Liar's Oath

Chapter Four

Raheli leaned against the barton wall, arms folded, watching the dancers through the open grange door. Out of courtesy for her, to spare her the long walk to the traditional sheepfold, they had brought the musicians here . . . they were dancing here . . . and she could do nothing but watch. She knew the music, the same as she’d heard all her life, and every step the dancers danced. She could remember, as if it had been yesterday, the night when Parin’s hand on her arm changed her from girl to woman. When the dance had changed from entertainment to courtship, and they had begun the dance of life that ended with his death.

She tried not to think of it; she had pushed it aside, so many times, from the moment the mageborn lords had broken his head. She would not let herself brood on it; it did no good. But the old songs ran into her heart like knives; for an instant she almost thought she felt the flutter of that life she had never actually borne. Her child, and his. The face that had come to her in dreams, as her mother had said her children’s faces had come. She could smell the very scent of him, feel the warm skin of his chest against her cheek.

The dancers shouted, ending one dance, and a short silence fell. In the torchlight, the dancers’ faces wavered, bright light and black shadow, as strange for a moment as ghosts. Raheli had the feeling for a moment that Parin and the child both were in there, somewhere, waiting for her. She had pushed herself off the wall before she realized what she was thinking. Her movement had caught someone’s eye; before she could return to her place, she saw people watching her. She would have to go in, and greet them. She tried to smile, and walked forward.

“Rahi! The Marshal’s back!” yelled some of the younger yeomen. A way opened for her. They had been dancing a long time; the grange smelled of sweat and onions and the torches and candles, more like a cottage during a feast than a grange. “Now we can dance the Ring Rising.”

They meant it as an honor. They could not know she had danced the Ring Rising with Parin, that first time. Rahi blinked away scalding tears, put off her old grief, and accepted the role they demanded of her. The musicians finished their mugs of ale, and picked up the instruments again.

Ring Rising had been, Gird told her once, older than any other dance. Something about it had to do with the old Stone Circle brotherhood, that Gird had turned into the Fellowship, in his own way. But long before, so the oldest tales went, the dance had raised stones, rings of stones, on hill after hill, until the mageborn came and struck them down with their new magic.

Hand in hand with her senior yeoman-marshal, Belthis, Rahi began the dance to the beat of the finger-drums. Couple after couple fell in behind them. It felt strange to dance this indoors; the walls seemed to lean inward, pressing on them. What if it did move stones? Rahi concentrated on the intricate steps, feeling her way back into the rhythms. Heel, toe, side, back, skip forward, stamp. A step, a double-stamp. Now a double line of couples, two concentric rings, then a swirl that twisted them to interlocking rings, dancing in and out of each other’s patterns. Soon all there had joined in, children and elderly as well as the young adults. Rahi found herself moving through four interlocked rings, touching hands with one partner after another for a quarter-turn, then swinging to find another.

It was in the midst of the dance, with the grange full to bursting of music and dancers, that she came face to face with her dream, the child she would have borne. Dark hair, dark eyes, Parin’s smile, soft fingers, light-footed and blithe. Her breath caught in her throat, but they had danced the pattern and separated again before she could get a word out. Tears burned in her eyes; she felt them on her cheeks, on the scar . . . and someone she could not see for tears put an arm around her shoulders, making sure she did not falter in the dance, until her breath came easily again.

It was not fair. It had never been fair. She rejected bitterness as instantly as she would have fear. Fairness had nothing to do with it, and everything, and was all Gird had wanted, and more than she would ever have. From bootheel to the top of her head, she felt the beat of that ancient dance, and from hand to hand the warmth and love of her people, and in the middle where the cadence and warmth met, she could feel her heart beating, expanding and contracting, as if it had grown larger than her chest.

Around her the faces glowed, all the children her children, all the men and women her brothers and sisters, her aunts and uncles, fathers and mothers. Her own scars bound her to them, to all those maimed or sickened by life’s disasters. Her people, with their ancient link to land and deeper magic than the mageborn would ever know . . . and it had not been fair, but she would make it fair. Light and dark, true and false, as simple as the realities they had all endured: hungry and not hungry, cold and not cold, pregnant and not pregnant. She felt herself rising above them, lifted on their affection and trust like a leaf on a summer wind, like the stones of the great rings in which peace and plenty dwelt. Here was the child she had lost, and the love she had lost, and here she would serve.

When the music stopped, she did not know it; she came to herself slowly, realizing silence and space around her. The torches had burned low, but gave a light unusually steady. Then, as she drew a long breath, the murmurs began. The senior yeoman-marshal of the grange bowed to her. “Marshal—it was our honor.”

“My pleasure,” she replied, hardly thinking. She felt different, but could not yet define the difference; she would have to think about it later. She glanced around. They were all watching her, most smiling, as if she were the favorite grandchild at a family gathering. Once, I was, she thought, and felt the scar on her face stretching to her grin. Now they moved closer, touching her arm, her shoulder; her heart lifted, suddenly exultant. She could have hugged them all, but had no need—she could tell by their expressions that they felt what she meant, just as she felt what they meant. Once, and again, she had a place, the place she had thought lost forever.

The next morning, she set out for Littlemarsh barton with a lighter heart than she’d had for years. She felt in place, comfortable; she thought of Gird suddenly with a warmth that surprised her. Could he have felt estranged, in these past years? She thought of him once more as a father, as the father he had been to her. Not perfect, not with his temper and his occasional bouts of drunken depression, but a man who loved his children even more than his beloved cows. For the first time in years, she let herself think of her mother: her face came to memory only dimly, but her words, her movements, the very smell of the bread she made and feel of her strong arms were as clear as if she’d died the day before. That was what she’d hoped to be—another woman like her mother—but time and chance had stolen that from her, as the lords’ cruelty had stolen her mother’s life, robbing her of peaceful old age.

Yet this morning, bitterness could not swamp the better memories. Mali had laughed a lot; even her scoldings had held warmth and good humor in their core. They had been, within the limitations of hunger and cold and fear, a family drenched in love. From that love, Gird had found the strength to hold and lead an army; from that love she herself had found the strength to come back from an easy death, lead others in battle, and care for them after. For all that had gone wrong, all the wickedness loosed on innocents that she had seen, love and caring had not abandoned the world—or her.

“Alyanya’s blessing,” she murmured, feeling the tears run over her face, knowing they were healing something. She was not cut off, alone, alienated from her people, a useless barren woman who could only hope for death. She had a family: all of them. She had given her blood, though not in childbirth, and this day she knew that gift had been accepted, by the gods and by her people.

I will go to Gird, she thought, half in prayer and half in promise. I will tell him he has a daughter again, and not just another Marshal. In her mind’s eye, she saw him grin at her; she saw his arms open; she felt the welcoming hug she had told herself she would never seek again.

Raheli dismounted stiffly. After six days in the saddle, she felt every one of her old wounds, and twice her age. She led her brown gelding into the stable, shaking her head at the junior yeoman who would have helped her. Taking care of her own mount came naturally to a farm girl. She stripped off the saddle and rubbed the sweat marks with a twist of straw. The junior yeoman had brought a bucket of water and scoop of grain; when her horse was dry, she put feed and water in the stall and heaved the saddle to her hip, closing the stall door behind her. Gird’s gray horse, in the next stall, put its head out and looked at her.

“You,” she said, with emphasis. The gray flipped its head up and down. Cart horse, she thought. Da should know better than that. She would never forget how it had shone silver-white in the sun at Greenfields. Here, in the dim stable, it looked gray enough, but she knew its coat would shine in the sun. It took her sleeve in its lips, carefully, its eyes almost luminous. She rubbed its forehead, scratched behind its ears, and it opened its mouth in a foolish yawn. “You don’t fool me,” she told it, and it shook its head. “Right.” Gird had loved cows, from her earliest memory, as much or more than people; she wondered that the gods had sent him a horse and not a magical cow. A snort from the gray horse. “I know—I’m not supposed to know the gods sent you.” She herself had discovered an affinity with horses, and the gray had responded much as others did, with its differences in addition.

Out of the stable, across the inner courtyard. In her Marshal’s blue, with the saddlebags that proclaimed her a visitor from some outlying grange, she found a way opened for her in the crowds (they seemed like crowds) that thronged the court and the passages of the old palace. The two guards at the outer door had nodded to her, not questioning her right to enter. Up the stairs, along the corridor, to the office where Luap—she had come to calling him that after Gird did—kept accounts and made the master copies of Gird’s legal decrees. She looked in—empty, but for the sick lad she’d heard about, asleep again. Gird’s office, near the end of the corridor, was empty too. She frowned. Usually this time of day one or both of them were at work here. She left her saddlebags on his desk, and went down to the kitchen.

“Rahi!” One of the cooks on duty recognized her at once. “When did you get in? How long can you stay?”

“Just now,” she said, pouring herself a mug of water. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here yet—where’s Gird?”

A sudden silence; eyes shifted away from her. She felt her heart quicken even before the first woman said anything. “Oh—he’s not feeling too well today. Nothing serious—”

He’d gotten drunk again. She was sure of it. She had come here to make peace with him, to restore their family, and he had gone off and gotten drunk. Rage blurred her vision, and she fought it down. She would not ask these people; it would embarrass them. She made herself smile. “Well—if he’s not up to work, perhaps I could find something to eat?”

“Of course.” In moments, a bowl of soup and a loaf were before her. “I don’t know if you remember me . . . ?” The woman looked to be her own age, or a little older, not so tall and plumper. Rahi tried to think, but nothing came back to her. “Arya, in the third cohort of Sim’s . . .” the woman prompted.

Yes. Arya had been thinner—they all had—but strong and eager, one who never argued about camp chores, either. “I do now,” Rahi said, pulling off a hunk of the warm bread. “You taught us all a song about the frog in the spring, I remember.” She hummed a line, and Arya grinned.

“You look like your da when you smile,” she said. “But dark hair . . .”

“My mother,” said Rahi, around the bread, relaxing. Arya had come from a vill much like her own; the talk about which parent a child resembled was as comforting as old tools. Next the talk would turn to their mothers’ parrions.

“Since you’re here . . .” Arya said, then paused, floury hands planted firmly on the table. Rahi swallowed the bread in her mouth and waited. Arya looked away, but didn’t move, and finally came out with it. “There’s some of the Marshals saying that now the war’s over, there’s no need for women to be taken into the bartons. There’s some of them saying the Code’s too partial to wives. Have you heard of that?”

Rahi nodded. “Mostly in the bigger towns, is where I’ve heard it. Mostly from men who weren’t in the fighting at all, crafters and traders and such.”

Arya sat down across from her. “It’s the same here, but some of the Marshals—I’d have thought they’d have more sense—some of the Marshals have taken it up. Taken it to Gird, even. I heard it myself, one evening: pecking at him like crows at a sack of grain, all about how there’s no need for it now, and the women won’t make good wives or mothers if they’re always drilling in the bartons. That in the old days our women had parrions of cooking or healing or clothmaking, not parrions of weaponwork.”

“He won’t listen,” said Rahi. “He lost that argument a long time ago.” She didn’t realize she was grinning until she felt her scar stretch; she was seeing in her mind’s eye the blank astonishment on Gird’s face that day in the forest camp.

“For you, maybe,” Arya persisted. “He would never try to stop you—but what about the rest of us?”

“But you’re a veteran,” Rahi said. “No one could put you out of the barton now—”

“Not exactly. Not yet.” Arya spread her hands. “I shouldn’t be bothering you, maybe, but you were the first—and we all look to you. Some of us don’t intend to be wives, or go back to farms; we like what we’re doing now. And if anyone can keep Gird from taking it away—”

“Don’t give it up.” She knew now what was coming, and hoped to head it off with a short answer.

“That’s what I say,” said the other woman, coming now to sit beside Arya. She was younger, darker, with the intensity of youth, Rahi wondered if she had ever been really tired. “It’s not up to Gird; our lives aren’t something for him to give or take. Arya’s a veteran, same as anyone else who fought; why shouldn’t she live however she wants? It’s not like she was a mageborn lady who needed watching.”

“But you know yourself, Lia, it’s not that easy—”

“Gird always said nothing’s easy that’s any good—isn’t that right?” The other woman faced Rahi with a challenging stare.

“But are you really afraid he’ll change the Code?” asked Rahi. “I’m not the only woman who’s a Marshal, you know.” But some gave it up, she reminded herself. Some went home, back to a family if they had one, or to start a second family if they’d lost husband and children. When she ran through the list in her mind, perhaps half the women who had won Marshal’s rank still held it. In her own grange, fewer women came to the drills as the memory of war faded, as fear of invasion lessened. She had not pushed them, she suddenly realized, as she pushed the men—she had accepted all the usual reasons: pregnancy, a new baby, a sick child, an ailing husband or parent.

“It’s not just the training,” the other woman—Lia—went on. “Who wants to fight in a war, after all? I was too young for fighting then; I train now because Arya tells me I should. Without her, I’d wait until trouble came before I picked up a sword. But the rest—you know how it was. Under the lords’ rule, women could hold no land, even as tenants; in the city, women couldn’t rent buildings or speak before a court for themselves. Father’s daughter; husband’s wife; son’s mother—that’s how it was for all but the mageborn ladies. My mother was a widow; she had no son. She had to ask her brother for houseroom for us, and I had to take him for my da. If the war hadn’t come, he’d have married me to the tanner’s son, and taken his share of the bride-price. The mageborn didn’t have that problem—that woman everyone calls the Autumn Rose, or the Rosemage—”

Rahi snorted; she couldn’t help herself. Arya grinned. “I remember what you called her, Rahi.”

“Don’t say it!” Rahi held up a hand, chuckling. “I’ve been told often enough how rude I was. Am. And if my mother were alive, she’d say throwing a name at someone is like throwing mud at the sky. It always comes back on you.”

“But what I meant was it was different for them,” said the younger woman, earnestly. “Their ladies had the right to choose; they had the right to learn weaponscraft—”

“Easy, Lia,” said Arya. “Rahi knows all that, none better.” She took the younger woman’s hand in hers, squeezed it. “Rahi’s not going to let her da, even the Marshal-General that he is, change the laws back and put free women under men’s thumbs again.” The look she gave Rahi said Are you? as clearly as words.

Rahi shook her head, and bit into the bread as if she hadn’t eaten in days. It made her uncomfortable, the way so many women acted around her, as if she were a sort of Marshal-General for women, and Gird was the one for men. Whenever she traveled, women would come to her with their problems, things their own marshals should have handled, things she had no idea how to handle. She supposed she deserved it: she had been the first, and the arguments she’d used on Gird still seemed reasonable. But when she heard them coming back at her from someone else’s mouth—and when some women went far beyond anything she’d ever meant—she never knew what to say.

They didn’t want to hear what she really thought. If she had had a family to go back to . . . if she had been able to bear children . . . she would not be a Marshal. She would have been happy to center a family as her mother had; she would have enjoyed (as, in her short time as a young wife she had enjoyed) the close friendship of other women in a farming village; she would have liked growing into the authority the old grannies had, when younger women came to her for help, one of the endless dance of women who passed on the knowledge and power that came with the gift of life. The peasant folk had always had a place for those who loved for pleasure, not bearing, but most of those married for children, and loved where they would. She had no way to understand those who were content outside the family structure, women who not only loved women but wanted no home as she knew it, wanted no children.

And even with those whose needs she understood, she felt she was the wrong person to help. She wasn’t the right age, the right status. To be one of the old grannies, you had to be a wife and mother first; you had to give the blood of birthing, the milk of suckling, proving your power to give life to the family, before you could share it abroad. She was no granny; she was barren, a widow, a scarred freak who would not fit in. The comfort she had felt at the dance vanished, and she blinked back the tears that stung her eyes, hoping the others did not notice, and finished her meal. Her past was gone, no use crying over it. That cottage would not rise from the rubble; those poisoned fields would not bear grain in her lifetime, and Parin would not rise from the dead to hold her in his arms, however she dreamed of it. And hers was not the only such loss; the only thing to do was go on. She struggled to regain the vision that had brought her to Fin Panir. She had said she would do what her people needed; if these women needed her, she must be what they asked.

“I don’t think Gird would change the Code that way,” she said slowly. “Not just for me, but because he really does believe in a fair rule for everyone. But I’ll keep my eye on it, how about that?”

“And on that luap of his,” said Arya, scowling. Rahi looked up, startled. He had seemed loyal to Gird, these last years—was he changing?

“What about him?”

Lia sniffed, and Arya’s scowl deepened. “He’s too thick wi’ that Autumn Rose, is what. And that old woman that brought fancy clothes for the altar in the Hall, she’s been telling him he’s a prince—”

Rahi shrugged. “Gird knew that, and told others. So?”

“But she treats him as one. What if he starts thinking he’d rather rule than be Gird’s luap? What if he has another child? What if the other mageborn are turning to him . . . eh?”

Rahi considered this. She had never liked Luap as well as some, or disliked him as much as others; in later years she’d come to think of him as important, even necessary, to the success of Gird’s purposes. A bit too confident in situations where an honest man wouldn’t be confident, but as Gird had said, if the gods could make a commander in war from a plain farmer, anyone could change. Yet—she doubted the gods had anything to do with Luap’s change, if it was a change. “I don’t know,” she said. “You know I don’t like the Rosemage, but Luap—he’s not the same as he was when I first saw him, and he’s not to blame for his father’s acts.”

“If you say so.” Both women had a sullen look Rahi could not interpret; she wondered what Luap had done or said.

“Rahi!” A man’s voice, from door to the courtyard. Marshal Sterin, she remembered after a moment. “When did you reach the city?”

She looked at the angle of sun through the tree in the courtyard. “Perhaps a hand ago.” Then it occurred to her that he had phrased his question curiously. Why? Why “reach the city” instead of “arrive?”

“Th’ old man’s had a bad morning,” Sterin said, coming in. The two women got up, silently, and went back to their work. Sterin sat where they had been. “He’d gone down to the lower market, on some errand, and met an old veteran from Burry.”

She had figured it out for herself; she didn’t want to hear it from Sterin. “He went drinking with him, did he?”

“Yes. We got him home all right, but—” Sterin leaned closer; Rahi noticed that he looked worried. “Did he ever talk to you about Greenfields? About before Greenfields?”

“No.” She had not seen him before Greenfields, except that one glance across the field; she had heard from others that he came down from the hill just before the battle started, and looked, they said, “strange.” By the time she saw him again, they had other things to talk of than the morning—and by the time she thought to ask, a season later, he would not speak of it. Everyone knew he would not speak of it.

“He said something,” Sterin said now. “He was drunk, yes, but his voice changed, and he said things. . . . I wonder if the gods gave him the words.”

Rahi doubted that. She waited; Sterin was silent a moment then told her the rest.

“He said he should have died, at Greenfields, and that all the troubles we have now come because he didn’t.”

“What!”

“Aye, that’s what he said. Plain as if he was in court, giving judgment. ‘I should have died,’ he said, ‘and that’s what’s wrong.’ The gods gave him a vision that day, he said, of a land at peace with him dead, and shattered with war if he wasn’t willing. Well, we were there, you and me, Rahi—we know how he fought. He didn’t save his skin by shirking danger; he and that horse were right in the middle of the battle. When he charged the magelords’ cavalry, I thought sure he’d be spitted.”

“Yes,” said Rahi, trying to remember anything but a confusion of noise and fear and stench. She could remember faces in her cohort, the thrust of pike and spear, the moment she slipped and fell, and someone yanked her up, but she could not remember anything of the shape of the battle. She had heard about Gird’s charge at the cavalry, but hadn’t seen it. All she knew was that it ended, at last, with the old king dead and victory for the peasants.

“So if the prophecy was that he’d have to be willing, I’d say he was—he proved that. Yet does that mean the prophecy was wrong, or he’s remembered it wrong, or is this something new?”

“I don’t know.” Rahi shook her head fiercely when Sterin kept looking at her. “I don’t, I tell you. He gets drunk sometimes, you know that, and drunken men spout nonsense. Why believe it’s prophecy? He may not remember anything of that morning but the end of it.”

“You could ask him,” Sterin suggested. “Maybe he’s willing to talk about it now, the morning after . . . maybe to you, especially. You are his daughter—”

She started to blurt “Not anymore!” as she had so often, insisting on her separation from all that daughter meant, insisting on her status as a yeoman and then a Marshal. But after all she had come here to regain that family name, and angry as she was at him for being drunk at such a time, she could not now deny that he was her father. “I’m a Marshal,” she said, after too long a pause. “Just like you: a Marshal.”

“If something’s gone wrong, something more, we need to know it,” Sterin said. “People heard, Rahi: people heard him say that, in the inn and on the street. They will talk; they will make stories about it. Luap is worried, too,” he finished, as if that would change her mind.

Rahi snorted. “Luap worries: that’s his duty. He thinks he’ll have to change the records, that’s what it is.” But Sterin still looked worried, his blunt honest face creased with it. “All right, I will ask. When he wakes, when I can see him.” Another task set her because she was Gird’s daughter, another burden she’d never asked for and did not want. The entire time she’d been insisting she was only a yeoman like any other, a Marshal like any other, people had expected her to have Gird’s ear: find out this, please make sure he does that, don’t let him do this other. Make him change the Code, don’t let him change the Code, tell him the Code will never work, explain that granges need more grange-set and that the farmer shouldn’t have to pay grange-set in a bad year. She wondered if anyone bothered Luap asking for Gird’s favor—it was his job, after all, to deal with such things.

Sterin left the kitchen, clearly relieved to have handed her the difficulty. The two cooks did not come back to chat, for which Rahi was glad. She wanted a few minutes of peace to think about all this, and decide which end of the tangled knot to grasp. Perhaps she should start with Luap, assuming he hadn’t been drunk, too. She wished she could stay in the kitchen, with its good smells of baking bread and stew and bean soup. She wished she could discuss it, parrion to parrion, with Arya, going back to the comfortable time when the way to chop onions, or season a soup, or preserve fruit, had been the most important topic of the day. She had not cooked, really cooked, for years; she eyed the great lump of dough Arya pummeled and wished she could sink her own hands into it.

But she would have to talk to Luap and Gird, bearing the grievances of some women and the fears of some men, worrying about prophecies and law instead of bread and meat. She sighed, finally, and pushed herself away from the table. Her bowl went into the washpot; she doused it and rinsed it and set it aside before Lia could intervene, and grinned at the surprised younger woman.

“My parrion was cooking and herblore,” she said. “In the old days.” Arya looked up at that.

“D’you still?”

“No—not much. I’ve five bartons and the grange to oversee, and the market courts as well.”

“Someday we won’t have parrions,” Lia said. “Someday we’ll be able to choose what we like.”

Rahi just managed not to stare rudely at her. “Parrions are what you like; I had my mother’s gift for it, and nothing made me happier than using it.”

“Not me,” Lia said. “I’d have learned leatherwork, if I could, but my uncle said girls must choose needlework, weaving, or cooking. And at that, he wouldn’t let me choose, but left it to my aunt.”

It must be the city way, Rahi thought. “A parrion is a talent,” she said firmly, “talent and learning both. If you’re not happy as a cook, why not learn leatherwork now?”

“It’s too late, and none of the leatherworkers would have me as prentice,” Lia said. She seemed to grow angrier as she talked about it, as if Rahi’s interest were fat dripping on hot embers.

“There’s a woman in my grange does that work,” Rahi said slowly. “She’s got a girl prentice.” She was realizing that even now she understood very little of the structure of city crafts; had city women been restricted in their parrions? Had the village girls? None of them, after all, were ever swineherd or tanner or—except in emergencies—drove the ploughteams. She had assumed those differences resulted from the magelords’ rules, but they didn’t really know all that much about their own ancestors. How much of what she saw now, in the villages and towns, was new, a still fragile structure?

Lia shrugged, the shrug of someone more ready to complain than change, if change requires effort. “It’s all right; I’m here and doing useful work. And with Arya.”

Another tangle. She wondered who would know how the crafts had been organized, which were traditionally men’s and which women’s. And how Gird could possibly come up with a law that would satisfy those who remembered the past and those who wanted a wholly new future.