Rahi snorted. "Luap worries: that's his duty. He thinks he'll have to change the records, that's what it is." But Sterin still looked worried, his blunt honest face creased with it. "All right, I will ask. When he wakes, when I can see him." Another task set her because she was Gird's daughter, another burden she'd never asked for and did not want. The entire time she'd been insisting she was only a yeoman like any other, a Marshal like any other, people had expected her to have Gird's ear: find out this, please make sure he does that, don't let him do this other. Make him change the Code, don't let him change the Code, tell him the Code will never work, explain that granges need more grange-set and that the farmer shouldn't have to pay grange-set in a bad year. She wondered if anyone bothered Luap asking for Gird's favor—it was his job, after all, to deal with such things.
Sterin left the kitchen, clearly relieved to have handed her the difficulty. The two cooks did not come back to chat, for which Rahi was glad. She wanted a few minutes of peace to think about all this, and decide which end of the tangled knot to grasp. Perhaps she should start with Luap, assuming he hadn't been drunk, too. She wished she could stay in the kitchen, with its good smells of baking bread and stew and bean soup. She wished she could discuss it, parrion to parrion, with Arya, going back to the comfortable time when the way to chop onions, or season a soup, or preserve fruit, had been the most important topic of the day. She had not cooked, really cooked, for years; she eyed the great lump of dough Arya pummeled and wished she could sink her own hands into it.
But she would have to talk to Luap and Gird, bearing the grievances of some women and the fears of some men, worrying about prophecies and law instead of bread and meat. She sighed, finally, and pushed herself away from the table. Her bowl went into the washpot; she doused it and rinsed it and set it aside before Lia could intervene, and grinned at the surprised younger woman.
"My parrion was cooking and herblore," she said. "In the old days." Arya looked up at that.
"D'you still?"
"No—not much. I've five bartons and the grange to oversee, and the market courts as well."
"Someday we won't have parrions," Lia said. "Someday we'll be able to choose what we like."
Rahi just managed not to stare rudely at her. "Parrions
are
what you like; I had my mother's gift for it, and nothing made me happier than using it."
"Not me," Lia said. "I'd have learned leatherwork, if I could, but my uncle said girls must choose needlework, weaving, or cooking. And at that, he wouldn't let me choose, but left it to my aunt."
It must be the city way, Rahi thought. "A parrion is a talent," she said firmly, "talent and learning both. If you're not happy as a cook, why not learn leatherwork now?"
"It's too late, and none of the leatherworkers would have me as prentice," Lia said. She seemed to grow angrier as she talked about it, as if Rahi's interest were fat dripping on hot embers.
"There's a woman in my grange does that work," Rahi said slowly. "She's got a girl prentice." She was realizing that even now she understood very little of the structure of city crafts; had city women been restricted in their parrions? Had the village girls? None of them, after all, were ever swineherd or tanner or—except in emergencies—drove the ploughteams. She had assumed those differences resulted from the magelords' rules, but they didn't really know all that much about their own ancestors. How much of what she saw now, in the villages and towns, was new, a still fragile structure?
Lia shrugged, the shrug of someone more ready to complain than change, if change requires effort. "It's all right; I'm here and doing useful work. And with Arya."
Another tangle. She wondered who would know how the crafts had been organized, which were traditionally men's and which women's. And how Gird could possibly come up with a law that would satisfy those who remembered the past and those who wanted a wholly new future.
Patiently, Luap trimmed another goosequill for the boy who might, if he lived long enough, make a scribe. The broken quill had not been the boy's fault; he could not control the spasms of coughing when they came. Garin was asleep now, and when he woke would find a new quill ready-trimmed. Luap wished he had better skills, some magic to heal whatever raged in the boy's lungs. So few had his gift of language, almost elven in its grace. He concentrated on that task, to avoid thinking about Gird's "prophecy," and the rumors already coming back to him in colorful variety.
"You spoil them," came a voice from the doorway. Luap set his lips in a smile and turned. Not the woman he'd wanted to see, this gray morning, but Gird's unmanageable daughter, back from the eastern wars to quarrel with her father . . . or so he saw it. In all fairness, Raheli often had the right on her side, but she had even less tact than Gird, if that were possible. And with Gird sleeping off a drunken binge, her tongue would be all edges; he wondered when she'd arrived, and if anyone had told her yet. In answer to her complaint, he tried a shrug with one shoulder. She scowled.
"The boy's sick," he said. "It's not his fault. I don't trim quills for all of them."
"I should hope not. D'you have the latest version of the Code?" Just the slightest emphasis on "latest"; whatever she thought of Gird's incessant revisions, she would not criticize her father to him. In the same way, copying her father's courtesy, she had continued to call him Selamis long after everyone else used Luap. Now she and Gird both used his nickname more often than not, but he remembered their care to preserve his own identity.
"Three copies." He stood, foraged in the pigeonholes above the work table, and handed her one, hoping that hint would keep her from taking it.
"Good," she said cheerfully; he anticipated what she would say and managed not to wince visibly. "Then I can have this, and you'll still have some . . . I'll have copies made for the eastern granges. You won't need to worry about it."
The end of his tongue would never heal, he was sure, from biting it. Rahi's eyes challenged him, daring him to argue. Tall as Gird, not quite as broad, though the padded tunic she wore gave her more heft than she owned, she stood foursquare in his doorway and dared him. Despised him.
Lord of justice
,
he let himself pray, and then dropped it. She was Gird's daughter; he was Gird's luap; he had no right to do whatever he thought of.
Not that she'd ever know what he thought of.
That
he hid far inside, from both Rahi and Gird . . . that Rahi reminded him of his dead wife, that he had waked from dreams of stroking her scarred face back into beauty with his magery, erasing the ruin of war, pretending (how long would such pretense last? he had demanded of himself) that she was Erris come back . . . and making her love him, as Erris had.
Which would never happen, no matter what magery he used; he could not do it.
"It would be a help," he said mildly, handing over the thick roll, enjoying her surprise at his cooperation. She even relaxed, a rare sight, and came forward to take it, bending then to look at the sleeping boy.
"One of yours?" The implication was clear: one of
his
meant one of the mageborn. Luap shrugged again.
"I don't know, to be honest. No parents he can remember . . . he came out of the taverns here in Finyatha. Voice like crystal, and had taught himself to read. He has a talent for words, that one, and takes in knowledge as damp clay takes footprints. The singer's gift is no commoner in my father's people than in my mother's—" At that not-subtle reminder of his dual heritage, he saw the long scar on her face darken. He went on smoothly. "—so he could belong to either, or both."
"That priest says the mageborn need no training to wake their powers."
That priest
was Arranha, but Raheli would not say his name. She liked nothing mageborn, and Arranha's mildness irked her, giving no excuse for her dislike.
"Not to wake, but to use . . . or at least, to control." Luap wondered what she was getting at now.
"So how can Gird say the children are safe?" She sounded puzzled more than angry, but underneath that puzzlement Luap sensed a decision already reached. She did not understand her father's reasoning, and would go her own way.
"I'm not sure—"
Her hand flashed outward, demanding silence; Luap bit off the rest of his words and waited. "I'm trying, you see, to follow him. I know it is not the child's fault, to be mageborn, to have the magicks inborn, any more than it is a strong child's fault to have strength. But the magicks are weapons; it's like handing a strong child a sword or a pike—pots will break, if not heads. If the powers can wake without training, and it takes training to control them—but we cannot let them be trained, lest they turn against us—"
"Why would they?"
Her eyes were dark, her mother's eyes Gird had often said, but they seemed full of light as a hawk's eyes, staring through him to distant lands he could not see. "Why would they not, knowing we killed their parents . . . or most of them? Knowing their magicks gave them power of vengeance, power of rule . . . why would they not turn against us?"
"You don't trust fairness? Gird does."
She did not quite snort at that, but she glared, this time directly at him. "Fairness! Gods know we need fairness, and demand it, but for all the fairness lodged in human hearts you might whistle down a hedgerow forever, hoping to call out a skreekie with a bag of gold. I've seen little enough fairness, nor you either. Fairness would have had you on a throne—"
"Fairness forbade me," said Luap. "Your father—Gird—trusts fairness. In the end, he says—"
"In the end, when all men are wise and honest . . . and do you, too, believe that will happen?"
He had changed this much: he could not lie to her, even though he wanted Gird to be right, and her to be wrong, as much as he'd ever wanted anything. "No," he said. "I don't. But I think it's worth working toward."
"Men and women aren't gnomes," said Raheli, as if he'd argued that point.
"No," he said. "They aren't." He wished she would go. He wished she would go now, quickly, before the Autumn Rose arrived . . . or he wished the Rosemage had his sensitivity and would delay her arrival until Rahi left. But she would not deviate a hairsbreadth from her way, that one, and if her way now aimed at more than her own pride's joy, it was still a straight uncompromising trail.
Go away
,
he thought at Rahi, knowing it would do no good. Even if she could feel a pressure from him, she would resist it.
"Will you marry again?" she asked, in a tone consciously idle. He knew it was not. Several of the men had offered for her, before she made it clear to everyone that she would not remarry. She probably thought women had offered for him.
"I doubt it," said Luap. "You know my story . . . and besides, a man marries to have children. What could I offer mine, but suspicion? You—everyone—would think it meant I was still thinking of the throne."
"I thought you might marry . . . her." Only one
her
lay between them. Luap said nothing, but Rahi persisted. "You know. Calls herself a rose . . . I say thorny. . . ."
Luap closed his eyes against the explosion: the Autumn Rose was in hearing distance, only a pace or so away. Silence. He opened his eyes, to find Rahi lodged in his doorway like a stone in a pipe, and the Rosemage's light streaming around her like water.
"You don't have to like me," the Rosemage said. "You don't have to understand one tenth of what I have done—"
"I understand quite well." Rahi's accent thickened; her back held the very shape of scorn.
"You do
not
." The Rosemage angry regained her youth; color flushed her cheeks and her light blurred lines of age and weather. Luap's mouth dried. He was bred to find her beautiful; her voice and the magic she embodied sang along his veins. Despite himself, he could not believe that the peasants knew what real love was. They could not feel this wholeness, this blend of body, mind, spirit, magery. "You hate me for things I never did; you despise me for not doing what in fact I accomplished."
"You never bore a child." Rahi, like her father, seemed to condense in anger: immovable, implacable.
"That's not
fair!
" That shaft had gone home; the Rosemage's light flickered, and true anguish edged her voice. "You know it's not—its—"
"It's women's warring," Rahi said, her own voice calm now that she felt her victory. "And for all that, lady, neither have I. You could have thrown that back at me." She glanced over her shoulder at Luap. "Don't marry this one, or they'll never believe you a luap." Before either of them could answer, she'd shouldered past the Rosemage and disappeared down the corridor.
"That miserable . . ."
"Peasant she-wolf is the term you're looking for," Luap said softly, nodding to the still-sleeping boy. "Prickly, a trait you both share. Is it, in fact, an effect of barrenness?" He hated himself for that, but he dared not show his very real sympathy, not now. Her face whitened, as her light died, and then her intellect took over.
"I don't know. Possibly. Her people, with their emphasis on giving as the sign of power, would obviously value childbearing . . . but all peoples must, or they die away. So she and I, childless, though each with good reason, know we cannot meet our own standards. I never thought of it that way, but it could be." She sounded interested now, not angry. She hitched a hip onto his work table, and swung the free foot idly. Even relaxed like that, she had more grace than Rahi.
"I try to think what the difference is, between her and Gird," Luap said. "Surely it's not that women bear grudges more—at least, Gird says his wife never did. But Rahi is not going to trust us, not ever."
"Not
me
, not ever." The Rosemage's hands clenched, then relaxed. "I suppose you've heard the full name she gave me?"
Luap had, but he was not about to admit it. She waited a moment, then went on. "I suppose it doesn't matter. I might even think it funny, if crude, if she'd pinned it on someone else. Thorny bottom . . . and she's as thorny as I am. . . ."