Wind Rider's Oath

warrior.'

Kaeritha nodded again, more emphatically, and Bahzell chuckled. If he found his position in Balthar difficult as a hradani, Kaeritha had found hers only marginally less so . . . as the heckler she'd trounced outside the temple made clear. Tellian's men, and those of the city guard, had at least taken their cue from their liege lord and extended to her the same deference and respect any champion of Tomanak might have expected. Yet it was only too obvious that even they found the concept of a female champion profoundly unnatural.

'Well, for all that our folk've spent the best part of a thousand years massacring one another,' Bahzell continued, 'there's much to be said for the Sothoii. But one thing no one is ever likely to be suggesting is that they've an overabundance of innovation in their natures, especially where matters of tradition and custom arСe concerned. Don't let Tellian be fooling you. For a Sothoii, he's about as radical as you're ever likely to meet, and well-educated about foreign lands, to boot. But your typical Sothoii is stiffer-necked than even a hradani, and the real conservatives are still after thinking the wheel is a dangerous, newfangled, harebrained novelty that will never really be catching on.'

Kaeritha chuckled, and Brandark grinned.

'Aye, and some of them are stupid enough to be after thinking they invented fire for their very own selves just last week,' Gharnal agreed. His grin was a bit sharper than Brandark's, honed on a core of deeply cherished hostility for all things Sothoii, but that represented a tremendous exercise of restraint for him.

'I won't say there isn't an element of the pot and kettle in that pithy description, Kerry,' Brandark said after a moment. 'But there's a lot of accuracy in it, too. The Sothoii take a tremendous amount of pride in how 'traditional' they are, you know. Their very name-'Sothoii'-is derived from the Old Kontovaran word sothСfranos, which translated roughly as 'sons of the fathers.' According to their traditions, they're descended from the highest nobility of the Empire of Ottovar, and they've grown pretty fanatical about protecting that line of descent-intellectually, as well as physically-over the last twelve centuries or so.'

'Are they really?' Kaeritha asked. 'Descended from the old Ottovarn nobility, that is?'

'That's hard to say,' Brandark said with a shrug. 'It's certainly possible. But the significant point is that they think they are, and that pride in their ancestry is part of what produces those conservatives Bahzell and Gharnal were just talking about. And the very existence of the war maids is an affront to their view of the way their entire society-or the rest of the world, for that matter-is supposed to work. In fact, the war maids wouldn't exist at all if the Crown hadn't specifically guaranteed their legal rights. Unfortunately-and I suspect this is what Bahzell was getting at-calling that royal guarantee 'a charter' is more of a convenient shorthand than an accurate description.'

Kaeritha cocked an eyebrow, and he shrugged.

'It's actually more of a bundle of separate charters and decrees dealing with specific instances than some sort of neat, unified legal document. Kerry. According to what I've learned so far, the original proclamation legitimizing the war maids was unfortunately vague on several key points. Over the next century or so, additional proclamations intended to clarify some of the obscurity, and even an occasional judge's opinion, were bundled together, and the whole mishmash is what they fondly call their 'charter.' I haven't actually looked at it, you understand, but I'm familiar enough with the same sort of thing among the hradani. When something just sort of grows up the way the war maids' 'charter' has, there's usually a substantial degree of variation between the terms of its constituent documents. And that means there's an enormous scope for ambiguities and misunderstandings . . . especially when the people whose rights those decrees are supposed to stipulate aren't very popular with their neighbors.'

'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 unnatural. But it would be a serious mistake to assume that any woman who chooses to become-or, for that matter, is born-a war maid isn't going to fall in love with a man and choose to spend her life with him on her own terms. Or at least to dally with one on occasion. And war maid mothers do tend to produce male children from time to time, just like any other mothers. Of course, those two facts lead to some of the thornier 'ambiguities' I mentioned earlier.'

'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 male children,' 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