The Warrior's Path (26 page)

Just as I began to resign myself to this new idea, Maara said, “Maybe you should sleep in the companions’ loft.”

I felt as if she was sending me into exile.

“No,” I said.

“You need to show the Lady that you’re taking her advice seriously. How are you going to get to know anyone if you see the others only at suppertime?”

My mind knew she was right, but my heart couldn’t keep up with her. Angry tears started in my eyes. To cover up my feelings, I busied myself with undoing my leggings.

“You don’t have to go tonight,” she said.

“Perhaps I should.”

“I’m not sending you away. I’m trying to do what’s best for you.”

I took a deep breath. “I know.”

The ties of my leggings were in a hopeless knot. I tugged at them in frustration and only made the tangle worse.

“Stop,” said Maara.

She came to sit by me at the foot of the bed and began to work on the impossible knot.

“A lot has happened today,” she said, “and we’re tired, and it’s dark.”

“What does the dark have to do with it?”

She glanced into a corner of the room that was beyond the reach of our flickering lamplight. “The dark changes things.”

“How?”

“You know how things look in the dark.”

“I suppose so,” I said, although I wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

“In the dark, you can’t see more than a little piece of anything, and most of what you see in the shadows might be things your mind makes up.”

“Oh,” I said.

She smiled. “Didn’t your mother ever say that things always look better in the morning?”

I had to smile too. “Everybody’s mother says that.”

“Then it must be true.”

She undid the last knot and pulled my leggings off. She looked at them for a moment. Then she said, “You don’t have to wear these.”

I took them from her. “I’m the only person in this house whose legs are always warm. If people look at me strangely, it must be only jealousy.”

Maara smiled at me. “Go to bed,” she said. “Tomorrow is soon enough to decide what you should do.”

Things did look much better to me in the morning. I was surprised to find myself looking forward to having supper with the companions. I remembered how reassuring it was to be one of them, and now that I was an apprentice, I was more than just one of them. I was a person of some importance. Those who were not yet apprenticed looked at me with envy mixed with a touch of awe, and the other apprentices accepted me as their equal. I no longer had to find an empty place for myself at the table. Someone would always make a place for me. Sometimes two or three of them at once would invite me to sit beside them. I had remembered none of those things the night before. Maara had been wise in what she said about the dark.

The day was drizzly. Ordinarily that wouldn’t have bothered us, but Maara suggested that we spend the day indoors, and I was more than willing to keep warm and dry.

I had awakened with new questions about what we had seen the day before. While I helped her dress, I asked her, “Why did no one try to stop Vintel from killing that man?”

“Vintel is their captain. Who would have dared?”

“I don’t mean our own warriors. Why did his friends do nothing? Why did they let it happen?”

“They aren’t savages,” she said. “They understand a blood debt.”

The prisoners may have understood, but I didn’t understand at all. A man had died, yet Eramet still lay in the barrow, none the better for it. Was Vintel’s heart any lighter? Was Namet’s heart? Was Sparrow’s?

That afternoon Sparrow found me in the laundry.

“Where have you been?” she said. She sounded cross with me.

“I’ve been right here all afternoon,” I told her.

I hated doing laundry, and Maara and I had once again run out of clean clothes.

“I don’t mean today,” she said. “You’ve hardly been home for weeks on end. Where in the world has your warrior been taking you?”

“We go out walking. She thought we were getting too soft sitting all day long by the fire.”

“So all you do is walk?”

“No,” I said. “She’s teaching me.”

“Teaching you? What could she be teaching you?”

“She’s taught me how to set snares, how to travel in cold weather, how to find food and make a shelter if a storm should overtake us. Lots of things.”

“Did your warrior trap the furs for those things you’ve been wearing on your legs?”

“Leggings,” I said. “She made them for me from the skins of rabbits we caught in our snares. They’re warm.”

“I wish I’d had leggings at the ravine,” she said.

I smiled at her. Somehow Sparrow always said the right thing.

“It sounds like she’s teaching you the old ones’ ways,” she said.

“Do you think so?” The idea appealed to me.

“It stands to reason. She can teach you only what she knows.”

I had finished rinsing the clothes and wringing them out. Together we began to hang them up to dry.

“Have you ever known any of the old ones?” I asked her.

“Not really,” she replied. “There was a woman named Bren in Arnet’s house whose mother was one of them. Bren worked in the kitchen. She used to mumble nonsense words over every animal she butchered and paint her face with its blood. She frightened people.”

I remembered that, after Maara killed the fox, there had been a smear of blood across her forehead. I had thought it was from the blood that spurted out when she cut its throat.

“Why did she do that?” I asked.

“I’m not sure, but it seems to be traditional among them. I’ve even seen one or two of our own warriors mark themselves with the blood of a warrior they’ve killed in battle. Laris marked herself at the ravine, when she killed the man who tried to escape.”

No one in Merin’s house had fairer hair than Laris.

“Laris isn’t one of the old ones,” I said.

“No,” said Sparrow. “But I think she’d like to be.”

Laris was one of the warriors who had sat and talked for hours with Maara in the great hall.

“Is that why she so often sits with Maara?”

Sparrow chuckled. “Partly, I suppose, but mostly I think it’s because she and your warrior have something in common.”

“What’s that?”

“They’re the only people here who have ever challenged Vintel.”

“Laris challenged Vintel?”

Sparrow hushed me and lowered her voice. “Last spring they had a falling-out. I don’t know what it was about, but they almost came to blows. No one but Laris has ever had the courage to challenge Vintel, not that I know of. Not until your warrior did.”

“How would Laris know about that?”

Sparrow laughed. “Everybody knows about it. Lorin was telling the story behind his hand to anyone who would listen before the day was out. And if he hadn’t, I would have had to tell somebody, even if it was only the companions. It was too good a story not to tell.”

“Would you have been that disrespectful to Vintel?”

“Disrespectful? That story isn’t disrespectful. It’s the simple truth. Vintel leads because people will follow her. People will follow the best leader they can find, but how can they know who that is? Only by seeing how people conduct themselves. If your warrior were not a stranger here, I would say that Vintel should beware of her if she wants to keep her position.”

“Maara isn’t a stranger here anymore,” I said.

“Not to you,” said Sparrow, “but she doesn’t mix with the others much, and part of the strength of leadership is the number of strong friendships one can call on. Anyway, it’s just as well for her that Vintel doesn’t see her as a rival.”

“What about Laris?”

“Vintel is wary of Laris. Laris is from a strong family, but she has too few friends here to challenge Vintel’s leadership.”

We had finished hanging up the clothes. I was about to take the tub of dirty water outside to empty it when Sparrow put her hand on my arm and said, “Your warrior doesn’t do anything so very strange, does she?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Like what?”

“I’ve heard some strange things about people like her. Bec says that when they kill an animal they cut the heart out and eat it raw.”

“She’s never done anything like that,” I said.

Of course I had never examined the entrails of the animals Maara killed to see if the hearts were missing. Sometimes she had given me some of the liver to eat, but she had always cooked it first.

“It’s probably just an old wives’ tale,” Sparrow said. “People will say anything.”

Then I knew where Sparrow’s questions came from.

“What are people saying?”

“Nothing you should worry about. They’re curious, that’s all. They’ve never known anyone like her before. Neither have I, except for old Bren, and she was a lot more peculiar than your warrior.”

“What are they so curious about?”

Sparrow hesitated. “Well,” she said. “You’ve been so late coming home sometimes. They wonder if she’s not out dancing to the moon.”

I burst out laughing at the absurdity of the idea. “She does nothing of the kind.”

Sparrow looked relieved. “Don’t pay any attention to them then. They have nothing better to do than gossip.”

I began to see the wisdom of spending more time in Merin’s house. As much as I loved the time I spent with Maara out in the snowy countryside, it was time for both of us to make a place for ourselves within the household. It was as important for my warrior as it was for me.

In the days that followed, whenever the weather allowed, Maara took me outdoors during the day, but we were always back in time for supper, and I began to look forward to telling the companions what we had done that day. They listened with fascination to my tales of our adventures in the wilderness. I didn’t tell them everything, but I told them enough to make them understand that I was learning useful skills, not some kind of ancient superstitious nonsense, as they had suspected.

One morning, while we were preparing to go out and check our snares, Laris asked Maara if she and Taia, her apprentice, could join us. Maara made them welcome.

Laris took great interest in everything Maara did, but Taia seemed bored and indifferent until she saw Maara make a fire. Maara had an uncommon skill with fire. Even in wet weather she could always find something that would burn. She would gather the down of cattails or pull the bark off a piece of deadfall and scoop out the dry heart of the rotting wood to use as tinder. There was no mystery in what she did, but Taia would watch her with delight, as if Maara had conjured the flame from the palms of her hands.

Although I too admired Maara’s skill with fire, I had spent much of my childhood herding sheep and had made camp in all kinds of weather. I could do what Maara did, if not quite as easily. I wondered who Taia’s people were, that she hadn’t learned such a simple thing.

One evening Maara stayed downstairs talking with Laris and Namet, while I went up to the companions’ loft with Taia. It had been a long time since I’d sat among them gossiping and telling jokes and stories. I found I couldn’t tear myself away. When I grew sleepy, Taia shared her blankets with me.

In the morning, when I returned to Maara’s room, I worried that she had wondered where I was. Instead she smiled at me and said, “Have you found your friends?” That night I moved my bed to the companions’ loft.

Though snow still dusted the hilltops, it had melted from the valley floor. The river ice had begun to break up weeks ago. A soft breeze blew warm out of the south, and the earth began to bloom. Our cattle, kept sheltered through the winter, were now pastured on new grass. Cattle raiders would soon come after them. It was time for our warriors to go north to guard our borders. Laris was to take her band of warriors into the hills northeast of Merin’s house. She asked my warrior to go with them.

Maara had cured the pelt of the fox she killed. She had left on it both the head and the brush, and over several long evenings she had fashioned a carrying bag out of it. She took great pains with it. The fox’s head formed the flap of the bag, and the tail slipped through a loop under the jaw to hold it closed. The legs overlapped around the sides, the black claws sketching a clever pattern against the fur.

The evening before we were to leave with Laris, Maara brought the bag downstairs. She sat down by the hearth, in the midst of a group of warriors, to put a few finishing touches on it. Several of the men admired it. Breda took it from her and turned it over and over in his hands. He was clearly quite taken with it.

“Would you make me one like it?” he asked her.

“Catch me a fox,” she said, “and I will.”

His face fell.

“Or you could have this one, if you have anything to trade.”

“I have a good knife.”

“I already have a knife.”

He thought for a moment. “A pair of boots?”

She moved her foot over next to his and smiled. His feet were much larger than hers.

Breda made an impatient gesture. “What do you want, then?”

Maara gazed into the fire as if she were giving it some thought. Then she said, “I could use a cloak.”

“A cloak?”

“Yes,” she said. “A good thick winter cloak.”

Breda hesitated before he said, “I have an extra cloak.”

“Let’s see it then.”

He got up to bring it from the men’s house.

“Not that old tattered one,” she said. “It’s worn so thin I could put my fingers through it.”

“I won’t trade my new one,” he said, and sat back down.

“All right,” she said.

Breda watched in silence while she braided a cord from strips of rabbit skin and attached it to the bag. He fidgeted a bit when another man took the bag from her for a moment and admired it. When she had almost finished with it, Breda got up and left the hall. A few minutes later he returned with a heavy winter cloak, made of wool in sunset colors, dark reds and browns with bright streaks of flame all through it.

Breda handed the cloak to Maara. She looked it over carefully, taking more time than she needed to check for worn and raveled places. When she was satisfied, she looked up at him and said, “Are you sure you want to trade this?”