But that’s the way it is, beauty, you’ll get used to it, and then you can ride with your master. .. .
At noon she led him back, suggesting to one of the women they put her more docile horse into the loose-box and leave her own small stall for the black stallion. Already, it seemed, she could see the nebulous figure of King Carolin riding into Hali on this splendid horse.
From this work, which she found easy – well, not exactly easy, but familiar and pleasant – she was sent to practice unarmed combat. She did not especially mind having to learn to fall without hurting herself – she had, after all, fallen from a horse more times than she could remember while she was learning to ride, and she supposed the skill was similar – but the series of holds, thrusts, jabs and throws seemed endlessly complex, and it seemed that every woman there, including the beginners with whom she was set to practice basic movements, knew more of it than she did. One of the older women, watching her for a moment, finally motioned her away, signalled to the others to go on, and said, “How long have you been pledged to the Sisterhood, my girl?”
Romilly tried to remember. Things had been happening so swiftly in the last few moons that she really had no notion. She shrugged helplessly. “I am not sure. Some tendays-”
“And you do not see much cause for this kind of training, do you?”
She said, carefully trying to be tactful, “I am sure there must be some reason for it, if it is taught in every hostel of the Sisterhood.”
“Where were you brought up – what’s your name?”
“Romilly. Or I’m called Romy sometimes. And I was brought up in the foothills of the Hellers, near Falconsward.”
The woman nodded. “I would have guessed that much from your speech; but you grew up in outland country, then, not near to a big city, where you never met a stranger?”
“That’s true.”
“Well, then. Suppose you are walking down a city street, one of the more crowded and dirty sections.” She beckoned and the girl who had sat next to Romilly at supper last night, Betta, came and joined them.
“You are walking along a duty street where thieves cluster and men think all women like the doxies of the taverns,” the older woman said. Betta shrugged, began to walk along the wall and the older woman suddenly leaped at her with a strangling grip. Romilly gasped as Betta twisted her upper body, jerked the woman forward and flung her to her knees, her arm immobilized behind her back.
“Ow! Betta, you are a little rough, but I think Romy sees what is meant. Now, come at me with a knife.”
Betta took up a small wooden stick, about the size of a clasp-knife, and came at the woman with ‘knife’ lowered to stab. So rapidly that Romilly could not see what happened, the ‘knife’ was in the other woman’s hands and Betta lying on her back on the floor, where the older woman pretended to kick her.
“Careful, Clea,” Betta warned, laughing and moving out of the way, then suddenly jerked at the woman’s foot and pulled her down.
Laughing in her turn, Clea scrambled up. She said to Romilly, “Now do you see what good this might be to you? Particularly in a city like this, where we are at the edge of the Drylands, and there are likely to be men who think of women as possessions to be chained and imprisoned? But even in a civilized city like Thendara, you are likely to meet with those who will have neither respect nor courtesy for man or woman. Every women taken into the Sisterhood must learn to protect herself, and-” her laughing face suddenly turned deadly serious, “When you are life-pledged to the Sisterhood, like myself, you will wear this.” She laid her hand on the dagger at her throat “I am pledged to kill rather than let myself be taken by force; to kill the man if I can, myself if I cannot.”
A shiver ran down Romilly’s back. She did not know whether she would be able to do that or not. She had been prepared to injure Rory seriously, if she must. But to kill him? Would that not make her as bad as he was?