Prologue
If the woods around her home had some fancy name, she didn't know what it was. But like all the forests around, it could be dark and dangerous, especially if you were young and unprepared.
But the dark didn't have to be scary, and Lotte was not afraid. Yes, her knees were shaking, and she'd been lost for nearly an hour, but if you'd just ask her she would have told this hypothetical person that she wasn't afraid. So, there you go!
Of course, she might just ask this stranger for help getting out of the woods. Unless they were lost, then she would have sucked up any fea… any lack of fear and tried to help them. Ol' Gunther, the Forester, said that that was the duty of those who knew the wilds. He'd said it a little drunk, on another lament that none of the boys of the village wanted to learn his profession. "I'd been a real adventurer, y'know. Now all I have is a girl to teach, though yer decent, don't get me wrong. But you know what I mean, don'tya Lotte?"
Lotte felt something sharp in her chest. She wished she was a boy, just so that Gunther would be a little less sad.
But he'd still taught her plenty, and she looked around the forest, and as she did, she relaxed a little. She didn't know where she was, yes, but she knew this part of the forest in general, even if she'd never gone this deep in. She recognized the trees, the way they bent and twisted around, like ol' missus Agna. They had been alive long enough to have deep shadows and blur at the edges.
She knew what the wind felt like, knew that it wouldn't carry her scent all that far, and she knew that tangy smell in the air. It was blood. The ten year old girl didn't let herself tremble, because if it was someone hurt, she'd have to save them, no matter the cost. Her parents didn't raise someone who could just walk away from that.
Still, she proceeded cautiously forward, eyes careful for the traps she knew were sometimes found deep in these woods.
If one were some stalking beast, perched on a tree, one would see a surprisingly large scrap of a ten year old, with blonde hair done in messy braids which she fiddled with in the village, though not out here. She was dressed in old leathers and decent cloth, all of it green and brown of just the shade to blend in with the forest. She had a quiver on her back, and an odd sort of rig there, to put her bow, such that it wouldn't warp, or dig into her back when she moved. Gunther had sworn by it. She wore shoes that were little more than hunks of leather, almost raw enough to moo, and moved with a grace that would have surprised some in the village.
Of course, if one were some stalking beast, she probably would have noticed them.
The forest was a dangerous place, where a predator could look like the shadow of a log, and a bandit could look, in shades and shadows, like nothing more than a bush. It wasn't a bright place, and it wasn't a quiet place, though at the moment it was doing its best impression. That's why she had a nose, and ears, and eyes, and instincts, and if all else failed hands. You couldn't rely on one thing, it'd be like going into the forest with a single arrow.
Her bow, of about medium-length when one accounted for her age, was held in her hand, strung when she'd left for the forest some hours before. She moved forward, careful of twigs and leaves, up the slight incline, around a tree that looked like it might be a den for animals she didn't want to disturb, and on. She listened, stopping every so often, to see if anyone had been following her.
She licked her dry lips and came, at last, to a twisted, tangled sort of depression in the earth. The grass was higher than the pastures her family raised their cows and pigs on, part of the time. At one corner was some nightmare of the past. It was a twisted thing of iron, twisted around a dark, struggling, bleeding wolf that whined and growled in equal measures.
The trap looked like nothing Lotte had ever been shown. Now, she was lettered, if just barely. (Her mother had insisted, and the priest would put her in a clean enough room and glare at her if she creased a page of books which, he'd reminded her, had been hand copied by people far more intelligent than her, and couldn't stand abuse.) But you didn't need letters to guess at what this strange contraption had to be. A Sepult Trap, and if that was so, it had been there for a thousand years without rusting, which made it the kind of thing you didn't want to touch. Magic wasn't that scary: her Mom had magic from the Gods, been an adventurer for a few years. But Sepult magic? Old Sepult magic?
Even if she could trust the wolf not to lash out in fear and pain, and she wasn't sure she'd trust a person not to do so… she was almost certain she couldn't undo it, clever though her hands were. The wolf wasn't going to get out of the trap, and nobody else was going to come around with the skill to help. She imagined some Sepult jerk, grinning to themselves as they set the trap, sure it'd catch some pony-riding enemy Sepult, or… something.
Still, she didn't linger long on the hurts of the distant past. Instead she looked at the wolf. It was a beautiful enough creature, even if she'd lost a few pigs to starving wolves in the late autumn.
It would starve to death, probably, or it would bleed out, but perhaps slower than one might expect. It was going to be a painful, slow death either way, even if the end, she supposed, would be dreamier than the start.
There was only one sort of mercy she could give. She prayed to Wilfhuld, the wolf-headed God who watched after those who worked together, whether they were hunters, warriors, or people gathered to make a village festival come off.
She grabbed an arrow, notched it smoothly, with years of practice already, and loosed it.
********
The family who lived surprisingly near to the outskirts of Valwald was often thought quite lucky. Henrik's father had been a bold man, a third generation of scrambling upwards helped by his lack of sons to care for other than Henrik, and only one daughter to see settled. Henrik had inherited a decent piece of land, a chunk of the village's common-land for farming, plus some pasture and pigs, cows, but the oxen was his own purchase, and the pigs were more numerous and more carefully kept than in his father's time. He'd married a wandering adventurer, a pious woman who could heal with a prayer, yet wasn't truly a priestess. She lent her hands to help the local midwife and care for local animals, and as any smart man did, he lent out his oxen to the service of others so that they didn't have to ask his High Lordship for it. It meant that when bad times came, and bad times would always come, they wouldn't whisper so loud and wouldn't hate so much.
They was good folks, all around, and good folks to adopt some doorstep child with no known mother. Lotte, well, she was odd in some ways, of course, but she was dutiful and you could do far worse than a child who took care around the farm, and sometimes brought venison back from her forest sojurns. They said she was good in the woods, though nowhere near as good as ol' Gunther had been before he'd been taken off, last winter. Such a shame, such a shame.
If she married some nice, respectful man when she was steady of herself, they'd no doubt prosper further. Or, some added with mischief, a woman. It wasn't unknown for two men or women to marry, though many around these parts thought it odd, and in a village of hundreds there were only two such marriages. But any talk of marriage was years premature, everyone ultimately concluded. You didn't marry until you had enough to marry on, not like the nobles, leaping into bed at fourteen, dead in childbirth at sixteen, or so everyone said.
The farmland was in common, though everyone knew what parts of the field were done by Henrik. You could draw a diagram of how a field should be by his work. Now, the pasturelands, on the other hand, were marked off with raised stone, piled on top of each other, a sort of fence without a fence. It was upon one such pillar that Lotte sat that spring day, whittling out a whistle for a local kid who'd begged her for it. She'd changed, in six years, but most of all she'd grown. There was a lot of woman, lean though she was, and all of it was dressed in hunter's clothing, even when she wasn't off in the woods. Her hair had been hacked short, after an incident involving a bear, honey, and a stream where she'd done some spear fishing. She wasn't bad at it, but it had none of the simple thrill of archery.
The pigs wandered, of course they did. There was a pen right up against the house, for when they needed to be kept there, and there always had to be pigs to give birth to new generations, when it came time for the slaughter. It was a regular thing, and there was a cycle and a rhythm to life that almost made sense to her, but didn't quite fit. Her parents worked well together, and cared for each other, and sometimes she wondered if it'd be so bad to settle down--
But, no. Something in that thought twisted and turned like a snake trying to avoid a hawk.
(She'd had a dream once, one she'd forgotten over time. She'd been coming home from working in the fields, and her spouse… who was vague, in the dream, when she thought of it and remembered it, had hugged her tight. Lotte's beard had tickled their cheeks, and--
She'd woken up upon realizing the absurdity of that. Only Sepult women had beards, and she was the furthest thing from a Sepult, a tall, strapping human woman. That fact woke her up, and that fact made it easy for her to drive it out of her mind with a pitchfork, so that by a month later she'd forgotten all about it.)
It was late, and still quite early in spring, and at this stage they wanted to do everything they could to protect the pigs. In the height of summer, they could often mostly look after themselves, but this early? There were things in the forests. Lotte had seen them, fought rabid wolves, driven by some dark design, since regular animals were shy and retiring enough, or at least, were easily scared off by pain and danger. Wolves were predators, and predators didn't fight to win, not like people were supposed to do. A person would impale themselves on a spear just to have the last laugh.
Animals were, in that way, a lot more sensible. Lotte still didn't really come in for book learning, but she'd seen plenty about people, and quite a bit about animals, in her sixteen years, or something roughly like that.
So she got the pigs where the pigs already wanted to be going, and then she washed her hands in the bucket outside her home. It was a nice wooden house chimney and a rough stone floor and everything. The whole house was one large room, of course, and in the deep of the winter they brought in the animals, but she'd seen the way some in the village lived. While her family wasn't the most well off of the families--that'd be the moneylenders, the village headmen, the local lord--it was more prosperous than most.
She stepped inside and inhaled the scent of stew and bread and beer. Her mother made her own beer, didn't trust the alewife that made it. Lotte thought she sometimes was too harsh in judging the village, but then again…
Her mother was a short, slightly plump woman with sandy blonde hair bundled together haphazardly and hidden beneath a cap. Her dress was stained with the work in the field she had done, and there was much yet to do in the house. Lotte was not enough help, she knew. But she hurried forward, towards the pot and the fireplace anyways and asked, "Ma, anything I can do?"
"Just sit at the table and tell me you've seen your father?" She said it in a tone of annoyance.
"What'd he do?" Lotte asked, baffled.
"He objects to all the time you're spending around that boy. The one with his father's spear."
Lotte thought her mother knew his name. But she asked, to be sure, "Ardnt?"
"Yes," she said, as Lotte moved to get the wooden bowls and metal utensils. She laid them out on the sturdy table, one by one. They clanged, because she was paying more attention to her mother's words than putting them right.
"Careful, dear."
Lotte knew her face wasn't one of those that could hide anything. She'd met girls and boys like that, who could get away with a lot. But her face, the features a little sharp, the chin a little too strong, an ugly face, she always thought, showed her discontent.
"Lotte, what is it?"
"Not… it should wait," Lotte said, firmly. She thought about Ardnt, a sandy-haired boy with blue eyes that made him look like a dreamer. Sometimes, when she looked at him, she just couldn't look away. She was innocent, and a virgin, but she weren't fool enough to not realize she had a crush on him. But that wasn't why she wanted to do this.
No, that's not really why she was nervous.
She breathed in the familiar smells of home, of hearth, of bread from the millers (make that four families that were wealthier) and beer, watered down for her age. She could smell the pigs, still, but they were a smell you could get used to. You could get used to a lot. She glanced over at her own bed, which she'd moved into once she was too old.
(She still squeamishly contrived to be elsewhere when she knows she would hear her parents having sex. It wasn't a thing that could be done in private, not really. One wondered how it could even be attempted.)
Henrik arrived, eventually, giving a wave towards Anelie and settling down in his chair with a groan. He was a big, bearded man with a laugh that could lift the roofs off thatched houses, and eyes that gleamed with mischievous intelligence. Lotte didn't understand it, sometimes, how two such intelligent people, both literate, had a child that had to be dragged through her letters and who fell asleep reading histories the Priest had given her. She liked the religious stories, as long as someone more interesting than the people in books could tell them to her.
At the moment there was no mischief in his eyes, just wariness. They drank their beer, ate their stew, scraped the bottom of the dish, bit into their bread. "Ma, Pa, I want to go adventuring," Lotte finally… ventured.
"You do?!" Henrik asked, staring at her. "After all the stories you've heard?"
Especially after all the stories she'd heard. Her mother did sometimes tell stories about the misery and the scramble for coins, but there was also the camaraderie of the road, and she'd only met her husband because she'd traveled. "Yes," Lotte said. "I'd like to go in a week, or two. Or less."
Anelie was frowning at her. "Are you going with Arndt?"
"Well, you always said that there was safety in numbers."
"Absolutely not," Henrik said. "You're my heir, Lotte. I love you, but if you leave now, run off with a man, what am I supposed to do?"
"I'm not running off with him. I'm telling you, and I'm going with him because you're supposed to have a party to keep you safe. Isn't that what you always said, Ma? Friends on the road."
Now her Pa was looking at her Ma, eyes clearly conveying the message: this is all your fault.
"I said that, yes, but," Ma began.
"Have we done something wrong?" Henrik asked, his voice rough with the anticipation of grief. "Have we been too hard, asked too--"
"No, no, of course not," Lotte said, in a panic. Her father didn't cry, not except once or twice a year, and then when he was so deep in his cups it wasn't really him that was crying.
"Can you just tell us… why?" Ma asked, her voice careful and gentle, the voice she got when a man started swearing up and down that he was going to die. Lotte knew that tone well, knew that in the right moments she could talk a little like that. "If that's alright?"
"It's not because of Arndt." Yes, she was fond of him and fascinated by him, but sometimes he looked at her in a way that made her feel as if he was imagining her in a wedding dress of some kind. His family was another decently well off family, after all. Something about that struck Lotte as wrong, but she couldn't quite understand why. "I want to see the world, see new things, find my own place in it. I'll probably come back in a year or two, as thoroughly sick of it as you think I'll be." Lotte let the longing creep into her voice, because she could hardly stop it. "But I'll know."
"You're sixteen," Henrik said, firmly. "You're not going, and that's…"
"Dear," Ma said, her voice soft. "Why don't we work out a compromise."
"A what?" Henrik asked, tugging at his beard in frustration, which was far better than almost crying, to Lotte's mind.
"You're still young yet, and you haven't trained that much, have you?" Ma asked.
"I've tried," Lotte said, then took a breath, aware of how close her voice had come to whining. She bit her lip, and reached over to her beer, taking a swig of it in the hopes that it helped. She'd never gotten really drunk, nothing more than tipsy, and even that involved drinking so much she was more likely to need to go find a ditch before it involved getting drunk. Though Arndt had once showed her a bottle of what he swore the Orime really called "Gods' piss", a white liquid which even a sip convinced her wasn't fit for humans to drink.
"So, why don't I tell you a little about priestly magic? I don't think you have any talent for it, but learning could help. And so could training a little more…"
"Anelie," Henrik said. "How is this a compromise?"
"If, if you give it two more years," Anelie said, her voice shaking a little, but her eyes bright as if glad she'd thought of this idea. " If you still want to in two years, when the noise and clamor dies down and Arndt is long-gone, then you'll have had plenty of experience."
"I don't agree," Henrik began.
"And, in the meantime you can't let your mind wander. Help out around here, and I'm sure you'll grow to understand that sometimes it's best to stay where you are. There's a lot for you here in this village. We'll give you coin to leave with, if you want to, in two years," Anelie promised.
"I… you know what? Yes, Lotte, I will make that deal with you. I'll shake on it, even, Lottie." That's what he called her when he was in a good mood, and Lotte knew that this was the most she was going to get, unless she fled from her home, her family, and her village in the night.
They shook on it.
*******
The family who lived surprisingly near to the outskirts of Valwald was often thought to be blessed, by their neighbors. The crops had been good the last two years, and they seemed to be doing even better than that would imply. Their daughter had taken to hunting far more often, and last fall she'd been in and out of the forest more times than seemed safe, coming back dragging a sledge of deer, arms and muscles straining in a way that indeed had a few of the village girls, and a village boy or two, giggling and staring. She'd taken the Priest aside and traded small whittled idols of a God or two for the right to be locked in a room with a book on herblore, and then she'd gone out and filled baskets with useful flowers and traded them for vegetables that could be pickled.
Everyone knew that the Spring Fever, which made one tired, sick, and yellow, was caused by a lack of vegetables, which put the humours out of balance and could only be solved by the right folk tonics. She'd worked herself to the bone for her family, and because of it they survived the winter happy and healthy, even by the time spring came, though it was lean by then.
She'd changed, in the last two years, though none of the villagers knew about the deal. She was taller, about average for a man, which was to say quite tall for a woman, and she'd filled out. You did that, when you walked and ran everywhere and hauled deer and otherwise made yourself useful.
She even had suitors, of a sort, or at least people whose interest might last, and whose marriage would be heartily approved. Arndt was back, with a spear wound in his gut that might have killed him, and a few interesting stories about adventure, too. He'd been changed, but nobody was quite sure how, except that Lotte spent a good deal of time talking to him, and he still seemed sweet on her.
Then there was the headman's daughter, Hildegard, who seemed equally taken with Lotte.
Either way, all expected that Henrik and Anelie's good fortune would continue, and that they must surely know how very lucky they were, and how beloved they must be by the Gods, to have done so well for themselves, and through hard work rather than through cheating ways.
They didn't feel particularly lucky that night.
"You… what?" Henrik asked.
"I'll be leaving in two weeks, Mother, Father," Lotte said, firmly. Her hair was even shorter than before, and this time by choice, and the clothes she was dressed in were soaked with sweat. She'd worked hard all last week, harder than she'd ever worked before.
"...why?" Anelie asked.
"You said that in two years I could go. It will be two years in two weeks, and I thought to give you notice," Lotte said, looking from one to the other, remembering the hours spent pacing and choosing her words with the same care that she'd looked over the mushrooms of the forest to make sure she didn't bring poison back to her family home.
"Oh," Henrik said, putting his head in his hands. "You hadn't mentioned it in over a year, we'd thought you'd… forgotten."
Lotte shook her head. "No, of course I didn't forget it. I've learned a lot, but now I'm ready to leave, and with more than I would have left with before."
"I…" Anelie gulped, startled for reasons Lotte couldn't quite understand. She sipped her own beer while she watched them, startled by their shock. There wasn't anything that should have occasioned such reactions. "If you're… sure?"
"Mother, Father," Lotte said. "Will you be able to let me go in two weeks? I've been whittling idols to say goodbye to the forest and its Gods, and I've been talking to Arndt about what it was like…"
"You're not… attached to him?" Henrik asked.
"No," Lotte said, baffled. Though he did sometimes act as if there was some tie that bound them together. But other moments, drunken moments, he seemed to resent her for not having gone with him. He'd have been fine, if only he'd had a friend out there. In those moments, she couldn't help but both blame herself and resent his blame.
"Nor Hildegard?" Anelie asked.
"No?" Lotte said, though it was as much a question. Hildegard was shy and retiring, a beautiful young woman whose smile could sometimes do funny things to Lotte's insides, but her shyness didn't extend to keeping her from watching Lotte sometimes. She'd watch as Lotte trudged, sweat-soaked, dragging a deer or carrying a basket, her eyes finding every curve of muscle, and staring in a way that made Lotte want to hide. Lotte's body was not something she wanted to be judged for, the thought made her sick with worry she couldn't define. "I don't. I just… I need to go."
"I… very well," Ma said, glancing over at Pa.
"I expect you not to slack off, these last two weeks, and we'll see about getting you everything you need to travel," Henrik said with a grin. "And come back whenever you want, and we'll have a place for you."
Of course, Lotte knew, he expected she'd be back in a year, or less… if she came back at all. Lotte expected the same, in a way. But she had to try, had to test herself against the world and against the road, and see how she stood up.
"I will, mama," Lotte said, standing up to wrap her mother in a hug.
*******
Two weeks later, Lotte left the village on a day where the sun was shining, where the whole world seemed filled with possibilities, and with every hope that the travel would show her new ways to be.
Lotte doesn't find her first adventure… it finds her!
[] Rats!: Just two villages over down the trade route, she finds that a village is being harassed by a Rat Piper, a man whose pipe allows him to control rats… and who is making at least some of them pay for the privilege of not having rats. Those that refuse, well, they have rats in the kitchen and rats everywhere, enough rats that even cats run away at them. He, and his apprentice, are a menace, and something has to be done! The peasants who have been most bothered are those who can least afford to pay, especially so soon after winter's end, so the rewards wouldn't exactly be great… but rats all over, biting things, peeing everywhere… it was a menace!
[] Little Lost Lamb: Lotte stumbles across a shepherd boy who is looking for one of his sheep. His stepfather will kill him if he doesn't find it, and so he desperately tasks Lotte to go and see what happened to it, and save it if she can. There's been rumors of bandits and wild animals in the area, but it should be nothing an adventurer can't handle, right?!
[] Neither Rain Nor…: After almost a week of not finding much, at least not much that didn't start and end with standing in place to guard something, Lotte was handed a package by a sickly looking man and told that if she continued to the nearest town, she could deliver it to a certain address, and that she'd be paid for it. She was also implored not to open either the package or the message, because they were personal. Which made sense to Lotte!
*******
A/N: And thus is the Prologue unfurled.
) mother was Beatrice of Savoy, whose family is now called the Savoyards (and eventually became Kings of Italy) but Savoy is a place. It's like if my last name was Missouri. 
