When Women Were Warriors
Book I: The Warrior’s Path
Chapter 10: Hostage
All afternoon I wandered through the house feeling like a ghost. When I approached a group of the companions in the great hall, they turned to look at me, and for the span of a few heartbeats no one said a word. Then they all turned away and resumed their conversations, as if they hadn’t seen me at all. At last I took refuge in the companions’ loft. The handful of girls who were there when I arrived left soon afterward. I was glad to see them go. I felt less lonely by myself than among people who wouldn’t speak to me. Sparrow found me there.
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
I nodded.
“Why are you here alone?”
“No one seems to want to be around me.”
“They don’t know what to say to you,” she said. “They’ll get over it.” She sat down next to me and took my hand. “Are you afraid?”
“No.” I didn’t feel any fear. I didn’t feel much of anything.
“The Lady didn’t mean it. She only wanted to see what your warrior would do.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s what everyone is saying. The Lady set a clever trap. If Maara were guilty of treachery, why would she have been upset when the Lady made you her hostage? If anything she would have been relieved.”
“Why?”
“The Lady left her free. She could escape any time she likes and leave you to bear the consequences.”
“Oh,” I said. Somehow I didn’t find that reassuring.
“Now the Lady has one more reason to believe she told the truth, and now she also knows her weakness.”
“What’s that?”
“You,” she said. “You’re why she came back to Merin’s house.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Others think differently.”
I began to feel a little better. “What do you think?”
“I think there were many reasons for Maara to stay far, far away from Merin’s house.”
The warmth of Sparrow’s body was a comfort. I leaned against her, and she put her arm around my shoulders.
“All the same,” she said, “if I were you, I wouldn’t try the Lady’s patience.”
***
I found Maara in her room. She looked up at me when I came in, and her eyes opened wider in surprise when she saw that I had my bedding with me.
“May I stay with you?” I asked her.
She eyed me suspiciously. “Are you afraid I’ll run away again?”
That made me angry. “No,” I said. “Run away if you like.”
“Are you so quick to throw away your life?”
“No one here will hurt me.” I hoped it was true.
She looked away from me and said nothing.
“I’ll go if you’d rather be alone,” I said.
She didn’t speak or look at me. I waited for a few moments. Then I turned to leave.
“Stay,” she whispered.
While I made up my bed on the floor, I felt her watching me.
“Do you need anything?” I asked her.
“No.”
“Have you eaten?” It was well past suppertime.
“I’ve had enough,” she said.
I sat down on my bed. I couldn’t think of anything to say. For the first time I found the silence between us awkward.
“You shouldn’t have stood with me before the council,” she said.
I shrugged. It was too late to change what I’d done, even if I wanted to. I didn’t think I wanted to.
“You didn’t have to come back,” I said. “When I freed you from any obligation to me, I meant it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You told the council you came back because you owed me a life.”
“That’s not exactly what I told the council.”
“Oh.” I was too tired to think about it. “Why don’t people ever say what they mean?”
“Do you always say what you mean?”
“Of course I do.” Then I stopped to think it over. “At least I try to. I think I do.”
Her face softened, and a smile started in her eyes.
***
In the middle of the night, something woke me. It was so dark I couldn’t see Maara’s bed, but I didn’t think she was in it. The room felt empty. I rose and groped my way to the door, along the narrow hallway, and down the stairs. In the great hall, by the light of the embers glowing on the hearth, I found Maara sitting on the hearthstone.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer me. She looked at me with eyes that saw nothing. I recognized the look. She was ghostwalking. I knelt down beside her and put my hand on her shoulder.
“Wake up,” I said. I shook her a little.
Strong arms seized me and threw me backwards onto the floor. Before I had time even to cry out, I was lying on my back with my warrior’s hands around my throat. Darkness wrapped itself around my eyes. I struck out blindly, and my hand met something hard. I heard the breath go out of her. She let go, and the darkness lifted.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
She was sitting on the floor beside me, rubbing her jaw.
“You nearly choked the life out of me.”
“What?” Then she saw where we were.
“You were asleep,” I said. “You were ghostwalking.”
I struggled to sit up. I was dizzy, and my throat hurt.
“Ghostwalking?”
I nodded.
“How did you know?”
“You’ve done it before.”
“I have?”
“You did it once last summer.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You never woke up that time.”
“Oh,” she said.
She got to her feet and held out her hand to me, to help me up. She peered at me in the dim light. I still had one hand to my throat.
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
“I think so.”
My legs shook a little. I took hold of her arm, to steady myself. Then I remembered the companions’ loft at the far end of the hall. I glanced up and saw the silhouettes of several heads peering over the edge. I thought we’d been speaking too quietly to be overheard, but they must have heard the sounds of our struggle.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I said. “Quickly. Before someone thinks we’re trying to escape.”
“I’m hungry,” said Maara.
“I’ll get you something. Go on upstairs.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Fine,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Go,” I said.
At last she did as I told her. I lit a lamp with an ember from the hearth and went into the kitchen. There I found a pot of barley soup. I put some in a bowl and set it in the embers of the kitchen hearth to warm it.
While I waited, I thought of old Gnith and wondered if, in her long life, she had gained a little wisdom, because I had questions only the wise could answer. Her pallet lay by the ovens at the other end of the kitchen. When I approached her, I was glad to see that she was awake.
“Can I bring you something, Mother?” I asked her.
“Nice hot tea,” she said.
I brewed her a tea of chamomile. I helped her to sit up and put the bowl of tea into her hands. Then I sat down beside her.
“Who are you?” she asked me.
“I’m Tamras, Tamnet’s daughter.”
“I don’t know you.”
“No, Mother.”
“Did I know your mother?”
“She was here once, long ago,” I said.
Gnith peered into her bowl and stuck her finger in the tea, to see if it was too hot to drink.
“I have a question, Mother,” I said.
“Young ones full of questions,” she muttered. “Full of questions. Never listen to the answers.”
She sipped her tea.
“What is ghostwalking?” I asked.
“Ghostwalking?”
“Yes.”
“Just what it sounds like.”
“But it’s the living who walk.”
“Of course it is. The dead don’t walk. But maybe their spirits come to their beloveds in their sleep. Maybe they try to lure them into the shadows.”
“Do they ever succeed?”
“Sometimes.”
“Can anything be done?”
“Leave her be,” the old woman said. “Let the dead have her.”
Her words frightened me. “I can’t.”
“Then you need a binding spell.”
Although my mother was a healer, she had taught me nothing about spell casting. It was her opinion that such things go oftener wrong than right.
“I don’t know any binding spells, Mother.”
“Me neither,” said Gnith. She knit her brows. “Can’t be very hard.”
She took a long drink of tea. Some of it ran down her chin. She didn’t bother wiping it away.
“Tell you what,” she said.
“What?”
“Bind her to someone living.”
“Bind her?”
“Yes.”
“With what?”
“A rope. A bit of twine. Anything.”
“Tie her, do you mean?”
“Yes. Tie her. Tie her to the living. Someone she loves.”
“I don’t know if she loves anyone, Mother.”
“Tie her to someone who loves her then,” she said. “Can’t see it makes a difference.” She caught the doubt in my eyes and chuckled. “Someone doesn’t want the dead to have her. Someone must love her at least a little.”
Gnith yawned. She finished her tea, then set the bowl aside and lay back down on her pallet.
“My mother told me stories at bedtime,” she said.
She closed her eyes and smiled, as if she could hear her mother’s voice, as I sometimes heard in memory my own mother’s whispered good night.
Gnith opened her eyes and looked up at me. “Who are you?”
“Tamras,” I told her. Then I remembered something I’d been meaning to ask her. “Were there once only women warriors, Mother?”
“Don’t know.”
“Oh.” I started to get up.
“Makes sense,” she said.
“Why?”
“Who else should take a life? No man ever brought a child out of his body.”
Something about that explanation bothered me. “Do you mean that a woman may take a life because she can give life back?”
“No, no,” she said. “Think of a woman whose body has made a child. Who gave birth to it. Cradled and nursed it. Loved it. She will hold life dear differently than someone who has not.”
I wondered if once only mothers had been warriors.
***
While Maara was eating, I opened the chest beside her bed, took out several long strips of leather that I had cut for bootlaces, and began braiding them together. Maara watched me with curiosity. When I had a braided thong as long as I was tall, I made slipknots at each end. By the time she finished eating, the thong was ready. I slipped one loop over her hand and pulled it snug around her wrist.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“It’s a bad time for you to go wandering about,” I told her.
I put the other end around my own wrist and sat down on my bed to make sure the thong was long enough. Whether or not Gnith’s makeshift spell would stop Maara’s ghostwalking, at least it offered a practical solution. Now she couldn’t go anywhere without waking me up.
Maara seemed doubtful. “What if I take it off?”
“In your sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Can you think of something better?”
She tugged at the braided thong, to test its strength. Then she gave the slipknot another tug.
“Don’t pull it too tight,” I said.
I got up from my bed and sat down beside her. The loop was so tight that it had already marked the skin on the inside of her wrist. I loosened it.
“There. Leave it alone. It’s tight enough.”
“Tamras,” she said. It was the first time she had ever spoken my name, and the sound of it went through me like a knife. I wished I could see her face, but she was gazing down at the thong around her wrist.
“Yes?” I said.
“Be careful how you wake me up.”
“I will. Don’t worry.”
She looked up at me. Her eyes were fierce. She grasped my wrist with a grip so strong my hand went numb. “I mean it,” she said.
The lid of the chest stood open. She reached into it and took out a small bronze knife. It had a walnut handle, bound with copper bands. The dark wood was worn smooth, and the copper had weathered to a color that was neither green nor blue, a color more beautiful than either. She handed it to me.
“Keep this by you,” she said.
I thought she meant that I should use it if I needed to cut the thong. I set it down beside my bed.
As I lay in the darkness with the thong around my wrist, I believed I understood Gnith’s spell. The thong was more than long enough, but every time Maara moved, I felt it move with her. It kept me constantly aware of her, and if a person’s thoughts are with someone, how can she break away to go with someone else? When I slept, my warrior walked in my dreams, and in my dreams, the thong that bound us was not from wrist to wrist, but from heart to heart.
***
When I woke, the first grey light of dawn was sifting through the shutter. I lay still and listened to the household wake. A winch groaned as one of the kitchen servants drew water from the well. Outside, the shouts of goatherds, muffled by fog, mingled with the anxious bleating of the goats waiting to be milked. In the room next door, Namet let out a grunt as she hoisted herself up out of bed. I needed to use the privy. When I slipped the thong from around my wrist, instantly Maara was awake.
“What is it?” she said.
“Hush,” I told her. “Don’t get up. I’ll be right back.”
I slipped on my trousers and boots, and as an afterthought, gathered up a pile of our dirty clothes to take with me. Hostage or not, I still had chores to do. On my way to the privy, I stopped by the lean-to outside the kitchen that served as a laundry and put the clothes to soak. When I returned to her room, Maara, still in her sleeping shirt, was rummaging through her chest, looking for something to put on.
“What am I supposed to wear?” she asked.
“You might as well go downstairs like that. No one pays any attention to you anyway.”
“They would if I went down in my nightshirt. Maybe I could put my armor on over it.”
My mind made a picture of my warrior eating breakfast in that outlandish costume. I had to laugh, and she laughed with me.
Namet appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on?” she said.
The thought of telling her what we were laughing at made me laugh all the harder. Maara tried to achieve the look of dignity that was proper in the presence of an elder and failed. I collapsed on my bed and laughed until the tears rolled down my face. Namet began to laugh too, though she had no idea what we were laughing at. She shook her head at us and went back to her room.
Maara had no choice but to stay in her room until her clothes were clean and dry, so I went down to the kitchen, to bring her some breakfast. The porridge that morning looked grey and pasty and didn’t taste much better than it looked. A few bites of it were enough to satisfy my appetite. Then I filled a bowl for Maara. In one of the storage rooms I found baskets of dried fruit and a crock of honey. I stirred a few slices of apple and a handful of berries into the porridge and poured a thick layer of honey over it.
I brought Maara’s breakfast to her room. I was surprised to see Namet sitting at the foot of her bed. When she saw the bowl of porridge, she raised her eyebrows.
“No one ever brings me meals like that,” said Namet.
“Shall I get you something, Mother?”
“No, no, child. I’m going down to the kitchen in a minute.” She turned to Maara. “Let us get to know each other better, shall we?”
Maara nodded, and Namet got up and left us. I took her place at the foot of the bed.
“She was talking with you,” I said.
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she was sorry I felt unwelcome here.”
At that moment, Namet became dear to me.
***
While Maara ate her breakfast, I went back down to the laundry to wash our clothes and hang them up to dry. Then I took a pail of warm water and a cloth upstairs. As I expected, Maara’s face and hands were sticky with honey. She let me wash her hands, as docile as a child, but when I tried to wash her face, she recoiled from my touch and took the cloth away from me. She held the warm cloth to her face for a moment. When she took it away, I saw that she had a lump on her jaw where I had struck her the night before, and the skin below her eye had begun to bruise.
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I said.
“I’m all right.” She smiled. “Just don’t make a habit of it.” She reached out and touched the side of my neck. The skin felt tender. “Your friends will wonder what we’ve been doing to each other.”
Ordinarily I would have enjoyed her teasing, but today it only made me sad. I felt as if I were in mourning, and in a way I was. I was mourning everything I’d lost. I had felt safe in Merin’s house. Now that feeling was gone. I had felt safe with Maara. Now I didn’t know if she intended to stay in Merin’s house or if she meant to leave me again. I started to ask the question, then stopped myself, in case I wasn’t strong enough to hear the answer.
I took Maara’s bowl back to the kitchen and brought her some hot tea. Then I swept her room and took her blankets downstairs to air. Nothing else needed doing, but I was reluctant to go back upstairs. When I understood that I was avoiding talking with her, I returned to her room and sat down at the foot of her bed.
I had expected her to wait for me to speak. Instead she said, “How can I protect you?”
I tried to reassure her, as Sparrow had tried to reassure me. “No one here will hurt me,” I said. “I know you told the truth to the council. I trust you won’t run away. Even if you did, how could the Lady harm the daughter of her dearest friend?”
I hoped I sounded more convinced than I was. In spite of Sparrow’s reassurance, I was beginning to believe that the Lady was capable of almost anything.
“All the same,” Maara said, “if something should go wrong, I want you to stay close to me.”
A shiver of fear ran through me. “What could go wrong?”
“The worst thing would be a raid from the north. The northern tribes don’t always act together. Just because some of them plan to cross the river doesn’t mean that others won’t do what they’ve always done before. A raid on the northern farms is what everyone fears, and when people are afraid, they’ll do things they wouldn’t do if they took the time to think it over.”
She saw that she had frightened me.
“Or perhaps nothing will happen,” she said. “Perhaps the northerners will change their minds about crossing the river once they’re faced with actually doing it. The Lady will be unhappy that she sent her warriors out in winter weather for nothing, but she can’t accuse me of treachery.”
Although I feared the answer, I had to ask the question. I needed to know if it was safe to care for her again.
“When all this is over, will you stay in Merin’s house?”
“That may not be possible.”
“Then take me with you.”
I hadn’t intended to say it, though I had thought it more than once since the council meeting. Every time the thought came into my head, I pushed it away. It was too terrible to think about. It made me a traitor, as much to my own family as to the Lady. I had just asked for something that would cost me the only place the world would ever make for me.
“I can’t do that,” said Maara. “I won’t. It would be the worst thing for you to do.”
I was close to tears. I had frightened myself with my own boldness, but once I’d said it, I refused to take it back. “When can I choose what’s best for me to do?”
“When you can choose wisely.”
I clenched my teeth on my anger. “I would leave a household where I’m held as a hostage by those who should protect me. What’s so unwise in that?”
I had never heard my voice sound as it did then. My words were brittle with resentment.
Maara lost patience with me.
“Stop,” she said. “You have cause to be angry with the Lady, but don’t be so quick to throw away everything you have.”
At that moment I was aware only of my own grievances. I gave her my most sullen look. “I am a free woman. No one can force me to stay here.”
“The life of an exile is not the life of freedom you imagine.”
The meaning behind her words chilled me. “Are you an exile?”
“We’re not talking about me,” she said. But of course we were.
My fear and my resentment had kept my thoughts centered on myself. Now I considered her position and saw that it was much more difficult than mine. I started to tell her so, but she spoke first.
“If I can stay,” she said, “I will, if only to save you from your own foolishness.”
It was what I had wanted to hear her say, but I knew I was wrong to ask it or to try to keep her in Merin’s house against her will.
“No,” I said. “I won’t hold you to a promise you may regret.”
I wondered what I did have the right to ask of her. The only thing I thought of was that I had the right to hear the truth.
“I ask only that you tell me before you leave Merin’s house again.”
She shook her head, but before she could say no, I said, “I give you my word I won’t try to keep you here. I won’t follow you if you don’t want me to. And I won’t betray you.”
She considered that for a moment, then nodded.
“All right,” she said.
Copyright © Catherine M. Wilson
