By the time she became a warrior, the tribes had made an uneasy peace, a peace that so far remained unbroken. She witnessed her three sisters carried lifeless from the battlefield, leaving her, the youngest, to be her mother’s heir. Too young to bear arms in the last war, from within the palisade where she trained to take her place among the warriors, she heard the clash of arms and the screams of the dying outside the walls. As far back as our line was remembered, our family and hers stood side by side. Their mother served the Lady’s mother in wars told of in grandmothers’ tales. My mother’s sisters, older than she, fought in the service of the Lady Abicel in the last war against the northern tribes. Īll the women of my family had gone to war. She sets aside her disappointment and performs as well as she can the humble tasks given her, and eventually she succeeds in winning the trust and then the friendship of the cantankerous warrior to whom she has been assigned. Tamras's journey begins with the smallest of steps. To make matters worse, the Lady Merin assigns her the position of companion, little more than a personal servant, to a woman who came to Merin's house, seemingly out of nowhere, the previous winter, and this stranger wants nothing to do with Tamras. In Book I of the trilogy, Tamras, our hero, arrives in Merin's house to begin her apprenticeship as a warrior, but her small stature causes many, including Tamras herself, to doubt that she will ever become a competent swordswoman.
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