Echoes of Betrayal

  “Then yes, I am a murderer,” Arvid said. He felt a weight on his shoulders pressing him down and down, but he braced his legs and back against it.

  “Did you not realize that before?”

  How could he possibly explain, and yet he had to try. “Marshal, the Thieves’ Guild has its own laws, and someone to enforce them, just as the city has its laws, and someone to enforce them. In Thieves’ Guild law, to kill a man at the Guildmaster’s order is to be an executioner, not a murderer. Someone else killing a thief, that’s murder.”

  “And you kept believing that?”

  “Mostly, yes.” Until … until last year. Until Paksenarrion’s ordeal. Until he felt compelled to save her—first her body, he thought, and then her life. Until he had killed to save her from that crazy, angry woman. Until she had said Gird might have plans for him and for the Guild. “It was Paksenarrion,” was all he could say aloud. The wood warmed in his hand again and this time glowed so brightly that he could see the bones of his fingers as shadows in red flesh. It didn’t hurt.

  “Well.” The Marshal rocked back on his heels. “The relic shows you telling truth. And you were touched by a paladin, were you?”

  “Yes,” Arvid said.

  “And how has it been since then?”

  “Since? I—” Tears rose again, this time overflowing; he could not stop them or the sobs that made his voice ragged. “I—I tried—I can’t—I am not the same. I can’t—do—what I did. I can’t feel—without that other. And the voice—”

  “Voice?”

  “In my—in my head. Saying things—”

  The Marshal’s bushy gray brows had risen almost to his hairline. “You hear a voice, do you? Gird’s voice?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know—” Yes, you do, the voice said. You know who I am. Tell him. Arvid struggled again with his own voice and said, “He says he’s Gird.” Light flared between his fingers again, brighter even than before. The boy was sitting up now, resting against the man’s knee, mouth open, staring. “It can’t be Gird, can it?” Arvid asked the Marshal, hating the pleading in his voice. “I know she said—but it can’t be—”

  “If it’s not Gird, who do you think is making that light?” the Marshal said. “Here in Gird’s grange, who but Gird could make Gird’s relic do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Arvid said. His hands shook.

  “Let me see the letter,” the Marshal said. He put out his hand for the relic.

  Arvid handed over the relic and fumbled the Marshal-General’s letter out of a pocket, annoyed with his trembling fingers. He was an adult; he was a—Fool. He tried to shut the voice out of his mind, close every door and window there, but though the voice said no more for the moment, he knew that presence remained.

  Instead, he watched the Marshal. The man read with pursed lips, intent. Once he looked up at Arvid, then back at the letter. Then he sighed. “Well,” he said. “It appears that this is in fact a letter granting safe passage to a man doing some task for the Marshal-General. Whether that man is you … I do not see a kteknik gnome at your side.”

  “He’s at the inn where I’ve been staying,” Arvid said. “Dattur is the name he gives humans. Mine is Arvid Semminson.”

  “How did the Guildmaster of thieves come to have possession of this letter?”

  Arvid told the story of his arrival in Valdaire, his approach to the Guildmaster, his capture and near death, then his return to the city.

  “Why did you risk that?”

  “The pass to the north was closed—I could not go back. Dattur and I had some gold—we took it from the men who tried to kill us.”

  “Are they dead?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t kill them. The ground collapsed.” The Marshal gave Arvid a sharp look but did not ask more. “And then here, I set up as a small merchant. Dattur does tailors’ work for a rockfolk shop. That’s given us enough to live on for the winter.”

  “And the Guildmaster who captured you?”

  “Dead,” Arvid said. “And by my hand.”

  “At whose command?”

  “My own. I counted it self-defense; you may not.”

  “I count it vengeance. A sword has fangs: it bites those who wield it.” The Marshal sighed. “You are in more trouble than you know, Arvid Semminson. I believe you are speaking truth, but the truth too has fangs. You cannot walk the streets in safety today, not like that—” His gesture took in Arvid’s choice of clothing and more. “I trust you left no clues behind you, but still—”

  “I left clues,” Arvid said. “I intended them to know who had done it.”

  “Then you will stay as my guest until nightfall, then leave the boy safe here and go.”

  Arvid shook his head. “I cannot—”

  “You cannot take him into your quarrel, man. You are a danger to him whether you mean him harm or not. He is a child. We can care for him, find him a home, see that he is not hurt again.”

  “They will come looking for him; they will blame him, too.” Arvid dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to make a darkness in which he could think. “I didn’t think—I didn’t expect a child to be there—”

  “And you got him out safely. A good thing. But not thinking— not ever a good thing.” The Marshal’s voice softened. “You need a cup of sib and a chance to sit down. Come on back to my office.”

  “The boy—” Arvid glanced over; one of the other men was talking to the boy in a low voice, but the boy was watching Arvid.

  “We’ll talk about that, too.” The Marshal stepped off the platform and put the relic back in its niche. It did not glow. Arvid turned his back on it with difficulty—would it start glowing again?—and walked over to the boy. The man looked up, ready to be angry; the boy smiled.

  “Says his name is Arvid, too,” the man said. “Not a common name here. Is it up north?”

  “Common enough,” Arvid said. “Maybe his family was from the north.”

  “Says his mother worked in a tavern. Doesn’t remember a father. She died of fever five winters ago.” He stared at Arvid as if he thought meaning could cross the space without words to carry it.

  “You’ve been in Aarenis before,” the Marshal said. His look was also challenging.

  “Yes … are you asking if I’m his father?” Arvid glanced at the boy; he was staring at Arvid, wide-eyed.

  “It’s a question,” the Marshal said.

  “I don’t know,” Arvid said. In the boy’s face he saw hope and longing … a father come to find him, rescue him … it was a bard’s tale, that notion. Really? And did not I come to find and rescue you? Arvid jerked as if someone had stuck him with a hot pin, and the Marshal shook his head.

  “You never thought of that?” the Marshal asked.

  “It wasn’t that,” Arvid said. “It was … I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You need sib,” the Marshal said again. “Come with me.”

  Arvid followed him out of the cavernous room, feeling the boy’s gaze following him like a ray of sun on his back, warming. Too warm. Too much.

  In the Marshal’s office, a small plain room with a table and two unpadded chairs, Arvid sat where he was bidden. He wanted to be alone. He wanted silence. He wanted, most of all, himself as he had been, without that annoying voice in his head, without the problems that had beset him since he first saw a stubborn yellow-haired girl with a sword. No, that’s not what you really want. He would have argued, but the Marshal was handing him a mug.

  “Sib and some herbs. Nothing to harm you, but you’re shaking like a man in fever.”

  He was shaking, the sib sloshing in the cup, and he hadn’t realized it. He took a gulp—lukewarm, as if it had been in the pot for an hour or so. “I—I can’t—tell—”

  The Marshal hitched a hip onto the table and sipped from his own mug. Arvid looked down, trying to will his hands to quit trembling. He had always had steady hands; a thief needed steady hands … and now they shook. “I can guess some of what’s happening,??
? the Marshal said. “But not all. You are the one who saved Paksenarrion’s life; Gird is trying to save yours.”

  “I didn’t need saving!” That came out in a rush. “I was fine.”

  “Gird thinks differently. Which means the High Lord thinks differently.”

  “I was Guildmaster in Vérella,” Arvid said. His voice still shook, and he hated that. He took another gulp of sib. “I thought that was Gird’s reward.”

  No.

  “And they betrayed you to the Guildmaster here,” the Marshal said. “And yet you escaped. Will you tell me Gird had no part in that?”

  Arvid remembered every detail of that miserable day. “No,” he said. “I can’t—the voice came—and the rain softened the thongs just enough—but surely he could have just cut them—”

  “You think Gird should have made it easy for you?” the Marshal said, brows raised. “Did he make it easy for Paksenarrion?”

  “No,” Arvid whispered. Those days and nights too came back to him, far more vivid than he wished. “No,” he said again. “And I thought … it was cruel.”

  “Umm. And for all your bravado, Arvid Semminson, all your years as a Thieves’ Guild enforcer, are you telling me you do not like cruelty? It must have been hard, when you were young, to pretend not to notice, not to care.”

  When he was young … He shook his head. He did not want to be that child again; he wanted the confident man he had been. “I don’t know why it bothered me,” he said. “It wasn’t supposed to.”

  “Did you ever worship the Bloodlord?” the Marshal asked.

  “No. I couldn’t. When my master died—the Guildmaster who first gave me my assignment as enforcer—and the next began to bring in the red priests, I was often away. I—I made reasons to be away.” He finished the last of the sib. “I just want—I just want to be who I was. I don’t care, really, about being Guildmaster … but I can’t—I can’t live this way, on a rope between two poles.”

  “No one can,” the Marshal said. “And you can’t go back, Arvid. You can’t be who you were. You have already changed too much, and the hands holding you now will never let you go.”

  Arvid felt the tears on his cheeks before he realized he was going to cry. The Marshal took the mug from his hand and set it on the table. He was mercifully silent, leaving the room for a moment and returning with a towel. He laid it in Arvid’s lap and sat down in the other chair. Arvid picked up the towel in shaking hands and mopped his face. Tears poured out, as if from a spring. He no longer knew what they meant, if it was grief or joy or anger or pain that brought them forth, but he could not stop them. Finally, they ceased. His belly hurt; his head felt near bursting. He could not breathe but through his mouth, and he took in long breaths, trying to reach calm.

  And calm held him. No voice in his head, just calm. He rested in it like a child … like the child he had once been, like that boy in his own arms. He blinked, clearing the last tears from his eyes, wiped his face again, and looked over at the Marshal. Instead of the scorn he expected, he saw only compassion.

  “Paladins,” the Marshal said, “always cause trouble.”

  “What?” That was not what Arvid expected to hear.

  “You could even say the gods always cause trouble—certainly Gird did, though we celebrate the trouble he caused. Paladins, though—we don’t really know how they started, but it’s clear they come into the world to change it, and that’s always trouble for someone. Usually a lot of someones. What I heard all last year, from the time the first spring caravans came down, was how things had changed in the north. All because of her.”

  Arvid thought about it. His life hadn’t changed after meeting her except for a sort of tickle in the mind, a curiosity about her. Had she worn the necklace? Had he changed her? He’d been sorry when he heard she’d been cast out of the Fellowship, but he hadn’t bothered looking for her.

  “Surely you recognize what happened,” the Marshal said. “Who found out Phelan was king? She did. Everyone the paladin touches changes, and change often hurts. Most of us in Valdaire knew of Duke Phelan even if we hadn’t met him. We knew his reputation; we’d seen him; his soldiers were here all winter every year, campaigned all over Aarenis in summer. I’d met his Captain Arcolin; he offered to the grange every year. Now Phelan’s a king, Arcolin’s a lord, that woman captain—the Falkian—is a duke: they all changed. Had to. You changed, too.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Arvid said. “After I met her—nothing changed for a while.” But looking back now, he could see images of himself … He had left Brewersbridge as smug as ever, but … the cruelty bothered him more. He had carried out assignments … mostly …

  “Would the man you were ten years ago have bothered to save her after the ordeal?”

  “I don’t know,” Arvid said. His younger self, well armored against compassion, confident in his superiority to the common herd of thieves, something he still felt, but … but differently … “I suppose not,” he said. “I would have left the city, found some errand to pursue, but I would not have cared about her. But then I hadn’t met her.”

  “And meeting her changed you,” the Marshal said. “I would say the change began with your first meeting—she intrigued you, she surprised you, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. But she wasn’t a paladin then.”

  “True. She was one of Phelan’s soldiers—she came to the markets whenever the Company was in Valdaire, just like the other soldiers. I saw her; everyone saw her. None of us knew what she would be; we saw only the surface. But that has changed me: knowing that someone I saw more than once, that I dismissed as just another non-Girdish soldier, could become a paladin of Gird. I am less certain of my judgment of those I see.” The Marshal grinned suddenly. “And that’s why you’re still alive today. My old self might well have killed you for what I supposed you were doing to that boy who bears your name.”

  “I’m no paladin,” Arvid said. “Nor like to be.”

  “Maybe,” the Marshal said slowly. “But what the gods plan for you could surprise both of us.” He was silent a long moment; Arvid concentrated on his own breathing and saw with relief that his hands no longer trembled. “You’re calmer,” the Marshal said then. “But you have not eaten—you and the boy both need lunch. I’ll send him in and bring you something.”

  “I have money,” Arvid said, reaching for his pocket.

  The Marshal shook his head. “Not today. Today you will share our lunch.”

  The boy Arvid came to the Marshal’s office hand in hand with one of the men, his hair still damp from a bath he’d been given, wearing clean patched trousers rolled up, a shirt that nearly came to his knees, and heavy wool socks on his bruised feet. He smiled shyly at Arvid. “M’ma named me … did she name you?”

  “No, lad,” Arvid said. “My own mother did, and she died long ago.”

  “Do you remember her?” the boy asked.

  “Not well,” Arvid said. “I was young, about your age, and her face faded over the years.”

  “My ma sang songs to me,” the boy said. “She said my da sang to her. So she gave me his name and said he’d given me his voice.”

  Arvid’s throat closed. He had learned to sing as a child, not from his parents but as part of the Guild’s training: children who could sing could beg by singing and distract listeners from pickpockets and cutpurses. He’d had a good voice, he’d been told, and he’d been put up on a table to sing for the Guild itself more than once.

  And as a man he’d sung sweet melodies to more than one lass, courting songs and bed songs both. How many of those happy nights had left sons and daughters scattered here and there? He’d never asked. He’d never cared enough.

  “Are you my father?” the boy asked. The way he stood, the expression on his face, the tone of voice, all pierced Arvid’s heart.

  “I don’t know,” he said, fighting the lump in his throat. “And I am sorry I don’t know. I do not know of any child I might have sired, but—Arvid—in my life I might
have sired more than one. I am sorry I cannot tell you for certain.”

  The boy looked at him—no anger, no fear, no condemnation. Not the way Arvid had looked at his own father; he had been an angry boy, a troublemaker, his father insisted. “It is not your fault,” the boy said. Arvid shivered. Of course it was his fault that he did not know if he had children. Whose else could it be? But the boy went on. “But if it does not displease you, sir, because you rescued me, and did not kill me, and because we have the same name, I would … I would pretend that you are, in my own mind. Not to trouble you …”

  He did not deserve this … this forgiveness, if that was what it was. This acceptance. And the boy himself did not deserve a liar, a thief, a murderer bent on vengeance as a father. But the boy stood there, watching, and he had to say something, something that would not quench the spirit in the boy’s eyes.

  “It would not trouble me,” Arvid said. “It would not trouble me to have a son like you, and if you are truly my son, then I am content, and if you are not, then … then I will do for you what I think a father should do.” What he could do with gold, he would do. What a father should be—he did not know.

  “You aren’t really a thief,” the boy said with certainty. “You wear black; you know thieves’ talk; you killed the Guildmaster, but you aren’t really a thief.”

  He had been telling people for years that he was not a thief—telling himself he was not a thief—and all along he knew himself thief to the bone … but the boy’s words felt as heavy as stone.

  “I was a thief,” Arvid said to the boy, his heart hammering. “But perhaps you are right, and I’m not a thief now.”

  “Here we are,” the Marshal said, bustling in with a large round loaf and a hunk of cheese that filled the room with its pungent scent. One of the other men brought in two stools; the boy stood and backed into a corner. The Marshal moved the empty chair over and then waved the boy into it. “You there, lad, and we’ll have plenty of room. Bring us some water, Cal.”

  Bread, water, and cheese made up the meal; the boy ate silently and fast, a style Arvid recognized from his own youth. Thief children weren’t ever plump. The Marshal and Cal—introduced at last as his yeoman-marshal—ate noisily, talking through mouthfuls of food about some grange business Arvid didn’t understand. He scarcely listened. He himself ate slowly—he was hungry but distrusted his stomach after the day’s already abundant emotion. One bite of the cheese was enough; he ate bread and drank water, grateful for them.