“Rahi!” One of the cooks on duty recognized her at once. “When did you get in? How long can you stay?”
“Just now,” she said, pouring herself a mug of water. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here yet—where’s Gird?”
A sudden silence; eyes shifted away from her. She felt her heart quicken even before the first woman said anything. “Oh—he’s not feeling too well today. Nothing serious—”
He’d gotten drunk again. She was sure of it. She had come here to make peace with him, to restore their family, and he had gone off and gotten drunk. Rage blurred her vision, and she fought it down. She would not ask these people; it would embarrass them. She made herself smile. “Well—if he’s not up to work, perhaps I could find something to eat?”
“Of course.” In moments, a bowl of soup and a loaf were before her. “I don’t know if you remember me . . . ?” The woman looked to be her own age, or a little older, not so tall and plumper. Rahi tried to think, but nothing came back to her. “Arya, in the third cohort of Sim’s . . .” the woman prompted.
Yes. Arya had been thinner—they all had—but strong and eager, one who never argued about camp chores, either. “I do now,” Rahi said, pulling off a hunk of the warm bread. “You taught us all a song about the frog in the spring, I remember.” She hummed a line, and Arya grinned.
“You look like your da when you smile,” she said. “But dark hair . . .”
“My mother,” said Rahi, around the bread, relaxing. Arya had come from a vill much like her own; the talk about which parent a child resembled was as comforting as old tools. Next the talk would turn to their mothers’ parrions.
“Since you’re here . . .” Arya said, then paused, floury hands planted firmly on the table. Rahi swallowed the bread in her mouth and waited. Arya looked away, but didn’t move, and finally came out with it. “There’s some of the Marshals saying that now the war’s over, there’s no need for women to be taken into the bartons. There’s some of them saying the Code’s too partial to wives. Have you heard of that?”
Rahi nodded. “Mostly in the bigger towns, is where I’ve heard it. Mostly from men who weren’t in the fighting at all, crafters and traders and such.”
Arya sat down across from her. “It’s the same here, but some of the Marshals—I’d have thought they’d have more sense—some of the Marshals have taken it up. Taken it to Gird, even. I heard it myself, one evening: pecking at him like crows at a sack of grain, all about how there’s no need for it now, and the women won’t make good wives or mothers if they’re always drilling in the bartons. That in the old days our women had parrions of cooking or healing or clothmaking, not parrions of weaponwork.”
“He won’t listen,” said Rahi. “He lost that argument a long time ago.” She didn’t realize she was grinning until she felt her scar stretch; she was seeing in her mind’s eye the blank astonishment on Gird’s face that day in the forest camp.
“For you, maybe,” Arya persisted. “He would never try to stop you—but what about the rest of us?”
“But you’re a veteran,” Rahi said. “No one could put you out of the barton now—”
“Not exactly. Not yet.” Arya spread her hands. “I shouldn’t be bothering you, maybe, but you were the first—and we all look to you. Some of us don’t intend to be wives, or go back to farms; we like what we’re doing now. And if anyone can keep Gird from taking it away—”
“Don’t give it up.” She knew now what was coming, and hoped to head it off with a short answer.
“That’s what I say,” said the other woman, coming now to sit beside Arya. She was younger, darker, with the intensity of youth, Rahi wondered if she had ever been really tired. “It’s not up to Gird; our lives aren’t something for him to give or take. Arya’s a veteran, same as anyone else who fought; why shouldn’t she live however she wants? It’s not like she was a mageborn lady who needed watching.”
“But you know yourself, Lia, it’s not that easy—”
“Gird always said nothing’s easy that’s any good—isn’t that right?” The other woman faced Rahi with a challenging stare.
“But are you really afraid he’ll change the Code?” asked Rahi. “I’m not the only woman who’s a Marshal, you know.” But some gave it up, she reminded herself. Some went home, back to a family if they had one, or to start a second family if they’d lost husband and children. When she ran through the list in her mind, perhaps half the women who had won Marshal’s rank still held it. In her own grange, fewer women came to the drills as the memory of war faded, as fear of invasion lessened. She had not pushed them, she suddenly realized, as she pushed the men—she had accepted all the usual reasons: pregnancy, a new baby, a sick child, an ailing husband or parent.
“It’s not just the training,” the other woman—Lia—went on. “Who wants to fight in a war, after all? I was too young for fighting then; I train now because Arya tells me I should. Without her, I’d wait until trouble came before I picked up a sword. But the rest—you know how it was. Under the lords’ rule, women could hold no land, even as tenants; in the city, women couldn’t rent buildings or speak before a court for themselves. Father’s daughter; husband’s wife; son’s mother—that’s how it was for all but the mageborn ladies. My mother was a widow; she had no son. She had to ask her brother for houseroom for us, and I had to take him for my da. If the war hadn’t come, he’d have married me to the tanner’s son, and taken his share of the bride-price. The mageborn didn’t have that problem—that woman everyone calls the Autumn Rose, or the Rosemage—”
Rahi snorted; she couldn’t help herself. Arya grinned. “I remember what you called her, Rahi.”
“Don’t say it!” Rahi held up a hand, chuckling. “I’ve been told often enough how rude I was. Am. And if my mother were alive, she’d say throwing a name at someone is like throwing mud at the sky. It always comes back on you.”
“But what I meant was it was different for them,” said the younger woman, earnestly. “Their ladies had the right to choose; they had the right to learn weaponscraft—”
“Easy, Lia,” said Arya. “Rahi knows all that, none better.” She took the younger woman’s hand in hers, squeezed it. “Rahi’s not going to let her da, even the Marshal-General that he is, change the laws back and put free women under men’s thumbs again.” The look she gave Rahi said Are you? as clearly as words.
Rahi shook her head, and bit into the bread as if she hadn’t eaten in days. It made her uncomfortable, the way so many women acted around her, as if she were a sort of Marshal-General for women, and Gird was the one for men. Whenever she traveled, women would come to her with their problems, things their own marshals should have handled, things she had no idea how to handle. She supposed she deserved it: she had been the first, and the arguments she’d used on Gird still seemed reasonable. But when she heard them coming back at her from someone else’s mouth—and when some women went far beyond anything she’d ever meant—she never knew what to say.
They didn’t want to hear what she really thought. If she had had a family to go back to . . . if she had been able to bear children . . . she would not be a Marshal. She would have been happy to center a family as her mother had; she would have enjoyed (as, in her short time as a young wife she had enjoyed) the close friendship of other women in a farming village; she would have liked growing into the authority the old grannies had, when younger women came to her for help, one of the endless dance of women who passed on the knowledge and power that came with the gift of life. The peasant folk had always had a place for those who loved for pleasure, not bearing, but most of those married for children, and loved where they would. She had no way to understand those who were content outside the family structure, women who not only loved women but wanted no home as she knew it, wanted no children.