Oath of Fealty

9

In the days before the mourning ceremony, Kieri’s daily schedule acquired some stability. Waking at dawn or before, a session in the salle with his Squires and Armsmaster Carlion, breakfast, a meeting with the Council, and then a longer session with one Council member after another. In the afternoon he visited his cohort and took exercise, then met again with his advisers. His elven relatives insisted they needed at least two hours a day for his schooling in matters elven, but the first session with Orlith consisted of sitting in silence as he tried—with little success he was sure—to open himself fully to the taig.

On the day before the mourning ceremony, Sier Belvarin came to instruct him in the rites, bringing with him two other Siers and the Seneschal.

“The ceremony’s … different … than it is in Tsaia,” Belvarin said.

Kieri waited out the glances, the shifting of hands on the table.

“You see,” one of them said, with a quick glance at the others, “we bury them.”

“Yes …” That didn’t sound different.

“It’s—you do know the Lady of Peace?”

“Of course,” Kieri said. Did they think because he had been a soldier he would not know of Alyanya?

“It’s the land.” Another long pause, another set of looks exchanged. “Well, we’re old in the land here, you see. Before the magelords came, there were people here. Humans. In Tsaia, too, but the magelords conquered them. Here, we have the old ways.”

The old ways. Kieri had read, with some scorn, the Girdish beliefs about their origins before the magelords came. All peaceful farmers and herders, but they had shed blood to thank Alyanya for the gift of fertility … was that what this was about?

“You blood the blade before setting iron to the soil?”

A look of relief from all of them. “Exactly. You know this?” Belvarin asked.

“Well, yes. I thought everyone knew that. I know some of my—my former—landholders did that before ploughing or digging. We blooded our blades at the Spring Evener.”

“So you see, then, that when someone dies, they go to the land, to return to Alyanya the gifts of flesh she gave them in life. They feed the land, so the land will feed others. That’s the first ceremony, returning to Alyanya what she gave, fruit for fruit. And then, when the time has passed, they rise again, clean bone—”

A distant memory pricked. Before Aliam raised him to squire, he had been sent up in the attics to look for holes in the roof after a windstorm—there’d been broken slates in the courtyard—and as he looked around in the dim light he’d seen a gruesome face leering at him. He’d managed not to scream, but he’d fled down the ladder, shaking, only to have Estil tell him it was only a skull. Only.

“You dig them up?”

“Yes. And that’s the greater ceremony, raising the bones and carrying them to the memory-hall.”

Kieri felt the small hairs rising on the back of his neck, as if they were tiny bones themselves. “Memory-hall?” he said, keeping his voice as level as he could.

“Every village had one, once,” Belvarin said. “It would be in the appropriate place, and the elders’ skulls were mounted to the center posts—but we don’t do that anymore. After the elves came north and made a pact with our people and those of our people who came from Tsaia when the magelords invaded—the old people, this is—the customs changed.”

“I had forgotten the skulls,” Kieri said. “In the attic at the Halverics’—”

“A fine family. Very traditional. So you see, my lord king, when the time is come, your part in the ceremony of recovering King Sarnion’s bones and placing them in the palace hall of memory will be longer than this one. It is a celebration: the Lady has accepted the gift, the land has been renewed.”

“I see. And when will this be?” Kieri had no idea how long it took for flesh to peel from bone in the earth.

“Not this fall harvest or the next but the one after that: the Fall Evener.”

Since the old king’s body was already in the ground, the formal memorial in which Kieri took part consisted of a short procession in which Kieri carried boughs of the important trees, and laid them in a certain order on the grave. He did not recognize the boughs, leafless as they were, but trusted Belvarin would have made sure which was which. It did not seem enough, for a king’s recognition of his predecessor, but it was what tradition required.

Afterward, the Seneschal led Kieri to the palace ossuary. “It’s a bit different here, because it’s the royal residence, you see. In a private home, there’s just the skulls in the attic, and maybe a bone-house somewhere. But here, it’s a kingdom’s history. All except the skull of King Darien, the first king, of course, because that was mortared into the top tower.”

The ossuary lay underground. Kieri had no idea what to expect, but did not expect to be impressed by mere bones. He’d seen enough of them on battlefields, especially that last year in Aarenis, when every field sprouted bones instead of grain.

The Seneschal unlocked a brass-bound wooden door. Above it Kieri saw fresh green branches laid across wooden pegs. “This one’s the ancestors’ home and that other one—” He jerked his head toward another similar door. “—is the treasury.” The treasury door had no green branches over it. “Now, this line of green stone, my lord, this is for respect. We go barefoot here.” He kicked off his palace slippers, revealing knobbly old man’s feet, blue-veined, and looked at Kieri’s boots. The look conveyed a command, but he said nothing. Beside the door was a bench; the Seneschal waited until Kieri sat on it, and then knelt to help him pull off his boots and socks. Kieri’s bare feet looked incongruous to him, under the formal robes he wore, but the stone felt warm and smooth, almost comforting.

When the Seneschal pulled the door open, Kieri expected a musty smell, familiar from cellars and barrows, part earth and stone enclosed, part bone. Instead the air had the freshness of spring outside. He’d expected a dim chamber filled with dusty old bones, cream, white, yellow-brown, gray. Instead, the ossuary blazed with color against whitewashed walls. Kieri stared. Human bones didn’t come in those colors—colors as bright as fresh-dyed yarn, as flowers, scarlet, green, blue, yellow. Here and there light glinted from other things—from curves of metal, copper and bronze and gold and silver. And on every skeleton, fresh green leaves, one between the teeth, one across each eyehole, one on either side, where ears might have been. They looked as if they’d been picked that very morning.

“What—?” Kieri choked back all he was tempted to say and instead said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” the Seneschal said, obviously pleased at the surprise he’d arranged. “This is the old way, you see. Remembrance is a form of honor, so nothing should be forgotten that is honorable to a king or queen. In the old days, before the magelords came, it was mostly simple things—this one was good with sheep, that one was a good cook. Simple dyes and a little knife-work made that clear. But kings, my lord, as you know, have more complicated lives, and so their bones must hold more … the first few kings, indeed, were scarce honored more than their people; their bones hold simpler stories and the old-fashioned decoration. You’ll see that in a moment. It was two or three generations before a king thought to find a bone-artist while he still lived, and explain what he wanted. But here’s your father, you’ll want to see him.”

Kieri did, and did not. The father he barely remembered, the bearded man who had picked him up and swung him about … that was a live man, however brief his memory. Bones meant death, meant he would never see his father in the flesh again. But it was tradition, and he followed the Seneschal farther into the ossuary.

“Here he is,” the Seneschal said.

The bones were neither fresh nor ancient, each set neatly as near to its place in life as possible, and each painted in brilliant colors, scribbled with thin black lines that Kieri now realized were script.

His father. His father’s bones. Kieri stared at the skeleton, wondering what he was supposed to feel. The colors made him uneasy: white bones, clean bones, were natural things, but these colors, this writing, seemed … alien.

“You may not be familiar with the script used,” the Seneschal said. “It is very old. I can translate for you.” Without waiting for Kieri’s word, he bent over the pelvis. “This, right here, tells of your birth. See, the background color is that used for sons, and it gives your birthdate, your mother’s name—”

Kieri shivered. He could read the script now, as he could not a few moments before; the words flowed through his mind in a voice he knew instantly was his father’s.

For on this day my son Falkieri was born, and we rejoice in his strength and pray all the gods for his long life, health, and joy.

“I can read it,” Kieri said, fighting the lump in his throat. He could read all of it, the writing voicing itself, the colors and script together making pictures as well as words, telling the story of his father’s life. Not far from his own birth was the birth of his sister. Not far from that, the anguish his father felt when his wife—Kieri’s mother—and Kieri disappeared, when word came back of her certain death, and his presumed. His father had grieved for years, pouring all his affection onto the sister … had died of grief, in the end.

Tears rolled down Kieri’s cheeks, through his beard. He could feel them, but he could not stop them; he did not try. His father … what would his father have thought of the man he’d become? He could be glad his father did not know what had happened to him, those bitter years of captivity; he wished his father could have known how his son was saved by a family he loved—his friends. He felt now, bone to bone, that human kinship; he knew his father’s favorite flavors, colors, pursuits, as if they were his own.

More than the elven sword, more than the Council’s acclamation, bound him here now. This was the human half of him, bone and blood, not song and immortality and the uncertain bounds of the elvenhome kingdom where his grandmother ruled. This was truly home, not just a childhood memory, but the place his bones knew, and where his bones would lie.

At last he turned from his father’s skeleton. “My sister?”

“Over here, on the women’s side.”

Laid with her were the few fragile bones of her child born dead. She had been taller than their father, as he was; her skull bore the shape of her elven blood, and her pelvis had not yet broadened as much as it might have, had she lived longer. The writing on her bones included the stories she’d been told about him, about the older brother who had disappeared, about her sense of duty, born of his loss. She had resented it sometimes; she had once or twice blamed him for their mother’s death, since that journey had been for him, but she had transferred that blame to their grandmother, and that—no forcing by a nervous Council—was the real reason for her early marriage, her decision to bear a child when the Lady advised against it. It had not been her brother’s fault, she had decided, but their grandmother’s, for insisting that the boy must come to the elfane taig to have the sword pledged to him and his own powers wakened.

Yet she had been, within her understanding, a good queen: loving, diligent, worthy of all the honor heaped on her. He remembered her now, her voice coming to him and wakening all the old memories of her birth, her baby face, her first struggling steps. He had been told he must care for her, protect her, that his status as elder brother meant responsibility, not power … and she had died because he was not there.

He could not have been there. Tangled in that he felt all that had happened over again, including Aliam’s decision not to tell anyone he might be the prince. He did not blame Aliam … but was that true? Had he not, for an instant, blamed Aliam? He had, just as his sister had blamed him … but fifty-odd years of experience refused to lay that guilt on the man. We are not gods, to know all. We do the best we can. Aliam had said that, when someone made a mistake and Kieri had laid blame. He could not have known. You would not have known. His sister had not known. She had been willing to die for her kingdom, but she need not have died, and the kingdom would have prospered more if she had not.

He would not blame her. He would not blame Aliam. He would not blame the Council that had pressured her, or their grandmother, who had told their mother to bring him.

When he was ready to leave that chamber, the Seneschal offered a green cloth, to wipe his tears, and then another. One was laid on his father’s breastbone, and the other on his sister’s. Kieri had no more tears to give.

With his boots back on, he came out into the spring sunlight, aching a little as one does after long sorrow’s ease. The King’s Squire he had left to wait for him stepped forward. Kieri turned to the Seneschal. “The leaves?”

“Connect the bones to the living earth, to Alyanya of the Flowers. So the bones remember their life, and the living remember those whose bones lie there.” He said it as if Kieri should have understood that himself, and Kieri realized he would have, in a few minutes.

He felt the sunlight on his face, on his shoulders through his robes, striking warm and comforting as his parents’ hands once had. Through the air came scents of spring, green things growing, flowers’ sweetness. When he died, his bones would have that connection, would not forget that he had lived, had been nourished by the same soil, the same air and water, that fed the great trees. His growing taig-sense felt the trees, steady, comforting.

“Thank you, Seneschal,” he said. “Thank you for all you have done, and do, and for teaching me, who should not need teaching—”

The Seneschal bowed, a deeper bow than before. “My lord king, it is an honor to guide one who needs no teaching, but only the chance to learn. Your father is well pleased; you have taken away the fear and grief of his life and death.”

“You felt that?”

“Oh, yes. No one may serve there who cannot sense the bones.” The Seneschal looked past Kieri to the trees. “I know, my lord, that you are trying to heal the breach between human and elf, and this is a fine thing to do, and something that must be done. But here, in the house of bones, this is a human thing. It is not what elves do; it is, they have said, beyond their understanding. We keep very old ways here, my lord, and they have agreed it is right for us to do so.”

“It is in my bones, too,” Kieri said. “I have no wish to interfere, even if all your assistants are of pure human heritage. And yet you lay out the half-elven, such as my sister.”

“It is hard to explain, my lord. You are right: only those of human blood—and old human at that—serve under me. The bones need those around them who understand, and elves do not.”

“Yet I am part-elf and they spoke to me.”

“They are your ancestors and relatives; it is a family thing with you. With others, not of the family, it is harder.”

“I will not interfere,” Kieri said again. “I do not fully understand, myself, and perhaps that is my elven heritage showing. I do understand that it is a good—no, a vital—task that you perform, and you have my goodwill in it.”

“Thank you, my lord,” the Seneschal said.

Kieri turned back to the palace, and went inside, flanked now by the King’s Squire. His stomach growled suddenly and he realized he had spent half the morning in the ossuary. Lunch should be ready …

The small dining room’s table was centered with flowers, and a nosegay of flowers and herbs lay beside every plate. Kieri looked at the steward, brows raised.

“The ceremony, my lord. Marks the end of the mourning period.”

Around the table, those he’d asked to come in for the afternoon’s work waited for him to begin, so he helped himself to cheese and bread and pickles. A jar of his favorite chutney sat beside his plate; none of his staff had yet acquired a taste for it, spiced as it was with southern peppers. When all had finished, the servants cleared the table.

“So now we have your coronation, my lord,” said Sier Halveric. “I brought the plans …” He handed over a sheet of parchment with the order of ceremony, the list of participants and invited guests, and another with the supplies, and finally the total cost.

Kieri read both carefully, while the others waited, chatting quietly among themselves. His mother’s mother, the elven Lady of the Ladysforest, from whom the humans of Lyonya held their rights to the land, and who ruled the elvenhome kingdom, would be a participant. Halveric had left spaces for the names of her attendants. The Captain-General of Falk, the members of the Council, all had roles in the ceremony. So did Paksenarrion, who had found and brought him. The main part of the ceremony would take place in the King’s Grove, not in the palace or its grounds—that did not surprise him, not after the time he’d spent here. Nor did the presentation of the new king to the bones below, including another visit to the previous king’s grave.

A procession through and around the city … a feast for all who came … that was the greatest cost to the Crown. Kieri had specified that no one else need wear new clothes, and the ceremonial banners of the previous king’s reign—used so seldom—could be reused. The cost lay well within the amount he had given Halveric.

“This is excellently done,” he said finally, looking up at Halveric. “I am surprised you managed the cost of so large a feast so well …”

Halveric flushed a little. “Your elven relatives, my lord, offered to share the cost and pledged half the feast.”

“Even so,” Kieri said. “It is excellently done and I appreciate your efforts. Now—have we heard from foreign guests?”

“I have heard from Tsaia—under the circumstances, they cannot risk the crown prince, but an envoy will come. Prealíth and Kostandan will send envoys as well. We have heard nothing from Pargun, as expected, since we did not invite them.”

“If they come in peace,” Kieri said, “we will be polite. If they sulk at home, so much the better.”

“If it were up to me, I’d build river forts against invasion, but most on the Council don’t agree.” Halveric kept his voice low.

“So … is it the elves who set the people against defense? Is it their enchantment?”

Halveric shrugged and spread his hands. “Truth be told, we don’t ask things like that. Aliam tells me war is brutal and he hopes there’s never another war this side of the mountains … and he makes his living by it, as did you. He says those of us who want to arm against Pargun don’t know what we’re asking for.” He looked at Kieri expectantly.

“He’s right that war destroys … can destroy everything.” The memory of that last campaign in Aarenis came to him again, barren fields sprouting bones, burning cities, once-prosperous villages sacked and their populations scattered, to beg along the roads. He wrenched his mind back to the present. “I profited by war, Sier Halveric, because it existed, not because I thought it good.” All but that one year, when a rage for vengeance had driven him past all reason. “Like Aliam, I would not see here what I saw in Aarenis—or for that matter in my own lands in Tsaia, when the Pargunese or the orcs attacked and good people died. And yet, unlike the elves, I am more willing to recognize the reality of intractable conflict, and use force when nothing else will serve. I would appreciate your assessment of any strategic dangers. Or those of anyone else who has studied these things.”

Halveric nodded sharply. “So I had hoped, my lord king. So I had hoped. I have no fear or hatred of the Sinyi, and indeed some Sinyi blood runs in our veins, but I worry about the security of the realm on several accounts. We cannot trust in elven powers alone—your mother’s death and your captivity prove that, if incursions from Tsaia, through Verrakai lands, and threats from Pargun, were not enough.”

“We will talk again in a few days,” Kieri said. “For now, we have my cohort of trained troops, should anything happen before the coronation. I would appreciate your assessment of what other defensive measures we could take.”

Halveric bowed, and took back his lists. The rest of that meeting, as the others discussed the coronation plans and which of their relatives were coming to Chaya, Kieri’s thoughts wandered to Tsaia and his stronghold. Arcolin should have been to Vérella by now. Would the Regency Council have taken his advice and given Arcolin the North Marches? Would he have taken a contract? He might be on the road to Aarenis. And why had no courier come from Vérella, to let him know what was happening? Surely they realized he needed to know how things stood with the Verrakaien.

As if in answer to that thought, Garris stepped into the room, escorting a man in Tsaian colors. “Sir King—a courier with urgent messages from Tsaia.”

Kieri’s glance cleared the room. The courier handed over a dispatch case. Kieri opened it and unrolled a scroll tied with rose and white ribbons and sealed with the royal seal.

Kieri read with growing alarm of the attempted assassinations, the deaths of Duke Verrakai and his brother, the Order of Attainder on the Verrakaien as a whole and those in the immediate family of Konhalt, the unsettled state of the eastern half of the realm.

Kieri frowned. A single cohort in Aarenis—that would be hard to manage, unless Arcolin took along extra support staff. Had he thought to do that? Then he shook his head. Arcolin was no longer his concern. His concern was here and now: Lyonya’s west border and the Verrakai. They had recently lost a battle—how much had that degraded their ability to attack? Dorrin’s cohort was all he had—if he gave that up and sent her back to Tsaia, he’d have no real troops so far as he knew. He wondered if Aliam Halveric’s company had left for Aarenis yet. And how many forest rangers were there? Who commanded them?

He asked Garris to find Sier Halveric. Halveric came back into the room looking worried.

“Here’s the word from Tsaia,” Kieri said, handing him the letter. “I wanted to talk to you before telling the whole Council, since you seem to have more grasp of our defensive situation. What forces do we have, to oppose the kinds of trouble you think likely?”

Halveric ticked them off on his fingers. “Our forest rangers, to the number of perhaps a thousand. Not many, to cover the entire realm, but the greatest number are deployed along the western border. They operate in small groups—mostly a hand or so, rarely more than three hands unless one calls for help—”

“What are their arms?” Kieri said.

“Blackwood bows,” Halveric said. “And swords, of course.”

“Training?”

“Woodscraft, primarily, and archery and fencing.” Halveric made a face. “Aliam’s pointed out to me before that they are not trained as a regular fighting force, the kind he uses. Archers, he says, are an adjunct to soldiers in formation, soldiers armed with polearms or sword and shield, like his company. Then he goes off into a spiel about mixed-arms tactics and I get lost. But I do understand that we have nothing that counts as an actual army, unless you count the Royal Archers.”

“And what are they?” Kieri asked.

“A longbow archery company, two hundred strong. You’ll see them at the coronation. They march and drill just like other foot soldiers.”

Kieri thought back to Aarenis. No one there used longbows; he’d had one of his cohorts trained in crossbows and had hired or allied with specialist crossbow units as well … but two hundred longbows …

“I suppose longbows haven’t the range of crossbows,” he said. “Or do they? They must be more awkward to carry and handle.” In his mind, he saw archers struggling through the woods, the longer bows catching on every vine and twig.

“Hardly,” Halveric said with a smile. “Didn’t Aliam talk about them? And doesn’t your paladin have a blackwood bow she got from our rangers? Talk to her, and find out why we never export bow-length blackwood.”

“But two hundred archers … against the Pargunese—” The Pargunese, he knew from paid spies and his own observations, could put two thousand troops in the field.

Halveric raised an eyebrow. “Do you know what happened during the Girdish wars?”

“No.” And what could that matter, as long ago as those wars had been.

“Quite a few Tsaian magelords thought it would be a good idea to shift into Lyonya, and drive us out. They knew we had no standing army, and even though they had been held back when the magelords first came over the mountain, they thought they had the resources to succeed.”

“But they were already fighting the Girdsmen,” Kieri said. “Why would they start another war?”

“They didn’t think they were starting another war,” Halveric said. “They thought they were invading a helpless neighbor who didn’t have the population or will to stand up to them. They knew that the humans in Lyonya were the same stock as those they’d conquered. And they knew somehow—how, I don’t know—that the Ladysforest elves were away, involved in something else.” He paused, and picked up a pastry from the tray. “They expected us to break as easily as this—” He broke the pastry. “And to be as soft inside. But they failed.”

“Because of blackwood bows?”

“Blackwood bows and those who know how to use them, to advantage.” Halveric spread his hands. “I know what Aliam does, what kinds of troops he has. He told me how you fought in Aarenis. Open ground, for the most part. Sieges of walled fortresses and citadels. Blackwood bows—if you could even get them—might not do as well there. But here … I think you will be pleasantly surprised.”

“Who commands these forces?” Kieri asked.

“You do, Sir King, if you choose to act directly. In the past hand of years, the king has left such matters to the Council in whole, and the Council has not been much interested. I am seen as dangerously influenced by my brother, but in fact Aliam’s descriptions of war terrify me. Only, like Aliam and you, I see that intending no harm is no protection.”

“But in the field—who decides where they go and what their orders are?”

“The forest rangers are divided into four groves, one for each border, and each commanded by a grove-captain. These have their orders from here—from me, if it seems needed. It was my decision, for instance, to move a half-grove from the southeast to the southwest, to provide more protection from Tsaian problems. Most of our southeast quarter, after all, is within the Ladysforest.”

“A wise move,” Kieri said. “What protection for the riverside?”

“The northern grove of rangers, and the three river towns with forts,” Halveric said. “The forts are manned by city militia … perhaps twenty or thirty in each.”

Clearly inadequate to prevent a river crossing. Though, he supposed, archers shooting from the forest cover could make rowing across the river very difficult.

“And who commands the Royal Archers in the field?” he asked.

“In the field? I have never known them to be more than a half day’s march from Chaya. They have a captain, of course. You should meet him, I suppose.”

“Indeed I should,” Kieri said. He sighed, thinking how far all this was from any real defensive force. Bowmen skulking in the woods could certainly delay an attacking force, but he wanted better. “How do you think others will react to this news?” He tapped the letter.

“They’ll be frightened,” Halveric said. “As I am. Worried. And the Tsaians want that cohort back. I was half hoping you’d retain it permanently.”

“It seems a time to press the Council about defenses,” Kieri said. “I was going to wait until after the coronation, but this gives reason.”

“They’ll balk,” Halveric said. “I would advise waiting—but then, they will balk any time.”

“They must at least know what the news is,” Kieri said.

He called the Council in, and read them the letter from the crown prince.

As he’d expected, they were frightened.

“They can’t make you send your soldiers away,” Galvary said. “Can they? They’re yours—”

“Mine when I was a duke in Tsaia,” Kieri said. “They’re Tsaian. Besides, only days ago you were wanting me to send them back, remember?”

“Yes, but—but if the Tsaians are going to cause trouble we need something—”

“We do,” Kieri said. “But until we know what Captain Dorrin’s orders from the Crown are, we can defer this discussion.” Down the room, the elves and Sier Halveric all gave short nods of approval.