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Her relief had been brief, however. They’d given her a half-hour, or so, for breakfast to settle, and then Garlahna—that traitor she’d thought was becoming her friend—had borne her off to face Hundred Ravlahn in the training salle. The only real blessing had been that there’d been no one there besides Garlahna and Ravlahn to witness her fresh inadequacy.
It hadn’t really been her fault, and she’d known it. She’d never been trained with a bow, although she was an excellent shot with the light crossbows with which Sothoii noblewomen hunted birds and small game. And however radical Tellian Bowmaster might have been, it would never have crossed his mind to have his daughter trained in swordsmanship, or in the most effective way to open someone’s belly with a dagger. Nor, for that matter, had it ever occurred to him to teach his only child the finer points of using a garrotte, or throwing a knife or throwing stars.
Her abilities when it came to hand-to-hand combat without weapons had been even more rudimentary—not to say laughable—than her clumsy efforts with the various wooden training weapons with which Ravlahn had provided her. The one thing Leeana had been able to say with a certain forlorn pride at the end of two and a half grueling hours, was that she’d never stopped trying. Her efforts might simply have served to demonstrate that she was about as dangerous to another human being as a newborn kitten, but at least she’d tried. And, she thought miserably, she’d ended up with the bruises, the bloody nose, and the split lip to prove it, too.
She’d hobbled off to the mess hall, still under Garlahna’s escort, in time for lunch. Which, she’d discovered, she’d needed at least as badly as she had breakfast. She’d ravened her way through three heaping servings of buttered potatoes, baked beans, and fried chicken and been wondering wistfully if she quite dared to ask for a fourth helping of the potatoes, when a youngish-looking woman in a neat gray gown came over to her and Garlahna.
“Leeana?”
“Yes?” Leeana had looked up from her mostly empty plate suspiciously, her spoon still clutched in her hand, and something about her expression had made the other woman smile.
“I’m Lanitha,” she’d said.
“Oh.” Leeana had lowered her spoon. “The archivist?”
“That’s one way to put it,” Lanitha had agreed. “Personally, I prefer ’librarian,’ but I suppose my duties do make archivist a better fit, these days.” She’d grimaced. “I’m also, however, the principal of our town school here in Kalatha.”
“Oh,” Leeana had said in a tone she’d belatedly realized might have been described as less than wildly enthusiastic.
“I see you’ve been having an … interesting day,” Lanitha had observed, her voice wavering oddly while she tried not to smile. “I’ll try not to make things any more difficult for you than I have to. But I do need to get some feel for your scholastic abilities.”
Leeana had hovered on the brink of asking her why, but she’d suppressed the question in time. She’d had no doubt she would discover the answer, probably sooner than she wanted to.
“If you’re finished eating,” Lanitha had continued in a tone which, for all its politeness, had informed Leeana that she was finished eating, “why don’t you—and Garlahna, of course—come along with me? This shouldn’t take more than two or three hours.”
“Of course,” Leeana had replied, with only a trace of glumness. Then she’d put her spoon down, given it a regretful pat, and followed Lanitha out of the mess hall.
Lanitha had been almost correct. In fact, her estimate of the time required had been only about an hour short. By the end of her examination, Leeana had felt as exhausted mentally as she’d already been physically, but at least this time she’d felt reasonably confident that she’d acquitted herself well. Her father might not have seen any reason to teach her to lop the heads off of enemies, but he and her mother had both actively aided and abetted her in the pursuit of an intellectual curiosity other nobles might have found most unbecoming in a mere daughter. Leeana spoke six languages—four of them fluently—and could read and write in two more. She had a formidable education in geography, history, and literature, and a practical knowledge of politics—at least as practiced at the highest level of the Kingdom—which was quite astounding in anyone her age, and especially in a daughter.
In fact, the main reason Lanitha’s original time estimate had proved overly optimistic was that the archivist/teacher had become too interested in discussing things with the subject of her examination. In the end, she’d sent Leeana back off to the dining hall with Garlahna with the warning that she intended to request at least an hour or two of Leeana’s time each afternoon as an assistant instructor.
Any temptation towards a swelled head which Leeana might have taken away with her had evaporated like snow in summer when she and Garlahna arrived almost twenty minutes late for her shift in the kitchen. The excuse that Lanitha had kept her longer than anticipated had done remarkably little to placate the head cook’s ire, and neither had the fact that Leeana had effectively no kitchen skills at all. It wasn’t exactly Leeana’s fault, but she hadn’t felt like explaining that she hadn’t acquired those skills because her parents had employed others to perform those menial tasks. Partly because she’d had a shrewd suspicion that the cook would not have responded well to the suggestion that her own skills were “menial” ones. But even more because Leeana had agreed that it was time she acquired them.
That willingness to dig right in—enthusiastically, however ineptly—had turned the trick. She’d wondered if perhaps part of the cook’s prickliness had resulted from an expectation that someone who’d been so nobly born would have dismissed her assigned duties as beneath her. It had seemed as if some of the other war maids assigned to Leeana’s work crew had cherished some of the same suspicions, but if they had, their reservations had thawed quickly as her willingness sank in. She’d been restricted by her ignorance to more or less unskilled labor, but most of her fellow workers had paused in passing at least once to drop some little hint or encouragement upon her.
That had helped, but by the time supper was finished, the tables were cleared and scrubbed, the pots and pans and dishes were washed, and the cooking utensils had been laid out in preparation for the breakfast crews, she’d been literally stumbling with exhaustion.
She’d thought her ride from Balthar to Kalatha had been exhausting, and no doubt it had been. But the fatigue she’d felt then, even after that first hideous, sleepless night in the rain, was as nothing compared to what she felt now. She knew with absolute certainty that she had never been this tired in her entire life.
She staggered out of the mess hall towards the dormitory, then shambled to a halt as she realized someone was standing in front of her. It took her a moment or two to focus, then she straightened her aching back as she recognized Mayor Yalith by the light of the lanterns above the mess hall entrance.
“I won’t keep you long, Leeana,” the mayor said. She smiled, and her voice was gently compassionate and understanding. “I know all you really want to do at this moment is to go fall on your nose and stay there for as long as we’ll let you. It may be cold comfort, but just about every war maid has been where you are right now, and most of us survived the experience.
“I just wanted to tell you three things before you go collapse.
“First, I feel confident that you’re convinced you were an absolute and utter failure when Erlis and Ravlahn examined you today. Well, you weren’t.” Leeana blinked in fatigue-foggy disbelief, and Yalith smiled again. “Oh, I won’t say you thrilled them with your incredible prowess. But given your complete lack of training, you actually performed quite well. And both Erlis and Ravlahn feel you have considerable native ability, which they confidently expect to be able to nurture.