Liar's Oath

Chapter Nine

Gird came from court as grumpy as Luap had seen him. “Your folk I expected to be difficult; mine I thought had more sense.”

“What now?”

“A petition from over northeast somewhere, to have all the mageborn children tested for magical powers and then destroy them. The magery, not the children. I think. I don’t know how many times I have to tell them—!” He broke off, scrubbing his forehead with a fist as if to wipe out the memory. “It will work in the end; it has to work.”

“Maybe it won’t,” said the Rosemage quietly. “What then?”

“Not another war,” said Gird. “We’ve had enough of that.” That no war didn’t mean no killing they all recognized. “Look at Aris and Seri; they’re fast friends. They get along with both peoples.” The Rosemage opened her mouth, but closed it again. Gird knew, as well as she and Luap, that few mageborn had Aris’s talents, and few peasant-born had Seri’s experience of friendship. You can’t, Luap thought, make an alliance work because two children get along. More likely, Aris would trust too much in his own goodwill, and some superstitious peasant with no goodwill at all would bash his head in for him. That Seri would then gleefully avenge him wouldn’t help at all. He wondered what Gird would do if someone killed Aris as a mageborn—would that finally convince him that the two peoples would never mix? Or would he ignore that as stubbornly as he’d ignored all the other evidence?

“We could leave,” Luap said, as if continuing the conversation interrupted long before. No need to say how or where: Gird had not forgotten that.

“All of you?” Not quite disbelief, but a tone that made clear Gird’s opinion. Root and branch, child and lady and old and young?

“All of us.” Luap shut his eyes a moment, seeing them all in the echoing arches of that great hall, hearing in his mind’s ear the voices racketing off stone. How could he feed them? “We could farm that other valley,” he said. “Small-gardens . . .”

“Most of us aren’t farmers,” said the Rosemage. Damn the woman—she should realize it was their best hope. “Small-gardens don’t yield grain. . . .”

“There’s a plain beyond,” he said. “Maybe that would produce grain. Or something Arranha said, about the terraces used in Old Aare; we could build terraces. And if we aren’t farmers now, more of us are than were. We can learn. Better that, than—”

“You want to run away!” Gird’s anger blazed from his eyes. “You won’t give it a chance!”

“I’ve given it a chance!” The moment he said it, he knew he’d lost; if only he had said we instead of I. He got his voice under control and tried to mend the unmendable. “Gird—sir—however much you want the mageborn to blend in, most of the others don’t. They’ve told you themselves. Even some of the Marshals; you know why you didn’t send Aris to Donag’s grange. And Kanis, in the meeting two days ago—”

“Kanis is a fool,” Gird said through clenched teeth. “And you’re another. You ought to see it, you of all of us, if blood-right stands for anything. Does your mother’s pain mean nothing to you? You are ours as much as theirs—” He flicked a glance at the Rosemage, not hostile, but acknowledging, and went on. “You could be the bridge between us, Luap, if you’d work at it, instead of haring off after some scheme to make yourself a comfortable niche with your father’s folk. You don’t have the right to say: the peoples must say. The mageborn, if they want to leave on their own, can go without you. They don’t need you, except to cause them trouble: you’ve sworn to take no crown, and what can you be, without one, but temptation?”

“That’s not fair!” He wanted to say more, but he had ruined his chance, and knew it. Gird would not budge now, not for a season or so. Yet he could not keep quiet. “You know I have traveled the land, more than you yourself, carrying copies of your Code, and trying to show your—the people—how harmless, how loyal, a king’s son can be. And they don’t trust me yet. What more can I do?”

“Quit saying ‘my people’ and ‘your people,’ for one thing. Quit thinking it, for another. The distance between a merchant trading across the mountains and a shepherd lass who’s never been away from home is no less than the distance between the mageborn and the . . .” Even Gird wanted a name for the others, and though he refused to say “my people” the words hung between them in the impervious flame of reality. He cleared his throat, avoiding the term, and kept going. “If I can expect the merchant and the shepherd, the cheesemaker and the goldsmith, to live under one law, what is so hard about the other?”

The Rosemage warned him with her eyes, but he could not desist. Gird must someday see the truth, he was convinced, and if he kept at it, perhaps it would be sooner. He did take time to choose his words carefully. “Gird, you set no limits on craftsmen or merchants or farmfolk, so long as they stay within the law, but what would happen if you told farmers they could not farm, or weavers they could not weave?”

“Why would I do that?” Gird asked. “And what has that to do with—”

“The mageborn powers, Gird. You want them given up, as if they were wicked in themselves, rather than talents like a dyer’s eye for color or a horse-trainer’s skill with horses.”

Gird cocked his head. “Talents like other talents? I think not, lad, and if you believe that you’re fooling yourself.”

“You let Aris heal: that’s a mageborn talent.” He hoped his envy did not bleed into his voice. Every time he saw Aris, his own talent ached within him . . . perhaps he too could heal, if only Gird would let him try.

“Healing is a gift of the gods. Yes, I know, it was said to be a mageborn talent, but what mageborn in my lifetime had it? had We saw no healing; we saw wounding and killing. I let Aris heal, yes, because some god’s light shines through that boy like a flame through glass, but you notice I haven’t let him do it without supervision. The gods I trust; his mageborn talent I trust no more than this—” He flicked his fingernails in derision. “Healing is a service; it’s not a way of getting power over others. Will you—you of all people—tell me the mageborn don’t use their talents to get power?”

“That’s not fair!” It was already too late; Luap felt the last strand of control fraying. “You trust that Marrakai whelp—born and reared in the privilege you claim to despise. You trust a stripling boy of whom you know nothing but another child’s report—and I’ve worked with you for years, gone everywhere at your command, and you don’t trust me—”

“And why should I?” Luap had not seen Gird that angry at him for years. “You tell me that—and remember what you did, Selamis-turned-luap. The first time I saw Aris use magery, it was to heal, and he gave his own strength to it. The first time I saw you use magery, you tried to kill me, to force me to accept your rule. Right after swearing you sought no crown, you tried that—should I then trust you?”

“Then why did you make me your luap? Why expect me, whom you don’t trust, to join our peoples? Why not pick someone you do trust—that Marrakai Kirgan, or Aris?”

“To give you the chance to change, rare as it is.” Now Gird looked more tired than angry. “D’you think I don’t know men can change? The High Lord knows I have, from the boy I was, from the farmer I became, from my first year as a rebel. Some say no one changes, that cows can’t turn to horses, or wolves into sheep—but I know change is possible. That’s what I hoped for you, that you’d grow out of envy and lying, and into some understanding of responsibility. You’ve worked hard—yes, and I’ve praised you for it—but you’ve never given up wanting what you think you should have had.”

“I . . . tried.” His throat closed on the rest. He had given Gird everything he could, every talent he knew he owned, except the one Gird would not accept, the magery. And what he had really wanted, Gird had never given him—not easy praise, but the trust he saw given to others for nothing.

“I know you did. In your own way. But—how many more like you, who still want power, would reach for it if I let active magery return? Yes, it’s hard on the mageborn to lift mud with a shovel when magic might do it, or rely on candles when they could have magelight—but it was hard on everyone else, when the mageborn chose to use their magicks as they did. We can’t have that again; we can’t have you, trying to control your wishes, and not doing it.”

If he had not felt Gird’s fist before, he would have thought the words hurt as much. Remorse lay a bitter blade at the heart of his pride: he wanted to throw himself down and plead; he wanted time to unroll its scroll and let him unsay what he had said. But it would take more than a change in the day’s writing; he had years of error to undo, and time flowed like the great river, always one way, always down to death. He swallowed the knotted anguish, in all its confusion of meanings and feelings, as he had swallowed so much, and felt an insidious relaxation. He had tried; he had failed; he should have expected that. It wasn’t his fault; he had done his best.

He wanted to shrug, but he knew that would anger Gird even more. Instead, he sat very still, avoiding everyone’s eye. From the corner of his own, he could see the Rosemage’s expression, composure over disappointment over frustration. She had as many layers as he did, was as different from Gird’s singleness of heart as he was, yet Gird, though he did not fully trust her, never subjected her to the criticism he aimed at Luap. He glanced at Gird, ready to be dismissed again, only to meet a steady look of regret that almost broke his determination.

As if no one else were in the room, Gird spoke. “You know, Selamis, you reminded me of my brother from the day I first saw you. My favorite brother; he died in a wolf-hunt, years before the war started, but I never forgot him. I thought ‘Here’s Aris back again, and this time I’ll protect him as he protected me.’ There were some who didn’t like your ways from the first; I argued that they were unfair. When you told me you had lied, and what had been done to you, I wept—do you remember that?” Luap nodded; he could not speak. “I knew that any man could be driven to lie by enough pain; I never blamed you for it. But you lied afterward.”

I told the truth afterward too, Luap thought. More often than I lied. You might give me credit for that. Aloud, he said, “I’m sorry. I am not the man you would have me be. But since I am not, give your task to someone more fit to handle it, and let me go.”

“I wish I could.” Gird looked at him. “But you know why I cannot, if you will only face it. You are who you are, your father’s son—and you came to me. That old woman knows, and Arranha: I know they’ve told you.”

“And they’ve told me that my magery is part of it. That I must tap that power to do what you ask—yet you ask me to do it without. How? I have tried, and failed.” For the time, his bitterness had vanished, leaving him at peace, a still pool in the calm before a winter dawn. “Since it is my lies that made you distrust my people—” There. He had said my people blatantly, just as he saw it in Gird’s expression. “—rid yourself of me, and you and the others may be able to trust them.”

“I don’t want to trust them, you purblind fool! I want to trust you. I want you to deserve my trust.” He had never heard such anguish in Gird’s voice; it shook his certainty. “I want you to be the Selamis we all see you could be.”

“And not the luap you all see?” The moment it was out of his mouth, he could have bitten his tongue in two. It was like slapping the old man’s face; nothing would heal now. But Gird looked more sad than angry.

“No, not the luap. If you could think past your balls, Selamis, and past your own losses, you could see that not all fatherhood involves a woman, and not all kingship requires battle.”

“I’m sorry.” It seemed he was always saying that; it tasted of long chewing, its meaning leached away, its savor lost. Yet he meant it; he would say it until he died, if he must. He shivered, and made a warding sign; he hoped he would not need to be sorry so long.

“Well.” Gird shook his head, refusing further debate on that subject. “You’re not going; I need you. And your people are not going out to your mysterious land, wherever it is. We will work through this; if I can lead peasants to war, surely I can lead them into peace. Although I remember Arranha saying that would be harder.”

Luap found the look on Arranha’s face worse than anything he might have said. He wanted to scream back at it, he wanted to run from it, he wanted to be what all these people wanted him to be . . . that they expected him to be without explaining beforehand. He was supposed to guess, to figure it out from the hints that were enough for others but had never been enough for him. He could always see more than one direction behind each hint, always see more and more complicated patterns radiating from a simple one. Arranha would say more light would help, but more light simply revealed more complexity, more ways to go wrong.

“What is the one thing you truly want?” Arranha asked, after a silence that seemed very long to Luap.

Cascades of images flowed through his mind, each begetting a dozen more. Each made of dark and light, color and its absence, lines and spaces, textures. . . . “To be whole,” Luap whispered, into the hollow space of his dream, the secret chamber of his mind, to which no god’s voice had come. To have this space filled, this chamber habited, the voiceless voiced, the blind—but he was not blind; he had all Esea’s light he could tolerate, and what it revealed was emptiness. “To be whole,” he said a little louder, putting voice to something without a voice.

“To be something,” Arranha said. Nothing colored his voice, neither approval nor disapproval. “Or to do something? Or to have something?”

Luap sat silent, trying to keep his hands still. Arranha’s questions always had traps in them; that parallel series must mean more than it seemed, must be more than the reflection of his own words from Arranha’s mind. He had been, he thought, plain enough. He wanted to be whole, more than anything. But to be? Not do? What did he want to be whole for? Had he a purpose? Had he some other desire which this phrasing veiled?

He wanted . . . he wanted to hear that voice, the one he had not found in the chamber that lay in no visible mountain, the one no one could find but himself. He wanted to hear that voice say . . . but that was nonsense. Children hoped to hear adults praise them; children hoped for approval. He was grown, a man old enough to have his first grandchildren on his knee, if his children had lived. It came to him in a sudden storm that his son had been killed, not as a whim of the soldiers sent to command his mission to Gird, but because he was a son—a potential heir in time of rebellion. Why had he not seen this before? Because his grief for the boy had eased before the much harder grief of knowing how his wife and daughter suffered when he did not betray Gird?

In the memory of his children, his longing for something only children wanted ebbed, leaving him aware of nothing but exhaustion and the hollow he so desperately wanted filled. “To be whole,” he said finally to Arranha. In his own ears, his voice held conviction. “That’s all. And—and I don’t know what that would be. With magery, without . . . just whole.”

Arranha’s expression softened. “I wonder sometimes if any of us have understood what your boyhood was like. Did you have any feeling of being in a family?”

“No.” Luap swallowed. “Or I supposed I may have, very young, but not later. I never knew where I fit; I never knew exactly what they wanted, except that I wasn’t right.” He did not try to express the memories that flooded him now: other children had brothers and sisters, parents, a pattern into which they fit. All those patterns excluded him; he had been defined, he realized, by negatives. You’re not my brother, one boy had said, shoving him away when he would have made friends. He had learned not to ask the adult men if they were his father; he had learned not to ask women if they were his mother. When he had asked those questions, in his innocence, he had been thrust away: you are not my son, you are not my child. He had learned not to ask the most important questions that crowded his head, for that would risk the little he did have, the little he did know. And in the unknown spaces, he could make up his own answers, safe as long as he did not ask, did not seek the truth, which always told him what he was not. His dreams were not lies if he did not ask.

Arranha stared at his own hands as if they were new to him. “I have been an outcast most of my life—causing trouble, as Dorhaniya told you, even as a young man—but at least I always knew what I was an outcast from. I knew my father’s face, my mother’s hands; I scuffled with my brothers, teased my sister . . . and I cannot imagine what it would have been like without them. Would I have gone my own way, if I had not been sure what that was? What I was? Have I taken pride in being true to my own vision without realizing how lucky I was in having such a vision?”

“For some,” Luap said, looking down, “the truth is a blessing. For others, the truth can only be pain.”

“Surely not!” Arranha’s voice shook. “Even if it seems painful, the truth is better than lies; light is better than darkness.”

Luap did not argue. He had lost that argument a long time ago, as a small child. Safer to guard his dreams, his private corners of the mind, his small comforts: what truth could improve them? In his mind, Gird could be the loving father he had never had; in truth Gird loved him no more than anyone else, perhaps less. How could the truth be better? What could anyone build from truths that only took away, that never gave?

But he felt Arranha’s gaze on him as he would have felt the sun’s heat. For all his apparent gentleness, for all his mild good humor, the old man had his passions, truth and light among them. “You cannot be whole without truth,” Arranha was saying. “You cannot be whole without the light.”

But he was wrong. What would make me whole, Luap thought, is something to fill the dark places, the inside places that have never seen light.

For some days, he and Gird trod gingerly around each other, much like lovers who have quarreled and want to make up. Luap said little, but remembered to say that little pleasantly, allowing no hint of his misery to color his voice. He drove himself in his work, beginning at the first hint of daylight, writing until his hand cramped and his arm ached, until he could scarcely stand. Gird gave his orders quietly, commended Luap on the neatness of the finished scrolls, asked necessary questions about accounts. And as time passed, Luap felt they were easier with each other. Gird would accept the help of a flawed luap as he would have used a flawed tool if a good one were not available. He himself basked in a gentle melancholy—resigned to his failure, to a future in which he satisfied no one, achieved nothing he wanted, never found trust or acceptance. He could at least be better than Gird’s fears, if not as good as his hopes.

In this mood, he found strange pleasure in visiting Dorhaniya and enduring her mild scoldings, in seeing the Rosemage’s doubts flickering in her eyes, in noticing how Arranha worried. He might not be what they wanted, but he had their attention. Perhaps it was not possible to be what they wanted—those several contradictory things they wanted. Perhaps the best he could hope for was their continuing interest and attention. It wasn’t the trust he craved, but it was better than being ignored.

He had fallen into a reverie one day, staring blindly out his window as he stretched his fingers to ease a cramp, when he felt someone watching him. He turned. Aris stood beside the door, one foot hooked on the other ankle.

“You seem tired, sir,” the boy said. He had grown at least a head in the past year, and was as skinny as ever.

“A cramp in my hand,” Luap said, smiling. “A problem all scribes share.”

“Would you like me to heal it?”

Luap stared. Would he expend his power on so small a thing? “No, Aris,” he said. “It doesn’t matter; it’s just a nuisance.”

“Father Gird asked me to see if I thought you had the healing magery,” Aris said. “I told him I thought you would know best yourself, but he said he had forbidden you to try.”

“Yes,” Luap said with difficulty. “He did.” Something about Aris’s posture communicated unease, though he seemed relaxed. “And what do you think?”

“I . . . don’t know, sir. Do you want that magery?”

I want all magery, Luap thought, and hoped it did not show in his face. “Yes,” he said. “I would like to heal the sick and injured, as you do—it would be a great good. But I know so little of my powers I cannot say if this is one of them.”

“Do you want me to attempt to find out?” The obvious answer was Yes, of course, but for some reason the obvious answer did not come. Why had Aris asked, instead of simply obeying Gird’s request? Was he trying to convey another message?

“Can you?” Luap asked. “What would it take?”

Aris untangled his ankles and came into the office. “I’m not sure, sir. Perhaps if I held your hands—but I don’t know if that would work. I’ve never done this before.”

Reassuring. Luap wondered if he’d told Gird that, and how Gird expected to get useful information from so young and inexperienced an examiner. The proof that one could heal was a healing: what did it matter what a boy thought of the possibility? But it did matter; he could feel his heart pounding in his chest at the very thought of it. If Aris, whom Gird trusted, said he had the healing magery, surely Gird would let him learn to use it. He held out his hands for Aris to touch. The boy took them, his own hands warm and dry, their bony length promising size and strength later.

“Did you ever feel your hands itch when you were near someone hurt?” he asked. Luap shook his head. Aris peered at his palms. “You have scars here—what happened?”

“Burns,” said Luap. He felt sweat start in his hair, under his arms. He did not want to remember that, not now. “When I first came to Gird’s army,” he said quickly, as if speed would protect him from the memory, “I had burned hands. They—the men who came to my farm—they burned them.” He blinked away the tears and looked up to find Aris’s bright eyes watching him steadily.

“I’m sorry,” Aris said, almost whispering. “I can’t do anything now. But perhaps that’s why you don’t feel it.”

Luap sat back, shaken. What did the boy mean? That he had the healing magery, but didn’t feel it because of the burns? That he had once had it, but the burns had destroyed it? Aris still held his hands, and now Luap felt a slow, languorous warmth moving through his own fingers and wrists, up his arms to relieve tension in the elbows he had not even known he felt. Then it receded, and he felt a coolness replacing the warmth. His own magery rumbled inside him like a simmering pot just coming to boil, and he shunted it aside. His head throbbed a moment, then eased.

“It hurts you not to use it,” Aris said. “Does Gird know?”

“Do I have the healing magery?” Luap countered. Gird was this boy’s hero; he would not complain of Gird.

“I don’t know,” Aris said, releasing Luap’s hands. Luap flexed his fingers: no cramp now, nor any residue of tension. “I feel great power, but it’s not like mine. That doesn’t mean it’s not the healing magery,” he said quickly. “I can’t tell.”

And since he could not tell, Gird would not release him from his oath, and the power would continue to fret in its cage. Luap hoped the boy would not feel his frustration. He did not want to come between Gird and Aris, though he would have liked to convince Gird that his own magery had some good purpose.

Aris left, to report to Gird, and Luap stared blindly out the window. So long as Gird refused to see how many of his people—our people, Luap reminded himself—did not want his vision of peace, he could do nothing. He had to abide by his oath, even when Gird thought him foresworn, and hope that things would change. Either the peasants cease hating the mageborn—which he felt would never happen—or Gird recognize the problem and let him take the mageborn to safety somewhere else. Not somewhere, but there—to his own land that he had found.

In the meantime—he picked up his pen and went back to work—in the meantime he must be Gird’s most loyal assistant and scribe. The work would ease his mind; it always did. And if nothing changed, if he spent his life this way, it could have been worse spent. He knew that; he accepted it, struggling to crush the doubts and desires that rose from his magery.