Austerity ruled the inside of the commander’s tent. Hide walls, a handful of diligent assistants, clay tablets piled in organized stacks…only the things that had a fundamental use to her work had made their way into the tent. It made me want to peek behind the covering blocking the way to her living quarters to see if that smaller space was as blank as her work area, though I knew better than to try. Instead, I settled for taking in the two luxuries the commander had allowed into her pristine space.

A tapestry and a hearth stone the size of my head. The tapestry covered the back wall of the tent directly behind where the commander was meant to sit and it depicted a pine tree beautifully limned in moonlight. I didn’t doubt that it was made by a master’s hand, though it was difficult to imagine anyone having the time and patience to make such a thing. The hearth stone looked like a simple gray rock speckled with orange flecks, but it was even rarer than glow stones—the heat hearth stone radiated out made them more valuable. Hearth stones were said to have been made by a whisper woman who could imbue heat into rocks that never faded. She had been lost to time and no new child had been blessed with the same mark. The stones endured. If not for the glow stones I would have considered them a complete myth, but feeling the heat on my skin from where it sat in the center of the tent on a low pedestal burned away the last of my doubt.

The commander herself was studying a large roll of leather marked with various dark lines and painted stones off on the right side of the tent. As the squad leader and I stepped in one of the attendant whisper women rose from her cushion, picked up a colored stone from a bowl near the leather’s edge, placed it near a long line of black, and resumed her place on her cushion. A suspicion rose in me but, if the roll of leather spread out on the ground was a map, it was a rather large one.

Hattie stopped between the two rows of attendants and crossed her wrists over her head in salute.

I followed suit.

Hattie said, “We came at your call, commander.”

The commander turned toward us and even through lowered eyelashes, I thought I saw a hint of good natured exasperation flicker through her features before they settled back to smooth stone. “I have no rituals for you, Hattie. Lower your arms and we can get on with it.”

Hattie suppressed a smile, lowered her arms, and straightened. “Of course, commander. The cleanup of the southern field continues apace. The Lady Blue doesn’t seem willing to waste any more of her warriors with failed incursions today.” She gestured to where I stood, arms lowered and wary. “I brought the Little Diver.”

The commander’s eyebrows twitched upward ever so slightly. “Little Diver?”

Hattie inclined her head. “I thought the name fit.”

“Hm.” The commander swept her gaze over me but didn’t give her opinion one way or another.

“You may go, sect sister.”

Hattie did smile as the commander openly acknowledged a link between them that she didn’t need to in that moment. “Of course, commander. Should the fish try anything your Listeners will be the first to hear of our victory.”

She left and suddenly I felt like I was alone with the commander despite the six whisper women and the single fire starter still in the tent. Then I corrected that thought. Given the unlikelihood of any of them attending to anything but their duties, I might as well have been alone.

The commander made a sharp beckoning gesture. “Come.”

Feeling sorely bedraggled as well as just plain sore, I went. I did my best to smooth over my stiff movements and she focused back on the open leather roll before her. As I stepped closer, I saw that my initial suspicion was correct. The seven foot by four foot leather roll was a regional map of the coast. The dark lines marked out the goddess’s great forest and scrubland and beaches. Rivers and streams, coves and cave mouths, were also drawn with delicate detail. The colored pebbles stood out against the dark lines in blues and oranges, greens and reds. I wasn’t sure what each individual color meant, but based on the placement they likely had to do with troops, ours and the enemy’s.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

Her question was less like a knife that drove into the gut like I expected and more like a soft rumble of thunder. Threat and warning, but also a promise of needed rain. I sincerely doubted she wanted an answer along the lines of ‘because you summoned me’ or ‘I messed up and this is my last chance’ which left me without a lot to draw on. Either way she needed an answer.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“I was tasked with ending the fight in this region in a month.”

“No.” The commander’s thin lips twisted up into a mirthless smile. “Your involvement with the end of the fight does not matter. If you spent the remainder of the month recovering in the healer’s tent and the fight ended within that time you could still return to the Seedling Palace.”

I opened my mouth to argue, to ask what she knew of my punishment, before thinking better of sounding like an oblivious idiot and shut it again.

She continued, “But that does not answer why you are here. You completed a Trial before your first blooding, gifted by the goddess Herself, no less.” This time she acknowledged my look of baffled consternation and elaborated, “Even if not for that mark on your chin, we whisper women are not puppets tugged along solely by our goddess’s whim. There is room within Her ambition for our own. I am not alone in keeping an eye on the Trials and whisper women talk.”

The commander let that sink for a long moment before she resumed her earlier point. “That alone does not answer for the attention you’ve garnered, however. You bear a blessing reminiscent of the Beloved’s own immortality, however pale a comparison it might be.”

A feeling of ice cold river water washed down over me, from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. I shivered. That wasn’t a comparison I had ever dared to make, though even as the commander spoke I could understand why others would latch onto it. Not dying wasn’t exactly common and even if it was said the Beloved couldn’t even be marred by a scratch to her cheek and I felt and dealt with every injury, the bare, most basic, baseline of living when others couldn’t was still shared. It was like comparing one of the Seedling Palace trees to a scraggly sapling barely clinging onto a cliff face, but the comparison could be made. They were both pine trees.

“And now, before you’ve even finished your time as a Seedling, the Lady of Calm Waters has declared herself as your patron—breaking tradition as well as her streak of not claiming a patronage in the last decade. You attacked two superiors and got a slap on the wrist.” Her gaze bore into my own. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“I—” I swallowed down the sudden lump in my throat. “Those…things make me valuable but also dangerous. I don’t fit the mold, so now you’re testing for where I do fit?”

I didn’t add my final thought: they were testing whether I could behave or if I would prove to be a misfit more troublesome than I was worth. Which, in the scheme of things, didn’t bode well for me. I had never fit in the way I wanted to and most of those things she listed had happened through luck as much as anything I had done. I hadn’t chosen my blessing or done anything purposefully to entice the Lady of Calm Waters to patronage. I still didn’t even know who she was other than her title. And I had completed the trial because it was either that or waste away in Flickermark while my only friend died.

The commander nodded. “Good. Perhaps you won’t prove to be a fighter, but that is of little consequence. There are other roles. You’ve earned yourself a boon. I will not end the fight in less than three weeks solely on that, but I will even out your playing field and offer you a challenge. Should you rise to the occasion I will ensure you return to the Seedling Palace.”

My eyes had gone wide. “You can end the fighting whenever you want?”

She chuckled, dry and a bit dark. “Of course not, strategy takes time and the enemy is not always agreeable.” The commander gestured, taking in the map and its icons as well as the camp surrounding her tent. “But it is not wise to ever think of something as impossible when you’re surrounded by those blessed by the goddess.”

I hesitated before asking my next question, “And the challenge, commander?”

The challenge sounded deceivingly simple: kill the crawler harassing the outposts. She even took time to point out on her map which outposts it had hit, what part of the coast it seemed to patrol, and the danger of horrible blisters and itching pain that came from getting stung by its tail. I was about to ask exactly what a crawler was and about other important information when one of the attendants hurried over with a quick bow and tablet in hand.

I was dismissed and a fire starter was ordered to bring me to the healer’s tent. I recognized the tall and balding man immediately as the fire starter who first guided us through the camp. Mishtaw had called him ‘Nadia’s man’. Nadia didn’t sound imposing enough as a name for the commander, but names didn’t always reflect their bearer well. I knew that well enough.

I suffered through getting treated at the healer’s tent even though I had to bite my tongue against offering advice or correcting a mistake four times throughout whole stupid ordeal. Sometimes I wondered how others healers got past the apprentice stage given the mistakes they made or the lack of thinking that went into some of their treatments. She would have had none of it. I mean, really, who uses weaver’s grass and dried ring bush bark to reduce swelling when there’s a pouch of frostbite berries not three feet away?

By the time I returned to Mishtaw’s tent it was long past the evening meal. She waited by the dim light of a candle in the main room, flipping her knife in the air and catching it.

Her eyes gleamed in the candlelight as I stepped inside. “You like to live in extremes, don’t you?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

Mishtaw flicked the knife up in the air, caught it by its blade. Then she gestured to my sleeping quarters. “Rest. Your real test begins tomorrow.”

Feeling like I was missing something that I should have understood, I went. She kept flipping the knife.