It wasn’t easy to smile back, but Eiryn managed it. Or anyway, she showed her teeth. “I’m not angry.”
“You’re standing over us as if you’re warding off an attack,” Helena said dryly. She pushed her dark, loose braid over her shoulder and patted the sandy grass beside her. “Sit down. Smile a little bit more. Pretend you’re a regular woman instead of an assassin.”
Eiryn bit back the first snide thing that came to mind. Then the next three. Then she forced herself to walk the four necessary steps, turn, and stiffly settle herself on the ground with the rest of them. Making a nauseating circle of softness, sweetness, leftover compliance, and no bladecraft.
“If I could pretend to be a regular woman,” she managed to say without snarling, though she was pretty sure she sounded almost exactly as uncomfortable as she felt, “I wouldn’t be me.”
Lyla leaned forward as if she was going to put her hand on Eiryn, but froze when Eiryn glared at the camp girl’s offending, extended fingers as if they were a set of knives. Very sharp knives, in fact, with poison-edged razor blades. Lyla blinked, then dropped her hand back to her lap.
“Why don’t you start by taking off your weapons?” she asked.
“What?”
“Your weapons.” Lyla waved her hand in a sweep over Eiryn’s harness, the dagger she wore strapped to her thigh. “You can’t walk around armed like that. A dagger, maybe two, sure. If they’re hidden. But no compliant mainland women walk around wearing harnesses filled with blades.”
“Or wearing all that black,” Maud agreed. “It’s not pleasing, is it? It doesn’t encourage a man to long to do his duty with you. It makes him think—correctly, as it happens—that you might gut him in his sleep.”
“And the braids,” Helena said, looking almost apologetic. “They make you look hard and terrifying. The way they’re supposed to, I grant you, but that’s the problem with them.”
“Thank you,” Eiryn managed to force out. “I’ll take all of that as a compliment.”
And then the three of them sat there, gazing at her so expectantly it made her stomach hurt.
Eiryn had been in more battles than she could count. She’d faced enemies of all stripes. Her own vicious father. Tedious mercenaries with their muddled, honorless intentions. Bandit scum hopped up on their wacked-out drink. Men trying to hold their puny little compounds against raider attacks or others making the foolish, fatal decision to try to steal from raider settlements. She’d drawn blood and she’d been cut deeply herself, more times than she could count, with the scars to prove it. She didn’t only carry her blade. She knew how to use it and she had, again and again and again.
But it turned out that taking it off—stripping herself of all her weapons—was harder than all those battles put together.
Her hand actually shook as she unhooked her harness and shrugged out of it, and she would have detested herself for the weakness if she hadn’t been too busy forcing herself to go through with it anyway. All her reasons for wanting to do this—needing to do this—still held true. Besides, she knew they were right. Compliant mainland women found strong men to protect them, they didn’t protect themselves.
Her opinion on that behavior didn’t matter. What mattered was that she figure out how to blend in with the world she was going to pretend to be a part of, or she might as well just put herself out of her misery here and now.
Her throat was tight as she laid her harness down beside her, carefully. Very carefully. And then even her breath felt strange, so light and easy in a chest not strapped with so much heavy steel.
It was the symbolism that was getting to her, she knew. Because it wasn’t as if she hadn’t taken her blades off before. To shower, to dress. To have sex. To do any number of things. But never, like this, without knowing when she’d get to put them on again. She pulled the dagger and its tight harness from her thigh, retrieved her backup from her boot, and then she was done.
Leaving her as good as naked.
If not worse.
5
“Breathe,” Helena murmured from beside her. “You’re still a member of the brotherhood, you know. You don’t actually need steel weapons to prove it.”
And Eiryn couldn’t even respond to that the way she’d like, with appropriate and scornful profanity at the very least, because she had to take that suggested breath to keep herself from getting too dizzy as she sat there. Weaponless for the first time since she’d been a small child. But she definitely wasn’t comfortable with the fact that the woman she’d written off as Tyr’s latest conquest and very little more seemed to see things in her she’d steadfastly refused to address in herself.
It wasn’t any better when she forced herself to look away from her beloved blades in a heap on the ground to find Maud studying her.
“How tightly do you bind your breasts?” Gunnar’s odd little nun asked.
Eiryn blinked. Then again, when Maud didn’t rephrase the question and no one else seemed to find it as strange as she did.
“Do you go around asking everyone that?”
“I can, if you want.”
Maud raised her brows at Lyla, who laughed and rocked her upper body a little bit, making her large, round breasts move against the fabric of her loose and unconfining shirt.
“Obviously I’m not into binding,” she said, grinning. “At all.”
“I bind myself sometimes,” Helena said next, without having to be asked. “But never very tightly. It hurts.”
Maud returned that endless blue gaze of hers to Eiryn.
“I don’t bind mine,” she confided. “I tried it when I first left the convent. I think it’s incredibly uncomfortable.”
“Is this the kind of thing nuns talk about?” Eiryn asked, trying to make herself relax. And failing miserably. She kept looking at her blades and judging their distance from her, then working out exactly how she would reach for one and fend off an attacker if necessary with the extra space between her dominant hand and the blade itself . . . “Like, while wandering around the church between prayers?”
“You’d be surprised what nuns talk about.” Maud laughed, bringing Eiryn’s attention back to her. “In the dark, anyway. But don’t worry. No one here is going to make you do any penance. We’re talking about uncomfortable things, that’s all.”
Eiryn blew out a breath, ordered herself not to look at her blades any longer since there was no changing this situation, there was only adapting to it. She tried to make her spine curve a little bit.
“Like this conversation?”
“Like bindings in the first place.” Maud held her hands up to her chest. For a moment Eiryn thought she was going to grab handfuls of her own breasts, because what wouldn’t this woman do if she felt like it, but she only let her palms hover there. As a suggestion. “They’re always too tight for me. They make me think I can’t breathe and I start to walk and hold myself differently.” Her mouth curved. “That’s why I think you should unbind yours.”
“I can’t do that,” Eiryn said automatically. It was pure reflex.
Because she had to be able to run and jump. She had to be ready to fight. She couldn’t let her breasts get in the way of that. Hell, she never had. But then she remembered herself and what was happening here, what she’d volunteered herself for, and she sighed.
“Fine.” She sat there a moment, waiting. “I’ll take the binding off.” She waited some more. Then she glared. “Is this a group activity?”
It did not exactly soothe her when the three other women exchanged looks and bit back obvious smiles, as if she was being funny. But she ignored that when they each turned away and gave her a measure of privacy. Not that Eiryn was all that precious or really needed privacy. Raiders weren’t big on personal space. That was what happened when a clan spent too much time on cramped little boats and small islands with terrible weather keeping them locked inside for weeks on end. Boundaries blurred.
But not as much for Eiryn or the other two female brothers. They practice
d a bit more modesty than the rest of the brotherhood, not because anyone had ever told them they should, but because it was smarter. Easier. None of them were necessarily any more shy or retiring than the rest of the clan, but the brothers in general were a bunch of horny assholes. Why put themselves in a situation where they could be thought of as a pair of tits and a pussy instead of what they were—three more otherwise interchangeable members of the brotherhood? It made sense to take a conservative approach to the clan’s historic clothing-optional preferences. To stay covered whenever possible and to take care of their sexual needs in a way that always left them looking strong and in charge—never fully undressed and on top, for example, or in private where no one could see it if they weren’t. Too many men found naked women weak by definition, whether consciously or not. That was just reality. Especially in the brotherhood, where everyone else was weak in comparison. Why play into that shit when it could be so easily avoided?
Eiryn didn’t tell her three tormenters any of that today. She shoved her unhelpful thoughts aside, pulled up her tank top, and tugged the end of her binding from the side, where she’d tucked it in to hold it in place. Then she slowly unwrapped the length of fabric from around her rib cage, layer after layer. There were a lot of layers, because Eiryn preferred a very tight wrap, and she bound herself extra hard because she couldn’t tolerate bounce of any kind. Each layer of microwool she peeled off left her skin stinging a little bit as she pulled it away from her body, and when she was done she rolled up the wool and set it next to her blades.
She couldn’t look at the two sad piles. Her life, discarded.
What was next? Her blood?
Easy there, drama queen, she growled at herself. But she didn’t feel like a drama queen. She felt shorn, like a sheep.
She took stock of the situation. Her breasts weren’t particularly large or noteworthy, but they felt huge and strange and aggressively feminine as she tugged her battle-ready tank top back into place and had to smash them a bit as she did. Because the tank top no longer felt like the preferred second skin it was meant to be, and it certainly didn’t fit right over unbound breasts that fell this way and that as they liked. Eiryn sat there for a moment, paying attention to the new sensations.
Bladeless and unbound, they were all unpleasant.
“I’m done,” she said shortly, rather than dwell on any of that any further, because it couldn’t be helped.
The three other women all turned back around, and Lyla’s eyes went wide when they fell on the roll of microwool Eiryn had put to the side.
“You were wearing all that?” she breathed. “At once? And it hardly looked like you were wearing anything.” She shuddered, as if in sympathy. “Ouch.”
Eiryn would admit that her skin was still stinging from the tightness of her wrap right about the time she renounced the brotherhood and her blade altogether. She only gazed balefully back at the camp girl and kept her mouth shut.
“You might as well change altogether, I guess,” Helena said briskly. “To get you in the right mindset.” She pulled a jumble of fabrics up from beside her and thrust them at Eiryn, who had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep herself from asking what the hell was wrong with her clothes. “I have a few things that are from the mainland. They should work.”
Eiryn grimly accepted the bundle. She recognized these clothes. If she wasn’t mistaken, this was what Helena had been wearing the night Tyr had kidnapped her from her mainland compound earlier this summer. There was a loose T-shirt that would allow any enemy who liked to grab hold of her and yank her off balance, much as Tyr had likely done to Helena when he’d found her in that little shithole of a concrete bunker. And there was a coarse pair of trousers in that bizarre fabric all the mainlanders liked so much, despite how useless it was in the constant rain and inevitable mud. Or for running, jumping, or any of the other things raiders did, and often.
And whatever raiders did a lot of, brothers did more.
“Jeans,” Eiryn said flatly, because it made no sense to her and never would. “Always with the jeans.”
“My jeans.” Helena actually sounded sentimental about a pair of pants, which only underscored all the reasons Eiryn was never going to understand her. Or these strange, noncombatant women in general. Yet she still had to figure out how to pretend she was one of them, didn’t she? “I brought them.”
Eiryn eyed the war chief’s pretty little captive turned mate. Who she found . . . baffling. “Why would you pack mainland clothes for a mission like this when we thought it would be easy?”
Helena shrugged, but something flashed in her gray eyes. “This is the first time I’ve been back to the mainland since I met Tyr.”
“‘Met,’” Eiryn echoed. “That’s an interesting choice of word to describe being carried off from a compound in the middle of the night with a pack of mercenaries at your back.”
“It was quite a meeting,” Helena agreed, but that wasn’t fear or regret making her gaze so bright. It was something much warmer that would have made Eiryn uncomfortable, had she allowed herself to think too much about it. “But I didn’t know what would happen this time. I thought maybe I might . . . need to blend in with the locals myself.”
Eiryn opened her mouth to ask why Helena would ever imagine she would need to go anywhere near mainlanders again now that she’d become a raider, the obviously superior way to live, but stopped herself. There was something in the other woman’s face, then. A certain vulnerability around her mouth.
And then she got it.
“Tyr would never let that happen,” Eiryn said matter-of-factly, because she recognized that expression. It was fear. Uncertainty. She reminded herself that this was a woman who couldn’t fight but who had still managed to outrun a pack of vicious mercenaries for years. That deserved respect, if nothing else. She tried to give it. “Even if we were surrounded by the enemy and risked defeat, he would find a way to protect you or at the very least conceal you. So would the whole of the brotherhood. So would I.”
Helena blinked at that. “You don’t even like me. Or Tyr, clearly.”
Eiryn stood in a rush, taking the clothes with her. She rolled her shoulders as she found her feet, surprised at how tense she’d become.
“You belong to the clan,” she said stiffly. “You’re a brother’s claimed mate. You’re certainly not going to be left as cannon fodder for scumbag mainland kings. Ever.” She paused, feeling as awkward as her loose breasts stuffed beneath a battle shirt. “And I don’t like anyone.”
She didn’t wait to see what Helena’s response to that was. She didn’t even understand why she’d said it. She stalked off into the woods a ways, deeply disliking the way she could feel her breasts move with every step, the soft weight of them noticeable against her rib cage. They were distracting. If she was set upon right now, she’d have to run for her blades and her breasts would bounce and ache the whole way. Why would any woman choose this when she could bind them up and forget they were there? It didn’t make any sense.
Then again, neither did bringing a secret stash of mainlander clothes on the off chance the finest warriors in the raider clan, and their king, all fell in battle. Did Helena really imagine that was likely? Eiryn might not personally care for the war chief, but he was a powerful man. He would tear down cities with his own hands rather than lose his woman to upstart mainlanders or mercenary whores. Eiryn shook her head at the very idea, tossing the bundle of clothes on the forest floor at her feet.
And then stared at the strange garments as if they were a pile of snakes.
She was a warrior, damn it. She did not fall apart at the first sight of the enemy. She was not going to let strange, compliant clothing ruin her brilliant escape plans. Or even her morning.
She absolutely was not.
Eiryn stripped off her clothes before she could think about it any further or talk herself out of it. She yanked the shirt on first, and sighed. It was worse than she’d thought. Helena was a few inches shorter than she was a
nd built curvier. The T-shirt was boxy and loose against Eiryn’s lean, taut frame. When she looked down, the mounds of her breasts were clearly visible and if she got rained on, or started sweating, she’d put on a little show through the thin, white fabric. She’d be nothing but a pair of tits. But she gritted her teeth and pulled on the jeans, marveling anew at how anyone would wear them by choice. The material was stiff and unyielding. The jeans hung on her hips, leaving a swathe of her abdomen bared between the waistband and the hem of the T-shirt, which could not possibly be ideal. Why not draw a target on herself? Please attack here. Then, when she ignored that as best she could, the fabric dug and caught at her as she sat back down to pull on her boots.
She muttered something dark and rude and satisfyingly out loud, here in the woods where no one could hear her.
Then she stood up, dusted the dirt off of her ass, and felt like a stranger to herself.
Not just any stranger. A stranger she, personally, would hate.
But that was the point, wasn’t it? Eiryn wasn’t doing this to fall in love with compliance and dedicate herself to repopulating the Earth in these hard times of low birth rates, declining populations, and decreased fertility. Which meant nothing but a whole lot of that unappealing compliant sex for little reward, she’d always thought. Not that the truth about compliance mattered to her. She was doing this for a very distinct purpose that had nothing to do with compliant people. This was merely her costume.
“It’s only a costume,” she told herself firmly. And a little bit too loudly.
But as she stamped back out of the woods, she couldn’t help feeling that it was more like a death sentence. She tried to shake it off.
“I don’t understand this,” she said as she walked back to the waiting trio on the edge of the beach. “I can feel my breasts every time I breathe and these jeans are stiff, useless, and uncomfortable. Can I even run in them?”
“Yes, you can run in the jeans,” Helena said, with what sounded like a little sigh, as if Eiryn was being ridiculous. “Maybe not the way you normally run, since they’re a little big on you and there could be chafing.”