Protector

They called her Protector from the moment she was born, told her the story of her miraculous and auspicious birth as though that was supposed to make her believe that she was destined for the greatness they wanted her to achieve.

She did believe, at first. How could she not? It was what she had been raised in, the culture she had breathed every day. Protector was a promise they made every time they said her name, and so she had thrown herself into learning how to fight, how to be the protector they wanted her to be. She had endured the aches and pains of training, the judgments of the elders that she was not yet good enough. And when they sent her to war, she went. This was why she was called Protector, wasn't it? This was what she was always meant to do.

Her idealism didn't die on the first battlefield or the second. It held on longer than the morale of the people she was fighting with, and only because she had that promise that they didn't. She had been born for this. She was doing what she was supposed to do. She was being a protector. The soldiers around her had been born before the wise-mothers visited cradles. They had chosen this battlefield, to fight and die for this cause. And when they told stories, she listened as she always had.

She heard about Ephrem’s wife, and how she had just given birth to a baby boy. He proudly told everyone how the wise-mother had seen his future as a Well-Speaker, someone who would end wars before they started. She heard Meira whisper about her older sister, gifted with the sight to be a wise-mother herself.

But she also heard Gideon, who had a son not much younger than her, born under all the right signs to be a Hero. Gideon told her how the wise-mothers had taken the boy before he had a chance to hold him, all so they could train him to be the Hero he was supposed to be.

"Heroes die young," he had murmured into the cool night air as they sat their watch. "Protectors, too. You're not the first Protector sent to us, but you're the only one we have now, and there's a reason for it."

The seed of doubt had been planted long before he'd said those words, but that was when the little sprout first uncurled its leaf.

The soldiers born before the wise-mothers' visits had people they were protecting. They could name the reasons they chose to fight, had people waiting for them to return and hopeful for their futures. As a Protector, she was living the future she was meant to have, fighting in the war to protect the people and their culture. But she didn't know the names of the people she was supposed to protect. She didn't even know the names of the wise-mothers who raised her.

For the first time, she began to wonder what a Protector was really meant to be.

-

The battle was brutal. She heard there was a Hero on the other side, newly raised to battle and turned on them like a divine weapon.

Gideon stayed near her as best he could while they fought. She might be the only one who understood the mounting horror he felt as they watched the Hero decimate their fellow fighters. She knew his thoughts almost as well as she knew her own. Was this what they were training his son to become? Was this the sort of Hero they wanted?

There was a lull in the battle she should have known not to trust, a breath of air where there shouldn't have been, but she wanted to stop and help Gideon. She wanted to assure him that this wasn't what they were going to do to his son, but she didn't have the words for it. She didn't know. She was a Protector, and she was here. Why wouldn't they send a Hero as well?

She turned away from the fighting for just a moment, and that's when the Hero struck. Gideon's words whispered in her mind as she felt the blade slice into her side. Heroes die young. Protectors, too.

The blade was gone before she had time to react and Gideon was beside her, his own blade locked against the Hero's. Her legs shook with the effort of keeping her upright and her mind ran faster than she could consciously understand. She knew with absolute certainty what was going to happen next and there was nothing she could do about it.

Gideon glanced her way, and she knew he had made this choice on his own. The Hero took advantage of the split second of distraction and gutted the only person on the battlefield she wanted most to protect. Then he turned his gaze on her as her legs crumbled beneath her. All she could see were his empty eyes staring down at her, a small spark of victory shining in the twist of his lips. He knew what she was as much as she knew him, and somehow he knew that killing Gideon destroyed her more thoroughly than any blade ever could.

When he walked away, she didn't do anything. Who would want a failed Protector after all?

-

She never left that battlefield, not until long after the war had moved on. Somehow the others just knew by looking at her that she couldn't be a Protector anymore. She wasn't sure whether to be grateful or betrayed that they left her behind. The other Protectors that had been with them just died. She had failed in what was supposed to be her destiny.

The wise-mothers were wrong, then. She wasn't a Protector. She had done everything they had trained her to do, had lived in the role given to her at birth, and she had failed.

A poisonous part of her mind suggested it was because she had started to doubt the wise-mothers in the first place. She didn't have the energy to argue with that conclusion. Gideon was dead and he had doubted them, too. Perhaps destiny as the wise-mothers told it only worked if you believed in it.

She couldn't find it in herself to trust in their assurances again. She doubted she ever would.

-

It was easier and harder to continue on once she had shed the symbols that marked her as a Protector. She all but vanished into the crowd wherever she went, and she was never particularly invested in where she was at any given time. Perhaps the wise-mothers would have been more accurate in calling her Wanderer instead. It fit her better than Protector now.

She wondered about Gideon's son, where he might be on any given day, what he might be learning under the care of the wise-mothers. She wondered if he had ever been told about his father. She had never been told about the family she must have been from. Only babes with auspicious destinies were taken in by the wise-mothers, so she might have had brothers or sisters somewhere. What if they lived in one of the villages she had failed to protect? What if she had ruined something she never even knew because she couldn't be a Protector when it mattered?

It was different being a regular person who wasn't a Protector. There were no symbols of status or rank to wear, no labels to wear unless someone wanted to wear them. Occasionally, she saw someone wearing a patch that proclaimed their destiny to the world, but most people weren't wearing anything like that. She wondered what their wise-mothers had told them about their destiny.

For some reason, it was children she watched the most. They were the ones who would most recently have been handed their destinies, but they didn't seem to care. One girl proudly wore the patch declaring that she would be a Mother. Another boy wore the patch of a Scholar. And yet they played together in the field as though the difference between their futures didn't matter.

She wondered if she should tell them about the future she'd been promised and how it all went wrong, but she wasn't sure if she was supposed to tell them to believe in the destiny the wise-mothers had foretold or pursue the uncertainty now before it could crush them. In the end, she did neither.

-

She wasn't certain what had woken her in the night, but she was instantly alert. The woman who ran the inn let her stay in the hayloft in the stable, offering it as a kindness she didn't deserve but was grateful to receive. This town was closer to the war she had left behind, and the battles sometimes came near enough to cause concern.

Creeping over to peer down into the streets, she stiffened as the smell of smoke drifted in on the gentle breeze. The night was quiet, but she could see shadows moving in the darkness and the dim glow of hooded lanterns.

War had come to the village like a thief in the night.

It was impossible to know if any of the soldiers meant to be protecting the village were there, but she doubted it. She had not been woken by the sounds of battle. This was an attack from which the village had no defense.

She climbed down from the hayloft quietly, avoiding the ladder in favor of a rope attached to one of the rafters that the children would swing on. Then she melted into the shadows, trailing behind the invaders.

Waiting until one of them fell far enough behind that getting rid of him wouldn't draw the attention of the others, she struck, slitting his throat with the small knife she used to skin rabbits while she was traveling. The quiet gurgle of blood in his throat when unnoticed by his fellows and she took up his swords as she continued to follow.

The next one she killed had turned back to find the first, and she cut him down behind one of the houses. The one after that was still with the group when she killed him, and it drew the attention of the rest. None of them wore the mark of a wise-mother's declaration. They would not have been trained as she had been. Even outnumbered, she was certain she could win.

"Why are you here?" she demanded of the last man as he lay bleeding out on the ground.

He didn't answer, choosing instead to use his last breath to spit in her face. She wiped away the spit and straightened, glancing at the rest of the bodies around her.

They were scouts. This was the advanced guard, preparing for their fellows to follow. She didn't know how far the army was from this village, but if scouts managed to make it there before there was even a rumor of the war coming closer, then one army was far closer than the other. And a small farming village was a useful place to control because of the food and supplies that moved through it.

Part of her wanted to leave. She wasn't a Protector anymore; she had failed when it mattered and now she was a lost wreck of a person trying to survive on her own.

But an enemy army was coming, and these people didn't have soldiers to defend them. There were children here who wouldn't live to see whether or not the destiny given to them by the wise-mothers was true. The kind woman who let her stay in the hayloft was here. There were families that had kept themselves out of the war and out of harm's way, and they didn't have the tools or the skills to fight back.

She had seven dead scouts with their weapons and supplies. She had the training from when she was a Protector.

She had, if only for tonight, a purpose.

-

Captain Alim was not unaware that he could be leading his soldiers into an ambush. It was nearing dawn and they had no idea how long their enemy had been on the move. The only thing he was certain of was that the village of Grassborough had no standing army to protect it, despite being a place of interest to anyone trying to control the supply lines through the area. What was more, it was in a tactically sound area, with a narrow valley leading to it.

If the other army had gotten their first, all they had to do was set an ambush on that road, and it would be a bitter fight to try and reclaim the town.

"Sir," one of the scouts called running toward the captain. "Aria found signs of the army moving off to the west!"

"What?"

The scout, Kai, panted in an attempt to catch his breath before straightening to attention. "Yes, sir. We were following the tracks of the enemy towards Grassborough but found that part of the company must have doubled back before breaking off toward the western border." Kai panted again, still winded. "Aria was certain it was a smaller group headed west than the one headed towards Grassborough. We thought maybe it was a trap of some kind, so we pulled back."

Why was a bad situation getting worse? Alim had been fairly certain they'd be able to handle an ambush, but this looked like it was turning into a potential massacre. Being lured into a narrow valley, the possibility of attack on both sides... He didn't know what else that could mean.

"Good. I think we need to stay together for this. If it's a trap, we need to be prepared to spring it." Captain Alim didn't bother mentioning that if it was a trap, they might not have long to regret it.

The half-light of pre-dawn was eerie, especially paired with the silence that held them. Alim didn't want to lead his soldiers into a trap, but Grassborough needed them. The scent of blood hanging in the air didn't make him feel any better about this decision.

He was lost in his thoughts, which was why he didn't notice the girl immediately. And when he did notice, it was the bodies laying around her that caught his attention first, all of them dressed in enemy armor. His company had stalled behind him, everyone trying to make sense of the scene they had come upon. They had been expecting an ambush and it appeared that an ambush had indeed taken place.

The girl had her feet planted firmly in the middle of the road, apparently heedless of the wounds they could see. She wore an ill-fitting breastplate with their country's symbol for Protector carved into the leather over her heart. She held a sword in each hand which hung loosely at her sides, and her shoulders slumped with exhaustion.

She looked up at them, and the blood smeared across her face was alarming. Some of it was hers, where several cuts bled sluggishly. "Permission to stand down, sir?" she asked, her voice thick with something Alim couldn't identify.

"Uh, granted?"

The girl immediately collapsed and Alim waved for their medic to follow him over. He knelt beside her, still unsure if this were part of some trap, but willing to believe just a bit because of the bodies of enemy soldiers strewn around where she'd been standing.

Now that he could see the severity of her wounds up close, he wondered how she had been standing at all. Beneath the blood, her face was startlingly young and pale. She couldn't have been much older than sixteen. And she wore the symbol of a Protector.

"I couldn't fail this time," she whispered. "They kept coming but I couldn't fail. The village didn't have anyone else. The wise-mothers were wrong, but I couldn’t let people die."

"Shh." Alim brushed a lock of hair out of her face. "You did fine. I'm sure the people are safe."

"But I'm not a Protector anymore! I failed!"

"Not here," Alim assured her, glancing at the medic beside him. "Not now." He didn't need the woman to speak to know that there wasn't much hope for the girl. He reached down for the girl's hand and held it tightly so she would know she wasn't alone. "Everything is going to be fine. I'm Alim. What's your name?"

She looked up at him with eyes that were much too old for her face. "Shamira. Protector." Slowly, she brought her other hand over to rest it on top of his. "He was right, wasn't he? Maybe that's what they saw when they looked into my future."

"Who was right?"

"Gideon. 'Heroes die young. Protectors, too.'" Shamira coughed, but she was smiling. "At least I'll die a Protector, right? They're safe?"

"Yeah." Alim forced the words past the lump in his throat. "They're safe."

"Good," she whispered. "That's good. Tell them I'm sorry?"

He didn't ask who or why, he just nodded. The day grew brighter as the sun rose, but Shamira turned colder under his hand.

Alim stood and picked up her body. Several of his soldiers moved to help him but he shook his head and started off toward Grassborough. They deserved to know who had protected them, and Shamira deserved to rest peacefully in death as she'd clearly never found it in life.