"I'm all right," she said. "Are you really twice my age?"
She was so predictable. She would ask next if Meshi were really his friend, and if he had slept with her, and then why the mageborn had gone to his stronghold . . . and so on, no doubt for hours.
"I don't know how old you are," he said. She scowled at that, looking for trickery in it. "And I don't really know my own years." Which was not quite true, but saved discussing it. She scowled again, not because she detected a lie, but because she had not been answered.
"Is Meshi, that cook, really your friend?"
He uttered a silent prayer to any god who might be listening to bring Cob back into the room. She would go down the predictable list, and it would drive him to saying something he would regret. For the first time, he felt he really understood Gird's rage that night in the forest. He answered all in a rush. "Yes, she's my friend; we met during the war. And she's not my lover and never has been, just as she said when you asked her."
Binis looked shocked; Luap stared her down. Cob came in, followed by Vrelan with a kettle wrapped in cloths, which he unwrapped and put on the hearth. "Better stew than I make; the inn's cook has the true parrion. And new bread, and a pot of custard."
"Marshal-General says Marshals should make their own meals," Binis said primly. Luap closed his eyes a moment. Didn't she realize—? Cob merely grunted, though his yeoman-marshal stared at Binis as if she'd sprouted green horns.
"I've cooked enough meals in Gird's army to last me, yeoman-marshal. When there's a good cook, who knows what she's doing, and needs the trade, I'm not going to eat lumpy porridge and soggy bread to please someone as won't get out of bed before midday. Gird could've milked a herd and ploughed two fields before Koris finishes breakfast." He dished out stew for everyone, breathing a little hard, and handed Binis her bowl with a stare. "And you go ahead and tell him, Binis, all I've said—he knows how I feel about him, and I know how he feels about me. But when all's said and done, he knows who fought beside Gird from the first day. I didn't
want
to be Gird's successor, but it was offered me.
He
had to argue his way into it."
Binis turned redder than the fire could explain, and ate her stew without looking up. Luap burned his mouth on the first bite, and slowed down. Cob was right—the cook had a parrion. Mutton stew could be almost as bad as lumpy porridge, but this had a savor he liked. Cob pushed over a half-loaf of bread and a dish of butter.
"You spoil me," Luap said, carefully not looking at Binis.
"No—we eat this well almost every day." Cob buttered a hunk of bread for himself and stuffed it in his mouth. Luap winced inwardly. He liked Cob, but the man had never acquired even as much polish as Gird. When he had refused the Marshal-General's position, he had apparently returned to his rural grange determined to be as much a peasant as possible.
Vrelan, meanwhile, sat in the corner opposite Binis, eating as rapidly as any hungry young man just past boyhood. He smiled shyly at Luap when their eyes met. He will want tales, Luap thought to himself. He will want stories of Gird, and stories of my distant land—he's got those dreamer's eyes.
Cob swallowed, then belched. "So—tell me, Luap, is that land what you hoped it would be?"
Luap nodded, and swallowed the stew in his mouth. "Yes—although it's even colder than this. I've never seen snow so deep. Luckily we need not travel in it, and the stronghold itself doesn't freeze. Though it's not really warm, either."
"Magic, is it?" This with a quick sidelong glance at Binis.
"No, the elves said it was the depth of stone. It stays about the same all year." Luap scooped up more stew before it cooled. His feet had quit throbbing and he felt almost sleepy. "We spent the time before snow building terraces," he went on. "Piled the rock up, had Arranha telling us how to level them."
"I thought you'd just level the valley floor," Cob said. "Isn't it a small valley?"
"Small and steep. Not just the sides, the floor as well. Level the whole thing and the new floor would be halfway up the mountains at the low end." Not quite, but it made a vivid image; Cob nodded, mouth pursed. "So we're doing smaller terraces, none more than three men high at the low end. Most less than that—it'd take too much soil to fill them otherwise."
"A lot of work," Cob said. "And so few of you—I suppose you found a way to use your magicks?"
Luap grinned at him. Cob would not demand, from a friend, but he was as curious as anyone else. "Yes, we did, though it still takes a lot of sweat and blisters. I must admit, it's good to see magery used the right way, for breaking stones and not people. And it keeps the few with magery too busy for mischief."
Cob shot another glance at Binis, who had finished her stew and was munching the end of a loaf of bread. "When you've finished, yeoman-marshal, you and Vrelan take back this pot and then check the horses. You can trust me not to let Luap out of my sight." His tone was pleasant but firm; she could neither resent that order, nor disobey it. Cob turned to Vrelan, "Since we have guests, get us a pot of their good ale, and see if they'll send a loaf of bread fresh from the morning baking." He gave the yeoman-marshal a few coins. Binis and Vrelan went out with the kettle, one cheerful and one scowling. When the outer door had shut behind them, Cob turned to Luap.
"There'll be things you don't want her repeating to the Marshal-General, I daresay, but you might share with an old friend. Tell me: did you find you had all the royal magery?"
For answer, Luap freed his light, and grinned at the expression on Cob's face. "I know—I shouldn't do that here, even though we are alone and you are a friend. You're a Marshal first, and I'm not supposed to use my magery. But I thought you'd like to see it."
"I'm glad for you, since you wanted it, but—glad to see it?—not really. Although it must be handy to have your own light, if you live underground. There are times I could use that. But—you built the terraces that way?"
Luap damped the light; the room seemed dark without it, despite the fire burning cheerily on the hearth. "We did," he said. "Some of us—it's strange, Cob, who has which magery. Our people have not tried to use it for work for a long time; I think that was a mistake. Some can move stones the size of this room—" Cob looked around, the whites of his eyes glinting in the firelight, as if worried that the room might take flight. "—And others can hardly shift a pebble. Most that have any magery at all can call some amount of light, enough to start a fire with. Aris, as you know, can heal. Were you in Council when he described his attempts to train others?"
"No. I missed that one." Cob prodded the fire and laid another split log on it.
"To make it short, he's found no one else who can do what he does. Some can heal lesser things, but at greater cost to themselves. He's hoping that some of the children will have that talent, that he can find it early and train it."
"I thought there was a girl—"
"Yes, so did the others—so did she, for that matter. It wasn't really healing; she could convince people they were not feeling pain, but what caused the pain got no better . . . unless it would have anyway. A useful skill, certainly, and a better use of it than charming someone into handing over their purse, but not true healing. Aris has worked with her, so she now recognizes when she needs to call him in and when it's safe to relieve the pain and wait for a natural healing." Luap sighed. "It's sad—the one magery we all wanted to have, that most people trusted, is the rarest. I had hoped to learn it; I can't. And Aris, so gifted, has little else but his light."
"I miss that lad," Cob said, shaking his head. "He loved Gird so, and Gird loved him like a grandson."
Luap felt a pang of envy and wrestled it down. Everyone liked Aris; he did himself. "We're lucky to have him," he said.
"And how's Seri doing, out there with all you mageborn?"
"Well enough. She has Aris, after all; they're still like two burs, though they don't seem likely to marry."
"Why not? Would you object?"
"Of course not," Luap said. "But since they came back from that long journey, back when she was still a Marshal-candidate, they've been different. I can't explain it, nor can the Rosemage, but we both recognized it."
"It's too bad," Cob said. "I was hoping their child might combine the two of them. Squeeze Aris and Seri into one person, and you'd have quite a Marshal-General." He stretched his legs to the fire. "You're looking better, now you've eaten—that sour-faced yeoman-marshal you're traveling with must have sucked the blood out of you."
Luap laughed. "It's not that. I didn't know she didn't ride, and she took it as an insult . . . and then she has trouble in the cold."
"She'd have died in the bad winter camps of the war," Cob said. "Or she'd have gotten over her foolishness. I hate to think of women like her becoming the next Marshals."
"How's Raheli?" That was the natural transition.
"Haven't seen her since the Council when she spoke for you. She'd mellowed a lot then, I thought. We talked a bit about Gird. I thought she should have been the next Marshal-General. She thought it shouldn't go from parent to child—but she has no children, so I didn't think that was a problem. She wouldn't do it, though."
"I thought the objection would come because—"
"Because she's a woman? So did I, though I don't agree. But she wouldn't take it. She nominated me, in fact, but—I don't know, maybe I should've done it. It just didn't seem right. I
knew
Gird; he threw me flat on my back the first day he came into our camp, and I'm no more fit to take his place than . . . than a cow is. Nobody is, when you come to it, but I couldn't."
The door opened, and the two yeoman-marshals came in, shivering. "A wind's got up," Vrelan said "Old Dorthan says he reckons another storm's coming." Cob looked at Luap, his brows raised. Luap shrugged.
"I didn't like the look of the sky behind us today, but that's all I can say."
"You're welcome to stay all winter, if that's what it takes," Cob said. "But if a storm's coming, we've some work to do, with two extra beasts in the barn. No—" Luap had started to stand, but Cob waved him back down. "If this is a big storm, your help will be welcome come morning, but stay warm now."
"I'll bring more wood, at least," Luap said.
"If you're determined on it . . . there's a stack in the barton corner."
Outside, in the blowing dark, the cold wind took his breath away. Binis had gone with Cob and Vrelan; he found the woodstack on his own, and thought about moving some in by magery. But Binis might see, and that would do Cob no good. He lugged in several armloads before Cob returned. By then it had begun to snow, small dry flakes that stung his face.
Morning's light barely penetrated the blowing snow; Luap and Cob fought their way around the end of the grange and into the barn built against it, carrying buckets of hot water from the hearth. "We should have built peasant cottages, wi' inside ways to the cowbyres," Cob said, struggling to shut the door against the wind. The horses whickered, their breath pluming into the cold air. When they drank, their whiskers whitened almost at once. Cob nodded to the ladder. "If you can make the climb, it'll be easier for me." So Luap climbed into the narrow hayloft, and threw down enough for all the beasts at once, then climbed back down to help Cob feed them.
Later, the snowfall lessened, though the wind still scoured flurries off the drifts. All four of them went out to check on the poorer folk in the village. Luap had never had a clear idea of what a rural Marshal did when not holding court or drill. Cob apparently thought that a Marshal's job included everything no one else remembered to do . . . he was remarkably like Gird, Luap thought, in the way that he had made himself a caretaker for the whole village. He had Vrelan chop firewood for a family in which the man had a broken arm, and the mother was pregnant. He and Luap climbed up to mend a gap in the roof of one cottage, where slates had blown off overnight. Cob himself dragged one drunk out into the street and made him fetch clean water from the public well to clean up the mess he'd made on the floor, while the man's wife tried to make excuses for him. Binis, clearly astonished that Cob considered her available for such work, was kept as busy as the rest of them.
"It's like this," Cob explained after darkness had fallen and they were eating in the inn. "Some Marshals think we're just judges and drillmasters, but someone's got to do all the rest. Back afore the war, each village had its headman or headwoman, and in some places, even the magelords took care of their people. Everyone knew what needed doing and how to do it. They knew who really needed help, and who was a wastrel. But the war changed that. People may not live in the village they were born in; we've got crafters and merchants and gods know what all, living all amongst each other. And whatever you say about one fair law for everyone, some things just plain aren't fair. You don't make it fair by treating everyone alike, either. That's all I do—what the village head would have done, or a good lord: either one. Know the people, know who needs help, and who needs a good knock on the head to straighten 'em up."
"But you can't do it all yourself." Binis looked tired, but less sulky than the days before. Perhaps work agreed with her; Gird had always said it was good for the sulks.
"No," Cob agreed, wiping his bowl with a slice of bread. "No, I can't do it all, not even with young Vre, here. But that's what I tell them on drill nights—just as in an army, we're all parts of each other. If you let your neighbor go hungry, he's not likely to help you when the robbers come. Same way, if you're always asking for help, but don't give any, soon no one cares. I went after Hrelis today, you saw—the drunk. His wife's always coming for grange-gift, says he's sick. We know what kind of sick; Vre told me last night he was in here drinking and begging. So for him I have a bucket of cold water, but poor Jos, who got his arm broken helping someone reset a wheel, we'll do what we can for him. When his arm's mended, he'll be around here doing chores without anyone saying a word." He belched contentedly, and smiled at Binis. "But you're right—I don't do it alone. I don't have to check Morlan's widow any more, and I didn't have to find homes for the children whose parents were killed by lightning in the pasture last spring. This grange is beginning to function as a village should—with care and common sense."