Liar's Oath

Chapter Fifteen

“What happened?” asked Aris, as Seri came out of the Council meeting room. She grinned, stuck up her thumb, and then put a finger before her mouth. They scurried down the stairs like two errant children, across a court, through another passage, and then found an empty stall in the stable.

“It went just as we hoped,” Seri said, when she’d thrown herself down on the straw. “I’m glad you suggested starting with the history, though.”

“Makes you seem older,” Aris said. He sat curled, with his arms around his knees. It had been Seri’s idea, all of it, but she had let him help her shape it.

“They had to agree with that, of course, since they knew it: that all the Marshals now were Marshals or yeoman-marshals under Gird himself, they’d all led soldiers in the war. And they had to agree that weaponsdrill in the barton, and marching in the grange drillfields, isn’t much like battle. Even Gird had to get them out of the bartons and into mock battles before real ones. So they could see where I was going, and some of ’em—Cob, for instance—were already nodding when I said the granges needed something more. He started in to propose just what I’d planned, so I didn’t have to bother.”

Aris chuckled. “They’ll like it better from Cob; he’s one of them.”

“And it doesn’t matter to me,” Seri said, with a wave of her hand, “as long as we have that kind of training. After all, he was in the war, not just scrubbing pots and carrying water like we were. He’ll know better how to set it up, now he’s thought of it.”

“But about the other—” Aris prompted.

“You won’t believe it.” Her grin lit up the stall. “He had just gotten well started on laying out a training plan when the Rosemage raised her hand and said she thought perhaps I’d had more to say. Cob stopped short, shrugged, and asked if I did. So I told them about our plan—”

“Your plan,” Aris said firmly. “I didn’t think of that.”

“My plan, then. I told them how future Marshals would need more training than just leading a gaggle of farmers around a hayfield, or even fighting in a mock battle once a year or so—that they needed to be real Marshals, well-tested before being given command of a grange—and Aris, they listened to me. I said it all, all we talked about: working up from yeoman-marshal, spending time in two different granges, and then talked about having a place for concentrated training.” She paused so long that Aris had to speak.

“Well? What did they say?”

“Five or six of the older ones all started talking at once, about how they didn’t have to worry as long as they had veterans, and how much it would cost, and that Gird never meant to have armies roaming around stealing from honest farmers—then Raheli stood up and they were all silent.” Seri lay back in the straw and stared at the high roof far overhead. “You know, I never realized how much she’s like him.”

Aris sat up straight. “Like Gird?” He thought about it. They saw her only when she came to Fin Panir, and often enough only from a distance. They had heard stories, of course, but none of them made her seem much like her father.

“I know, it surprised me, too. All we’d seen, after all, was her from a distance, walking around. That great scar on her face, and her dark hair—she doesn’t look anything like him. But when she looked at me, it gave me the same sort of feeling as the first time we met Gird. I don’t know how to say it better than that she’s an opposite of Luap.”

“Warm, not cold,” Aris mused, and looked up to see if Seri agreed. She was nodding vigorously.

“She has Gird’s directness. I liked her at once, but if she was my Marshal I wouldn’t dare try anything.” She didn’t have to elaborate on that; he knew about the tricks she’d played on her Marshal. It had been, she’d explained from time to time, the result of being separated from Aris. He had always kept her out of mischief. Not long after, they’d been reassigned to the same grange.

Now Aris came back to the main subject. “So Rahi stood up, and they were quiet, and then what?”

“She said it was a good plan. She said it should be in Fin Panir, and each grange should have the right to nominate two candidates a year, but not all would become Marshals.”

“But you thought three—”

“Two, three, it doesn’t matter. The point is, she approved. And—what you won’t believe—the Rosemage stood after her, and approved as well. She argued for including the study of law and the archives as well. Said that knowledge of war was only part of a Marshal’s training; that Marshals had to be able to act as judicars and recognize all kinds of things going wrong. The two of them started in, then, and it was almost as if they’d pulled the details of the plan straight out of my head.” She threw her arms out, raising a cloud of dust from the straw, and sneezed. “Of course, I know they didn’t, but it means we were planning in the right way.”

“Huh. If you said something that got the Rosemage and Gird’s daughter working together, it was definitely right.”

“They should be friends,” said Seri soberly. “They would fit together.”

“Luap doesn’t think so.”

Seri wrinkled her nose. “Luap couldn’t do what he does if they did, is what he means. But it’s what Gird would have wanted. Think of it—the Rosemage could lead her people—”

“Not while Luap is the king’s son, and she’s an outlander.”

“He could let her; he could tell them to follow her, and not him. But he won’t.” Seri rolled over on her stomach and propped her chin on her fists, as if she were a child again. “He’s ruining things.”

“He’s not!” Aris scrambled nearer and thumped her shoulder, then bent down to look her in the eye. “He’s Gird’s chosen luap, Seri: he is not ruining things.”

She didn’t budge. “You don’t see everything; you’re thick as bone some ways. I think the healing makes you see people differently. You don’t see what they are; you see their needs.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose for a moment before going on. “I don’t think he knows it, I’ll say that for him. I think he believes he’s doing the right thing, what Gird would have wanted. But he got it into his head a long time ago that the Rosemage and Rahi were natural enemies, like a levet and a wren—”

Aris snorted. “And which of those two is a wren?” Seri smacked him.

“You know what I mean. He thinks that, and he can’t see that they’re made to be allies. Not friends, maybe, but allies. And so he treats them as enemies, and they see each other through his vision, except sometimes like this.”

“Mmm.” It was something to think about. Did the healing magery give him such a different view of people? Or was it the magery itself? Could that be why Luap saw the Rosemage and Rahi as natural enemies? But he had no chance to discuss that with Seri, for someone was calling her. She rolled to her feet; he sighed and scrambled up after her. They had little time together these days, and he treasured the brief encounters.

“Seri!” Now the voice was closer: Rahi, Gird’s daughter. Aris followed Seri out of the stall. The older woman laughed, the first relaxed laugh he had ever heard from her. “I might have known you’d be off somewhere with Aris.”

“Yes, Marshal,” said Seri. Her braid had come half undone again, and she had straw in her springy curls.

“Did you come up with all that by yourself, or did Aris help?” Now that she was close, Aris realized what Seri had meant about her being like Gird. A bluntness, but without any brutality, a sense of great strength in reserve, a warmth . . . he found himself grinning back at her, more at ease than he usually was with the older Marshals.

“He did—”

“No, Marshal, it was all hers—” Aris broke off as his voice clashed with Seri’s and they laughed. “She will give me credit I don’t deserve: we talked about it, but that’s all.”

“Gird said you two were great friends—but he sent you to separate granges for training, didn’t he?”

“Yes, Marshal, but that doesn’t matter.” Seri might have said more, but another voice hailed them; the Rosemage moved across the stable yard, Aris thought, like one of the graceful horses.

“There you are, Rahi—and with the younglings. They’re a pair, aren’t they?” Aris felt like a colt up for sale at the market when the Rosemage shook her head at them. “Hard to believe the two of you could be our children, when you come to Council with solutions for problems the other Marshals haven’t thought of yet.”

Rahi had flushed, but now seemed relaxed and cheerful; Aris wondered what had upset her momentarily. He wanted to look at her scar; he wondered if he could heal it, but he dared not ask. “Fair enough.” Rahi said slowly. “One for each of us, that way.”

The Rosemage shook her head. “They come as a pair . . . we’ve learned that in Fin Panir, if nothing else. Gird himself separated them for a few years, in training, but even he admitted they were the closest he had seen outside a few twins.”

Rahi grinned; Aris noticed how the scar pulled at her mouth, making the grin uneven. “They don’t look much like twins,” she said.

“We’re not,” Seri said boldly. “We’re not alike, but we fit together. Father Gird said that was stronger than two alike.”

The two older women looked at each other, a measuring look, brows raised. “That’s true enough,” murmured the Rosemage. “But again uncanny wisdom for one so young.”

Seri shrugged, with a side glance at Aris. “It’s not my wisdom, but Gird’s.”

“Well, yours or Gird’s, it’s true enough. Now I—we—need to talk to you.” The Rosemage looked at Rahi. “Don’t we? It’s a nice afternoon for a walk in the meadow out near Gird’s grave.”

“And no one will overhear or interrupt,” said Rahi, smiling. “Of course we need to talk to these two. I hardly know them except by what I hear from Luap,”

With the older women flanking them, Aris and Seri walked out the west of the stable complex into the meadows beyond. Once well out of earshot of the stables, Rahi said, “You didn’t say all you had planned, Seri; I could tell that. What else?”

“Cob said it well enough,” Seri said. “The details don’t matter—I mean, they do, but it doesn’t matter who does it right, only that it’s done. I know I’m too young to be telling Marshals anything, let alone the Council.”

“But you were right,” said the Rosemage. “That’s what matters, not age.”

“Well . . . it’s like food. If I have it, I share it; if they eat it, it’s nourishing. It doesn’t matter who gave the bread and who gave the salt, so long as the bowl’s full.”

Rahi chuckled. “Peasant wisdom, lady.”

The Rosemage pretended to stumble. “You’re calling me lady?”

Rahi shrugged; Aris thought she was embarrassed. “I can’t remember your real name.”

“I quit using it, it meant something noble in our language I never lived up to.” From the tone, she had never said that to anyone before. Rahi nodded slowly.

“And my name meant ‘fruitful vine’—so I perhaps have no right to it.”

“Rosemage,” said Aris, trying to head off emotions he did not understand, “is a difficult sort of name to use—I mean in talking to you.”

“You’re right, it is. It’s actually Luap’s nickname for me, a nickname of a nickname.” Aris noticed that the others looked as confused as he felt; she sighed and explained. “Your father knew this, Rahi, but I don’t know if you did. The old king of Tsaia, the one I killed, had called me ‘Autumn Rose’ in a sort of jest. A bitter jest to me, for I loved him. When I killed him, I felt I had killed my old self, with its unsuitable name, as well, and I told Gird I would henceforth be the Autumn Rose in truth. Luap turned that to Rose Magelady, and then Rosemage. As you say, it’s more a name of reference than one of address. Arranha told me I was being silly, and now I agree—but it’s too late to change back.”

“Never mind,” said Rahi. “I can call you lady as the others do, without it hurting my mouth. I still have some questions for young Seri.”

“Yes?” Seri, like Rahi herself, had seemed less interested in the Rosemage’s explanation than Aris.

“You may be right to have the senior Marshals set out the plan themselves, but I’d like to know how you would have done it. Perhaps some of your details need to be included—and I’m a senior Marshal; I could see that they are.”

“Oh.” Seri paused a moment; Aris could almost see the thoughts in her head, busy and humming like a hive of bees at work. “Well, it seemed to me that we needed Marshals capable of leading out a grange against small problems, like wolfpacks or robbers. And then we needed Marshals, or perhaps High Marshals, who could lead groups of granges against invaders. I know it’s peaceful now, but it was peaceful before the mageborn came—excuse me, lady—”

“No need,” the Rosemage said.

“—And even though Gird won the war with ill-trained troops, and no cavalry,” Seri went on, “it would be easier—it would cost less blood—to have better training and maybe some horse soldiers.”

“Knights,” said the Rosemage.

“Not too many,” Seri said. “Mostly it should be yeomen, as it is now, but there should be a few whose parrion—guild?—it is to learn how to engage in wars, so that we have that knowledge when we need it.”

“You would have the training place here, in Fin Panir?” Seri nodded. Rahi went on. “And you would have the Marshals—let’s stay with that for now—learn what?”

Seri ticked the items off on her fingers. Aris was proud of her, the way she was staying calm when he knew she was bubbling inside. “First, the Marshals must be reliable, honest, hardworking that’s why I said they should have grown up in one grange, and then worked in another. They have to be old enough to become yeoman-marshals first, because you don’t know if they’re going to misuse power until they have some. Marshals shouldn’t be bullies. Then they have to know the Code, and they need to know the Commentaries, too, because the Code’s always changing and it probably always will. Marshals have to get along with everyone in the city—or town—all the merchants, crafters, and farmers. They may not be the strongest, but they have to be skilled in all the weapons our people might use, and they have to be good at teaching them. They have to know something about the mageborn, and about the horsefolk, and anyone else we find, because they have to judge whether there’s been fair dealing.”

When she paused for breath, Aris put in, “And she wouldn’t mind if they were skilled in each craft, and born with every parrion in the world.” Seri flushed red.

“It wouldn’t hurt,” she muttered.

The Rosemage chuckled; Aris thought she looked much younger than usual. “No, it wouldn’t hurt, but how long do you think they could be in such training?”

“If they’re made yeoman-marshal after their first year as senior yeoman,” Seri said, “and then serve four years as yeoman-marshal, they’d be the same age as someone finishing journeyman training in most crafts. Surely a Marshal must have earned the same respect as a master in a craft, and most journeymen spend four to six years before they pass the guild. . . .”

“And in that four years they would have time for law and history and languages as well as military things,” Aris said. “I think—we think—that Marshals should all have knowledge of healing crafts, as well. If they lead yeomen into battle, they should know how to treat wounds and camp sicknesses.”

“So new Marshals would be over twenty-six,” Rahi said. “Even thirty—”

“Weren’t most of Gird’s Marshals, appointed in the war, over thirty?”

“Yes, but that was a special case.” Rahi looked thoughtful; Aris gave Seri a warning glance. Best let Rahi think it out for herself. “I wasn’t close to thirty . . . but then . . .” Aris smiled to himself. He had expected her to see their logic. “You’re saying that all Marshals should have that maturity, as Gird and his first recruits did?”

“Yes, because Marshals aren’t just battle commanders; courage isn’t all they need.” Seri looked back and forth between the two older women. Aris watched them smile at each other, as if at the antics of favorite children.

“I think, Rahi, that these two have more maturity than some gran’thers I’ve seen.” The Rosemage shook her head. “But don’t you two get above yourselves, eh? I heard about the tricks you played when you first came, Seri.”

“I wouldn’t do that now,” Seri said. Aris wondered. She hadn’t meant any harm, and none had followed, but she could no more forswear mischief than he could healing. Tease, prick the pompous, and then hug the hurt away—that was Seri. “And besides, I don’t know enough yet—I want to learn all the things I’m talking about—”

“And be the first truly educated Marshal?” The Rosemage whistled. Seri blushed, and Rahi reached over to tousle her already tousled hair.

“I keep telling myself it’s a new world these younglings live in,” she said. “It’s not like where I grew up, nor you either. But sometimes it does startle me. I presume you know it’s going to be hard, Seri?”

“Of course.” Now she looked affronted “It’s supposed to be hard, or it’s not any good. I’ll be tired, and grumpy, and even scared—”

“And dirty and hungry and hurting, if we do it right,” Rahi said, no humor at all in her voice now. “And you will be scared, I promise you that.”

“And you, Aris—” The Rosemage broke that tense silence. “Do you, too, look toward being a Marshal?”

“I—I don’t know. I want to learn all that Seri does, but—I’d like to spend more time healing, if I could. Teaching it, too.”

“Mmm. It will be interesting. . . .” The Rosemage and Rahi shared a look Aris could not interpret, but turned the talk to other things until day’s end.

Aris licked the grease from roast chicken off his fingers and reached for the bread. Seri pushed the loaf within his reach with her elbow; she was too busy eating her own chicken to free a hand. He tore off a hunk of bread, wiped his fingers, and ate that before saying anything. He had not been this hungry since coming to Fin Panir. Across the little fire, two of the yeomen with them grinned.

“I wonder what gave th’ Marshal th’ notion t’play this game,” said one of them around a mouthful of bread.

“If I find out,” said the other, “I’ll knock his nob for ’im, that I will. My da told me it was more work than it sounded in songs, and he was right. We’ve climbed five hills a day, I’d wager, and haven’t walked down but one.”

“And that one muddy,” said the first yeoman. “Wi’ rocks at the bottom.” He crunched the bone of his chicken leg and sucked the marrow noisily, then belched with satisfaction.

“Rocks!” said the second. “I’ll tell you about rocks—” Then, as Aris raised an eyebrow, he fell silent. Their Marshal’s blue cloak swirled past, then the yeoman resumed, in a lower voice. “Like to broke my legs, I did, and the old man says ‘That’s what eyes is for, lad, to look where you put your feet.’ ”

Aris gave Seri a long took; she blushed and wiped her mouth and fingers with bread. He knew where the Marshals had found that idea, and who to blame. He knew she would have confessed, challenging the man to thump her if he could, had the Marshals not told them to keep quiet about whose idea it was. Once they’d decided the idea had merit, it hadn’t taken them long to put it into practice. Aris had been thinking of maneuvers in the spring, marching over soft green grass under warming skies. He had imagined himself setting up a clean tent to which the injured would come for treatment. Instead, the granges in Fin Panir, all four of them, were sent out in the cold after-harvest autumn storms, to practice moving engagements in the hills southwest of the city. Three days’ march to the hills had taught them all how little they knew of supply and camp organization (the veterans enjoyed pointing it out) and the hand of days in the hills proper had been a revelation even to them.

Aris took another hunk of bread. So far he hadn’t been scared, except of not keeping up, but he had been cold, wet, muddy, tired, stiff, and hungry. He hadn’t been needed to heal anything worse than blisters and bruises, for which most of the yeomen had their own pet remedies. Instead of a healer’s tent, he found himself carrying a staff just like everyone else, and doing the same camp chores he had done as a boy. Even though he and Seri had been with the peasant army, even though he had once lived a much harder life, the years he’d lived in Fin Panir had taken the edge off. And tomorrow they faced the three days’ march back, into the teeth of the winter wind. He wondered if they’d get to sleep tonight, or if the Marshals had some surprise planned for them, as they had on other nights. He hoped not. His eyes felt gluey.

Luap hardly believed what he saw, the Rosemage and Raheli eating elbow-to-elbow at the campfire, and both enjoying it. He was not sure what he felt. On the one hand, the two of them quarreling could knot his stomach. But on the other . . . he had always been able to move one by invoking the other’s opinion. What if they really agreed? What if they became (he shuddered) friends? The Rosemage had always gotten along with Gird better than he did himself; if she made friends with Rahi, his whole rationale for withdrawing the mageborn could fall through.

Everyone knew how those two had loathed each other; if they could become friends, so could any other mageborn/peasant pair.

Beside them were Aris and Seri, a pair he already found inconvenient. He wanted Aris to come with him; he did not want Seri. But he knew Aris wouldn’t leave her behind. He needed the Rosemage; he needed Aris’s healing talents. He did not need Gird’s troublesome daughter or that curly-headed young warleader who should have been born early enough to fight in the war.

He had come on this uncomfortable jaunt, he told himself, simply to chronicle the training exercise. Burdened with his sack of scrolls, his inksticks and pens, his folding table and a tent to keep them dry, he had not been tempted to take part in the training itself. Instead he instructed two of his more promising clerks in the art of field mapping, wrote up each day’s notes as reported by the Marshals, and tried without success to devise a better way to render rough country visible on a flat surface. It had been tiring, difficult work, carried out under difficult conditions, but it had not been the same as clambering up hill and down to hold mock battles with another group of tired, rain-soaked yeomen. He knew that, he had been there in the real war. So he had stayed away from the evening fires, to avoid making his comfortable job any more insulting than it was already.

Tonight, though, the maneuvers were over—supposedly—and they would all march toward home in the morning. So he had brought out a jug of the peach brandy his favorite cook made, in hopes of sweetening the Autumn Rose’s attitude. And there she sat, dirt and grease to the ears, joking with Raheli.

He walked toward them; young Aris saw him coming, and leaped up. “Sir—Luap—”

“Sit down, lad. You’ve worked a lot harder than I have.” Other yeomen moved aside to give him room beside Aris.

“I wanted to ask you,” Seri said, direct as always. “About those maps. Did you ever talk to the gnomes about mapping?”

How could the girl be that wide awake, that full of energy? Aris looked tired to the bone, but Seri—it must be the peasant endurance, Luap thought. He remembered Raheli brimming with energy when others had been too tired to move. And Gird, despite his age, had nearly always been the first up in the mornings. “Once, after the fall of Fin Panir,” he answered. “They’d come to talk to Gird, and he showed them my copy of the map they gave him.” He chuckled. “They weren’t impressed. I told them I had had to do it without the original; it was lost in the flood outside Grahlin that time—”

“Was that when the well exploded?”

He looked past Aris into that bright, wide-awake face, and past it to the two older women. Was that tone just a bit put on? Did Seri have some purpose besides what he heard in words? Rahi spoke up, as if he’d asked her to.

“Not exploded—but apparently the local magelord had magicked all the water in the river into it, underground, and sent it all out at once. It made an awful noise, and scared us silly.”

“The water shot up in the air,” Luap added. “Higher than any fountain, a column of water perhaps a man’s height across. It was, only a little mud-brick fort and when the water hit, it came apart around us. On top of us.”

“And the next day we had a pitched battle we never should have fought,” Rahi went on. “Gird was too shaken by the flood, I think—he felt we had to hold the bridge. Cob’s foot was hurt that night; he’s limped ever since. And we lost others who’d been with us from the start—” She stared at the fire, her face, grim. That fiasco and Gird’s sullen, drunken response in the next hands of days had almost ended the rebellion. Seri looked from Rahi to Luap.

“What I meant, sir, was that I wondered if the gnomes had solved the problems you were having with the new maps. Do they have some way of showing the land, even when it’s wrinkled up, so you can tell what part of a hill sticks out?”

“Not that I know of. By the time I had them to copy, of course, they’d been soaked and torn. We had to dig them out of the wet rabble, try to uncurl them without tearing them any worse, and then redraw them. Maybe there were marks that didn’t show after that.” Seri looked interested, alert, and—in another place and time—Luap would have been flattered by that alert interest. He had had few chances to teach her, but those few times he had enjoyed it. She came to everything with such enthusiasm, such eagerness to learn and do well, and those Marshals who had supervised her considered themselves lucky. But now he felt her intensity as a veiled threat—she and young Aris between them were up to something, and he could not decide what. Had they anything to do with the new friendship between Raheli and the Autumn Rose?

For those two were as amiable with each other as either with anyone else, now, and from the looks they cast at the youngsters, might have been their aunts if not their mothers.

“I brought something to warm cold hearts,” Luap said, holding up his jug of peach brandy. “Who’d like a sip?” The Autumn Rose held out her hand, and he gave it to her.

After a sip, she handed it on to Seri. “Be careful, girl; it’s stronger than it tastes. Did Meshi make that for you, Luap?”

“Yes; she spoils me.” Safer to say it himself.

“True, she does,” the Autumn Rose agreed. “Do you know I found her making spiced preserves one time, and she told me she didn’t have enough for everyone—but when Luap came down the stair . . .” They all laughed; Luap managed a grin.

“It comes out even—the other cooks don’t like me because she’s so partial, and won’t give them her secret recipe for the spiced preserves. I’ve thought of getting it from her, and telling them, just for peace in the kitchen, but—” He shrugged, and threw his hands out; everyone laughed, but with no sting in it.

“You know what would happen then,” Rahi put in. “They wouldn’t like you more, and Meshi would bang you on the fingers with a spoon every time you came in the kitchen. It is good; reminds me of my mother’s preserves, but there’s something else in it.”

“Whatever it is costs enough to put cooks at each other’s throats,” Luap said. “I think one of the spices must come from over the mountains.” He took a sip himself, that warmed him all the way down. Perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing to have Rahi and the Autumn Rose friends. It seemed less threatening than it had, just as Seri’s—or was it Rahi’s?—ideas about the training of Marshals to replace those retiring seemed less threatening. He looked over at the girl—not really a girl, now. She would make a formidable Marshal in her day. He glanced at Aris. Would he take Marshals’ training as well, or stick with his role as healer? He tried to imagine them both in middle age, and failed.

As sharply as a pinprick, his own vision of his stronghold intruded. He wanted to see Aris there, using his healing magery, teaching others how to heal. Seri did not fit. He had no use for a Girdish Marshal, a peasant with no more magical ability than any other peasant. What could she do? He wasn’t going to raise and train an army; they would have no enemies to guard against, out there. Aris belonged, was one of his people by birth and talent, and she did not belong. She would hold Aris back, prevent him from learning what other mage powers he had. If they did not marry—and he was sure would not, though he could not have said why—it would be best for Aris to learn to get along without her, so that he could be with his own people. She would be happy enough in Fin Panir or elsewhere, busy with a grange.

How was he going to manage that? He watched Rahi and the Autumn Rose; clearly they, like Gird, thought the two belonged together. He would have to find some way of shifting them apart, bit by bit. He looked at Aris; the boy had deep circles under his eyes. This had taken more out of him than Seri; he was not, Luap told himself, as robust. He should be protected, his healing magery nurtured. That was too precious a talent to be squandered in mock warfare.