Wind Rider's Oath

Chapter Nine

"That was delicious, Tala-as always," Kaeritha said with a deeply satisfied sigh. She laid her spoon neatly in the empty bowl of bread pudding and patted her flat stomach as she leaned back in her chair, smiling at the sturdy, middle-aged hradani woman who'd been sent along by Prince Bahnak as his son's housekeeper.

"I'm glad you enjoyed it, Milady," Tala said in a pronounced Navahkan accent. "It's always a pleasure to cook for someone who knows good food when she tastes it."

"Or devours it-in copious quantities," Brandark observed, eyeing the empty platters on the table.

"I didn't seem to notice you shirking your share of the devouring, Milord," Tala replied dryly.

"No, but there's more of me to maintain," Brandark replied with a grin, and Kaeritha grinned back at him. Brandark might be of less than average height for even a Bloody Sword hradani, but that still left him a good three inches taller than Kaeritha, and he was far more massively built.

"Aye," Bahzell agreed. "For a sawed-off runt of a hradani who's after sitting on his arse with a pen and a bit of parchment all day, you've a bit of meat on your bones, I suppose."

"I'll remember that the next time you need some obscure Sothōii text translated," Brandark assured him.

"Hush, now, Brandark!" the third person at the table scolded. Gharnal Uthmâgson was short for a Horse Stealer, but taller than Brandark and almost as massively built. Which still left him over a full foot shorter than his foster brother, Bahzell. "It's not so very nice of you to be pointing out as how the thin air up where Bahzell's after keeping his head keeps a man's brain from working. It's not as if it was after being his fault he can't be reading for himself."

He grinned at Brandark, without a trace of the vitriolic hatred for all Bloody Swords which had made him Brandark's bitter enemy when the smaller hradani first accompanied Bahzell to Hurgrum.

"Speaking of obscure Sothōii texts," Kaeritha said in the voice of an adult overlooking a children's squabble as a smiling Tala withdrew, "I wonder if you've come across a copy of the war maids' charter in your forays through Tellian's library, Brandark?"

"I haven't been looking for one," the Bloody Sword replied. "I've done a little research on the entire question of war maids since you and Tellian discussed them the other morning, but I've really only scratched the surface so far. I assume there's probably a copy of the charter and its amending documents somewhere, though. Would you like me to take a look for them?"

"I don't know." Kaeritha grimaced. "It's just that I've realized I'm really pretty appallingly ignorant where any detailed knowledge about the war maids is concerned. Tellian's suggestion that whatever I'm supposed to be dealing with concerns them may well be right, but my training in Sothōii jurisprudence is a bit shakier than my training in Axeman law. If I am supposed to be investigating the war maids' claims, it would probably be a good idea to know what their prerogatives are in the first place."

"I'm not so sure laying hands on a copy of their original charter would be enough to be telling you that," Bahzell put in. He leaned back in a chair which creaked alarmingly under his weight.

"Why not?" Kaeritha asked.

"The war maids aren't so very popular with most Sothōii," Bahzell said in a tone of deliberate understatement. "Not to be putting too fine point on it, there's those amongst the Sothōii who'd sooner see an invading hradani army in their lands than one of the war maids' free-towns."

"They're that unpopular?" Kaeritha looked surprised, and Bahzell shrugged.

"An invading army is likely to be burning their roofs over their heads, Kerry. But roofs can be rebuilt, when all's said. Rebuilding a way of life, now-that's after being just a mite harder."

"And that's exactly how your typical conservative Sothōii would see having a batch of war maids move in next door," Brandark agreed.

Kaeritha nodded in acknowledgment, yet there was still a baffled edge to her expression. As she'd told Leeana, she'd been born a peasant in Moretz, which was at least as patriarchal a society as that of the Sothōii, but she'd fled that land when she'd been even younger than Leeana was now. And she'd also been educated in the Empire of the Axe, where women enjoyed far broader choices and possibilities then were generally available to Sothōii women.

"Kerry," Bahzell said, "I'm thinking you've too much of the Axewoman in you. You, if any, ought to have realized by now how hard any Sothōii is after finding it to wrap his mind round the very notion of a woman as a warrior."

Kaeritha nodded again, more emphatically, and Bahzell chuckled. If he found his position in Balthar difficult as a hradani, Kaeritha had found hers only marginally less so . . . as the heckler she'd trounced outside the temple made clear. Tellian's men, and those of the city guard, had at least taken their cue from their liege lord and extended to her the same deference and respect any champion of Tomanâk might have expected. Yet it was only too obvious that even they found the concept of a female champion profoundly unnatural.

"Well, for all that our folk've spent the best part of a thousand years massacring one another," Bahzell continued, "there's much to be said for the Sothōii. But one thing no one is ever likely to be suggesting is that they've an overabundance of innovation in their natures, especially where matters of tradition and custom arСe concerned. Don't let Tellian be fooling you. For a Sothōii, he's about as radical as you're ever likely to meet, and well-educated about foreign lands, to boot. But your typical Sothōii is stiffer-necked than even a hradani, and the real conservatives are still after thinking the wheel is a dangerous, newfangled, harebrained novelty that will never really be catching on."

Kaeritha chuckled, and Brandark grinned.

"Aye, and some of them are stupid enough to be after thinking they invented fire for their very own selves just last week," Gharnal agreed. His grin was a bit sharper than Brandark's, honed on a core of deeply cherished hostility for all things Sothōii, but that represented a tremendous exercise of restraint for him.

"I won't say there isn't an element of the pot and kettle in that pithy description, Kerry," Brandark said after a moment. "But there's a lot of accuracy in it, too. The Sothōii take a tremendous amount of pride in how 'traditional' they are, you know. Their very name-'Sothōii'-is derived from the Old Kontovaran word sothСfranos, which translated roughly as 'sons of the fathers.' According to their traditions, they're descended from the highest nobility of the Empire of Ottovar, and they've grown pretty fanatical about protecting that line of descent-intellectually, as well as physically-over the last twelve centuries or so."

"Are they really?" Kaeritha asked. "Descended from the old Ottovarn nobility, that is?"

"That's hard to say," Brandark said with a shrug. "It's certainly possible. But the significant point is that they think they are, and that pride in their ancestry is part of what produces those conservatives Bahzell and Gharnal were just talking about. And the very existence of the war maids is an affront to their view of the way their entire society-or the rest of the world, for that matter-is supposed to work. In fact, the war maids wouldn't exist at all if the Crown hadn't specifically guaranteed their legal rights. Unfortunately-and I suspect this is what Bahzell was getting at-calling that royal guarantee 'a charter' is more of a convenient shorthand than an accurate description."

Kaeritha cocked an eyebrow, and he shrugged.

"It's actually more of a bundle of separate charters and decrees dealing with specific instances than some sort of neat, unified legal document. Kerry. According to what I've learned so far, the original proclamation legitimizing the war maids was unfortunately vague on several key points. Over the next century or so, additional proclamations intended to clarify some of the obscurity, and even an occasional judge's opinion, were bundled together, and the whole mishmash is what they fondly call their 'charter.' I haven't actually looked at it, you understand, but I'm familiar enough with the same sort of thing among the hradani. When something just sort of grows up the way the war maids' 'charter' has, there's usually a substantial degree of variation between the terms of its constituent documents. And that means there's an enormous scope for ambiguities and misunderstandings . . . especially when the people whose rights those decrees are supposed to stipulate aren't very popular with their neighbors."

"You have a positive gift for understatement," Kaeritha sighed, and shook her head. "Axeman law is much more codified and uniform than what you're describing, but I've seen more than enough of this kind of melt-it-all-together mess of precedent, statute, and common law even there." She sighed again. "Just what rights do the war maids have? In general terms, I mean, if there's that much variation from grant to grant."

"Basically," Brandark replied, "they have the right to determine how they want to live their own lives, free of traditional Sothōii familial and social obligations."

The Bloody Sword scholar tipped back in his chair, folded his arms, and frowned thoughtfully.

"Although they're uniformly referred to as 'war maids,' most of them aren't, really." Kaeritha raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. "Virtually every legal right up here on the Wind Plain is associated in one way or another with the holding of land and the reciprocal obligation of service to the Crown, Kaeritha, and the war maids are no exception. As part of King Gartha's original proclamation, their free-towns are obligated to provide military forces to the Crown. In my more cynical moments, I think Gartha included that obligation as a deliberate attempt to effectively nullify the charter while pacifying the women who'd demanded it, since it's hard for me to conceive of any Sothōii king who could honestly believe a batch of women could provide an effective military force."

"If that was after being the case, then he was in for a nasty surprise," Gharnal put in, and Brandark chuckled.

"Oh, he was that!" he agreed. "And in my less cynical moments, I'm inclined to think Gartha included the obligation only because he had to. Given how much of the current crop of Sothōii nobles is hostile to the war maids, the opposition to authorizing their existence in the first place must have been enormous, and the great nobles of Gartha's day were far more powerful, in relation to the Crown, than they are today. Which means his Council probably could have mustered the support to block the initial charter without that provision. For that matter, the measure's opponents would have been the ones most inclined to believe that requiring military service out of a bunch of frail, timid women would be an effective, underhanded way of negating Gartha's intentions without coming out in open opposition.

"At any rate, only about a quarter of all 'war maids' are actually warriors. Their own laws and traditions require all of them to have at least rudimentary training in self-defense, but most of them follow other professions. Some of them are farmers or, like most Sothōii, horse breeders. But more of them are shopkeepers, blacksmiths, potters, physicians, glassmakers, even lawyers-the sorts of tradesmen and craftsmen who populate most free-towns or cities up here. And the purpose of their charter is to ensure that they have the same legal rights and protections, despite the fact that they're women, that men in the same professions would enjoy."

"Are they all women?"

"Well," Brandark said dryly, "the real war maids are. But if what you're actually asking is whether or not war maid society is composed solely of women, the answer is no. The fact that a woman chooses to live her own life doesn't necessarily mean she hates all men. Of course, many of them become war maids because they aren't very fond of men, and quite a few of them end up partnering with other women. Not a practice likely to endear them to Sothōii men who already think the entire notion of women making decisions for themselves is unnatural. But it would be a serious mistake to assume that any woman who chooses to become-or, for that matter, is born-a war maid isn't going to fall in love with a man and choose to spend her life with him on her own terms. Or at least to dally with one on occasion. And war maid mothers do tend to produce male children from time to time, just like any other mothers. Of course, those two facts lead to some of the thornier 'ambiguities' I mentioned earlier."

"Why?" Kaeritha leaned forward, elbows on the table, her expression intent, while she cradled her wineglass in her hands, and Bahzell hid a smile. He'd seen exactly that same hunting-hawk expression when she encountered a new combat technique.

"There's always been some question as to whether or not the war maids' charter automatically extends to their male children," Brandark explained. "Or, for that matter, to their female children, in the eyes of some of the true reactionaries. When a woman chooses to become a war maid, her familial duties and inheritance obligations are legally severed. Even your true sticks-in-the-mud have been forced to admit that. But a fair number of nobles continue to assert that the legal severance applies only to her-that whatever line of inheritance or obligation would have passed through her to her children is unimpaired. For the most part, the courts haven't agreed with that view, but enough have to mean it's still something of a gray area. I suppose it's fortunate most 'first-generation' war maids come from commoner stock, or at most from the minor nobility-the squirearchy, you might call them. Or maybe it isn't. If the higher nobility had been forced to come to grips with the question, the Crown Courts would have been driven to make a definitive ruling on the disputed points years ago.

"At any rate, the exact question of the legal status of war maids' children is still up in the air, at least to some extent. And so is the question of their marriages. Their more diehard opponents argue that since their precious charter severs all familial obligations, it precludes the creation of new ones, which means no war maid marriage has any legal validity in their eyes. And there really is some question, I understand, in this instance. I doubt very much that Gartha had any intention of precluding the possibility of war maid marriages, but Baron Tellian's senior magistrate tells me some of the controlling language is less precise than it ought to be. According to him, everyone knows it's a matter of technicalities and reading the letter of the law, not its spirit, but apparently the problems do exist. And, to be perfectly honest, from what he said-and a couple of things he didn't say-I think the war maids have done their own bit to keep the waters muddied."

"Why would they do that?" Kaeritha asked. "Unless . . . Oh. The children."

"Exactly. If war maid marriages have no legal standing, then every child of a war maid is technically illegitimate."

"Which would take them out of the line of inheritance, unless there were no legitimate heirs at all," Kaeritha said with a nod of understanding, but her expression was troubled.

"I can follow the logic," she continued after a moment, "but it seems awfully shortsighted of them. Or maybe like the triumph of expedience. It may prevent their children from being yanked away from them and drawn into a system they wanted out of, but it also prevents them from extending the legal protections of their own families to those same children."

"Yes, it does," Brandark agreed. "On the other hand, their own courts and judges don't see it that way, and for the most part, the charters which create their free-towns extend the jurisdiction of their judges to all of the citizens of those towns. The problem comes with legal cases which cross the boundaries between the war maids' jurisdiction and those of more traditional Sothōii nobles."

"Tomanâk," Kaeritha sighed. "What a mess!"

"Well, it isn't after being just the tidiest situation in the world," Bahzell agreed. "Still and all, it's one the Sothōii have been working at for two or three centuries now. There's those as have some mighty sharp axes to grind, but for the most part, they've learned how to be getting on with one another."

" 'For the most part' still leaves a lot of room for potential trouble, though," Kaeritha pointed out. "And somehow, I don't think He'd be sending me off to deal with a crop of Sothōii who were 'getting on with one another.' Do you?"

"Well, as to that," Bahzell replied with a crooked smile, "no."

It was still raining when Kaeritha left Hill Guard . . . of course.

At least it wasn't a torrential downpour, she told herself encouragingly as she started down the steep approach road from Baron Tellian's ancestral keep. The Wind Plain was actually a huge, high plateau which, for the most part, was one vast ocean of grass and occasionally interspersed patches of ancient forest. The terrain might fairly be described as "rolling," but there weren't very many true hills on it, so, over the centuries, those which did exist had exhibited a distinct tendency to attract towns and fortifications. Hill Guard had come into existence in exactly that fashion the better part of eight hundred years ago when Halyu Bowmaster, the first Lord Warden of Balthar, had looked about for a suitable spot for the capital of his new holding. Now the city of Balthar sprawled out for several miles from the castle which brooded down over it from above.

The Sothōii weren't great city builders. For the most part, their people continued to follow their ancestors' pastoral lifestyle. While the Wind Plain remained the heart of their realm, they'd also acquired extensive holdings to the east, below the towering plateau. Those lower regions enjoyed a far milder climate, and a substantial portion of the vast Sothōii horse and cattle herds were wintered in those more salubrious surroundings. But the huge stud farms where the magnificent Sothōii warhorses were bred and trained remained where tradition insisted they must-atop the Wind Plain. And for whatever reason, the Sothōii coursers flatly refused to live anywhere else.

Horses-and coursers-required a lot of space, and the Sothōii population by and large was scattered sparsely about the Wind Plain, watching over its herds. That produced a lot of villages and small towns, but not very many cities. Which, conversely, meant that what cities there were tended to be quite large.

They were also well maintained, and Kaeritha moved briskly along the wide, straight avenue on the new mount Tellian had insisted upon giving her. She'd argued about accepting it, but not, she was guiltily aware, very hard. Any Sothōii warhorse was worth a prince's ransom, and the mare Tellian had bestowed upon Kaeritha was a princess among her own kind. Smaller and lighter than the heavier cavalry horses of other lands, the winter-hardy Sothōii warhorse was perfectly suited to the swift, deadly, archery-dominated tactics of the people who had bred it. Indeed, only the coursers themselves excelled its combination of speed and endurance.

And unlike Kaeritha, the warhorses seemed perfectly content with the Wind Plain's soggy spring weather.

She chuckled damply at the thought and reached down to pat the mare's shoulder. The horse flicked her ears in acknowledgment of the caress, and Kaeritha smiled. The mare's dark chestnut coloring, even darker at the moment thanks to the rain, probably accounted for her name, but Kaeritha still felt that naming such an affectionate creature "Dark War Cloud Rising" was just a bit much. She'd promptly shortened it to "Cloudy," which had earned her a rather pained look from Tellian. His stable master, on the other hand, had only grinned, and from the readiness with which Cloudy answered to her new name, Kaeritha suspected that the stable hands had employed a similar diminutive before she ever came along.

A packhorse trotted along at Cloudy's heels. Even he, although far more plebeian than the aristocratic warhorse, was a magnificent creature. He would have been happily accepted as a superior light cavalry mount anywhere but among the Sothōii, and Kaeritha knew she had never been better mounted in her life. Which, she reflected, was saying something, given the care the Order of Tomanâk took when it came to equipping their god's champions.

Despite Balthar's size, there was very little traffic as she approached the city's East Gate. The weather undoubtably had a little something to do with that, she thought, looking past the open gate to the rain blowing across the road beyond and rippling the endless spring grass of the Wind Plain. Sothōii roads were not, by and large, up to Axeman standards. Few highways outside the Empire itself were, but the Sothōii's efforts came up shorter than most, and Kaeritha felt an undeniable sinking sensation as she contemplated the one before her. It was straight enough-not surprisingly, given the unobstructed terrain of the Wind Plain-but that was about all she could say for the broad line of mud stretching out before her.

The officer commanding the gate guard saluted her respectfully as she passed, and she nodded back with equal courtesy. Yet even as she did, she wondered how the officer might have greeted her if not for the gold and green badge of the Order of Tomanâk Tellian's seamstresses had embroidered across the front of her poncho.

Then she was through the gate, and the gentle pressure of a heel sent Cloudy trotting down the last bit of slope towards the waiting road.