Oath and the Measure (9 page)

That morning, all but the boldest of them averted
their eyes.

In the chilly, torchlit corridors, as the night turned and the bell of the third watch tolled deep and lonely, the squires began to stir, preparing their masters’ armor and grumbling at the weather and the hour. It was a time that usually bristled with activity and horseplay and gossip, but on this morning, business stopped and conversation hushed as Sturm hastened by on his way to the stables. Silent, almost embarrassed, the Knights and squires averted their gazes. Even the servants, usually indifferent to Solamnic events, murmured as he passed and made signs of warding.

“Faring off a doomed man,” Sturm muttered to himself as he stepped into the great central courtyard, into the dark
and the flurried last snows of the season. Derek Crownguard, long awake on mysterious business, stood a stone’s throw from the stable door, shrouded in misted breath and blankets. A brace of Jeoffreys stood with him, his whey-faced partners in misdeed. Aristocrats all, and first families for generations back, the three of them had no morning duties, and Sturm could only guess what would lift them from warm beds and superior dreams.

As Sturm walked into the stable and reached for his saddle, which hung from its customary peg on the wall, he found it tied and tangled with dried vines, decorated bizarrely with branches of evergreen. He heard the laughter from outside and angrily tugged the saddle from the snarl of greenery. The vines snapped, he staggered with the saddle, and a chorus of young voices arose from the dark and the cold.

“Return this man to Huma’s breast,” they sang.

Sturm stepped from the stable. Despite himself, he couldn’t keep from smiling. After all, the boys were singing a Solamnic funeral song.

They finished the verse and stood scornfully in front of him. Derek Crownguard was flushed and breathless with off-key singing, but he loomed substantial in front of his rival, his leather armor pocked and blemished and dirty, his face in much the same shape. Behind him, two pale, bat-faced Jeoffreys wheezed with malicious laughter.

A crazed thought dawned on Sturm. If he were indeed to fulfill Derek Crownguard’s wish and never return from this strange and misbegotten journey, why not leave as his father
had left his mourning garrison that legendary night when Castle Brightblade fell? Indeed, why not leave them with laughter?

Suddenly, wildly, Sturm joined in the singing.

Louder and louder Sturm sang, drowning out first one Jeoffrey, then the other, then the ringleader Derek himself. Puzzled, a little frightened, the squires backed away from the stable, Sturm following them and singing louder still.

Thoroughly unnerved, the Jeoffreys turned and ran, leaving Derek backing through the courtyard alone. Sturm stepped up to him, singing still louder, until lights flickered and shone in the Tower windows as disgruntled Knights were jostled from their sleep by Derek’s strangely backfired joke.

Quickly and more quickly the haughty squire backed up, the laughter all vanished from his face now as he looked into the hard eyes of this obviously mad southerner. So intent was Derek Crownguard on his retreat that he didn’t notice the young gardener Jack, who had stopped behind him for a moment’s rest in the unpleasant duty of hauling a wheelbarrow of manure away from the stables.

It was a true shame he did not notice.

Backward Derek toppled into the bed of the wheelbarrow, but his fall was cushioned by its rather fresh contents. He lurched from the wheelbarrow, stumbled, and fell, and Sturm finished the funeral song in a loud and exultant voice.

Stephan and Gunthar stood on the battlements above the boys, peering down on them and watching the strange
morning music come to pass.

“All Brightblade, that one is,” Lord Gunthar said softly to his old friend.

“Not
all
Brightblade,” Stephan allowed. “But, the gods willing, he is Brightblade enough.”

Sturm smiled again as he saddled his horse. He felt wild and unsettled and strangely free.

Derek had blushed and fumed and backed away, this time very carefully, leaving his first-family arrogance behind him in the snowy courtyard. Lord Boniface had emerged furiously from the steps leading to the Knight’s Spur and caught the soiled squire by a clean sleeve.

“How dare you pass the morning in horseplay,” Boniface growled, “when I’ve a hundred tasks remaining for you before sunrise!” They trooped away across the courtyard, the Knight berating his squire and battering him with question after obscure question. The gardener Jack covered a gap-toothed smile and pushed the wheelbarrow off after them, humming Sturm’s tune ever so quietly.

Sturm chuckled as he watched the procession. No doubt Derek would be doused and then sent to his carpeted chambers now, angry and flustered, rehearsing what he should have done or said when the upstart from Solace turned on him, roaring with laughter and dirges.

“Give him a day, Luin,” Sturm whispered to the mare, who snorted affably in the slowly dispersing dark of the stable. “Give Derek a day, and let me be far away on the road, and there’s no telling what the story will be as to what took place this morning in the courtyard.”

Already the castle grounds were defined in a pale gray light. The lamps in the tower seemed dim now, and overhead the bats and glowing vespertiles rushed to the safety of cave and lowland barnloft. Deep on the plains, the horizon took shape.

The sun had risen by the time Sturm led Luin into the courtyard and up to the southern gates. Lord Stephan was there to see him off, mist trailing through the white strands of his beard. Gunthar was there, too, and he inspected the young man sternly, making sure his horse was properly saddled and that his inherited armor fit him with Solamnic propriety.

“These ancestral arms are a bit … outsized, lad,” Gunthar proclaimed in disappointment, staring skeptically at Angriff’s breastplate, so wide and swallowing that it looked as if someone had dropped Sturm into a cage. “Perhaps you have a more suitable fit in your quarters?”

Sturm shook his head.

“A closer fit, yes, Lord Gunthar. But more
suitable?
I think not. For I am the Brightblade, called to a challenge by Lord Wilderness. My legacy rides with me to the gods know where.” The lad masked a smile. It was a speech he had rehearsed while combing the mare, and he thought it was all resonant and Measured, a fitting exit line and a fitting prologue to his own great adventure.

Pompous little bumpkin, Lord Stephan thought with gentle amusement. Rattling about in that coffin of a breastplate. We’ll see how well ‘the Brightblade’ and his legacy weather the coming news.

“The gods know where, indeed, Sturm Brightblade,” Stephan announced aloud as the great oaken gates of the Clerist’s Tower opened behind him. “But your first destination is no doubt the Southern Darkwoods, and the way to that place Lord Vertumnus … insists on showing you, it seems.”

Sturm’s eyes widened as he looked over Stephan’s shoulder. Inexplicably, vines had grown from the cobblestones at the foot of the Southern Gates, spreading over the huge passageway like an enormous green web. And out on the wings of Habbakuk, tumbling south and east into the rocky foothills, a narrow swath of grass had risen from nowhere. Overnight it had spread from the gates of the castle down
onto the Solamnic Plains. As bright as green fire it was, and as flawless as a ribbon or a dignitary’s carpet.

“A good host he is, this Vertumnus,” Sturm jested weakly, rubbing his shoulder, which all of a sudden had begun to throb. “A good host indeed, to guide me from the Tower to his hold.” His words felt thin in the misted air.

“I trust the venture is not as dark as your friend Crownguard makes it,” Lord Stephan insisted. “Nonetheless, I cannot lie and say the path will be easy. But may the Dragon and the Mantis guide you also, and may the Gray Book open and show you its wisdom.”

Waxing pompous myself, Lord Stephan thought. Must be the hour and the greenery. For it had taken the Knights by surprise, too—Vertumnus’s magic leading up to the very gates of the stronghold. A narrow swath of green it was, but powerful. Lord Gunthar had stepped from the gates and touched it, first with his sword, and then with his bare hand. Stephan had followed suit, and the spring grass felt warm and pliant between his fingers, and with the touch had come a strange, undefinable yearning for the depths of the wilderness, for the fastness and green of the forest.

“May the Dragon and the Mantis guide you,” he whispered again as Sturm led his horse gingerly through the maze of greenery out onto Vertumnus’s magical path. Boniface and Gunthar watched from the walls, too, and to all three of the Knights, the lad seemed frail, forever unprepared. Again Lord Stephan regretted that Oath and Measure prevented the lot of them from taking up arms and following.

Brightblade the lad might be—indeed, Lord Angriff’s son he
was
, in image and spirit. But what lay ahead …

Boniface dragged his sputtering squire to a secluded spot off the gardens. It was near a shed, where the gardeners’ tools lay amid broken statuary and the wreckage of a
gnomish irrigation system that had never worked in the first place.

Boniface looked about him and quickly set upon his hapless nephew.

“Is everything in place, Derek?”

“Ev-everything?” the boy stammered nervously.

“Everything, you pampered little fool! The trap at the ford, the mare’s malady, the ambush, the surprise at the village, the—”

“Unc—Lord Boniface, please!” Derek urged in a whisper, nodding frantically in the direction of Jack, who was serenely dumping the manure on the pile at the foot of the garden. The gardener wiped his hands and shuffled carefully through a maze of flowers, where he knelt and examined the green bud of a green rose.

“Never mind him!” the Knight ordered, his voice low and menacing. “Only a servant and simpleton he is, but perhaps even
he
would have done better in preparing the surprises for that fool of a Brightblade.”

“You may rest assured, sir,” Derek replied coldly, his anger and dignity rising. “By Paladine and all the gods of good, you may know that everything you planned for Sturm Brightblade is in place and awaits only his … his
honorable
presence.”

At those words, the great Solamnic swordsman relaxed and loosened his grip on the squire. With a curious smile, he regarded the lad in front of him.

“Those are strange gods for your oath, Derek Crownguard. Strange gods indeed.”