1. MIDWINTER
Thespa wept behind the black rock, her sword discarded on the icy ground. There were too many. She was too late. She knelt on the fern, hands grasping her leather jerkin, shaking with unvoiced rage.
Smoke and steam billowed from the thatched roof of the cottage. Riders cried to each other as they remounted, horses slipping on the packed snow. The unconscious body of a fur-draped woman hung across the saddle of an Aroth raider. It was Penoa, Thespa's mother.
The riders circled the burning home, then galloped over the half-frozen stream and up, over the brown hills on which her father would pasture his flocks in spring. She could see, through her tears, his limp body, impaled by an Aroth spear. A war cry tore from her throat.
Sword twisting in her hand, she ran to her father's side, her eyes wary of the shadows. But naught was to be seen. An early lamb, torn from the mother who had been herded away, cried at the top of the hill. The stream babbled under its crust of ice. But her father did not speak.
His eyes were motionless, his face tinged blue, stiff from cold. And death. She knelt by him and wept, for how long she did not know, but when she raised her head again the noon sun was westering.
She returned to the cave behind the rock, where she had hidden, returning home with her father's stallion. She had attended the midwinter feast of Thor in the village that lay not two miles east from their home. Erod, their finest possession, stood quietly where she had left him, one rein trailing on the ground. She led him carefully to her father's side.
She laid her father's body out on her cloak, and pulled him gently over the snow-covered ground to the cave. She wrapped him carefully, tying leather strips about his body, no time to wash him or light a fire to send him on his way. With great strength, she lifted his wrapped body up to a natural shelf in the cave, and laid her own sword beneath his feet. Stepping back, she let her palms glide through the air above him as she said a spell to guard her father and guide him on his way. She filled baskets with rocks and covered his body to protect it from vermin. And then she pushed the black rock until it covered the entrance to the cave, and scattered the dirt and snow until her footsteps were hidden.
She found her father's shield and sword in the outbuilding behind the trees, in the war chest he kept there. She used her knife to hack off her long blonde tresses. She took up her father's helmet and held it up over her head.
"I am Thespa, child of Penoa and Yeni, a virgin shieldmaiden. Thor, give me strength." Her voice was wrung with tears. "Give me the strength of my fallen father, and my unborn brothers." Hardened, her voice then rang out, carrying far across the fields. Thunder rumbled. "I claim the right," she cried, and placed the Aeti helmet on her head. It fit perfectly. Her father's sword she gird to her side, his shield she took in her left hand. She strode into the yard.
She moved toward the stallion, reborn, a woman with the strength of a warrior, her girlhood over. Her blue eyes were fierce, her once soft mouth now grim with vengeance. She hung her shield on the saddle and gathered Erod's reins in her left hand. She paused, looking again at the collapsing cottage, the stream where she bathed every morning, snow or no, remembering.
Remembering: her mother braiding her waist-length gold hair, bread baking on the hearth. Her father, showing her how to test the edge of her sword, teaching her to lift and fight, amazed at her strength. The passionate depths of the love her parents gave one another. The visions stung her heart.
Her mother's face flew into her mind, hair streaming as she flew through the air. She was lying face down over the withers of a rough-haired pony. Blood dripped from her mouth. "Thespa. East, toward Oria."
Thespa closed her eyes in silent prayer. Then she threw her foot in the stirrup and mounted. "Erod! Follow the Aroth devils!" The black stallion reared, snorting its eagerness, foam dripping from its mouth. In one swift movement, they were gone.
