His sword clashed on three; he was too busy to be scared, but a corner of his mind insisted he had no chance against so many. He had no time to remember exactly what he'd been taught. He had to thrust, swing, and thrust again; an iynisin blade slid past too fast for his response and he felt it burn along his side. He sagged to one knee; another blade caught his swordarm, slicing deep; his fingers opened, and the sword fell. He heard Seri gasp, and a dark form leaped above him. He grabbed a boot, and yanked; the iynisin fell, cursing, kicked back then scrambled out of reach. His hands itched, intolerably; he had no strength to withhold the healing magery. It leapt from hand to hand, almost brighter than his mage-light, scalding first his wounded arm, then burning along his bones to reach his wounded side. With an intolerable wrench, his rib reknit itself, and the organs within returned to health. So
that's what Father Gird meant,
he thought, reaching for the sword.
Battle had now passed beyond him, for they had Seri backed to the rockface, her sword dancing in her own light, ringing a wild music off her attackers' blades. Her face had a withdrawn expression, showing neither fear nor anger. Aris ran forward, noticing how his light threw the iynisin shadows back into themselves, caught between the two lights. He thrust clumsily at the first black-cloaked back he saw, wasting no time in challenge. Seri had told him often enough he should spend more time in grange and barton: he would admit she was right, if they lived. This close he could see the blood on her clothes, sense the heaviness in her legs. He did not wait for Gird's admonition. To send his healing to Seri was the same as healing himself; he hardly slowed his attack on a second iynisin while closing her wounds.
They turned upon him again, but he fought through the ring to her side, taking another slashing blade across his shoulders. This, as he set his back to the rock, repaid his healing of it with a pain the double of its cause. One corner of his mind wanted to think about that: to wonder at the discovery that he could heal himself, to consider why it hurt, when none of those he healed had ever complained of pain. Between him and this curiosity stood the memory of Gird, who would not put up with nonsense in the middle of a fight. First things first, the old man would have said.
"I thought they'd killed you," Seri said. Then, before he could answer, she said, "Shift sides." She lunged forward, and he slithered sideways behind her. He had come up on her right, her strong side; she needed him at her left.
"I, too," Aris said, trying to look sideways and to the front at the same time. He wished he'd practiced whatever it was she'd just done to make an iynisin lose its blade. Something slashed the back of his hand, and he dropped the sword again. His tendons and bones screeched their fury at his clumsiness as the magery pulled them back into place and knit them into strength; in the meantime, the dagger in his left hand had shattered. He snatched frantically at the fallen sword, and got it up just in time to save Seri from a killing thrust to the side.
The analytical corner of his mind decided that the pain was healthy after all; it was the compaction of all the pain normally felt during normal healing. As healer, he had used his magery to lift such pain from those he healed; part of his exhaustion came from absorbing that pain. But he could not do this for himself. Better, the analytical function went on, like a prosy lecturer who does not realize that outside the classroom a riot has started, better to mend the real damage than soothe the pain, if that is the choice.
"ARIS!" Ser'is shout brought him out of that, to see the black-cloaked iynisin fleeing through the twisted trees and over the rim of the hollow. From behind them, above the rock-face, a light stronger than their own held all starlight at its core. It was that, and not their fighting, that the iynisin had fled.
Although Luap had been startled to find Aris's note, he realized that it might be wiser to bring up the idea of moving the mageborn when Seri and Aris were not in the city. They could only confuse the issue, and he had not yet formed a plan for convincing Aris to leave Seri behind. First convince the Council, and then talk to Aris. He rolled and unrolled a scroll as he thought about it. The details of the plan he had rehearsed so long flicked through his mind. How long, he wondered, would Aris be gone? Should he press for a meeting today? He thought not. Any appearance of hurry would plant some of those peasant hooves firmly in their muddled minds, ox-like. He remembered how it had been with his first version of Gird's Life.
He waited until the next regular meeting, two days later. The younglings, as he thought of them, had not returned. Some had noticed a column of smoke from far away, but that could have been anything. It was the season for storm-lighted grass fires, he reminded the worriers. And he had the feeling that they were unhurt, no matter what the smoke meant . . . they would reappear when they were ready, cheerful and sturdy as always. And inconvenient, no doubt.
The meeting began on a sour note, because a complaint of witchcraft had been referred from a grange-court. A group of sheepfarmers insisted that a mageborn boy had cursed their flock, causing all the lambs to be born dead. They had beaten the boy, who had responded with an obvious burst of magery, setting a hayrick afire. The local Marshal had saved the boy, but wasn't sure the first accusation was correct—and the boy, he said, would never completely recover from the beating. He had come, with the boy and two of the sheepfarmers, to Fin Panir to "settle this once and for all," as he put it. Luap winced; this would make the Marshals edgy about anything to do with mageborn.
He watched the sheepfarmers, tall husky men in patched tunics, sit on the edge of the bench in the meeting room, as far from the mageborn boy as they could. He didn't entirely blame them. It was hard to judge the boy's age—Luap guessed about twelve—because of his strangeness. He had mismatched eyes, one that slewed wide, and a constant tremor that erupted in a nervous jerk to his head at intervals. The eye that looked ahead had an expression Luap had never seen before, cool and calculating it seemed, though his mouth dripped spittle when his head jerked. The Marshal, balding and scrawny (had he really been the one who saved Gird from being trampled that time?), explained that the boy had had a bad name in their vill from the beginning. And it was his limp—not the slewed eye or the tremor—that resulted from the beating.
The farmer's testimony came in slow, difficult bursts of thick dialect; Luap knew they resented the questions he asked, but he had to know what they said to keep accurate notes. They knew their sheep, they kept repeating, and while it's true that sheep come into the world looking for a way back to the high pastures, they'd had a fair crop of lambs every year until this lad took a dislike to 'em, and for nothing worse than being told to keep away from Sim's daughter who was carrying her first and feared the evil eye. They knew he'd cursed the sheep because he said so—or at least he gabbled a string of nasty-sounding stuff that must have been a curse, and right then old Fersin's best ewe bloated up and died. Within a day, anyway, and it wasn't the season for death-lily, neither. Then the ewes started dropping lambs too soon, dead lambs, all of 'em, as if someone had fed them bad hay with birthbane in it, but no one had. Wasn't any birthbane nearer than a day's ride.
The Council looked at the Marshal—one of many named Sell, called for convenience Bald Seli—and he shrugged. "They called me in when the first ewe died, and accused this boy. I said don't be calling down evil you don't need—that ewe could've eaten something. None of 'em knew what the words meant, that he used. And they had no proof he was mageborn, only that he showed up years back with no family, and a scrap of good cloth for a cloak. Then the lambs started coming, all dead. They didn't call me; I heard from you—well—one of 'em's son, a junior yeoman. Thought I should know, he said. I went up there and found they'd pounded this boy so hard they'd broken bones, and then he'd set the hay on fire. The way I understand Gird's law is if the boy did magery first, he's wrong, but if he was hurt first, he could use magery to defend himself."
"Burning hay's not defense," muttered one of the farmers, as if he'd said it before.
"It made you let go of him," the Marshal said, as if he'd said that before, too.
"Is he truly mageborn?" asked Luap. The boy flicked him a malevolent glance that sent shivers down his back. Mageborn or not, the boy was wicked.
"I don't know," Bald Seli said. "He won't say. Isn't there some way to tell?"
Everyone looked at Luap. Would they realize that it was a use of magery to detect magery, and thus required a breaking of the law to detect a possible breaker of the law? No, irony was beyond them. He thought of sending for Arranha, but decided against it. He let a little of his power come forth, a mere trickle, and spread it as a net, imagining a silvery web before him. If the boy had mageborn blood, and such power, it should color that web. He leaned toward the boy.
"Are you mageborn?" he asked quietly. The boy stared past him, his skew eye to one side and his focused gaze to the other. Luap turned to Bald Seli. "Can he answer questions? Has he ever talked with people in your vill?"
"Oh, aye," the Marshal said. "He never said much, but he made shift to ask for food, and answer yes or no. He didn't have our accent, but we could understand him."
"No, ye didn't!" The boy's voice was a peculiar skirl, rising and falling with no relation to the sense of the words. "Ye never understood me. Me. Never. Ye ask am I mageborn—I'm more'n mageborn. . . ." His words fell into a gabble Luap could not understand. The two farmers cringed against the wall.
"Careful, sir, he's doin' it again. He'll be cursin' the whole Fellowship next—"
To Luap it seemed that the boy's gabble was that of one who could not control his voice, like the very old who sometimes lost words and strength all at once. It did not sound as he had imagined cursing to sound, but the boy's cold gaze made him uneasy. He felt nothing in his net of magery to make him think the boy was mageborn—but he was not sure he wasn't, either. The babble died away; the boy licked the spittle off his lips with an eagerness that frightened Luap again. He wondered what Gird could have made of this; it was beyond him.
Cob came up with their solution. "Take him into the High Lord's Hall," he said. "And get Arranha. If it's a curse, that'll be the place to take it off. We'll know what we're dealing with."
Luap did not want to go, but he knew he must. He watched two Marshals carry the boy, whose tremors and twitches seemed less a struggle to escape than the way his body worked. Arranha met them at the Hall doors, and seemed no more upset by this than any of the problems people had brought him. He looked at Luap.
"He's mageborn, in part, but he was also born flawed. Both in his magery and in himself."
"Did he curse the sheep?" one of the farmers asked.
"I don't know," Arranha said. He asked the boy the same question, but got no reply. "Bring him up to the altar," he said then, "and we'll see if the god can shed light on our dilemma."
But as they approached the altar, the boy exploded in wild squeals and convulsive movements so strong the Marshals could hardly hold him. "He's frightened," one of them said. "Maybe he thinks we sacrifice people."
The farmers muttered, and Luap thought he heard one of them say "Only a mageborn would think of that."
"Put him down, then," Arranha said. They laid the boy down as gently as they could, for all his thrashing about, but he began beating his head on the stone floor. "We need Aris," Arranha said. He laid his hands to either side of the boy's head, but instead of quieting the boy screamed, a piercing noise that echoed in the high vaults of the Hall. Then he twisted around and caught Arranha's thumb in his teeth. Luap leapt forward, as did others, and somewhere in the struggle to unlock the boy's teeth from Arranha's thumb, the boy quit breathing. No one quite knew when, or why.
After that, and its daylong aftermath of confusion, grief, and anger, Luap expected nothing but trouble when he introduced his idea the next day. He led up to it as carefully as he could, explaining how a distant land could let his people learn to use their skills to benefit others, but he was sure their minds were full of the boy's malicious grin as he bit down on Arranha's thumb. When he paused, he heard exactly the disapproving murmur he had expected.
To his surprise, Raheli stood. The murmur stilled. Everyone peered to see Gird's daughter.
"I believe him," she said. Then she looked at Luap, eye to eye, gaze to gaze. "I believe him," she said more softly, and silence lay heavily on them. "My father—Gird—" As if they did not know, he thought. "Gird saw good in him; he was spared to serve Gird's Fellowship." In a long pause, no sound broke the stillness; he saw her take a long breath and wondered what would follow. "What is the reward of a faithful luap?" she asked. None answered. She looked around. "I will tell you, then," she said. "A faithful luap, one who serves without enjoying power, one who stands beside, in the place of, the inheritor, shall be recognized at last by the one he serves. He shall stand before him, and be given his reward, the respect of the people. This is Gird's luap: Gird will determine his reward."
Luap blinked; that could be taken two ways, and one of them he felt as a blade at his throat. "In the meantime," Raheli went on, "we can give our respect. I believe him, that he will take his folk to a far place and not breed up an army of invasion. You know I have not trusted him in the past. If his stronghold were nearer, I might be less willing to trust him now. But I believe he means what he says, and I believe the distance will enforce a truce between our peoples. My father wanted all to live in peace, but he himself could not find a way to let the mageborn learn to use their powers aright. That boy yesterday—if he had been brought up in a distant land, he would never have caused the trouble he did here. Arranha and Luap would have recognized something wrong in him. I believe Luap in this—that Gird agreed to let them go, and to this end." She sat down, and in a moment the murmur began again, this time in a wholly different mood.