Still with me? Good. This one first showed up in a now defunct online magazine called The Boundless Realm back in 1998. It was the second fiction piece I ever published, and I got a whopping $5 for it. It’s the original Brutal Women story, and sorta set the scene for everything I’d write afterward. I gave birth to my boy along a barren stretch of the High Way near the King’s hold in Skall, twelve miles from the Hold at Inveress. I squatted in a dusty ditch as twilight neared, a time when spirits of the dead and dying roam free in search of unwilling hosts. I pulled on my tattered trousers - patched and bloodied so many times that I’ve lost track of which blood came from whom - and started my walk to Inveress with my son wrapped up in an old black tarp and bits of burlap. I would train him as I wished, I decided, with help from the best teacher of battle and survival I knew. The hold at Inveress is not like the King’s hold in Skall. It is not one of the old, burned out structures, built before the cataclysm when men loved their buildings tall and full of large windows.
