When Women Were Warriors Book I: The Warrior's Path

A Game With Rules

At midnight Maara woke me. For a moment I didn’t remember where I was. I looked up and saw the branches of the oak tree against the starry sky. I heard Cael’s voice, then Donal’s deeper one. My warrior was already buckling on her armor. I got up and tried to help her, but my fingers were clumsy.

“I can do it,” she told me. “Get our pack ready.”

“What happened?”

“Hurry,” she said.

In a few minutes all of us were ready—Donal and Kenit, Cael and Alpin, Maara and me. There was no moon that night. We made do with starlight as we stumbled through the pastures to the foot of Greth’s Tor, where Laris and Taia waited for us.

“Two fires,” I heard someone say.

We walked all night, traveling north, finding our direction by the bear stars. When light began to show in the eastern sky, Laris led us into the shelter of a stand of trees that lay between two hills.

“If we’re lucky, they’ll come through here,” she said. “It’s an easy trail, and they may be trying to stay out of sight of the Tor.”

Laris took Cael aside, and they had a brief whispered conversation. Then Cael and Alpin started up the hill behind us.

“Where are they going?” I asked Maara.

“They’re going to find a vantage point. The people who were so careless with their fires last night may make the same mistake again this morning.”

We waited under the trees for a long time before Cael and Alpin returned. They had seen nothing. Laris was undecided about what to do. She called the warriors together to talk things over. The general feeling was that if we kept going north, we might miss the travelers, who could have taken another way and gone past us, or we might run into them unexpectedly and risk a confrontation before we knew their strength.

Then we heard in the distance the groaning of cart wheels and the heavy tread of oxen’s feet. At once Laris had us spread out on both sides of the cattle trail that wound through the dale. We found hiding places where we could and waited.

Whoever was approaching wasn’t trying to be quiet. I heard a man’s voice coax his beasts over a rough place. A few minutes later he spoke again, and another man answered him.

They soon came into view—two oxen pulling a two-wheeled cart with a woman and three men walking beside it. The cart didn’t appear to be heavily laden, but where the trail ran uphill, the oxen strained against their yoke. One of the men carried a pole for driving them. None carried weapons.

Laris stepped out from her hiding place and blocked the trail, and Donal too showed himself. The rest of us stayed hidden.

Laris approached the man driving the oxen, and they talked for a few minutes. Maara and I were too far away to hear what was said.

The man lifted the covering of oxhide to show Laris the contents of the cart. Once she had inspected everything, she motioned to the rest of us to show ourselves.

The strangers were traders, bringing tin and copper ingots and some finished goods, farming implements and an assortment of bowls and cooking pots. They had been traveling with another group of traders who had left them that morning to travel farther west. It was their fires we had seen. I was both relieved and disappointed.

We traveled south with the traders, even though their oxen moved so slowly, because they brought news and gossip with them. Maara seemed to want to keep her distance from them, so she and I walked on ahead.

“What would we have done if they had been cattle raiders?” I asked Maara.

“That would depend on how many there were. If we could have done so safely, we would have confronted them and made them turn back.”