This is all right, Sister?” Lindsey asked, her voice low.

“Don’t call me that.” Kitty reached down into herself, into the core of wild bravery she knew was there, and pulled Lindsey closer to kiss her.

It was warm, and wet, and sour with wine—nothing like she had imagined when she was a child her older sisters had told her romantic tales. She waited for love to blossom in her heart, but felt only heat and excitement and a kind of recklessness. Was this what love felt like? She couldn’t be sure.

“Kitty,” Lindsey murmured, pulling her mouth away to breathe the word along Kitty’s cheek. Her hand moved, as soft as before but more certain, down from Kitty’s mouth down to her neck, lingering at the curve of her breast.

Kitty had touched herself there, but she’d never felt another’s hand give her that particular kind of pleasure, so she whispered, “Lindsey. Please…a little harder?”

A disbelieving puff of warm air tickled at the soft skin under Kitty’s ear, and the hand at her breast pinched. Kitty squirmed.

“No, no…,” she muttered, frustrated at the way words seemed to have suddenly abandoned her. “Firm?”

“Ah,” Lindsey breathed, and the pinching fingers loosened, her hand solidly cupping Kitty’s breasts, pressing gently as her fingers rubbed circles on Kitty’s breastbone.

Kitty sighed in pleasure. She wriggled her own hand from Lindsey’s grip and brought both hands up to the other woman’s face, to brush the sweaty hair from her forehead and smooth her fingers along the expanse of skin that seemed so open to exploration.

“What do you want?” Lindsey murmured.

Kitty couldn’t imagine, she couldn’t remember the hours she’d spent with her hand under the covers at the Order when everyone else had gone to sleep, she couldn’t think enough to remember her fantasies, which paled against the reality she found herself in. “I don’t know,” she said, and then, because she’d been raised to be polite, “What do you want?”

Lindsey laughed again, just an amused huff of air, and said, “Worry about it later. Let’s—my mouth? That sound good?”

From what Kitty’d seen of Lindsey’s mouth so far, it was wonderful, nothing better, so she nodded and felt the shape of the other woman’s smile against her face.

They stepped backwards, and Lindsey shifted her weight and pulled or something, and they were sinking awkwardly onto the bedroll. It was thicker than Kitty’s, probably because Lindsey hadn’t had to settle for whatever Patti could find. It was hard to muster much envy, though, when there was a woman pulling up Kitty’s dress so they could have sex.

They wrestled with the dress for a long moment. Kitty refused to lose her virginity with a worn dress covering her head blocking her vision, so she finally wriggled out of it completely and threw herself back into kissing Lindsey.

“Holy rotting Moon Maiden,” Lindsey breathed as Kitty’s mouth found her neck, “and here you had me thinking all those stories about nuns weren’t true!”

Kitty nipped at her for that, a feeble kind of punishment, and Lindsey grinned hungrily and pushed Kitty firmly down onto the bedroll, so that she was lying down and Lindsey was propped up on her elbows, hovering over her with her breasts hanging in front of Kitty’s face like some kind of never-before-seen but unimaginably tempting fruit. But then they vanished, hidden behind the curve of Lindsey’s neck and shoulders and her curtain of black hair as she lowered her head to press hard little kisses over Kitty’s own breasts, pausing every now and then to suck and nibble as if she liked the taste of Kitty’s skin. Kitty had never felt this particular kind of moist warm pleasure punctuated with tiny points of pain, and she felt warmth gathering between her legs, excitement curling in her belly.

Lindsey worked her way down Kitty’s body, every now and then lowering her own body so the soft, smooth skin of her breasts brushed against Kitty. Every inch of Kitty felt alive and awake, and no story had ever filled her with a greater desire to learn what would come next.

There was a funny kind of tickling as Lindsey blew a warm path of air down from Kitty’s navel, rustling the hair between her legs and making her feel like a cat being gently stroked in the wrong direction. And then—

Then there was an almost inconceivable heat as Lindsey’s tongue shot out, nimble and strong, to trace circles and firm lines over places where only Kitty’s fingers had ever been. Around her nubbin, over it, in between the wet folds of skin, and then in her opening, in and out again, not quickly but surely.

“Giver—preserve--” Kitty managed, but she couldn’t finish the prayer as Lindsey’s tongue pressed firmly on her nubbin while her finger—and when had she brought her hand down their—pressed into Kitty’s opening.

Lindsey chuckled, and Kitty felt the vibrations in a line of pleasure up her spine, so intense it almost hurt. “Lindsey….” she said.

“You like it?” Lindsey said, but she’d pulled her face away from Kitty’s crotch to say it, and Kitty whimpered.

“Don’t stop.”

“Oh, don’t worry.” Lindsey’s breath was panting, as if she herself was feeling a bit of the intensity running through Kitty’s bones, but her smile was confident and unshaking. “I’m not done yet.” And then she was over Kitty once again, her mouth sucking at Kitty’s right nipple while her fingers found her opening, two fingers, a third brushing against her nubbin, and something inside Kitty blazed bright for a moment, tightening, making even her toes curl with pleasure like an itch that needed scratching, and she thought maybe she shouted, or would have, if Lindsey’s mouth hadn’t moved up to cover hers.

And then everything loosened again, and the satisfaction was like a tangible thing, something that could be tasted and smelled and felt on the skin. “Oh,” said Lindsey, “oh,” and then Lindsey was moving, straddling one of Kitty’s thighs and moving herself, rubbing herself on Kitty.

“Are you…,” asked Kitty, clarity starting to return. “Should I….”

“My breasts,” Lindsey gasped. “Could you…could you just rub at them?” Kitty felt something warm and wet through Lindsey’s trousers as the other woman slid back and forth against her leg.

Unsure of what she was doing, Kitty leaned up a bit, propping herself on one elbow, and reached out with the other hand to caress one of Lindsey’s breasts, rubbing gently and firmly, as she rubbed her own belly when she had monthly-blood cramps. She felt awkward, unskilled, but Lindsey didn’t complain, breathing hard and short and bending her head, her unbound hair tickling along Kitty’s collarbones.

“Kitty,” she said harshly, “Kitty, I’m….” And her voice rose high at the end, like a muffled shriek, and she bit her fist while continuing to, well, hump Kitty’s leg.

She stopped after a moment, taking her fist from her mouth. “Well,” she said. “That was…how did you like it?”

Kitty felt unaccountably like a blushing maiden in a tale, despite what she had just done. She wanted to return the question, make some attempt to preserve her modesty, but looking at her own naked body, the sweating Lindsey still straddling her thigh, it seemed ridiculous. “I liked it. A lot.” It didn’t quite seem to cover everything, but it was all she could think of.

Lindsey’s face relaxed into a smile, and she wiped her face on her sleeve. “I’m glad. I thought you might.” She pushed herself to her feet with a slight grimace and stretched. “If you don’t mind staying the night….” She shot Kitty a quizzical look.

Kitty couldn’t even imagine wandering out again into the night now. “I don’t. I mean, I’d like to.”

Lindsey nodded. “Well, all right then,” she said. “Let me change into a night shirt, and I’ll get us a clean blanket.”

Kitty watched as Lindsey made her way over to a bundle of clothing, hoping to see the other woman naked, as exposed as she was. But somewhere in between making out the shape of the bundle and the way the white night shirt shone in the dark tent, even the half-reality of the scene seemed to lose its definition, and she fell into sleep before she’d even realized she was tired.

In the cold gray light of early morning, she awoke, stiffer than usual and with a funny taste in her mouth. She looked over to where Lindsey slept, sprawled out on her bedroll, and thought about waking her. But she couldn’t think of what she’d say if Lindsey were awake, and besides, it wasn’t like either of them had gotten too much sleep last night, so she just slipped out from under the blanket, slipped her dress back on over her head, and went back to her tent.

The morning was chilly, the grass covered in frost. The sun was up just enough to turn the sky in the east a pale pink, but not enough to feel warm or to dispel the stillness over the camp. The only noise was the fire crackling outside of Cassadee’s tent, which was next to Kitty’s. Cassadee was huddled over a small pot, stirring it with the long wooden spoon she kept hanging from her knapsack, but she looked up as Kitty approached.

“Where’d you go last night?” asked Cassadee with a frown. “Well, I mean, I know where you went, but you shouldn’t leave your tent all alone at night. You want someone to steal your stuff?”

“No.” Kitty shivered in the morning chill. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.” Cassadee searched her face. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I just….” She struggled to find the words. “All this time, I didn’t…it was like…” She sat down next to Cassadee, needing the warmth of the other girl’s friendship more than she needed the heat from the fire. “Have you ever felt like you didn’t really know yourself? Not all the way?”

“Not really,” said Cassadee matter-of-factly. “A troupe of actors used to come by my town, and I knew the first time I saw them that I sure as shit wasn’t going to live and die in that town. And I guess everything I ever needed to know about myself kind of came from that.” She was silent for a long moment and then said, “You never did it with a woman, huh?”

“Never did it with anyone,” Kitty mumbled. “I was in a nunnery, remember.”

“Oh,” said Cassadee. “Oh, Kitty. I get you, now.” She left the spoon standing straight up in the pot like a little flag and put an arm around Kitty. “Ratfuck of a way to find out.”

Kitty had let her head rest on Cassadee’s shoulder for a minute, but then she lifted it. “What do you mean?”

Cassadee shrugged her other shoulder. “Just, doing it with Lindsey’s not exactly like your first time in a love song, you know? I mean, I haven’t,” she said hurriedly. “I like men too much to do that kind of thing. But I hear stuff. She’s not interested in romance, Lindsey. She likes friendship, and she likes sex, but I don’t know if she really loves anyone, not like that.” She turned her head to look into Kitty’s eyes and said, mock-sternly but with a real seriousness underneath, “So don’t go falling in love with her, all right?”

How did you know if you were in love with someone, anyway? Everyone in the stories seemed to know without being told, but then, the only women who had sex in any of the stories Kitty had ever heard were married women or women who were foolish and got ravaged and then died when their virtue did. What would it mean to fall in love with someone you couldn’t ever marry?

Well, anyway. Kitty didn’t think she was in love. “I won’t,” she said, and she meant it. Cassadee squeezed her hand around Kitty’s shoulder once before letting go and standing up.

“Well,” she said. “Soon as I’m done with my breakfast, Patti and me are making oatmeal for everyone else. Wanna help?”

Kitty kind of wanted to go to sleep in her own tent for a while, or at least to lie on her bedroll and think about what she’d done that night, but Cassadee had been so kind to her all along, kinder than she’d ever had any reason to expect, and besides, Kitty was actually being paid to help. She accepted the bowl of oats that Cassadee handed her and ate. It was bland enough to be tasteless, but that wasn’t anything Kitty wasn’t used to. At least it was warm.

She half expected Lindsey to approach her at some point during the day—to tell her it wasn’t happening again, to ask her to spend another night in her tent, to tell her it was a mistake, just to ask how Kitty was. But she didn’t. She smiled sleepily at her over her bowl of oatmeal when Patti ladled it out to the men, and she waved cheerily at her from horseback while riding to the front of the party, but they didn’t speak at all. Kitty wondered if this was something she always did—found a new girl in the camp, told her a story about Moon Maiden, fucked her, and then acted as if it didn’t happen.

“I wouldn’t say always,” said Swati. Kitty hadn’t even realized she was speaking out loud, and her face flushed painfully with embarrassment. Swati raised a wry eyebrow at her from her seat in the cart, but didn’t comment. Instead, she said, “She and I used to fuck sometimes. Back before Thao and I. She’s a great person, Lindsey, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re looking for the Moon Maiden to your Atlanta, well, don’t bother, because she doesn’t take sex that seriously.”

“I don’t need her to take sex seriously,” said Kitty, although the idea of just having sex for fun shook her world almost as much as having sex with woman did. “I’d just like her to talk to me.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Thao. “She’s gonna talk to you. Just don’t expect, you know, romance.”

“I don’t.” She also didn’t expect Lindsey to stumble out of Jimmy’s tent the next morning, looking supremely satisfied. It seemed like the kind of thing that ought to have made her jealous, but instead, she was just confused. Sex was too new a thing for her—she was miles away from being able to contemplate sleeping with a woman one night and a man the next, much less actually do it.

Lindsey caught Kitty looking at her, and the relaxed, content expression tightened into something else. “Kitty,” she said, not hostile, but almost wary.

“Are you and Jimmy….” She thought about what she wanted to ask. “Are you going to get married? After you stop being guards?” Maybe Jimmy was the sort of man some of the others had told stories about last night, the kind who didn’t mind if his wife slept with other people. It might even be easier for him to accept if they were other women.

The question seemed to catch Lindsey off-guard. “No!” she said, as if the very notion was ridiculous. “Where’d you get an idea like that? Jimmy’s like my brother.”

Huh. Kitty had three brothers, and she’d never had sex with any of them, but then, there was clearly a lot about these things that she didn’t understand. “Okay,” she said, and she turned to leave.

Lindsey grabbed her by the arm before she could go. “Wait, Kitty,” she said. “Look. I didn’t mean to—it was just for fun. You understand that, right?”

“It wasn’t just fun for me,” Kitty said. Before Lindsey could say any of the things her alarmed expression promised, she cut her off and added, “Don’t worry. I’m not in love with you or anything. I’m grateful. I didn’t know women could do something like that, and now I do. And I want to do it again, and suddenly all these things I couldn’t figure out about myself make sense. So, thank you.”

Lindsey looked at the ground for a long moment. Then she mumbled, “Way to make me feel like shit.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” said Kitty honestly.

“That makes it even worse.”

There were times when Kitty didn’t like the new person she’d become in the last month or so. Didn’t trust her, didn’t know her. This was one of those times. She tried to walk away again, but Lindsey stopped her with a word. “Kitty,” she said. “I like you. I liked the other night, a lot. And if you wanted to do it again some time, I’d be happy to, it’s just….” She shrugged. “I’m not interested in settling down. I like sleeping around. I know you used to be a nun and everything, I’m not trying to shock you, but that’s just how it is. I don’t think I was made that way.”

Mother Phyllis would say that everyone was made to follow the Rule. That’s what the Rule meant—everyone was born to fulfill their roles as assigned by the Giver. Kitty believed that, too. She just didn’t think she and Mother Phyllis had ever agreed on just what that role was. If Kitty’s was to turn her back on her family and her life in order to become a camp follower and love women the way some of the younger Sisters of Order had talked about loving men, well, then, maybe Lindsey’s was to love everyone and no one, to fight like a beautiful, strong goddess who couldn’t be tied down by one girl. “Okay,” she said to Lindsey. “That’s okay.”

Lindsey smiled a little ruefully and said, “I’m glad you think so. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’m gonna sneak off to my tent and change into some real clothing.” She wasn’t in her trousers and leather armor, Kitty noticed for the first time. She was just wearing a plain white shift. It made her look less like Kitty’s mental picture of Moon Maiden and more like a woman.

“See you around,” she said, and Lindsey smiled and returned the farewell before striding off toward her tent, her clothes and boots in her arms and her feet bare but her step just as confident as if she were swinging a sword.


Part 4