Liar's Oath

Chapter Thirteen

Luap and the others had been back in Fin Panir only a few days when Raheli arrived. She wanted, she said, to see what progress Luap was making on the Life of Gird. He showed her the racked scrolls of notes, explained about the interviews.

“Did you get the ones I sent?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. You are the only source I have for his early life, you know. Can you tell me anything more about his childhood? Anything that would fit well?”

“Fit well?”

“You know—something that would show the reader that he was going to be what he became. That story about his brother dying of an attack by wolves—where was Gird then? What did he do?”

Rahi stared at him. “Arin went out with the hunters; he was the elder. Gird stayed—you know my grandparents were still alive then, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure.” Luap pulled out the scroll she had sent and looked. “No—all you said here was that Arin died, and Gird succeeded to the tenancy.”

Rahi frowned. “It’s more complicated than that. It was before I was born; Arin and his wife Issa and their children, and Gird and my mother Mali, lived with their parents. Gird’s and Arin’s. The eldest son in each cottage could be called out for a hunt; I don’t know if Arin had to go, or if he chose to, but he went with other men out to a distant sheepfold. When wolves came, he ran out after them; they tore him but were beaten off by others. Gird said when they brought him home, the steward came, and granted a sheep’s carcass to the family. Even remitted the death-duty. But within a year, his father died, and the cottage and all the family came to him. Issa and her children, his mother, his own children—for I was born later that year.”

“But Gird didn’t go out to hunt the wolf that killed his brother?”

“No—the other men had killed most of them. And he had to do the work Arin had done, as well as his own.”

“It would have made a better story,” Luap said.

Rahi gave him a strange look. “It’s not a singer’s tale,” she said. “It’s what really happened.”

“Another thing I don’t understand,” Luap said, avoiding that implied criticism, “is when he actually began working against the magelords. From what you’ve written, and from what I heard others say, his own liege was harsher than most, deliberately cruel.”

“Indeed he was!” Rahi’s face stiffened; her scar stood out white as bone.

“Then Gird must have resented it all along; he was no man to put up with cruelty lightly. Why didn’t he join the Stone Circle earlier?”

“Do you think he never asked himself that?” She sounded angry; Luap could not understand why. “Do you think no one else ever asked? Why did he have to wait until the count’s meanness killed his mother and his wife, until starvation and disease picked off children and friends, until his best friend died beneath the very hooves of the lords’ guard, until I—” She drew a long, shuddering breath, and flushed and paled again. “Until they killed my husband and nearly killed me, and I lost his first grandchild. Why did he wait and wait? I don’t know.” She shook her head slowly; her accent thickened. “I would not call it cowardice, nor stupidity. He knew it was wrong; he knew it was worse; he thought—as much as I can know what he thought—that the Stone Circle way would be no better. It was throwing lives away, not saving them. He did give grain, and pull his own belt tighter, that I know, once his friend was killed. But he had sworn to follow Alyanya’s peace, and seek no mastery of steel.”

“But why?” asked Luap. He had never heard Rahi speak even this much of her father; he was fascinated.

She sat for some time in silence, her face grave. She, like Gird, had gained weight with peace and prosperity; she had grown almost massive, like a matron with many children. “You know he was once in the count’s guard,” she said finally.

“I had heard that, back during the war; someone said it was where he learned the craft of war. But others said he had been a farmer all his life. Which was it?”

“I don’t know this of myself,” Rahi said. “I don’t know if I should tell you; he never told me about it and I heard it only in bits and pieces, from my mother and the village women her age.”

“If it made him the leader he was, it should go in his life,” Luap said.

She nodded, slowly. “Very well—but understand that this is a tangled story, and I was a child when I heard it.” He waved a hand to urge her on; she continued. “Gird was big and strong, even as a boy; the count’s steward saw that and suggested he join the local guard. He trained part time, and his father had payment for his service. When he came to manhood, and would have been made a guard, the count chose to torture a boy who had stolen fruit, and Gird ran away. Arin—the same Arin the wolf killed—brought him back, and the count did not kill him, but the fine and the count’s enmity destroyed my grandther’s standing in the vill. So Gird gave up all thought of soldiering, and became a farmer in his father’s cottage; he had learned, the women said, what came of following foreign gods of war.”

“But he had been in long enough to have knowledge—” Luap prompted.

“No—it’s before you joined, but remember that he spent that winter understone, with the gnomes. He said himself that what he learned from his old sergeant in the guards was to real soldiering as his own breadmaking was to my mother’s. He knew a few things, more than the men who had just run away to live like animals in the woods—but he could not have led an army in war without the gnomish training.” She stretched, then pushed herself out of the chair to prowl around his office and peer out the windows. “I think myself, Luap, that his very slowness, his very reluctance to oppose the magelords openly is what made it work. He had no hothead enthusiasm, no boyish illusions, such as I see in the lads and lasses in my grange, who dream of glory. He had a grown man’s thought, slow but sure, and when he finally moved it was like a mountain shifting its place.”

She looked back over her shoulder at him. “Of course, it would be nice to think he had been working against them secretly his whole life. If he had organized the Stone Circle, if he had planned it all. But if he had, that would mean he had planned to let his mother and mine die of fever, rather than risk the count’s ban against harvesting herbs in the wood. It would mean he had planned to use the anger generated by one outrage after another to rouse the peasants . . . that his own anger was false, assumed for one occasion and put off for another. And a false man, Luap, could not have done what he did.”

Luap felt hot. She had made no direct accusation, but he felt as he had often felt when Gird insisted on strict, literal truth where a little pruning of a tale would make it more effective. He had been thinking that she would like his story of Gird’s life, the way he had emphasized what was really important, and treated the more noisome moments lightly, as necessary contrasts to the main theme. Now he felt uneasy about that.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said, smiling. “You have said you have part of it written, the part you know from your own experience. Read it to me.”

He spread his hands. “Rahi, you’ve just told me things I didn’t know, that will make some changes necessary. Not changes in what happened, but in what the events mean. I’m not writing for the people alive now, who knew him personally, but for those in the future to whom all our time will be as dim as eight generations back is to us. So I must make it clear not only what happened, but why—not only what Gird said, but what he thought.”

She frowned at him. “I don’t see why that would change anything from the war years.”

“It would,” Luap said firmly, now determined not to let her see the Life until he had added and adjusted and rearranged the new material. “Consider his interaction with the first Stone Circle group he met, for example. Cob has told me that they all thought he had been a soldier, not just a boy in training. It would have been different if he had been—”

“But the facts don’t change,” Rahi said. “What happened is what happened. At least for what you yourself witnessed, you should have no changes to make.”

“I can’t agree.” He laid his hand flat on the work table. “When I have had time to consider what’s already written, in light of what you’ve told me today, then I will show you—but not now.”

She looked more puzzled than angry, though he had expected anger at any confrontation. “I don’t understand, Luap. You wrote to tell me your Life was coming along well; you wanted me to see it; you clearly expected me to approve—and now you look like a man who knows someone else’s gold has found its way into his pack.”

“It’s not that!” he said, feeling his ears redden.

“I didn’t say it was—but I don’t understand why you’ve changed your mind. Da said you had notions sometimes—”

Notions. Gird had said that about old women who accused each other of being witches. He had also said it about Luap, in one of their arguments. Luap struggled to find his dignity. “I do not have notions,” he said. “I am doing my best to make Gird’s life memorable and accessible to people who never knew him. I want to do a good job. What you’ve told me today makes me realize that I haven’t done as well so far as I thought. And I’d rather show it to you when I’m more satisfied with it myself.”

“As you will.” Rahi shrugged, as if to show she didn’t care, but the tightness of her expression said otherwise. She was probably thinking notions even if she didn’t say it again.

For the rest of that visit, she remained more pleasant than he expected, if somewhat cool. She did not quarrel with the Rosemage—in fact, Luap realized, she had not quarreled with the Rosemage in a long time. She did not upset anyone at the Council meetings, except in quietly insisting that Marshals should accept and promote girls as well as boys in barton training.

“It’s not necessary anymore,” Marshal Sidis said. “You know yourself Gird only allowed it because you started it, and you were his daughter. There’s no reason for women to waste their time in training to use weapons, when there’s no war.”

“That’s not so,” Rahi said firmly. “You weren’t there, but Cob can tell you—he was. Gird came to believe it was both necessary and right—the only fair way. Some say there’s no reason for anyone to train, when there’s no war—but without training, we’d have the same mess Gird started with. If we’re to be safe from another invasion, we must know how to fight—and for the same reasons as last time, women need to know as much as men.” She surprised herself by having little anger to control. Sidis, from the northwest, had hardly made it to the war before it was over; he had the title Marshal only because he had led his small contingent and Gird confirmed most such leaders as Marshals if they fought at all.

“The horsefolk women learn weaponskills,” she added, “and they were never conquered by the magelords.”

Sidis snorted. “No one can conquer them—they simply ride away.”

The Rosemage shook her head. “The mageborn tried, Marshal Sidis, in the early years; they wanted to settle the rich pasturelands along the upper Honneluur but the horsefolk drove them back. And it’s in our archives that the horsefolk women fought as fiercely as the men, making our defeat sure.”

“That may be,” said Sidis, “but if every glory-struck girl spends her days in the barton, who’ll be weaving and baking, eh?”

“Do the glory-struck boys spend all their days in the barton, in your grange?” Rahi wasn’t sure if it was his tone, or the dismissive gesture in which he had indicated that the girls were not serious, but now her anger stirred.

“Well, no, but—”

“And do you find they cannot learn to scythe a field or dig a ditch, because they swing a hauk at drill?”

“That’s not what I meant, Marshal Raheli!” His use of her long name was the final flick of the lash.

“Wasn’t it?” She had both hands flat on the table, the broad hands she had inherited from Gird; her mother’s had been longer. “Have you forgotten, in the years of conquest, that our people know Alyanya’s blessing comes with the gift of blood, and that women in birthing face the same death that comes in battle? Do you not think it might be well for girls to learn discipline and courage, that our people never fall to ungenerous hearts again? You sound as if you thought it was a bad habit our women picked up from the magelords.”

“But then they want to be yeoman-marshals, and the boys complain if the girls are better. They don’t think it’s fair.” Sidis said this as if it answered all objections, then reddened as he realized, from the expressions around the table, that it didn’t. Cob almost choked on a laugh. Some laughed aloud. Even Luap smiled. Sidis shifted in his chair, and finally shrugged. “All right. You’re Gird’s daughter, and no one can argue with you about what Gird said. I still think—but what does that matter?”

“It matters,” Rahi said. “It always matters, because what you really think will change the meaning of the words you say. If you think the girls are silly and glory-struck, while boys with the same visions in their heads are sensible and brave, every child in your grange will know it . . . and the sensible, brave girls will find a reason to stay home. And they will be as I was, good young wives to be trampled underfoot of the first tyrant who comes to the door.” He started to speak, but she shook her head at him. “No, Marshal Sidis, you must think again. I do not want some child like me, some young girl whose mind is all on baking and weaving, as you would have it, left with no way to defend herself. Even my father, even the man who led the army to victory, could not defend me when an enemy came: that is the hard truth of it. There’s nothing glorious about a soldier’s death, but a victim’s death is worse. My father saw it that way, finally: he had seen me near death, when I had no chance to fight, and if I had died on the battlefield, it could not have been worse.”

Cob raised his hand, and Rahi sat down. “She’s right, Sidis,” he said. “It’s the old way, after all. Some even believed that women taking up weapons caused less disruption than men, because Alyanya’s Curse could not apply.”

“I never heard that.” It was not quite a snort, but close.

Rahi leaned forward. “You’re not a woman. The Lady of Plenty, Alyanya of the Harvests, requires that blood be given for any use of iron or steel in planting or harvesting, isn’t that so?”

“Yes, but—”

“And for a man, that means his own blood on the blade: shovel, spade, plow, sickle, scythe, pruning hook, even the knife used to cut grapes. Some folk said—in our village it was said, but I know in others it was different—that Alyanya required the same for using a blade on an animal. Others said that sacrifice was to the Windsteed, or even Guthlac. A man who withheld his blood would be cursed, in his loins and his fields. But for a woman, Sidis, the Lady had already had her sacrifice of blood; a girl cut her thumb once only, to promise the blood of childbearing later, and could use an edged tool with no more concern for Alyanya’s Curse. Even in Torre’s Song, it is the wicked king who is cursed for bringing steel to flesh, while Torre herself . . .”

“All right.” Sidis turned up his hand. “I submit. We shall have granges full of girls, and lads who cannot keep their minds on the drill—”

“If you make clear to them that death follows stray thoughts as an owl hunts mice, Sidis, they should be able to follow the drill. If a girl can distract them, I would hate to have them in battle.” Cob, again, with a look at Rahi. “For that matter, look at young Seri, in training here. If it weren’t for her, I suspect Aris would wander from healing to healing, help Luap with scribes’ work, and never take drill at all. That girl would make a yeoman worthy of any grange, and she’s been nothing but good for a dreamy-minded mageborn lad with more talent than sense.”

Rahi thought better of Aris than that, but she agreed about Seri. She knew that Seri had cheerfully dealt with a couple of lads who were at the age to see her as a girl, not a fellow-yeoman. Her Marshal had told the tale for a season afterwards. “She wasn’t angry, and she didn’t make any fuss,” he’d said. “Just bashed them once each, told them not to be silly, and got on with it. Now they’re her friends, and they’ve quit smirking at the other girls, as well. Do their courting at the dances, like they should.”

Sidis still looked angry and stubborn; despite herself Rahi felt a twinge of pity for him. She hated being argued down, herself, and she knew he would have to come to this on his own before he would really believe it. She tried to think of some way to make it easier for him. Nothing came to her; she wished she had her father’s power. Then she remembered how often he had stopped an argument with his fist, and a snort escaped her. Sidis glared.

“I’m sorry,” Rahi said. “It’s just—I remember Da—Gird—settling matters with his fist. I didn’t like it, but here I am doing the same thing with words. I think you’re wrong, Sidis, but you have a right to be wrong as long as it takes to change your mind. I don’t want you agreeing with me just because I’m Gird’s daughter, or Cob is one of the most senior Marshals. Gird himself thought we should talk things out, even if he stopped the talk sometimes; he was right in that.”

“I don’t understand you,” Sidis said. “You change your mind—”

“No. I don’t. But I won’t try to change yours by force.”

He still looked confused, but he nodded. When the time came to vote on the matter, he waited until he saw how the others voted. Then he shrugged. “It worked for Gird,” he said. “So why not? We can always change it back if we’re wrong.” And he tossed his billet on the pile for retaining women’s rights in the grange organization.

After the meeting, Rahi was packing her things for the journey back to her grange when Sidis sought her out. “I wanted you to know it wasn’t you I objected to, or any of the women who were actually veterans,” he said “But most women up where I’m from didn’t fight—in fact, most of the men didn’t fight. They see the grange drill as something imposed from outside; it’s the women who’ve pestered me to send their daughters home.”

“So they don’t see the worth of it, eh?” Rahi sat down, and waved at him to do the same.

“Aye. It was on the edge of the magelords’ holdings, and even I remember that things weren’t too bad until after the war started. That’s when our Duke—the Duke that was—raised the fieldfees and imposed stiffer fines. We had less bad to fight about, and more to lose, and there’s feeling now that the grange system’s as bad as the magelords’ stewards ever were.”

Rahi whistled. “Perhaps they don’t think they need anyone at all, is that it?”

Sidis twisted a thong and untwisted it. “That’s what it seems, most times. They’re good folk, but they don’t look ahead much, and they think they can deal with their own lives better than anyone else.” He looked troubled, someone telling an unpleasant truth about people he cared for. “I’ve wondered myself, now the magelords are gone, what we need all this drill for. I come here, and you all seem to know things—it comes clearer, like. But how I’ll explain it to them—”

“Maybe they should do without a grange for awhile.” Rahi leaned back against the wall, watching his face. He didn’t say anything at first. “If they don’t want it, if they aren’t supporting it—maybe they have to feel the need first. Da always said you can’t convince an ox it will need water in the middle of the work when you show it a bucket at dawn. You could find another place . . . even here.”

“But—” His hands worked the thong back and forth, back and forth. “It’s losing, that is. Giving up. If there’s a grange somewhere, it should stay—”

“Not if it’s not wanted.” Rahi felt her way into this argument, hoping she was right. “We’re not here to make things worse, after all. The granges started because people wanted them. It’s true there has to be some kind of law—if those folk come to market in a town with a grange, they’ll have to abide by the Code. But if it sticks in their throats, why not let be?”

“The other Marshals,” Sidis muttered. “They talk of their granges growing, of founding new bartons. They’ll think I did something wrong.”

Rahi opened her mouth to deny that, and then stopped. To be honest, she thought he’d done something wrong. He’d come into the war, and then his position as Marshal, without any real conviction. And if she thought so, others might as well. She could not reassure him with her dishonesty. “If you made a mistake,” she said, picking her words as carefully as she would have picked through a bundle of mixed herbs, sorting them, “—if you did something wrong, it sounds to me that your folk have made mistakes as well. You couldn’t have done all the wrong. Our whole system began with the people, the peasants. If they aren’t with us, we have nothing. Pretending we do leads right back into what the mageborn did, all that pretense about the lords protecting the people, and the people serving the lords. If the folk in your grange don’t want a grange, it won’t be a real grange no matter what you do.”

His brows had drawn together, but his hands were still. “Some do—at least—”

“If they want it, they will make it work. Think about it.”

“What would you think, Raheli, Gird’s daughter, if I let the grange go—closed it, or however it’s done?”

Rahi looked past him, seeing against the far wall of the room a stream of images from the war, and the years after. What might it have been like, to live in a village with a better lord than Kelaive? Or with no lord at all? Could there be farmers, village folk, who did not understand in their bones what the grange was for, and how it worked? Apparently so. “I would think you had tried,” she said. “I hear the truth in your voice. But it’s not my decision.” She could not tell what Sidis thought of what she said; he merely nodded and went away, leaving her to ride out of Fin Panir later that day still wondering.

She took that uncertainty with her back to her own grange, and looked more carefully at the people who did not choose to come. She had heard no grumbling for some time, but did that mean satisfaction? Or that people grumbled where she could not hear them? She was not surprised when a letter from Fin Panir reported that Sidis’s grange had dissolved, and he himself had given up his Marshalship. She hoped they would fare well, and hoped that her words had not formed his decision.

It was half a year before she came to Fin Panir again. Luap had finished his Life of Gird, and the Council wanted her approval. From the tone of the letter, she wondered what the other Marshals thought of it. They might have sent a copy, instead of a letter, surely it would have been easier to send the scrolls here, instead of dragging her to Fin Panir in the busiest time of the year.

A copy of the original awaited her in Fin Panir; the young yeoman who led her to a small room opening on an interior court pointed to it. “Luap said that was for you, as soon as you arrived.”

Rahi stretched out on the room’s narrow bed, and unwrapped the scroll. Luap’s fine, graceful handwriting moved in even lines; she found it easier to read than her own crabbed script. “In the days of the magelords, in the holdings of one Count Kelaive, was born a child who would grow into Gird Strongarm, the savior of his people.” Rahi wrinkled her nose at that. A bit flowery, not much like Gird himself.

She read on, her thumb moving down the scroll and holding it open. It couldn’t be exactly like Gird, she reminded herself, because Luap hadn’t known the young Gird. Even she had only village tales to rely on. But she felt uneasy, as if a hollow bubble were opening in her chest. She could not say, at first, just what it was, but something . . . something was definitely wrong. She put the scroll down and lay back for a moment. Would anyone else notice it? Did it matter, when so far as she knew, no one else had survived from their village?

She picked up another scroll, and began reading. This was set during the war; Gird was enjoying a mug of ale in a tavern—she stopped again, trying to remember. Tavern? When had they been in a tavern? The drinking she remembered had been in various camps in the woods; by the time the army was taking towns, he had not been drinking that much. She looked at the scroll more closely. It was, she decided after a bit, intended to be funny: the great war-leader relaxing with ale, becoming excited, almost starting a fight. Her shoulders felt tight; she remembered how dangerous Gird could seem, in those rare drunken rages from her childhood. It had not been funny at all. And worse than that . . . this was not real; she could think of no time when it really happened. She scanned along the scroll, looking for some reference, and found it. This was supposed to have happened after the capture of Brightwater, and before Shetley, but she remembered that time as clearly as the past half-year . . . Gird had not been in any tavern; he had been off trying to persuade brigands to join the army.

Luap had made it up. He had made up a good story, as men often did, but then he had put it in this work, which was supposed to tell Gird’s story for all time. Rahi felt cold, then hot. How much had he made up? Was that what bothered her about the first scroll? She snatched it up, and read it carefully, with growing anger.

“You’re not telling the truth!” Rahi’s voice went up. Luap managed not to wince visibly. He had been afraid she would not appreciate what he had done, how he had turned the story of an ordinary farmer-turned-soldier into the shape of legend.

“I am telling the truth—I’m telling what it meant. That’s what they need to know, not every little detail.”

“It’s a lie.” She glared at him, Gird with brown hair and breasts, the glare he remembered all too well. “You’re making it into a story . . . a song, like the harpers sing, that everyone knows is just a tale.”

“Raheli, listen! If the harpers change the kind of tree a prince hid behind, because it rhymes—oak, say, instead of cedar—that helps the listener remember. It doesn’t change anything important. The prince still hid behind a tree: that’s what matters. If they say half Gird’s army wore blue, when it was one person less than half, or almost two-thirds, why does that matter? The point is that we won at Greenfields. That’s all I’m doing. I’m making sure people remember what it meant—what his kind of life meant—and they won’t make sense out of the real details. You didn’t yourself.”

Would it work? For a moment he thought it had; her gaze flickered, as she thought about her own reaction. But then the angry glare came back.

“You’re turning him into a lovable old gran’ther, using even his lust for ale—”

Luap shrugged that off. “Most men like ale; it makes him more human—”

“He was human! And his liking for ale cost us lives, you know it did.”

“That’s not the point—”

“It is, and it would have been his point. Was his point, at the last, remember? There’s nothing good about it. . . . I remember after—” A long pause; he wondered which after she was seeing. “After my mother died, a bad stretch then; he came home drunk and sour with it, angry with everyone—”

“He had cause,” Luap offered, sympathy he did not really feel.

“Everyone has cause,” Rahi said. “But some do better. He did, later. And if you make it endearing, you diminish him—what it cost him to stop it, to change.” In her eyes, I never did that, defiance but not quite pride. He knew she didn’t, had sought, without admitting it, evidence that she was as fallible as Gird. As far as he could find out, she made none of Gird’s mistakes; no drinking, no carousing, no wild flares of temper. Frustrating. He had never been able to maneuver Gird while Gird lived, and he could not maneuver Raheli, either.

He shrugged, as close to discourtesy as he allowed himself with her. “I’ll change it back, then. You’re his daughter; it has to please you—” He expected an explosion; instead he got a flat stare, and her nostrils widened as if she’d smelled something dead.

“I’m not . . . you’re trying to make me feel bad about that, and I won’t have it. He said you were slippery, and he was right about that.” If nothing else. She didn’t have to say that; it hung between them, something on which they agreed. She took a deep breath, and tried again. “I’m not asking you to improve the tale to please me; quite the contrary. I want you to tell the truth. Just the plain truth.” If you can. He heard that, as if she’d shouted it.

“Even you don’t believe the plain truth,” he said, accenting “plain” just a little. “You weren’t here; you’re convinced it was something else than what we said.”

She shook her head, the dark hair tossing back in a movement he remembered from his wife. His mouth dried. “You said things I found hard to believe—”

“Then ask the others! I know you did—”

She prowled his study, a thundercloud ready to burst. “What they said made even less sense.”

His temper flared. “Then believe what you like! If I lie, and the others talk nonsense, what will you have in the chronicles, eh? Shall we just forget him, and all he tried to do?”

“You know I don’t mean that.” Again that level gaze. “We can’t just forget him. But—”

He would try sweet reason, though it had never yet swayed her. “You hate having to hear it from me. You don’t trust me; you never have, not even as much as Gird himself did, and you wish you’d been here yourself. Well, so do I. Then you could tell me what to write, and—” He stopped himself from saying and if you lie, it’s your oath forsworn, not mine.

“I would not have said to turn a dark cloud into a dark beast,” she said firmly. “Even if I’d seen such a cloud.”

“I’ll change it,” Luap said. He could always change it back. “I simply have no idea how to write of that cloud so anyone years hence will know what I mean.”

“Do you know what you mean?” That with a shrewd sidelong look that took his breath away, the very look Gird had given him so often.

“I—no. No, I don’t. It seemed—I told you—as if all the wicked thoughts and shameful fears in every heart had taken visible form, a black blight thicker than a dust storm. But what it was . . . I daresay only Gird himself knew. The words he spoke, that scoured it, lifted it, condensed it—those were no human words. I know that, and I’ve asked the elves—”

“And they said?”

“They found I could not recall the shape of the words, could not repeat them—and indeed, it was as if they slipped past my ears—and would say only that Adyan might be pleased with Gird.”

“And then he died, while you stood there doing nothing.” That was unfair; he seized that unfairness and cloaked himself in honest resentment.

“It was the gods’ will; none of us could move. I cried—dammit, Rahi, I told you that, and others must have—”

“Yes.” She had turned away. He waited. Finally she turned back; her eyes were dry. “You cried; I cannot cry yet. Tears are cheap.”

He hated her. He felt he had always hated her; he willed himself to forget the times he had been sure he loved her, when (surely) he had only loved her father, and of her father only that part she herself could not share. “Your tears,” he said formally, in as steady a voice as he could manage, “your tears you can name the worth of. It is your right. The tears of others you have no right to shame.” He felt dark, dire, brooding as a storm-cloud low over the western hills. Great, and in some sense noble, to chide her about that, standing up for the tears (he could almost feel his gathering to fall) of plain, simple men who rarely cried, whose tears tore apart the rock walls of their souls, great floods that ripped mountains asunder. He looked up to find her watching him, that flat peasant stare (how had he ever thought it attractive?), that hard mouth with no sweetness, a dried haw withered on a dead stem.

“You’re too poetic,” she said. “You will make it all pretty, make all the patterns match at the edges, as they do in the rugs we took from the mageborn houses . . . better you should learn from village weavers, who leave one corner open for the pattern’s power to stay free, and able to work.”

“You don’t understand.” She didn’t. She couldn’t. She could but she wouldn’t. He did not know which, but only that she did not understand.

“Nor you.” Her back to him now, a back broader than a woman’s ought to be, shoulders bulking more than his own. He had an excuse, a scholar’s hours, but she had no excuse for looking (to his now critical eye) like a stubborn ox. “I’ll see you in Council,” she said, and left the room without looking back. Luap’s mouth held a dry bitterness; he made himself sit back down at the desk, but could not find words to pen. Council meetings had been going so well, until now; Raheli would ruin all that, he was sure.