Liar's Oath

Chapter Seventeen

Although Luap had been startled to find Aris’s note, he realized that it might be wiser to bring up the idea of moving the mageborn when Seri and Aris were not in the city. They could only confuse the issue, and he had not yet formed a plan for convincing Aris to leave Seri behind. First convince the Council, and then talk to Aris. He rolled and unrolled a scroll as he thought about it. The details of the plan he had rehearsed so long flicked through his mind. How long, he wondered, would Aris be gone? Should he press for a meeting today? He thought not. Any appearance of hurry would plant some of those peasant hooves firmly in their muddled minds, ox-like. He remembered how it had been with his first version of Gird’s Life.

He waited until the next regular meeting, two days later. The younglings, as he thought of them, had not returned. Some had noticed a column of smoke from far away, but that could have been anything. It was the season for storm-lighted grass fires, he reminded the worriers. And he had the feeling that they were unhurt, no matter what the smoke meant . . . they would reappear when they were ready, cheerful and sturdy as always. And inconvenient, no doubt.

The meeting began on a sour note, because a complaint of witchcraft had been referred from a grange-court. A group of sheepfarmers insisted that a mageborn boy had cursed their flock, causing all the lambs to be born dead. They had beaten the boy, who had responded with an obvious burst of magery, setting a hayrick afire. The local Marshal had saved the boy, but wasn’t sure the first accusation was correct—and the boy, he said, would never completely recover from the beating. He had come, with the boy and two of the sheepfarmers, to Fin Panir to “settle this once and for all,” as he put it. Luap winced; this would make the Marshals edgy about anything to do with mageborn.

He watched the sheepfarmers, tall husky men in patched tunics, sit on the edge of the bench in the meeting room, as far from the mageborn boy as they could. He didn’t entirely blame them. It was hard to judge the boy’s age—Luap guessed about twelve—because of his strangeness. He had mismatched eyes, one that slewed wide, and a constant tremor that erupted in a nervous jerk to his head at intervals. The eye that looked ahead had an expression Luap had never seen before, cool and calculating it seemed, though his mouth dripped spittle when his head jerked. The Marshal, balding and scrawny (had he really been the one who saved Gird from being trampled that time?), explained that the boy had had a bad name in their vill from the beginning. And it was his limp—not the slewed eye or the tremor—that resulted from the beating.

The farmer’s testimony came in slow, difficult bursts of thick dialect; Luap knew they resented the questions he asked, but he had to know what they said to keep accurate notes. They knew their sheep, they kept repeating, and while it’s true that sheep come into the world looking for a way back to the high pastures, they’d had a fair crop of lambs every year until this lad took a dislike to ’em, and for nothing worse than being told to keep away from Sim’s daughter who was carrying her first and feared the evil eye. They knew he’d cursed the sheep because he said so—or at least he gabbled a string of nasty-sounding stuff that must have been a curse, and right then old Fersin’s best ewe bloated up and died. Within a day, anyway, and it wasn’t the season for death-lily, neither. Then the ewes started dropping lambs too soon, dead lambs, all of ’em, as if someone had fed them bad hay with birthbane in it, but no one had. Wasn’t any birthbane nearer than a day’s ride.

The Council looked at the Marshal—one of many named Sell, called for convenience Bald Seli—and he shrugged. “They called me in when the first ewe died, and accused this boy. I said don’t be calling down evil you don’t need—that ewe could’ve eaten something. None of ’em knew what the words meant, that he used. And they had no proof he was mageborn, only that he showed up years back with no family, and a scrap of good cloth for a cloak. Then the lambs started coming, all dead. They didn’t call me; I heard from you—well—one of ’em’s son, a junior yeoman. Thought I should know, he said. I went up there and found they’d pounded this boy so hard they’d broken bones, and then he’d set the hay on fire. The way I understand Gird’s law is if the boy did magery first, he’s wrong, but if he was hurt first, he could use magery to defend himself.”

“Burning hay’s not defense,” muttered one of the farmers, as if he’d said it before.

“It made you let go of him,” the Marshal said, as if he’d said that before, too.

“Is he truly mageborn?” asked Luap. The boy flicked him a malevolent glance that sent shivers down his back. Mageborn or not, the boy was wicked.

“I don’t know,” Bald Seli said. “He won’t say. Isn’t there some way to tell?”

Everyone looked at Luap. Would they realize that it was a use of magery to detect magery, and thus required a breaking of the law to detect a possible breaker of the law? No, irony was beyond them. He thought of sending for Arranha, but decided against it. He let a little of his power come forth, a mere trickle, and spread it as a net, imagining a silvery web before him. If the boy had mageborn blood, and such power, it should color that web. He leaned toward the boy.

“Are you mageborn?” he asked quietly. The boy stared past him, his skew eye to one side and his focused gaze to the other. Luap turned to Bald Seli. “Can he answer questions? Has he ever talked with people in your vill?”

“Oh, aye,” the Marshal said. “He never said much, but he made shift to ask for food, and answer yes or no. He didn’t have our accent, but we could understand him.”

“No, ye didn’t!” The boy’s voice was a peculiar skirl, rising and falling with no relation to the sense of the words. “Ye never understood me. Me. Never. Ye ask am I mageborn—I’m more’n mageborn. . . .” His words fell into a gabble Luap could not understand. The two farmers cringed against the wall.

“Careful, sir, he’s doin’ it again. He’ll be cursin’ the whole Fellowship next—”

To Luap it seemed that the boy’s gabble was that of one who could not control his voice, like the very old who sometimes lost words and strength all at once. It did not sound as he had imagined cursing to sound, but the boy’s cold gaze made him uneasy. He felt nothing in his net of magery to make him think the boy was mageborn—but he was not sure he wasn’t, either. The babble died away; the boy licked the spittle off his lips with an eagerness that frightened Luap again. He wondered what Gird could have made of this; it was beyond him.

Cob came up with their solution. “Take him into the High Lord’s Hall,” he said. “And get Arranha. If it’s a curse, that’ll be the place to take it off. We’ll know what we’re dealing with.”

Luap did not want to go, but he knew he must. He watched two Marshals carry the boy, whose tremors and twitches seemed less a struggle to escape than the way his body worked. Arranha met them at the Hall doors, and seemed no more upset by this than any of the problems people had brought him. He looked at Luap.

“He’s mageborn, in part, but he was also born flawed. Both in his magery and in himself.”

“Did he curse the sheep?” one of the farmers asked.

“I don’t know,” Arranha said. He asked the boy the same question, but got no reply. “Bring him up to the altar,” he said then, “and we’ll see if the god can shed light on our dilemma.”

But as they approached the altar, the boy exploded in wild squeals and convulsive movements so strong the Marshals could hardly hold him. “He’s frightened,” one of them said. “Maybe he thinks we sacrifice people.”

The farmers muttered, and Luap thought he heard one of them say “Only a mageborn would think of that.”

“Put him down, then,” Arranha said. They laid the boy down as gently as they could, for all his thrashing about, but he began beating his head on the stone floor. “We need Aris,” Arranha said. He laid his hands to either side of the boy’s head, but instead of quieting the boy screamed, a piercing noise that echoed in the high vaults of the Hall. Then he twisted around and caught Arranha’s thumb in his teeth. Luap leapt forward, as did others, and somewhere in the struggle to unlock the boy’s teeth from Arranha’s thumb, the boy quit breathing. No one quite knew when, or why.

After that, and its daylong aftermath of confusion, grief, and anger, Luap expected nothing but trouble when he introduced his idea the next day. He led up to it as carefully as he could, explaining how a distant land could let his people learn to use their skills to benefit others, but he was sure their minds were full of the boy’s malicious grin as he bit down on Arranha’s thumb. When he paused, he heard exactly the disapproving murmur he had expected.

To his surprise, Raheli stood. The murmur stilled. Everyone peered to see Gird’s daughter.

“I believe him,” she said. Then she looked at Luap, eye to eye, gaze to gaze. “I believe him,” she said more softly, and silence lay heavily on them. “My father—Gird—” As if they did not know, he thought. “Gird saw good in him; he was spared to serve Gird’s Fellowship.” In a long pause, no sound broke the stillness; he saw her take a long breath and wondered what would follow. “What is the reward of a faithful luap?” she asked. None answered. She looked around. “I will tell you, then,” she said. “A faithful luap, one who serves without enjoying power, one who stands beside, in the place of, the inheritor, shall be recognized at last by the one he serves. He shall stand before him, and be given his reward, the respect of the people. This is Gird’s luap: Gird will determine his reward.”

Luap blinked; that could be taken two ways, and one of them he felt as a blade at his throat. “In the meantime,” Raheli went on, “we can give our respect. I believe him, that he will take his folk to a far place and not breed up an army of invasion. You know I have not trusted him in the past. If his stronghold were nearer, I might be less willing to trust him now. But I believe he means what he says, and I believe the distance will enforce a truce between our peoples. My father wanted all to live in peace, but he himself could not find a way to let the mageborn learn to use their powers aright. That boy yesterday—if he had been brought up in a distant land, he would never have caused the trouble he did here. Arranha and Luap would have recognized something wrong in him. I believe Luap in this—that Gird agreed to let them go, and to this end.” She sat down, and in a moment the murmur began again, this time in a wholly different mood.

For that, and for some other reason he did not fully understand, when the Marshal-General called on him again, he found himself speaking with less forethought and grace than usual.

“Marshal Raheli has said more than I would claim—that boy frightened me. It’s true that I think our young people are best trained elsewhere—some place where we can be sure their power does no harm, that they have control of it, and know how to use it for good. But that boy—Marshals, I cannot claim to understand that.”

“But if you had such a child, in your distant place, you would not let him come back here to cause trouble, would you?”

“No.” He shuddered at the thought. “I don’t know what we’d do—but we would not let him loose on the world.”

“What about Arranha’s thumb?” asked another Marshal. Many of them. Luap knew, liked the old man even though they would not follow his god. Luap shook his head.

“We don’t know. If Aris were here, I’m sure he could heal it. But Garin is not as skilled, or as powerful. Arranha says if the Sunlord wants him healed, he will be healed, but he’s feverish this morning.”

Bald Seli had attended the Council, though his sheep-farmers had already headed home. Now he spoke up. “Maybe I should have let them kill him, ’stead of bringing such trouble on us.”

Glances flicked at Luap, each a minute but definite blow. “Maybe—but I think you did right,” Cob said. “You were trying to be fair; that’s what mattered. And I’ll agree with Raheli, Gird’s daughter, that if the mageborn had some safe place to teach their children, we might not have problems like this. At least not with the mageborn. It’s not Luap’s fault that the boy went wrong; for all we know he was cursed from birth.”

To Luap’s surprise, the other Marshals slowly came around to the same decision, and for much the same reasons. No one wanted to say good riddance to the mageborn—he was not even sure they thought that inwardly. Instead, the boy and his uncontrolled powers became the reason to agree that the mageborn needed a place to be trained properly. And they trusted Luap and Arranha to oversee that training and determine who might come back to the eastern lands.

“Will you take everyone? All the mageborn?” asked Bald Seli finally.

Luap shook his head. “I will take all who want to come, and try to persuade the younger ones that it’s best. But some are too old, at least until we have established a settlement. Most of you know Lady Dorhaniya, for instance: she will certainly not come at first. Others are happy here, and get along well with those who are not mageborn—either they have no magery, or they are content not to use it. Unless you demand it, I expect they will choose to stay. Those who have little mageborn heritance, and whose families have no other mageborn blood, will almost certainly stay.”

“I like that.” Bald Seli said. “I remember old Gird saying we needed most to get along with each other; I’d hate to see that dream abandoned.”

“So we’ll give you all the troublemakers,” Cob said to Luap with a grin, “and keep all the good ones—except you and Arranha, of course. And I suppose young Aris will come with you?”

Luap didn’t want to start on that. “I thought to invite all mageborn who wanted to come—”

“But no others?” asked Raheli.

There was the crux of it. “I hardly thought any but mageborn would want to come,” Luap said carefully. “Surely it would be as strange for them as a society wholly without magery is for the talented among us.”

“But who’ll do the work you mageborn don’t know how to do?” asked Bald Seli. “Your folk don’t know cooking and building and such, do they? They couldn’t yoke a span of oxen and use a plough. . . .”

Luap nodded. “Some of those I think will want to leave are half-bloods, as I am . . . remember that I was fostered among farmers; I farmed, before the war.” From the look on Bald Seli’s face, he didn’t quite believe it. Luap let a little humor seep into his voice, as he broadened his accent. “Aye, Var, coom up there; steady, Sor. . . .” His hands clutched imaginary plough handles, and his use of the traditional names for oxen brought smiles to more than one face. He grinned at Bald Seli. “My foster-father had me make my own yoke, same as anyone else. I’ve no doubt there are better farmers among you, but I made my crops and paid my field-fee and fed my family from my own work.”

“I thought you’d been brought up in a big house.” That was Kevis, who knew Dorhaniya.

“Only as a small boy. Then it was off to the farm, and no more big house for me until I came here.” Luap glanced around the room. “I won’t say all of us are farmers, or have such skills, but even for those who don’t, it won’t hurt them to learn.” A shuffle of feet at that, agreement too strong for silent nodding. “We won’t have to take the farmers and crafters you need here.” Phrasing it that way, it could seem he was concerned for the welfare of those left behind. Which he was, in a way.

“But if someone wanted to come—I’m thinking, Luap, that if Aris goes with you, Seri will want to go too. You can hardly expect to separate those two.”

“I wouldn’t forbid it, certainly.” Certainly not now, not when it could cause the failure of the whole plan. “But we don’t want youngsters who wish they had magic powers wasting their time out there, when they could be learning good crafts here.” Others nodded, seeing the point of that. “As well, since it is for our people to learn to use magery, it could be more dangerous for those without it. What I’m thinking of is more—more an outpost, say, where our people go for special training. When they have it, some of them—if you permit—will no doubt want to come back, and use their powers for good purposes.” More dubious looks, at that, eyes shifting back and forth under lowered brows. All the better: if they forbade mageborn to return, then it was not his fault that the peoples sundered.

“What about the archives?” asked another Marshal. “How can you keep the archives and lead your settlement?”

Luap relaxed. This was something he had planned carefully. “We have many good scribes now, those who can not only copy a text accurately, but understand how to organize the archives. I can’t do both jobs—certainly not in the first few years out there—but I will always be available for questions. Frankly, I think my successors—those I will recommend—are as skilled as I am, if not more skilled. I will continue to write, of course, but I doubt you’ll miss my contributions.”

“But are these scribes Marshals?” asked the same man.

“No,” Luap said. “Although there are at least three who have been yeoman-marshals and might qualify for the new training, if you felt it important. Certainly there are advantages in having an Archivist who is also a Marshal . . . even though I’m not.”

“As good as,” Raheli said. “We’ve granted you Marshal’s blue, and the authority within the archives. I, for one, would prefer an Archivist to have Marshal’s training.”

The Marshals discussed that for a time, and Luap realized that they had made their decision, made it far more easily than he had ever expected. They would argue about when he should go, and who should be in charge of the archives after him, and how often he should report . . . but they were letting him go.

So he told Arranha that evening, trying to cheer him up. Arranha’s thumb had swollen to twice its size, and a red streak ran up his arm. Suriya, the woman Aris had worked with in herblore, had come to poultice it, but so far without effect.

“She didn’t have to tell me it was a bad bite,” Arranha said. He sat with his eyes almost closed and the tense expression of real pain on his face. “I knew that, from the malice on his face, the way he ground his teeth on it, the way I felt.”

“I wish Aris were here.” Luap tried to sit still; he knew that Arranha needed quiet, restful companions.

“I, too. Young Garin has a lovely voice, but not a tithe of Aris’s healing power. He eased the pain awhile . . . suggested I have Bithya in, that girl Aris worked with . . . but I’ll wait. Perhaps I won’t need her.”

“Do you want us to send after Aris? Although I don’t even know for certain which way he went.”

“No . . . no, don’t trouble the lad. He needs this chance to show what he can do somewhere else, and if the gods don’t choose to send him back . . .” Arranha’s voice faded. Luap felt a stab of worry. The old man could die of this, and then what? He needed him; they all needed him. Mageborn and peasant alike, they needed his wisdom, his determination to find the light in any tangled darkness.

“Rest now,” he said to Arranha. “Is there anyone or anything . . . ?”

“No . . . don’t bother.”

Luap wondered if anyone else might help. Raheli, he remembered, had had a parrion of herblore. When he found her, she shook her head. “The woman Aris studied with knows more than I did, she and her daughter both. We talked about it.”

“There’s nothing more—?”

“Not without taking his hand off, and that’s chancy, as you know. Sometimes it saves lives, but some die anyway.”

“I thought of sending for Aris, but we don’t know where he went, and Arranha says not to.”

“Arranha’s getting feverish. But you’re right, we don’t know where Aris is, and we have no way to find him.” Rahi sighed. “It seemed like such a good idea, giving Aris his chance to travel and test his healing—and he and Seri might make a good partnership, if they had time together—but now I wish we’d waited.” She stalked restlessly about the room for a moment, then said, “Well—and when do you think you’ll start resettling your people?”

“I don’t know I’d—you know Arranha and I had talked about it?” She nodded. “I depended on his advice, but now—”

“Now you may have to make all the decisions yourself. I hope not, for your sake as well. What will you do first?”

“Take others to see it. Start thinking how to make it workable—we should grow our own food, for one thing, and not have to transport it from here. There’ll be plenty of work, hard work, to make it feasible.”

She nodded. “There’s something else: you need to think which mageborn to move first, and whether you want to gather them somewhere before you take them. Supplies for the first year or two, until your crops take hold. . . .”

“Supplies, yes.” Luap grimaced. “Well—I did it for Gird; I ought to be able to do it now. But I don’t even know how many mageborn there are, or how many will come.”

But the familiar rhythm of planning comforted him in the days following, as Arranha grew sicker, the swelling worse. He began making lists: seed grain, vegetable seeds, tools for farming and tools for making tools. He knew of no mageborn smiths . . . could he hire a smith to set up there? And if he could, with what could he pay a smith’s high fees? He found a master smith, and began asking the necessary questions; smiths were notoriously slow in giving answers. He went back to his lists. They would need a few looms—with skilled craftsmen and enough wood, they could easily copy the pattern looms. He paused, thinking. He had never worked wood himself . . . and that forest was very different . . . did that matter? Another question to ask a craftsmaster. He needed to know more about the skills of the people he would take—how many mageborn could weave, cook, plough, reap? So far as he knew, the work that needed doing—the work that would keep them alive—had never been done by magery.

Several times a day he checked on Arranha, who was unfailingly cheerful but visibly weaker each visit. To his surprise, others with no mageborn blood at all also visited. Rahi delayed her return to her grange and scoured the archives for anything on herbal treatments. Dorhaniya worked her way up the hill and arrived breathless and faint; Luap was afraid she would have a fatal attack as well. He insisted that she stay overnight in the palace; Elis agreed, and the next day Luap hired a cart to take her home. The men who had listened to Arranha’s many lectures on light and wisdom came to stand by his door, peering in shyly but unwilling to intrude on a sick man.

Luap felt a deep guilt he could not explain. He knew it had not been his fault: the boy would have bitten anyone; he had been mindlost if not possessed by some evil. He knew it was not his fault Aris was gone—Rahi had confessed that she and the Rosemage and Arranha himself had connived at that. He knew it was not his fault that he lacked the healing magery. But he felt guilty nonetheless . . . somehow it was his fault—his fault that Gird’s dream had not come true, and his fault that Arranha suffered for it. In reaction, he felt that his irritation was pardonable when one of the scribes made a mistake or spilled the ink. He got a morbid satisfaction out of scolding someone he would not ordinarily have scolded, and then lashing himself for being short-tempered.

He clung to his lists, and shared them with the Rosemage and Rahi. The Rosemage pointed out that he should require the mageborn to pay their own way, if they could: he was not a king, so he could not be expected to fund the expedition. Some of them were still wealthy; nearly all of them had something to contribute.

“They’d better,” Rahi said lazily, leaning back on the cushions of a bench in the scribe’s room. It was late night, and the scribes had long since ceased work. “If they don’t have something to contribute, they’ll starve.”

“More than skills: money,” the Rosemage said. “Clothes, tools, dishes, all that.”

Luap had a sudden panic. “How are we going to transport all that? Either we have to take it to the cave, and try to stuff it in the chamber; or we have to take it into the High Lord’s Hall—that doesn’t seem right.” He had a vision of the chamber choked with boxes, bags, sacks, bales of household gear . . . of the mess creeping across the floor of the great hall. Yet it had to be done: they couldn’t make everything out there.

“It will work,” the Rosemage said. “You don’t have to do it all yourself.”

“No, but—” But it had been his idea, his plan, and his place . . . his dream, in place of Gird’s. If it came true, it would be his responsibility; he could not deny that. Gird had known, Gird had not started a war and then gone home to twiddle his thumbs and watch how it went.

“Scary, isn’t it?” asked Rahi with surprising understanding. He looked at her, and she smiled. “Back before you joined, that very first battle, Norwalk Sheepfolds . . . remember it from the archives?”

“Of course,” Luap said. “Were you there? I thought—”

“No, I wasn’t there. But it scared Gird—what he’d started. He wanted it; he thought it was the only way. But when it came, when he saw what it meant, that he could never go back and things would never be as they were, that scared him. And I thought that was what you were feeling.”

“Yes,” said Luap. “I suppose I am. I believe we have to do it, that it’s the only way.” The undefined warning the elves had given rose from his memory; should he tell them about it? No, for he could not tell them what he did not know himself. “If I’m wrong—if I forget something—”

“You can always come back for it. You will be coming back quarterly at first anyway, to report to the Council and check on the new Archivist.”

“That reminds me.” Luap rummaged among the scrolls on his desk, glad to be distracted with something more pleasant. “I think we should keep a copy of the records out there, as well, and a copy of my records there should be transferred to Fin Panir each year. You know we found that mice and damp had damaged many of the old scrolls. This way, we would have complete records in two different places.”

Rahi snorted. “You would have all the world scribes, if you could. Think of the hours of work—”

“Yes, but good records are important. Without them, we wouldn’t have been able to clear up the land disputes of the past few years, for instance. And if we had better records of the early mageborn invasion, we might know more about what happened to the magery, and why the transfer pattern is graved in the floor of the High Lord’s hall.”

“Very well, but you’d best take more farmers than scribes or you’ll be hungry.”

“What are you going to do about Aris?” asked Rahi suddenly.

“Do? We can’t find him; we have no idea where he’s gone. We can only hope he comes back before Arranha dies.”

“I didn’t mean that: I meant about taking the mageborn away. Do you think Aris will go with you?”

“Of course he will,” Luap said. “He’s mageborn—more mageborn than I am. He has the most useful of mageries.”

“And Seri?” asked Rahi.

Luap shrugged. “She’s welcome, of course; I said that before. I don’t think it’s the best place for her; I doubt any without magery will find it comfortable. But we all know how attached she is to Aris.”

The Rosemage stretched and grinned at him. “Yes—though you did your best to separate them, didn’t you?”

Luap felt his ears getting hot. “I thought it would be easier later, yes. Evidently you two don’t agree, and I’m willing to admit I was wrong about them. So I suppose I’ll have a peasant-born Marshal as well as a mageborn healer—”

“—And Marshal,” Rahi said. “Aris will probably pass the Council when Seri does.”

“Is he keeping up his drill that well? I wasn’t aware. Two Marshals, then, one of each. That should convince the more stiff-necked on the Council that we’re being well watched and not up to mischief.”

The Rosemage scowled. “Nothing will convince some thickheads. And they may not want to let Aris go; he’s become very popular. If he does much healing on this journey, he will be under pressure to stay here. If Seri supports that—”

Luap shivered. “I hope not. Though to tell you the truth, if only he and Seri come back in time to save Arranha, I would trade that for having him in the new land.”