Crouching beside the fire, Maierva whispered to herself as she periodically tossed sprinkled dirt on the sputtering flames. Opposite her, lounging on a pile of blankets, Lyara pretended to be reading that same chapter from On Military Strategy she’d started yesterday, as she stole glances at the other woman.
Maierva was six years younger than she was, a black-skinned fur tanner with dark, angular eyes, who followed her sergeant husband from one end of Avaron to the other since they married two and a half years ago. This was her fourth campaign this season, and she apparently spent an hour during each battle performing this same ritual. That was as much as Lyara had pried from her up to now. And she was the most talkative of the other camp wives by far.
“Who are you praying to?” Lyara asked, genuinely curious.
Maierva frowned at her and kept whispering. Lyara folded her book shut and waited, trying to piece together what the woman was saying. It was in the same Ristaer they all spoke, but she mumbled.
Finally, Maierva leaned back and dumped the rest of the dirt from her bag on top of the fire, smothering it. “Tácnere,” she said, meeting Lyara’s gaze with an edge that suggested she expected some kind of debate, or at least a teasing. “The Guardian.”
Lyara nodded, trying to appear anything but confrontational. “What prayers do you say?”
Maierva tilted her head. “It’s not any of your business.”
Lyara nodded again and glanced away. “I’m sorry. I really am just curious. I pray Gallian’s prayer a lot myself, and from what I’ve read about Svaldan tradition the two strike me as surprisingly similar—”
Maierva’s frown deepened. “There is nothing similar, Láefe. You abandoned our ancestor’s traditions to follow new ones on this New World. You are fickle and easily swayed from what we all used to know as truth. If there are similarities it is because you cling to what you once knew while pretending not to.”
Lyara laughed, soft and uncomfortable, and looked deliberately at her book. “…I’m making a mess of this, aren’t I?”
Maierva nodded, the spark of a smile in her eyes as she cinched her bag. “You are.” She shifted her position to sit cross-legged beside the fire, pulling a strip of jerky from her pocket to gnaw on. “I guess this permits me to ask a few wrong questions, now?”
Lyara shrugged.
“What are you doing here?”
“Following my husband?”
Maierva snorted. “The way you prance about, reading and drawing, we all thought you came on holiday.”
Lyara shrank back into her chair of blankets. “…why are you here, then?”
“If I wasn’t, I’d be sleeping on the floor with my mother’s dogs, eating scraps with them so my siblings don’t starve. Three more campaigns and Renard might save up enough to buy me four walls and a roof with a leak.” She patted her satchel. “If I steal two more blankets I’ll have enough to sew my own bed.”
Lyara studied the other woman’s face in sympathy, but Maierva’s fierce stare said that was the last thing she wanted.
“You’re spoiled. You don’t know how good you have it in the Inner Circle.”
“No, I do, but…” The words didn’t carry any weight. Lyara’s shoulders drew in as the silence stretched on. Ashamed, and not looking up, she gathered her book and sketchpad, then paused, hand brushing over the pad’s cover. “…if you could speak with the people of Edras, what would you say?”
Maierva stared at her, raising an eyebrow. “What does it matter? They don’t listen.”
Lyara fished her charcoal pen out of her pocket and flipped to the nearest blank page. “Imagine they did. What would you say?”