Tarma had carefully, patiently, and in the tone and simple words one would use with a five-year-old, explained why one never treats a weapon that way, even when one is tired, even when the weapon is just pot-metal and fit only to practice with.

Then, as if that wasn’t humiliation enough, she put the blade away and made Kero chop wood and haul water for the next three days straight, instead of chopping and hauling in the morning, and practicing in the afternoon.

So she hung onto the little hand-ax until Tarma took it away from her. “All right, youngling,” she said in that gravelly voice, as Kero raised a hand at the end of an arm that felt like the wood she’d just been chopping. “Let’s get back to the Tower and a hot bath and some food. You’ve earned it.” Then she grinned. “And after lunch, a mild little workout, hmm?”

Kero finished getting her arm up to her forehead, and mopped her brow and the back of her neck with a sleeve that was already sopping wet.

“Lady,” she croaked, “Every time you set me a ‘mild little workout,’ I wind up flat on my back before sundown too tired to move. You’re a hard taskmaster.”

Tarma only chuckled.

Lunch in the Tower was as “civilized” as even Kero’s mother could have wished. The three of them sat around a square wooden table in one of the upper balconies, sun streaming down on them, a fresh breeze drying Kero’s hair. Despite the fact that she had braided it tightly, bits of it were escaping from her braids and the breeze tugged at them like a kitten with string. She kept trying to get it back under control, but it persisted in escaping, and finally she just gave up and let it fly. There was no one here to care how “respectable”—or not—she looked.

She felt much the better for her hot bath, though her muscles still ached in unaccustomed places from that little exercise this morning. Furthermore, she knew very well that she was going to hurt even more tonight. But it was a small price to pay for freedom.

Freedom from the bower, from boredom, from pretending I was something I wasn’t. That thought led inevitably to another. So what am I now? What am I supposed to be doing with myself? And one more—Why wasn’t I like Dierna, content with being someone’s lady?

An uneasy set of thoughts—and uncomfortable thoughts. But problems that, for the moment, she could do nothing about. She forced her attention back to more immediate concerns.

Like lunch.