As sharply as a pinprick, his own vision of his stronghold intruded. He wanted to see Aris there, using his healing magery, teaching others how to heal. Seri did not fit. He had no use for a Girdish Marshal, a peasant with no more magical ability than any other peasant. What could she do? He wasn't going to raise and train an army; they would have no enemies to guard against, out there. Aris belonged, was one of his people by birth and talent, and she did not belong. She would hold Aris back, prevent him from learning what other mage powers he had. If they did not marry—and he was sure would not, though he could not have said why—it would be best for Aris to learn to get along without her, so that he could be with his own people. She would be happy enough in Fin Panir or elsewhere, busy with a grange.
How was he going to manage that? He watched Rahi and the Autumn Rose; clearly they, like Gird, thought the two belonged together. He would have to find some way of shifting them apart, bit by bit. He looked at Aris; the boy had deep circles under his eyes. This had taken more out of him than Seri; he was not, Luap told himself, as robust. He should be protected, his healing magery nurtured. That was too precious a talent to be squandered in mock warfare.
"You're going," said Seri. Aris looked up from the scroll he'd been studying, Seri looked as she always did when she'd pulled off some mischief.
"And who's to be my guardian?"
"I am." She sounded as smug as she looked.
"You? But you're—"
She pointed to the badge on her tunic. "A Marshal-candidate in good standing, of known good character, approved by the Council. So we can leave whenever you like, and stay as long, and—"
To be free again—to ride out the gates, with Seri at his side, and no one to argue with him whether this one or that needed his healing more, no one to suggest he must conserve his power for greater needs—he felt a childish glee of his own, to match the sparkle in her eyes. "Tomorrow?" he asked, not really believing it.
"Good choice." said Seri. "I'll tell the cooks, and get our things ready. You finish that miserable compilation for Luap, and—I suppose you do have to tell him?"
"I should." Aris sighed. "But surely he knows—he was at the meeting, wasn't he?"
Seri rolled her eyes. "Meeting? What meeting? Can't a few Marshals get together and discuss minor matters without holding a formal meeting?"
"But then are you sure it's—"
"Raheli, the Autumn Rose, Cob, and Garis: is anyone going to argue them down? And they had discussed it with others—not
all
the others, admittedly, but enough to justify it. My directors agreed—in fact they had brought it up before I had And Rahi did suggest we go on and leave now—quickly—before the decision caused comment."
Her look said even more: it usually did. "I could leave within a glass or so," he said softly. "I could leave Luap a note. We don't need that much—"
She clasped his shoulder, and leaned close. "Even better. We'll take an afternoon ride." She waved her hand, "I'll go get the horses ready."
Aris turned back to the scroll. He couldn't concentrate on it; he had read it before, and knew that nothing on it would help him. He rolled it carefully, slid it back into its case, and the case back into the rack. He rummaged on the desk until he found a scrap of old parchment, scraped many times and fraying, to write his note to Luap.
He felt slightly guilty for not taking the trouble to find Luap, rather than leaving the note in his office, but he did not want to discuss his plans with the Archivist. More and more, in the past year or two, he had felt uneasy around Luap, and he could not explain why. Seri, he knew, felt the same way. He put the note where Luap could not miss it, then went to see if Seri had left anything behind. His pack, rolled neatly, lay on his pallet, and his box held only what he himself would have left behind. When he ran his hand into the center of the pack-roll, he felt the hard edges of coins—so she had thought of that, too.
With his pack under one arm, he didn't look like someone out for an afternnoon's ride—but then if anyone asked, he had permission to leave for longer than that. He remembered a Marshal saying once that an innocent heart was the best disguise, and on his way to the stables, no one seemed to look at him. Seri had both horses saddled, and her own pack strapped tight. Mischief lighted her eyes; her horse, catching the excitement, jigged sideways.
"I am hurrying," said Aris, to both horses as much as to Seri. His own snorted, as he snugged the pack straps, and mounted. He didn't have to ask which way—they would start as they often did, riding west and north into the meadowland beyond the city.
By sunset, they were out of sight of the city, beyond the range of their earlier rides in this direction. They had passed one village to the east, but now saw nothing, not even sheep, to indicate that another was near. Still, they felt safe; they could walk back to the city in one day if the horses pulled loose in the night. But the horses did not escape, and they rode off the next morning in high spirits. All that day they moved into country new to them, rolling land covered mostly in grass, with scattered groves in hollows and along streambanks. In the last span before sunset, they chose a grove near water to camp in.
"It's almost like being children again," said Seri. "When we used to go and make houses in the bushes, remember?"
"Yes, but now we know how to do it right." They had blown fluff from a seedhead for camp chores: tonight Seri had to dig the jacks, and Aris had to take care of the fire. Not that it mattered to either of them, Aris thought, but Gird's training held to the tally-group system, and it had come to feel natural. With the horses watered and fed, their own waterskins full, and their camp laid out properly, they settled in by the fire to talk.
"I wonder if we should take turns as guard," Seri said. "I know there's no war, and this is settled territory, but it's good practice—"
"Mmm." Aris leaned back. He had not ridden so many hours in a long time, and he knew he would wake stiff. "I don't sense any dangers."
"Nor I. But it's the right way to do things. I'll take first watch."
"All right." He looked at the fire for awhile, listening to Seri's footsteps on grass and stone. She went down to the spring, up the slope to the edge of the trees, and came back to the fire.
"Nothing now." He could feel her tension as if it was his own. In a way, it was his own tension, reflected like firelight. They both knew why they had needed to get out of Fin Panir, why they had needed to travel alone, but the years in the city made it hard to return to the easy communication of their childhood, when idea and response had flowed between them without barriers.
Seri sat back down with a sigh. In the flickering light, her face looked much older, and as heavily stubborn as Gird's had been. "Remember after Father Gird died?" she asked. Aris nodded. Because they were then training in separate granges, they had been able to talk for only a few minutes now and then—but they had had the same dream in the days after the funeral. "I always felt close to him," Seri went on. "From the first day we came. It was like having a grandfather of my own. Not that I didn't respect him, but—"
"It was much the same for me," Aris said. They had talked of this before; it was as good a way as any to ease into the real problem. "If I had been able to choose a father, I'd have chosen Gird."
"And then he died," Seri said. "Like any other father or grandfather, except it wasn't."
Aris looked at her. They had each tried to talk to the Marshals about it, and had had the blank looks given to those who have said something outrageous. They had learned not to talk about it, not to mention what was, to them, the most salient point of Gird's death. "I think," he said softly, "that they don't quite remember it. They know they felt better afterwards; they know they couldn't quite remember why they had been so angry—but I think they don't actually remember what happened."
"Luap does," said Seri. "Or he did, but that's not what he's put in his
Life of Gird
. He's made it a monster."
"How did you find out?" Aris had been wanting to see the
Life
for several years, but Luap gave him no chance.
"I heard from someone who heard Rahi complaining about it. She said he was trying to make it more like one of the old tales from the archives, one of the kings' lives tales."
Aris snorted. "That wouldn't fit Gird, no more than a crown would have."
"Rahi said he couldn't make clear what really happened, so he made up the monster so that people would understand. Only they won't, because that's not what it was."
"I wish he'd let me help," said Aris. "It could be written the right way, the way it happened. It wouldn't be easy, but that would be better than making up a false tale."
"Rahi said Luap can't see that—he thinks a false tale that makes sense is better than the true one no one will understand." Seri poked a stick at the fire, until sparks flew up. "Aris—do you ever feel Father Gird is still around?"
"Really? In person? Or just—feeling that he's there when he's not?"
"I'm not sure." She faced him directly. "Aris, those dreams we had after he died—those aren't the last ones I've had."
He wasn't surprised. Those hadn't been his last dreams of Gird, either. He nodded, and said, "Tell me about them."
"I can't, exactly. It's—it's as if he wanted me to do something, and I'm not sure what. If he
were
alive, he wouldn't be happy with Luap, that's certain . . . Luap's ruining it all."
That was the core of it, what they had needed to talk over far away from Fin Panir's many curious ears. Aris felt a cold chill down his back, as if someone had run a chunk of snow down it "I know. And I don't think he knows what he's doing . . ."
"How can he not!" Seri had finally let go her anger, and now it blazed in his mind as brightly as the fire she poked into brilliance. "He's a scholar; he surely knows if he writes truth or falsehood. He was Gird's helper so long, he surely knows what Gird would have wanted. Gird wanted mageborn and peasant living in peace, one people. Luap swore
oaths
that he would obey Gird and follow Gird's will, yet he's doing everything he can to push mageborn and peasant apart."
"Not quite everything," Aris pointed out. "If he really knew he was doing it, he could do worse—"
"Not without the Council noticing. He's just being sneaky." She glared at him. "Or have you gone over to them as well?"
He stared at her, shocked and horrified. "Seri! I couldn't!" Tears filled his eyes; if Seri thought he would turn into another like Luap, he wasn't sure he could bear it.
"You spend so much time with them," she said, her voice hard. "You do what Luap tells you; you hardly have time for anyone else—"
"I'm here," he said. "I left Fin Panir in the turning of a glass, on your word—how can you think I
like
all that, you of all people!"
"Then don't defend him," said Seri, "when you don't believe what you say. D'you think I can't tell what you really think? But if you won't say it, even to me, even alone in the dark wild, how is that different from him?"
Aris struggled to control his voice. "I have tried to be fair," he said. "Tried not to . . . to make hasty judgments. I saw—I see—Luap and the other Marshals, all quick to say what someone meant, and sometimes I know that's not what the other meant. So I look for the chance that someone like Luap, doing something I would not do, has at least a good reason, in his own mind, for doing it." He swallowed the lump in his throat. "But—you're right—I don't like what he's doing, and I haven't liked it, and I haven't been able to do one thing about it. I'm too young, and I'm mageborn, as he is—"
"And half the distrust you meet is for him," Seri said, now less fiercely. "They're afraid you're another Luap. When you were younger, and you were out and around more . . ."
"Which is another thing," Aris said. "I want to do more healing myself; I want to go more places, and it's the Council—yes, and Luap—who insisted I stay close and try to train other mageborn to heal. It isn't working, and I don't think it will, but they won't listen to me."
"Why not?"
"Why won't it work? I'm not sure. The Autumn Rose says the healing magery was rare anyway; it failed first, when the mageborn were losing their powers. I've found only one who responded to the training—"
"Garin—"
"Yes. And he exhausts himself when he closes a cut; the one time he tried to heal a broken bone, he fainted partway through and slept for a week."
"You did that, when you were a child—"
"Yes, when I'd worked with all those sheep. But he's a man grown, older than I am. The Autumn Rose found a girl said to have healed her family members of headaches and the like, but what she was really doing was charming them—they didn't feel the pain as long as she was there. That's not a bad use of charming—I've taught her to use it on more serious things—but it's not healing. You remember that Gird wanted me to work with peasant healers to learn herblore, and with the granny-witches to learn hand-magicks. I've learned a lot more about herbs, and most of the women with a parrion of herblore say if I were a girl they'd trade my parrion, though they don't think much of a man learning it. The grannies have watched me heal, and I've watched them lay pains on a stone, and neither of us learned how the other did it. Whatever they do is not in their power to explain, or mine to learn—and the same for what I do. They don't sense the light of health and the dark of fever or injury the way I do, but they do feel the prickling in their hands."
"I suppose that's something," said Seri. She frowned. "So you don't think you'll be able to teach anyone?"
"I don't know. Some child, perhaps, will be born with the talent, and I can help train it. But it's not like reading or writing—it's not something everyone can learn more or less well—and since I didn't have someone to train me, I really don't know what the training should be like." Aris leaned away from the fire as a gust sent smoke into his eyes. "Nobody wants to hear that, though: Luap is still convinced I could teach other mageborn to heal, and the other Marshals still hope I can work with the granny-witches. They don't want me to be the only one—and I wish I weren't." He struggled with the sorrow that always came when he thought of that, of being the only one who knew what he knew. He could share his skills by using them, but he had no one who could understand what his life was like, what it felt like to hold that power in his hands and pour it out.