Free Nobody's Princess by Esther Friesner Page B

insisted on carrying the buck into the throne room myself and dropped it at my father’s feet before I noticed we had a guest.” She smiled at the memory.
    “I’ll bet Father thought you were Artemis herself,” I said.
    That made my mother laugh. “Not Artemis. You know how he feels about her. But he did say he mistook me for one of her huntress nymphs. That was just before he told me he had to marry me or die.”
    I made a face. “Father said
that
?”
    “Men say many things when they want to win a woman. Whether or not they mean what they say…” She shrugged. “Your father meant it. Poor soul, it seemed like he
would
die, because none of my father’s advisers thought I should marry him. Tyndareus came to Calydon as a landless exile; his brother had stolen his kingdom.”
    The story of Father’s early trouble and final triumph was so well known that the palace stones could tell it. “Did you come to Sparta to marry him after he won back his crown?” I asked. “Or did he have to go back to Calydon for you?”
    “Are you asking because you want to know, or because you want to distract me from what we
need
to talk about?” Mother asked, her fingers curled around the polished curve of her bow.
    I looked away. She touched my chin and gently turned me back to face her.
    “It’s all right, Helen,” she said. “When I was your age, I, too, believed that if you buried a problem, it would go away.”
    “There’s no problem,” I said. “I’m through.”
    “Why? Because of what Glaucus said to you? I was standing in the shelter of the trees. I saw and heard everything. He was right, you know. You
did
act stupidly, running headlong at him like that, and it was just the sort of thing that would’ve gotten you killed in a real fight.”
    “I know,” I said, miserable. “That’s why I quit!”
    “Yes,” she said. “But why did you start?”
    “I don’t know. It was silly.”
    “We both know that’s a lie,” my mother said. She set aside her bow and picked up the women’s tools I’d brought with me. She studied the thread wound around the spindle and the clump of carded wool tied to the distaff. I knew I’d made a mess of both and waited for her to say so.
    Instead, she said, “For once, your distaff doesn’t look like you stuck it into a bird’s nest. And look at this: It’s the smoothest thread I’ve ever seen you spin.”
    “It ought to be,” I muttered. “I worked on it for five days.”
    “And how many days did you work with the sword? One. Don’t you think the sword deserves at least as much of a chance as the spindle?”
    I gave her a startled look. “Are you saying that you
want
me to go back to training with my brothers?”
    My mother held my hands in both of hers. “That would be easy, wouldn’t it?” she said. “So easy to let someone else make your choices for you. That way, if you fail, it isn’t your fault.” She clasped my hands more tightly. “You deserve to live a better life than that.”
    “I—I don’t understand.” My mother’s words confused me. I was only ten years old.
    She let go of my hands and leaned back. “You will, if you think about it. Then, whichever choice you make—sword or spindle or both—will be truly yours.”
    As I stepped out of the bedroom doorway, one last question made me pause. “Mother?” I rested one hand on the doorpost, with its carved pattern of palm branches. “Mother, will you teach me how to hunt?”
    She gave me a strange look. “Gladly. But why?”
    “Because if I do choose to go back to the training ground and Father finds out and wants me to stop, I want to bring him a whole
cauldron
of stewed rabbit so he’ll change his mind.”
    When Mother stopped laughing, she took me outside, off into the olive grove, and gave me my first archery lesson. I didn’t hit anything, but as Mother told me (with a perfectly straight face), I did manage to scare the olives off a couple of trees.
    I went back to the training ground