Free The Warrior's Path by Catherine M. Wilson Page A

before she had to face the council in the morning.
    When she was as clean as I could make her, I dressed her, and then I let her eat. She offered some to me. I shook my head. She needed all of it.
    There was just room enough on the floor of the armory for both of us to sit. While she ate I watched her, until I forgot my fear and my anger. My warrior had returned. I smiled at her.
    “What?” she said.
    “I’m glad you’re home.”
    “Well,” she said, “you’re the only one.”
    She finished the last of the bread and washed it down with ale.
    “Are you too tired to talk?”
    “About what?”
    I started with the thing that bothered me the most. “You lied to me.”
    Maara looked away.
    “You never intended to join Vintel.”
    “No,” she said.
    “Will you tell me why?”
    “No,” she said.
    “Eramet told the Lady what happened last spring.”
    “Eramet wasn’t there.”
    Then she realized that she had confirmed Eramet’s story.
    “You should have told me.”
    At last she looked at me. “Why? What would you have done? Would you have told the Lady? Does a warrior need a little girl to run to the Lady with every wrong done to her?”
    Her words stung me. “I would never have done anything you didn’t want.”
    She looked away again. “It was between me and the others.”
    “Not when you made everyone believe you came here to spy on us. When you didn’t join Vintel, they thought you’d gone back to your own people in the north, to tell them what you’d learned of us.”
    She didn’t answer, and I thought she might have misunderstood me.
    “Everyone but me,” I said. “I knew you wouldn’t abuse our hospitality.”
    “Well,” she said, “you were right about that.”
    “I wish you hadn’t lied to me.”
    I wanted her to tell me she was sorry. Instead she said, “Did you believe I didn’t know you were the Lady’s watchdog?”
    Although it was not an accusation, she took me so aback that I couldn’t think of what to say. I had done nothing that would shame me in her eyes. How could I explain to her that she was both right and wrong?
    “I have been a very poor watchdog,” I told her.
    She tried to smile. “You did make it much too easy for me to get away.”
    “I believed you,” I said. “I trusted you. You told me you would join Vintel, and I never doubted that you would. That’s why I didn’t tell the Lady you were going to go alone to the frontier, although I should have.”
    Maara still wouldn’t meet my eyes. I tried to make her understand.
    “The Lady wanted to know more about you,” I said. “She asked me to repeat to her anything you might tell me about yourself. Didn’t you ever wonder why I never asked you where you came from or why you’d come to Merin’s house? I couldn’t break faith with the Lady by telling you what she asked of me, but I never broke faith with you.”
    Maara leaned her head back against a crate and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry I got you into trouble.”
    “I don’t care about being in trouble!” I spoke so sharply that she opened her eyes and looked at me in surprise. “I care that you took advantage of my trust in you. I care that you had so little trust in me. What the Lady asked of me, I couldn’t do. She asked it of me again tonight, and I refused her.”
    “I trusted you,” she said.
    “Then tell me why you lied to me.”
    “If I had not, my escape would have been your fault.”
    “The Lady blamed me anyway.”
    “Of course she did, but she never questioned your loyalty, did she?”
    “No.”
    “If you had known that I was going to the frontier alone and that I had no intention of joining the Lady’s warriors there, and if you had kept that knowledge from her until it was too late, what would that have led her to believe?”
    She was right. The Lady had thought me too trusting to see through my warrior’s words. She’d scolded me, but she had understood, and she had forgiven me at once. If Maara had told me what she