"I don't know much, but it smells like what my folk called allheal and itchleaf."
"So it is, lad, with a pinch of dryhand, for them as gets the sweats without need. Scribes use that sometimes, that shouldn't, for a natural sweat keeps the body pure, but they don't like smudges on their scrolls." She waved at two other women, who came nearer. "This is my daughter, Pir, and my niece who's just come into her full parrion. You'll learn from her first, if it doesn't bother you to learn women's things."
Aris shook his head. "No, why should it? The law's the same for all, and the gods gift whom they will."
The women looked at each other, the family resemblance clear in the angle of eye, the set of the mouth. "Well, then," said Suriya briskly, "we'll get along. Aris, your name is, so I've heard—has that a meaning, in mageborn speech?"
"I don't know," Aris said. "I think it may have been a child's name, and I never learned the other."
"Ah. Well. It's the wrong time of year to gather most herbs, but we've still some collecting to do: barks, roots, that sort of thing. We'll meet you here at sunrising tomorrow, shall we?"
Aris ran back up to the palace, excited and worried both. He found Seri in the same mood, but in her it came out in chatter. "I like our Marshal," she said. "I only wish you could be there—but I know what Father Gird means, and he's right. He's made me his yeoman-marshal's helper, already, and I had no idea how much work there is in a city grange. I missed you, but I like it."
That set the pattern for the next two seasons. Before dawn, both were off to their granges, to learn from the best their Marshals could find. They drilled with the junior yeomen, and both assisted the yeoman-marshals and Marshals in any grange work to be done. Aris spent hours with Suriya and Pir, sorting herbs into packets and sacks, learning to identify by smell dozens of different dried leaves, roots, barks. They taught him to brew some into thick dark teas to drink, and mash others to a paste with lard, to be spread on the skin. He went with Suriya to the people who asked her help. Many times his own gift did not wake; he simply watched as she applied her herbs, and saw how her very presence soothed the worried families. At night, back in the old palace with Seri, they compared notes. Her days, spent almost entirely in grange work, were very different from his. Beyond the usual drill, her Marshal had begun giving her extra classes in weapon skills. The first time she was allowed to use a sword, she came back almost glowing with glee.
"But Seri—" Aris didn't know how to disagree with her; in all their life he never had. But swords were for hurting people; he knew she could not really want that. Not Seri, whose warmth was almost a healing magic in itself. Besides, swordfighters—soldiers—died younger than most.
"I am not becoming a bloodthirsty warrior," she said, almost angrily. "You're as bad as my Marshal. Stopped in midswing, he did, to ask what I was grinning about and scold me for it."
"I know you're not bloodthirsty," Aris said, rubbing her shoulder where a knot of pain resisted his fingers. "That's why I worry. If you wear a sword, someday you'll have to use it, and you'll feel bad about it."
"I'll feel worse if I don't know how, and get killed. Or if others get killed because I didn't learn enough. The Marshal-General didn't like killing people, but he did it. He did it as quick and clean as he could." Seri, unlike Aris, had actually watched some of the final battles, despite being warned off more than once by the rear ranks. She had come back white-faced and shaky, but ready to help tend the wounded. Aris had stayed near the fires, tending the wounded as they came from the field as best he then knew, unaware that the pounding headache and itching of his palms came from something more than tending smoky fires and boiling whatever herbs someone gave him.
"I don't want you to die," Aris said softly.
"I won't," she said. "I will work hard, and be
very
good." It should have sounded arrogant, but it didn't.
By the time Suriya was ready to send Aris and Pir out to collect the early summer herbs in the fields far from the city, Gird had decided that the two should live away from the palace, in or near their granges. Aris moved his small pack down to Suriya's house, and slept on a pallet in the kitchen. He had been called out at least once every hand of days for a healing; it would be simpler to live here. But he knew he would miss Seri. The first time he had healed in Suriya's presence, she had gasped and turned pale. Now she knew what to do, what he needed of rest, quiet and food afterwards. But her hands, warm and strong as they were, were not Seri's hands; he never felt the same afterwards until, in his rare free time, he could get up to the grange where she lived and worked, and tell her what had happened. She seemed cheerful enough, but her face always lighted up when he came, as if she, too, needed the familiar audience for her own tales.
The young man strode into the courtyard like someone who had never been thwarted.
Marrakai.
Luap struggled against a lance of envy that pierced him. He had known, as a boy, what the Marrakai were; he had been taught, in those early years, the high nobility of both realms. He fought the envy down, refused that easy resentment. Marrakai, according to Gird, had lost their magery early, and adapted. Gird no doubt thought he had much to learn from the Marrakai. Perhaps he did, though he was sure that learning to live with the loss of a talent was not the same as learning not to use one.
The young man went to one knee before Gird, surprising everyone, including Gird; Luap saw the flush of red that darkened his neck.
"Get up, young Marrakai: we don't do that."
"You have my respect, Marshal-General." He stood straight now, almost quivering in eagerness for something . . . Luap could not imagine what. What could a man like that need from Gird?
"Aye, well . . ." Gird rubbed the back of his neck with one broad hand. "You have mine as well, and your father. How is he?"
The young man grinned. "He's still in some trouble with the king, Marshal-General. For all the king needs his support, he wishes it need not be so."
"That bad, eh?" Gird waved the others aside, called Luap with a look, and sat heavily on the bench beneath the plane tree. "Here—sit and talk." He reached beneath the bench and pulled out a water jug. "Thirsty?"
"No, sir—Marshal-General." The young man leaned back, and stripped off his dusty gloves. "My father thinks the king will settle. He's not like the old one; he's got sense and no wish to evil. But he finds it hard to forgive my father's support of the peasants."
"I thought your father was going to stay at home and pull his woods up around his ears."
The young man shook his head. "That was not his nature, Marshal-General, as I think you know. He could no more ignore a war than a fine horse can ignore a race . . . it began with sanctuary given to fugitives from other domains."
Luap watched the Kirgan closely. The boy had Gird's confidence and no wonder: he hung on Gird's every word, eyes wide with admiration. Luap eyed the thick, lustrous cloth of his tunic, the oiled leather, finely tooled, of his belt, the carved bone hilt of the dagger in his obviously new boot. He remembered cloth like that, boots like that; the boy was rich, and had enjoyed a lifetime of such riches . . . which was fine; Luap could understand that. What he could not understand, or accept, was the way Gird accepted this youth, and his equally rich and powerful father, as friends.
I have served you honestly
, he said silently toward the back of Gird's head, and pushing aside the memory of that time when he hadn't.
And I would have been this boy's master . . .
but you never trust me this way.
"But in spite of that your father is satisfied?" Gird asked. Luap had already told him that, as had the first messengers back from troubled Tsaia. "He is sure the new king has no such powers?"
"He swears it," the Kirgan said. "He considers the Mahierian branch the best choice, for all it angers the Verrakaien." Luap wished he knew more about the Verrakaien, who seemed, by the rumors, to be as powerful as the Marrakai but utterly inimical to them. Rumor also gave them the largest remaining store of magery, along with whispered tales of its source. He watched the young man's face, wondering how Gird was so sure the Marrakaien were telling the truth.
"And he has not taken the field at all?"
"No, although some of the local bartons sent volunteers. You did know that father allowed the bartons to organize openly?"
"Oh, yes." Gird's deep voice broke into a chuckle. "That news reached us quickly, I suspect." It was not quite the reaction the Kirgan had expected; Luap recognized the flicker of eyelid, the tension of shoulder quickly controlled. "Luap—"
Luap recalled himself and said, "Yes, Gird?"
"The Kirgan Marrakai confirms our reports that Tsaia's new king has no powers of magery, and that the merchants and craft guilds support his rule, while our supporters have mostly returned to their homes. I see no purpose in pursuing the war, with the most dangerous magelords dead—"
"Except the Duke Verrakai, Marshal-General," murmured the Kirgan.
Gird's shoulders lifted. "Far to your eastern border, Kirgan, and well beyond my reach. Those of you who know him best must do as you think wise, but you are not asking my aid, are you?"
"Well—no." He had the look of one who would have taken help if it had been offered, and had been hoping for that offer.
"Then I see no cause for quarrel between your land and this. Is that not what your father meant by sending you?"
"Well . . . yes. To ask, rather, if it satisfied you."
Gird heaved the kind of sigh that Luap had learned was intentionally dramatic. "Lad, I would be happiest if all the kingdoms lived in peace and plenty, but that's not like to come in
my
lifetime. Men delight in quarrels, as cows in summer grass. But your father's gold bought our freedom, in those steel points we used to let the mageborn blood run out—" Luap could not see the slightest flush, any sign that the youth considered mageborn blood his kin. Gird had told him the Marrakaien magery had been lost long before. How long? Long enough to consider themselves peasants? Not likely, with that air of mastery, that rich embroidery on sleeve and hem, those supple boots, that elaborately tooled belt. Was their friendship then pretense? What other motive could the Kirgan Marrakai have, coming to Gird, than that which he spoke openly?
He felt uneasy, all along his side, as he walked the Kirgan to the common dining hall. Gird had said, with a look that might have been meaningful (but which meaning?) to take care of him.
"He's not changed." The Kirgan sounded happy about that. Luap eyed him.
"Did you expect him to?"
"No. I suppose not. But my father told me that men in power often do." A pause, in which they entered the dining hall, and Luap's look quelled those who would have challenged the Kirgan. He showed the young man where to wash, and led him to the serving table. Would he expect fancier food? No—he dipped into the mutton stew as if he liked it, tore off a hunk of bread just as Luap did, and sat on the bench as if his rump were used to no better. "I saw that myself, in the new king we have."
"Ah." The new Tsaian king, which Duke Marrakai had backed against other contenders. "You are at court much?"
"Only to carry my father's messages. He says court life is not healthy for young men—or for him, at present." The Kirgan chuckled as he said that, and Luap smiled responsively. He could not decide if the young man's frankness were what it seemed or not. He wished the Rosemage were there; she had known Duke Marrakai when he was young, though she would not talk much about him.
"So—has your new king changed?"
The Kirgan looked thoughtful and clasped his fingers as if that would help him decide what to say. "He was . . . they had always made fun of him. I heard that in the years I was in Valchai's household. The king—the old one, I mean—had the mage powers our family had long lost, and some said that his cousin's lack proved his bastard blood."
A white rage shook Luap as a dog shakes a rag, then dropped him, leaving him hot and cold at once. He could feel his power struggling to escape, prove itself, but held it in check. He would not let this—this
boy
push him into anything rash. "Are the gifts then proof of pure blood?" he asked, as calmly as if discussing the color of a new calf.
"No. At least my father says not. Once perhaps they were, but when our folk came into the north, they began to fail, unaccountably and unpredictably. Some families accepted this as the gods' price for the gift of a great new land, and others fought it . . . but that you know."
"Yes." It was all he could say, through clenched teeth; luckily, the Kirgan seemed not to notice.
"At any rate, the new king had been considered of no moment so many years that some thought he would be unable to rule. He was known to spend his days in the stables, training his own horses and even grooming them."
"And what's wrong with that?" Gird asked, setting his own bowl down on the table and grunting as he swung his leg over the bench. Luap bit his lip. Even now, he'd find Gird down in the cowbyres of a morning, humming over some cow as he brushed her. For himself, if he never saw a cow except on the table, ready to eat, it would be well enough. The Kirgan flushed, and Gird relented. "I know: your great lords aren't supposed to do their own work. But if the man likes horses, how can he keep away? Still, he'll be busy enough now to have no time for that, as I have no time for farming. . . ."
"Would you go back to it?" No one else had asked, that Luap knew; trust a rash youth to open his mouth and say it.
Gird sighed. "Now? I—I like to think I would, if the chance came. I miss it, the smell of the grass and the cows, the feel of a scythe handle as the blade bites into the stems. But my farm's gone, my family's gone—and that's all part of it, you see. Not just any field, but the field I knew from boyhood, and the same cottage, and my family around the table. Friends beside me in the field, all that. If I went back to farming, took a vacant place, I'd have to do it all alone. That I don't want: their faces would hover over the table, and I—I'd be alone."