Oath and the Measure (32 page)

As Vertumnus played, the waters stirred before him. Lost in his thoughts and memories, he recalled a distant winter, a time of arrivals, when Lady Hollis had brought him back from a murky sleep.

He had never been sure what had happened. He remembered the midnight assignation that he and Lord Boniface had kept with the bandits, remembered his shock as money and conspiracy had passed from Knight to brigand. He remembered the aftermath, being accused of betraying the Order, slipping his guard at night, and the winter and the walking. The safety of the walls dwindled behind him and the snow was a curtain ahead of him as, blindly and foolishly, he sought a path to the east, a clear road to Lemish and home.

All about, it was cold, and the snow was relentless and the wind so loud that soon he lost all bearing, all sight and reason.

He remembered the torchlight in the far encampment and how that light swelled in the darkness and snow until it seemed like a moon or a sun ahead of him, instead of the death he feared it was. He remembered stepping into that light, the ragged men on all sides of him, and the curses and the blows to his head, punctuated by the fierce vowels of his
native language. He tried to answer amid the battering rain of stick and club and knotty fist, and then there had been the sudden blow to his left shoulder, the sharp black dagger of pain above the heart. The world went suddenly white, then dark. Then away.

Finally he remembered this place. He awoke with an old hag over him, singing a long restorative verse. He remembered all of those many words, for each of them, in the way she sang them, spread warmth through his extremities and breath through his paralyzed body. And with each word, age slipped from the singer’s face, and she recovered a lost and incomparable beauty—almond eyes, brown skin, and dark hair shining like the winter sky.

Slowly and painfully he had begun to move—first a finger, then a hand. He clutched at the grass beneath him, plucked a blade, then another. But he was still too weak—he couldn’t raise his hand. So he closed his eyes and rested, secure in the woman’s song and care. He saw nothing but green, green, and he slept and dreamt of leaves and of springtime and of roots deep in the soil.

It seemed like a hundred years. It seemed like time immemorial. And yet he was here, in the Southern Darkwoods, companion of dryads and owls and of this beautiful, mysterious woman. She had given him life, had made him blossom. She had given him the flute and the knowledge of the modes.

And now there were others—others who threatened his life and his kingdom. He had come to know them all, and he had come to forgive them. But forgiveness was not surrender: The Darkwoods grew in his blood and were irrevocably his.

His song was over, rising through the moonlit branches of the vallenwoods. Slowly, almost lovingly, Vertumnus leaned over the lad in the bed of the wagon, whispering
something to Sturm that nobody, not even the dryads, ever heard.

Years later, in the High Clerist’s Tower, in the cold of a late February, those words would return to Sturm while he slept. Waking, he would not be able to call them out of the murky country of his dreams, nor would he pause too long in the recollection, for Derek would have led scores of Knights to the slaughter in the dark day before, and the morning would be a rush of arms and preparation.

But the words were simple. “You can choose,” Vertumnus said. “To the last of this and anything, you can choose.”

“He will live, won’t he, Father?” Jack asked anxiously. Evanthe snaked her arm through his and kissed him mischievously, her small lips poised behind his ear.

“One way or the other, he will live,” Vertumnus declared. “If all goes well in the Lady’s care. Now sing, Evanthe. Diona, sing with your sister. While we carry the lad to Hollis, sing the song of the forest.”

He turned to Jack with a sudden, wild-eyed roguishness. “You sing, too, Jack. You have your father’s fine tenor voice as well as his sword hand. Or so you must, for his are on the wane.”

Jack smiled and scrambled onto the driver’s seat of the wagon, leaving his worries at the blackened foot of the oak. It was a fine tenor voice indeed with which he began the song. The wagon began to move, with Jack at the reins, and the dryads, each astraddle the neck of one of the horses, joined in sweetly and quietly, letting Jack carry the burden of the song.

Jack Derry sang, and his father accompanied him, the flute flashing over the notes and over the silences between notes. Had Mara been there, at once she would have recognized Vertumnus’s playing for the magic it was by the elaborate technique that filled the pauses in the music, the spaces between words. The wagon departed the clearing, the foliage closed around it, and soon all was silent by the clearing and pool except for the fading singing and the brisk and
imaginative sound of the flute.

In one of the silences between verses, Sturm’s sword dislodged from the tree and tumbled to earth. The scar it had made in the wood healed instantly, and leaves sprouted in wonderful profusion upon its branches. When the music resumed, this time only faint and at the edge of hearing, two knots on the trunk of the tree darkened, then moistened and glistened as the treant wakened, once again opening its ageless eyes.

Sturm slipped in and out of sleep as the wagon
moved deeper into the forest. He opened his eyes to a dark green canopy and imagined it was night, that he had slept away the day in travel.

But travel to where? And from where? He could remember the events of that morning only vaguely—something about a moving tree, an armed adversary. Vertumnus was in his memory as well, and despite himself, Sturm kept returning to a recollection, cloudy and fevered, of Jack Derry driving a wicker chariot into a clearing.

Covered by green and fever and clouds, he dozed, his sleep interrupted by snatches of song from somewhere, a distant song without echoes, muted as though it rose from the heart of a lamp or a bottle.

Closing his eyes, he listened for the briefest of whiles. Fitfully, the shape of a copper spider passed over the inside of his eyelid like an afterimage following a flood of light. He thought of Cyren, then of Mara, but the thoughts tunneled back into darkness and sleep, and the afternoon passed in dreams he would never recall.

Suddenly the chariot bed flooded with light. Sturm blinked and gasped, tried to sit up, then tumbled back into a feverish stupor. Strong hands were moving him, of that much he was certain, and the light quickened above him, dodging through leaves and needles, and the air was immediately fresh and pine-scented.

He thought he saw Jack Derry once standing over him, but the brightness of the air was so green and excruciating that he couldn’t tell for sure. Twice he overheard parts of a conversation he guessed to be between the dryads, for the voices that spoke were high and pure and musical, like the sound of crystal wind chimes.

“Dying?” one of them asked, and “Not so” the other answered.

Then he started, trying in vain to move. For leaning above him was the Druidess Ragnell, smelling of herb and peat moss, her wrinkled face a mask of riddles.

They have taken me back to Dun Ringhill, Sturm thought, fear and anger rising with the fever. But above him, the face blurred and wavered, as though he saw it reflected in disturbed waters, and when it reappeared, it was beautiful and dark and green-eyed, the face of a woman no older than forty, her black hair crowned with a waxy wreath of holly.

Sturm saw the Lady Ilys in the back of her eyes, but it was not Ilys. Though fevered, he was sure of that. “Let it begin,” she whispered, and behind her, a choir of birds burst into song.

The tranquil pool before Sturm shivered with the slightest breeze, and the sides of the tree opened around him, forming a rustic chair of sorts in which he rested, his sleep impenetrable and calm.

Muttering, lifting their thin skirts above their knees, the nymphs danced away into the forest, leaving the wounded Solamnic with the other three. The success or failure of the Lady Hollis’s doctoring was of no concern to them, the great theater of battle between Knight and treant having reached its loud and spectacular conclusion.

And they despised the Lady Hollis, the gnarled old druidess who went by the name of Ragnell back at Dun Ringhill and who had become a minor celebrity for her assaults on Solamnic castles some six years earlier. For some unexplainable reason, Lord Wilderness had taken her to bride.

Diona, never quite believing the folly of men, turned back once before they lost Vertumnus entirely behind a thick stand of blue aeterna. Setting her hand to the short evergreen, she parted the branches and peered toward the clearing. For a moment, distressingly, she thought that the druidess looked ever so much younger, that her hair was dark and her back lithe and straight.

Evanthe called for her, and the smaller nymph turned elegantly and raced into the forest, the branches of aeterna she had touched erupting in white and golden blossoms.

Of course, neither Vertumnus nor Jack Derry, who stood in the clearing above the ministering druidess, saw the ancientness of the woman in front of them. Hollis knelt gracefully over the wounded lad, her flawless features knit with concern.