A Walk in the Dark Chapter 23 by Maggie Finson

I watched Oesssethhe miss another throw with a knife and saw the problem. Her trainer, Goresh looked at me and shrugged. I just gave him a wink and walked up to the frustrated girl.

“Sethe,” I greeted her, “I’ve been watching you throw.”

“I just can’t seem to get it right, no matter how much Goresh shows me.” She admitted and I could feel her frustration as much as I could see it.

“You’re still used to being male.” I told her.

“I love being female!” She countered then stopped and gave me a look that said she was beginning to understand.

“Yes you do.” I agreed, not going into the long, really long discussion I’d had with her about being a bit more careful with the way she acted around males in general. “But you’re still trying to throw as if you were male.”

She gave me a puzzled look then shook her head. “What is the difference, Lady? You see a target, you throw at it.”

“True enough.” I answered. “But think about this. Your center of gravity has changed, your greater areas of physical strengths have changed. A male uses his upper body when throwing. It doesn’t increase accuracy just gives the throw more force.

“You don’t need that force.” I went on. “You don’t have the upper body strength to make that work. So you use the strengths you have now.

“When you try to use the ingrained male way of throwing, it makes you miss because your arms, shoulders, and hips are different. You don’t have the physical strength to force the throw any longer and the way your body moves is different.” I told her. “Now your hips have a great deal of impact on what you do in anything, be it walking, standing, or fighting. Use that. Focus your center on that lower center of balance. Don’t try to force the blade to penetrate the target. Let the whole action flow from your feet, to your knees, to your hips. Once you do that, use your arms and shoulders, but don’t depend on their strength to do what you wish to happen. A simple twitch of a hip can produce a lot more power in a throw than most men can generate with their broad shoulders and big arms.”

She looked at me and I could see that she wanted to do a face plant right there.

Her next throw was right on target and so was every other one I watched her do.

“Lissara.” I called to the most violent of my handmaidens once she had reduced her sparring partners, yes partners, in the sword drills to quivering heaps of badly bruised meat.

Once she had wiped the perspiration (women perspire, not sweat, I’d learned) from her face she put her wooden practice sword back into the rack where it belonged then walked over to me. “Yes, Lady?”

“Lissa.” I told her. One thing you need to understand here is that you are a good warrior, one I wouldn’t care to face in face to face combat. That is something to be proud of.”

“My thanks, Lady.” She answered. “But that is not what you found me to say, is it?”

“No.” I looked at her and even all sweaty and disheveled from her workout the girl was flat out gorgeous. Her gold colored hair, her sea green eyes, her light complexion, her shape… “You have no problems being a warrior at all.

“But I have seen you looking at your reflection at times and I can tell that you are starting to like what you see.” I told her.

“But that is an image, Lady. Not me!” She countered. “Of course any male self would get pleasure and arousal from seeing that!”

“That is part of my point, dear.” I nodded and reached out to give her hand a little pat. “It is not JUST an image. What you see in those reflections is you. You aren’t male now, and you aren’t human. Your race, elves, has always been considered beautiful by humans, but you are lovely even among elves.”

“So?”

“You are going to need to start accepting the simple fact that males are going to look at you with the appreciation a beautiful female deserves.

“I have seen you, as I said, admiring and just looking at your reflection.” I pressed the issue. “Having been male before you know what a male would think when one sees you as you are now.”

“Yes I do, and that is why I fight that when one approaches me.” She shot back.

“When they do that, would it be so hard to simply ignore them, or return their smiles with a little upward twitch at the corners of your mouth that no one would interpret as a smile of welcome?”

“I don’t like men that way!” She almost shouted.

“I know.” I soothed. “There is nothing to say that you have to do that. If you like women stop glowering and threatening the males long enough to look at how the females watch you. There is nothing in what changed you saying you have to bed a male, Lissara.”

“Oh.” That one got her. She stared off into space for a while then came back still looking as surprised as she had when I told her that. “Is that something the gods would condone?”

“My Mother doesn’t mind.” I informed her then grinned. “Getting to know some of my relatives on her side has shown me a lot of things. Trust me, the gods are just as petty, and often confused as you are. All I ask here is that you stop trying to gut any male unfortunate enough to give you an appreciative look. If you are obviously partnered with another female most of them will leave you alone.”

“Such unions are unnatural.” She countered.

“My mother is a goddess, Lissara.” Okay, I’d finally done it. Pulled out that goddess card in my deck of life and general methods of getting along in life. But this time I thought it was needed. “Are you going to try telling me that something that doesn’t offend HER is unnatural?”

I was finished there. I just walked away to let her think about what I’d told her. I also expected her to collect some bruises during training because of that. Hey! A little humility never hurt anyone, right?

Janise was working her way through a tracking exercise in the overgrown parts of the garden. You know, the one full of traps, potentially dangerous beasties, and vegetation just as likely to eat you as let you smell it? It was one of the places where Kae’song actually allowed intruders to enter the citadel. Not many made it past that wild garden, by the way.

“Wow.” I commented once she’d taken out a particularly bad tempered vine-wolf and avoided another carnivorous something or other that disguised itself as an apple tree.

“I take it that is an expression of satisfaction with your hand maiden’s performance?” Kae’song chuckled as I just nodded. “That one is quite good. It seems that your Mother has provided well for your companions.”

“Yeah.” I grimaced. “Mom and I still aren’t talking all that much, she’s still upset that I got pissed off at the way she got me my handmaidens. Oh, pissed off means angry.”

“I know.” The mage chuckled. “I’ve heard you use the expression before and the circumstances tended to help me understand what it meant.”

“Hormones.” I told him and sighed. “My moods swing, so does my temperament, and I’m beginning to wonder how any species manages to survive if its females are that way.”

“Said females learn to curb those baser, unthinking impulses.” He answered with another chuckle. “You’re learning.”

“Getting used to, more like.” I grumbled, but had to admit that he had a point there.

“As do all females as they grow into the maturity of their lives and bodies.”

“No one likes a know-it-all, you know.” I told him.

“That may well be the reason for my lack of popularity in social circles.” He easily agreed.

I gave up. The man was insufferable when he got that way. I just nodded, validating what he’d just said by NOT yelling or cussing at him, and left to see how the others I hadn’t checked on yet were doing.

Ilsa was gleefully running rings around a bunch of fighter types, any one of which would have taken the old me apart in less time than it took to take a breath. The girl just seemed to flow to one side or the other, or back, forward, up, down, whatever was needed for the situation. The trainers couldn’t touch her and she took an inordinate amount of pleasure from touching one or the other and shouting, “Tag! You’re it!”

The only problem I could see with her was curbing her enthusiasm for the sport. But one real fight would probably take care of that I thought with some regret that she would lose the simple pleasure that doing what she was gave her once that happened.

Annisithhe was going through the simple exercises a newly emerged magic user has to put up with an ease that was nearly scary. She would complete one exercise, eliminate the results, then give her teacher an expectant look and ask. “I see how that works. What next?”

My handmaidens, newly minted as they were all seemed to be better at their specialties than I was at doing the same thing. Okay, I was most definitely NOT a head to head fighter type, so being better than that was easy and kind of no brainer.

Annis was a natural with using magic.

Ilsa was good enough to embarrass a Navy Seal with her abilities in fighting and evasion during said fight.

Janise just KNEW forests and what dwelt in them along with how to deal with all that and avoid getting killed or even hurt while doing so.

Lissara was almost as good an ‘up front, confrontational’ type fighter as Sam was.

Oesethhe was already expert at blending into shadow, other surroundings, moving silently, and was so good at swiping things that I’d already had to order her to give what she’d taken from people back several times.

Sam was the old cliché. A tough, dangerously skilled warrior with brains that he wasn’t afraid to make use of.

Me? I was the generalist. I could do everything the others could — okay without the head on diving into a fight thing — but I was also the healer and leader of the gang. Oh, yeah. I had that Mother/Daughter thing going with Llolth even if I did try to not make use of it as much as possible.

All in all, though, I had to admit that the group that would be travelling to Caet’he Og with me and that meeting with the local Dhro’aaa elders was really very formidable.

Now, if I could just get my handmaidens to realize that they were all very lovely, sexy females and that they (with the exception of Lissara) really should stop teasing all the males they ran into.

The night before we were supposed to leave for Caet’he Og I was walking past Lisarra’s room when I heard a series of thumps, crashes, thuds, moans, yelps and the ripping sound of cloth being torn.

Natrually, idiot that I am at times, I just had to check to make sure my problem child wasn’t dismembering some fool male who had sneaked into her quarters.

The room was a mess, things knocked over, vases broken, furniture overturned…

The really shocking thing was what I saw in the center of the room, on a rumpled carpet that was in the process of getting more rumpled. Only Lisarra wasn’t trying to gut or castrate some unfortunate male.

In fact, the male, very male, elf on top of her was enthusiastically working his hips in a time honored ritual that I’d never thought I’d see Lisarra putting up with let alone seem to be enjoying so much.

She saw me enter, gave me a dreamy little smile and mouthed. “Close the door, please.”

Then went right back to humping with the — as I mentioned before — very male elf who was with her.

“Huh!” I shook my head, left them to their entertainment and closed the door behind me. I even managed to improvise a ‘Do not disturb’ sign to hang on the door.

Lisarra did like the boys. She just liked it rough. Go figure.

Sheesh.