His one advantage was the willingness of the people to help him; he knew where the king's army moved, but the king's army must search for him. The king had left Finyatha again, and this time Segrahlin rode with him (so the word came), and every lord who could make magicks of any kind. And their well-fed soldiers, rank on rank of them, and their horsemen, who now had learned to armor the horses as well.
Thus he was in no mood to be cooperative when Selamis cornered him again the next night, and wondered, in too casual a tone, if Gird were going to name him a marshal in the coming campaign. Gird stared at him, momentarily speechless.
"I can't give you any command now," said Gird. "You can see that, I hope—"
Selamis glowered silently. When he was sulky, he
did
look almost aristocratic.
"And it's going to be damned hard to explain why I'm not. Blast you, you might have
thought
—"
"Would it have done any good to tell you sooner?" Gird did not like the self-righteous whine in that voice. Selamis had lied, and liars had no right to be self-righteous.
"Whether it would or not, you didn't. You didn't tell me, and didn't tell me, and if you hadn't had that—that experience—" He couldn't say it aloud, that Selamis had used magic, that he was a mage. It terrified him still, though he hoped he was concealing his reaction. The saying was that liars weren't much good at spotting others' lies. He hoped it was true.
"If I'd had no magic, it wouldn't have done any good to tell you."
"You think it's done
good?
"
"Well, I meant—if I didn't have magic, then my birth didn't matter—"
Gird rounded on him. "By the Lady's skirts, you're
still
thinking of the throne, aren't you? You still think your
blood
and your gods' cursed stinking
magic
give you some sort of right to power?"
"It wouldn't be the same—"
"You're right it wouldn't—because you're not getting within leagues of that throne, my lad. Forget that. You can make pretty lights, and your father is the Finaarenisian king. And that means
nothing
, not one damn thing, to me or any other peasant—"
"It means something to the nobles," said Selamis stubbornly. "You said that yourself. If they knew—"
"They'd slit your stupid throat. How can you be so
dense?
I've seen smarter stones, that had at least the sense to roll downhill. No. You're the king's bastard, and not alone in that, I'll wager. You've got a bit of magic, enough to scare girls with—"
Light blazed around them, and a cold fist seemed to squeeze Gird's heart in his chest.
"It scares
you
," said Selamis, furious, his handsome face distorted. "Quit pretending it doesn't. Admit it."
But there was rage and rage, and Gird's grew out of deeper roots than pique. He forced one breath after another out of stiff lips, and felt his heart settle once more into a steady rhythm. Without his thought, his powerful arm came up and smashed Selamis in the face. The light vanished, as Selamis measured his length on the ground.
"You stupid, stupid fool," said Gird, almost calmly. He squatted, made sure that Selamis was still breathing, then looked around. Could they be lucky enough that no one had seen the light Selamis made? No: there in the gathering dusk someone hurried toward them. Gird sighed, gustily. He ought to kill Selamis, quickly and painlessly, before he woke. He should have done it before, when he first realized the man had lied, and lied again. The fool had renounced his claim before the gods; that alone should have settled him. Now he, Gird, would have to explain everything, and it was the worst possible time to tell everyone that they had the king's bastard in their camp.
He was frowning over the supply rolls when he realized that Selamis was awake and staring at him. He glanced over and met a furious look.
"You hit me," said Selamis, in a hoarse whisper. His head probably hurt; the bruise on his face made it look lopsided.
"That I did. You showed me what you were."
"Why do you assume I'll be
bad
—?"
Gird put down the notched tally stick reporting the grain harvest in Plumhollow Barton and looked hard at Selamis until he wilted. "You know what you did: you lied, and lied, and lied again, and then lost your temper and used your magicks on me. Is that what any of us would want in a king, if we wanted a king at all? Should I believe that a crown will make you honest, teach you patience and mercy, give you wisdom? You seem to think you'll be a good king, better than your father. You might argue that it would be hard to be
worse
. But I'm not helping a liar, a lackwit, or a hotheaded fool onto a throne, where he can put his foot on my neck again. No."
Selamis's eyes closed, briefly, and the hand Gird could see stirred. Was he up to magicks again? But the eyes opened again, and the hand relaxed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have done that—"
"No more you should. Where'd you be if you'd killed me, eh?"
"I—I didn't think—"
"True enough. And does
not thinking
make a good king?"
"No." It sounded sulky, but then Selamis's face must have hurt a lot. A sigh, then, long and gusty. Gird didn't look up. "What are you going to do now?"
"I ask myself that," said Gird, picking up the single tally from the smithguild and running his thumbnail along the nicks. "I should have killed you, back when I first realized you were lying, and I definitely should have killed you last night. But I'll tell you what, lad, I'm a bad keeper of accounts, and you're good at it—and sometimes the best milker is the worst for kicking the pail."
"You'll let me live because I can read and cast accounts?"
"For now. But use those magicks just once more and you're dead."
"Did I hurt you?"
Gird's hand went to his chest before he thought; he glanced at Selamis and met his eyes. "Yes, and you might have killed anyone less stubborn. What did you think you were doing, eh?"
"I didn't really know—it just seemed as if I could press—"
"Don't. Don't even think about it. As soon hand a child of three Midwinters a pike to play with, and hope no crockery breaks."
"I'll be loyal," said Selamis, but it carried little conviction.
Gird put the tally down, and faced him squarely. "You will be loyal, lad, because I will break your neck myself if you're not. You have no more choices, no more room to maneuver. I've told the marshals what they must know; what you must know is that your life depends on my good word. And if they think you've charmed me, magicked my good word, they will kill you. And if you try charming one of them first, the same. If you find that too harsh, consider your father's way of dealing with traitors. We will kill you quickly as we may—but we will not let you loose again to misuse your talents."
Gird shifted east and south, taking two smaller holdings easily when the outnumbered garrisons fled, and winning another with a stiff fight: he needed the food enough to make the losses worthwhile. One of the fleeing lords had magic enough to poison the wells and blast a field to dry ash. Gird wondered if anything would ever grow in that gray grit. The others' fields might make a harvest, if nothing went wrong through the summer. The one that fought gave them, unwillingly, their first magelord prisoners.
The lord was dead; whether he had had magicks or not, he had fallen to pikes. His wife, several servant women, and the children—wholebred and bastard—had barricaded themselves into a wholly inadequate tower. Gird's yeomen battered the door down easily and dragged them out. Gird looked at the woman. But for her long robes, so unlike anything the peasant women wore, she looked like any other woman her age. She had borne children; she looked to be carrying another. The children were children: a stairstep gaggle, in all states from wild terror to infant placidity. The servant women were trying to gather them in their arms, soothe them.
Gird felt his head throbbing. He had never really thought about prisoners, and certainly not women and children. He had assumed that the lords would all be killed in battle, somehow, and he wouldn't have to worry about it. Now he did. The woman—the
lady
, he found himself thinking—looked as if
she
expected death. Or worse. The servants were unsure, glancing from the lady to his yeomen.
"She was about to stab the children," said one of the men holding her. Gird came closer. Brown hair, eyes with flecks of blue and green and gold. Her chin came up and she braced herself to face him.
"You didn't want to kill the children," said Gird.
"Better me than you," she said. Her voice was calm, almost toneless, the voice of someone who had given up.
"I'm not going to kill the children." What was he going to do with them? Where could he send them? But he was certainly not going to kill them; that was what lords did.
"What, then? Torture them for your amusement? I know what kind of games you peasants play." She had gone white, sure of what he would do; in the rage that followed, he almost did it, but one of the children broke loose from the servant women, and ran straight to him, pummeling his legs and screaming. Gird leaned over, wrapped the child in his arms and lifted him. Her? The mite had braids; did the lords braid boys' hair as well as girls'? The woman struggled frantically when Gird picked the child up, but quieted when she saw Gird hold the child carefully.
"Quiet, child," Gird said to the girl. He would assume it was a girl. She screamed all the harder, red-faced, tears bursting from under tight-shut lids.
"No!"
he yelled down at her. Silence followed; the child sniffed and opened her eyes. Remarkable eyes, blue flecked with gold, eyes he could drown in. He looked across at the lady. "You do not know the games peasants play, lady, if you think we torture children. It is the pain of our children that drove us to this war. Is this one yours?" White-lipped, she nodded. "A lovely child. I hope she has a long life." He set the child down and pushed her toward her mother. "Go, little one."
It was still no solution. He caught the sidelong looks, the low-voiced comments he was meant to overhear. As he toured the stronghold, learning more about fortifications than the gnomes had ever bothered to tell him, he wondered what he was going to do with them. The dungeon, when he found it, drove that thought out of his mind briefly, for there were the fates the lady had feared, knowing them too well. Gird swallowed nausea and rage, as his yeomen helped the pitiful prisoners up to daylight. He fingered the torturer's mask of red and black, wondering which of the dead men above had worn it. There on the wall was a larger version of the same mask, leather stretched over wood and painted in garish stripes. Beneath was a circle of chain, with barbs worked into the links. Behind him, his yeomen murmured, angry. Gird yanked the mask and circle off the wall, careful not to let the barbs prick his hands, and nodded to the other equipment.
"Take this all up and burn it. We'll leave nothing like this behind us." The words rang in his mind as he went back to his prisoners.
Nothing like this behind us
meant intent as well as material objects. He wanted to crush something, hurt someone, but that was what had started the whole mess.
The lady was crouched, with her children, in a corner of the outer wall, with a jeering crowd around her. They fell silent when they saw Gird, and he waved them away, but for a few guards.
"I think you know what I found below," said Gird. She would not meet his eyes, this time. She had known. Had she condoned, even encouraged? "I found the mask, the barbed chain—"
"I told him," she said, looking at her clenched hands. "I told him we were never meant to follow Liart. That our only hope was Esea's light, and if it failed, we should greet the long night peaceably. But he would not. He would not admit his powers failed, that his children might not have all he had been given. I told him nothing was forever, that men rose and fell like trees, like—like wheat, even, brief as that is. That we could not win safety this way."
Gird reached out and took her hands in his. "Look at me. Yes, like that. Did you, yourself, kill anyone? Did you send anyone to the torturers?"
Her head shook once, side to side; she said nothing, staring into his eyes with those multi-colored eyes of hers. Was she trying to charm him? Could she?
"Did you truly try to stop him, your husband?"
"Yes. But he would not listen."
Gird released her hands. "Well, then: you listen to me. If I find you've lied, that you helped with that filth, your life is forfeit. Otherwise, it depends on you. Will you redeem the evil your husband did?"
Her eyes widened; she had not expected that. "How could I do that?"
"Come with us, work to heal those who are hurt."
"I have not the healing gift—and besides, I am—" she gestured at her belly, just swelling her robes.
"Where do you think peasant women go, when they're thrown off their land and are pregnant? As for healing gift, if you can boil water and wash bandages, you will earn your keep—though I admit it's little enough, until this war's won."
"And I will be the slave of slaves, for your delight?"
His mouth soured. "No, lady, I would be delighted to have everyone safe at home, no one a slave to anyone."
"And if I don't agree?"
Gird shrugged, and stood up. "I suppose we can turn you out, chase you away from our camps, and let you find your own keep, if you can. Can you?"
"Not as I am," she said. "All right. I will take your offer." The unspoken
for now
seemed to hang in the air around them. Gird had the uneasy certainty that this would not be the last such problem, and he was not at all sure he had found the best solution.
The next day, he watched the lady—now garbed in the more practical peasant clothes—and her children set off with those of his wounded he was sending back to the rock shelter. He had had to argue harder than he liked with his own yeomen, to extract their promise to treat her fairly. The children they would have taken happily; he sensed that they wanted him to kill the lady, but feared to say it. Selamis—the
luap
, he reminded himself—had not offered his opinion, and Gird had not asked it. He had returned to being the efficient keeper of accounts and carrier of messages.