The Nameless Warrior

Promise Me You'll Become A Warrior

Kindra Odion stood in the shadow of a tent and wiped her sweaty palms on her wool pants. A cool spring breeze blew through the valley, rustling the edges of the hide tent and throwing her chin-length hair in her face. On the field before her, warriors gathered in groups, talking or practicing, while a group of boys milled about in the center, looking unsure and excited.

"Are you going to stare at them?" Her twin sister, Kaye, asked. "Or are you going to join?"

Kindra rubbed her hands down her pants again and glanced at Kaye. "What if I'm not ready?"

"You've been practicing."

"By myself. Against trees."

Kaye watched the boys gathered on the field. "Do you think they're ready?"

Kindra followed her gaze and watched them fidget, bouncing from one foot to the other in anticipation, wiping their palms as she had. Only one stood still and sure, and he was the trainer's son, practicing with the best warriors since birth. If Kindra was going to prove herself worthy of becoming a warrior, he was the one she'd have to prove it to.

"Calm down," Kaye squeezed her hand. "You're making me nauseous."

"Sorry." Kindra wiped her other palm again, trying to calm her nerves enough that Kaye wouldn't feel them through their twin-bond. Whenever one of them experienced a strong emotion or physical sensation, the other felt the echo. As a priestess attuned to energy, Kaye felt Kindra's emotions much more intensely than Kindra felt her sister's.

It was another reason Kindra was nervous to go out on that field and declare her intention to become a warrior—if she was injured, her sister would feel it too.

Kaye stepped before her and put her hands on Kindra's shoulders. "You've been training for this since father died. You're a descendant of the warrior god, Eoin. You bested Gar as children, for Trina's sake, and everyone says he'll be as good as father."

A familiar pang of loss tightened Kindra's chest at the mention of their father.

"All you have to do is walk out onto that field and stand with those boys and tell everyone who asks that Fennec Odion sent you."

Promise me, Kindra, her father's voice rasped in her ear from where he'd laid on his deathbed four summers earlier. Promise me you'll become a warrior.

"I promise," she whispered, then and now. Her hands folded into determined fists and Kaye shoved her out from her hiding place between the tents. Kindra took a deep breath and walked out to the field, standing just shy of the group of boys.

They didn't look intimidating up close—most of them no older than fourteen summers, still growing into their bodies. None of them had the broad shoulders of a warrior yet, nor the stubble of a beard, nor the deep voice of a man. Kindra, on the other hand, had reached her final height. Her breasts had stopped growing—thank Aleda—and her blood came every moon. At sixteen summers she was old enough to join the fertility rights at the end of spring. A woman grown. And yet her hands trembled slightly as she stood on the training field, waiting for her chance to prove herself to these boys.

"Hello, Kindra," the warrior trainer, Wolf, smiled as he spotted her. "Here to watch the trainees earn their first lumps?"

She'd been watching the warriors train since she was a child, always eager to emulate them later in private. None of them knew her desire to become the first woman warrior of Fie Eoin, and none of them knew the promise she'd made to her dying father.

"No, sir," she swallowed hard. "I'm here to join them."

The smile froze on his face and a few of the boys turned to watch.