Liar's Oath

Chapter Ten

Luap and the Rosemage met on the road below Fin Panir; he had been to a barton with a message from Gird to its yeoman-marshal, and saw her coming along the road. He drew rein and waited for her. She looked best, he always thought, on horseback, her slenderness all grace, her innate arrogance appropriate to the task of mastering her mount. She wore her old armor; she often did, riding out, though it made her more conspicuous than he would have thought comfortable. Perhaps she did not think of it. But on this day, hot and sticky, he wondered how she bore the heat. As she came nearer, he saw the flush of sunburn on her cheek, on her nose.

Before he could say anything, she said, “I was a fool to wear armor on such a day, with no reason.” Her gloves were dark with sweat. “Although I suppose I could consider it proper training. That’s what I was taught: you don’t know the day you will need to fight, so you must be trained for cold and heat both.”

Luap smiled “I must say I’m glad I’m not wearing that.”

“So you should be.” She reined up beside him. “Gird’s right: all these pretensions of our ancestors were more trouble than they were worth. There you are, in soft pants and shirt, with a hat that shades your head instead of cooking it—and I wanted to feel grand, so I’m basted in my own juice.”

“Well, you’ll be back in the city soon, and into a cool bath—”

“No such luck. I’ve agreed to teach a class in longsword—that’s why I’m back so early—and while I can get out of this cooking kettle, I’ll be in a hot banda soon enough.”

They rode on to the city gate, and almost at once heard the unmistakable grumble of an unhappy crowd. Luap might have turned up an alley to avoid it, but the Rosemage pressed ahead, straight toward the noise. Luap shrugged and legged his horse up beside hers. Traffic thickened around them, slowed, became the back of a crowd. Luap stood in his stirrups, peering over the nearest to see the usual small opening in the middle. A man had hold of a boy; and several people were yelling. He could not make out the faces at that distance. Just another brawl, he thought, and would have backed his horse away. He looked at the Rosemage; she turned to him and nodded.

“We need to do something about this.”

“Us? Why not a Marshal?”

“Didn’t you recognize that boy? He’s one of ours.” She urged her horse on; around it, people backed away, scowling and muttering Luap followed, getting the same scowls and mutters, and handsigns that he knew all too well. These were the peasants who never forgot or forgave anything the mageborn had done; his skin prickled all over: Slowly, pace by pace, the horses forced their way into the crowd. One man, enormous of girth and shoulder, refused to give way.

“We don’t want you here,” the big man said. Luap thought he remembered the man as a troublemaker in the last assembly. At least he had the same build and resolute scowl as the one who had stood up in the back and told Gird he was an old fool to trust the surviving mageborn.

“Perhaps not, but I am here, and I’m staying. What is this?”

“None o’ yer business, magelover! Think we don’t know how ye put it in Gird’s ear, and you with that fancy magelady at yer side?” That was someone much shorter, who ducked quickly into the crowd; even from horseback, Luap could not see the man’s face.

“That’s right, Luap,” the big man said. “You always claimed to be no threat, a true luap, even a steer, but day after day we see you with that sorceress and that old mageborn priest. Think we don’t know you lust for magery like a boar for a sow? Think we don’t know you hoard every scrap of power Gird gives you, may his eyes clear? Seems every time he sits in a court, he’s come more to favor your people: we know who to blame for that. And every year he ages; he’s not half the man he was the day of Greenfields, but you haven’t a handful of gray hairs yet. What’re ye doin’, stealing his life from him bit by bit?”

An ugly sound, not quite a roar, from the crowd, showed their agreement. Luap’s horse flattened its ears and tail, and shifted nervously under him. He could not have spoken, for the rage and contempt that filled him—these dolts, these fools, to think this of him, to blame Gird for partiality to the mageborn, when anyone with sense could see that Gird trod a knife-edge between the resentments of his people.

Anger roared through him, a cleansing wind that swept away the memory of his own half-loyalties, his own errors.

“I would give him my years, if it would help,” he said, in such a tone that the crowd stilled. He meant it at that moment. “I am but a child, and he my wise elder. What is this, that you will not let Gird’s luap know?”

“A mageborn brat causing trouble, then,” said the man, in the tone of one who means And what will you do about it?

The crowd opened just a little, showing a scrawny lad, much-bruised, in the grip of a husky man with his other fist cocked. Parik, that was, a member of one of the three granges in the lower city. His scribe’s mind read the details off the last grange report: Marshal Donag, veteran of the war in its last year, and known for his dislike of the mageborn. Gird had commented on that when choosing another grange for Aris’s training; Donag had later complained that he spoiled the boy. Parik he did not know, though he remembered the man’s name on the grange rolls; he could not remember his craft or trade. He could not recognize the boy with all those bruises.

“Let him go.” The Rosemage, in her gleaming armor, shone in the sun almost as if she had called her light. The crowd shifted slightly away from her, enlarging the central space. Even the man barring her way moved aside. “Is it Gird’s way to batter children?”

“He’s no child. He’s a mageborn demon; he put fire on me.” The man shook the boy, who wobbled and nearly fell.

“Let him go,” Luap said, this time releasing enough of his own magery so that the man obeyed, as if his hands were not his own. The boy staggered across the open space to the Rosemage, bleeding from a broken nose and split lip, one eye rapidly swelling shut. She steadied him; Luap could feel her anger’s warmth, like a banked fire, and hoped the boy would realize she was not angry at him. He was wondering how to get the boy to safety, how to send word to Gird, when he saw a disturbance in the crowd across the way. He saw sidelong glances, heard the murmurs that ran faster than an old man could walk, Gird. He hoped fervently that it was.

The crowd parted for him, reluctantly it seemed, and Luap watched that heavy-shouldered figure stalk into the sunlit opening. He could think of nothing to say; he watched Gird eyeing Parik and his bruised knuckles, the Rosemage and bruised boy. It had gone far beyond I-told-you-so, and Luap felt no satisfaction in that. Gird’s glance had lost none of its edge; raked the crowd, and Luap saw many of them flinch from it.

“Well?” His voice cracked; Luap suddenly felt his own throat close in pity. Gird had not been well—really well—since Midwinter Feast, when he’d insisted on showing everyone how to do the Weaving dance in the snow, in and out of all the doors of the palace. It was monstrous that they would not let him rest and heal, that they kept pecking at him with one little problem after another.

Parik, insolent to the bone, tried to pass it off as the boy’s fault, a misuse of magery, and then insulted Gird into the bargain, mocking the old man’s sayings. Luap saw Gird turn pale, and hoped it was anger—it would have been anger, in the old days, but now it might be illness. Gird’s next words did not reassure him; Gird’s voice shook. The crowd stiffened; they did not quite growl. Parik pushed his luck, as such men always did, Luap thought, with a viciousness intended to break Gird’s authority completely. He felt so angry he could hardly keep from attacking Parik—but Gird would not want that. He must fulfill Gird’s trust, at least until Gird died. He was promising himself that he would kill Parik without pity the moment Gird died when Gird surprised him again.

Across that space, in the face of those who despised both of them, Gird met his eyes, nodded, and said, as casually as if they were relaxing after dinner; “You were right, and I was wrong. Are you still of the same mind?”

It could only be the plan he had forbidden so angrily. Luap felt the heat mount to his face; he stammered his answer. Of course he was of the same mind—but to say it now—!

“They are not all Parik.” Luap winced; Gird, of all men, should not have to plead that way to him. He nodded. He saw that Gird understood that, trusted him now as he had never trusted him before. What Gird might have said next, he never found out, for Parik interrupted, furious that Gird would dare speak to a mageborn. Rude, loud, insolent—and this at last roused the old Gird, the Gird who had settled more than one dispute with his fist. He rounded on Parik with the same intensity, the same deep roar, stalked up to him as if he would as soon clout the lout on the ear as take another breath. Parik backed away, as so many bullies had backed away, making excuses. . . . Luap smiled inwardly. That would do him no good with Gird: excuses never did. Gird went on, inexorably as always, digging at the root of the matter: what really happened? Who did what first?

Luap had not noticed the girl before she spoke; he doubted anyone had. But the boy the Rosemage held shivered as she came forward. He knew her. The girl’s evidence made it clear that Parik’s sons had started the trouble, and then their father had intervened, to help his sons beat the boy bloody, for no more reason than being mageborn and deft-handed. Parik claimed the boy had “put fire” on him then; the girl claimed that if he did, it was to save his life.

Again an interruption, this time Marshal Donag, who tried blustering and sarcasm. To hear him talk, Luap thought, you’d think he’d fought the whole war at Gird’s side—or by himself, with Gird coming in at the end. He didn’t really hear what they said, concentrating instead on being ready for the trouble he knew was coming. This crowd was as ripe for riot as the summer air for a thunderstorm. Thus it was only the Rosemage’s gasp of surprise that brought his attention back to the actual words, and he was as astonished as any in the crowd when Gird suggested exiling the mageborn. “. . . Send them all away,” he heard. “Will that satisfy you? Let the boy go, and any like him.”

His own plans in Gird’s voice; his own dream exposed, taken over.

But the crowd wanted none of it. Like the brooding menace of a dark cloud on a sultry day, the crowd’s mood darkened, threatened; he could almost see the murderous anger. Luap struggled to meet it with calmness, to convey that he was not part of this—that he would not meet that anger with his own, that he would honor the oath he had sworn. As if he could reach Gird’s mind with his own, he held his thought before him in clarity: We will not fight. We will not break your peace. He was sure they would die here, he and the Rosemage and the boy, and probably Gird as well, when the crowd finally stirred, but at least he would have kept his oath.

The change in Gird’s expression, the shift from grief through resignation to wild astonishment, brought him back to full attention. All those who could see Gird were locked in the same pose: rigid, staring. All at once, the old man seemed to come alight, not the magelight he knew, but something else, something that made magelight look homely and comfortable.

Then Gird spoke. The words . . . the words had meaning, but no form; sound but no meaning. He could not follow them; he could not do anything else. They battered at him, shattering walls of reticence, caution, prudence, opening up spaces in his heart which he had hardly known existed. As a house unroofed by storm seems suddenly small and full of light, its furnishings dim and shabby in the open air, his mind looked strange to him. Yet as Gird continued to speak those words he could not quite hear, he felt cleansed. He had not wanted to furnish his mind’s walls with such shoddy ideas, or its rooms with such ill-made decisions. He could let go, now, of his fears, his spite, his wish that things might have been different . . . he could trust others, as Gird was trusting him. He was scarcely aware of the tears that streaked his face, and only slightly more aware of the Rosemage’s voice, murmuring a counterpoint to Gird’s.

But this would kill him. Surely this would kill him. Luap blinked away his tears; it was not fair that Gird, who had earned a peaceful old age, should be the one to die of this. He wanted to help, wanted to do something to save Gird, but he could not speak. A voice spoke; he knew what it was, as Gird had always suggested he would if it happened. He had his command. This was not his task. Something else was.

Gird fell silent. Luap could tell that others had been affected as he was; faces had softened from angry hostility to the surprised bewilderment of children who do not understand. He looked up, and saw what might be the cloud such summer days breed, but one that boiled with malice . . . he knew what it was, the dark malice of them all, in a form visible to some . . . and now cleansed, but for how long?

Gird’s face changed again, this time through disbelief to calm acceptance. The cloud contracted, condensing around Gird to a black fog that seemed to weigh on him, pressing in on him until he collapsed slowly. Even as he watched, even as he stood paralyzed by awe that such a thing could happen, Luap was aware of part of his mind trying to fit what he saw into words. He would have to write it; he knew that as surely as he knew this would kill Gird. He would have to write it, and how could he possibly convey, in mortal language, what he was seeing? No one could possibly believe it. The cloud thickened as it grew smaller, as Gird struggled to stay upright, and sank to one knee, then to both, then fell on his face. The cloud vanished, and Gird lay motionless. Luap knew he was dead, even as he found he could move again, and came to Gird’s side to touch him.

In his own mind, in the faces of others, Luap saw changes he could not yet analyze. Fears vanished; all the nagging barbs of envy and irritation ceased . . . sorrow pierced him, but he knew, even then, that sorrow would heal.

Free, a corner of his mind whispered to him. You’re free, now. But in the silent space where he knelt, holding Gird’s cooling hand in his, he felt not free but rebound to Gird’s service. All the rancor, the quarrels of the past days . . . none of that mattered. He had never realized how he loved Gird, how he respected him; he had fooled himself with his ambitions. I’m sorry, he said silently. I will do better.

In that peace of mind which perfect sorrow brings, he and the others carried Gird’s body back up the hill, to lie in the High Lord’s Hall a brief space before burial. Silence followed them, spread through the streets, and despite crowds packed breathless close, no noise intruded. In one brief, almost cordial meeting, the Marshals then in residence in Fin Panir, Arranha, and Luap agreed that Gird should be buried in what had been the palace meadows, and his name carved in a stone of the Hall’s nave. No argument, not even a hint of discord, marred that meeting, or the solemn ceremonies that followed. Messengers rode out at once to distant granges; Luap felt only sorrow that Raheli, at the eastern border of the land, could not possibly arrive in time for the funeral.

Despite the crowds that poured into Fin Panir from every town and vill and farmstead within two days’ travel, the crowded streets never erupted into argument or brawl. People hugged each other, crying, then walked arm in arm, smiling through their tears. Peasant-born greeted mageborn, and mageborn greeted peasant-born, all at peace and willing to meet as equals. With hardly any formal organization—for the peasant folk had no tradition of elaborate funerals, and no one consulted the remaining mageborn—the city orchestrated a spontaneous ceremony unlike anything its citizens had ever seen. “It seems right,” someone would say, and others would agree, as if they had had the same idea but had been slower to speak. They would have a procession from the city wall to the High Hall, and then follow as Gird’s body was taken out to the meadow for burial. The family-centered verses of a village funeral would be spoken by volunteers, who had come forward to tell Luap “I want to say the younger sister’s part” or “We want to sing the brothers’ song.”

Two elves brought a length of white cloth bordered in intricate blue embroidery, finer than any Luap had seen, to wind the body in, and herbs to preserve it until the burial. The Gnarrinfulk gnomes sent a squad of gnomish pikes to stand guard over the body. A squat, red-haired, bandy-legged horse nomad appeared the second day with a sack of horsehair he claimed was the forelock and tail of his clan’s lead mare and stallion. The horse hair was to be plaited, it seemed, into rings for Gird’s great toes and thumbs, the remainder to stuff a pillow for his head. When the nomad found no one skilled at such work, he muttered but sat down in the main court to do it himself. Then, before the funeral, he rode away. Luap hoped he was satisfied; the horsefolk made difficult enemies, and might easily consider that Gird’s death dissolved any agreements with his successors.

The funeral procession began at the city gates, by the river. Veterans of the war marched, all in blue shirts or with blue rags around their arms; Marshals and yeoman-marshals marched with their staves; craftsmen and merchants and farmers walked in more ragged, but no less fervent, processions. Some groups sang, others marched in silence. Luap, along with the more senior Marshals, carried the poles on which the body rested. Out the palace gates to the west, into the meadows where someone (Luap had forgotten to think of it) had scythed the long grass and the city’s gravediggers had dug the grave. Now the little group came forward, and said the ancient words familiar in every peasant village: the father’s lament for a son, the mother’s lament for her child, the older and younger brother and sister. No one had spoken for the role of wife, and since Raheli lived, no one could take her place as a child, but the crowd together sang the short farewell.

When Gird’s body sank into the grave, and the first clods fell, the crowd wept as one, but they rose from that weeping refreshed again, sad but not despairing. Luap, standing by the heap of dirt, felt someone’s arm around his shoulders, and looked up to see Cob at his side.

“I’d hoped not to see it,” Cob said, shaking his head. “But then, when it came, I was glad—and that makes no sense at all. They say you were there?”

Luap’s scattered wits came back to him. Cob, he realized, must have ridden fast to make it here; he’d been at his grange, a hand of days normal travel from Fin Panir. “I was there,” he said. He felt tears rolling down his face again, as if a wound had opened.

“I was at the market,” Cob said, as if Luap had asked. “There was some dispute the judicar couldn’t settle, and they’d called me in. One of those days when you think everyone wants to quarrel and is looking for an excuse. I was ready to break a few heads myself, just to let some sense in, although I told myself it was the weather. Then like a weather change it came over us—I could see it in the faces of the others, as well as feel it. I even looked to see if the wind had lifted the pennants, or a storm had neared, for the change was that sudden, and that strong. One moment scowls and whines and angry voices; the next moment smiles and apologies and . . . I’ve never known anything like it. The two men who’d started the fuss turned to each other and shrugged, and the quarrel unknotted like greased string. I felt suddenly stronger and young again, convinced that Gird’s latest revision wasn’t silly after all, but would work.”

Luap had not had leisure to wonder what had happened beyond the immediate environs of the city; he was both fascinated and surprised. Had no one else seen the dark cloud, or recognized it? “How did you find out what really—?”

“Gnomes,” said Cob. “Don’t ask me how they knew, because I couldn’t tell you. The rest of that day went by with everyone in a holiday mood, and no reason for it. I would have worried, but couldn’t. Then that night, someone knocked on the grange door, and when I went to see, there was a gnome. ‘Your Marshal-General is dead,’ he said. ‘He has taken away the darkness from your human sight; he has freed your hearts from unreasoning fears and anger.’ I’d only met gnomes once before, at that Blackbone Hill mess you were lucky enough to miss; they didn’t talk like that. Afore I could ask any questions, he was gone, and I heard the beat of their boots, running all in step in the darkness.” Cob paused for breath, and cleared his throat. “ ‘Course, the darkness wouldn’t bother them, living understone as they do. But then I roused my yeoman-marshal, and called out the grange, and before dawn I was on my way. Rode day and night, I did, as if I’d lost thirty years, changing horses wherever I could. Met your messengers at Hareth—”

“Come on back,” said Luap. “There’s plenty of beds here—”

“He threw me, you know,” Cob said. “I was with him from the first, from the forest camp Ivis had, back in the Stone Circle days. I remember him coming in with his lad and his nephew, all hollow with hunger, and Ivis bade me wrestle ’im, and he threw me. Flat on my back, I was, before I knew what happened.” He shook his head. “Not many of us left, that started with him there, and I don’t suppose anyone from his vill at all, barring Raheli.”

“I wish she had been able to get here in time,” said Luap, meaning it.

Cob shrugged. “You sent word; that’s all you could do. Rahi’s got sense; she’ll understand.”

“And now what?” Cob scratched thinning hair. Every Marshal in Fin Panir and all those visiting had gathered in the old palace. “Th’ old man’s dead, gods grace his rest, and we’ve to decide what to do. Did he ever say, Luap, aught about what came next?”

“No . . . not really.” Luap looked around the table. “He wouldn’t be king, remember—I know he didn’t want to see a return of kingship. He wanted just what he always said: one fair law for everyone, and peace among all peoples.”

“So we’ve got a Code he revised every half-year, meaning he wasn’t convinced it was one fair law yet, and quarrels enough to break his heart—” That was a Marshal from the east, someone Luap barely remembered from the war.

“Not now,” Cob said. “No one’s quarreling now—it’s as if Gird himself cast a charm at us.” Even that word, so potent for strife, brought no frown to any face. “It’s in my heart that’s about what he did, him and the High Lord. Gave us some peace to sort ourselves out and have no more stupid quarrels, no more need to knock heads. But we’d best decide how to do that before everyone wakes up.”

“We could have a council of Marshals,” said Sekkin.

“We are a council of Marshals.” Cob scratched his head again. “Thing is, will that be enough? Gird himself knew we couldn’t go back to steading and hearthing organization, and the bartons aren’t large enough either, no more the granges. We’ve got to have summat up top, if not a king someone who’ll do what Gird did, at least in a way. . . .” His voice trailed off. No one could do what Gird did, and they all knew it. Gird, for all his talk of every yeoman’s abilities, had known it.

Eyes came back to Luap. Now, if ever, he could take what Gird had never offered, become Gird’s successor. He knew the Code better than any of them, having written more copies than he cared to remember of each revision, and he had traveled more than most of them, carrying Gird’s letters to each corner of the land. It would be logical—would have been logical, if he had been other than he was. Might still be logical, except that he had promised Gird, albeit in silence, in that last moment.

“I think,” he said slowly, picking his way through possibilities as if along a steep mountain path, “I think Gird thought of Marshals selecting another Marshal-General. Perhaps a council of Marshals, perhaps all of them—I don’t know exactly what he thought. Whoever was chosen ought to have been a Marshal, I would think . . .”

“In other words, you don’t want the job.” Cob had Gird’s directness, if not all his other qualities. Luap spread his hands.

“I was never a Marshal. As well, you know my heritage, my vow to seek no command.”

“Aye, but you’re the one man might stand to both folk as the right person to lead now. It’s not like you’re taking anything from Gird; he’s dead.” Others nodded, around the long table. “You know the Code and the land; you were his choice for many things. And it’s not like you’d be a king—you’d have plenty of Marshals making sure you didn’t revert to that nonsense.”

It made sense, but he felt repelled. What he once might have thought his due, for all the work he’d done, what he had wanted when he thought no one would give it to him, he now did not want. The thought of having to perform Gird’s daily duties shepherded by Marshals who would no doubt look for any deviation from Gird’s custom made his skin itch. If he took command—any sort of command—it must be command. And besides, he’d promised Gird he wouldn’t.

“It would break my vow,” he said. Cob nodded.

“All right. Whatever anyone’s said, you’ve always been true to Gird; I’ve seen that. It’s not your fault who your father was, nor any of the rest of it. But that leaves us still with no decision.”

He might have changed his mind if they’d pressured him more, but he felt that even with Cob the offer had been as much courtesy as anything else.

“I do think,” Cob said, “that we ought to start calling you Marshal—you may not have sought command, but you’ve been doing Gird’s work all this time. If you’re not to be Marshal-General, you’ll still be needed in any councils, as you were with Gird.”

The word popped into his mind from some forgotten conversation. “Why not Archivist?” he asked. “Someone who keeps the records—that’s what I really am. You all earned the title of Marshal, leading yeomen—I haven’t done that.”

“Makes sense,” said Donag, down the table. “Like a scribe, only more so, eh? Judicar and scribe together, maybe. You’ll write Gird’s life, won’t you?”

He had not actually thought of that, in spite of having written accounts of the war, battle by battle. He had been hampered by Gird’s insistence that he include only the barest facts; the time he’d tried to explore the meaning of a battle to the morale of both sides, following a model in the old royal archives, Gird had insisted he rewrite it. “You don’t know what they thought, or even what most of our people thought: you only know who was there, and who won.” But it came to him in a rush how much good he could do, writing about Gird, making Gird come alive for later generations, so that those who had never met him would understand how great a man Gird had been.

“Yes,” he said to Donag, to all of them, to his own memory of Gird. “Yes. I will write Gird’s life.”

Aris, dressing carefully to take his part in Gird’s funeral procession, felt guilty that he felt no more pain than he did. He had loved the old man as the grandfather he had never known; he had admired him as the hero who had singlehandedly routed the wicked king. How could he be taking this so calmly? Only last Midwinter Feast, when his healer’s eye had recognized that Gird’s health was failing, he had spent several miserable days trying to hide his grief until Seri talked it out of him. He was not ready to lose Gird’s wisdom, he told himself. He was not ready to lose that straight look, the one that made him feel as if Gird were seeing into his head, finding all the messier corners of his mind. Yet—he had cried only briefly. His appetite was good. He had carried out his duties as yeoman-marshal of his grange, to his Marshal’s evident surprise and possible distrust. Could he really have loved and respected Gird, if he was acting so normally? Even Seri, usually level-headed and calm, had flung herself on Aris, sobbing wildly, in the first hours after.

You know better, said an almost familiar voice in his head. Better than what? he wondered, and answered himself: better than to think tears define sorrow. Of course he’d loved Gird, and Gird had loved him. But now they had to honor Gird’s memory, and go on with the work.

He rubbed at a possible smudge on his belt-buckle and went out to face his Marshal’s inspection. He had advanced from junior yeoman to senior yeoman with the others his age, as had Seri. To his surprise, he had been offered a trial period as yeoman-marshal in this, his second grange assignment. His first Marshal, Kevis, had recommended that he change granges for the next stage of training, and Gird had concurred. Seri’s promotion had surprised no one, except perhaps the pompous Marshal she had once played tricks on. And now he would walk at Marshal Geddrin’s side, at the head of the third grange formed in Fin Panir.

Geddrin, a massive man whose freckled face usually looked surprised, was frowning at his own image in a polished shield. By its shape, it had been captured from a magelord in the war. “Cut myself,” he said out of the side of his mouth. Shaving was a new fashion in the past few years, taken from the merchants and much commoner in cities than in rural granges.

Aris wondered whether to offer to heal it. Geddrin had accepted Gird’s word that Aris must be allowed to heal, but it clearly made him nervous to watch. And he might take the offer as an accusation of softness. He moved closer until he could see the cut, then whistled softly, “It’ll drip, Marshal, sure’s you start singing, where it is. Let me close it for you, and it won’t stain the cloak. . . .”

“Heal it, you mean,” said Geddrin, but without heat. “Say what you mean, Aris. But yes, go on—Gird’s seen my blood before; I’ve no need to look like I was showing off for him.”

“Yes, Marshal,” said Aris. So small a wound, clean and new, took only his touch and enough breath to make his knees sag. It vanished, leaving Geddrin’s face just as rough-scraped and freckled as before.

“If all the mageborn were like you . . .” Geddrin said, wiping the blade with which he’d shaved on a cloth, and slipping it into its sheath. He didn’t finish that, though Aris knew the thought in his mind. If all the mageborn were like him, there would have been no war.

One step to Geddrin’s rear, Aris led the grange’s cohort of yeomen around to the city gates where the parade would start. There the most senior Marshals decided the order of march. Aris listened to the mix of accents, the muttered comments on various Marshals, the rumors already abroad over who would be the next Marshal-General.

“—An’ I said to him, your Marshal may be a veteran but he’s all hard stone from his eyebrows back. Old Father Gird was tough, but he wasn’t stupid.”

“What I always say is, the ones you’ve got to watch is them quiet ones. The nicer they are, the more they’re looking for a way into your beltpouch, eh? Isn’t that so?”

“—So there we was, Geris and me, not an arm’s-length away from old Gird on that horse. An’ he was bashing heads, lads, like you wouldn’t believe, till one o’ them poles got him under the armpit and I was sure he was killed—”

“And you and Geris got him back up on his horse. Alyanya’s tits, Peli, we’ve heard that story every drill night since the war. . . .”

“I dunno why they don’t get his horse, the way we always heard in the songs. . . .”

“I heard nobody’s seen that horse these two days.”

“Eh? T’ old man’s horse?”

A silence spread; Aris could pick out the speaker now. A tall, stout woman with graying hair, whose old blue shirt hardly stretched across her front. She nodded, decisively. “I heard it from my daughter, who heard it from a lad who cleans the stables. That very evening, he said, going to tell the old horse, he found the stall empty. And the latch fastened, he said, and that’s what she told me.”

An excited murmur ran through the crowd, though no one broke ranks; Aris shivered as if a cold wind had touched his neck. He had not had leave, in the days since Gird’s death, to go up to the high city; he had assumed the old gray horse still dreamed in its stall. He looked beyond the dust-clouds rising from the crowd assembled to march, as if he half-expected to see a gray horse in a nearby field. But he saw no animals at all, and in a moment Marshal Geddrin called the grange to order.

Through the old massive gateway they marched, one grange after another, singing the old songs from the war, that Aris had learned as a child. Far ahead, the first marchers were soon out of time with those behind, but no one noticed or cared; those who had come to watch shouldered their way in among the marchers, so the entire route soon resembled a vast segmented monster in tortuous motion upward.

Aris gave himself up to the movement and emotion of the crowd, willing himself to melt into it, be part of it. Not until the silence around the grave did he think to look and see if Gird’s gray horse was visible anywhere. He saw no horse in the crowd, or near the grave, or—when he narrowed his eyes to see beyond, to the far edge of the meadows—anywhere on the grassy expanse. Then a flick of cold air, sharp as a tail’s lash across his cheek, drew his eyes upward. A fair wind, fresh and fragrant, blew tumbled clouds across the sky, and by some trick of eye and mind, one of them seemed to run, its mottled gray suddenly gleaming white in a streak of sunlight. Then he could not find it among the others, and when he dropped his eyes they were full of tears.

Geddrin’s arm came around his shoulders. “S’all right, lad,” he said. “It takes some longer to find their tears, that’s all. I knew you cared—go on now, give him that gift.” The tears ran down his face, and he felt the knot of grief inside loosen enough to let more fall. What he really wanted was time alone with Seri, time for both of them to cry together, and comfort each other. But Geddrin, unlike Kevis, did not know him well enough to know why he needed that. When he followed his Marshal and grange back through the city, he felt bruised and lonely.