"Start by telling me your name, if you will, and what you know of your history."
Perhaps Luap had not taken down what Seri said. Aris began with his name, his father's name, the place of his birth. That was enough of family, he thought, and said, "When I found I could heal—"
"Wait." Luap held up his hand. "Were you the only child?"
"No, sir. But the youngest, by several years; my next older brother had already begun arms training when I was born. That's why I was so often alone with Seri and her family and the other servants; my parents were away at court, or visiting other domains, or—by the times I remember at all—at the war."
"Do you read, then?"
Aris nodded. "Until near the war's end, I had a tutor my father provided. He taught me to read and write and keep accounts, and I taught Seri—"
"A servant's child?" Disbelief edged the Marshal-General's voice at that.
"She's my friend," Aris said. "It was more fun, to have someone to read with, to write to, and as for accounts, she is faster than I. It was a game to us."
"So," Luap said, with a glance at the Marshal-General, "Seri was your companion in childhood, and much of that was during the war. Did your tutor instruct you in magery?"
"No, sir. He had none himself; he said my father would have me taught later, if I showed any ability. But then my father was killed, and my mother—" He stopped, feeling the heat on his face. His mother could not have known what he overheard; surely no child was supposed to hear things like that. He had tried to forget them.
"Seri said your mother married another lord after your father died in battle," the Marshal-General said. "Seri said the other lord didn't want to bother with you. Is that what you think?"
The last time his father had been home, his mother had said those things he wished he'd never heard.
I
didn't want the last brat
, she'd screamed.
It's not my fault he's too young to help.
There was more, that he carefully did not remember. Then his father had come for that last moment, scooping him into a tight hug, telling him to remember. Not what he'd just heard, he was sure: his father could not have known, any more than his mother, that he'd been awake with a headache.
If only you had the magery
, his father had whispered.
But it's too late, now.
He had been frightened; he had started to cry, partly with pain of his headache and partly with fear, and his father had put him down gently and gone out the door.
Aris realized too much time had passed, and his hands had knotted in his lap as they did when he thought about his mother. "She—she grieved at my father's death," he said finally, in a low voice. "The lord Katlinha swore to protect her."
His throat closed on another memory he had not quite buried. The lord Katlinha's long black moustaches, which had fascinated him with their stiff curl. The lord's hand stroking Seri's cheek and neck, and the drawling voice in which he'd said, "Of course you can bring your sweetling, lad, though you're really too young to appreciate her. . . ." Something wrong: he had realized suddenly that Seri was frightened, Seri who was never frightened—her eyes dilated, her breathing shallow. "But you'll both have to mind me," the lord had said, laughing at something Aris couldn't understand, because Seri afraid was nothing to laugh about.
Then his favorite pup, the lame one, had chosen that moment to nip the lord's other hand, and the lord's hard bootheel had stamped. The pup squealed, Seri jerked free, Aris had flung himself at the injured pup, ignoring the lord's command to let the beast die. In the end the lord had shrugged. "I'll have you, lady, if it's your will, but I won't bother with that worthless scrap. There's no mageblood in him; you said you weren't willing, and no doubt you withheld yourself."
They had gone, and left him. He and Seri had run off to join the blueshirts, with the surviving servants, and spent the last of the war fetching water and digging trenches for the peasant army. That he could say; he could not say the other.
"The lord didn't want another son," he said, half-gasping with the pain of remembering it.
"And your mother?" The Marshal-General's voice held no anger, but also no space for refusal.
"Didn't . . . didn't want me," said Aris, eyes down. It was his greatest shame, that he had been the kind of boy a mother would not want.
"Did she know you had magery?" asked Luap.
"No, sir. She was sure I had none; my brothers, she said, had shown it younger than I did."
A silence followed. Aris looked up to see that the Marshal-General's face had contracted in a black scowl. Luap stared at nothing, across the room. Finally the Marshal-General shook out his shoulders and looked at Aris. "Well—she was wrong, quite clearly. When did you find out what powers you had?"
"It was the puppy." He hadn't told them about the puppy; he tried to make it brief, and avoid that difficult moment with Seri. A favored pet, accidentally injured, and the pressure of his grief. "The cowman had already told me I was good with animals," he said. "I liked the stables and byres; the beasts were quiet with me, and the men showed me how to work with them. But all I'd done was what they told me, until the puppy." The huntsman had said it was hopeless; the cowman had said the same. Broken spine, soon death, and the sooner the better; the huntsman wanted to put the pup out of its misery. He had burst into tears again, and again an adult had been disgusted with him, though this time not cruel.
Yer not cryin' 'bout the pup,
the huntsman had said.
Yer cryn' 'bout yer ma and da and that sun-lost count, may he die in the dark.
He had held the whimpering, shivering pup, that had made such a mess in his arms, and felt Seri behind him, also shivering. Then the familiar prickle he had felt so often before without doing anything—without guessing what it was. His hands itched, stung, moved almost without his knowing. He ran a finger down the pup's back to the soft pulpiness where the count's bootheel landed. He tried to imagine what should be there, what it should feel like. The pup rolled in his hands suddenly, squirming, and slapped his face with its wet pink tongue . . . and he'd fallen asleep where he sat, with Seri holding his head.
By the time he'd wakened, the pup had run off somewhere; Seri, the cautious, had said it was best. Before he could argue with her, the remaining servants had rushed in with word of an advancing peasant army. He never saw the pup again, to be sure he'd healed it. But in the next few seasons and years, he had plenty of opportunities to try out his powers. Seri argued for caution, for secrecy, but later helped him use—and hide—what he could do.
"I thought at first it was for animals only," he explained, now once more calm, with the story far enough from his mother. "After what the cowman said—well—I asked to work with the beasts, wherever I was, and found I could help them. Seri said to start with little things, so if I couldn't do it, it wouldn't matter so much. Scratch on a cow's udder, a sore teat, lameness from stepping on something sharp, that kind of thing. I couldn't always heal it, but I could usually make it better. Then one place at lambing time, the shepherd wanted my help because my hands were so small—"
And lamb after lamb he delivered, in the cold rain of that week, had lived . . . they had all lived. The shepherd, who had taught him the old hard truth that sheep are born looking for a place to die, had taken his hands and spread them, looking for the gods' mark, he'd said. He'd found nothing, but Aris had slept for a week when the lambing was over, so deep asleep that Seri had had to clean him where he lay, like a baby. It was natural, then, when the shepherd's wife's next baby came out blue and still, for the shepherd to thrust the limp bundle into his hands and growl, "It's a lamb, lad—save it!"
"The baby lived?" asked the Marshal-General.
"Oh, yes. She's a healthy child; it was just something about the birthing." He paused, trying to think what to tell next. Not how frightened he had been; Gird wouldn't want to hear that. The shepherd had assumed his talent came from Alyanya; he himself wasn't sure. The only magery he'd seen was a dance of light by his father and brothers when he was very small, one Midwinter Feast. He'd been told Esea gave them magery, and that made sense, for the light dance. But healing? No one had even mentioned the possibility. In that remote village, once the war passed, all anyone cared about was sowing and tending and harvest, the daily routine, into which he fit happily. No one really cared how he healed, or where the power came from, so long as it worked.
"But you had no family—who'd you live with?" asked Luap, leaning forward. Aris grinned and spread his hands.
"After the war, sir, there's many not in the right place . . . we worked in well enough, here and there, until things settled a bit. Then that shepherd, he took us into his family."
"It must have been—" Luap coughed, spat, and went on. "It must have been very different from what you knew before." Aris did not miss the keen glance the Marshal-General shot at his luap.
"It was, sir, but—but for missing the people I knew, it was better."
"Better!" That from both of them, clearly surprise and disbelief.
Aris felt his face reddening. "Before, sir . . . my tutor and some others, they didn't think I should spend so much time with Seri, or in the stables with the animals. We've been lucky; I know that. Except for that one bad winter, we've always had enough, and we've always been together. Once I found out what I could do, what the feeling was for, I felt happier than I'd ever been."
"Hmmph." That was the Marshal-General, giving his luap another look Aris couldn't read. "Well, then: if things have gone so well, why come to me?"
This part he could tell without a hitch. From the shepherd's child, to another in the vill born apparently dead, from those to a child with fever, a man injured by falling rock, a woman poisoned by bad grain . . . he had begun testing his powers on people as well as livestock. When the village saw how each attempt at healing wore on him, they were careful in their requests, and Seri protected him as best she could. Then came the first request from a neighboring vill in the same hearthing, a child kicked by a plowhorse. Another, from another vill, then another and another. He had come to be known all through that hearthing, as the boy who could heal what herblore could not. Most of the time, he worked with animals, learning all he could of each kind, but when the calls came, he would go and heal the sick and injured. Seri stood between him and the world, the warm hand at his back, the one who remembered that he needed food after, the one who would sometimes scold those who hadn't tried herblore first.
"Then the Code came," Aris said, meeting the Marshal-General's gaze directly. "Of course we'd all heard of you, sir, and I'd seen a Marshal in the market towns. Our vill has a yeoman-marshal; Seri and I drilled with the other younglings as we grew tall enough. No one thought anything wrong about my healing and being in the barton as a junior. I don't know how many knew I was mageborn, but no one questioned me. Until last harvest-time."
Last harvest-time, the new Marshal of Whitehill grange had come to inspect each barton on his rolls, and with him, he'd brought the new version of Gird's Code. All the village stood in the barton to hear him read it, nodding their heads at familiar phrases—it wasn't that different—until the clause about magery.
Aris felt the now-familiar tremor in his hands, and locked them together. "It said, sir, that no form of magery could be tolerated, that what seemed good was really evil in intent and act, and forbade the mageborn to use, or anyone to profit by, magery. Of course everyone looked at me, and the Marshal stopped reading. 'Do you have a mageborn survivor in this vill?' he asked. Some nodded, and some didn't—I think they wanted to hide me, protect me. I raised my hand, and he called me forth. 'Do you practice evil magicks, boy?' he asked. Sir, I could hardly answer. I had healed, yes: that hand of days, I'd healed a serpent bite. But evil? I said so, that I had healed, and he drew back as if I'd thrown fire at him. Our yeoman-marshal stood up for me, then, and said I'd caused no trouble, nor had a bad heart, but the Marshal was firm that my magery was evil. If I had no bad heart, he said, I'd be willing to forswear it, never use it again. The people sighed at that, but he overrode them. I could not be in the barton, he said, if I used magery, nor could they harbor me. It was in the Code, he said."
"What did you do?"
"I said I was sorry, and would do so no more, though I couldn't see how healing was evil. He bade the yeoman-marshal watch me closely, and warned me that he would tolerate no magery in his grange." Aris looked at the Marshal-General again. "He said you knew best, sir, and if you said it was evil, then it was. I did my best, after that. The village folk were troubled in their minds; a few said I must have charmed them, to make my power seem good, but most wished naught had happened. They still came to me, many of them, when someone was sick, or a beast hurt. The yeoman-marshal tried to make them quit, but he couldn't. He asked couldn't I do something, short of using magery, but I don't have what Seri's folk call a parrion of herblore: I don't know any way but the power. And it came to hurt, sir . . . it rises up in me like water in a spring, when I see someone in need . . . I fell sick myself, late in winter, and Seri said that caused it. She said we had to come to you, because the Code is yours, and perhaps you didn't know that magery could be healing power."
"I had heard it could be; I never knew it so." The Marshal-General leaned forward; Aris could see doubt in his expression. "You say you had seen little use of magicks by your own folk before—did you never see someone charmed?"
Aris shook his head. "Not that I know of. Others have told me . . . it makes them think they want to do something, or like someone."
"And people do like you." The Marshal-General said that flatly. "Seri says everyone in your household liked you."
"You think I
charmed
them?"
"Perhaps you didn't mean to; a child may not know what it does. But I worry about it, lad. From what Seri says, even my own reaction to you. . . ."