Liar's Oath

Chapter Twenty

Getting the first working groups funneled through the cave was almost as difficult as moving Gird’s army, Luap thought. Aris had agreed to come to the stronghold with Seri “for awhile;” he would not say whether he would settle there permanently. In the wake of Seri’s defiance of the Council, Luap chose not to press the issue. Surely they would find the new land fascinating enough once they had lived there for a time.

“Here we need not hide our abilities.” The Rosemage eyed the canyon walls with a craftsman’s look.

“The stronghold itself is large enough. . . .”

“For now. But it won’t be. And we’ll need tradeways: roads, passes, bridges. Look—” From her fixed stare, a line of light sprang to the nearest rockface a few spans away. A high screech ending in a ping, and burst of rockdust. A cylinder of stone wobbled, and fell out, leaving behind a clean, smooth, perfectly round hole. Luap stared at her, surprised once more. She reddened. “Of course, you could do more; I know that. And this tires me. But it will save our few numbers from spending all their time chipping stone.”

It would that. Luap shivered, wondering if she were right in thinking he could do “more” when he had never imagined even so much. He shivered again, as the thought crossed his mind of what such use of power might say, to those with the ability to sense its use. As the smoke of a city could rise above it, reveal it, before its towers came in sight, could their magery make obvious their location?

“I wouldn’t suggest it,” the Rosemage went on, “if this were not empty land, unpeopled. The rockfolk never accepted human magic applied to stone; that was one of the quarrels the gnomes had with us.” Luap had not known that; he wondered if she knew it as fact or legend. He wondered if the dwarven king he had seen would object; he wondered why he had been given no specific warning prohibition about that. The Rosemage continued. “If the rockfolk lived in these mountains, we would have to have their permission.”

“What about elves?”

The Rosemage shrugged. “They would not care, why should they? They work their magery with living things, not lifeless stone.”

“Gird told me once of the blackcloaks, who seem elves but are not.”

“Legends.” The Rosemage stared not quite through him, and he shrugged.

“Some are true.”

“Yes, and some horses fly. No one will argue that Torre’s magic horse did not fly, or that the gods could not turn mountains on their heads if they wished, but we never see a mountain balanced on its peak. Elves are strange enough without making them into two kinds of folk—”

She shook her head as he would have answered. “No—I have heard the tales, too. Bright elves that come by day, and dark elves that come by night, good elves living in trees and wicked ones living in holes of the ground and poisoning the roots of trees: children’s tales. These people see duality everywhere, in everything, balancing a water hero against a sky hero, stone against tree: night and day, storm and calm. That alone shows it can’t be true . . . it’s too neat, a dance instead of war.”

Luap drew a long breath, which tasted of nothing more dire than pine. The way Arranha had explained the original Aarean beliefs, the Rosemage’s ancestors and his own had also believed in a duality, but one soon fragmented into a great arch of deities and powers, from the vicious to the benign. He had never really believed in any of them, until Gird. He was sure Gird had not lied about the dangerous being that had cursed him one dawn—Gird would not bother to make up something like that, assuming he had the imagination. But he had not seen it himself; Gird could have been mistaken. He had been, after all, only a peasant . . . he would not have known what it was, only what it told him. It might have lied, if it had been as evil as Gird thought. And he did not want the Rosemage’s scorn.

“You have more knowledge, lady.” Even as he said that, he wondered why his tongue chose knowledge over wisdom, which would have made the compliment stronger. He drew another long breath of air as clean and cold and empty of human scent as any he had ever taken. “An empty land . . . a fine refuge.”

“Good morning!” That was Arranha, moving far more briskly than a man his age should, Luap always thought. Since Aris and Seri had healed him, Arranha might have been ten years younger. “A fine day. So, lady, you have the skill of stonework?”

The Rosemage smiled at him. “In a small way, Arranha.” From her tone, she did not think it that small. He peered at the hole. Luap pointed out.

“Ahh. Fine work, indeed; you have a straight eye. But you’ve done it the hard way; we don’t need that precision in moving large blocks. We’re going to need to move a lot of stone; best use the quicker ways.”

“Quicker ways?” She was rarely flustered, but she looked flustered now. Luap took a guilty pleasure in that.

“With your permission.” Not that anyone would refuse Arranha permission here, whatever Gird’s folk might have said. Luap smiled and nodded; the Rosemage waved her hand. “There, then,” said Arranha, pointing out the opposing rockface, a little distance down canyon. “Block the flow there, and we’ll have a sizeable terrace to work with, once we have soil for it.”

Arranha’s mild expression did not change; the rock buzzed, then screamed like some dire creature mortally wounded. A dark line scored it, visibly darker and deeper with every heartbeat. Finally light flashed out from it, as if someone had poured boiling oil into its wound, and a chunk of red stone the size of a cottage leaned out from the cliff and fell gracelessly into the gorge. When it struck, Luap felt the shock in his boots and knees; a cloud of dust rose above the noise and every bird in the canyon took to the air. He had no time to watch that cloud vanish in the morning wind; the old priest had begun carving another chunk, and as it fell another. By the time Arranha quit, the low end of the gorge had a pile of broken rock chockablock in its neck, and the little stream had already backed up into a muddy pond. The Rosemage stood silent, arms folded, her brows drawn together.

“There now,” Arranha said, a little breathlessly. “Yes, you can learn, lady. So can he.” With his thumb he indicated Luap.

Not all could. Luap found it easy, and the Rosemage difficult, but not more so than her finer carving. But some could not sense the stone’s inner grain, and wore out their power on cuts that led nowhere, mere slits in the stone, while others could not score even a nail’s path in the stone by magery. Aris, whose skill in healing no one matched, could do nothing with stone but carry the smaller chunks to be stacked somewhere.

Luap admitted to himself that he liked that. He, the king’s bastard, had that power in full measure; he could carve his own castle, depending on his own abilities. Day after day he labored, never letting his growing excitement affect his concentration on the task. As Arranha had taught, he felt for the rock’s own internal structure, the grain and interleaving of its substance, and concentrated his power so that it fell away as he wanted, and left sound walls behind. He learned to anticipate even the shattering that followed those falls, so that the very blocks fell readily to hand, for the builders to raise into terraces.

Others of his people had other magery; man-long blocks rose at their will, and eased into place. Sooner than he had expected, the framework in the small canyon had been done, and the lowest dam laid in the large one. The Rosemage had found a passable route to the lower lands southward, a matter of one low pass and a twisted canyon outlet where the little river ran knee deep from wall to wall. Next year they would smooth that route for horse travel. No one knew what lay beyond, but the Rosemage and Arranha both insisted some humans lived there.

As nights chilled, and frost starred the pools of still water at dawn, Luap felt well content. He had made a good beginning, it was going to work. They could not plant the next spring, but the one after that he was sure they’d have enough level land for some grain. Gird’s successor had promised food for four growing seasons, he should make it with one to spare. His careful planning seemed to lock into place like the blocks of stone forming the terraces; he took comfort in the evidence that his leadership was working.

Sunrise on Midwinter: Luap no longer shivered, having learned the bodily magery from Arranha. He stood, on the eastern end of the rock platform, looking southeast as rose light flushed the snow, as a high wing of cloud grew feathers of rose and gold, then bleached to whiteness as the sun flared, blinding. Behind him, the song rose up, the song he had vaguely remembered from earliest childhood, sung now by all his people. Not quite all, he corrected himself; all the ones here, the best of the workers of old magery. Deep voices, high voices, all in towering harmony that rang off the nearby cliffs, the echoes seeming answers from yet other choruses . . . his skin prickled. The words were nothing like the peasants’ short rhymed Midwinter chants; he could feel the longer flowing lines twining around each other, statement and response, question and answer, full of power as the singers themselves. “Sunlord, earthlord, father of many harvests . . .” echoed back from the facing cliffs, and behind him the choir sang of “springing waters shining in the sun. . . .”

He alone did not sing; he had sung the invocation in the Hall below, at Arranha’s direction, and now (also at Arranha’s direction) he stood silent, looking at the land, listening to his people, being—according to Arranha—the tip of the spear the first light touched, the one through whom the Sunlord would enlighten his people.

“If you are clear,” Arranha had also said, last night. “You must be clear, the crystal to gather the light and spread it abroad.”

He would be that crystal, he thought, banishing from his mind the faint doubt he had heard in Arranha’s voice. If Gird could become what he had become, if from peasant clay had come first that stone hammer to break the old lords’ rule, and then that . . . whatever it was . . . that he had become at the end, surely he, Luap, could be that clear crystal point Arranha spoke of.

Light speared from the sun’s rim, just clearing the distant mountain. He squinted only slightly. Take it in, Arranha had said. Fear nothing light; the god cannot darken your sight; only you can darken the god’s light. Fine, but a lifetime’s experience made squinting easy. Gird’s voice, it seemed, came into his head with the thud of worn boots on hard-packed earth. Easy? And who said leadership’s easy, lad?

He forced his eyes wide, and felt that his head filled with brilliant light, radiance, glory. Slowly, the sun crawled upward; he watched, not thinking now, returning only praise for glory. At last its lower edge flicked free of the world’s grip. Behind him, the singers fell silent. He stood motionless another long moment, then remembered his next duty. Arms wide, welcoming, he let his gaze fall to the little altar before him. Light to light, fire to fire, sight to sight . . . the peasant chant intruded, and he had to strain to remember what now he should say. “Lightbringer, firebringer . . .” His own power’s fire given to the eight carefully laid sticks, no conceit of actual help to the Sunlord, Arranha had said, but willingness shown. And he must make that fire the hardest of the several ways he knew. A flame burst from the sticks, unsustained by them, unconsuming: his own power given freely. They would be saved to kindle the first fires after Midwinter Feast.

He quenched the fire, and turned. Arranha nodded at him; the others smiled. Beyond them, their shadows stretched blue across the plateau almost to the cliff beyond. In his mind, their numbers matched those shadows; he could imagine the beauty of so many voices, singing the Sunlord’s praises. This year they would fill the terraces they had built; this year they would plant for the first time, and then . . . then others could come. Others of his people, and in a few years children born here, would raise their voices in song to speed the turning year.

Back inside, he called the Rosemage and Arranha into his own room. “I will be going, in a few days. If it goes well—”

“It should,” said Arranha. “They were friendly enough last fall.”

“I hope it will.” Luap paused to sip from the mug of sib the Rosemage had poured him. He had not expected her to become his servant, but she had been doing him such services since autumn. At first it had felt very strange, but now he enjoyed it. “But some may object even if we take the dirt from fallow lands.”

“You can’t take it from the cursed lands,” the Rosemage said. “Remember—”

“I know.” He waved at her. Most of the old lords who poisoned their lands had done so with temporary magicks, having hoped to restore themselves to power. But a few, in the final days of the war, had chosen to use long-lasting curses which even now could not be broken. Generations, Arranha had said, would pass before that soil bore healthy growth. Luap had seen the blighted fields, black as charred wood and far less fertile . . . luckily they were few. He would not bring that curse back here to work its evil. “It’s still going to be difficult.”

“I had a thought,” said Arranha. Luap looked at him. From the tone it was one of those thoughts that caused them all to feel that their minds had been twisted into bread coils. He nodded, and Arranha, smiling as usual, went on. “At one time, our people had the power to make much of a small supply. As the Sunlord’s light brings increase to the fields, or one seed makes many after the growth of a crop—”

“Argavel’s Lore,” said the Rosemage.

“Yes. And it came with the usual warning: the gods’ gifts must not be used lightly. Some of our ancestors used this too greedily, and lost it. But I asked Gird one time—”

“You asked Gird?” Luap could not keep the surprise from his voice.

Arranha nodded. “Of course: he was a farmer, and a good one. The priesthood or Esea had preserved a verse at the end of Argave’s Lore which implied, I always thought, that the elements had been unaffected by the decree that mortals might not usurp the gods’ power of increase.”

“So?” For once, the Rosemage sounded abrupt with Arranha; Luap was glad his tediousness bothered someone else as well.

“So we could no longer make a pile of gold rings from the pattern of one, or a platter of bread from one slice . . . but we might, I thought, have the power to make two lumps of clay from one, or two gusts of wind from one . . . you see?”

“And what had Gird to do with that?” asked Luap.

“He let me try, with a lump of soil. And it worked.” Arranha looked pleased with himself. Luap felt he was supposed to get something more from this than he had yet figured out.

“So you—took a lump of soil, and you got two lumps of soil?”

“Five, altogether. It’s harder than it looks. One needs a matrix of some sort. I was using sawdust. Rockdust would be better.” Arranha smiled again, and then shook his head. “Gird was not impressed. He said you could get good soil by putting sawdust and cow droppings together, every farmer knew that much.”

At last it came together in Luap’s mind. “But you’re saying you could use some good dirt and the rockdust we have to make more? I would have to bring only one fifth what we need?”

“Better even than that. It didn’t occur to me while talking to Gird, but I should be able to use whatever you bring doubled, and then redoubled, and so forth.” Luap wondered if his face was as blank as the Rosemage’s; Arranha sighed at them. “It’s the same principle as my way of cutting stone.” How, Luap wanted to ask, but Arranha anticipated this and went on “Remember what I showed you about reflecting lines? Symmetry? This should work the same.”

“How many of us can do it, do you think?”

Arranha shrugged. “As with the stone, we don’t know. It may not be the same ones; young Aris may find multiplying earth more like healing than stonework, for instance. And it will not take many: doubling increases faster than you think.”

Luap had chosen to return to Fin Panir after Midwinter Feast, and in the Lord’s Hall before dawn. That should satisfy the new Marshal-General’s finicky notions about magery, he thought. Everyone knew by now he traveled by magery; it was ridiculous to insist that he hide the fact. Particularly since he could time his arrival to alarm no one.

That had been his intent, at least, and he depended on his lookouts’ report of the star positions to time his exit—but there was light enough in the Lord’s Hall for a very frightened junior yeoman to see his arrival, and for Luap to see the youth’s rapid flight, as well as hear it. Amused, Luap stepped from the incised platform below the altar and strode after him into the snow-streaked courtyard.

The yeomen on duty at the Council stairs were not amused. Roused from late-watch endurance by the boy’s startled cry and plunge from the Lord’s Hall door, they’d been prepared for something more dangerous than Luap: a demon, perhaps, or at least a ghost. Luap himself, familiar to them but not the boy, merely irritated them.

“You didn’t have to scare the lad,” said one, wiping his nose. “Comin’ in th’ dark like that—you could ha’ been anyone.”

Luap tried a smile, which made no difference in their expressions. “I’d thought coming before dawn would be the least trouble,” he said. “I didn’t expect anyone to be there—”

“It’s after dawn,” the guard pointed out.

“Here it is. Where I was, it will be dark another span. This is nearer the sun’s rising, and I forgot how much.” Actually he was not sure how much sooner dawn came to Fin Panir, but they need not know that.

“Huh. Don’t think of everything, do you? Well, if it’s the Marshals you want, they’ll not all be up yet?”

Luap thought of the years in which Gird was always up by dawn, at work by daylight. Some of the Marshals were like that still, but some, in Fin Panir, clearly relished the chance to lie abed warm on cold winter mornings. That had begun even while Gird lived, though the old man had not been above routing younger Marshals out himself.

“Something wrong, out there?” asked the other guard. He sounded hopeful. Luap laughed.

“No—all’s going well, but I am supposed to report at intervals.” The guards moved back into the windless angle of the building, and Luap moved through dim passages to the kitchen.

“You look fresh for someone who rode all night,” said Marshal Sterin, hunched over a mug of sib. Another Marshal sat silent beside him. “Or did you come in late, and find a room?”

Luap chose a mug from the stack, and dipped himself a hot drink. “I came the mageroad,” he said, not looking at them.

“But that still leaves you a long ride—unless you can come here—” By the change in tone, Sterin didn’t like that possibility. His voice sharpened even more. “Or can you just flit from place to place at your will, regardless? I thought it was some special place you’d found, that made it possible.”

“The Lord’s Hall,” said Luap, between sips. “The same pattern, or part of it, is incised in the floor near the altar. I thought you knew that.” He could not remember which Marshals had been in Fin Panir the last time he’d come.

“Ah. So when you take the old lady, she won’t have to ride a week to your hidden cave, eh?”

“No. That’s why I came this way—” That was a reason they could accept, and even admire.

“How did you learn it worked here as well?”

Luap shrugged, and reached past them to a cold loaf; he could smell the morning’s baking in the ovens. “Tried it once. I don’t know what might have happened; my thought was that if it didn’t work, I’d have come out in the cave anyway.”

“Huh. Like jumping a horse over a fence in the dark,” Sterin said, in a tone that suggested it took courage and stupidity in equal measure. Luap remembered now that he had been a stableboy before the war; he loved horses. “So—how do you like it out there? Is it good land?”

“It’s rough,” Luap said. “Mountains, narrow rocky valleys: it’s going to be hard to farm, but it’s ours.”

“There’s some won’t mind thinking of the mageborn breaking their fingernails on hard work,” said the other marshal in a carefully neutral voice.

“Work won’t hurt us,” said Luap. Let them think that, and gloat, while his people moved house-sized rocks with a finger’s touch and magery.

Both men chuckled. “You learned something, your years wi’ Gird,” said the quieter one.

“And my years as a farmer,” Luap pointed out. They looked as if they’d forgotten or never believed, but finally smiled at him. “When’s the Marshal-General available?” he asked.

“Oh—time the sun hits the side court, he’ll be done eating,” said Sterin. “You don’t want to bother him afore then—but you’d remember.” Luap nodded; anyone who’d tangled with Marshal-General Koris before he had two mugs of sib and hot breakfast inside him remembered it. That he’d been just as unpleasant to the magelords during the war, especially that morning at Greenfields, had won him a Marshal’s shirt and later advancement. No one doubted his courage, or his willingness to work (once he was up and fed) but Gird himself had learned not to disturb Koris at dawn without urgent reason.

“You want what?” The Marshal-General stared as if his froggy eyes would burst. Luap still found it difficult to believe they had chosen Koris, even though he’d been at the election. If only Cob had not been so adamant about staying with his rural grange.

“Dirt,” said Luap again, being patient. “Soil. You know: what you grow crops in.”

“You’re going to take dirt back to your mountain fortress by magery?”

Luap bit back a sarcastic remark about the practicality of taking it any other way, and nodded instead. Still, through the ensuing argument, he had a vivid mental image of a caravan loaded with dirt headed for an unknown destination. “With your permission,” he said. The Marshal-General scowled at the courtesy, and Luap cursed himself. He had forgotten how rude—honest, they called it—the Girdsmen were, in their own land. Among his people, he found himself thinking, courtesy implied no weakness; he had acquired the habit of smooth speaking. Here it could only get him in trouble.

“Well . . . let me ask the others.” The Marshal-General had run out of reasons, but he was not about to give in.

Luap bit his tongue to keep from explaining again that they would not take much dirt; it could inconvenience no one to take a little dirt from some disused farmstead. He could have simply taken it, without asking, except that he had promised Gird, a promise he had so far kept. But Gird would not have had to ask anyone, he would have given his answer at once, and that would have been the end of it. In his mind, Luap asked Gird, and Gird—his imagined Gird—growled assent, irritable at being disturbed for such a trivial matter. Luap felt better. Gird would have let him take the dirt, and this paltry successor to Gird’s position would accomplish nothing with his indecision.

“You will excuse me,” he said smoothly to the Marshal-General, not minding now that it ruffled the man so. “I have friends waiting, whom I have not seen in more than a season. When the Council has considered, perhaps you would let me know?”

Astonishment. Resentment. Envy. Anger. This was someone who would always end in anger, for whom anger served every need. “And where will you be,” the Marshal-General asked querulously. “Here in Fin Panir, or off in that haunt of magery?”

Already such a reputation! Luap wondered what the man would have said if he’d seen them carving the very mountains to build their terraces, and smiled to himself. That smile came into his voice; he did not trouble himself to hide it. “I will be here, in Fin Panir, some length of days, Marshal-General. Working on the chronicles, and checking the copyists’ work, as the Council requested. Should your decision take longer, I may be there awhile.”

The Marshal-General sniffed. “We shall take what time we need, to consider carefully all that might result from such a choice.”

Luap struggled not to think It’s only dirt too loud. The man’s eyes dropped again to his desk, then flicked up as if hoping to catch Luap by surprise. Luap met that glance with blandness. “I would not try to hurry you, Marshal-General.”

Now the man flushed, and he rushed into explanation. “It’s not just my decision, you know. I’m not like a king—”

“It’s quite all right, Marshal-General,” said Luap. They had no real hierarchy, having fought a revolution to end hierarchies, and had discovered the function behind tradition with dismay. Gird, taking a king’s power, had never believed he held it, and in that belief had used it casually, as if born with the rod in hand. His successors, so far, had used it nervously, uncertain how much use was needful. Even Cob, who had seemed to understand the need for a single final leader, had not pursued his original plan. Luap smiled again at the Marshal-General, and left.

For all that he felt alienated from the peasants who crowded the streets, he enjoyed the city bustle. From the palace area, he went down to the main market, noting how healthy, if rude, the population seemed these days. Red-cheeked men and women, bundled warmly against the cold, hurried to and fro, meantime trampling the snow to a dirty mess. When he came to the wider streets near the market, he found more signs of improved trade and order. An oxcart of sand almost blocked the street, and two men shoveled sand over a thick lens of ice. The inn where Gird had gotten so disastrously drunk looked busy enough; he heard singing from behind its windows. Loud voices in the streets, cheerful but coarse; half the words were those his people never used.

He had remembered where Dorhaniya’s narrow house stood, past the market, and up one of the crooked streets on the lower hill. When he knocked, Eris answered the door, as stolid as ever, but she smiled briefly.

“She’s doing better,” she said. “I’ll tell her.”

“I didn’t know she’d been sick,” Luap said.

“Oh. I thought maybe that was why you came—”

“No, I’ve been out in the new place—surely she told you?”

Eris shrugged. “I don’t pay that much mind, to be sure. She’s getting on, you know. She did say something—about a new place, and we might go—but she’ll never shift out of her own room, again, let alone move the household.”

“But—” He said no more. He had counted on Dorhaniya, old as she was; something about her eased his mind in a way no one else did. To her, he was the prince, the legitimate heir to the throne, and while she agreed he must never take the throne, she still gave him the deference, the respect, she thought due his birth.

“I’ll tell her,” said Eris again. “Please—wait here—she’ll want to see you, but she’ll want to dress.”

He waited in a stuffy little room hardly warmer than outside. Perched on a carved chair that seemed designed to poke him in the spine if he relaxed, he looked around at a room lit by sunlight reflected from a snowy back yard, perhaps a garden in summer. Gradually, he recognized the contents, the tools and supplies of a lifetime’s occupation for a woman of Dorhaniya’s class. Baskets of fine-spun yarn in neat balls, two standing tapestry frames, another hand-frame with a half-finished design placed neatly on a table under the window. He stood, after another vicious poke from the chair, and went to the table. Outlined in a circle of blue, a white G and gold L intertwined, the stitches so tiny that, as with the altarcloth, he almost believed the design painted and not embroidered. He glanced at the frames. On one, another version of the G and L design, this one set in a blue rectangle bordered with red and white interlacing. To his eyes, it looked finished. The other, hardly begun, he could not interpret—something geometrical, he thought, in green and blue and red.

“She begs your pardon,” said Eris, behind him; Luap turned quickly. “She wants to see you, but wishes to have me put up her hair. Would you like something to drink?” She had brought a tray with a tall, narrow silver pot; the scent of the vapor rising took him straight back to childhood. What had it been called? Something he’d never tasted, but served to the adults in the afternoon. “Selon, perhaps?” said Eris, touching the pot. Luap nodded, more curious than thirsty. It looked as he remembered, darker than sib, with a hint of red, but clear. Eris poured into a cup thin as an apple petal, and shaped almost flowerlike, of five lobes. He took it, inhaled, and smiled at her. The impulse came to confide.

“I haven’t smelled this since I was a boy,” he said. Her answering smile was clearly ironic.

“I don’t doubt,” she said, in a voice that halted any further confidence. “No more trade to Aarenis or Old Aare; my lady’s had the sacks hidden in her grain-jars more than half her life. It was her husband’s, the Duke’s—part of the marriage settlement, it was, for my lady’s father craved selon, especially in cold weather. Hasn’t been any in the markets since I was a girl, not even for the richest mageborn. Yet my lady’d rather starve than sell it.” From her tone and expression, it was clear that Eris had never tasted it, and that it would never occur to Dorhaniya to share, and that Eris would resent any questions far more than her lady’s thoughtlessness.

Luap sipped. A strange flavor, that fit well with its aroma: rich, exciting, an edge of bitterness (though less bitter than sib, and needing no spoonful of honey to ease it down.) By the end of the cup, he felt rested, as if waking from a night’s sleep. Eris had left the tray on the table; he considered pouring himself another cup, but resisted the temptation. Lady Dorhaniya might want to share one with him, and it would not look well if he had guzzled the whole pot. But the tray also held a small plate, of the same delicate ware, with tiny pastries; he tried one and found it delicious. He had not suspected Eris of being that good a cook. He ate another, then another.

“She’s ready,” said Eris from the doorway. She turned and led the way up a short flight of stairs, and showed Luap into a room in the front of the house, overlooking the street. He stopped just inside the door, appalled. It had not been that long—surely it had not been that long! Exquisitely clean and groomed as always, she lay against piled pillows, silver hair elaborately dressed—but no longer the spry elderly lady he had known. Only her eyes still looked alive, and even there, he thought, he could see the faint veils of approaching death wrapping her gently away from the world.

It could not be; he would not have it. He was making the safe place for her to live; she must live until he made it. He would heal her—he remembered then that Aris was in the new stronghold. Well, then, he would get Aris. He realized he was standing there, like any rude clod, saying nothing, and that she was smiling at him, the rueful smile of any grandparent observing a child in distress.

“You can’t do it,” she said, her voice as fragile as a frost-fern on the window. “It is not something you can cure.”

“Aris—” he said.

She shook her head, once, very carefully, as if she feared it might come off. “No, my prince. Not even that sweet boy—man though he is—can defeat age. I’m glad you came back in time; I wanted to see you again.”

He knelt by her bed, holding her hand in his and blinking back tears. It was hard to remember how he had resented her at first, when he felt she intruded on his childhood memories. Now it was as if he had always known her, as if she were part of his own family. “I wanted you to see it,” he said softly. “I thought of you, as we carved the valley walls. . . .”

“I know,” she said. “You told me. . . . I can almost see them in my mind, the way you said. A land made of castles, towers and walls, rose-red and pink and sunset-orange. I think of you standing there in the sun, atop a red stone wall, the wind blowing your cloak. Your place, your own land. Prince, if you never wear a crown, you will still have more than your father had, when you have your own land, at peace, with your own people around you.”

In her soft old voice, the dream came alive; he forgot the surly guards, Sterin’s doubts, the Marshal-General’s obstructions. Already, the terraces lay green with springing grain, edged with vegetables, and fruit trees bore blossom and fruit on the same branch in a warm spring sun.

He blinked. Whoever did or did not have the power of charming men, Dorhaniya had it full measure, though he doubted she knew it. That vision had been hers, not his—for his included watchtowers on the height. “I came directly here,” he said. “To the—to Esea’s Hall; the same pattern is there, behind the altar. I could take you back, if only for—”

Her head turned slowly. “Prince, if you command, I will do even this—but I would not live to see it. Esea’s light almost blinds me even now. Do not trouble yourself about me—think of the others you are working to save. Think of your friend Gird—”

“Gird?” The last person he wanted to think of right then, and the last he’d expected her to mention.

A sigh escaped her. “Prince, never forget him. He was—more than a man, I think. A great man, at the least. Peasant though he was, the gods gave him light to see beyond the rest of us. And he was your friend, though he and you might both deny it.”

“I . . . would not deny it.”

“Wise of you.” She drew a breath, and let it out slowly. “If I cough, prince, do not fret. Just wait.” He waited; she did not cough, but did not speak for some time. Then: “Gird loved you, but as a man loves a son he does not understand. And so his advice to you could not be precisely fitted—but it was not bad, for all that. You were his luap; I would not have you disloyal.”

“Disloyal?” His heart sank. Could she possibly imagine all he had thought? Hoped? And would even she consider it disloyal?

“Downstairs,” she said. “In the room where Eris left you. You saw the embroidery?”

“Yes, lady.” Was her mind wandering?

“Prince, I charge you to take as your crest that symbol.” It was as if a tiny child had spouted legal theory, or a wren had given voice to an eagle’s scream. Luap felt his jaw drop, and hastened to shut it again. It was not a voice to bear argument. “Gird and Luap—your initials intertwined. I think of you as a prince, as indeed you are, but Esea’s light shows me you will prosper as Gird’s luap only. Stray from that at your peril.”

“But, lady—why do you think—?”

“Because—” Her old face crumpled, and her grip tightened on his hand. “Prince, I will not insult you—but remember an old lady’s years. I had children; I had nieces and nephews enough, watched them grow through all the awkwardnesses of youth to adulthood, saw the same patterns in the adult as in the child, the same grain in the wood. It is not your fault; I could never blame you. But you know what I mean—don’t make me say it!”

“I don’t hate Gird,” he said, almost whispering.

“That is not enough,” she said. “You must love him. You must be his luap, truly his luap, before you can be the prince you are—or rather, the prince you were meant to be.”

“To all but you, I have always been his luap.”

“Then . . . to me also, be his luap.”

“But, lady . . . you were the one who said I must be a prince; you encouraged me.”

“Yes. I did.” Her other hand plucked at the lace on the coverlet. “I did not always understand, until Gird died. I thought it was foolishness longer than I should have, all that about Gird’s rule being one for both peoples. But it came to me when he died, that he was right: that was the only way. And if I encouraged you to think of your heritage, and that made you unwilling to enter into Gird’s vision, then I was wrong and Esea may send me to the dark forever.”

“You could not be so wrong,” Luap said. He squeezed her hand. “You, who love the gods so much—how could they be angry with you?”

“Don’t be silly!” Again that tone of authority that stung like a lash. “Selamis—no, I will call you Luap! If that will get through your thick head—how can you think of the gods as indulgent grandparents? If I cause great harm, then of course Esea will be angry with me. I only hope I have not, or that I can cure it.”

“You have not caused any harm,” said Luap firmly. If he could do nothing else, he would soothe the fears of this dying old woman. “You are quite right; I am Gird’s luap. I loved Gird from the day I met him, served him as well as I could, and will continue to honor his memory to the day I die. Don’t fear I could forget him.”

She had fallen back against her pillows again. “You will use the crest I made?” she asked, her voice unsteady. “You will be loyal?”

He kissed her hand. “I will use it,” he said. “I will carve it into the very rock, if that will please you. And I will serve Gird’s memory as I served him in life.” He meant that, and his voice carried all that conviction.

“Esea’s light guide you,” she said. She lay for awhile, eyes shut, breathing shallowly. Eris came in to sit beside Luap.

“It won’t be long,” she murmured. “Today, perhaps tomorrow.”

Luap forgot time, and sat silently, holding that old hand with its soft loose skin, until the light failed outside. Eris went to fetch candles; when she came back, Dorhaniya’s breathing had changed. She seemed to struggle, panting, then all at once lay motionless, each breath slower than the last. Luap waited long for the last, before he realized it had already come and gone. Beside him, Eris sobbed.