"I thought perhaps they'd lost it." That sounded strange, even as he said it. "Forgotten it," Luap amended. "There's no sign anyone's used it."
Gird blinked. "But you haven't been watching. How would you know?"
"I—don't." He had been sure, from the utter blankness of the chamber in this cave, the empty hall
there
. No smells of occupation, no stir of air, no sounds. He was sure the place had been waiting for him, would be empty any time he returned to it, until he took others there.
If
he took others there. His heart quickened, and he took a long breath. He would not think about that now.
"How much sign did we leave?" Gird went on. "In a day or so, whatever snow we tracked in will have dried. That's large country, out there. You could take an army through this cave, a tensquad a time, and send them out into that, and a day later no one could tell."
Luap hoped his face showed nothing; he felt the sweat spring out under his arms and on the back of his neck. He cleared his throat and forced a shrug. "But until we know where
there
is, what good is that?"
Gird nodded. "That's sense. We're not wandering folk, any more; we have no need of more lands. There's plenty amiss here to clean up. You're right, lad; my mind just wandered a bit. And I should thank you for showing me, not keeping it to yourself. You're right; someone else should know it exists, someone human, I mean. But it's lucky we didn't know during the fighting. Some would've wanted to hide from trouble that way."
He almost told Gird then. His mouth opened; he said the first words that came into his head . . . and they were not those words. "It would have complicated things," he said, and ducked his head and pretended to yawn. Towers, walls,
castles
slid through his mind, peopled with mageborn men and women and children, living together in peace, far from the quarrels Gird never wanted to hear about, where he could learn the ways of his powers, and use them to prove they were not dangerous.
"Tires you, does it? Traveling that way?" Gird prodded the fire; Luap managed another yawn as the flames danced high for a moment, and nodded. He was tired but not from that. From being caught in the old trap of Gird's mistrust, from being penned in too small a pen.
Gird came from court as grumpy as Luap had seen him. "Your folk I expected to be difficult; mine I thought had more sense."
"What now?"
"A petition from over northeast somewhere, to have all the mageborn children tested for magical powers and then destroy them. The magery, not the children. I think. I don't know how many times I have to
tell t
hem—!" He broke off, scrubbing his forehead with a fist as if to wipe out the memory. "It will work in the end; it has to work."
"Maybe it won't," said the Rosemage quietly. "What then?"
"Not another war," said Gird. "We've had enough of that." That
no war
didn't mean
no killing
they all recognized. "Look at Aris and Seri; they're fast friends. They get along with both peoples." The Rosemage opened her mouth, but closed it again. Gird knew, as well as she and Luap, that few mageborn had Aris's talents, and few peasant-born had Seri's experience of friendship. You can't, Luap thought, make an alliance work because two children get along. More likely, Aris would trust too much in his own goodwill, and some superstitious peasant with no goodwill at all would bash his head in for him. That Seri would then gleefully avenge him wouldn't help at all. He wondered what Gird would do if someone killed Aris as a mageborn—would that finally convince him that the two peoples would never mix? Or would he ignore that as stubbornly as he'd ignored all the other evidence?
"We could leave," Luap said, as if continuing the conversation interrupted long before. No need to say how or where: Gird had not forgotten that.
"All of you?" Not quite disbelief, but a tone that made clear Gird's opinion. Root and branch, child and lady and old and young?
"All of us." Luap shut his eyes a moment,
seeing
them all in the echoing arches of that great hall, hearing in his mind's ear the voices racketing off stone. How could he feed them? "We could farm that other valley," he said. "Small-gardens . . ."
"Most of us aren't farmers," said the Rosemage. Damn the woman—she should realize it was their best hope. "Small-gardens don't yield grain. . . ."
"There's a plain beyond," he said. "Maybe that would produce grain. Or something Arranha said, about the terraces used in Old Aare; we could build terraces. And if we aren't farmers now, more of us are than were. We can learn. Better that, than—"
"You want to run away!" Gird's anger blazed from his eyes. "You won't give it a chance!"
"I've given it a chance!" The moment he said it, he knew he'd lost; if only he had said
we
instead of
I
. He got his voice under control and tried to mend the unmendable. "Gird—sir—however much
you
want the mageborn to blend in, most of the others don't. They've told you themselves. Even some of the Marshals; you know why you didn't send Aris to Donag's grange. And Kanis, in the meeting two days ago—"
"Kanis is a fool," Gird said through clenched teeth. "And you're another. You ought to see it, you of all of us, if blood-right stands for anything. Does your mother's pain mean nothing to you? You are
ours
as much as theirs—" He flicked a glance at the Rosemage, not hostile, but acknowledging, and went on. "You could be the bridge between us, Luap, if you'd work at it, instead of haring off after some scheme to make yourself a comfortable niche with your father's folk. You don't have the right to say: the peoples must say. The mageborn, if they want to leave
on their own
,
can go without you. They don't need you, except to cause them trouble: you've sworn to take no crown, and what can you be, without one, but temptation?"
"That's not fair!" He wanted to say more, but he had ruined his chance, and knew it. Gird would not budge now, not for a season or so. Yet he could not keep quiet. "You know I have traveled the land, more than you yourself, carrying copies of your Code, and trying to show your—the people—how harmless, how loyal, a king's son can be. And they don't trust me yet. What more can I do?"
"Quit saying 'my people' and 'your people,' for one thing. Quit thinking it, for another. The distance between a merchant trading across the mountains and a shepherd lass who's never been away from home is no less than the distance between the mageborn and the . . ." Even Gird wanted a name for the others, and though he refused to say "my people" the words hung between them in the impervious flame of reality. He cleared his throat, avoiding the term, and kept going. "If I can expect the merchant and the shepherd, the cheesemaker and the goldsmith, to live under one law, what is so hard about the other?"
The Rosemage warned him with her eyes, but he could not desist. Gird must someday see the truth, he was convinced, and if he kept at it, perhaps it would be sooner. He did take time to choose his words carefully. "Gird, you set no limits on craftsmen or merchants or farmfolk, so long as they stay within the law, but what would happen if you told farmers they could not farm, or weavers they could not weave?"
"Why would I do that?" Gird asked. "And what has that to do with—"
"The mageborn powers, Gird. You want them given up, as if they were wicked in themselves, rather than talents like a dyer's eye for color or a horse-trainer's skill with horses."
Gird cocked his head. "Talents like other talents? I think not, lad, and if you believe that you're fooling yourself."
"You let Aris heal: that's a mageborn talent." He hoped his envy did not bleed into his voice. Every time he saw Aris, his own talent ached within him . . . perhaps he too could heal, if only Gird would let him try.
"Healing is a gift of the gods. Yes, I know, it was said to be a mageborn talent, but what mageborn in my lifetime had it? had We saw no healing; we saw wounding and killing. I let Aris heal, yes, because some god's light shines through that boy like a flame through glass, but you notice I haven't let him do it without supervision. The gods I trust; his mageborn talent I trust no more than this—" He flicked his fingernails in derision. "Healing is a service; it's not a way of getting power over others. Will you—you of all people—tell me the mageborn don't use their talents to get power?"
"That's not
fair!
" It was already too late; Luap felt the last strand of control fraying. "You trust that Marrakai whelp—born and reared in the privilege you claim to despise. You trust a stripling boy of whom you know nothing but another child's report—and I've worked with you for years, gone everywhere at your command, and you don't trust
me
—"
"And why should I?" Luap had not seen Gird that angry at him for years. "You tell me that—and remember what you did, Selamis-turned-luap. The first time I saw Aris use magery, it was to heal, and he gave his own strength to it. The first time I saw
you
use magery, you tried to kill me, to force me to accept your rule. Right after swearing you sought no crown, you tried that—should I then trust you?"
"Then why did you make me your luap? Why expect me, whom you don't trust, to join our peoples? Why not pick someone you do trust—that Marrakai Kirgan, or Aris?"
"To give you the chance to change, rare as it is." Now Gird looked more tired than angry. "D'you think I don't know men can change? The High Lord knows I have, from the boy I was, from the farmer I became, from my first year as a rebel. Some say no one changes, that cows can't turn to horses, or wolves into sheep—but I know change is possible. That's what I hoped for you, that you'd grow out of envy and lying, and into some understanding of responsibility. You've worked hard—yes, and I've praised you for it—but you've never given up wanting what you think you should have had."
"I . . . tried." His throat closed on the rest. He had given Gird everything he could, every talent he knew he owned, except the one Gird would not accept, the magery. And what he had really wanted, Gird had never given him—not easy praise, but the trust he saw given to others for nothing.
"I know you did. In your own way. But—how many more like you, who still want power, would reach for it if I let active magery return? Yes, it's hard on the mageborn to lift mud with a shovel when magic might do it, or rely on candles when they could have magelight—but it was hard on everyone else, when the mageborn chose to use their magicks as they did. We can't have that again; we can't have you,
trying
to control your wishes, and not doing it."
If he had not felt Gird's fist before, he would have thought the words hurt as much. Remorse lay a bitter blade at the heart of his pride: he wanted to throw himself down and plead; he wanted time to unroll its scroll and let him unsay what he had said. But it would take more than a change in the day's writing; he had years of error to undo, and time flowed like the great river, always one way, always down to death. He swallowed the knotted anguish, in all its confusion of meanings and feelings, as he had swallowed so much, and felt an insidious relaxation. He had tried; he had failed; he should have expected that. It wasn't his fault; he had done his best.
He wanted to shrug, but he knew that would anger Gird even more. Instead, he sat very still, avoiding everyone's eye. From the corner of his own, he could see the Rosemage's expression, composure over disappointment over frustration. She had as many layers as he did, was as different from Gird's singleness of heart as he was, yet Gird, though he did not fully trust her, never subjected her to the criticism he aimed at Luap. He glanced at Gird, ready to be dismissed again, only to meet a steady look of regret that almost broke his determination.
As if no one else were in the room, Gird spoke. "You know, Selamis, you reminded me of my brother from the day I first saw you. My favorite brother; he died in a wolf-hunt, years before the war started, but I never forgot him. I thought 'Here's Aris back again, and this time I'll protect him as he protected me.' There were some who didn't like your ways from the first; I argued that they were unfair. When you told me you had lied, and what had been done to you, I wept—do you remember that?" Luap nodded; he could not speak. "I knew that any man could be driven to lie by enough pain; I never blamed you for it. But you lied afterward."
I told the truth afterward too
, Luap thought.
More often than I lied. You might give me credit for that.
Aloud, he said, "I'm sorry. I am not the man you would have me be. But since I am not, give your task to someone more fit to handle it, and let me go."
"I wish I could." Gird looked at him. "But you know why I cannot, if you will only face it. You are who you are, your father's son—and you came to me. That old woman knows, and Arranha: I know they've told you."
"And they've told
me
that my magery is part of it. That I must tap that power to do what you ask—yet you ask me to do it without. How? I have tried, and failed." For the time, his bitterness had vanished, leaving him at peace, a still pool in the calm before a winter dawn. "Since it is my lies that made you distrust my people—" There. He had said
my people
blatantly, just as he saw it in Gird's expression. "—rid yourself of me, and you and the others may be able to trust them."
"I don't want to trust them, you purblind fool! I want to trust
you
. I want you to deserve my trust." He had never heard such anguish in Gird's voice; it shook his certainty. "I want you to be the Selamis we all see you could be."
"And not the luap you all see?" The moment it was out of his mouth, he could have bitten his tongue in two. It was like slapping the old man's face; nothing would heal now. But Gird looked more sad than angry.
"No, not the luap. If you could think past your balls, Selamis, and past your own losses, you could see that not all fatherhood involves a woman, and not all kingship requires battle."
"I'm sorry." It seemed he was always saying that; it tasted of long chewing, its meaning leached away, its savor lost. Yet he meant it; he would say it until he died, if he must. He shivered, and made a warding sign; he hoped he would not need to be sorry so long.