Liar's Oath

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

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

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

  “What about him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “D’you still?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Five

  Patiently, Luap trimmed another goosequill for the boy who might, if he lived long enough, make a scribe. The broken quill had not been the boy’s fault; he could not control the spasms of coughing when they came. Garin was asleep now, and when he woke would find a new quill ready-trimmed. Luap wished he had better skills, some magic to heal whatever raged in the boy’s lungs. So few had his gift of language, almost elven in its grace. He concentrated on that task, to avoid thinking about Gird’s “prophecy,” and the rumors already coming back to him in colorful variety.

  “You spoil them,” came a voice from the doorway. Luap set his lips in a smile and turned. Not the woman he’d wanted to see, this gray morning, but Gird’s unmanageable daughter, back from the eastern wars to quarrel with her father… or so he saw it. In all fairness, Raheli often had the right on her side, but she had even less tact than Gird, if that were possible. And with Gird sleeping off a drunken binge, her tongue would be all edges; he wondered when she’d arrived, and if anyone had told her yet. In answer to her complaint, he tried a shrug with one shoulder. She scowled.

  “The boy’s sick,” he said. “It’s not his fault. I don’t trim quills for all of them.”

  “I should hope not. D’you have the latest version of the Code?” Just the slightest emphasis on “latest”; whatever she thought of Gird’s incessant revisions, she would not criticize her father to him. In the same way, copying her father’s courtesy, she had continued to call him Selamis long after everyone else used Luap. Now she and Gird both used his nickname more often than not, but he remembered their care to preserve his own identity.

  “Three copies.” He stood, foraged in the pigeonholes above the work table, and handed her one, hoping that hint would keep her from taking it.

  “Good,” she said cheerfully; he anticipated what she would say and managed not to wince visibly. “Then I can have this, and you’ll still have some… I’ll have copies made for the eastern granges. You won’t need to worry about it.”

  The end of his tongue would never heal, he was sure, from biting it. Rahi’s eyes challenged him, daring him to argue. Tall as Gird, not quite as broad, though the padded tunic she wore gave her more heft than she owned, she stood foursquare in his doorway and dared him. Despised him. Lord of justice, he let himself pray, and then dropped it. She was Gird’s daughter; he was Gird’s luap; he had no right to do whatever he thought of.

  Not that she’d ever know what he thought of. That he hid far inside, from both Rahi and Gird… that Rahi reminded him of his dead wife, that he had waked from dreams of stroking her scarred face back into beauty with his magery, erasing the ruin of war, pretending (how long would such pretense last? he had demanded of himself) that she was Erris come back… and making her love him, as Erris had.

  Which would never happen, no matter what magery he used; he could not do it.

  “It would be a help,” he said mildly, handing over the thick roll, enjoying her surprise at his cooperation. She even relaxed, a rare sight, and came forward to take it, bending then to look at the sleeping boy.

  “One of yours?” The implication was clear: one of his meant one of the mageborn. Luap shrugged again.

  “I don’t know, to be honest. No parents he can remember… he came out of the taverns here in Finyatha. Voice like crystal, and had taught himself to read. He has a talent for words, that one, and takes in knowledge as damp clay takes footprints. The singer’s gift is no commoner in my father’s people than in my mother’s—” At that not-subtle reminder of his dual heritage, he saw the long scar on her face darken. He went on smoothly. “—so he could belong to either, or both.”

  “That priest says the mageborn need no training to wake their powers.” That priest was Arranha, but Raheli would not say his name. She liked nothing mageborn, and Arranha’s mildness irked her, giving no excuse for her dislike.

  “Not to wake, but to use… or at least, to control.” Luap wondered what she was getting at now.

  “So how can Gird say the children are safe?” She sounded puzzled more than angry, but underneath that puzzlement Luap sensed a decision already reached. She did not understand her father’s reasoning, and would go her own way.

  “I’m not sure—”

  Her hand flashed outward, demanding silence; Luap bit off the rest of his words and waited. “I’m trying, you see, to follow him. I know it is not the child’s fault, to be mageborn, to have the magicks inborn, any more than it is a strong child’s fault to have strength. But the magicks are weapons; it’s like handing a strong child a sword or a pike—pots will break, if not heads. If the powers can wake without training, and it takes training to control them— but we cannot let them be trained, lest they turn against us—”

  “Why would they?”

  Her eyes were dark, her mother’s eyes Gird had often said, but they seemed full of light as a hawk’s eyes, staring through him to distant lands he could not see. “Why would they not, knowing we killed their parents… or most of them? Knowing their magicks gave them power of vengeance, power of rule… why would they not turn against us?”

  “You don’t trust fairness? Gird does.”

  She did not quite snort at that, but she glared, this time directly at him. “Fairness! Gods know we need fairness, and demand it, but for all the fairness lodged in human hearts you might whistle down a hedgerow forever, hoping to call out a skreekie with a bag of gold. I’ve seen little enough fairness, nor you either. Fairness would have had you on a throne—”

  “Fairness forbade me,” said Luap. “Your father—Gird—trusts fairness. In
the end, he says—”

  “In the end, when all men are wise and honest… and do you, too, believe that will happen?”

  He had changed this much: he could not lie to her, even though he wanted Gird to be right, and her to be wrong, as much as he’d ever wanted anything. “No,” he said. “I don’t. But I think it’s worth working toward.”

  “Men and women aren’t gnomes,” said Raheli, as if he’d argued that point.

  “No,” he said. “They aren’t.” He wished she would go. He wished she would go now, quickly, before the Autumn Rose arrived… or he wished the Rosemage had his sensitivity and would delay her arrival until Rahi left. But she would not deviate a hairsbreadth from her way, that one, and if her way now aimed at more than her own pride’s joy, it was still a straight uncompromising trail. Go away, he thought at Rahi, knowing it would do no good. Even if she could feel a pressure from him, she would resist it.

  “Will you marry again?” she asked, in a tone consciously idle. He knew it was not. Several of the men had offered for her, before she made it clear to everyone that she would not remarry. She probably thought women had offered for him.

  “I doubt it,” said Luap. “You know my story… and besides, a man marries to have children. What could I offer mine, but suspicion? You—everyone—would think it meant I was still thinking of the throne.”

  “I thought you might marry… her.” Only one her lay between them. Luap said nothing, but Rahi persisted. “You know. Calls herself a rose… I say thorny…”

  Luap closed his eyes against the explosion: the Autumn Rose was in hearing distance, only a pace or so away. Silence. He opened his eyes, to find Rahi lodged in his doorway like a stone in a pipe, and the Rosemage’s light streaming around her like water.

  “You don’t have to like me,” the Rosemage said. “You don’t have to understand one tenth of what I have done—”

  “I understand quite well.” Rahi’s accent thickened; her back held the very shape of scorn.