Liar's Oath

Chapter Seven

Gird’s ideas of proper guidance surprised Aris and Seri both. For a hand of days, they lived in the old palace, free to run about and meet the others who lived there. The lad Aris had healed woke to comfort and health; he was shy at first, but soon treated Aris like a favorite brother. Gird’s luap tested their knowledge of reading, writing, and accounting, and argued that they should be kept among the clerks where those skills would be most useful. Aris decided he liked the man, though he didn’t want to spend all his time hunched over a desk. He found Luap’s mixture of grave courtesy and sadness fascinating, and hoped that he would be able to learn the healing magery. Seri, for once, did not agree with him: she didn’t exactly dislike Luap, but she could not, she said, see any reason for Aris’s fascination.

On the fifth day, Aris widened his explorations to the stables and cowbyres, where he met Gird’s old gray horse.

“You’re—you’re not old at all,” Aris said, staring wide-eyed at the gray. It looked nothing like a carthorse now, in the sunlight that speared through the doorway. Hammered silver, an arched neck, great dark eyes that looked Aris full in the face. Then it turned to Seri, whose breath caught in her throat.

“It’s not just a horse,” she said softly. The horse fluttered its nostrils and made a sound like a growl. Aris, entranced, put out his hand. Warm breath flowed over it.

“I don’t think anyone’s supposed to know,” he said. The horse bumped his hand with its muzzle. He wanted to touch it, stroke that head and that glossy mane. With a twitch of its ear, it gave permission. His hands moved without his thought, gentling and caressing, as he would have touched any horse. He always liked handling animals; he felt better when he touched them. This was more; he felt strong, safe, and alert “Does Gird know?” he asked softly, into an iron-gray ear. The horse drew back its head and favored him with a look combining mischief and warning.

“No,” said Seri, coming up beside him to fondle the horse’s other ear. “Father Gird doesn’t know, and he—” she meant the horse, “—thinks it’s funny. And in the legends, no one quite believes it. They don’t want to think about it. But how can anyone think you’re an old broken-down carthorse?”

In the way of horses, each of them received the full power of one dark eye, then the horse seemed to collapse in on itself. Suddenly it was thicker, stubbier, paler—no longer hammered silver, but the dirty gray of white cloth left out to mildew and weather. The hollow in its back deepened; it stood hipshot, head sagging over the stall door. It yawned, disclosing long yellow teeth; its lids sagged shut over those remarkable eyes.

“But why did you show us?” Aris asked. He was sure it had, that the horse had its own reasons for revealing to them what it concealed from others. Without a change in shape or color, this time, the eyes opened, and the horse looked deliberately from one to the other. Aris felt the hair rise all over his body, as if he’d been dipped in cold water. He felt even more alert, as if some great danger had passed near. Every sense came to him sharply. He could hear a horse five stalls down licking the last oats from its manger, and another slurping water. The voices of men in the yard outside, bantering about their work, were almost painfully loud. He could smell everything, from the pungency of the horses to the smoke to the last apples frost-pierced on the trees in the meadow. He could feel the clothes on his body, the slick hair of the horse’s neck, the pressure of the air in his nose that promised an autumn storm.

He glanced at Seri. She looked as if she felt the same. Her hair stood out from her braid as it did on cold clear winter days, more alive than some people’s faces. Now she looked the old horse full in the face. “We’re supposed to do something? We are? But we’re newcomers; we don’t know anyone. What—”

As if a large, warm hand had touched his shoulder, Aris felt calm rest on him. Not his calm: the horse’s. The horse shook its head sharply. “Not yours, then,” he said. “A god?” No answer, but it must be. A god wanted something from them, which meant they must give it, whatever it was. And they were to be ready—that much was clear—but whatever it was would come later, not now.

The gray horse yawned again, and when it was through stood looking even more aged and decrepit, if possible. “So,” said Gird from behind them. “You’ve found my old horse.” Aris managed not to look from the horse to Gird and back again. “He’s a good campaigner,” Gird said, rubbing the horse’s poll, “but getting long in the tooth.” The eye nearest Aris opened an instant; he felt the horse’s secret laughter. “You said you liked cows, boy,” Gird went on. “Come see ours. We’ve got two of the dun milkers and four of the spotted ones.” Aris glanced back as they left the horse stables and saw the gray horse watching them.

Gird lavished the attention on the cows that Aris and Seri had given the old horse. He and the cowman discussed them in detail, from their broad black nostrils to their carefully curried tails. Gird ran his hands over them, looking inside their ears, stroking their broad sides and velvety flanks, feeling the udders for any inflammation. Aris liked the smell of cows, and their complacent belief that grass counted for more than anything else, but he could see that Gird’s affection went beyond that. Finally Gird was done, and led them out into the meadow west of the palace complex. A few fruit trees, the remnants of a larger orchard, clung to their last leaves and some wizened apples.

“If you could live as you liked,” Gird said, “what would you do between healings?”

Aris thought. “Well—I could work in the stables—or I suppose with your—with Luap in the copying rooms.”

Gird looked at Seri. “I’d like to work with the horses,” she said. “If Aris is, that is.”

Gird nodded, as if that confirmed something he’d been thinking about. “That’s about it. You two have lived and worked together for years, but—but if one of you died, what would the other do? You, Aris, are willing to do whatever’s needful; you have the mageborn courtesy; you won’t say what you want most, and I’m not sure you know. Seri knows, and will say it, but then thinks she must stay with you. I would not split brother from sister or friend from friend, but the two of you need to learn that you can live out of each other’s pockets.”

Aris felt cold. Would Gird send Seri away?

“I’ve been talking to Luap and the Marshals,” Gird went on. “I don’t like to see younglings cramped inside with scribe’s work. Unless that’s what you wanted most, I wouldn’t have it so. You both need grange discipline, and you both need a chance to find your own balance. So here’s my thought.” He looked from one to the other, as if to be sure they were paying attention. Aris could hardly hear over the blood pounding in his ears.

“You, Aris, need to know herblore as well as your own magicks, and you need to be around others who heal in different ways. There’s a grange in the lower city that has three women with parrions of herblore in it; they have agreed to teach you what they know, and the Marshal can supervise your use of your own healing. You will be a junior yeoman, as you were in your own barton; you will spend your days in grange work and healing and study. And you, Seri, seem like to grow into a Marshal someday. For you I’ve found a grange with a healthy group of junior yeomen; if you have the abilities I suspect, you will be a yeoman-marshal soon enough. And yes, before you ask, these are separate granges. But both are in Fin Panir, and you will live here, near me, for the first year. You will still be together part of every day; but you will learn to trust others, and work with others, not just yourselves.”

This was so much better than what Aris had feared that he felt himself flushing with relief. “Thank you, sir,” he said. Gird smiled at him, obviously well-pleased.

“All right, then,” he said, “let’s go down to the city, and I’ll introduce you.”

Marshal Kevis of Northgate Grange welcomed Aris as warmly as any mageborn could expect. “A healer, the Marshal-General tells me. Gods, lad, if we’d known about you during the war! But you would have been too young, then, I suppose?”

“I didn’t know what I could do until later—at least, I thought it was only animals.”

“Gird said that, yes. Well. Suriya is our oldest herblore-healer; she wants to meet you at drill tonight. Her daughter Pir and her niece Arianya are the others. We have the same drill-nights as the other granges here, and I’ll expect you to attend unless you’re sick—or do you get sick?”

“Yes, Marshal,” Aris said. “I don’t think I can heal myself—if I could, I wouldn’t have gotten sick in the first place.”

“That’s sense. Well, then, be at drill, study healing with Suriya, and when someone needs your skill, come and tell me. If Suriya has nothing for you to do, there’s always work at the grange. Gird says you’ll be staying up the hill, with them—even so, you’re to come to me before you go healing someone.”

Aris nodded. He felt half-dressed, with Seri off somewhere else, but he understood what Gird was trying to do. Not split them apart, but teach them to grow on their own. When he asked, the Marshal had several chores he could do that day, until time for drill. The yeoman-marshal, a young man a few years older than Aris, put him to work chopping wood and carrying water.

Suriya was a gray-haired woman who looked old enough to be his grandmother. She laid a gnarled hand on either side of his head, and hummed, then nodded sharply and spoke to the Marshal. “He’ll do. The Marshal-General was right, Alyanya bless him: Here, lad, see what you think of this—” She handed him a small cloth bag of aromatic herbs. Aris sniffed.

“I don’t know much, but it smells like what my folk called allheal and itchleaf.”

“So it is, lad, with a pinch of dryhand, for them as gets the sweats without need. Scribes use that sometimes, that shouldn’t, for a natural sweat keeps the body pure, but they don’t like smudges on their scrolls.” She waved at two other women, who came nearer. “This is my daughter, Pir, and my niece who’s just come into her full parrion. You’ll learn from her first, if it doesn’t bother you to learn women’s things.”

Aris shook his head. “No, why should it? The law’s the same for all, and the gods gift whom they will.”

The women looked at each other, the family resemblance clear in the angle of eye, the set of the mouth. “Well, then,” said Suriya briskly, “we’ll get along. Aris, your name is, so I’ve heard—has that a meaning, in mageborn speech?”

“I don’t know,” Aris said. “I think it may have been a child’s name, and I never learned the other.”

“Ah. Well. It’s the wrong time of year to gather most herbs, but we’ve still some collecting to do: barks, roots, that sort of thing. We’ll meet you here at sunrising tomorrow, shall we?”

Aris ran back up to the palace, excited and worried both. He found Seri in the same mood, but in her it came out in chatter. “I like our Marshal,” she said. “I only wish you could be there—but I know what Father Gird means, and he’s right. He’s made me his yeoman-marshal’s helper, already, and I had no idea how much work there is in a city grange. I missed you, but I like it.”

That set the pattern for the next two seasons. Before dawn, both were off to their granges, to learn from the best their Marshals could find. They drilled with the junior yeomen, and both assisted the yeoman-marshals and Marshals in any grange work to be done. Aris spent hours with Suriya and Pir, sorting herbs into packets and sacks, learning to identify by smell dozens of different dried leaves, roots, barks. They taught him to brew some into thick dark teas to drink, and mash others to a paste with lard, to be spread on the skin. He went with Suriya to the people who asked her help. Many times his own gift did not wake; he simply watched as she applied her herbs, and saw how her very presence soothed the worried families. At night, back in the old palace with Seri, they compared notes. Her days, spent almost entirely in grange work, were very different from his. Beyond the usual drill, her Marshal had begun giving her extra classes in weapon skills. The first time she was allowed to use a sword, she came back almost glowing with glee.

“But Seri—” Aris didn’t know how to disagree with her; in all their life he never had. But swords were for hurting people; he knew she could not really want that. Not Seri, whose warmth was almost a healing magic in itself. Besides, swordfighters—soldiers—died younger than most.

“I am not becoming a bloodthirsty warrior,” she said, almost angrily. “You’re as bad as my Marshal. Stopped in midswing, he did, to ask what I was grinning about and scold me for it.”

“I know you’re not bloodthirsty,” Aris said, rubbing her shoulder where a knot of pain resisted his fingers. “That’s why I worry. If you wear a sword, someday you’ll have to use it, and you’ll feel bad about it.”

“I’ll feel worse if I don’t know how, and get killed. Or if others get killed because I didn’t learn enough. The Marshal-General didn’t like killing people, but he did it. He did it as quick and clean as he could.” Seri, unlike Aris, had actually watched some of the final battles, despite being warned off more than once by the rear ranks. She had come back white-faced and shaky, but ready to help tend the wounded. Aris had stayed near the fires, tending the wounded as they came from the field as best he then knew, unaware that the pounding headache and itching of his palms came from something more than tending smoky fires and boiling whatever herbs someone gave him.

“I don’t want you to die,” Aris said softly.

“I won’t,” she said. “I will work hard, and be very good.” It should have sounded arrogant, but it didn’t.

By the time Suriya was ready to send Aris and Pir out to collect the early summer herbs in the fields far from the city, Gird had decided that the two should live away from the palace, in or near their granges. Aris moved his small pack down to Suriya’s house, and slept on a pallet in the kitchen. He had been called out at least once every hand of days for a healing; it would be simpler to live here. But he knew he would miss Seri. The first time he had healed in Suriya’s presence, she had gasped and turned pale. Now she knew what to do, what he needed of rest, quiet and food afterwards. But her hands, warm and strong as they were, were not Seri’s hands; he never felt the same afterwards until, in his rare free time, he could get up to the grange where she lived and worked, and tell her what had happened. She seemed cheerful enough, but her face always lighted up when he came, as if she, too, needed the familiar audience for her own tales.

The young man strode into the courtyard like someone who had never been thwarted. Marrakai. Luap struggled against a lance of envy that pierced him. He had known, as a boy, what the Marrakai were; he had been taught, in those early years, the high nobility of both realms. He fought the envy down, refused that easy resentment. Marrakai, according to Gird, had lost their magery early, and adapted. Gird no doubt thought he had much to learn from the Marrakai. Perhaps he did, though he was sure that learning to live with the loss of a talent was not the same as learning not to use one.

The young man went to one knee before Gird, surprising everyone, including Gird; Luap saw the flush of red that darkened his neck.

“Get up, young Marrakai: we don’t do that.”

“You have my respect, Marshal-General.” He stood straight now, almost quivering in eagerness for something . . . Luap could not imagine what. What could a man like that need from Gird?

“Aye, well . . .” Gird rubbed the back of his neck with one broad hand. “You have mine as well, and your father. How is he?”

The young man grinned. “He’s still in some trouble with the king, Marshal-General. For all the king needs his support, he wishes it need not be so.”

“That bad, eh?” Gird waved the others aside, called Luap with a look, and sat heavily on the bench beneath the plane tree. “Here—sit and talk.” He reached beneath the bench and pulled out a water jug. “Thirsty?”

“No, sir—Marshal-General.” The young man leaned back, and stripped off his dusty gloves. “My father thinks the king will settle. He’s not like the old one; he’s got sense and no wish to evil. But he finds it hard to forgive my father’s support of the peasants.”

“I thought your father was going to stay at home and pull his woods up around his ears.”

The young man shook his head. “That was not his nature, Marshal-General, as I think you know. He could no more ignore a war than a fine horse can ignore a race . . . it began with sanctuary given to fugitives from other domains.”

Luap watched the Kirgan closely. The boy had Gird’s confidence and no wonder: he hung on Gird’s every word, eyes wide with admiration. Luap eyed the thick, lustrous cloth of his tunic, the oiled leather, finely tooled, of his belt, the carved bone hilt of the dagger in his obviously new boot. He remembered cloth like that, boots like that; the boy was rich, and had enjoyed a lifetime of such riches . . . which was fine; Luap could understand that. What he could not understand, or accept, was the way Gird accepted this youth, and his equally rich and powerful father, as friends.

I have served you honestly, he said silently toward the back of Gird’s head, and pushing aside the memory of that time when he hadn’t. And I would have been this boy’s master . . . but you never trust me this way.

“But in spite of that your father is satisfied?” Gird asked. Luap had already told him that, as had the first messengers back from troubled Tsaia. “He is sure the new king has no such powers?”

“He swears it,” the Kirgan said. “He considers the Mahierian branch the best choice, for all it angers the Verrakaien.” Luap wished he knew more about the Verrakaien, who seemed, by the rumors, to be as powerful as the Marrakai but utterly inimical to them. Rumor also gave them the largest remaining store of magery, along with whispered tales of its source. He watched the young man’s face, wondering how Gird was so sure the Marrakaien were telling the truth.

“And he has not taken the field at all?”

“No, although some of the local bartons sent volunteers. You did know that father allowed the bartons to organize openly?”

“Oh, yes.” Gird’s deep voice broke into a chuckle. “That news reached us quickly, I suspect.” It was not quite the reaction the Kirgan had expected; Luap recognized the flicker of eyelid, the tension of shoulder quickly controlled. “Luap—”

Luap recalled himself and said, “Yes, Gird?”

“The Kirgan Marrakai confirms our reports that Tsaia’s new king has no powers of magery, and that the merchants and craft guilds support his rule, while our supporters have mostly returned to their homes. I see no purpose in pursuing the war, with the most dangerous magelords dead—”

“Except the Duke Verrakai, Marshal-General,” murmured the Kirgan.

Gird’s shoulders lifted. “Far to your eastern border, Kirgan, and well beyond my reach. Those of you who know him best must do as you think wise, but you are not asking my aid, are you?”

“Well—no.” He had the look of one who would have taken help if it had been offered, and had been hoping for that offer.

“Then I see no cause for quarrel between your land and this. Is that not what your father meant by sending you?”

“Well . . . yes. To ask, rather, if it satisfied you.”

Gird heaved the kind of sigh that Luap had learned was intentionally dramatic. “Lad, I would be happiest if all the kingdoms lived in peace and plenty, but that’s not like to come in my lifetime. Men delight in quarrels, as cows in summer grass. But your father’s gold bought our freedom, in those steel points we used to let the mageborn blood run out—” Luap could not see the slightest flush, any sign that the youth considered mageborn blood his kin. Gird had told him the Marrakaien magery had been lost long before. How long? Long enough to consider themselves peasants? Not likely, with that air of mastery, that rich embroidery on sleeve and hem, those supple boots, that elaborately tooled belt. Was their friendship then pretense? What other motive could the Kirgan Marrakai have, coming to Gird, than that which he spoke openly?

He felt uneasy, all along his side, as he walked the Kirgan to the common dining hall. Gird had said, with a look that might have been meaningful (but which meaning?) to take care of him.

“He’s not changed.” The Kirgan sounded happy about that. Luap eyed him.

“Did you expect him to?”

“No. I suppose not. But my father told me that men in power often do.” A pause, in which they entered the dining hall, and Luap’s look quelled those who would have challenged the Kirgan. He showed the young man where to wash, and led him to the serving table. Would he expect fancier food? No—he dipped into the mutton stew as if he liked it, tore off a hunk of bread just as Luap did, and sat on the bench as if his rump were used to no better. “I saw that myself, in the new king we have.”

“Ah.” The new Tsaian king, which Duke Marrakai had backed against other contenders. “You are at court much?”

“Only to carry my father’s messages. He says court life is not healthy for young men—or for him, at present.” The Kirgan chuckled as he said that, and Luap smiled responsively. He could not decide if the young man’s frankness were what it seemed or not. He wished the Rosemage were there; she had known Duke Marrakai when he was young, though she would not talk much about him.

“So—has your new king changed?”

The Kirgan looked thoughtful and clasped his fingers as if that would help him decide what to say. “He was . . . they had always made fun of him. I heard that in the years I was in Valchai’s household. The king—the old one, I mean—had the mage powers our family had long lost, and some said that his cousin’s lack proved his bastard blood.”

A white rage shook Luap as a dog shakes a rag, then dropped him, leaving him hot and cold at once. He could feel his power struggling to escape, prove itself, but held it in check. He would not let this—this boy push him into anything rash. “Are the gifts then proof of pure blood?” he asked, as calmly as if discussing the color of a new calf.

“No. At least my father says not. Once perhaps they were, but when our folk came into the north, they began to fail, unaccountably and unpredictably. Some families accepted this as the gods’ price for the gift of a great new land, and others fought it . . . but that you know.”

“Yes.” It was all he could say, through clenched teeth; luckily, the Kirgan seemed not to notice.

“At any rate, the new king had been considered of no moment so many years that some thought he would be unable to rule. He was known to spend his days in the stables, training his own horses and even grooming them.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” Gird asked, setting his own bowl down on the table and grunting as he swung his leg over the bench. Luap bit his lip. Even now, he’d find Gird down in the cowbyres of a morning, humming over some cow as he brushed her. For himself, if he never saw a cow except on the table, ready to eat, it would be well enough. The Kirgan flushed, and Gird relented. “I know: your great lords aren’t supposed to do their own work. But if the man likes horses, how can he keep away? Still, he’ll be busy enough now to have no time for that, as I have no time for farming. . . .”

“Would you go back to it?” No one else had asked, that Luap knew; trust a rash youth to open his mouth and say it.

Gird sighed. “Now? I—I like to think I would, if the chance came. I miss it, the smell of the grass and the cows, the feel of a scythe handle as the blade bites into the stems. But my farm’s gone, my family’s gone—and that’s all part of it, you see. Not just any field, but the field I knew from boyhood, and the same cottage, and my family around the table. Friends beside me in the field, all that. If I went back to farming, took a vacant place, I’d have to do it all alone. That I don’t want: their faces would hover over the table, and I—I’d be alone.”

For a moment, Luap saw Gird in some cottage, surrounded by children and grandchildren—but it would not happen, and they all knew it. He suspected that Gird would make a less than perfect grandfather anyway.

The Kirgan said, “I have thought long on what you told me before, sir. I have been learning the skills of farming myself.” He opened his hand to show Gird the calluses on his palm as if they were battle scars. Perhaps they were, Luap thought. Gird clearly approved, and his nod seemed to mean as much to the boy as any praise. What kind of duke would he make, with the attitudes he learned from Gird? As difficult as the blend of mageborn and peasant in Fintha. Luap could not imagine how it would work in Tsaia, with the mageborn retaining their right to rule. His envy ebbed, thinking on the difficult task the Kirgan would face as time went on.

When Arranha invited him to one of the courtyard discussions, Luap went hoping to hear something which would help him deal with his own confusion. Instead, Arranha spent the whole afternoon propounding the idea that common daylight and inspiration were analogous: that the gods gave light to see with eye and mind both, that the mere exposure of evil by such light somehow ensured its defeat, that all good men would naturally choose to be flooded with that light, so that any errors could be seen and corrected.

Luap could not explain what bothered him about that doctrine. Gird, somewhat impatient after a day spent settling quarrels between granges, had no sympathy with his imprecision.

“He’s a priest, and a Sunlord priest at that. Why should you understand what he says?”

“He thinks we all should.” Luap rolled the quill in his hand. “He thinks we should all understand the gods . . . that the Sunlord’s light enlightens everyone. . . .”

Gird snorted. “There’s some as stumble into holes in broad daylight. Granted, we all stumble more in the dark, but—”

“That’s what I mean. If . . . if you’re thinking about something else, if you’re not using the light, you can run square into something . . . and if you’re trying to see, you can see better in dim light sometimes than midday glare. I think the mind’s light is the same, but Arranha doesn’t.”

“Mind’s light, or god’s light?”

“They’re the same, aren’t they?” At Gird’s expression, Luap tried again. “I mean, once inside your head—how can you tell? Light is light.”

Gird’s expression might have been pity, or contempt, or some combination. “I think if you ever have a god in your head, Luap, you will discover the difference. Now—about those grange rolls—” And he refused, with a glower and another question about the grange records, to enter into that discussion again.

Luap puzzled over it himself, day after day. Somewhere in that concept of Arranha’s something didn’t fit his own experience, his own knowledge of himself. Was refusing knowledge the same thing as choosing evil? Was his desire for the privacy of his childhood memories, his instinctive distaste for Dorhaniya’s reminisences, the same as turning away from the light? He could not tell, and he could not tell if that failure meant something.