Arrows of the Queen Read Free Page A

blurted out, “I don’t want to be Married at all!”
    The little rustlings and stirrings of a group of bored women suddenly ceased, and they became as still as a row of fenceposts, all with disbelief on their faces. Nine identical expressions of shock and dismay stared at Talia from the sides of the table. The silence closed down around her like the hand of doom.
    â€œTalia, dear,” a soft voice spoke behind her, breaking the terrible silence, and Talia turned with relief to face Father’s Mother, who had been sitting unnoticed in the corner. She was one of the few people in Talia’s life who never seemed to think that everything she did was wrong. Her kind, faded blue eyes were the only ones in the room not full of accusation. The old woman smoothed one braid of cloud-white hair with age-spotted hands in unconscious habit, as she continued. “May the Mother forgive us, but we never thought to ask you. Have you a vocation? Has the Goddess Called you to her service?”
    Talia had been hoping for a reprieve, but that, if anything, was worse. Talia thought with horror of the one glimpse she’d had of the Temple Cloisters, of the women there who spent their lives in prayer for the souls of the Holderkin. The utterly silent women, who went muffled from head to toe, forbidden to leave, forbidden to speak, forbidden—life! —had horrified her. It was a worse trap than Marriage; the very memory of the Cloisters made her feel as if she was being smothered.
    She shook her head frantically, unable to talk around the lump in her throat.
    Keldar rose from her place with the scrape of a stool on the rough wooden floor and advanced on the terrified child, who was as unable to move as a mouse between the paws of a cat. Keldar took her shoulders with a grip that bruised as it made escape impossible and shook her till her teeth rattled. “What’s wrong with you, girl?” she said angrily, “You don’t want an Honorable Marriage, you don’t want the Peace of the Goddess, what do you want?”
    All I want is to be left alone, Talia thought with quiet desperation, I don’t want anything to change— but her traitorous mouth opened again and let the dream spill.
    â€œI want to be a Herald,” she heard herself say.
    Keldar released her shoulders quickly, with a look of near-horror as if she’d discovered she’d been holding something vile, something that had crawled out of the midden.
    â€œYou—you—” For once, the controlled Keldar was at a loss for words. Then— “Now you see what comes of coddling a brat!” she said, turning on Father’s Mother in default of anyone else to use as a scapegoat, “ This is what happens when you let a girl rise above her place. Reading! Figuring! No girl needs to know more than she requires to label her preserves and count her stores or keep the peddlers from cheating her! I told you this would happen, you and your precious Andrean, letting her fill her head with foolish tales!” She turned back to face Talia. “ Now , girl—when I finish with you—”
    But Talia was gone.
    She had taken advantage of the distraction of Keldar’s momentary tirade to escape. Scampering quickly out the door before any of the Wives realized she was missing, she fled the Steading as fast as she could run. Sobbing hysterically, she had no thought except to get away. With the wind in her face, and sweating with fear, she ran past the barns and the stockade, pure terror giving her feet extra speed. She fled through the fields as the waist-high hay and grain beat against her, and up into the woodlot and through it, following a tangled path through the uncut underbrush. She was seeking the shelter of the hiding place she’d found, the place that no one else knew of.
    There was a steep bluff where the woodlot ended high above the Road. Two years ago, Talia had found a place where something had