ALANNA: THE FIRST ADVENTURE, CHAPTER SIX: WOMANHOOD, OR, IN WHICH ALANNA TELLS GEORGE A SECRET, NEARLY DIES, GETS A LETTER, WINS A DUEL, AND IS INVITED ON YET ANOTHER SPECIAL PAGE FIELD TRIP. IT IS AN ACTION-PACKED ADVENTURE THRILL RIDE, BASICALLY.

“Womanhood” is the longest chapter of Alanna: The First Adventure, and it would have been a lot shorter had Alanna ever read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.  Just sayin’.

So Alanna’s doing her sword fighting thing, learning to not be shitty at life, and she wakes up one morning and realizes that there are things happening in her special region.  Mysterious, bloody things.  She freaks out—shockingly—and quickly realizes that she can’t tell any of the Palace healers.  So she decides to ride out into the Lower City to find George, because if there’s one person to whom you can confide your secret double life as a lawbreaking vagina-owner, it’s the King of Thieves.  Rather than actually go inside the Dancing Dove and talk to anyone, she breaks into George’s rooms via the roof.  George hears her coming and nearly slits her throat.  Apparently people who break into his rooms don’t get the one-ear warning.  Alanna tells him that she needs to see a female healer, and George is all “you’ll need to give me a little more than that, brosef.”  And so she tells him.

Alanna swallowed hard.  “I’m not a boy.”  It was incredibly hard to say.  “I’m a girl.”
“You’re a—you’re a what!” George yelled.
“Hush!  D’you want everyone to hear?”  She scuffed her foot against the floor.  “I thought you’d guess.  You have the Gift.”
“And your Gift shields you.  Alan, if this is a jest, it’s a poor time for one.”
She glared at him.  “D’you want me to take my clothes off?”

NO, ALANNA.  And then it comes out that she’s apparently seen George naked like ten thousand times before.  Apparently either Tortall has no nudity taboo or the Dancing Dove is like the Shortbus of imaginary medieval countries.

George takes a moment to absorb this new information, then tells Alanna that he is going to take her to see his mother, a trained healer who used to be a priestess of the Goddess.  She takes Alanna into her study and asks her what’s wrong, and then just about kills herself laughing when Alanna tells her that she’s bleeding from her bikini area.  She tells Alanna that this is not a medical emergency and is just something that happens when you own a vagina for the correct amount of time, and Alanna—guess what!—freaks out.  She’s all I HAVE THE GIFT I CAN MAKE MY VAGINA NOT DO STUFF and Mistress Cooper’s like NO YOU CAN’T DERPYHOOVES, because apparently that pisses the gods off or something.  She gives Alanna an anti-pregnancy charm (even though Alanna insists that she doesn’t intend to have sex at any point, ever—oho, my dear, just wait until your fake homosexual liaison is finally consummated), and then takes her hand to read her future and is all “aw, shit, you’re chosen by the Goddess, SUCKS TO BE YOU.”

And it does suck to be her, because when she gets back to the Palace Duke Gareth grounds her for riding into the Lower City without permission.

She doesn’t get out again until after her thirteenth birthday, when Sir Myles asks her to ride out with him to his estates for a sleepover field trip excursion.  He tempts her by telling her that there is a ruin near his castle that dates back to the Old Ones, the people who founded Tortall.  Duke Gareth gives his permission (in a dressing gown fit for Chrestomanci himself) and within a few days Alanna and Sir Myles are trit-trotting out to Olau, a barony nearly due south of Trebond.  Alanna briefly gets a little homsesick because Olau reminds her of home, except it’s full of orchards and fields instead of bloodthirsty Scanran raiders and the castle has windows that don’t let in the wind.  That seems like a great reason to NOT be homesick, tbh, but okay.

On their second day at the Barony, Myles and Alanna hike out to the ruin and Myles tells her about the super awesome paper he is writing about the way the Old Ones lived.  He is apparently particularly interested in the way they… cooked.  He is like that Sociology graduate student who spends long hours at the grad bar, drinking scotch and talking about his thesis and totally killing your buzz.  Myles also lets slip that he was compelled to bring her out to Olau via prophetic dream.  (Those pop up a lot in Tortall, no big.)  Alanna is weirded out, which is odd, as everyone who meets her can’t seem to stop talking about her special ~destiny.  They reach the ruin, and Alanna’s ~destiny directs her to a big black door in what used to be the armoury.  She promptly moves it using special touched-by-the-Goddess strength.  It opens onto a dark, forbidding tunnel, which Alanna naturally bounds joyfully into, using her Gift to light the way.  She finds a neat-looking sword with a crystal on the pommel and examines it while Myles bellows outside about a sudden storm on the rise, which he says is some kind of supernatural god-storm or some bullshit.  Alanna’s all “yeah, whatevs, lookin’ at this sword I found,” and then the dark tries to strangle her.

Yep.

Suddenly the light of Alanna’s magic went completely out.  Darkness swirled around her in long tentacles that tightened on her body.  She opened her mouth to scream for Myles, and no sound emerged.  She fought to breathe and fought to throw her magic into the stifling blackness, but nothing happened.  She tried to shove it away with her arms and legs and found the blackness had bound her tight.  It was squeezing her ribs, forcing the air from her lungs… She was dying, and she knew it.

Alanna accepts her own death—dude, like two pages ago you couldn’t even accept that you were bleeding from the twat, suddenly you’re accepting your own death?—and then the crystal on the pretty sword she found lights up and, like, sucker punches the darkness off of her.  Or something.  Anyway, she doesn’t die, and Myles is like, “Keep that, I was probably compelled to bring you here because of that life-saving sword with the crystal on the butt.”  Alanna does keep it, and names it Lightning.

Back in Corus, people notice Alanna’s new sword, and she tells them all that she picked it out of Myles’s armoury, instead of telling them that she found it while barreling into a tunnel and getting into a wrestling match with the dark.  (She tells George the truth, and his only reaction is “lol you accepted something?”)  Duke Roger asks to inspect the blade, and when he does he freezes up and twitches and has some kind of crazy evil sorcerer reaction to it.  He’s like “WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU GET THIS IT IS MAGIC AS BALLS” and Alanna plays dumb.  She also realizes that she really, really hates Duke Roger, because apparently the way to get on Alanna of Trebond’s bad side is to mess with her stuff.  SHE JUST DOESN’T LIKE OTHER PEOPLE TOUCHING HER THINGS.

Shortly after this, Stefan the Hostler brings Alanna a secret letter from Thom, who sends them via George.  Thom tells her about having moved from the Convent to the Mithran cloisters, and warns Alanna not to trust Duke Roger.  Yes, Thom, that is certainly something that could conceivably happen.  Thom also mentions that Duke Roger is one of the few living sorcerers powerful enough to send the Sweating Sickness to Tortall, and that he is next in line for the throne should Jonathan die.  George mentions this to Alanna as well, and Alanna pooh-poohs them both.  However, she finds herself working stronger, more complicated spells in her free time, almost as though she actually believes them and isn’t a complete tool.  Almost.

While Alanna works spells and pretends not to hate the Duke, Jonathan keeps going down to the Lower City to drink with the riffraff.  I’m sure that what Pierce was trying to set up here is that Jonathan is a king who cares about the common man, but the Dancing Dove is full of con artists, thieves, swindlers, cutthroats, and ladies* of negotiable affection.  I feel like sending the privileged, sheltered heir to a vast and wealthy kingdom to a den of iniquity as his first exposure to the working class gives him a slightly crooked** idea of what the poor are actually like.  Jonathan is going to be knighted soon and everyone wants to be his squire.  (Note: it is also revealed at this point that Alex was chosen to be Duke Roger’s squire, which makes Alanna side eye at him a lot.)  Everyone wants to be Jonathan’s squire, especially Alanna, but she’s all I’M A GIRL ANGST ANGST I’M NO GOOD AT SHIT ANGST ANGST HE’LL NEVER WANT ME AS HIS SQUIRE ANGST ANSGT FOREVERRRR.  Kid, you have a magical sword and you’re destined as fuck, I think you’re gonna be okay.

In April—this is in Alanna’s fourth year, for those of you keeping score at home—Lord Martin of Meron arrives at Court.  (Fief Meron, by the way, is apparently better known as the Great Southern Desert, a land that was already populated by an indigenous people, the Bazhir, before Tortall conquered it.  And now it’s a “fief” that just happens to be roughly as big as the northern half of the kingdom and home to a number of nations and tribes.  Good show, Tortall.)  He’s come North to propose a trip for all the soon-to-be knights, so they can meet the Bazhir and learn their ways before they inevitably kill them as adults.  Which is all kinds of horrifying.  Lord Martin was an expert swordsman in his youth, and Captain Sklaw takes his arrival as a sign from the gods that it’s Humiliate Alanna Time once again.  He pits her against Lord Martin’s son, Geoffrey, in a free-style practice duel, and she kicks his ass, proving that all those late nights with Coram’s sword have started to pay off.*** It’s a BFD and everybody claps.

Later that night, Jonathan goes to see Duke Gareth to ask him if he can take Alanna on the trip to the Great Southern Desert.  His explanation for why he wants to do this:

“Because he’s my friend.  Because I always know where he stands, and where I stand with him.  Because I think he’d die for me, and—and I think I’d die for him.  Is that enough?”

Before the squires (and one page) leave on yet another Tortallan field trip, Duke Roger calls them all into the Great Library for a special man-to-man talk.  There is, apparently, a place called the Black City in the middle of the desert which is totally evil and from which nobody leaves alive.  He hints that since he is the best and even HE doesn’t dare to go anywhere near it, a bunch of pansy-ass babies like THEM don’t stand a chance.  He is wearing a very pretty sapphire necklace, which he fiddles with as he talks to them, and which makes Alanna sleepy and dopey when she looks directly at it.  He closes his lecture with “I know when a sword is too heavy for me to lift,” almost as though he is challenging them (or rather Jonathan, who he is looking directly at).  This disturbs Alanna deeply, because sure, he’s next in line for the throne, and yeah, he’s been repeatedly named one of the few sorcerers in the Eastern Lands who would actually be able to send the Sweating Sickness from a great distance, and okay, she’s been having weird awkward hostile feelings toward him and his moustache since they both arrived on the scene, but that doesn’t mean anything, right?  Right?  Right?

Will Alanna’s newfound fencing skills come in handy in the desert?  What’s the dealio with this Black City crap?  Will anyone ever stop being derpy about Roger’s repeated attempts to kill Jonathan? (Nope.)  Find out next time in CHAPTER SEVEN: THE BLACK CITY, OR, IN WHICH THEY GO TO THE DESERT AND ARE NEARLY DEAD FROM PLOT DEVICE

* There may also be men, although they are never mentioned.  In the Beka novels there are certainly a few male sex workers kicking around, although they seem to be an exception to the rule, but perhaps that’s one of those kooky Tortallan customs that died out between King Roger and King Roald, like lady knights or not killing LBGTQ people.

** See what I did there?  Ah, this is why I make the big blogging bucks.

*** This could be a euphemism.  But it’s not.