Liar's Oath

Chapter Thirty-two

He knew at once it was no dream, not as he had dreamed before, and his first thought was that Gird had not warned him what meeting a god was like. Where had the space come from, he wondered, in which he hung suspended, like a thought in some vast intelligence? At once his mind clung to that notion, and began elaborating it, an activity he recognized even as it continued: protective flight into logic, the mage’s trance.

A face appeared before him, a man’s face of near his own age, he thought. Unlike dreams, it carried no emotion with it—a stranger’s face, weathered by life into interesting lines. It stared aside, not directly at him, and he watched with his usual attention, looking for clues to character and motivation. A face used to command, to the obedience of others, to hard decisions . . . it was turning now, toward him. Eyes a clear cool gray met his, caught his, across whatever gulf of time and space lay between them. Commanded him, as they had (he could tell) commanded so many others. Now he could see the head above the face, bearing a crown—a crown?

A king. A king’s face, and not the one he had seen last, dead, on the trampled earth of Greenfields. And not Tsaia’s king, past or present, nor the black-bearded king of the Khartazh: those faces too he knew, and this was something else. A god? He thought not, though awe choked his breath. He tried to look aside, and could not. Slowly, inexorably, the rest of the man’s figure became visible. A king in green and gold, the gold crown in his hair shaped of leaves and vines. Something about the clothes seemed foreign, strange: he could not say what. Slowly, as the drifting of morning fog, he began to see the room around the man . . . its paneled walls, its broad table littered with scrolls and books, its carpet like a garden of flowers, manycolored. Someone else . . . across the room, a woman whose weathered face wore a curious ornament on the brow, a silver circle . . . but in a trick of light she seemed to fade and he could not see her. The king said nothing . . . did he see Luap as well as Luap saw him?

Then, “You.” The king’s voice, deep, resonant, carrying power as a river carries a straw. “You are part of it; you will help.”

He did not want to answer a wraith, a dream, whatever this was, but from his mouth came the honest bleat of fear he felt. “I can’t.” Even if he’d wanted to, he had no more help to give, not even to his own people. Could he explain that to a wraith, a messenger, whoever this was? The iynisin could not get in, through no power of his but the original power of those who had sculpted the fortress . . . but he and his could not get out.

“You will wake them?” That voice came from the glare he could not see, where the woman had seemed to stand. The king’s face turned aside, and Luap almost sagged in relief. It was like facing Gird again, on his worst days—and worse, that he had now failed at what he’d promised.

“I must,” the king was saying. “They close the pattern. I cannot explain—”

“No matter.” For an instant, Luap could see her again, this time as if through a white flickering of flame. She had a smile that rang aloud, louder than laughter would have been; when she chuckled, softly, he realized again that his senses were rapt in some strange magic. “I think you’ve missed your mark, sir king. What you seek to wake has not slept.”

“What?” The king looked again, deep into Luap’s eyes, a look he felt as a sword probing his vitals: “How can that be? I sought along your memories, to find the place—”

“While thinking of the reason you sought them, a reason many lives old, did you not?” The king’s eyes never wavered from Luap’s, but he nodded. The woman went on. “You found what you sought, then, but—Gird’s teeth, my lord, I can’t understand how you will get them out, and still leave what we found.”

“Nor I.” The king took a breath, and let it out slowly, now watching Luap with obvious wariness. “You—” and there was no doubt which of them he addressed. “You are of Gird’s time, are you not? And someone who knew him?”

Luap was not aware of speaking, but he knew he spoke in some manner the king understood. “I am Luap.”

“Yes.” One word, in that tone, and Luap wondered what the king saw in his face. What Gird had seen? He hoped not, but the king’s next words were not reassuring. “You are not . . . what legends made you.”

No time to ask that, not of such a king. “I was Gird’s friend, until his death; his chronicler, after.”

“You have Aarean blood.”

He could not help it; his chin lifted. “I am a king’s son.” He did not trouble to explain which king.

“And your mother—?”

Damn the man. Luap struggled once more with the envy that never died, and said, “A peasant woman. I never knew her, past infancy.”

To his surprise, that stern face softened a little. “I am sorry. My mother, too, died when I was young, and I had a . . . difficult time.”

Difficult, Luap thought bitterly, could not have included being tossed out to fend for himself in a peasant village. “I have the royal magery,” he said, uncertain why he said it.

“I suspected you might. Some of you, at least.” The king turned away again, and spoke to the woman. Luap wondered again why she was so hard to see, for a white fog lay across her image. “If you’re right, and we have opened a gap between times as well as places, how should I proceed?”

“I have no idea.” The fog intensified, then she appeared, much nearer, peering past the king’s shoulder. “You truly are Luap?”

He found it hard to answer, even in this nebulous state. “Yes. . . .”

Her eyes widened; humor quirked her mouth. He was reminded, for no reason he could imagine, of Raheli in one of her rare good moods. “Gird—understood you, did he?”

Tears flooded his eyes and ran down his cheeks before he could blink them away. What he might have said vanished in the storm. Her brow puckered; the ornament centered it, serene and unchanging.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t worry . . . he understands.”

“Who?” asked the king.

“Gird. He shelters you as well, Luap.” He had thought the king’s voice commanding; he had never imagined a woman with such power. Light and tears blurred his vision to a white glow. “It will be well,” she said; her voice came to him as a warm arm around his shoulders. “King’s son, listen to the king.” Then he could see again, the king’s face expressing rue and tenderness. For her, he was sure.

“Lady—dammit, Paks, you will unnerve me, as well as him.”

“Sorry, my lord.” She had moved from his sight, though he knew, as if he could see, that she had stretched out in a chair at one end of the table.

“You aren’t really sorry.” It sounded like an old quarrel between them, worn comfortable with time.

“No—but he needs your help, as you need his. Tell him, sir king.” She did not need to say “then listen” aloud; it was implicit in her tone.

The king raised his brows; Luap’s knees would have shaken if he had been aware of them. Not a man to anger, he thought wildly. As bad as Gird. As good? Not another one, he thought; gods save me from heroes! As if she had heard his thought, the woman chuckled again, out of sight, but with no scorn in it.

“I am Falkieri, Lyonya’s king,” the king began. “You won’t know of me—and was Lyonya even a kingdom in your day?”

“Ah—I had heard tales—” Such tales as no one believed, he’d always thought, but so had the iynisin been, until they attacked. And what did the man mean, “in your day—”? Was this foreseeing, this trance? He had thought that gift lost utterly; even the Rosemage, even Arranha, never suggested he might have that power.

“Good. I am half-elven, and if the old tales be true, and your father was a king, then you are half-Aarean. Is that so?”

Half-elven. He had never heard of mortals and elves together; his skin shivered at the thought of the iynisin who waited outside the hall’s protection. “My father was a magelord, sir king—” Odd way of speaking, that seemed, after the Rosemage’s description of court life, after the florid formality of the Khartazh. Plain, even. “They came from Aare, but old Aare is no more. So they say, who have traveled the south; I have not.”

“Magelord . . . and that means?”

“Some of the mageborn retain the powers all once had. I myself have some—but much diminished, if the tales be true, from those with which the magelords came.”

The king sighed. “As I suspect it was my magic that called you, it is but courteous that I explain why. Your ancestors, king’s son, had long abused the powers they held before they came to this land. No blame to you, but when the pot’s broken, it matters not who spilled it—all must clean. Long and bitter wars have followed every trail your ancestors took; the Seafolk they raided and scourged from the eastern coasts fled seaward, and found this land, only to find your people moving into it from the mountains. Generations of war—which I, as a young man, helped to fight. Injustice on injustice, which I now feel called to redress.”

“You?” That got out; Luap clamped his lips on the “alone?” that would have followed.

“I have an heir. Several, in fact. I have a trustworthy Regent—”

The king’s glance went aside, to where the woman sat out of Luap’s gaze.

“And Council,” she put in. “You know my limitations.”

“If Gird sends you elsewhere on quest now—” the king began.

Another warm chuckle. “I’m not that old; you were still commanding the Company—”

“But—”

“And I’ll make no promises I can’t keep.” Luap flinched, and hoped the king didn’t see. From something in her voice, he knew it as truth: she had never made promises she couldn’t keep, and had kept promises he didn’t want to contemplate.

“I know. And you know my meaning. King’s son, I am going back to a place where I made grave errors; I will try to put them right. I need your help, and that of your people—Gird’s people—to bring justice to Aarenis and even to Old Aare. Now—”

As if that pause released his voice, Luap heard himself asking “Who is she?”

“A paladin of Gird,” she said, a bright shape once more wavering at the king’s shoulder. “Does that grieve you?”

She had chosen the very word. Whatever she was, he could not be. “Paladin?” he asked, clinging to the unfamiliar word.

“Gird’s warrior,” the king said. “Sworn to his service, under his command.”

Awe choked him again. “You’ve—seen—him?” Faster than speech could be, the hope ran through his mind that Gird had not mentioned him; shame made his ears burn.

“In my heart,” she said, bringing a fist to her chest. Now he could see clearly; a big fist, scarred with work or war, and a face that had seen a life’s trouble without hardening to bitterness. A yellow braid hung over one shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said again. “Gird will help you.”

Even the Sunlord wouldn’t help him, he thought miserably. If this was foresight, no wonder the gift disappeared; it would drive him mad, one more instant of it. He squeezed, trying to close his eyes, but could not. “Not me,” he said, with difficulty. “I—erred. Stupidly. Again. He warned me, but I thought—I could read, you see. I was smarter.”

“Smart enough to cut yourself with your own sword?” asked the king. His smile was rueful again. “I did that, too.” He flicked a glance at the woman. “We kings’ sons have much to learn from peasants, Luap.”

The rush of laughter came as suddenly as the tears, as despair; he gulped it down. “So . . . so Gird said. And Rahi.” At the king’s look of incomprehension, he added “Gird’s daughter.”

“I never knew he had a daughter,” said the woman; Luap winced, suddenly quite aware of the reason. He had left Rahi out of the chronicles where he could, helped by her own belief that being Gird’s daughter meant nothing special. If these folk were indeed from far in the future, when some at least of the records must have been lost, Rahi’s part might have vanished.

He could think of nothing to say about Rahi. He could think of nothing but his guilt, and the iynisin outside, waiting.

“You’re afraid,” the woman said. “What is it?”

Her voice soothed, warmed. “Iynisin,” he said. Best get the tale over with quickly; this vision had lasted a long time already. Without sparing himself, he told of the decision to move all the mageborn to the canyons, and how he and the others had used their powers to smooth the way, to make the canyons livable. Then of his dealing with the Khartazh, and his decision to use his power—he thought only his—to keep him young. And then the iynisin, whose influence at first escaped notice, until that morning’s attack, and then of the judgment of elves and dwarves that sealed the mageroads against them.

They stared at him, the two faces unlike but the same expression.

“We will die,” he said, facing it for the first time. “All of us. If we can’t go out to plant and harvest, or trade . . . we will starve.”

“What would you?”

“Escape, of course. Can you—”

“No.” The king’s face was grim. “I have no magicks to bring so many so far, from such a length of years. What I had thought to do was wake those found sleeping in your Hall—” Luap opened his mouth, and the king raised a hand to silence him. “Paks saw that, years ago. I presume that was you and your remaining warriors. She traveled by the pattern—the mageroad, you call it?—back to Fin Panir, where the Girdsmen rule; I had thought to ask you to go that way, or to another end—for some went elsewhere, the time Paks used it. But you are not now sleeping in that hall—at least, the man I talk to is not—”

“Sir king.” The woman’s voice carried power again; again she reminded him of Raheli. If Gird’s daughter had been fair instead of dark . . . he shivered, suspecting that she was Gird’s daughter in a way he had never been his father’s son. “If he is not sleeping, yet we found him sleeping—if peril threatens which he cannot escape, and fighting will not serve any good—Gird knows I understand the iynisin—” She turned to Luap. “They captured me, for a time.” Luap shuddered; her eyes were steady below the circle on her brow. “Perhaps you can suggest a way for him to save his people in that enchantment.”

The king’s eyes came alight. “And then—”

“And then perhaps a call to wake will actually awaken them.”

“But—” Luap cut that off. To sleep but awaken only to another danger, to whatever distant war the king had in mind, to waken only to more guilt, more peril . . . what purpose was that? Even if it could be done, why not simply die, and be done with life? Despair seized him again, and all he could remember were the numberless lies, the many times he had dodged trouble, to let it fall elsewhere. The face of his dead wife swam before him, for the first time in years; he heard his daughter’s pitiful cries as they dragged her away. He could hear his own voice, the perpetual whine that Gird had accused but he had never heard. And he had robbed even Gird’s daughter of her due, in shaping the chronicles as he had. He would be better dead; he would only ruin another man’s dream.

“All the others with you?” asked the woman. She had read his thought again, or it showed on his face for all to see. Now she shook her head slowly. “No—they can have a better death than that, to fall once more because you fell. And for you, too, death is not the answer.”

“How?” All his rage, all his sorrow, all his weakness; they knew everything now, or should have. “I was their king; I failed them!” He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to hold back the tears, then stared at her through that wavering pattern. “How many? Tell me—how many were left?”

“I . . . don’t remember. Fifty, perhaps. A few more or less. I was not counting them, and the High Marshals left them in peace.”

“We have more than that—some hundreds—” He could not reckon them up; their faces flickered through his mind too fast to count. Somewhere they had records, he was sure of that. “Children, parents, old people . . . not just warriors. . . .” He shook his head. “Few warriors; we were a peaceful people.” That too was his fault; guilt squeezed him harder.

“Yet there are warriors with you,” the woman said. “Two of them: who are they?”

He had forgotten: the dream or vision had taken him so far away that he had lost any memory of Seri and Aris standing near, holding him. He tried to see, tried to remember, but the woman went on as if he had spoken, her voice suddenly lighter. She spoke to them, not to him, some greeting that they answered, though he could not really hear it.

“I should never have been a prince,” he said, not knowing to whom he said it. Perhaps to himself, perhaps to Gird’s memory.

The woman spoke to him again: “What do you mean?”

“Do you know what my name means?” he asked. Irony flavored the thought, even now.

“Luap? It’s your name: that’s all I know.”

Luap looked for mockery on her face, and found only compassion and mild interest. “It means ‘one who holds no command,’ ” he said. “Or ‘one who does not inherit.’ Some called bastards that, when they meant to be kind. I was Gird’s luap—his scribe, his helper, his friend—but he forbade me command, and in the end I took the name of my position. Then he died.”

“Killing the evil monster,” the woman said, nodding.

“No. That’s what I wrote, thinking it more understandable than what he did do . . . and what that was I cannot say: you would have to have been there and experienced it. But he died, and released me from my oath—or so I thought. As you see I sought command. And this is what came of it.”

“You—oathbreaker?” That was the king, for whom command had no doubt come early and with no qualifications. “You seized your command against your oath to Gird?” No doubt, from the tone, what the king thought of that.

“At Gird’s death, he said he was wrong—about our peoples.” There was too much to explain, no way to make it clear. Luap found he could say nothing more, though his memories clamored for expression. “I thought,” he said finally, “that he meant I was free to bring my people here, and take command here—only here—if they agreed. And they did.” A long silence; he saw both faces clearly. “I was wrong,” he said then. “I thought I would be better than my ancestors; I was worse. And I don’t know what to do. Aris and Seri—” He could only hope that the woman now knew who Aris and Seri were. “—told me to pray, and when I prayed, I saw you.”

The king grimaced; the woman laughed—not cruelly, but in genuine amusement. “I doubt it will be so easy, Luap, but are you willing to try?”

“Try what?”

“If you got into this by taking command you should not have had, relinquish it.”

“How?” How could anything lift that weight from his shoulders? Who would take it? Yet he longed to hand it over, all his pride with it—anything, if only the wrongs he had done could be undone.

She grinned at him, and he could not help but feel better. “There is a king,” she said. A real king, she did not say, but meant. “Would you follow such a king?”

That was the king he would like to have been; a last stab of envy took his breath, a last certainty that that king had had an easier life, and then he felt the tears running down his face. “I would,” he said.

“Then be the luap you were: give Falkieri, Lyonya’s king, command, and obey him.”

Could he trust this stranger seen in a dream? Luap shrugged; he could not trust himself—this man, he was sure, could be no worse, not if he had a—what had she said, “paladin of Gird”?—to help him. “I will,” he said, and looked the king in the eyes. The king looked back; Luap would have flinched if he could, but then the king’s eyes warmed.

“Tell me about your people,” he said. “Tell me about your land, and what you know that might help us save them.”

“This is what you must do,” the king said finally. Luap nodded. He felt eased, though it was not over. “Your people must go—now—tonight—with your paladins to guard them.”

“My paladins?” He had no paladins he knew of, nothing like that woman with her strange ornament and her laughing eyes.

“Paks says your Marshals are paladins: Seri and Aris, is it? Yes. They must go with them, or your people have no chance at all. Then you will need some for a rear guard, who cannot expect to escape.”

“The militia, I suppose,” said Luap. His lips felt stiff. Seri’s militia, he might as well have said, for he had had nothing to do with it for years.

“You will stand guard,” the woman said. “Where we found you, on the stone arch there above the entrance of your Hall.”

“There isn’t an arch,” he said. “The mountain falls sheer. The arches are in other canyons.”

She shrugged. “By the time we come, it will be there; I saw you as a vast guardian shape, protecting that approach and the upper entrance from all harm, in Gird’s name.”

Luap would have protested: he wanted death, not an eternity of waiting, of the memory of all his errors. He wanted to ask how long he would stand there, how many hands of years. But he had given his oath; this last short time he could be true to it. As if she understood, the woman smiled at him.

“You loved this land,” she said. “You will be able to see its beauty all those years.” She did not say how many; perhaps she did not know. Despite himself, through all his guilt, that brought him joy. It was a mercy too great, and bought at too dear a price; tears scalded his face again.

“And I will need the use of your royal magery,” the king said, as if asking for the use of a spoon or knife. “I must command your people, through you, and this is the only way.”

“I—very well,” Luap said, hardly able to speak. “Go ahead.” He was aware of his voice, speaking the king’s words, but it seemed to come from some distance, as if he hung suspended between the vision and the place his body stood. He heard himself explaining, asking for volunteers for the rear guard, directing everyone to go now, to snatch up only what they could carry. Aris and Seri looked stubborn, and would not have gone with the others if something—he could not know what—had not intervened; he saw their faces change. Sorrow fought with hope, reluctance with eagerness. Seri embraced each of her militia in turn, then turned to Aris; hand in hand they led the others out of the great hall.

Then the king’s magery and his own twined in the last acts of power, preparing the enchantments that would let his survivors rest, that would place him once more where he had first seen his kingdom and imagined himself a king.

He stood poised on a great stone arch on the eastern end of the mountain; he could feel neither heat nor cold, neither wind nor rain nor snow, neither hunger nor thirst. Above him, above the clouds that blew past in the seasons, the stars wheeled in their steady patterns; he knew them all. Beneath him, in the hollow heart of stone, his warriors rested at peace, until they should be called to rise again.

Beyond his mortal vision, but within his dream, on the dark night his watch began, he had seen the fragile human chain make its way down the canyon. He had seen the glowing figures of those he had not recognized as more than Marshals; he had heard the cries of those who fell; he had known that some lived, that some survived to reach far Xhim and the sea beyond, and a few—a very few—returned to the eastern lands to tell of a disastrous end to his adventure. But they had all been children when the stronghold fell, and their tales, though he could not know it, were dismissed as children’s make-believe and soon forgotten.

He knew when the Khartazh soldiers came to visit, and found demons abroad once more, and saw the western canyons fill up once more with brigands who preyed on the caravans of the west. He knew what they said, how they mocked the folk who had once lived there, who had disappeared so suddenly.

He stood guard on the stone, year after year and age after age, bound to that place by his own magery and the magery of those who built it. In time the iynisin retreated to their lairs of stone; in time the trees grew again, in time the snows and floods of years tore down the terraces and left the canyon once more “no good for farming,” as Gird had said, with all the soil so carefully placed scoured from the canyons to dry and bleach on the desert far below. In time the stone beneath him crumbled, leaving him suspended on a vast arch of stone. He could not tire, but he could hope for an ending, a completion of the pattern once begun, a better completion than he had himself designed.

He knew it would come, because he had begun it. The paladin would come, and restore the mageroads; the king would wake his warriors. Then his long watch would be over; he would be freed to go before the gods. He knew that would come, because the king had promised, and the paladin had given her word, and they were not liars: he could trust their oaths. It did not depend on his.