Surrender None

Chapter Thirty-one

Greenfields broke the king’s power, and gave Gird control of the main grain-growing regions of Finaarenis. But it was not the end of the war. Those lords who had not joined the king’s army, for whatever reason, were now sure destruction loomed. Some walled themselves in Finyatha; others fled toward Tsaia. Heirs of lords killed at Greenfields squabbled over inheritances now in jeopardy; rich merchants, who assumed a peasant government would have no desire or need for fine goods, appealed to the remaining lords for help.

Gird knew all this, and much of it he had anticipated, but his first problem was securing the year’s limited harvest. Where there were no lords, there might be brigands. He split his army into sections, put each under a high marshal, and sent them to settle the countryside. He himself rode for the north, crossing the Honnorgat for the first time in his life on the gray horse, which seemed less like a broken-down carthorse every day. He could stay on at a trot now, although he preferred the swinging canter. Most of his marshals had caught a horse and learned to stay on it, as well. It made supervising a march or a movement much easier, and messages could pass far more quickly. Feeding the beasts was another worry, but men could not eat grass, and horses could. In summer, at least, they could afford a few horses.

Rumors of the king’s defeat spread even faster than Gird had expected. In the north, he and his column found mostly deserted, looted manor houses, and celebrating peasants. Few of his recruits had come from the north—in fact he had trouble understanding their speech—but they seemed genuinely pleased with his success. He wondered if the quickly-established bartons in each village would ever amount to anything, and prayed that war would not test them.

Finyatha offered a different problem. Largest and richest city of the north, the seat of the Finaarenisian kings, it hung just out of his reach like a tempting plum. Most of its people were common folk, as everywhere, but at the moment it swarmed with magelord refugees. He had no knowledge of siegecraft; common sense told him that assaulting those walls with pikemen would do no good—a much smaller force on the walls could defend it. He thought of trying to divert the river, but remembering Segrahlin’s tricks with water decided that some mage inside could simply call water into any well he wanted. In the end, he left it alone, and like an overripe plum, it fell on its own. One party of magelords tried to escape along the River Road to Tsaia; most of those fell to raiding parties, Gird’s or brigands. The rest were too weak to keep control of the city. When the disruption inside reached the gates, and the fighting erupted into the fields outside, Gird’s column—which had been waiting at a distance—marched in with little difficulty, to the apparent delight of all.

The gray horse brought Gird into those stone streets as if carrying a king; cheers racketed off the walls, and the flowers of summer fell on his shoulders, Alyanya’s blessing. Then the horse pranced into the courtyard before a towering stone structure that seemed to spring, like trees, from the roots of the world itself, and reach skyward with every stretched finger. Between its arches, great windows had stood; they were shattered now, glittering fragments crunched beneath the horse’s hoofs. A few pieces still clung to their frames, reflecting brightness against the cool darkness inside. The horse knelt; Gird stepped off and looked around. It was a hot day, blue-skied, and the courtyard had blue shadows under every ledge of gray stone. The very air shimmered; he blinked. Was it the air, or his eyes?

Arranha stood on the steps, between splintered doors. Gird would have been surprised, but could not quite feel it. “This was Esea’s High Hall,” Arranha said, as if he were a guide. “It became something else, something worse, and Esea’s blessing was withdrawn.” He shook his head. “I warned them, but they thought they could extract more power by bringing darkness and light so close together.”

Gird could not follow this, but he did follow Arranha into the partly ruined building. It soared overhead, high arches of stone, one after another rising from fluted pillars, making a space reminiscent of a great forest. At the far end, where a circular window had been, sunlight fired the lower arc to a silver crescent. Gird felt hairs rise on the back of his neck. He swallowed.

“You must see this,” Arranha was saying, “because you must decide if the gods demand this building be torn down. I myself would hate to see that; it’s the most beautiful in the north, to my eyes. But the people know what went on here; you must see for yourself.”

What he had to see was evidence enough that the magelords had lost all sense of right and wrong. Arranha tried to explain what they thought they were doing; to Gird, who had never sailed a ship, did not know a lodestone from any cobble in the river, who did not care about the theory behind it, it was simply disgusting and grotesque. An excuse, as he saw it, for some to bully others, to excuse their own cruelty on religious grounds. Here were the same symbols he had found in that count’s dungeon: the barbed chain, the masks with horns and spikes, painted to terrify, the instruments whose only purpose was pain. The place Arranha had led him to stank of old blood, death, and fear. He heard a nauseated gulp beside him, and turned to see Selamis at his side; he had followed Gird, as he often did, without speaking or asking permission.

“Don’t make it worse,” Gird said. “Go spew outside if you must. But this is your real inheritance from your father.” The younger man made it to the outside before he threw up. When he came back—to Gird’s surprise—he looked grim but in some way satisfied.

Gird came back out to find a crowd of those who had suffered under the old, and wanted his justice. His, he thought. The blue summer sky pressed down on him. Another than Alyanya had given him that victory; what did he want here? Justice, and all that came with it. The Hall?

The evil, he told them, is not in the stones, but in those who did wrong. Justice will rule here, the High Lord who judges all things rightly. He himself went to the crypt under Esea’s altar and scrubbed it until it stank no more of all that had happened in it. He brought in the holy herbs for the dead, and lay them reverently on the floor. He came up to find the crowd still standing, and scolded them as if they had been his yeomen for years. Cleaning before building, he said, waving his arms at the shattered glass in the courtyard.

With Finyatha fallen, the other lords in Finaarenis fled to Tsaia, where the Tsaian king gathered an army to retake that land and save his own. Gird ignored that for the present. They had not time before winter to mount a campaign; the Marrakai told him all he needed to know of preparations. He himself was back in Brightwater before snow fell, with Selamis and Arranha, to plan for the coming year.

Despite the destruction of farming villages and fields, they had more food than the year before. The lords’ granges had held a surprising amount; some had burned, but more had been saved. Many other goods were found in more abundance, though the distribution was not as even as Gird would have liked. But he did not interfere with anything but gross injustice. If these people were to help make their own fair laws, they would have to start by making some mistakes.

In spring, the fighting spread eastward into Tsaia. Gird had not realized how far the barton organizations spread—not only in Marrakai lands, but beyond. Barton after barton rose, combined with its neighbors, and elected a marshal: most were competent. The Tsaian royal army which had at first treated the very idea of a peasant army with contempt, even after the defeat in Finaarenis, fell back again and again. Gird did not want his Finaarenisian troops to invade Tsaia: they had fought for their own freedom, in defense of their own homes and families. That much he had felt confident—that Alyanya, Lady of Peace though she be, could understand and condone. Invading someone else’s land, even for the best reasons, did not seem the same.

But Ivis, his high marshal in the east, had no such worries. Bartons were bartons; yeomen were yeomen; in any fight between peasants and lords, he wanted to be one of the leaders. Several cohorts volunteered to go to Tsaia with him. Gird, working hard on the new and—he hoped—simple legal system that would enable men to live in peace and deal fairly with one another, let him go with only a warning.

The legal code was, in fact, turning out to be much harder than he had expected. If he made the laws simple, they were so general that someone would claim not to know how that general principle could be applied in a particular instance. If he made the laws precisely applicable to common situations, someone would come up with an uncommon situation and claim to have found no guiding general principle. Gird tried to ignore the twinkle in Arranha’s eyes, but finally admitted that he had been as naive in law as in war.

“Not that you won’t end up with better law than we’ve had,” said Selamis, quite seriously. “I think it’s coming quite well.”

“Some of it,” growled Gird. It had been so simple to say that no one should beat up someone else, but now he was faced with honest merchants who had pursued thieves, and husbands convinced that they must beat their wives. And how much beating was beating? If a thief, once caught, kept fighting and had to be clouted before he would come along to a magistrate, was that a lawful or unlawful beating? Gird had insisted that the right to beat, within marriage, was both limited and equal for both sexes, but enforcement proved beyond his means. He felt at times like the father of a roomful of quarrelsome children, each of whom insisted that the other one started it.

Mercantile law proved equally tricky. Gird himself had gone around to three markets, taken a sample weighing stone, and found that no two were the same. He had one of the Brightwater masons cut one that matched the middleweight stone, had several more made to balance it, and replaced all the Brightwater weightstones with the standard. As the mason turned out more standards, Gird sent them to nearby markets, and insisted on their use. Prices danced up and down with the new stones. Gird assumed they would settle to something equivalent to those before, but his mental analogy—a chip on a bucketful of water, after shaking—did not satisfy him.

At least this year most of the arable land was under cultivation, and his noncombatant camp followers had returned to their homes or settled in partially deserted villages nearer by. Some of the bartons had dispersed as well, those that had villages to return to. Food should not be a problem, if the war stayed in Tsaia.

As the war receded eastward, the land that had been Finaarenis settled back into farming and trade. Some lands were blighted, some wells ruined; peasants shrugged and moved on. Some fields grew rich green grass over bones the crows had picked; those they avoided for another year. Gird moved from Brightwater to Grahlin, amused now to see how small a town it really was, that had seemed a city to him. Esea’s Hall there had been burned, by the local inhabitants; they showed him the charred foundations proudly. He moved on east, to camp near the Tsaian border for a time.

Tsaia fell, at last, with blue-shirted farmers calling themselves “Gird’s Yeomen” holding the king captive in his own dungeon. By the time word came to Gird, the king had escaped—and been found dead, of a magelady’s anger. The two messages came on the same day, in Ivis’s difficult script. Gird had tried to insist that his marshals, at least, must learn to read and write, but some had struggled as hard as he himself. He looked up from puzzling his way through it, having read it aloud, to meet Selamis’s steady gaze.

“So,” he said. “You are the last surviving magelord of rank, if you look at it the way you once did.”

Selamis shook his head. “No, you know I don’t.”

“You feel no slightest flicker of desire for that throne? They say it is lovely.” The throne of Finaarenis had been hacked to bits before Gird saw it.

“None. That was not my throne anyway, even if they wanted a king.”

Gird drew a long breath. “I suspect they do; there’s a different feel over there. Marrakai said their king was foolish, not cruel, and Marrakai is anything but a fool. It’s a land that might take lords, if they were not mages.”

Selamis looked down, pensive. “And where is a land that will take mages, if they are neither lords nor evil?”

“You think of yourself? You are safe with me.”

“I think of others like myself. I cannot be the only bastard with magic in his blood, that will someday bring him death at the hands of those for whom all magic is evil. Even some of the pure blood—that lady you sent away, and her children.”

Gird cocked his head. “If I had magic in my hands—if I could bring light, as you and Arranha can, whenever I needed a light to find my way; if I could light a fire with it, and never be cold—I would find that tempting. I would want to use it, first for myself, and then for those I loved, and then—I don’t know, friend luap, as you would be called—”

“I wish you would just call me Luap, as the others are doing now—”

“And forget who you are? I wish I could. But I see no way to use magic well, to have that much power others cannot share, with no force to bar misuse.”

Selamis waved at the papers Gird had been working over, another revision of the first part of his Code. “Your law?”

“Law without force behind it is but courtesy: for love or greed, men do things they should not, and law must have a hard hand to knock those hot heads into sense. For ordinary men, the law can serve, but what force can bind a mage?”

Selamis laughed aloud. “You did it yourself, Gird—a good knock to the head, as you say, and there I lay.”

Gird laughed too. “Yes, an untrained mage. By the gods, d’you suppose if I’d felled that sier in the first place he would never have fought against us?” A ridiculous idea, but he was in the mood for it.

“Mages are children first, Gird—good parents can teach them law.”

That sounded reasonable but he still had his doubts.

Then the Tsaian king’s killer sought sanctuary in his camp. He wondered what she would say about his death. Magedead, the report had been, from someone who claimed to know what that meant. A royal ring on his chest, and briars grown over him, in bloom even in this season. The season was autumn. Late autumn.

“Bring her in, then,” he said to Selamis-now-Luap.

“She’s a mage,” said Selamis. He meant more by that; Gird looked at him sharply.

“So?”

“She’s one of them, but not one of them.”

“One trying to do good, like the Marrakai?”

Luap looked away. “Not precisely. She had lived for years as a sheepherder.”

“A mageborn lady?”

“So those who knew her say. In exile from the Tsaian court, for some wrangle there—”

“And she comes to us. Why? Did she say?”

“She says you must know how the king died, and hopes you will let her take service with us.”

Gird stared at Luap. “Is she a fool, this magelady? Take service with us? Why not join Marrakai, if she’s what you call a good mage?”

Luap shrugged. “I don’t know. Will you see her?”

Gird shifted in his seat. “Oh, I’ll see her.”

She was tall, and even in armor conveyed a lithe lightness, a supple strength. It set Gird’s teeth on edge. This one had never, he was sure, borne a child or suckled, had never so much as cared for a sister’s child. Dark hair, braided snugly to fit beneath the helm she carried under her arm. Skin pale as ivory, flushed with rose at the cheeks, eyes used to command, bright and piercing. Before he could speak, she had spoken.

“The king is dead, and by my hand,” she said. “If you do not allow murderers in your army, you will not want me. Otherwise—”

Gird felt that his head was full of apricot syrup: sweet, cloying, thick. He dragged his thoughts through it, just able to think So this is what that charming is about! Whatever had happened to the magicks of the other magelords, this one had full measure and running over. He struggled with his tongue, which wanted to say “Yes, lady,” and dug his fingernails into his palms. It helped a little.

“I wish you’d stop that,” he said, somewhat surprised at the even tone in which it came out.

Her mouth opened, and her cheeks paled. “You—are not afraid.”

Humor tickled the inside of his mind, thinning the rich syrup of her magicks. “No, but I am getting angry. I don’t like tricks.”

“It’s not a trick,” she said. The pressure of her sweetness increased; it was hard to breathe.

“Trick,” insisted Gird, through the honeyed mist over his eyes. “Same as luring a fly to honey, and swatting it. You might try honesty.”

All at once, the magicks were gone, his mind clear, and the woman’s face had gone all white around the mouth. That had gone home hard, though most of the magelords didn’t seem to regard honesty as much.

“I did,” she said between clenched teeth. Without the magicks, her face was older, not unlovely, but no longer a vision of beauty and terror. The dark hair had silver threads in it; the face had fine lines, a touch of weather. “I tried honesty, back then, and that brought me exile. And when I tried again, my duty to the king—ah, you would never understand!” She turned away from him, a gesture Gird read as consciously dramatic.

“You killed him,” Gird said, deliberately flat across that drama.

“I killed him.” She faced him again, and now he saw tears glittering in her eyes. Did she really care, or was it all an act? Women he knew cried noisily, red-faced, shoulders heaving, not one silver tear after another sliding down ivory cheeks. “I trusted him; he was my liege. And then—”

He was tired of her dramatics, and wholly out of sympathy with her kind of beauty. “Spit it out, then, lass, or we’ll be here all day—” It was the tone he used on his own folk, the young ones, the frightened ones. On her it acted like a hot needle: she jumped and glared at him.

“He sent me away because I would not give up my weaponcraft and magery to be his queen, or so he told me then. I loved him dearly, and thought he loved me; there was no Rule requiring me to give up the sword as queen. I thought it his whim, and tried to talk him out of it, but he would not. I went into exile heartsore, like any girl whose betrothed turns her away. When he was imprisoned I knew it; he called in the way of our folk, though he had no need to call me. I would have come. When I took him from the prison where your folk had him, when I’d fought our way past the walls to safety, he told me he’d sent me away because of foretelling. Because he’d been told he’d need me someday. So he set conditions he was sure I would not understand nor agree to, to force me to refuse him, and then to leave the court. I had been honest those years, true to him and his memory: he had lied to make use of me. No love, no children, no freedom for my own life—”

It was the sort of thing the women talked about, back home, stories and gossips about unfaithful lovers, men cheating women of a promised marriage, women’s vengeance on them. The men, Gird had to admit, had their own gossip, muttered into their mugs of ale, or half-whispered from man to man during shearing time, with guffaws and backslappings. Still, it sounded just as petty from this magelady as from any village girl; he was surprised she hadn’t come up with something better.

“And for that injury you killed him?”

“For that, and for the king he was not. By Esea’s Light, he had enough of the old Seeing to know what went on. Marrakai would have helped him stop it if he’d wanted to, but he could not be bothered.”

“And from that act of—honesty—” Gird let the word trail out, and watched the blood flood her face. “You came here, and used your magicks on me. Why?”

“I thought you would not give me hearing, but kill me first. It was only to buy that much time—”

“And you found that time worth the cost?”

“It did you no harm,” she said.

“You.” Gird leveled both index fingers at her. “It cost you, mageborn lady. It cost you my trust.”

“But—”

“NO!” He hammered the table with both fists. “No. You listen, mageborn, and then see if you want to dare our mercy. This you did, this use of magicks to charm me into listening, this is exactly what we despise. To keep yourself safe and put others in peril, to use weapons we cannot bear: this is unfair, unjust, and we will not let you do it.”

“What do you know about justice?” she snapped.

“More than you. I would not use my strength against a child to take what was not mine—no, not if I hungered. I know what fair exchange is—”

“You’ve been talking to kapristi—”

“Aye, and listening, too. Weight for weight, work for work, honest labor for honest wages, no chalk in the flour and no water in the milk: that’s fair exchange.”

“And what did you exchange for this wisdom?” She was still scornful, ready to be very angry indeed.

“What they asked for it: when we gain the rule, to bind ourselves to respect their boundaries evermore. To allow gnomish merchants in our markets, at the same fair exchange humans use.”

“That is all they asked?”

“ ’Tis more than they got from you, all these years, so they said. They want a peaceful, ordered land nearby, one content with its borders; they want fair dealing.” Someone came in then, an excuse to dismiss her. But he could not quite dismiss her from his mind. Her image clung there, disturbing. He wished she would leave; it was going to take all his influence to keep the others from attacking her. They might even think she had charmed him.

Several nights later he heard music from the far side of camp. Strings, plucked by skillful hands, and sweet breathy notes of something not quite like a shepherd’s reed pipe. A voice, singing. He stiffened. He knew that voice, knew that honeygold sweetness. Damn the woman, he thought. Her with her arts, she’ll get us all killed.

He chose a roundabout way to her; he could not have said why. Perhaps the sentries would be less alert, listening to the singing? But no. They challenged him, every one, with a briskness he found irritating rather than reassuring.

She sat well back from the fire, cradling the roundbellied stringed instrument and listening to another woman play a wooden pipe three handspans long. Gird watched her from the shadows. That long bony face, the hollows of the eyes—she had grace, he had to admit. Her hands moved, her fingers began touching the strings again, bringing out mellow notes from her instrument. They wove around the pipe-player’s melody and tangled Gird’s attempt to follow either instrument alone. One of the men began to sing, a horse-nomad song. “Fleet foot the wind calls, run from the following storm—” The magelady joined in, again that golden tone he mistrusted. Her voice ran a little above the tune, patterning with it, but in no mode Gird knew. He scowled, ready to be angry. All at once her eyes met his. Her voice slipped, and found itself again.

No. He would not listen to her. He would not look at her. She was betrayal, treachery: she had killed her own king. Magelady, born to deceit and mastery. He was himself: peasant: Mali’s husband. Mali’s dead, whispered some dark corner of his mind. Raheli’s father, then. Broad and blunt, and liking it that way—he would not let himself be seduced by mere grace and golden voice.

She was surpassing beautiful. He tried to think of her body as no more than the body of an animal, a sleek cow he had seen and coveted, a graceful horse. He focused on her hands, now racing over the strings to finger some intricate descant to the piper. It was not the same song. For how many had he stood here, fascinated, watching her? Those long-fingered hands, strong and supple, that long body. He met her eyes again, dark eyes older than her years, full of sorrow.

She knew. She knew he watched, and how he watched. Rage roiled up in him: she was charming him again, even now. He glared at her; she looked back, sorrowful and unafraid. Calm. Kill me now, her look said. I did not do this. Yet, if it was not charm, why wasn’t she disgusted at his interest? A peasant, a coarse man old enough to be her father—

Not so, came her voice in his mind. You are not so old, nor I so young.

No disgust? He was disgusted, with himself. How could he think of such a woman, as a woman, after Mali’s loyalty and Raheli’s tragedy? What had he fought for, if not to remove such women from power?

Time had passed, the fire only warm ashes under a dark sky. The others had fallen asleep. Only she remained awake, watching him as he watched her. Magicks, he thought disgustedly.

“Not so, lord marshal,” she said. Aloud, in her own voice, but quietly.

“Reading minds is magicks.”

“That, yes. The other—if it be magic at all, it is older far than mine.”

“I—would like to hate you.”

“With reason.” She turned away, and folded around the melon-bellied instrument a trimmed fleece. “But you cannot, lord marshal, any more than I hate myself. I did not come here to unsettle you.”

“Wind unsettles water,” he said, surprising himself. Where had that come from?

She laughed softly; it had an edge to it. “Yes—wind. But you are not water, lord marshal—Gird. You are what you said—good peasant clay. Do you know what the rockfolk say of clay?”

“No.”

“Sertig squeezed clay to rock. And rock squeezed makes diamond, fairest of jewels that gives light in darkness.”

He grunted, surprise and superstitious fear together. He had consented to be rock; the other, half dreamed of, still wholly terrified him. And diamonds were jewels, and jewels belonged to the wealthy, to such as this lady: he would not so belong. But his mouth opened, and he spoke again.

“I have dreamed of you.” He had waked sweating and furious; he had not spoken to her since.

She looked away. “I thought you might. I’m sorry.”

“You—you are like no one—”

“I am myself. Once—a name I will not use again. Now, what he called me, an autumn rose, a last scentless blossom doomed by frost—”

“You like that word. Doom.”

“Gird, I know myself, and my future: it is the chanciest gift our people had, but in me it is, like the others, strong. I will have no children; my time is past.” She met his eyes squarely. “And you, who have children—you think you could give me some?”

He felt suddenly hot. Now she was smiling, but it had no warmth in it.

“I know your dreams, Gird; your eyes speak of them. A magelady’s body—a magelady unwed—what is she like? You see the foreign shape of my face, my hands, and you wonder about the rest.” From musing, her voice roughened to anger. “Ah, Esea! You will believe it my magicks no matter what I do! And I have tried, if you had the wit to see it, to be invisible to you, to draw no eyes, least of all yours.”

“It was your sorrow.” That, too, came without his thought. Yet it was true. She had tried no charms on him or anyone, after that first meeting, but the stress of her sorrow drew eyes to her.

“Look, Gird: I will show you, and then if you are wise, if the gods are truly with you, you will know that in this I am honest.”

He opened his mouth, but her gesture silenced him, for she had thrown off her cloak, and begun unlacing her shirt. If he said anything now, someone might wake, and the explanations would be, at best, difficult. Her fingers moved quickly, deftly, stripping off her clothes with no more apparent embarrassment than he would have had in his own cottage. It should have been too dark to see her, but she glowed slightly, a light he knew was magelight.

She had the body he had imagined. Long legs, long slender body untouched by childbearing; her hips were like a young girl’s and her breasts—he ached to touch them. Even Mali as a girl had not had such breasts, the very shape of his desire. But through the beauty he had expected he perceived the barrenness she had claimed. Like some graceful carving of stone, set up in a lord’s hall for amusement: he could engender nothing there. His hands opened, closed; instead of the imagined softness and warmth, there was hardness and cold.

She wrapped the cloak around herself again, dimming the glow until he could just make out her face. “You see?” A thread of sorrow darkened that golden voice. “It is not you, Gird; it is a choice I made, long years ago: obedience to my king. Service, not freedom. Death, not life.”

“It’s wrong.”

Her brows rose. “You are my judge?”

“No, but—” There had to be a way to say it, that meant what he meant. “Serving things rightly, that can’t be serving death. Loyalty’s good, I’ll agree there, but it’s not all—what you’re loyal to must be worthy.”

“Wise clay, lord marshal.” Her voice mocked him, but her face was uneasy. “Where did a peasant learn such wisdom?”

“It’s only sense,” Gird said stubbornly. “Peasant sense, maybe: we serve life in our work. Growing crops, tending beasts—that’s serving life.”

“I erred, as I’ve admitted. A mistake, believing the king was true, and worth my obedience. A mistake I remedied, you remember.” Her voice had chilled again; he thought she did not truly believe it was a mistake.

“So you said.” He was grumpy, annoyed with his body which had not admitted what his mind knew—no comfort there. A man his age, to be so put out—he was disgusted with himself, and with her for rousing that interest. On the way across camp, he stumbled into one thing after another, knowing perfectly well it was his own temper making his feet clumsy.

Arranha. The old priest was one of them; perhaps he could explain. Gird sought him out, not surprised to find that Arranha was awake, peaceably staring at the stars.

“And how is the lady?” asked Arranha. Gird felt himself swelling with rage, to be so easily read, and then it vanished in a wave of humor. He folded himself down gingerly, to sit beside the priest.

“She is herself,” he said.

“Too much so,” said Arranha. “A bud that never opened, eaten out within. She has the body of a girl, but no savor of womanhood.”

Gird opened his mouth to let out surprise; his ears were burning. “She is lovely,” he said, after a decent interval.

“Cold,” insisted Arranha.

“Well—yes. And yes, I looked; she showed me—”

“She wants you?”

“No. I had never seen anyone like her—not to speak to—and I suppose—it was my own curiosity.”

“Natural enough.” Arranha shrugged that off, as he did other things Gird could not anticipate. “Which curiosity, I gather from your words, has now vanished. I would pity her, myself, were she not capable of better.”

Gird chuckled. “I thought you said we all were capable of better.”

“True. But great talents draw envy, even from tired old priests sitting up all night. Gird, she might have prevented much evil, had she listened to good counsel. It was not all heedlessness of love: she has the foreseeing mind. She chose not to listen; she chose in spite of her knowledge. She could not have saved the king, I daresay—from all I ever heard of him, as foolish a young man as ever sat on a throne. Not wicked, in any active sense, but silly and shallow. But she might have saved more than she did, and I can’t forget that. Nor should you. If she ever quits making a singer’s tale out of her lost love, she’d make you a fine marshal, but you’ll have to change her course.”

“I have enough to do, without teaching mageladies.” Arranha shrugged. “If a weapon falls into your hand, you either learn to use it, or your enemy uses it against you.”

Luap looked up as a strong, slender hand slapped down on the account rolls. He started to complain, but the look on the magelady’s face stopped the words in his month. She was white around the lips—with fury, he was sure—and he half-recalled hearing Gird’s bellow only a few minutes before.

“You!” she said, in a voice that had some of Gird’s bellow in it, though not so loud.

“Me?” He could not help noticing the hilt of her sword, her fine and reputedly magical sword. The jewel set in the pommel glinted, as if with internal fires. And every bit of metal she wore glittered, bright even beneath the cloth that shaded him from midday sun. Her eyes, when he met them again, seemed to glitter as well, fire-bright and angry. What could he have done? She had always seemed remote, but calm, when speaking to him.

“You,” she said, very quietly now, “you have mageblood.”

Luap shrugged, and looked away. “Common enough, lady; if you look closely, there’s bastards aplenty in this army.”

Her hand flipped this half-truth away. “Bastards in plenty, yes, but those in whom the mageblood stirs and wakes are few enough.”

He stared at her, shocked almost into careless speech. But he caught the unspoken question back, and tried to school his face. He could see by her expression that she wasn’t fooled, or maybe she could see his thoughts. She nodded at him, mouth tight.

“Yes. I do know. You have the magic, the light, and you know it. You could be what I am, were you not obedient to that—that churl out there!” Her arm waved. Luap felt a bubble of laughter tickle his throat. “That churl” must be Gird, whatever he’d done this time to anger the lady.

“It may be so,” he said, trying to keep even the least of that laughter out of his voice. “There was a time I thought so, but truly, lady, I have no desire for it now.”

She rested both fists on the little table and leaned close to him; he could smell her sweat, and the onion on her breath from dinner. It did nothing to diminish her beauty, or her power. “It has nothing to do with your desires, whatever your name really is. It is given to you, like the color of your eyes, the length of your arm: you cannot deny it.” He said nothing, facing her with what calm he could muster. Her eyes looked away first, but she did not move. Then she straightened up, with a last bang of one fist that crumpled the supply roll. “No. You are more than just a bastard, and you must learn it.”

Suddenly she was alight, blinding him at first, and then the heat came, scorching heat that blackened the edges of his scrolls. Without thought, he grabbed for power, and threw a shield before him, swept the scrolls to safety behind him.

“Stop that!” he said, furious and frightened at once. She laughed, a scornful laugh he remembered from his earliest childhood, the laugh of one whose power has never been overcome. Above his head, the fabric caught fire, the flames hardly visible against her brightness and the noonday sun.

“You have the power; you stop me!”

It was challenge, challenge he had never expected to face, that Gird would never have had him face. And he felt within a surge of that uncanny power, whose ways he had never learnt, never dared to explore. But as he had startled Gird, perhaps he could startle her, and so he let it out, in whatever form it might choose to come.

It came as a fiery globe, that raced at her; she slapped it away, first with a laugh and then, when it surged again against her hand, with a startled expression. She drew her sword, now glowing as brightly as she, and swiped at the globe. Luap would have been fascinated, if he had not also been involved. He could feel a vague connection between himself and the globe, as if he had a ball of pitch at the end of a long and supple reed.

With a final pop like a spark from sappy wood, her brilliance vanished. Luap blinked. Her shadow stood behind her, lean and black; the sun was overhead—he realized then that he was alight as she had been. She was staring at him, her first expression changing to respect, and then awe.

“You,” she said, in a very different tone from her first approach.

“Yes?” Whatever was in his voice, it worked on her. Her mouth moved, but she said nothing. Finally she shook her head, and managed speech.

“Do you know whose bastard you are?” she asked. Luap kept his mouth shut tight; if this was where she was going, he was not going to help. But she nodded, slowly, as if this confirmed something she’d hardly dared imagine. “The king’s,” she said quietly. Calmly. “You have the royal magery; it could not be anyone else—and I think you knew, Luap. I think you chose your name of war precisely.”

“And if I did?” he asked, relaxing slightly. The shadow behind her blurred, as if his light dimmed. He could not tell; his eyes still refused to answer all his questions.

“If you are the old king’s son, born with his magery—”

“They said not,” said Luap. “Like all bastards with no magic, I was fostered away—”

She laughed, this time ruefully. “Luap, they erred, as you must have known long since. You are his heir—in blood, and in magic—and the evidence is right here—in what just happened. Show this to any of the old blood, and you would inherit—”

“Inherit!” For an instant his old dream sprang up, bright as ever, but anger tore it away. “Inherit a kingdom torn by war? Inherit the fame my father had, that made men glad to see him dead? Inherit his ways?”

Her voice lowered, mellowed, soothed him as honey soothes a raw throat. “You have thought of it, Luap; you must have. He was a proud man, a foolish man . . . even, in some ways, a cruel man. He should have had more sense than to foster you away. None of our people have done all we should. But you—you know better. You could be—”

“I could be dead,” said Luap. He wanted to hit her; he could feel her attempt to enchant him like a heavy weight of spring sunlight. It had been bad enough to go through this once. He shook his head at her. “If you had asked me two years ago, lady, I might have been foolish enough—I would have been foolish enough to agree. What my father did to me—the vengeance I wanted, the power I had always envied—yes. I would have. Even a year ago, maybe. But I’ve learned a bit, in this war. Even from you.”

“Even from me? You mean, because of me, you would not—?”

“Not you alone. But, lady, I can see what Gird sees now; I can see the cost of your counsel, down to the last dead baby, the last poisoned well—”

“We are not all evil!”

“No. But—you tell me, lady, what it is that made you angry this time? What sent you here to work behind Gird’s back?”

She whirled away from him; he let his own power flow out to her, and she turned back, unwilling, but obedient—recognizing even as she fought it the source of her compulsion. He released her, and she staggered. “He—he’s an idiot! He knows no more of governing than any village bully!”

Luap chuckled. “He is an idiot, that I’ll grant. But he’s far more than a village bully, and if you can’t see that, you’re not seeing him yet for what he is.”

“He lets those fools of merchants blather on, bickering about the market rules—”

“What should he do, crack their heads for them?” Luap could see she had thought of that, with relish. He shook his head at her. “Lady, Gird’s as likely to lose his temper and bash heads as any man I’ve ever known. If he lets them bicker on, wasting time as you’d say, then he has his reasons.”

“He claimed they would obey rules they made better than rules he gave—and yet he won’t let them make the rules they want to make. Insists that they and the farmers must agree what is a ripe plum, nonsense like that.”

“Nonsense like that matters, to those who grow the plums, or pay good coin for them.”

“And that brings up coin. D’you know he’s planning to call in and melt down all the old coinage? No more copper crabs and gold crowns, but stamped with wheat-ear and poppy. I tried to tell him what that would cost: the finesmiths don’t work for nothing. He wouldn’t listen. And he asks of me what he does not understand—”

“He wants you to give up your grievance, as he made me give up mine.”

“Your heritage, he’s made you give up.”

“One and the same. My grievance: being born of royal blood, and thrown out to live in a peasant’s world. Having the royal power, and being denied its use. The world, in short, not to my liking.”

“It’s more than that!”

“Not really.” Luap grinned sideways at her. “Lady, I’ve known peasant lads enough, furious because their father favored another brother, because the steward was unfair, because the world was. Grumbling, sour, envious, resentful, quick to take offense and seek vengeance for every slight. So was I, though I hid it, thinking myself too good to admit such feelings, though they burned in my heart.” He paused, to see how she would take this. She listened, though he suspected it was only because she knew he was a king’s son. He took a deep breath, hoping no one would interrupt them, or come close enough to overhear what only Gird, so far, knew of his past.

“When I married, lady, I loved my wife as a prince might love a scullery-maid: just so much, for her beauty and her skill. Our children: I saw them in my mind, clothed in royal gowns, and hated the reality of their broad peasant faces, their rough hands. You are unwed: you cannot imagine what this means of love foregone, of wasted years, when I might have been rich in hearts-ease. Then as Gird’s power grew, my master—who should, I knew, have been but a courtier at my court—commanded me to join the army, gain Gird’s confidence, and betray him. I would have done so, for the reward he promised, but he did not trust. He took my wife, my children—killed my son, to make his point, and held them captive against my behavior. The wife I had never loved as I could have, the daughter I thought too plain: I saw in their eyes, as the soldiers took them away, a trust I had never earned. Then I began to love them, but it was too late.” The old pain struck to his heart again, and tears blurred his vision. He blinked them away, and saw on the magelady’s face a curious expression. He hoped it was not contempt: he could feel rage rising in him like a dangerous spring; contempt from her would set a fire under it. She said nothing.

“So I came to Gird, as one driven into rebellion by injustice, but I meant to betray him, only he was gentle, that night, with my injuries, and something—I could not do it. I told him, about my family, and he cried: great tears running down his face, his nose turned red—I could not believe it.” He waited until she asked.

“And then?”

“And then they died, as my master had promised, and I could do nothing. In the market square at Darrow, before a frightened crowd—someone told me about it later, not knowing whose wife it had been. And I—I hated Gird, almost as much as my master, for having done nothing—though there was nothing he could have done. When I discovered my powers, I had thoughts of claiming my own place, somehow. Making things better, being the king that should have been, in a land where no one suffered. A boy’s dream, after a beating. Crowns and palaces for all, meat and ale and honey on the loaf—”

“You could have—”

“I could not. Gird knocked me flat, when I tried my powers on him, and rightly so. I didn’t see that at the time. But if you’ve wondered why I have no command, that’s why. He could not trust me. The marshals still look at me sideways, but Gird knows I’m different now. So could you be, if you’d give up that old wound you cherish.”

“I do not cherish it! The ruin of my life—!”

“Only if you choose so. Lady, listen to me. You have lost something: who has not? It is what we make of what’s left that counts. I lost my wife, my children, lost them even before they were taken, in the blindness of my pride in blood. I lost a crown, the way you see it. You stayed away from this war; you have not seen what I have seen, or learned the lessons it taught. My loss is as important as any other, and no more important than any other. King’s son, bastard, widower, childless by war, a luap in every way: I have lost or renounced all command, being unfit for it.”

“And this is what you and Gird want me to do?”

Luap stretched his arms high over his head, easing the knot in his back. By her tone, she was at least thinking about it, no longer quite so sure of herself. “Gird wants you to quit thinking you’re a special case. I would have you consider the fruits of freedom: freedom from your past. What good is that old anger doing you now? What good is it doing any of us, when you would lure me into a conspiracy to undo what all these men and women have died to do? You, lady, best know whether you are as unfit for command as I was.”

Her expression shifted, from half petulant to something approaching respect. “I—never doubted my ability to command, when it should be time. Not until now—”

“Yet you never took the field. And why come here, to your people’s enemies? And why stay?”

“I’m not sure.” She looked down, and away, and anywhere but his eyes. “I did not take the field . . . because the king did not call me, as he called other nobles. After I killed him, I thought . . . I knew that none of our people would accept me, the king’s murderer. Why should they? I’d broken my oath to him, why not join his enemies? My own act placed me there, it seemed.”

“And what did you think Gird would do, pat you on the head and tell you the king had treated you badly and deserved your vengeance?”

She flushed. “I didn’t know. I don’t suppose I was thinking clearly. As for why I stay . . . where would I go? Back to Tsaia to pick sides in that contention? Away from here, where some peasant terrified of magery is like to split my skull with an axe while I sleep?”

Now she met his eyes again, with an expression he had never seen on her face, honest bewilderment and the first glint of humor. “I set out to save the king, and killed him; after that, what could I dare intend, that would not go awry?”

Chapter Thirty-two

Gird had been right; Tsaia preferred lords to peasants, if peasants to mages. There the followers of cruel gods had all been magelords, or their close kin. When the bartons rose, some found their own lords with them, against those they most hated and feared. Duke Marrakai, though accused of treachery by Duke Verrakai, proved his loyalty in most men’s eyes by supporting a Mahieran for the throne. The Rosemage, as Gird called her, assured him that the candidate had no more magical ability than a river cobble. He was not sure he believed her, but he did believe Arranha, who said the same thing.

He was, as he had never expected to be, alive and a hero. Everyone knew the big blocky man in blue (it seemed simpler to keep wearing that color; when he didn’t, someone would give him a blue shirt “to remember by”) on the stocky gray—almost white now—horse. Children ran out to meet him on the way, calling to him, running beside the horse. If his route was known, there would be bits of blue tied to branches, blue yarn braided into women’s hair, blue flowers, in season, thrown before him. If he surprised a village, they would drop their tools and gather, beg for his blessing, bring all their problems for him to solve.

He found that they wanted him—his physical touch, his presence, his listening ear—far more than they wanted his ideas. They had each their local heroes—someone who had fought with him at Grahlin or Greenfields, Blackbone Hill or Brightwater. Every little ambush, each battle, had its heroes, and they had all gone home, if they lived, to tell the tale their own way. Gird heard with some astonishment that he had thrown a horse and rider “so far the crash was not heard when they landed” in one battle, and someone who had lost a leg and survived (Gird remembered the man clinging to his hand, begging for death) came hopping up without it to hug Gird and pound his back and show off his children.

But when he tried to speak to them of the future, only a few paid heed. The others were busy with their work, with lives deferred. They had won, and life was good; they feared nothing but the lords’ return, and needed nothing but Gird’s friendship.

Some were interested in the legal reforms he instituted. Merchants, craftsmen, and even a few former farmers—but their interest in abstract justice and perfect fairness gave way to factional argument far more often than Gird had hoped. Eventually, after hours and days and even seasons of wrangling, one group would agree on a particular rule, only to have those who had not attended the original conference refuse to follow it. Then everyone appealed to Gird, and he found himself making the very judgments he had called on others to make.

Most folk understood the need to have some armed force for protection, both locally, against brigands, and regionally, in case of invasion. But fewer wanted to support the barton and grange organization Gird envisioned, with adequate, uniform training for yeomen, yeoman-marshals, marshals, with regular drill for all yeomen even in times of peace.

He was troubled, as well, by the feeling that he had had since surviving the battle at Greenfields. He had been told that he could not see the peace he would bring, and here it was, all around him. Either the gods were wrong—and he could not believe that—or he had misunderstood. He didn’t believe that, either. Which meant that the peace he saw was somehow not real. Something was wrong with it, as something had been wrong after Norwalk Sheepfolds. He had asked then if it was his fault that he would not see true peace, and had had no answer. He asked himself the same question now: was the wrong here his fault? Had he failed in something he should have done, that would have brought true and lasting peace—had he withheld something he should have given?

His own memories reminded him of his mistakes; the victories others boasted of in his name seemed to him full of his miscalculations, deaths he’d caused by his stupidity or carelessness. That one fit of drunkenness, which left a legacy still; even now, even when everyone called him Father Gird, someone would take the mug from his hand with a kindly smile, when he’d had what they thought was enough. He had done what he set out to do—free the land of its bad rulers—but every time his gray horse ticked a hoof on a skull, or he saw the white end of a bone turned up as someone plowed a field, he shuddered.

He traveled widely, urged on by that vague but persistent uneasiness. Everywhere he went he seemed to see prosperity returning, as farms returned to burnt-over fields, as once-deserted villages hummed with life. His people had more flesh on their bones; foreign traders complained of their scant profits, but kept returning. So did wealthy craftsmen who had thought a peasant kingdom would have no need of their abilities. His new coinage, which the magelady had so complained about, circulated more freely than the old ever had. When Luap first mentioned what he saw as the problem, the continuing bitterness between former magelord landholders and tenants, Gird scoffed at him.

“They won’t hurt children,” he said. “The adults, maybe, but—”

“I’ve talked with Autumn Rose.” Luap said the name without embarrassment; Gird still thought it was silly. If she wanted to conceal her real name, she could have taken any simple one. She had changed, over the years, but she still had what he thought of as lordly arrogance. He let himself remember the first time she had laughed at herself, admitted that she could be as ridiculous as anyone. Was it then that she began to change, to give up her old grievance against the dead king. She had made, as Arranha had predicted, a good marshal when she finally quit dramatizing her lost love. He realized his mind had wandered, as it did more often now, and came back to find that Luap was watching him, patiently. Luap went on. “She thinks it will get worse. There are too many of the halfbred children, and sometimes the power sleeps a generation or so, cropping out unexpectedly. Besides, you said not all the adults were guilty, that if they wanted to live under your laws they would be safe.”

“So I did, and so they are.” He hated it when Luap was patient with him, as if he were a doddering old man; it made him grumpy.

Luap shook his head. “If they come so far as your courts, they are. Many don’t. There was a man killed in the south, near Kelaive’s old domain—” The regions had not been renamed; Gird decided they needed to do that next. The very name Kelaive wakened old angers. “—a younger son, he could make light with his finger, enough to light a candle. Stoned, Gird, and no one will admit to having anything to do with it. You can lose your temper and stab someone in a rage, or bash his head with one rock, but stoning—that takes time, and many people.”

“What did they say he’d done?” He must have done something, to arouse that kind of anger.

“They don’t say, because no one admits to doing it. Cob’s your high marshal down there; you know he’s sensible.” He had always liked Cob, whose blunt, matter-of-fact approach to life had not changed through war or peace. He still limped, from the foot broken outside Grahlin, but never complained.

“What does Cob say?”

Luap pulled out the message and read it aloud. “Tell Gird he must do something, perhaps send the mages away.”

“Away where? Where would people trust me to send them? Those here don’t want to live in Tsaia, won’t go back to Aarenis—and they say there’s nothing left in Old Aare. Besides, if I send them away, that kind of folk will worry that they’re plotting together. I hear enough of that on the east side now, worrying that Tsaia will invade. It’ll wear itself out, in time; what takes years to grow can’t wither in a moment.”

He went back to the maps, determined to eliminate Kelaive’s name before the day was out. The old names, the folk names, belonged: Burry and Berryhedge (four families lived there now, in the ruins) and Three Springs. Get rid of the lords’ newfangled names; he would agree that some of their family members were innocent, but no need to honor a bad name by putting it on a map. He was uneasily aware that some bartons had indulged in more looting and destruction than he would have approved if he’d been there, but he was sure—he hoped he was sure—that that had been a single overreaction to years of oppression.

Another year went by, and another. He put on weight; his old belt gave way one day in the middle of a court session, to everyone’s delight. Someone ran to bring him a strip of blue leather; he insisted on paying for it (he was, after all, sitting as judge) and wore it thereafter. He still rode out from the city that had been Finyatha and was now Fin Panir, visiting villages and towns, following that old restlessness. He had to admit that Luap was right in one thing; it was taking much longer than he’d expected to reconcile the common folk to the continued presence of surviving magelords and their children. It would come, he was sure of it: at some point they would recognize what they lost in this continual picking at the past. Mali had told him that, all those long years ago, when he had held a grudge against Teris: all life soured if you held anger.

He was working by an open window one hot afternoon when he saw the furtive movement of those who know they’re about to do wrong. One, then another, slipped past beneath him, heading around the corner toward whatever lured them on. He was not really curious; it was too hot, and his feet hurt even in slippers. Then he heard children’s shrill voices, and someone yelled “I’ll tell Gird!” in the very tone in which one wrongdoer informs on another. Sighing, he pushed himself away from his desk, put his feet into his largest pair of boots, and was downstairs when the threatened information arrived. “Something” was going on “down the market way” that he wouldn’t like. The marshal, the barefoot child informed him “made no good of it.” Then the child was gone, with a flick of a smile that could mean anything from “I started it” to “I know you’ll fix it.” Both could be true.

He followed the furtiveness he’d observed before, and saw more hurrying backs. Odd that someone’s back could reveal intent, he thought. As much as a face, perhaps more. Then he saw a crowd, in the lower market, where the livestock pens were. At the moment, their backs had the look of guilty curiosity.

He felt the crowd’s mood shift even before the growling mutter began. Not again, he thought. Couldn’t the fools understand? Why did they start this nonsense again, now, when all was won, and only ruin could follow such anger?

Those at the back of the crowd moved instinctively away from his determined stride, even before they recognized him. Their voices followed, then raced ahead: “Gird—it’s Gird—he’s coming—” A lane opened for him, leading him toward the trouble.

There was Luap, as he had expected, and the Autumn Rose. She held the shoulders of a whip-thin, dark-haired lad whose face was a mass of bruises and scrapes, eyes barely visible in the mess. Blood dribbled from his broken nose and split lip. Gird could see the lad shaking, and no wonder. Across from them was a yeoman of the local grange, Parik, sucking raw knuckles. When he saw Gird, he glowered, no whit repentant.

Luap, uncharacteristically, said nothing. The Autumn Rose looked past Gird’s ear, an insult he would have thought but for the warning that leapt into her eyes. So. He looked back at Parik, seeing in Parik’s eyes the confidence that came from knowing he was not alone in this.

“Well?” Gird’s voice cracked, as it had been doing since Midwinter Feast and that disastrous dance in the snow. He swallowed the lump and awaited an answer.

“That’n used magicks,” said Parik, in a tone well-calculated to sting without justifying rebuke. He merely looked at the lad, and then gave a final lick to his own knuckles.

“You’re accusing him of misusing magicks?” asked Gird mildly.

“Nah—they all seen it. He’s a magelord’s brat, should never have lived this long, and needs mannering, if he’s to live any longer.” Parik made a show of patting his tunic back into place.

“And you thought it your job—?”

“He put fire on me,” said Parik, as if explaining something difficult to a dull child. “He put fire on me, so I put m’fist on him. Like you says, Gird, or used to say, simple means for simple minds.” He laughed, a little too loudly, and Gird heard nervous sniggers elsewhere.

He closed his eyes, suddenly so tired he felt he must sink to the ground. He had told them, and told them, and explained, and argued, and shouted, and broken their stubborn heads from time to time, and even, when his breath ran out, spoken softly, and here they were, just as bad as ever. Just as bad as the magelords, barring they used fists instead of magic. Gods—! he thought, then stuffed the prayer back. Ask their help and get their interference, like as not. He opened his eyes to find everyone staring at him. Give them an answer, a judgment: he had to, and he could not.

“The Marshal?” he asked. His voice was unsteady; he could see their reaction to that, like a child’s to a parent weeping.

“Don’t need no Marshal to know right from wrong,” said Parik, bolder now that Gird had not unleashed his usual bellow. “S’what you taught us, after all: don’t need no priests, no crooked judges, no lords—and ’specially no magelords—”

Gird looked at Luap: Luap white-faced, gaze honed to a steel blade that sliced into Gird’s mind. Luap, who had warned of this, whose warning he had ignored, thinking it special pleading. It was to Luap he spoke, in a conversational tone that confused the others.

“You were right, and I was wrong. Are you still of the same mind?”

Luap’s face flooded with color: surprise. “I—yes, Gird.”

“They are not all Parik.” And that was special pleading, his special pleading. Luap nodded, taking it seriously. He had not hoped for so much compassion.

“Talk to me!” yelled Parik. Gird watched the Autumn Rose transfer her gaze to him, as deliberate as someone shifting a lance; Parik paled, but did not retreat. “Is that it, then? Are you hiding behind your pet magelords, using their power to charm us?”

“WHAT!” That time he had the old strength in it, and Parik backed up a step. Fury lifted Gird to his full height, pumped power into the fists clenched at his sides, as he stalked towards Parik, stiff-legged. “I never hide; I never did. There are no magelords, Parik, because I led you and the others to fight free of them. Mages, yes, and some mere children, like this lad here—but no magelords. No, Parik.”

Parik backed up another step, blustering. “But—but that lady there—she looked at me—”

“I’m looking at you, Parik, and seeing a bully who’d be a lord as bad as ever we fought, had he the power.”

“Me? But I just—”

“You just beat a lad half your size, for using magicks you said, but you brought no accusation to the Marshal—”

“Donag, he don’t want to be bothered with little stuff like that—”

“Then Donag must not want to be Marshal; that’s what Marshals do, is deal with ‘little stuff like that’ and keep big hulks like you from bruising their knuckles breaking lads’ faces—”

Gird heard a growl from the crowd, concentrated over there—disapproval, backing for Parik. Maybe Donag as well? Could one of his Marshals be supporting this madness?

“He used magicks!” yelled Parik. “He put fire on me!”

“And what had you done, eh?” Gird glanced around at hostile faces, frightened faces, confused faces. “What started it all?”

“Parik’s boy complained,” said someone softly, just audible under the shifting crowd noise.

Gird swung toward that sound, and located a face that fit the voice. “Parik’s boy?” he asked.

Silence fell, in the center. Parik scowled at the young woman who edged her way to the front. Neither beautiful nor ugly; a quiet face, clear-eyed and determined. She looked straight at Gird, as if afraid to look elsewhere—certainly not at Parik.

“It was Parik’s boy, sir—Gird. He’n the others was playing, playing the stick game, y’know?”

He knew: a boy’s gambling game, easily disguised as something else if disapproving adults came by.

“Julya—” began Parik angrily, but the girl went on, ignoring him.

“That lad, he has quick fingers—he’s a tailor’s apprentice now, and I’ve watched him with a needle—and he won twice running. Then Parik’s boy said he was a cheat, and a magelord’s bastard, and the lad said he was no bastard, and Parik’s boy jumped him, and Parik grabbed him, held him for his boy to hit. That’s when the lad made fire on his fingers, to make Parik let go—” Her voice trailed away.

“You—you just want to lie with a magelord’s son, you Julya—” Parik’s voice had a nasty whine to it. The girl reddened but stood her ground.

“I don’t want to lie with you or any of your hardhanded sons, that’s the truth. And I won’t see you lying about what happened and not tell.”

“Here now! What’s going on here!” That interruption was Donag. Gird merely looked at him when Donag got to the center of the crowd, and Donag wilted. “I heard something—” he started to say.

“Awhile back, I heard something,” said Gird. He hardly knew what he was saying: a great space in his head rang off-key, like a cracked bell, and his vision was uncertain. “Awhile back I heard trouble—which you, Marshal Donag, should have heard. And then I heard that you did not care to hear such trouble. Or so Parik said.”

In the quick glance that passed between Parik and Donag, Gird saw as much trouble as he feared. Anger gave him the energy he needed to round on them all, but before he had two words out, Donag interrupted.

“Gods blast it, we’ve tried for years! You keep telling us they weren’t all bad. You keep telling us the children aren’t their fathers. And yet we still have mages working their magicks on us and our children. Look at Tsaia—they have a king again, of the same mageborn line—”

“He has no magicks,” said Gird heavily. “That was his great-uncle—”

“So he says,” Donag growled. “So they all say. ‘We have no magicks—we were born without—’ And then some mageborn spawn of Liart burns an honest yeoman—”

“An honest yeoman who was doing coward’s work, holding a lad for his lad to beat! And look at the damage: Parik has not even a blister, and just you look at the lad’s face. By the wheatear and corn, Donag, if the lad had bitten Parik—as any lad would, to get away—you’d no doubt claim that was magicks.”

“He could poison his bite,” muttered someone.

“Donag, think! If the lad could charm someone, why didn’t he charm Parik’s boy—or Parik—into letting him alone?” Donag’s face did not change; he was not thinking, or even listening. Nor were the others. Gird tried something new. “Suppose we exile them—send them all away. Will that satisfy you? Let the boy go, and any like him.”

Parik and Donag both opened their mouths, looked at each other, and then Donag spoke. “If we let them go, they’ll come back. Same as mice or rats or snakes—let ’em go, they’ll breed and come back worse’n ever.” Gird heard a murmur of agreement from the crowd. He wanted to tell them that what bred and multiplied here was their own fear, but he knew it would do no good. He struggled for words, and none came. He could feel the mood deepening, one frightened and angry person reinforcing another’s fear and anger, as one bell vibrates when one near it is struck.

Black murder hung over the crowd, a veil of hatred and fear. Some had wrapped themselves in it, as if it were a literal cloak of supple velvet, welcoming the darkness. Others stood hunched, frightened, unsure which was worse, the growing darkness or the spear-bright danger of the mageborn.

Luap gazed at him, calm, almost luminous. For the second time, Gird felt that crevice open in his mind, and Luap’s voice flowing through, cool silver water from a spring.

—We will not fight—he said.—We will not break your peace—

My peace! Gird would have snorted if he could. Some peace, with the city in wild turmoil; even Alyanya’s peace could not still this storm.

—My peace— echoed in his mind, in the great empty cavern still clangorous with the crowd’s noise.—Do you want my peace? Do you want justice?— As once before, he could not confuse that voice with any other.

Out of his emptiness, out of his pain, he cried—silently, as the crowd listened in momentary silence—for help. To the gods he had tried to serve, and feared, and refused to ask before, he cried for help.

Again, as at Greenfields, he was snatched up from the ground, whirled in a storm of fire and flowers and wind high above the city. But only for an instant. Then he found himself standing where he had stood, but no longer empty. Overflowing, rather, with utter certainty. Full of light, of wisdom, of mellow peace thick as old honey in the comb.

It was still hard. His head would burst, he was sure; his mouth was too small for the breath he drew; he could barely form the words that he must speak. They had strange shapes, awkward in his mouth, as if thought were sculpted into individual shapes not meant for human speech.

With the first words, the crowd stilled. He could not hear himself; he was balancing himself on those internal forces. Incredibly the thought sped by that this might be what women felt at birth—stretched beyond capacity, control relinquished to forces they could not name. Then he was drenched in a torrent of bright speech he must somehow say, its meaning racing past his mind faster than he could catch it. He felt the hair standing upright on his arms and legs, the prickle of awe becoming a wave of sheer terror and joy so mingled he could not tell one from the other. It was so beautiful—!

And as he spoke, and tried to hold himself upright, he saw the crowd change, as if someone had thrown clean water on a mud-caked paving. The hatred and fear lifted in irregular waves, leaving some faces free of that ugliness, others still stained but clearing.

After the first wrenching outwash of it, he was more aware of the crowd, of his own voice, of what he was saying. The words were strange to mouth and ear, but he knew what they meant, and so, somehow, did his hearers. Peace, joy, justice, love, each without loss of the others, engaged in some intricate and ceremonial dance. More and more the dark cloud lifted, as if his words were sunlight burning it away. Yet they were not his words, as he well knew. Out of his mouth, through his mind, had come Alyanya’s peace, the High Lord’s justice, Sertig’s power of Making, and Adyan’s naming: these powers loosed scoured the fear away.

That effect spread. Beyond the crowd gathered in the courtyard, beyond the city walls, across the countryside, the light ran clean as spring-water, lifting from fearful hearts their deepest fears, banishing hatred. Gird knew it happened, but dared not try to see, for the effort of speech took all his strength, even the strength he had been given. Sweat ran off his face, his arms, dripped down his ribs beneath his shirt, and still the great words came, and still he spoke them.

Now the darkness writhed, lifting free of his land, like morning fog lifting in sunlight. But it was not gone. He knew, without being told that when his words and the memory of them faded, it would settle again. And he could not stand here forever. Even as he thought this, the flood of power in his mind, faded, leaving him empty once more, but light, a rind dried by sunlight.

—It is not over—He had no doubt who that was. If he could have trembled, he would have. It had to be over: what else could he do? He could not live long as he was now. As he watched, seeing now with more than mortal eyes, the darkness contracted, flowed toward him. He closed his mind to it, as he had closed it to hatred so often before. It would not take him, even now, even weak as he was. But in his head the pressure grew again, forcing its way out, forcing an opening.

—Do not push that away: take it in. Take it all in, and transform it for them—

“I can’t—” But he could, and he could do nothing else. With a despairing look at the crowd, at Luap, at the buildings that stood high around the market, even the top of the High Lord’s Hall against the sky, he shrugged and relaxed his vigilance.

Now the great cloud of hatred and disgust pressed on him. He drew it in, doggedly, like a fisherman dragging a large net full of fish into a small, unsteady boat. It hurt. He had forgotten how painful it was to be that frightened, how hatred prickled the inside of the mind like a nestful of fiery ants, how disgust tensed every internal sinew. He had complained of his emptiness, to himself, but he had found those great clean rooms of his mind restful. There the spirit’s wind had had space to blow; there he could go for quiet, for renewal. Now those spaces were filling, packed tighter and tighter, with stinking, slimy, oozing, crawling nastiness.

Envy, spite, malicious gossip like cockleburs, wads of gluttony like soft-bodied maggots, a sniggering delight in others’ pain, thoughts and fears more misshapen, harder to hold, than the bright words he had found so painful. He felt himself grow heavier, as if he were filling with literal stones and muck, felt himself cramping into ever more painful positions as he tried to hold it all, and bring the rest of it in. Like a tidy housewife whose home is invaded by raucous vandals, he tried to protect some small favorite crannies of his mind, long-furnished with joyful memories—and failed. The stink and murk of it found every last crack, and filled them all. He felt himself creak, the foundations of his mind almost shattering from the weight. What would happen then?

He had it all. He dared not open his mouth, lest something vile leak out. The faces around him were stunned, horrified—he could not imagine what his face looked like, but it must be worth their horror. Transform, the gods had said. And just how? That ungainly, rebellious mass struggled to get out, and he squeezed. He did not feel the stones beneath his knees, then his hands—he felt only the terrible crushing weight of fear, the compression of hatred.

Through scalding tears Luap saw that homely, aging face transformed. Like the High Lord’s windows, he thought. From outside, they looked dark—until at night a light woke them to brilliance. Now light illuminated Gird, almost too bright to watch, and from his mouth came rolling the words they all understood without quite hearing them. Beside him, the Autumn Rose murmured a counterpoint to Gird, her face radiant. Then she was silent. Luap felt his own heart lift, expand—and then his sight, as if Gird’s speech awakened all his magegifts at once. He saw clinging darkness rolling away, lifting, knew in his bones precisely what Gird was doing, and what would come of it.

He could not bear it. It should not be Gird, who had earned a peaceful age, a time of rest. He should be the one. But when he opened his mouth, it was stopped, and the breath in it.

—You have other tasks—

He would have argued, but he had scarce breath to stay on his feet, and when he recovered, Gird was silent. Above them the cloud visible only to a few shifted, as if it were living spirit meditating attack. Gird was staring at it, mouth clamped shut just as so often before. Then—then his eyes widened, and his jaw dropped in almost comic surprise. Again Luap tried to move to his side, to help however he could. But again he could not move. Gird shrugged, then, and eyed the cloud doubtfully.

Even as he watched, Luap was thinking how he could record this in the archives. What would be believed, what would be too fantastic even for the superstitious, what would cause controversy, and what bring peace? He had no doubt that this was Gird’s death. The man was too old, too battered by his life, to survive this.

—No one could—As he swayed under the pressure of that answer, he wondered if that was what Gird had heard.

And then the cloud settled on Gird, condensing, becoming, in the end, visible to everyone. That dark mass had no certain form, no definite edges. It weighed on him, pressed against him, until he sank first to one knee, and then the ground. They could not move to help, not until he lay flat, hands splayed on the stone, struggling to rise, to breathe—not until the darkness vanished, and Gird lay motionless.

Luap knew before he reached Gird’s side that he was dead. His flesh was still warm, his broad blunt hands with their reddened, swollen knuckles still flexible, almost responsive, in Luap’s. Luap blinked back his tears and looked at the crowd. Silent, awed, most of them had the blank and stupified look of someone waked from deep sleep. A few were already weeping.

But the air around them had the fresh, washed feel of a spring morning after rain. Inside, in the chambers of his heart where he had struggled to wall up ambition and envy, Luap knew that walls had fallen, and nothing was there but love.