Oath and the Measure (36 page)

Vertumnus rose to his feet and hopped to the smithy shelves, stood on a chair, and brought down a long object wrapped in canvas cloth. Slowly, proudly, he unwrapped the thing and held it before Sturm.

It was a sheath for a sword, the work on its surface intricate and flawless. A dozen faces stared at Sturm, embossed in gleaming silver. Like reflections in a dozen mirrors they were, or like the statuary in Castle di Caela, miles and years away. Each face shared his eyes and expression, and each was bordered in copper leaves and roses intertwined, red and green, so that it seemed on fire—a dozen suns, or sunflowers, or burgeoning plants.

“It’s … it’s magnificent, sir,” Sturm said quietly, his manners overcoming his perplexity. He admired the sheath from
a distance, almost afraid to touch it. Absently he sat on the anvil, squinting to regard the skill of the craftsman. “I trust it could only be Weyland’s work.”

“The work of his master,” Vertumnus said quietly. “No man alive could do the likes of it, if I do say so.” Quietly he crouched by the open forge.

“These amenities, Lord Vertumnus, are most welcome to the traveler,” Sturm announced in his most formal and measured manner, turning the scabbard in his hand. “And doubtless they are testament to your honor and breeding, as is this wonderful gift.”

Muffled laughter came from the corner of the smithy, where Vertumnus crouched in violet shadow and yellow light, laying peat upon the glowing coals of the forge.

Sturm cleared his throat and plunged on. “But I recall an agreement between the two of us, sealed at a Yuletide banquet. ‘Meet me on the first day of spring,’ you said, in my stronghold amid the Southern Darkwoods. Come there alone, and we shall settle this—sword to sword, knight to knight, man to man.’ You told me I had to defend my father’s honor, and you challenged mine.”

Vertumnus nodded, his obscure smile fading into a sharp and rigid solemnity.

“So we turn to the business,” he whispered. Laying the last square of turf on the fire, he stood to his full, imposing height—a head taller than the lad in front of him.

Sturm gasped. He hadn’t remembered the Green Man this tall, this imposing.

“Those were not
all
the words that passed between us,” he insisted. “You Solamnics, with your passion for rules and contracts, should remember the whole brittle world of what was said and the very words that said it.”

“But I do remember,” Sturm replied. “ ‘For now I owe you a stroke,’ you said, ‘as you owe me a life.’ ”

“Then our memories agree,” Vertumnus murmured. “Follow me into the smithy yard. There we shall satisfy the terms of this agreement.”

Sturm set down the scabbard and stepped from the smithy into the afternoon light. Vertumnus waited for him by the well amid a litter of leaves, flawed artifacts, and half-finished ornaments. At once, a low music rose from the earth around them, and Sturm held his naked sword to the fore with a nervous and intent readiness.

“Arm yourself, Lord Vertumnus!” he challenged, his teeth clenched.

Lazily, catlike, Vertumnus leaned against the stones of the well.

And then, in a blurred and blinding instant, he seized Sturm, his green hand closing over the lad’s sword hand with irresistible strength.

“Sword to sword,” he muttered, and tightened his grip.

Sturm winced. A sensation—overpowering, almost electrical—coursed through his sword arm. Sturm tried to cry out, to release the blade, but the power was binding, riveting and relentless. In shock, he looked at Vertumnus, who returned his stare with a gaze that was wild and gleeful and yet surprisingly kind. From the lad’s heart arose a tremendous sense of sweetness, and around him was music, the flute and the timbrel and the elven cello and somewhere, rising in the midst of these, the faint, crisp call of a trumpet he would hear again and again until that day on the battlements of the Tower, when the Dragonlord approached in the distance and he stood atop the Knight’s Spur and heard the song one last time, finally understanding what it meant.…

He knelt on the ground amid plowshares and horseshoes and bent swords. Vertumnus stood over him, the sword bright in his hand.

“Knight to knight, and man to man,” Lord Wilderness concluded quietly.

Sturm could not look at his victorious opponent. Slowly, abjectly, he crept toward Lord Wilderness.

“The terms are nearly met,” the lad said, fearful and beaten. “You may give me the stroke that is my due and take the
life owed you.”

Kneeling before Vertumnus, Sturm wrestled down his terror. He murmured the Solamnic funeral song in bleak preparedness for the falling sword.…

Which touched his left shoulder, then his right, with a stroke that was light and affectionate and playful.

“Arise, Sir Sturm Brightblade, Knight of the Forest,” Lord Wilderness chuckled.

In consternation and anger, Sturm glared up at his opponent …

Who had mocked him and dismissed his honor and taken his weapon …

Who had wrenched the Measure even from chivalrous death …

“The life you owe me, lad,” Vertumnus said, “is the one you would spend in swordplay and vengeance.”

Sturm stared at him, dumbstruck and questioning.

“My son has told you of … Lord Boniface Crownguard?” Lord Wilderness began. “And you have seen his handiwork before you on the road to the Darkwoods?”

“I—I cannot say that road has been easy, Lord Vertumnus,” Sturm replied haltingly. “But I cannot believe it was Lord Boniface’s doing.”

“Think!” Vertumnus urged angrily. “Bandits and assassins paid in Solamnic coin from here to the Clerist’s Tower, a gauntlet of misfortunes and accidents, the one gift you received from Boniface purposefully flawed … Simple
mathematics
could tell you the answer if your Oath and Measure weren’t blinding you to the truth!”

“But why?” Sturm asked. “If Lord Boniface Crownguard is capable of such treachery, why waste it on the likes of me?”

“Why?” Vertumnus asked, and suddenly music filled the littered yard, as though somehow the wind passed over the flute at his belt, drawing song out of it. “Listen, and look to the reforged blade of your sword …”

He could not help but look, and in the heart of the blade,
Sturm saw a snowy landscape, the metal swirling from silver to white. Sturm squinted and looked closer.…

A sinister, shadowy company of men, cloaked and hooded against the driving snow, assembled at a remote pass. At the head of the column, a man was seated on horseback, his hood tilted back despite the weather. Bearded and scarred he was, as if he were carved from rubble and dried branches.

The man was deep in conversation with another, elegantly dressed in Solamnic armor. The Knight had come with scant escort: another Knight, it seemed, and three foot soldiers. His armor beaded with melted snow, the Knight in command slipped a scroll into the rugged man’s knotted hand and pointed through the boiling frozen air to a dark passage between rockfaces.

“Through that pass they will come,” he said.

Sturm knew the voice. He started to shout, but the music surged about him and silenced him.

“The standard will be that of Agion Pathwarden,” the man said. “Red centaur against a black mountain.”

The rough man huddled more tightly in his cloak. “And for this such a generous payment. Lord …”

“Grimbane,” the man replied. “You know me only as Lord Grimbane.”

“Illusion!” Sturm shouted, wrenching his eyes from the vision. Vertumnus sat atop the anvil, regarding him curiously and a little sadly. “It … it
must
be illusion! It
must …
”

“But if it is not …”

“I shall wreak such revenge that …” Sturm began.

“No.” Vertumnus slipped gracefully from the anvil. In two long strides, he was beside Sturm, hand clasped tightly on the lad’s shoulder.

Sturm gasped. The pain was gone … the wound …

“No,” Vertumnus repeated. “It is no illusion. For I was the other Knight, Sturm Brightblade. I rode in the snow to that remote pass, where scroll and payment were handed over to the brigands. Along with the infantrymen who accompanied
us. And when Agion fell and the castle was doomed, I was the one that Boniface blamed.”

Dumbstruck, Sturm dropped the sword. Blinded by tears and anger, he groped for the blade on the smithy grounds, while Lord Wilderness continued serenely.

“I followed him into the mountains and the driving snow, buoyed by my love for the Measure, my delight in the honor Lord Boniface had conferred upon me by asking me to accompany him. The love and delight changed to loathing and rage when I watched him conspire, watched the money pass from Knight to bandit.

“But there was nothing I could say. I returned to Castle Brightblade, where Boniface, doubling over his tracks like an old fox in the snow, used the Code and the Measure and the whole damnable Solamnic machinery to convict
me
of
his
treachery. When I left the ranks and wandered into the risking snow, I knew nothing of Hollis and the change that awaited me. I thought I walked toward death, toward a slow fading into ice and slumber, but I preferred such a death to that exacted by the Order—to the shedding of my blood and my joy beneath the nails of a bloodless, joyless company.

“But I have not brought you this far for a bloodletting. Solamnic revenge is a nasty, entangled thing, as hot and poisonous as spiders coupling. And no to your Oath and Measure, too, and the pride your Order derives from them. For the Measure may be revenge by rules, but still it is revenge, still intricate and vicious.”

“Then … then
what?
” Sturm almost shouted.

Vertumnus crouched beside the lad.

“Stay in the Darkwoods,” he said. “Forgive Boniface … the Order … your father … the lot of them. Forgive them and leave them behind you. Forgive them.”

“But there is the Oath and Measure!” Sturm insisted. “A thousand years of law—”

“Have done no good!” Vertumnus interrupted vehemently. “They have made monsters of the Crownguards and the
Jeoffreys, have slaughtered nameless thousands, have cost you a father and wounded you past hope, past recovery, unless …”

Fearfully, angrily, the lad scrambled away from the man in front of him, striking his shoulder against the stones of the well. Tripping over a discarded andiron, he lurched to his feet at last, his eyes clenched in pain and desolation and anger, his knuckles white on the hilt of the sword.

Blasphemy. I shall not have it. By Huma and Vinas Solamnus and Paladine himself, I shall not have it I

“My father is the Order now!” Sturm cried out, his voice thin and anguished in the silent yard. “My family is the Order! Go back to your woods and leave me alone!”

He awoke lying on the anvil, the scabbard in his hands. All about him, the smithy had vanished, and with it the stable. A solitary Luin grazed peacefully amid a nearby vine-covered orchard, and Lord Vertumnus was nowhere to be seen.

The music had stopped. In one direction, then another, Sturm moved, circling about the anvil and facing in all directions, hoping the song would resume, would guide him to Vertumnus. But the whole village was silent—thickly, oppressively quiet.

Luin raised her head and whinnied, but Sturm heard nothing.

He looked above, and the wind was diving silently through the trees. The leaves rustled noiselessly, and overhead a flock of geese moved quickly south in their seasonal migration toward the cooler regions, their wingbeats and cries inaudible.

“What?” Sturm asked aloud, starved for a sound, even that of his own voice. He shouted again, and again a third time.

It was the only sound in creation, and it shivered before it
lost itself in the deep and abiding silence around it. Then out of the silence came the dull, regular sound of a drum in the distance. Sturm strained to listen, to follow the sound, but wherever he turned, it was equally faint, and wherever he moved—toward Luin, toward the anvil, back toward the center of town—the sound was unchanging, muffled.

He was in the village green before he recognized it as the sound of his own measured heart. He stopped and drew the sword. In the quiet around him, he heard the scuttle of leaves, a high wind sighing in the branches.…

And at once, unexplainable by all of his rules and codes and instructions, he knew that he would never again find the Green Man.