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Things hadn’t gotten any better the next morning.
Garlahna turned out to be one of those disgusting people who were bright and cheerful the instant they got out of bed. Leeana had nothing against mornings, but she usually preferred to at least let the sun get up before she did. Garlahna, however, had rousted her out of bed over an hour before sunrise—and not with the welcoming cup of hot chocolate Marthya would have brought her—and helped her into the new garments one of Johlana’s minions had deposited outside Leeana’s door during the night.
There was quite a difference, Leeana had discovered, between seeing the chari and yathu on someone else, or even worrying about how they would feel on her, and actually finding herself dressed—if that wasn’t too strong a verb—in them for the first time. She’d been certain she was about to fall right back out of them! And despite the fact that she was far less bountifully provided for by nature then Garlahna, she’d been appalled by the amount of cleavage that showed once the yathu was laced snugly—very snugly—into place. If its designed function was to support her bosom during physical exertion, it was admirably fitted to the job, she’d decided. In fact, she’d rather thought that one of her father’s steel breastplates had to have more flex to it. She wasn’t quite certain how something could be simultaneously so confining and so humiliatingly revealing, but the yathu had managed just fine.
Not that the chari had been any better! The amount of leg it showed was bad enough, and she’d made a firm mental note to be very careful how she sat down in it. But she hadn’t realized quite how low on the hips it sat, either, and the notion of displaying her navel for the entire world to see had not been a comfortable fit for the girl who had been the daughter of the Baron of Balthar. As for how her mother would have reacted to the sight—!
And it had been cold! The least they could have done was to provide her with shoes, she’d thought plaintively as Garlahna urged her out into the windy predawn darkness. She’d shivered convulsively as the chill breeze nipped at all that conveniently exposed skin, but that had been little more than a minor inconvenience compared to the wet, muddy, occasionally gravel-strewn ground under her bare feet.
“My feet are freezing!” she’d whispered to Garlahna.
“Hah! Only your feet?” Garlahna had laughed. “Sweetheart, I came to Kalatha in early winter. I froze my sweet young arse off—not to mention something a bit higher!”
“You would have to mention that!” Leeana had groaned, reaching down to tug uselessly at her chari’s hem as another cold breeze blew up it. She was accustomed to long skirts or trousers, and the predawn wind’s chilly kisses on places it had no business kissing made her wish desperately that she was wearing them now.
“Oh, stop whining!” Garlahna’s cheerful snort had robbed the words of any offense. “I bet you don’t even have icicles down there yet!”
“No, but they’re forming nicely. And why can’t I even wear shoes?” Leeana had moaned, too miserable, for the moment at least, to remember her aristocratic pride.
“Anything that doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger,” Garlahna had replied with an oddly sympathetic chuckle. “That’s what they told me, anyway! And even if it weren’t true, it’s a matter of tradition.” She’d shrugged. “Personally, I always figured it was just our way of proving how much tougher than mere men we are.”
“I’d rather have warm feet and let them sneer at me for being weak,” Leeana had muttered back.
“Hush!” Garlahna had said, and Leeana had looked up to discover that they had just joined at least forty or fifty other war maids.
At first, she’d assumed that mandatory morning calisthenics for everyone must be part of the same bizarre, self-mortifying philosophy which had denied her shoes. She certainly couldn’t think of any other reason for so many women, of all ages—she even saw Dalthys and Johlana among them—to be standing around semi-naked and barefooted in the icy predawn wind! It had taken her several shivering minutes of listening to scraps of other conversations to discover that most of them had chosen to be there. That they actually enjoyed these “brisk” morning workouts together.
At that moment, Leeana had begun to seriously consider the possibility that all of those who insisted any woman had to be mad to choose to be a war maid were right.
Unfortunately, unlike the lunatics who’d been there voluntarily, Leeana had had no choice. Nor, she’d discovered, had Garlahna. It didn’t seem to bother the other young woman particularly, but as Leeana’s “mentor,” she was expected to lead by example. Leeana suspected that it would have bothered her a great deal, if their roles had been reversed.
She’d still been standing there, shivering as she looked woebegonely about herself in the gray half-light, when Erlis and another, younger, war maid with chestnut hair had come bounding energetically up. Erlis had a whistle, which she had immediately begun to blow with revolting vigor, and thus had begun what was quite possibly the most hideous single morning of Leeana Hanathafressa’s life.
Leeana had always been an active girl. She’d ridden virtually every day of her life, from the time she could walk. She’d been an energetic hiker, and she and her maids had enjoyed swimming—at least when it was warm enough for the water not to turn them blue the instant they jumped into it. But she’d never been particularly interested in exercise for exercise’s own sake. For her, physical exertion had been a way to get from one point to another, or a secondary cost of doing something that she enjoyed.
Erlis obviously came from a completely different tradition. It had been the first time Leeana had ever encountered a carefully pla
It had lasted for a seeming eternity, but that had turned out to be just long enough to prepare her for an even more humiliating experience. At least the physical exertion had warmed her up, and it had also loosened up her muscles. Which was fortunate, since Erlis and the chestnut-haired woman, who turned out to be Ravlahn Thregafressa, had descended upon her for the promised “evaluation of her general physical skills.”
By the time their exam—finally—came to a close, Leeana had concluded that she had no “general physical skills.” She’d done her best, and at least her examiners had maintained grave, nonjudgmental facades as she strove to meet their demands. But it had been evident to her that her life as an indolent aristocrat had left her woefully underequipped with the physical skills a war maid required. The only area in which she’d felt she’d performed with something approaching adequacy had been the sprints they required of her. She supposed that she’d done at least semi-adequately in the longer runs, as well, but that was about the best she could say.
At least they’d released her in the end and allowed her to stagger off under Garlahna’s guidance, limping on her bruised-feeling, bare feet, to the mess hall for breakfast. Back home in Balthar, Leeana had normally made do with hot chocolate or tea, a croissant or two, butter, some honey, perhaps, and a few pieces of fruit, when it was in season. But here in Kalatha, she’d found herself devouring a third huge bowl of honey-laced porridge, and then wondering where she could find just a little bit more of it for dessert. To her amazement, she’d actually felt almost human again when she finished.