Chapter Four
God, he was handsome when he smiled.
She hadn’t been expecting that.
Anaxandra’s heart did a strange leap when the man who had introduced himself as Estevan laughed at her response when he asked for her name.
For a woman who had spent zero time around men in general, and had hardly even had any contact with them her entire life, the introduction of five very big, very strong warriors into her midst was a bit overwhelming.
And intimidating.
She was trying not to lose her head about it.
She was curious about men in general. How they spoke, how they acted, how they ate, how they fought.
Aye, even how they fought. Since she’d been trained since birth as a warrior, she wanted to know everything she could about it.
It was her vocation, her trade. It was all she knew.
But the truth was that she’d only been surrounded by women her entire life, women who knew how to fight, but women nonetheless.
Unfortunately, she had been taught to both fear and shun men.
That was how the order functioned. Since it was founded by a widow, and not a nun or a saint, it had a different set of rules.
Of course, they prayed every day, on the liturgical schedule.
And that was to keep the church happy so they could continue to benefit from the rules that applied to the Catholic Church.
But beyond that, things got a little different.
It wasn’t so much that they were taught chastity and abstinence, more that they were simply taught that men were vile creatures not to be trusted.
Killing wasn’t discouraged, not even really between each other, so the whole of the abbey functioned like some kind of weird civilization where the women traveled in packs.
That was the dark truth of it.
Anyone coming to visit, such as a visiting nun or even a priest, were discouraged to dig deeper than what they saw on the surface because of the feral way in which the order tended to function.
Anaxandra was part of the Bow Pack, a group of women who had been primarily trained in the crossbow.
There was the Foot Pack and the Animal Pack, to name a couple others.
All of the packs would pray together and attend mass together, but when it came to actually functioning outside of the sanctuary, they tended to stick to one another.
Mother Michael did not discourage it.
In fact, she would use the packs against one another for training purposes, as she would call it.
Anaxandra thought that maybe it was because she enjoyed watching women fight one another more than they were actually training, and sometimes people did become badly injured.
When the warriors had brought the wounded woman to their doorstep with the logic that if they were a fighting order, then they had healers within, they had not been wrong.
The order did indeed have women whose sole purpose was healing.
And those were the women who wielded the most power.
In the midst of all of this, they actually did have a few legitimate nuns, and those women basically ran the abbey.
Sister Hildegarde was one of them. They tended the foundlings and delivered the education, cooked, sewed, and did any number of other odd jobs.
Those women were usually the kindest of the bunch, surprisingly, and tended to stay neutral in any given conflict.
But the workings of St. Margaret’s of Loch Doom were much more than the outside world knew.
And that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Therefore, when they had strangers in their midst, as they did now, everyone seemed to be on high alert.
Suspicion was the order of the day, especially if those strangers were male.
All Anaxandra knew was that she was both curious and fearful of the visitors.
Curious because it was her nature, fearful because she’d been told to be.
The truth was that she wanted to speak to the man in the stables.
She was wildly curious about the outside world, the world he lived in, and wanted to know about it.
She wanted to ask him where he had been, where he was from, and anything else that came to mind.
More than almost anyone at St. Margaret’s, Anaxandra was very curious about the Outworld. That was what they called it here.
The Outworld.
They had men from another world in their midst.
But she was behaving the way she was taught to behave toward them.
It wasn’t the way she wanted to behave. As she stood by the door, listening to the rain pound, she watched him as he tended one of the horses.
She assumed it was his. Behind her, in the part of the stable that was more exposed to the elements, the two women with crossbows that had been left behind had fanned out to find better shelter from the rain.
They were still close by if she needed them, but they’d settled into the shadows for the night.
Cautiously, she stepped back into the stable.
He was still bent over his horse, his hand on the front-left fetlock.
He seemed to be feeling for something because he kept going back and forth between the front legs, comparing one against the other.
She watched for a moment, opening her mouth to speak at one point but then quickly clamping it shut again.
But her hesitation didn’t last long.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
Estevan’s head came up and he looked at her. “I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with him,” he said. “His left leg feels hot tae the touch, but I canna be sure.”
“Do you require a poultice?”
He shook his head. “I dunna think so,” he said, looking back at the horse. “Give it some time. If it still feels hot in a little while, then mayhap ye’ll be kind enough tae help. Clay mud will do, if ye have any around here.”
She shook her head. “Not clay,” she said. “But these grounds used to be a moor. The mud is rich with compost.”
He nodded. “Thank ye for telling me,” he said. “If I need the mud, I can gather it outside.”
She nodded in return but didn’t reply. His gaze lingered on her for a moment before returning to his horse.
Anaxandra found herself wrestling against the urge to speak to him more than she already had, knowing she shouldn’t but too curious for her own good.
She wasn’t entirely sure he would even speak to her, given their interaction from the moment she’d fired bolts to stop him to this very moment.
She hadn’t exactly been a welcoming conversationalist. Arching her neck, just a little, to make sure the other women guards were far enough away so that they couldn’t hear any discussion, she stepped over next to the wall, leaning against it.
“Anaxandra,” she said softly.
He didn’t react for a moment. But then he realized there was no one else in the stable but the two of them, so he looked at her curiously.
“Did ye say something?” he said.
She nodded. “I said that my name was Anaxandra,” she said. Then she shrugged. “You asked, after all.”
Something in his pale eyes seemed to warm a little. “I did,” he said. “Anax…?”
“Anaxandra.”
“An unusual name,” he said. “Are ye named for someone?”
She shook her head. “I do not know,” she said. “I came to St. Margaret’s as an infant, a foundling. I do not know where the name comes from, but it means ‘defender of the people.’”
He smiled faintly. “Is that what ye were told?”
“It is.”
“My name means ‘crown.’”
“Does that mean you are royal, then?”
He snorted softly. “Nay,” he said. “Not even close.”
“But you said your father was the Earl of Torridon.”
“That does not make him royal,” Estevan said. “But he does have old bloodlines. We all do.”
“We?”
“My brothers and sisters.”
“How many?”
“Seven brothers, two sisters.”
Her eyes widened. “Such a big family?”
He nodded. “There are ten of us,” he said. Then he threw a thumb in the direction of the sanctuary. “My younger brother is with me. Kaladin. Ye almost killed him with yer bolts. Ye almost killed me, too.”
She shook her head. “Untrue,” she said. “If I had wanted to kill you, I would have. I simply prevented you from approaching the gatehouse too closely.”
“Why?”
She seemed surprised by the question. “Because you do not belong here,” she said. “We discourage any visitors. Especially male visitors.”
“But we aren’t visitors,” he said. “We brought a sick woman we found by the river. In fact, were it not for the weather, we would be in Dumfries now, cozy in a gambling room, losing all of our money. So, I suppose I should be thankful for the weather.”
Anaxandra pondered his statement curiously. “Gambling room,” she repeated. “What is that?”
“Where men go tae gamble.”
“What is gamble?”
He thought she might be teasing him, but from the expression on her face, he could tell that she was serious. He had to remind himself that the woman had grown up in an abbey. He was fairly certain that the subject of gambling had not been part of her upbringing.
“Well,” he said, stepping away from the horse and reaching down to pick up two sprigs of dried grass. He extended one to her. “Let’s say this is a gold coin and it belongs tae ye. Take it.”
Hesitantly, she did. “What do I do with it?”
He held up the other sprig. “This is my gold coin,” he said. “Now, let’s say ye feel strongly that it is going tae stop raining by the time ye count tae five.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “It is not going to stop raining by the time I count to five.”
He held up a hand, begging for patience.
“I know,” he said. “But for the sake of argument, let’s say ye feel strongly about it.
Now, I tell ye that it is not going tae stop raining by the time ye count tae five.
Ye believe so strongly that ye’re right that ye tell me if ye’re wrong, ye’ll give me yer cold coin. ”
She was following him closely, realizing he was speaking of the dried grass in her hand. “This?” she said, holding it up. “I’ll give you this if I’m wrong?”