Brief Summary:

~ In a prejudiced society, a girl in search of her destiny finds a mentor and confident in a mysterious female traveler who is compelled to seek shelter at the Fort. While the girl seeks male attention the woman is adamant in her desire to pass unnoticed.~

The girl is 17 year old Amarice, the oldest daughter of Vanora and Bors. Unknown to her parents she befriended a Woad female warrior who trained her in the art of combat. Though far from ready, Amarice wanted to fight the Roman invaders alongside the Woads but her illusions were shattered when the female Woad suddenly disappeared.

Things get more complicated when her secret is discovered by Lancelot, the very man she had been infatuated with for over a year, while he did not even know her.

Not long afterwards Amarice meets Maniya, a traveler from the east, who came to Britannia in search of an old friend. The two of them get acquainted when circumstances force Maniya to spend a night at the fort and Amarice soon discovers that she could learn much from this woman.

PROLOGUE

At the early age of seventeen Vanora, at the time a young maiden from Britannia serving at the tavern in the fortress of Hadrian's Wall, gave birth to a beautiful daughter, conceived with one of the knights who were brought there to protect the Roman establishments from the Woads, British rebels who despised the Roman invaders, and eventually from the the years Bors and Vanora became more than just occasional lovers and had together eleven children. His fellow knights would often use this as the target for their jokes, having a laugh on Bors' account for having impregnated Vanora on the very first day of their arrival since that was the approximate date when Amarice was conceived.

Growing up had been difficult for Amarice. Being the oldest, her mother expected her to help raise the siblings who kept on coming, one after the other. Perhaps another would have welcomed such activities, seeing them as practice for the future but Amarice disliked such a inherited the beauty of her mother and the character of her father, she had always been a wild-spirited, rebellious girl, pulling more pranks than all her brothers put together. Out of love for her mother, Amarice had to put her pride and dreams aside and at an age as young as ten she had started to help her mother out in the tavern, either with the cleaning or with the 's knights, the most regular customers at the tavern were always nice and friendly to her, yet there was something Amarice disliked: they continued to treat her like a child even when she turned fifteen. That was undoubtedly a consequence of her being a tom-boy in her early years but along with puberty came the revealing of her feminine side.

With that came certain desires as well. She began to see life in a different way and some of her childhood dreams changed, though her rebellious nature remained the same. Then something unpredictable happened: she began to feel a strong, different attraction for the Knight named Lancelot.

With every passing month her secret affections for him grew in intensity and what should have been a beautiful feeling turned into a horrible one when she saw how little attention he was giving her, despite the femininity she was striving to display. He would flirt and joke with all the other women, even with her mother, but never with her. Amarice often thought that perhaps she was the only one to notice she was no longer a child.

Disappointed, she tried to spend as little time as possible at the tavern and in the daytime she would go outside the fortress under the pretext that she was going to the river either to bathe or to wash clothing. What she actually did was meet with a female Woad warrior whom she had befriended months before when the woman had saved Amarice from two bandits who attacked her in the forest. After that experience, the stubborn Amarice pleaded with the Woad woman until she agreed to teach her to fight.

NOTE:

For the purpose of the story I have assumed that some of the Knights were in their late teens/early twenties when they arrived at the fort at Hadrian's Wall. Since Amarice is 17, it means they have been there for more than 15 years, which is actually more believable to me since the actors in the movie looked too old to be only in their late twenties, since that would have been the case assuming they were taken from home at around the age of 12 or 14 and had spent 15 years in Britannia.