Woven Steel

CHAPTER 5: A Difference in Kind

The green hills of Dorael rolled by Kay under a naked blue sky. With every mile of the packed-earth trade road, the hills diminished just a little, getting smaller and flatter as they undulated down towards the sea. She rode a good-natured sorrel mare named Kettle. Kettle, like Kay and the nineteen other newly-made Sisters of the Woven Shield who rode with her, were part of the repayment.  They were not alone, either. Six large wagons trundled along the trade road with them. Each wagon was packed to bursting with the produce of the renowned Raelle-worshipping craftsmen of Dorael. Finely carved furniture of oak and poplar, racks of shining swords and pikes, and piles of crates marked "FRAGILE:CLOCKWORKS" wrapped in layers of wool padding could be seen, lashed tightly onto the jouncing wayns.

Kay, like most of her sisters, was only an adequate rider at best.  She handled her mount in a stiff, conscientious fashion.  Luckily, she was not called on to test her skills much. The wagons kept the column to a crawling pace.  Brouduer had a crew of teamsters to manage the wagons, and a score or so of his mercenaries to guard them.   Kay and her sisters had little to do but practice their riding and contemplate their fate.

Kay did this in solitude, for the most part. Something about the change in context, away from the abbey and out onto the road, changed the way she saw her sisters.  In the past ten years, she had almost never been further than a mile away from any one of them. For most of that time, the distance was less than a hundred feet. They were as familiar to her as her own body.

Nothing they did was new to her. Kandra snored like a roaring swamp demon. Ally went barefoot whenever propriety did not absolutely require her to be shod. Freckle Jenny had read every book in the abbey library. Layla, like Iona, had an aunt who was a Virtue. Unlike Iona, she mentioned it at every possible opportunity, but always in an infuriatingly nonchalant and casual way.  Before, this had all been normal- just the human landscape of her life.

Now there something unpleasant, almost horrific about all their little quirks- and she thought she knew why.  At the abbey, all the sisters had existed in a web of relationships, which over the past couple years had become as rigid and regular as the rotation of the moons. And her moon, her rock, the centerpiece of every one of her days had been Iona. They had other friends together- but Kay now realized they had been just that- their friends, not her's. And what was true for he must be true for all the other women.

They had existed in a rigid lattice of interpersonal relationships that changed only slowly over years, if at all. Now, they had all been shaken around like dice in a wooden cup and thrown out into the world. As a result, there was little sisterhood on display between the 40 sisters who accompanied Broduer on the road to Latimer.  Perhaps, by spreading out as they rode and staying silent, they were merely trying out solitude, many of them for the first time, and seeing how they liked it.

Kay was maybe the most isolated of all, though not for lack of trying. She was horrified by her own annoyance at her sisters. For the past ten years, the values of cooperation, compromise, sisterhood were drilled into her every day. As virtues, they stood only slightly behind craftmanship as the values most pleasing to the Raelle. So she overcompensated. She volunteered for watches at night, helped the other girls set up their tents and saddle their horses. It didn't seem to earn her much goodwill.

Also working against her was the fact that that Broduer had, for reasons unknown to Kay, begun to treat her as the foremost of the sisters. When he had orders to give- where and when to set up camp and break it, or when the teamsters needed help moving a fallen tree off the road- he told Kay and expected her to relay his instructions to the rest. This unearned and unofficial promotion seemed to lower her in the eyes of most of her companions. She was thinking over this with a mix of indifference and annoyance, when Brouder reigned up next to her.