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Her mother looked up at her: even wearing boots, she was slightly shorter than her daughter. Fine lines framed the Lioness’s famous purple eyes and her mouth, marks of long weeks in the open air, summer and winter. There were a few white strands in her mother’s shoulder-length copper hair that Aly could not remember seeing before.
“She’s not your mother,” she told them. “You try being the daughter of a legend. It’s a great deal like work.”
Tired? Aly thought, startled. Alanna the Lioness tired? Impossible.
Well, well, Aly thought, amazed. I have a god.
If you’ve a story, make sure it’s a whole one, with details close to hand. It’s the difference between a successful lie and getting caught. —From A Workbook for a Young Spy, written and illustrated by Aly’s father and given to her on her sixth birthday
“Not the Lioness,” Aly said, her mind scrambling. Mother lose? How could she? “Not since she’s been Champion, that I know of.” Remember, you only know the stories, she ordered herself.
“I don’t see how any Tortallan girl would want to be a maid, not with all the choices you have, compared to us,” Sarai remarked. “If I lived there, I’d join the Queen’s Riders, and learn to ride and use a sword and bow like they do. Or maybe even become a knight like the Lady Knight Keladry. The raka ladies of old knew how to fight. In the last great battle against the luarin, on the Plain of Sorrows, a third of the Kyprin warriors were female.”
“Gods complicate things.” It was the understatement of her life, to judge by the havoc her mother’s Goddess and her Aunt Daine’s god relatives had wreaked.
