War Maid's Choice-ARC Read online

  “Leeana, Taraiys?” the five hundred asked in a musing tone, and the girl—she couldn’t have been a day over seventeen—blushed rosily. It was a fascinating shade of deep red, Balcartha noted, and Taraiys’ blond hair, blue eyes, and very fair complexion made it even more spectacular.

  “I beg your pardon, Five Hundred,” she said stiffly. “I meant to say that Seventy-Five Leeana is here. She says she has an appointment.”

  “Ah—that Leeana,” Balcartha murmured, and watched Taraiys’ blush turn even darker. For a moment, the five hundred wondered if smoke was actually going to curl up off of the girl’s skin. But she didn’t quite burst into spontaneous flames, and after a moment, the Guard commander relented and smiled slightly. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been expecting the Seventy-Five. Please ask her to step into my lair.”

  “Yes, Five Hundred!” Taraiys actually came to attention and touched her chest with a raised fist in salute, and Balcartha managed not to crack a smile as she solemnly returned it. Then she leaned comfortably back in her swivel chair, legs crossed, propped her elbows on the chair arms, and steepled her fingers under her chin.

  “Seventy-Five Leeana, Five Hundred!” Taraiys announced with sharp formality a moment later, opening the door and ushering the considerably taller Leeana through it. Her head barely topped the older war maid’s shoulder, and Leanna’s jade-green eyes danced with devilish delight as they met the five hundred’s over Taraiys head. Her lips quivered with her womanful struggle to restrain the smile obviously dancing right behind those eyes, but somehow she managed to maintain a suitably solemn demeanor when Balcartha gave her a warning glance.

  “Thank you, Taraiys,” the five hundred said solemnly. “That will be all, I think.”

  “Yes, Five Hundred!” Taraiys saluted again and disappeared through the office door with the air of a rabbit escaping down its hole, perhaps half a leap in front of the fox. The door closed behind her, and something suspiciously like a giggle spurted out of Leeana.

  “That will be quite enough of that, Seventy-Five Leeana,” Balcartha said primly.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, Five Hundred Balcartha!” Leeana said earnestly. “Mother! She was so red when you sent her back out I thought you’d set her on fire!” The tall, redhaired young woman shook her head. “What did you say to her?”

  “That’s between her and me.” Balcartha smiled and shook her own head. “She does color up spectacularly though, doesn’t she?”

  “Oh, I think you could certainly say that,” Leeana agreed. Then she smiled a bit penitently. “I really shouldn’t make fun of her for it though, I suppose. I can produce a pretty spectacular blush of my own, can’t I?”

  “On the rare occasions when anyone can manage to embarrass you, yes,” Balcartha agreed.

  “Are you implying that such a low person as myself no longer has the delicacy to feel embarrassment?” Leeana asked innocently, and Balcartha chuckled.

  “Something like that...these days, at least,” she agreed, and Leeana threw up her right hand as if she were acknowledging a touch in a training match.

  “I deserved that,” she acknowledged. “But she really is awfully young, isn’t she?”

  “This from the broken down old grandmother in front of me?” Balcartha raised both eyebrows. “I seem to remember a fourteen-year-old who didn’t know which end of the dagger to hold when Erlis and Ravlahn first evaluated her. Now, let me see, let me see...what was her name?”

  She gazed up at the ceiling, lips pursed in obvious thought, and Leeana laughed.

  “You really are training with live blades today, aren’t you, Five Hundred Balcartha?”

  “Only against some,” Balcartha replied with a twinkle.

  As the commander of the Kalatha Guard, she wasn’t supposed to have favorites, and she never allowed favoritism to govern her actions, but there was no point pretending she didn’t have a special place in her heart for Leeana Hanathafressa. She did remember—vividly—the pampered fourteen-year-old noblewoman who’d fled to Kalatha almost seven years before. Not that Leanna had realized she’d been pampered, and by the standards of her birth rank, she hadn’t been. Which hadn’t changed the fact that, as Balcartha had just pointed out, she’d been totally unequipped with the skills her new life was going to require of her. Her embarrassment at finding herself clad—more or less—in the traditional chari and yathu had been only too apparent to someone with Balcartha’s experience, and unlike most war maids, Leanna hadn’t fled to Kalatha to escape an intolerable, all too often abusive family situation. Indeed, she’d escaped to Kalatha no more than hours in front of her pursuing father because of how much she’d loved her parents, and she’d been miserably homesick and unhappy at leaving them, however bravely she’d tried to hide it.

  Looking at her now, Balcartha could still see that fourteen-year-old inside the poised, confident, athletic young woman who had replaced her. Not the misery or the uncertainty, but the dauntless, uncomplaining spirit which had risen to meet the demands of a life so utterly different from the one to which she had been raised.

  Now Leeana smiled at her, and Balcartha unsteepled her fingers to point at the empty chair in front of her desk.

  “Sit.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Leeana said meekly and settled obediently into the indicated chair. She also folded her hands neatly in her lap, planted her feet very close together, and sat very straight with a demure, earnestly attentive expression.

  “You do realize you’re about to draw two extra weeks of patrol duty for being such a smartass, don’t you?” Balcartha inquired.

  “Oh, I suppose something like that might happen in some other city guard,” Leeana replied. “My five hundred is far too broad-minded and much too far above the sort of petty mindedness which would permit that sort of mean-spirited retaliation...Ma’am.”

  “You just go right on believing that until you see the patrol roster,” Balcartha advised her. Then she shook her head. “Although truth be told, and given how much you actually seem to enjoy running around out in the grasslands, I suppose I’d better come up with some other way to demonstrate my petty mindedness. Maybe I should convince the mayor to send you back for another conversation with Lord Warden Trisu.”

  “Mother forbid!” Leeana leaned back and raised both hands in a gesture of surrender, the dismay in her expression only half-feigned. “I’ll be good. I promise I’ll be good!”

  “That bad, was it?” Balcartha swung her chair slowly from side to side. “Didn’t Arm Shahana’s visit give you any cover? I thought he was on his best behavior when she comes to call on him.”

  “I suppose he is, really.” Leeana cocked her head, and her tone was more serious. “I’d say he’s at least trying, anyway. Unfortunately—as you and Mayor Yalith are both perfectly well aware—Trisu can’t quite seem to forget who my father is.” She grimaced. “He’s not very good at hiding his conviction that becoming a war maid is about the most disgraceful thing a properly reared young noblewoman could possibly have done. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t try very hard, really.”

  “What do you mean?” Balcartha’s chair stopped swinging and her eyes narrowed.

  “Oh, I’m not saying he goes out of his way to offer me insults, Balcartha,” Leeana said quickly. “On the other hand, you know he doesn’t believe in operating under false pretenses, and becoming a war maid isn’t some sort of minor faux pas like getting myself caught sleeping with someone else’s husband or producing a child whose father I can’t name. It’s a seriously reprehensible thing for anyone to do!”

  There was a genuine bite under the humor in her tone, Balcartha noted, continuing to gaze at her intently, and the younger woman shrugged.

  “Whatever he may have thought or felt, he was perfectly polite in the way he addressed me, Balcartha. And let’s face it, we both know Mayor Yalith chooses me as her envoy to make a specific point to him. I understand that. That doesn’t mean I don’t get a little tired sometimes of being used as the mayor’s hamme
r, but I understand it.” She shrugged again. “If putting up with the occasional visit to Trisu is the worst thing the war maids ever ask of me, I’ll figure I’ve been a lot luckier than I deserve.”

  “I see.” Balcartha considered her for another few seconds, then tipped back in her chair once more. “Should I take it, then, that you accomplished whatever it was Yalith sent you there to deal with?”

  “I think so.” Leeana nodded, but she did not (Balcartha noted) tell her exactly what it was Yalith had sent her to Thalar Keep to do. The younger woman’s reticence didn’t offend the five hundred. In fact, she approved of it—strongly—and the fact that Leeana wasn’t the sort to gossip about any diplomatic missions upon which she might be sent was one of the reasons she tended to get sent on them.

  Well, that and the fact that she’s smart as a whip, not to mention better educated than at least three quarters of our war maids, and better informed on the Kingdom’s politics than Yalith and me combined. And equipped with a confidence in her ability to handle even people like Trisu that most war maids twice her age could only envy. The really funny thing is that as smart as she is, I don’t think she fully understands even now just how unusual that confidence of hers is.

  Part of it, the five hundred knew, was simply who and what she’d been born. It would have been ridiculous to expect someone like her friend Garlahna, who’d been raised on a farm, to have the same confidence and poise as the only daughter of one of the Kingdom’s four most powerful nobles. There was reason in everything, after all. Yet birth alone couldn’t explain Leeana Hanathafressa, and neither could the young woman’s knife-edged intelligence.

  The truth, Balcartha admitted to herself just a bit more grimly, was that the majority of war maids had been damaged—or at least scarred—by whatever it was which had driven them to revolt against all the rules and expectations of “proper conduct” which had been trained into them. Not all of them, of course. There would always be those who simply discovered they wanted something more out of their lives. That they wanted to step beyond the mold and the restrictions, and thank Lillinara for them! But there was no point trying to deny that the war maid community was a refuge—a place to heal, or even hide—for the majority of women who sought it out.

  In a sense, that was true for Leeana, as well, but what she’d come to hide from was the proposal of an arranged marriage she’d known her father’s political enemies had contrived as a weapon against him. And if she’d had the inevitable regrets, shed the inevitable tears at giving up her family, there’d been nothing damaged or scarred about her. There’d been only that deep, abiding, astounding strength, and over the years, Balcartha had come to have an equally deep and abiding respect for the parents who’d given it to her.

  “And did Lord Trisu’s grooms offer to take care of Boots for you?” the five hundred asked out loud, her eyes gleaming faintly, and Leeana snorted.

  “Lillinara, no!” She shook her head. “How can you even ask such a thing? Any properly bred Sothōii male offer to care for a war maid’s horse? They were far too busy undressing Garlahna and me with their eyes!”

  “Alas, that doesn’t seem to happen to me anymore,” Balcartha said mournfully, running one hand over her gray hair.

  “Trust me, I wish it didn’t happen to me, either!” Leeana said vehemently.

  “Oh, hush, child!” Balcartha stopped running her hand over her hair to shake an index finger at the younger woman. “Trust me, the day men don’t look at you, you’ll notice! I know what you’d really like to do is wring their necks, and I’d pay good kormaks to see you do it. For that matter, I’d offer to help if I thought you’d need it! But you’re only as young and good-looking as you are once, so go ahead and rub their noses in it. In a properly ladylike way, of course.”

  “Oh, of course,” Leeana agreed, but a faint echo of Taraiys’ fiery blush seemed to touch her cheekbones, and Balcartha frowned mentally.

  Quite a few war maids, especially the ones who’d fled to the free-towns like Kalatha rather than being born there, took full advantage of the sexual freedom their new lives offered. Some of them took too much advantage of it, in Balcartha’s opinion, and the behavior of certain war maids she could call to mind didn’t help the bigoted stereotype which viewed all war maids as perhaps a half-step above common harlots. Or below them, perhaps. Of course, it was hard to blame them, after what many of them had endured, and whoever any individual war maid might choose to bed was her concern and hers alone. Whatever else might be true, war maids belonged to themselves, not anyone else, in all ways. They’d given up far too much of the rest of their lives to compromise on that, however much their “licentuous ways” offended the society they’d rejected, and they were perfectly prepared to make their defiance of that society’s rules abundantly, one might even have said flagrantly, clear.

  Expecting anything else would have been not merely foolish but wrong, and as a general rule Balcartha didn’t make it her business to worry about what any of her war maids did whenever they were off duty. Still, she’d become aware Leeana wasn’t one of the ones who took advantage of that particular aspect of her freedom. Or if she did, she was incredibly discreet about it, at any rate. Bacartha had thought for a while that she and Gharlana might decide to pair up, but that obviously wasn’t the case...especially now that Barlahn Ironsmith had come on the scene! And it wasn’t as if someone with Leeana’s looks and warm, open personality hadn’t attracted plenty of attention, male and female alike, especially over the last few years. But she’d rebuffed all of them—with a smile or a laughing, wicked joke that made it abundantly obvious she was no prude, whatever else might be true, far more often than not. And she clearly had a healthy appreciation for her own attractiveness. Aside from an occasional flash of resentment like her comment about Traisu’s armsmen—and the gods knew Balcartha understood that well enough!—she never seemed the least...repressed, or unhappy, but still...

  “But still” it isn’t any of your business, old woman! the five hundred scolded herself. It’s up to her who she does—or doesn’t—sleep with, so just you let her worry about it!

  “Well,” she said out loud, “I’m glad to hear your mission was a success and you didn’t leave any bruised or broken armsmen in your wake.”

  “Not this time, anyway.” Leeana grimaced. “I can’t guarantee that won’t happen another time, though!”

  “Just make sure there’s a witness who can honestly testify that he made the first move, and you’ve got my blessing.” Balcartha’s tone was light, but there was a genuine note of warning in it, as well, and she waited to continue until Leeana nodded back.

  “And now that I’ve issued my stern injunction, what was it you wanted to see me about?” she asked then.

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about a furlough,” Leeana said, and Balcartha’s mental ears pricked.

  The younger woman looked as relaxed and comfortable as she’d been from the moment she entered the office, yet there was some subtle change. Some tiny shift in her body language, or perhaps something in her eyes. Balcartha couldn’t put a finger on what that “something” was, but that didn’t prevent her from knowing it was there.

  “A furlough?” she repeated.

  “Yes.” Leeana shrugged. “It turns out I’ve been running up unused leave time for quite a while now. In fact, according to Erlis, I’ve got over three months of it on the books. With your permission, I’d like to use some of that up now.”

  “Over three months?” Balcartha blinked. To have accrued that much unused leave time, Leeana must have pretty much not taken any leave at all for the last couple of years, and the five hundred rebuked herself for not having noticed. Attention to duty and hard work were always praiseworthy qualities and much to be encouraged, but it was important for anyone to save a little time for herself, as well. In fact, it was as important as attention to duty, and if she’d realized Leeana was shorting herself on leave to that extent...

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Leea
na made a small, almost apologetic gesture. “It just sort of...piled up.”

  Those mental ears of Balcartha’s twitched again as Leeana’s tone registered.

  Now why don’t I believe it just “piled up”? And if it didn’t, why has she been saving it up on purpose?

  “I suppose that happens sometimes,” she said after a moment, “if not usually to quite that extent. And if it has, then by all means let’s get some of it used up. Unless you’re planning on letting it go on ‘piling up’ until you can retire a year or two early!”

  “That’s not what I had in mind.” Leeana grinned and shook her head. “In fact, if the Guard can spare me, I’d like to go ahead and take a month or two of it, starting next month.”

  “I’m sure we can survive without you for a few weeks,” Balcartha said dryly. “May I ask exactly what it is you have in mind to do with all that time?”

  “Well...” Leeana shrugged. “Next month is my birthday, and I’d like to go home—to Hill Guard, I mean—for it.”

  Balcartha’s eyes narrowed in sudden understanding.

  “That’s right. You’ll be twenty-one this year, won’t you?” she said.

  “Yes, I will,” Leeana replied, meeting her gaze levelly, and Balcartha nodded slowly.

  Twenty-one was the year of majority, the official beginning of adulthood, for a Sothōii noblewoman. For noblemen, it came two years earlier than that—just another of those little natural advantages which accrued to someone who’d had the good sense to be born male. Among those scandalous war maids, of course, the rules were somewhat different, and unlike Leeana Bowmaster, Leeana Hanathafressa had been legally an adult from the moment she completed her probationary period.