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“You have a positive gift for understatement,” Kaeritha sighed, and shook her head. “Axeman law is much more codified and uniform than what you’re describing, but I’ve seen more than enough of this kind of melt-it-all-together mess of precedent, statute, and common law even there.” She sighed again. “Just what rights do the war maids have? In general terms, I mean, if there’s that much variation from grant to grant.”
“Basically,” Brandark replied, “they have the right to determine how they want to live their own lives, free of traditional Sothoii familial and social obligations.”
The Bloody Sword scholar tipped back in his chair, folded his arms, and frowned thoughtfully.
“Although they’re uniformly referred to as ’war maids,’ most of them aren’t, really.” Kaeritha raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. “Virtually every legal right up here on the Wind Plain is associated in one way or another with the holding of land and the reciprocal obligation of service to the Crown, Kaeritha, and the war maids are no exception. As part of King Gartha’s original proclamation, their free-towns are obligated to provide military forces to the Crown. In my more cynical moments, I think Gartha included that obligation as a deliberate attempt to effectively nullify the charter while pacifying the women who’d demanded it, since it’s hard for me to conceive of any Sothoii king who could honestly believe a batch of women could provide an effective military force.”
“If that was after being the case, then he was in for a nasty surprise,” Gharnal put in, and Brandark chuckled.
“Oh, he was that!” he agreed. “And in my less cynical moments, I’m inclined to think Gartha included the obligation only because he had to. Given how much of the current crop of Sothoii nobles is hostile to the war maids, the opposition to authorizing their existence in the first place must have been enormous, and the great nobles of Gartha’s day were far more powerful, in relation to the Crown, than they are today. Which means his Council probably could have mustered the support to block the initial charter without that provision. For that matter, the measure’s opponents would have been the ones most inclined to believe that requiring military service out of a bunch of frail, timid women would be an effective, underhanded way of negating Gartha’s intentions without coming out in open opposition.
“At any rate, only about a quarter of all ’war maids’ are actually warriors. Their own laws and traditions require all of them to have at least rudimentary training in self-defense, but most of them follow other professions. Some of them are farmers or, like most Sothoii, horse breeders. But more of them are shopkeepers, blacksmiths, potters, physicians, glassmakers, even lawyers—the sorts of tradesmen and craftsmen who populate most free-towns or cities up here. And the purpose of their charter is to ensure that they have the same legal rights and protections, despite the fact that they’re women, that men in the same professions would enjoy.”
“Are they all women?”
“Well,” Brandark said dryly, “the real war maids are. But if what you’re actually asking is whether or not war maid society is composed solely of women, the answer is no. The fact that a woman chooses to live her own life doesn’t necessarily mean she hates all men. Of course, many of them become war maids because they aren’t very fond of men, and quite a few of them end up partnering with other women. Not a practice likely to endear them to Sothoii men who already think the entire notion of women making decisions for themselves is u
“Why?” Kaeritha leaned forward, elbows on the table, her expression intent, while she cradled her wineglass in her hands, and Bahzell hid a smile. He’d seen exactly that same hunting-hawk expression when she encountered a new combat technique.
“There’s always been some question as to whether or not the war maids’ charter automatically extends to their malechildren,” Brandark explained. “Or, for that matter, to their female children, in the eyes of some of the true reactionaries. When a woman chooses to become a war maid, her familial duties and inheritance obligations are legally severed. Even your true sticks-in-the-mud have been forced to admit that. But a fair number of nobles continue to assert that the legal severance applies only to her—that whatever line of inheritance or obligation would have passed through her to her children is unimpaired. For the most part, the courts haven’t agreed with that view, but enough have to mean it’s still something of a gray area. I suppose it’s fortunate most ’first-generation’ war maids come from commoner stock, or at most from the minor nobility—the squirearchy, you might call them. Or maybe it isn’t. If the higher nobility had been forced to come to grips with the question, the Crown Courts would have been driven to make a definitive ruling on the disputed points years ago.
“At any rate, the exact question of the legal status of war maids’ children is still up in the air, at least to some extent. And so is the question of their marriages. Their more diehard opponents argue that since their precious charter severs all familial obligations, it precludes the creation of new ones, which means no war maid marriage has any legal validity in their eyes. And there really is some question, I understand, in this instance. I doubt very much that Gartha had any intention of precluding the possibility of war maid marriages, but Baron Tellian’s senior magistrate tells me some of the controlling language is less precise than it ought to be. According to him, everyone knows it’s a matter of technicalities and reading the letter of the law, not its spirit, but apparently the problems do exist. And, to be perfectly honest, from what he said—and a couple of things he didn’t say—I think the war maids have done their own bit to keep the waters muddied.”
“Why would they do that?” Kaeritha asked. “Unless … Oh. The children.”
“Exactly. If war maid marriages have no legal standing, then every child of a war maid is technically illegitimate.”
“Which would take them out of the line of inheritance, unless there were no legitimate heirs at all,” Kaeritha said with a nod of understanding, but her expression was troubled.
“I can follow the logic,” she continued after a moment, “but it seems awfully shortsighted of them. Or maybe like the triumph of expedience. It may prevent their children from being yanked away from them and drawn into a system they wanted out of, but it also prevents them from extending the legal protections of their own families to those same children.”
“Yes, it does,” Brandark agreed. “On the other hand, their own courts and judges don’t see it that way, and for the most part, the charters which create their free-towns extend the jurisdiction of their judges to all of the citizens of those towns. The problem comes with legal cases which cross the boundaries between the war maids’ jurisdiction and those of more traditional Sothoii nobles.”
“Tomanak,” Kaeritha sighed. “What a mess!”
“Well, it isn’t after being just the tidiest situation in the world,” Bahzell agreed. “Still and all, it’s one the Sothoii have been working at for two or three centuries now. There’s those as have some mighty sharp axes to grind, but for the most part, they’ve learned how to be getting on with one another.”