Liar's Oath

Chapter Two

Arranha had a favorite walled court, on the west side of the palace complex, edged with stone benches and centered with a little bed of fragrant herbs. Against one wall a peach tree had been trained flat: something Luap remembered from the lord’s house in which he had grown up. Most mornings, Arranha read there, or posed questions for a circle of students. Luap led Lady Dorhaniya by the shorter, inside, way, ignoring her running commentary about who had lived in which room, and what they had done and said. When he reached Arranha, the priest responded with his usual cheerfulness to the meeting.

“Lady Dorhaniya! Yes . . . weren’t you—?”

She had flushed again, whether with anger or pleasure Luap was not sure. “Duke Dehlagrathin’s daughter, and Ruhael’s wife, yes. And you—but I’m sorry, sir, to so forget myself with a priest of Esea.”

“Nonsense.” Arranha smiled at Luap. “This lady knew me in my wild youth, Luap, and like her friends gave me good warnings I was too foolish to hear.”

She softened a trifle. “I blame my sister as much as anyone, she and your father both. If he had not tried to force a match, or she had accepted it—”

“I would be a very dead magelord, having fallen honorably on the turf at Greenfields with my king,” said Arranha. “If, that is, your sister had not knifed me long before, for driving her frenzied with my questions. She threatened it often enough, even in courtship.”

“Well . . . that’s over.” With a visible effort, the old lady dragged herself from memory to the present. “And my business with you, Arranha, is about the Sunlord, not about the past.”

At once, he put on dignity. “Yes, lady?”

She sat on the stone ledge beside him, and recited the whole tale again. Arranha, Luap noted, actually seemed to listen with attention to each detail—but of course it was his god whose rituals mattered here. But when she started to pull the cloth from her bag and unfold it, Arranha put out his hand.

“Not here, lady.”

“But I wanted to show you—”

“Lady, I trust your piety and your grandmother’s instruction, but you have now told me—Esea’s priest—about them. From here, the ritual is his, not yours or mine. Give me the bag.”

She handed it over, eyes wide, and Arranha held it on outstretched hands. A pale glow, hardly visible in the sunlight, began to gather around it. Luap realized that the sun seemed brighter, the shadows of vineleaves on the wall darker . . . stiller. No air moved. The glow around the bag intensified, became too bright for eyes to watch. Luap felt a weight pressing down on him, yet it was no weight he knew, nothing like a stone. Light. But very heavy light.

Abruptly it was gone, not faded but simply gone; he blinked at the confusing afterimages of light and shadow. A cool breeze whirled in and out of the courtyard. And the bag on Arranha’s outstretched hands lay white as fresh-washed wool, only less white than the light itself. The old lady sat silent, mouth open, eyes wide; her companion’s face had paled, and even Arranha had a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

“Lady, your gifts are acceptable, and we can now, with your help, restore Esea’s altar to its proper array.”

“What was that?” Luap asked. Arranha merely smiled at him and shook his head; a fair answer. He offered his arm to the old lady, who roused suddenly from her daze and stood, more steadily than Luap would have expected.

“You should come too,” Arranha said, as he guided the women toward the High Lord’s Hall. Luap knew better than to ask why; he suspected the answer had to do with his ancestry, and only hoped Arranha wouldn’t think it necessary to tell the old lady about that. He tried to think of a duty he must perform, right now, somewhere else, and couldn’t—and in Arranha’s presence, he could not make one up.

Fortunately for his composure, the walk through the maze of passages and little walled yards that had grown around the old king’s palace kept the old lady breathless enough that she had no questions to ask. When they finally came to the great court before the High Lord’s Hall, Arranha led the way straight across it to the main entrance. Whatever the doorwards may have thought, they offered no challenge to Arranha and Luap.

Inside, the coolness of stone and tile and shadowed air. Most of the windows shattered when the city fell had been boarded up. Luap supposed that someday artists would design new windows to fill the interior with manycolored light, but for now Gird had no intention of spending the land’s wealth on such things. The great round hole in the end wall, above the altar, had been left open, for light, and through it the sun’s white glare fell full on the pale stone of the floor, a bright oval, glittering from minute specks in the slabs of rock. Luap noticed how it was all the brighter for the shadows around it, focusing the eye on what lay within the light.

Arranha walked up the Hall, followed by the other three, their footsteps sounding hollowly in that high place. They walked through the sun, and back into shadow, halting when Arranha did, then moving at his gesture to stand at either side, where they could see. At the altar, he bowed before laying the bag atop it. His prayer seemed, to Luap, unreasonably elaborate for something so simple as the consecration of a handwoven cloth for its covering, but he omitted none of the details the old lady had mentioned, from the selection of the animal, to the washing and spinning and weaving. From time to time, he asked the old lady for the name of the person who had performed each rite. At last, he came to some sort of conclusion. By then Luap was bored, noticing idly how the sun’s oval slipped up the floor, handspan by handspan, as the morning wore on. Arranha’s shadow appeared, a dark motionless form; when he looked, the sun blazed from Arranha’s robe. It shifted minutely to catch the edge of the altar, which would be in full sun any moment.

Abruptly, in silence, Arranha came alight. As if he had turned in that instant to the translucent stone of a lamp, his body glowed: Luap could see the very veins in his arms, the shadows of his bones. Once more he prayed, this time in a resonant chant. Without haste, yet swiftly as the sun moved, he opened the bag and drew out the cloths, unfolding them with cadenced gestures. In the full light of the sun, that rich embroidery glittered, shimmered, gold and silver on blue. Arranha’s hands spread, and passed above the cloth. Its folds flattened as if he’d soothed a living thing. Blue as smooth and deep as the sky . . . light rose from the altar, as light fell from the empty window, to meet in a dance of ecstasy.

Luap did not know if Arranha kept on chanting, or if he fell silent. Until the sun moved from the altar, as it passed midday, he stood rapt in some mystery beyond any magicks he’d thought of. Then the spell passed, and he looked across to find the old lady’s face streaked with tears; she trembled as she leaned on Eris’s arm. Arranha folded the cloths, just as ceremoniously, and returned them to the snowy bag for storage. Then, stepping away from the altar, he turned to her.

“Lady, Esea accepts your service, and I, his priest, thank you for your years of diligence.”

She ducked her head. “It is my honor.” From the way she said it, Luap wondered if she had anything else in her life to look forward to. He smiled at her when she looked up, but none of them said anything as they left the Hall. Back outside, she seemed to have recovered her composure, and turned to Luap with a sweet smile.

“You will thank the Marshal-General for me? I will come again, but now—I am a little fatigued. Eris will see me home; please don’t trouble yourselves.”

“Of course, lady,” he said. He might have offered to escort her anyway, but she’d already turned away, and something in Arranha’s expression suggested that Arranha wanted to talk to him out of the old lady’s hearing. For a few moments, Arranha was silent, then he shook his head abruptly and smiled at Luap, a smile twin to the old lady’s, before leading the way back to his own chosen courtyard. There he waved Luap to a seat on the stone bench and sat beside him, hot as it was now in midday. Luap was about to suggest that they find a cool inside room in the palace when Arranha shook his head slowly. “I had forgotten her, you know. Until you brought her, I had not thought of Dorhaniya for years.”

“You knew her,” Luap said. “A . . . duke’s daughter?”

Arranha sighed, and nodded. “Yes—longer ago than I care to think.” He gave Luap a searching look, then went on. “You need to know some of this, and you probably don’t remember it.”

Luap felt himself tense, and tried to relax; he was sure Arranha saw through that, as he did through most pretense. “Don’t remember what?”

Arranha peeled a late peach with care, and then handed it to him before starting to peel another for himself. Luap bit the peach fiercely, as if it were an enemy, and Arranha talked as he peeled.

“You need to know that we both saw you, as a child. Dorhaniya and I.”

“What!” It came out an explosive grunt, as if he’d been punched in the gut, which is what it felt like.

Arranha gave him an apologetic look. “I didn’t remember, until I saw her, and she started talking. Then, thinking of places we’d met before, I remembered. She will remember, too, once she thinks of it. She’s the kind of old woman who thinks mostly of people, and where she’s seen them. She will tease at her memories, Luap, until your boy’s face comes clear, and then she will come to ask you. Be gentle, if you can; that’s what I’m asking.” He started eating.

Luap could not answer. He had locked all that away, that privileged childhood, a private hoard to gloat over when alone. Now he realized that no one had ever claimed to know both of his pasts . . . the nobility had left him strictly alone, a pain he had thought he could not bear, and the peasantry, where he’d been sent, had not known him before. He did not even know, with any certainty, just where his childhood had been spent. It had never occurred to him, during the war, that he might come face to face with anyone but his father who had known him . . . that the other adults of his childhood might still exist, and recognize him.

He felt that a locked door had been breached, that he had been invaded by some vast danger he could hardly imagine. His vision blurred. In his mind, he was himself again a child, to whom the whole adult world seemed alternately huge and hostile, or bright and indulgent. He could remember the very clothes, the narrow strip of lace along his cuff, the stamped pattern on the leather of his shoes. And someone else had seen that—someone who knew him now—someone who could estimate the distance between that boy and this man, could judge if the boy had grown as he should, even if the boy had potentials he had never met.

“I—didn’t know—” It came out harsh, almost gasping. He could not look at Arranha, who would be disapproving, he was sure.

“I’m sorry.” Arranha’s voice soothed him, sweet as the peach he’d eaten and which now lay uneasily in his belly. “I was afraid she would tell you and cause you this grief in a worse place . . . here, you are safe, you know.”

He would never be safe again . . . all the old fears rolled over him. He had been safe, secure, in that childhood, and then it was gone, torn away. The farmer to whom he’d been sent had not dared cruelty, but the life itself was cruelty, to one indulged in a king’s hall, a child used to soft clothes and tidbits from a royal kitchen. All around, the walls closed in, prisoning rather than protecting. He could hardly breathe, and then he was crying, shaking with the effort not to cry, and failing, and hating himself. Arranha’s arm came around him, warmer and stronger than he expected. He gave up, then, and let the sobs come out. When he was done, and felt as always ridiculous and grumpy, Arranha left him on the bench and came back in a few minutes with a pitcher of water and a round of bread.

“I daresay you feel cheated,” Arranha said, breaking the bread and handing Luap a chunk. “Those were your memories, to color as you chose, and here I’ve pointed out that others live in them.”

Luap said nothing. He did feel cheated, but it was worse than Arranha said. Someone had invaded his private memories, his personal space, and torn down his defenses. The only thing that had been his, since he had had neither family nor heritance.

“I don’t remember much,” Arranha said, musing. “You were a child; I was a priest, busy with other duties. Not often there, in fact.”

Luap noticed he said there instead of here, which must have meant he had not been brought up in Fin Panir—at least, not in the palace complex. That made sense; he remembered a forecourt opening on fields, not streets. He got a swallow of water past the lump in his throat, and took a bite of bread. If Arranha kept talking, he could regain control, re-wall his privacy.

“Someone pointed you out. I was in one of my rebellious stages, so I remember thinking what a shame it was—”

“What?” That came out calmly enough; Luap swallowed more water, and nearly choked.

Arranha chuckled. “Well—she’s right, Dorhaniya, that I was troublesome. I questioned—as I do to this day—whatever came into my head to question. Her sister threatened more than once to cut the tongue from my head—and might have done it, too, that one. Anyway, I not only thought the lords’ use of peasant women was wrong, I thought it was stupid—and said so. You were an example: a handsome lad, bright enough, eager as a puppy, and by no fault of your own the hinge of great decisions. All the talk was of your potential for magery: not your wit or your courage, not your character or your strength. I thought you had the magery, but that fool of a steward had frightened it out of you; others were hoping you had none.”

“Why? Didn’t the king have legitimate heirs?” He would be reasonable; he forced himself to ask reasonable questions.

“You didn’t know—? No, of course, how could you? Luap, the king’s wife lost four children, either in pregnancy or birthing, and died with her last attempt, who was born alive but died within the year. By then he had taken the fever that left him no hope of children, even if he married again. He did, in fact, but to no purpose. He had sired you just before his wife’s death; his older bastards had shown no sign of power, and most—for three were the children of a favorite mistress—died in the same fever that left him sterile.”

Luap had never thought of his father as a king with problems. Whatever the king’s problems, they could not have been as great as those he gave Luap. It gave him a strange feeling to hear him spoken of, as an archivist might write of a figure of history. In his mind he could see the very phrases that might be used of such a king.

“And his brother and brothers-in-law, and his cousins—all would have been glad to have him die without an heir. As in fact he did, before you were grown.”

“But—but then the king Gird killed was not my father?”

“Oh no. Although when Gird told me you were the king’s bastard, that’s who I thought of, naturally. It was the simple answer, and like so many simple answers, it was wrong.” Arranha shook his head, presumably at his own foolishness. “Seeing Dorhaniya again brought it back to me, and then I realized the child’s face would grow into one very like yours. The king Gird killed was . . . let me think. First there was his brother, but he died in a hunting accident. So-called. Then his eldest sister’s husband, who caught a convenient flux. The king Gird killed was the fourth, or fifth, since your father, a cousin.”

“But she said she knew him—when she was talking about mistakes—”

“Well, she knew all of them. So did I. Her father was a duke, her husband one of the cousins—not one who became king; they killed him, I’ve forgotten how. She did know your father—”

“Does Gird know?”

“Know what?”

“That the king he killed at Greenfields—the king who defiled the Hall—was not my father?”

“I . . . I would have thought so, but . . . perhaps not.” Does it matter? was clear on his face, then his expression changed. “I see. Of course he must be told, in case he doesn’t know. You are not that man’s son; you would have been the heir, but of a different man. A better man than that, though not much wiser. I’m sorry, Luap, but your father was, for all his troubles, a blind fool. I said it then, and spent a year in exile for it, and I’ll say it now, to his son.”

“He . . . didn’t hate me?” It took all his courage to ask that; it was the deepest fear in his heart, that he had somehow earned his father’s hate. Against it he had mounted a fierce defense—it wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t fair.

“Esea’s light! No, he didn’t hate you. He put all his hopes on you, but understood only one thing to hope for, and pushed too hard. He was desperate, by then, but that doesn’t excuse him.”

“No.” Luap stared at the pavement under his feet. He had held that grudge too long; he was not ready for a father who had had problems of his own, who had been desperate, who had placed a kingdom’s weight on the hope that his latest bastard would grow to have the tools of magery. He was not ready to consider how a king might be trapped by something more honorable than his own pleasure. “My . . . mother?” For the instant it took Arranha to answer, he held the hope that she had been mageborn too.

Arranha gave a minute shrug and spread his hands. “I’m truly sorry; I know nothing about her. When I saw you, she was nowhere in evidence. A tutor had you in hand, and bragged to the king of your wit.”

“I don’t remember her.” He said that to his locked hands, staring at his thumbs as if they were the answer to something important. “I never knew—except that I couldn’t ask. It made them angry.”

“I daresay it frightened them as much as anything. You know the peasant customs: the mother’s family determines lineage. We overrode that, whenever our law intruded into the vills, but quite often the peasants evaded our law one way and another. If you had found your mother, if she had claimed you, her people might have helped her get you away and hide you.”

“But she didn’t.” Luap strained for any memory of his mother, forcing himself to imagine himself an infant, a child just able to stand. Surely he would remember who had suckled him, that first deep relationship; surely he could raise it from the deep wells of memory. A face hovered before him, dim and wavering like the reflection of his own in a bucket of water.

Arranha shrugged again. “It’s likely she couldn’t. She may have been sent far away; she may have died. That I don’t know. Your problems were not her fault, Luap, any more than they were yours.”

Too much too soon. His mind ached, overstretched with new and uncomfortable revelations. He had had it all organized, he thought, his past tidied into a coherent tale of childhood wrongs and struggles flowing logically into the conflicts of his adult life. He had constructed it of his own pain, his own understanding, and he had become comfortable with it. Now he must revise it, and found he was unwilling to do so. Tentatively, somewhere in his head, a new version began to take shape, safely remote from the other . . . something he could revise, to bring it into conformance. A tragic king, struggling against destiny—an equally tragic peasant victim, a child doomed from the start to be less than anyone’s hopes, including his own.

He spent the rest of that day pretending to write, hoping no one would ask what he was doing. He wanted no supper, but knew that if he did not eat with the others, someone would ask questions. So he forced the food down, complained with the others of the heat, and spent a restless night by his window, staring at a sky whose stars held no messages for him.

The old lady returned days later, as Arranha had predicted. In those two days, Luap had struggled to regain the balance she had disrupted. Arranha had told Gird which king had really fathered him; Gird had grunted, scowling, and then given Luap one of his looks.

“What difference d’you think it makes?” Gird had asked. Luap felt abraded by the look and the question, as if the mere fact of stating his real parentage had been an evasion, or a request for something Gird could not approve. He realized he’d hoped for understanding, for Gird to move toward a more fatherly or brotherly relationship, but now he saw that could not happen. Anything that reminded Gird of his father’s blood and rank—even this, which should have made it better—aroused the old antagonism.

This day she came early, before the late-morning heat. He heard, again, her voice below, and went down to meet her. Be gentle, Arranha had said; he wasn’t sure he could be gentle, but he could be courteous. She wore a dress equally costly, but different, from the day before, more blue and less green in its pattern. Lady Dorhaniya’s servant gave him another warning look, as he led them toward an inner room on the ground floor. He had no idea what it had been, but recently it had housed scribes copying the Code from his originals. These, at his nod, left their work gladly enough. The room had a high ceiling and tall narrow windows opening on a court shaded by trees and edged with narrow beds of pink flowers; it held night’s coolness and the scent of the flowers as well as the tang of ink and parchment.

“No need to climb the stairs,” Luap murmured, offering her a chair. Lady Dorhaniya smiled, but tremulously. Clearly she had something on her mind.

“Thank you, young man. Now let me just catch my breath—”

“A drink of water?” The scribes kept a jug in their room; he poured her a mug. She took it as if it were finest glass, and sipped.

“You should sit down, young man. What I have to say is . . . is very important to you.”

Luap tried to look surprised. “I thought perhaps you’d come about something in the Lord’s Hall.”

“No. It wasn’t that.” She peered at him, then sat back, nodding. “I wasn’t wrong, either. I may not be as young as I was, but I’ve not lost my memory, for faces. Tell me, these men call you Luap, but do you know your real name?”

“I’ve always been told it was Selamis,” Luap said.

“Ah. You have reason to wonder?”

He shrugged. “Lady, by what I was told, my mageborn father chose my daily name, and gave me no other—common enough with such children.”

“You know that much,” she said, her eyes bright. “Do you know which lord fathered you?”

“I’ve been told it was the king,” Luap said with more difficulty than he’d expected. “But many bastards dream of high birth.”

She bent her head to him, in so graceful a movement that he did not at first recognize it as a bow. “Then I will confirm what you were told: you were the king’s son—not this recent king, but Garamis. I saw you many times as a small boy, and you have the same look about the eyes you had then. Your mother was, it’s true, a peasant lass—a maidservant in the summer palace—but some said she had mageborn blood a generation or so back.”

Even knowing it was coming didn’t help. He felt the same helpless rage and fear that had overwhelmed him while listening to Arranha. This old lady, so secure and decent, had seen him, remembered him. She had seen his mother, no doubt; she had known his father. He shivered, and looked up to find them both staring at him. The old lady’s servant—Eris, he remembered—had a look he could interpret as contempt.

“Does it bother you?” Lady Dorhaniya asked. Her eyes were altogether too shrewd. “You were a charming boy, very well-mannered, and you’ve grown to a charming man. . . .” It was almost worse, though he could not explain it. If he’d been a bad child, cruel or wicked or dull, that could justify what had happened to him. If his father had been the last, most wicked king, that could justify what had happened to him. But he could see, against the inside of his eyelids, the child he had been, the child she was now describing so carefully . . . the child who wanted so much to please, the child alert to the wishes of those who cared for him. “—you brought me a little nosegay,” she said. “So thoughtful, for such a young boy. . . .” He had learned that from a mageborn youth, a few years older, and found it impressed ladies visiting; he had made nosegays for all of them. “—and recitations. Your father had you stand up one night before dinner, and speak the entire text of Torre’s Ride. You must have been nine or so, then—”

That he remembered; it had been just before he was sent away, and at first he’d thought it was because he’d made an error. His tutor had scolded him for it. He had known, then, that the king commanded that performance, but not that the king was his father. And then the steward had come, with a false smile on his face, to take him to an outlying vill and deliver him to the senior cottager.

“—Just before your dear father died,” Lady Dorhaniya said. “I don’t expect you remember it. They closed the summer palace, and I suppose you went somewhere else.”

She could not know where “somewhere else” had been—to someone like her, the closing of one palace meant the opening of another. His mind, running ahead on its own track, tripped on the memory of “—your dear father died,” and came back to the present. “He died after that—not long after that?”

“Yes, that’s what I was saying. Before Sunturning, it was, and then Lorthin took the throne, and sent my dear husband into exile for a time. So of course I wouldn’t have been to the summer palace even had it been open.”

“What—” His mouth had dried; he swallowed and tried again. “Did you know my mother—I mean, her name?”

“You don’t remember—? Oh—yes; they sent her away when you were just walking. Her name . . . no, I don’t . . . but she was a comely lass, never fear. Darker haired than your father, but with red in it; that’s where you got the red highlights in your hair, and your eyes are more like hers. Your face is his, brow, cheek and chin.”

That didn’t help; she seemed to realize it, for she made one of the meaningless comforting sounds old ladies make, and reached to pat his knee. “There, young man—young prince, I should say, for you alone survive of the royal blood, though it won’t do you much good. You’ve nothing to fear in my memories of you. . . .”

But I do, he thought, feeling himself squeezed between intolerable and conflicting realities. Already I have much to fear from you, and I can’t even tell what it is . . . but I feel it. “I . . . don’t remember much,” he said with difficulty. Even as he said it, details he had forgotten for years poured into his mind as pebbles from a sack, each distinct. Yet it was not a lie, for he could not remember what he most wanted to at the moment, what this old woman had looked like, which of the many noblewomen she had been. He could not remember what she remembered; he had nothing to share, no memories that would make sense to her.

“I expect you remember more than you want, sometimes,” she said, surprising him again. He had scant experience of old women, and none of his own background; when he met her eyes, they seemed filled with secret laughter, not unkind. “Most men remember the bad things; my husband, to the day he died, remembered being thrashed for riding his father’s horse through a wheatfield near harvest. Yet in his family he had the reputation of being a rollicking lad no punishment could touch. You look now as you did then—sensitive enough to feel a word as much as a blow. That’s why I thought, perhaps, my memories could help you. Show you the way you seemed to others—”

“No!” It got past his guard, in a choked whisper; then he clamped his lips tight. Tears stung his eyes. He swallowed, unlocked his jaw, and managed to speak in a voice nearly his own. “I’m sorry, Lady Dorhaniya, but—that’s over. It’s gone. I don’t—don’t think about it—”

She sat upright, her lips pursed, her expression unreadable. Then, as if making a decision, she nodded gravely and went on. “Prince, you cannot put it aside that way. It’s true, the world has changed; you have no throne, and no royal family to sponsor you. But you must know your past, and make it your own, or you cannot become whatever Esea means for you.”

The god’s name startled him; he started to say that he was no worshipper of the Sunlord, but stopped himself. Instead, he said, “I swore that I would give up all thought of kingship.”

She nodded briskly. “Quite right, too. Pursuing such a claim could only bring trouble to the land and people. And you have had no training for kingship. But this does not mean that Esea has no path lighted for you.”

Luap shrugged, easing tight shoulders. “As Gird’s chronicler, scribe, assistant . . . it seems clear to me that this is my task.” Listening to himself, even he could hear the lack of completion; he was not surprised when she shook her head.

“For now, prince. For now, that is your task, and see that you do it in the Sun’s light! But you have more to do—and don’t laugh at an old woman, thinking me silly with age.” For an instant, she looked almost fierce, white hair and all, though he had not laughed, even inside. “You have a position no one else can share: you are the royal heir, though you have no throne. But you—and only you—can lead your own people—”

“Which of my people?” Luap asked irritably. She was beginning to sound like the Autumn Rose, and he had a sudden vision of that dire lady in old age, still pursuing his irresolution with her own certainty.

That got him a long straight stare; he could feel his face reddening. “That,” she said severely, “was unworthy of you. You know quite well I meant your father’s folk, the mageborn. I would have thought Arranha would have spoken to you. . . .”

“He has,” said Luap, suddenly as disgusted with himself as she seemed to be. “He and the Autumn Rose both. I am supposed to do something—but no one can tell me what, or how, or even more how to do it without breaking my oath to Gird—” And the gods. Sweat came out on him. What kind of leadership could he give, without using magery he had sworn not to use? What kind of leadership without usurping Gird’s authority?

“Of course no one can tell you,” Lady Dorhaniya said tartly. “You are the prince; you inherited the royal magery—oh yes, I have heard that, too. As the prince, the Sunlord’s light is yours, do you choose to ask such guidance. Have you?”

To such a question only a direct answer was possible. “No, lady,” said Luap, sweating. He had had a child’s knowledge of the gods when he was sent away; after that, among peasants, he could not have worshipped the Sunlord even if he’d wanted to. He had not wanted to; he had been abandoned by his father and his father’s god, and he would not pay homage to either of them.

“Well, you should. Esea knows you had a poor enough childhood, with that prune-stuffed steward and whatever happened after your father died, but the fact remains that you are what you are, and unless you learn to be that, you’re as dangerous as a warsteed in the kitchen.” She looked around for her servant, and then hitched herself forward. Luap rose and offered his arm. “Yes—I must be going. I’ve said too much too soon, it may be. But your father, prince, had more sense than his brothers; somewhere in your head you have it. I suggest you ask the Sunlord’s aid, and soon.” Then she stopped again. “And who is this Autumn Rose you mentioned?”

That he could answer. “A mageborn lady, a warrior from Tsaia, who joined Gird’s army after—”

“Oh, her. The king-killer. Some nonsense about her having been involved with the king before his marriage.” Lady Dorhaniya sniffed. “She was a wild girl, willful, always storming off about this and that. It’s one thing to learn weaponlore, if you’ve the strength and stomach for it, and another to be starting quarrels just to have the chance of settling them. Not that the prince—later the king—wasn’t as bad, for he loved to watch her flare out at things. So she’s calling herself Autumn Rose, is she?” From her tone, that was just more foolishness.

“Do you know her name from before?”

The old lady’s eyes twinkled in mischief. “Of course I do, but if she hasn’t told even Gird, why should I tell you? I doubt she has much family left to be embarrassed, but it’s her business, silly as she is.” Luap could not imagine anyone thinking Autumn Rose silly. Dangerous and difficult, but not silly. “You might just tell her it sounds more like a title than a name.”

Luap grinned. It had not occurred to him that the old lady would have known the Autumn Rose, or, knowing her, might disapprove. She sounded as she might about an errant granddaughter. “I think of her as Rosemage,” he said. “Some call her that.”

Another sniff. “It would not hurt either of you to ask Esea’s guidance,” she said. “You’ve no time for foolishness, either of you, at your ages.” Then, with a last nod, she left, leaning only slightly on Eris’s arm. Luap followed silently to the outer door, then climbed the stairs to his office. He felt even more unsettled than usual. Everyone wanted something from him, but none of them agreed on what it was. All the decisions he’d made so firmly, in good faith, seemed to be coming apart, unravelling in his hands like rotting rope.