The Warrior's Path (24 page)

Merin’s house stood at the northern end of the valley. The land to the north of it was hilly, and the path we followed wound between the hills. We had to break our own trail through snow that lay knee-deep in places. The exertion warmed us, but after several hours, I was having trouble keeping up with Maara. At last she stopped and waited for me.

“We’ve spent too much time sitting by the hearth,” she said, as I caught up with her. “Where I was made a warrior, we never sat indoors all winter.”

“What did you do in the wintertime?”

“We hunted. We fished through the ice. We set out traps.”

“Traps?”

“For fur,” she said.

The men who had come across the river had been dressed in skins and furs. The legs of my woolen trousers were soggy from walking through the snow, and while I had thought those men ragged and ill-dressed, that day I would have been glad to wrap my cold legs in fur.

We had stopped at the edge of a wood a short distance from the river. Maara led me in among the trees, where we would have a little shelter from the wind. She cut some pine boughs and laid them down for us to sit on. From a pocket in her tunic she took a handful of tinder and her firestones. In just a few minutes, she had a fire started. She fed it with pine twigs, then with larger branches, but she kept it small, so that we could huddle close to it.

Maara sat across the fire from me, her arms clasped around her knees, and gazed into the flames.

“Vintel has taken Sparrow as her apprentice,” she said. Of course we both knew that. Everyone knew that. I waited for her to tell me what was on her mind. Suddenly she looked up at me. “Is that hard for you?”

I shrugged. “I wish Sparrow could have found someone better.”

“That isn’t what I asked you.”

Too late I realized I hadn’t been paying enough attention. I heard in her voice my warrior’s disapproval. It had been there when she complained that I couldn’t keep pace with her, but I hadn’t taken it to heart. Now I thought about her question and tried to give her a truthful answer.

“It’s hard for me to know that someone I care about has had to accept less than she deserves,” I said.

“She has what she wanted, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said. “At least, she has all she dared to want.”

“If she has what she wanted, then you must learn to accept it.”

“I do accept it. That doesn’t mean I can’t have my own opinion about it.”

Maara’s eyes reproached me. “What good will your opinion do you? What good will it do Sparrow? Things are as they are.”

She seemed almost angry with me. A sharp retort was on the tip of my tongue. I bit it back. I studied her face, trying to understand what she was telling me.

“What have I done wrong?” I said.

She looked away from me and shook her head. “You’ve done nothing wrong. Not yet. But I see a danger you don’t see, and I wouldn’t have you walk blindly into it.”

“Into what?”

“I didn’t want to have to speak to you about this. It’s none of my business, but I know that you and Sparrow are close, and now things will have to change between you.”

She was starting to frighten me. “What things?”

“Vintel won’t share her with you. You already know too well Vintel’s jealousy over things she believes are hers.”

“Sparrow is not a thing,” I said, “and Vintel doesn’t own her.”

“Sparrow is bound to her, and to Vintel that amounts to much the same thing.”

“Sparrow is bound to her as I am bound to you, but I belong only to myself.”

At last she looked at me. “I’m not Vintel,” she said.

I was afraid of what she was asking of me. If I had kept Sparrow’s gift only to lose the giver, I had made a very poor bargain.

“What am I supposed to do?” I said. “I can’t stop being Sparrow’s friend because of Vintel’s jealousy.”

“I’m not telling you that you can’t be her friend, but you can’t be more than that.”

We stared at each other across the fire. It took me a minute to understand that she thought Sparrow and I were lovers. At first I was relieved that I could still be Sparrow’s friend and that this whole conversation had come from a misunderstanding, but before I could explain, she said, “I believe you when you tell me you want the best for Sparrow, but don’t deceive yourself. You must know in your heart that you’re going to lose what you had with her, that Vintel is going to keep at least that much away from you. It’s your own jealousy that hides behind your protest that Sparrow deserves better than Vintel.”

Her accusation stunned me. Then I was furious with her, furious that she had presumed to tell me that my feelings were not what I believed them to be, that she was, in a way, calling me a liar.

“You’re right,” I said. “This is none of your business.”

I started to get up. She reached across the fire and took hold of my wrist, twisting it in a way that forced me to sit back down.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “If you’re going to disregard my advice, at least do it when no one but yourself will have to bear the consequences.”

Although I knew that we were talking at cross-purposes, I was so angry with her that I didn’t try to make her understand. I glared at her and waited for her to release my arm. When she did, I got up and brushed the snow from my trousers. Without another word to her, I started back to Merin’s house.

My anger blinded me as I blundered back along the half-broken trail we’d made that morning. Soon I was gasping for breath, and the cold air made my chest ache. I had to stop, and when I did, the pain that so often follows anger caught up with me. I tried to nurse my anger, to keep the pain away, but Maara’s words echoed in my head, and my anger yielded to the pain of knowing that she believed me guilty of both jealousy and self-deception.

Anger. What had she tried to teach me about anger? Her words came back to me.
Why do you care about Vintel’s opinion?
Once I realized I didn’t care, Vintel’s insults had no power to hurt me, but I did care about Maara’s opinion of me. I cared very much. Nothing she had taught me about anger would help me this time.

I looked back down the trail. I had assumed that Maara would follow me, but I didn’t see her. I waited for several minutes while I caught my breath. She didn’t come. When I looked for the smoke of her fire, I could neither see nor smell any trace of smoke in the air.

Fear fluttered in the pit of my stomach. I tried to reason it away. The fire was too small to smoke. She was giving me time to think over what she’d said to me. I didn’t dare to wonder if she had no intention of coming home with me, but suddenly I knew I had to find her. The fact that I had more to fear from being alone in the winter woods so far from home never occurred to me.

I quickly retraced my steps. I was relieved to find her where I’d left her. She looked up at me, her face expressionless. It was up to me to heal the breach between us.

“I care what you think of me,” I blurted out. “I can’t pretend I don’t. It hurt to think I might have lost your good opinion.”

She looked surprised. “It would take more than a little disagreement to do that.”

Before I heard or understood her, I tried to explain, to her and to myself, why I had been so angry with her. Words tumbled over one another in my mouth. Even I couldn’t make much sense of them.

“Tell me later,” she said. “Sit down. Let’s just be quiet for a while.”

“I need to tell you — ”

“Hush,” she said. “You won’t find the truth in so much talk.”

When I stopped talking, my trapped thoughts flew around like dry leaves in a whirlwind. A few times I forgot what she’d told me and opened my mouth to speak only to shut it again, until at last my mind began to let go of the thoughts that only chased their own tails inside my head.

For a while I watched Maara out of the corner of my eye. Then I began to pay attention to the world around me. It was quiet. No wind stirred the trees. No birds called. No trickle of running water, no scurrying feet of forest animals broke the silence.

I thought of Sparrow, and my heart grew heavy. Our friendship began when she was Eramet’s apprentice. As close as she had been to Eramet, she had made time for me. Now she was apprenticed to someone who might not allow her even to be my friend.

In a way, Maara was right. I was afraid of Vintel’s power over Sparrow. I was jealous that someone who valued her so little should have such a claim on her, while someone who valued her as I did should have none at all. I sat an arm’s length from the woman who had risked so much to become my teacher and felt bereft.

If I had been sitting with Maara in her room or in the great hall, I would have questioned her about what she’d said to me. There in the silent woods, I let my new knowledge of myself sift through my mind and settle around my heart. While Maara may have misunderstood my relationship with Sparrow, she understood my feelings better than I did myself.

The shadows of the trees grew long. The light began to fade. I worried that we would have to walk home in the dark. As if she had heard my thoughts, Maara said, “The moon will rise early tonight. We’ll walk home by moonlight.”

After the sun had set, I began to feel the cold. We were both wearing heavy tunics, which were warm enough as long as we were walking and even while we were sitting by the fire in daylight. Now that the sun was gone, I started to shiver.

Maara had brought her winter cloak, rolled into a bundle slung over her shoulder. She unrolled it and draped it around her shoulders. Then she lifted one side and looked at me. I didn’t need a second invitation. I took the place she offered me.

Our bodies warmed each other as the dark closed in around us. I closed my eyes. We were in the armory, where I couldn’t run away from her. I wanted to.
Don’t run,
she said. How could I? But I had, hadn’t I? I had run from her, was running from her, running through the snow. It was dark, and I blundered off the trail. I stopped and fell to my knees. She lifted me up.

You are bound to me by an oath,
she said.

Yes.

But it’s not the oath that binds us.

What binds us?

“It’s time to go,” she said.

She got to her feet and took my arm to help me up. I stumbled against her, still half asleep. The moon had risen, giving us light enough to retrace our steps back home.

I woke to find Maara kneeling next to me, her hand resting on my shoulder.

“Are you going to sleep all day?” she said.

She had taken the shutter down, and light poured into the room. Cold air poured in too. I sat up in my bed and pulled my blankets up around me.

Maara was already dressed.

“Well?” she said. She stood in the doorway waiting for me.

I stayed where I was, reluctant to exchange my warm blankets for the clothing that had hung out all night in the freezing air.

“Are you tired? Shall I bring you something to eat?”

I shook my head and got up. Maara waited while I got into my clothes. They were as cold as I thought they would be.

While I dressed, Maara stood leaning against the doorpost, gazing past me out the window at the bright snowy world outside. I thought about our moonlight walk, about sitting with her in the woods, sharing her cloak and the warmth of the fire. I hadn’t felt a distance between us then, but I did this morning.

“We didn’t talk yesterday,” I reminded her.

Her eyes turned to me. “I thought we might have talked too much.”

I was thinking of the silence we had shared, and of how an understanding of my own feelings had come of itself, clear and true, into my heart. How had she known that would happen?

“You were right,” I said. “I was jealous of Vintel.”

I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t find the words for what had been so clear to me the day before.

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” she said. “I wanted you to be aware of something that could bring trouble to both you and Sparrow. Now you’re aware of it. What you do about it is up to you.”

Then I remembered that I hadn’t told her the most important thing. I hadn’t let her know that what she believed about my relationship with Sparrow wasn’t true.

“There’s something else,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Sparrow is my friend.” I had intended to add, “not my lover,” but a sudden shyness stopped me. Instead I said, “That’s the most important thing to me.”

“You won’t lose that,” Maara said. “Sparrow will honor your friendship whether Vintel approves or not. Vintel can’t command her feelings.”

I didn’t know how to talk to her. I felt awkward and bashful, and the look of caution, almost of dread, on Maara’s face stopped me from saying more. Some things are just too intimate to talk about, even with the person closest to you.

And how could I explain what Sparrow was to me? How could I deny she was my lover? It had been only the one time, but it had happened, and ever since, I had felt a new tenderness for her. I had never been close to anyone in the way I was close to Sparrow. It all seemed much too complicated to explain.

While the good weather lasted, Maara and I went out into the countryside almost every day. She showed me how to make snares from twisted strands of the inner bark of a certain bramble and how to set them out on a rabbit run. We caught a number of rabbits that way, and from the skins she made me a pair of leggings that covered my legs from the ankle to above the knee.

I heard a few unkind remarks about how odd they looked, but I didn’t mind. I could walk all day through the snow, and my legs stayed dry and warm.

Once, when we went to check one of our snares, we heard a rabbit scream in terror. A fox had discovered the rabbit helpless in the trap and was too preoccupied with it to notice our approach.

Without taking her eyes from the fox, Maara knelt down and felt the earth beside her, until her fingers found a stone. With a sidearm throw I’d never seen before, she sent the stone at the fox’s head. The fox fell, stunned, and she ran over to it and slit its throat.

She skinned the fox and dressed its body as if it were a rabbit. Then she made a fire and cooked it and gave me some to eat. The meat was tough and stringy, with a strong, bitter taste. I didn’t like it, but I believed she was testing me, and I forced myself to eat more than I wanted of it.