She knows I’m lying, of course. But she knows why. It was all the amends she could make.
Jaelle said, “You have broken shelter-truce, for which the penalty is three years’ outlawry. And you have attempted to rape a woman here, for which our penalty is castration. Think yourselves lucky that your jnan did not succeed. And now gather up all that is yours, and be gone. By law we need not share shelter with outlaws and rapists.”
Blackbeard said, and the drunken dismay in his voice was actually comical, “In this storm, mestra?”
“You should have listened to the voice of the storm before you broke shelter-truce,” Jaelle said, and her face was like stone. “Outside, like the dirty animals you are! And if one of you sets foot over the threshold while we are still here, I swear, I will cut out his cuyones and roast them over the fire there!” She gestured with her knife. “Out! No more talk now! Out!”
Fumbling, drunken, muttering obscenely, they gathered up their belongings; grumbling and angry, but before the gleam of the women’s knives, their massed, indomitable waiting, they went. When the door had closed behind the last of them, Jaelle said, “Rayna, Gwennis, go and be sure they do not disturb our horses and gear.” She handed the torch to Sherna, and came slowly toward Magda. “You. Are you hurt? Did they do anything worse than tear your clothes and maul you?”
“No.” Magda’s teeth were chattering with shock and reaction. I’ve been false to everything. To the Amazons, by behaving immodestly before men. To the mission I came on, by not finding out what I risked so much to know. She felt sick, shamed, exhausted with the violence of her emotions.
Jaelle put an arm around Magda, supporting her. The action was not kind, but contemptuous. She said, “Give her some wine before she finishes this by falling in a faint at our feet!”
She shoved Magda down on a bench; Camilla held a cup to her lips. Magda pushed it away. “I don’t want-”
“Drink it, damn you!” Camilla forced the cup against her mouth; Magda gulped, choked, swallowed again. Camilla said viciously, “You! I warned you, you bitch! Who let you out of the Guild-house in this state, with no notion of how to behave? If they had not all been as drunk as monks at midwinter-feast, it would have come to a fight, and we could all have been raped, or killed. You deserve to be beaten and sent back to the Guild-house!”
Sherna had built up the fire again; the women came in from the barn, and Rayna said, “They have gone; good riddance. I hope they freeze in the storm.”
Jaelle was standing with her back to the fire, looking formidable. Camilla shoved Magda toward her.
“Jaelle, you are our chosen leader; it is for you to deal with her. If you say so, I will beat her bloody for you; it would be a pleasure!”
Jaelle said at last: “Let her go, Camilla; if I decide she should be beaten, I can do it myself. Well,” she said to Magda, “what have you to say for yourself?”
It’s not over yet. I’ve got to go on bluffing. She said, with a spurt of defiance. “You are not my chosen leader. Do I owe you an explanation of my conduct?”
Jaelle said angrily, “You could have involved us all in your stupidity-or your wantonness, whatever it was! What is one of our first basic rules? Never get yourself into anything you can’t get yourself out of again! No one forces a woman into danger; but having taken a risk, you should be able to meet it. Now you have reinforced one of the old dirty stories about us, that we fight only in wolf packs and never meet our enemies fairly! Yes, damn you, I think you owe me an explanation; not me alone-all of us.”
That was fair enough. She said at last, truthfully, “I heard a part of what they were saying; and it seemed to me that it bore on the business that brought me into these hills. I felt I had to hear it.”