Jael looked up to Rillion standing beside her. “Go now, lassie. I think it best if you rest for a while.”
†
Wolves, thought Leonhardt, sitting with her legs dangling over the edge of the maidens’ carriage, examining her father’s sword. Forged Against the Tides of Winter, it read, but in her dream it had slain a wolf. Only in my dream, she thought. In real life, it had been no help against the other novitiates nor the captain of the Guard. She was nothing like her father said, “one to repent for the sins of the world.” She had to be rescued, just like a little girl—like the rest of the maids chattering away behind her, blathering on about hair and clothes and Sir Holland. Suddenly, Jael became aware of the dampness lingering in her shirt and trousers. They chaffed her skin, reminding her of the shape of her body—thick, muscular, ugly. The maidens’ banter seemed less vacuous then. After all, she could not compare with them, but neither could she compete with the men. There was nowhere for her, she realized. It had all been a lie. To her father, to herself. She thought of Zach and the promise she had made. I’m a liar. A pretender. A bastard daughter to a dishonoured knight.
“Sweetling, what’s wrong?” came a gasp from outside the carriage. Without lifting her eyes, Jael knew who it was. Sarah Purwynn, novitiate of the Religious Sisterhood, twenty-eight and eldest daughter of Baron Purwynn whose lands lay just within the domain of the Count of Castle Hibernis. She possessed all of the colors of the north-eastern reaches—milk-pale skin, platinum hair down to her hips, eyes like sapphires—and dressed as befit her noble blood. Each day of their journey she wore flowing gowns of watered silk garnished in gold-leaf or silver, and with different boots to match. Given how often Sarah crossed the caravan from her private coach, Jael imagined her servants must continually be beating the dirt from her clothes. That morning, a mix of dry and wet mud caked over Lady Purwynn’s blued leather boots. Sarah hardly noticed, though, so occupied was she with her armful of fresh quilts. She helped herself onto the edge of the carriage. “Oh, you’re soaked through. What happened, dearling?”
Jael recounted the morning’s events. One by one she told them, and one by one they seemed smaller than the last, each weighing a little less as Sarah defended what she did, what she said, the way she felt in those moments. Jael loved her for that. And in the few days she’d known Lady Purwynn, she thought of her as the mother she could have had.
“Men are such boars. They can’t even tie a proper knot. What if you caught a chill? You may still, if we don’t get you out of those wet clothes. Here, wrap yourself in this.” She handed Jael a heavy quilt from her pile. It was patchwork blue and highborn violet, stitched together from discarded noble livery. Silk and cotton and velvet and warm. Leonhardt stripped quickly as her clinging clothes would allow and buried herself inside fresh layers of fabric. Sarah smiled, her eyes like happy half-moons, her cheeks full and homely. “That’s much better. Truly, dearest, I wish you would have stopped by my coach this morning. My servants would have found you something dry and becoming, I’m sure.” She picked up Ricard’s old surcoat from the pile of damp clothes. Looking it over, she tilted her head and frowned. “Even clean, this doesn’t fit you at all. Why don’t you let me take this in for you. It can’t be comfortable running around in a sack.”
It’s not a sack! Jael stopped herself from snapping. Instead, she answered, “You’re too kind, my lady, but I like the way it is. It was my father’s.”
“Was it? Tell me, sweetling, do you love your father.”
Leonhardt puzzled over the question. “Of course I do. Who doesn’t.” Why are asking something like that all of a sudden?
After a pause, Sarah answered, “I don’t.”
There was quiet for a moment, broken by a howling in the distance.
“Why?” asked Jael.
Sarah Purwynn stared into the distance and bit her lip. “Have you ever been in love? No, don’t answer, I can see it on your face. Yes. A man waiting back home perhaps? Or maybe a stranger who passed through town? It doesn’t matter. Listen to me, Jael. I was in love once. Foolishly, wondrously, wonderfully in love. I tried to tell my father. Oh how I tried, but Baron Purwynn had only deaf ears for me. Then he had the gall to be angry when I refused his betrothals. He said I was being willful, as if a woman could will her own heart. And I even tried a few of the boars he put before me. Appalling, the lot of them, with kindly smiles and rotten hearts.” She turned so that they faced one another, eyes locked, and snaked a hand low on Leonhardt’s shoulder under the quilt. “Give him up, dearest. Whoever your love was, he’s just like the rest of them.”
“No,” Jael began, “Zach isn’t—”
Just then, a long yawn sounded from the distance, growing closer, the sucking sound of boots in mud and the endless grumble of exhausted men. They were on their return from the saint’s carriage, every one of them soiled to his knees. A few whistled and waved as they passed the maidens’ carriage. Sarah scowled. “Ugh. Disgusting, filthy boars.”
“Right you are, you noble
