War Maid's Choice-ARC (12 page)

Which, she sometimes reflected, probably had something to do with the lumps of sugar that were customarily nestled in her pocket when she went to call upon him.

She smiled at the thought and took her right hand off the wall long enough to pull one of the dark green ribbons out of her hair. She held it up between thumb and forefinger, listening to it snap gently as the breeze played with it, then opened her hand and let it fly. It swooped up into the branches of one of the trees, wrapped itself around a limb, and flew bravely, like a banner against the steadily darkening charcoal of the sky.

You’re being silly,
she told herself...again.
Every single one of the girls
you grew up with would give her eyeteeth for your life, and you know it!
Well, all but
one
of them, maybe. Of course, her life went the opposite direction from yours, didn’t it?

She laughed at the thought, but that didn’t make it untrue. Yet what all those other girls she’d grown up with probably wouldn’t believe for a moment was that she’d never wanted to be a lord warden’s daughter. She’d been perfectly happy—well,
almost
perfectly happy—as the daughter of a simple armsman. Oh, she’d been proud of her father and the officer’s rank he’d gained. And being a wind rider’s daughter had made her even prouder. She could still remember the first time Kengayr, her father’s courser companion, had presented his huge, soft nose to a grubby five-year-old’s hand, towering over her like a vast gray mountain. A single one of his forehooves had been as big as she was, and his head had been bigger—she could have used one of his horseshoes for the seat of a swing, and he could have squashed her with a thought—but all she’d felt was the wonder of him, and she’d known even then that Kengayr meant her father really was as wonderful as she’d always thought he was.

But Sir Jahsak Dragonclaw could have stopped at Major Dragonclaw in Baron Tellian’s service, as far as Sharlassa was concerned. In fact, she wished he had!

If wishes were fishes, we’d never want food,
she told herself tartly, quoting one of her mother’s favorite maxims. Yet there were times she suspected Lady Sharmatha wasn’t a lot happier about the “Lady” in front of her name than Sharlassa was about the one in front of hers. In fact, she was certain there were, although Lady Sharmatha would no more ever admit that than her father might admit that he, too, must cherish occasional second thoughts about the consequences of the honor Baron Tellian had bestowed upon him.

And it
is
an honor, you twit,
Sharlassa told herself sternly.
From a common armsman to a knight and a wind rider and a major all the way to
lord warden?!
It’s the kind of honor other people only
dream
of, and you should spend your time being happy for him—and proud of him—instead of worrying about all the problems it’s made for
you!

Unfortunately, it was easier for Sir Jahsak—and for her brothers—than it was for Sharlassa...or her mother. The rules were so
hard
for a girl who’d been raised as a tomboy until she was thirteen years old. She was still trying to figure them out, six years later, and she dreaded the even greater number of rules—the
endless
number of rules—she’d have to worry about in years to come. She knew her mother found her new role as Lady Golden Vale an uncomfortable fit, and not just because so many of “their” retainers and tenants hated and resented them as interlopers and usurpers. It would take someone much braver than Sharlassa to show Lady Sharmatha disrespect to her face, yet Sharmatha had to be aware of the way all those hostile eyes scrutinized her, watching for any miscue or misstep they could pounce upon as fresh proof of how uncouth and unworthy of his lord wardenship Sir Jahsak was.

Sharlassa
was only too well aware of it, at any rate.

Yet she could have handled that hostility if it had been the only problem. Or she thought she could have. She might have been wrong about that, the way she’d been wrong about so many other things in her life.

She sighed again and leaned forward, picking at a bit of moss on the stone wall, feeling the unseen, damp pressure of the rain growing slowly more omnipresent. A patch of the moss came loose and she held it up, studying it, feeling the velvety softness of it against the ball of her thumb. The back, where it had kissed against the stone, was rougher grained, papery, so
different
from its front, and she wondered if that was some sort of metaphor for her life...or if she was only being maudlin again.

She snorted softly, with bittersweet regret for what might have happened. It was strange, and it made her feel guilty sometimes, but she could hardly remember what Sathek had truly looked like. They’d been supposed to have his miniature painted for her before he’d ridden off with Sir Trianal to deal with the mystery attacks being launched on Lord Warden Glanharrow’s herds and fields. She ought to remember anyway, painting or no painting—she’d been madly in love with him, hadn’t she?—but she didn’t. Not truly. She remembered how she’d
felt
about him, how she’d looked forward to the marriage as soon as she was old enough, sometimes she even remembered the feel of his arms around her, but his
face
was slipping away from her. In an odd way, and one which frequently made her feel almost unbearably guilty, she had a far clearer memory of Sir Trianal’s face on the day he’d personally ridden up to her father’s house to tell her that Sathek Smallsword had died in his baron’s service and under Sir Trianal’s command.

Well, of course you remember Sir Trianal’s face better!
Her inner voice was tart this time.
Sathek is gone, and you never got that miniature painted, and they say the mind forgets what the heart remembers. Besides, Sir Trianal
isn’t
dead
,
now is he? It’s been—what? All of three hours since you saw him at breakfast? That probably tends to keep him a little fresher in your memory, don’t you think?

True enough. That was true enough. And it still didn’t keep her from feeling guilty when she couldn’t remember. Just as the fact that life was what it was, and Lillinara knew Sharlassa couldn’t change it just by wishing it was different, didn’t make her any happier about it.

At least Mother knows you need all the help you can get,
she reminded herself.
No matter
how
much you wish she’d stop beating herself up for “not having done right by you” when you were a girl! She didn’t know where we were going to wind up any more than Father did. Or than
you
did, for that matter! And when it comes down to it, teaching you to think of yourself as a fine lady would have been the cruelest thing she could have done before Father became a lord warden
.

So, yes, she was deeply grateful to Lady Sharmatha for sending her where she could get the schooling she needed as a proper Sothōii noblewoman, even if it did seem like one of Hirahim’s worse jokes to find herself in that position. And no one could possibly have been more understanding or kinder or a better teacher than Baroness Hanatha. Yet sending Sharlassa
here
—sending her to the place she still thought of deep in her bones as “home”—had its own sharp, jagged edges. She was no longer the person she’d been when she’d lived here in one of the neat little houses maintained for the garrison’s officers. The girls she’d grown up with—those that weren’t married, at any rate—had no better idea of how to act around her now than she had of how to act around them. Even her closest friends felt awkward and uncomfortable, divided by that invisible armor of rank which lay between them, afraid someone—possibly even Sharlassa herself—would think they were being overly familiar if they dared to treat their old friend
as
a friend.

She sighed yet again—she was getting a lot of practice at that this afternoon—and tossed the moss up into the air. Unlike the ribbon, it plummeted to the ground, disappearing into the orchard’s grass, and she found herself wishing she could do the same.

It was a potentially dangerous thought, especially here in Balthar, and she knew her mother was concerned about that, however careful she’d been to never discuss it with her daughter in so many words. But there wasn’t any point pretending the idea hadn’t crossed Sharlassa’s mind more than once.

Lady Leeana Bowmaster had been just as much a tomboy as ever Sharlassa Dragonclaw had been, and she’d gone through life with a fearlessness Sharlassa deeply envied. She’d wondered sometimes if that was because Leeana was not simply one of the most nobly born young women in the entire Kingdom but also an only child, treated more like a son than even she’d realized at the time. Now, with her own closer acquaintance with Baron Tellian and Baroness Hanatha, Sharlassa knew it wasn’t that Leeana’s parents had treated her like a son but that they’d treated her as a unique person in her own right. Baroness Hanatha treated Sharlassa the same way, and she’d seen the easy affection and love—the trust—in the way they treated Sir Trianal, as well.

Yet there was no denying that Sharlassa had deeply admired and respected Leeana. Of course, Leanna had been not simply the daughter of her liege lord but also over two years older than Sharlassa. They’d never been anything someone might have described as friends, for they’d lived in different worlds which simply happened to overlap from time to time. But those worlds
had
overlapped—sometimes in one of the paddocks or the stables, sometimes right here in this orchard when both of them had helped gather apples—and whenever they had, Leeana had been unfailingly friendly and kind. More than that, she’d...
radiated
something, something Sharlassa had seemed to sense the way she sensed the apple trees around her now. There’d been a sparkle, a strength, a sense of vibrant, flickering energy. No doubt that was as much her imagination as sometimes dreaming she was a tree, but that hadn’t made the sensation
feel
any less real, and she couldn’t quite convince herself that it had
all
been imagination.

She frowned moodily, with the expression her father had always called “scratching a mental itch” when she’d been younger, just before he chucked her under the chin or snatched her up onto his shoulder or tickled her unmercifully. She wished he was here to do that now and distract her from her brown, unreasonably moody mood, although it would, of course, be unspeakably improper for Lord Jahsak to do such a thing with Lady Sharlassa.

In a way, that feeling that she could almost reach out and touch the innermost being of the orchard’s trees was to blame for much of her present mood, and she knew it. She treasured the feeling, took strength from it as if it helped to center her and remind her of who she was deep down inside, not simply who she had to learn to be as
Lady
Sharlassa. Yet she’d always secretly thought she would someday outgrow the absurd fancy that she could sense the trees at all, and she hadn’t. In fact, it was actually growing stronger, and she sometimes thought she was reaching deeper and further.

Was the problem that she
wanted
to be able to do that? That she was so unhappy, so uncertain, about who she must learn to be that she longed for escape into some warm, comforting dream? Or into something which could distract her from learning the lessons her life had set her? Or was she simply losing her mind in a pleasantly harmless sort of way?

Her lips twitched at that last thought, remembering Granny Marlys. All Balthar’s children had loved Granny growing up, although even the youngest of them had realized she was what some of the adults in their lives called “not quite right.” As she’d grown older, Sharlassa had realized that people who
were
“quite right” didn’t firmly believe they were the goddess Chemalka and could summon rain on a whim or make the sun shine whenever they wanted to. Yet aside from that minor foible, Granny Marlys had been the warmest, kindest person—and greatest storyteller—imaginable. Not a parent in Balthar would have hesitated for a moment to ask Granny to care for a child, and her kitchen had been a magic land where the scent of fresh cookies or gingerbread had a habit of ambushing a youthful visitor.

But, no, she wasn’t another Granny. Granny had simply ignored the fact that she
couldn’t
always make the sun shine whenever she wanted to...and that she frequently managed to get herself drenched working in her kitchen garden because that rain she’d forbidden to fall had fallen anyway. And she’d regarded all of the mortals around her with a benign sense that all of them were there to serve her whims but that she didn’t really need them to do anything for her just at the moment, so they might as well go ahead and get along with their own lives until she
did
need them.

Sharlassa didn’t live in that comfortable sort of imaginary world. That was the problem, after all! And that was why it...worried her, if that wasn’t putting it too strongly, that she seemed to be becoming more sensitive, not less, to at least portions of the world around her.

And if you’re going to become “more sensitive” to part of the world, why not all of it?
she asked herself bitingly.
But, no, you can’t do that, can you? It has to be just
some
of the world and just
some
of the people in it!

To be fair, she’d always thought she could sense Kengayr whenever the courser was around. And there’d been that feeling that she could tell thirty seconds ahead of time when her father or her mother was about to walk through a door or someone like Leeana had been about to come around a corner. She’d mentioned that to her mother once, and Lady Sharmatha (only, of course, she hadn’t been “Lady” Sharmatha at that point) had told her about something called “
syn shai’hain
.” Sharlassa had never heard of it, but her mother had explained that it meant “something seen before” or “something already seen” in ancient Kontovaran. Sometimes, Sharmatha had told her eleven-year-old daughter seriously as they’d peeled apples—apples from this very orchard, in fact—for one of Sharmatha’s peerless pies, someone had a flash, a feeling, that they’d already done or seen or experienced something. No one knew exactly why or exactly how it worked, but it happened to a lot of people, especially those—she looked up under her eyelashes with a smile—who had particularly
active
imaginations.