"Hmm. Trouble is always waiting, lad; at least you had the sense to stay in the light." He turned away, and left Selis standing alone. Then he turned back. "This other boy—who is he?"
"He's—"
"Selis, you'd better be quiet." Raki sounded as dangerous as ever.
"Are you threatening our guest, thief?" asked one of the Girdsmen.
"Peace, Arñe," said the Marshal. "Let the boy answer, if he will."
"It's—Raki," said Selis. "He's—someone I know."
"I gathered that. Someone you know who is not a friend—who wants to hurt you?"
"Yes, sir."
"Does he follow Liart?"
"Yes, sir."
The Marshal walked over to Raki, and crouched beside him. "Let me see—not a bad wound. And so you think, Liart's thief, that Liart has all the power? You think Gird does not protect his own?" Raki did not answer. "Well, then—do you wish to live, or not?"
"All wish to live," said Raki. "Even that rabbit over there."
"Rabbit or rat, eh? I tell you what, Raki, I will not let a Liart's thief go free. Especially now. You entered a grange unasked, you violated the platform and the vigil, you attacked a yeoman of Gird: for any of these your life might be forfeit. Yet you are young. Would you prefer prison?"
"No!"
"Or will you forsake Liart, and swear your life to Gird's service?"
"Forsake the Master? But he will—"
"Then you, too, are as afraid as that boy?"
Raki seemed to shake a moment before answering; his voice was lower and less scornful. "No—no, but I have seen—"
"Something you're afraid of. All men are afraid, Raki. You call that child a rabbit—have you the courage to do what he has done?"
"Him? What?"
"He came here. He endured the treatment of his wounds without complaint. And he stayed in Gird's light when you tried to frighten him away." The Marshal paused; Raki said nothing that Selis could hear. Then the Marshal spoke in a different tone. "And where were you, Raki, when the paladin of Gird endured your god's torment? Were you there?"
"Well, I—yes."
"Did you taste her blood, as Selis did?" Raki nodded, unwillingly, Selis thought. "Did you do more?" After a long pause, Raki nodded again. "What?" Selis saw Raki shake his head, then his face worked. Whatever he said came to Selis only as an unintelligible gasp.
The Marshal shook his head at the end. "Well, Raki—make your choice. Choose Gird's service, and live; or Liart's, and die."
"You won't really let me go—"
"Not go, no. If you choose Gird's service, we will tend that wound and put you to bed, then find you a trade to learn—"
"As someone's slave," snarled Raki.
"No. Girdsmen hold no slaves."
"But how do you know I—"
"You would swear your oath on the Relic of this grange," said the Marshal. "I warn you that swearing falsely is a perilous thing."
"Has Selis sworn?" asked Raki.
"Selis is not your concern," said the Marshal. "It is your life we speak of now. Will you choose Gird, or death?"
"I don't want to die." Raki's voice trembled a little. Selis could not see his face for the others around him. He had never heard Raki sound frightened before.
"Well?"
"I—I'll swear."
"You will serve Gird, by the laws of our Fellowship?"
"Yes."
"Bring him." The Marshal turned back, moving around the platform to the recess; Selis flattened himself back into the corner. The Girdsmen untied Raki's arms and hauled him up. He looked shaken, unlike the confident boy Selis had always known. They urged him forward, until he stood beside the Marshal. He glanced sideways and looked at Selis. Selis looked back, seeing Raki for the first time as a boy—only a boy—older, but far from powerful. The Marshal reached into the recess and brought out the club. Selis could not see his face, as he spoke, but his voice was grim.
"Raki, I know you do not believe what I am saying, but I warn you: if you intend dishonesty, if you swear falsely on this relic of Gird, you may die. This club, we think, was Gird's own. Others have died of false swearing; you must know this. Your choice is meagre; you have lived with evil so long that we dare not trust anything but an oath like this; I wish it were otherwise. Now—take it in your hands. Yes, like that. Now—"
"It isn't fair, five against one," said Raki sullenly. Selis felt a pressure in the air, as if a listening crowd had Formed.
"Oh?" The Marshal's voice held no emotion. "Was it fair, many against one paladin?"
"No—"
"Then swear, Raki, or do not; it is time."
"I—I don't know what to say."
"Say: I swear my life to the service of Gird, according to the rules of his Fellowship." Selis could see the tension in Raki's face; it glistened with fog or fear. He saw Raki's hands clench on the club, and knew he was about to strike. But no one moved. Raki breathed fast, staring at the Marshal, then took a long breath.
"I—I swear—" he began. His eyes dropped to the club, widening. "I—swear my life—to the service of Gird—" Now the club glowed slightly; Raki's brows went up and his tongue ran around his lips. "I mean it," he breathed. "If—"
"Finish," said the Marshal.
"According to the rules of his Fellowship," said Raki quickly. The club's glow brightened, then faded.
"Do you renounce your allegiance to Liart of the horned chain?"
"Y-yes."
"Good." The Marshal took back the club, and replaced it in the recess. "Kevis, you and Arñe tend his wound; one of you stay with him when he sleeps. Raki, you are oathbound to obey them, for now. When you wake, you and I will talk. For now, I have something to say to Selis." Selis watched Raki move way between the two Girdsmen with a strange feeling of unreality. It simply could not be that Raki—daring Raki, wild Raki, dangerous Raki, the prize apprentice, the ringleader of the youngest thieves—was now sworn to the Fellowship of Gird.
"Selis." The Marshal's voice brought him back from that reverie. "Come here." He was suddenly afraid again. What if he had to swear, and the relic proved him false? He didn't know if he could be a Girdsman. But the Marshal was leading him to the platform. "Do you know what that is?" he asked, pointing at the object that lay glinting in the middle. Selis peered at it. A flat medallion on a chain, crescent-shaped.
"Yes, sir," he said. "It's a symbol of Gird."
"That's right. Pick it up." Selis looked at him, surprised, and the Marshal nodded. He stepped onto the platform gingerly, expecting that hollow booming; instead, his feet scuffed lightly on the wood. His back twinged as he bent to pick the medallion off the broad planks. He wondered if it would be respectful to touch it, and lifted the chain instead. "Hold it in your hand," directed the Marshal. Selis wrapped his hand around it, wondering. It felt like metal, chilled from the night air. The Marshal cocked his head. "Are you frightened now, Selis?"
He thought a moment before answering. "No, sir."
"Would you be frightened if I asked you to stay in the same room with Raki?"
"No—not now. Not if you were there."
"Are you afraid of me?"
"No, sir. Not now. But if you were angry—"
"Selis, I have been angry since you came. If you do not fear me now, you need not fear me at all."
"Angry—at me?"
"No. Should I be?"
"I did what they did."
"Boy, we have all done evil in our time; I pray Gird's grace that's the worst evil, and the last evil, that you do. Listen, Selis. You are younger, and I judge less tainted with evil; you should not need binding with such a strong oath as holds Raki. But in this time, with so much evil loose in the world, you need protection. Do you wish ours, or would you find another patron?"
Selis looked at him. "You mean be a Girdsman?"
"Yes. Join the Fellowship, but as a child does, not as a man. Thus if you grew to be called by another worthy patron, it would be no oathbreaking for you to become a F
alkian, say, or join a forge of Sertig. It would mean putting yourself under our authority, until you were grown; the Fellowship would be your family."
"I—don't know if I can ever be a fighter," Selis said. "Raki's right, that I'm a rabbit. I—I cried, when they took me forward, even before they hit me." Somehow it seemed important to say that; he did not know why.
"Not all Girdsmen are fighters, but the Fellowship helps all learn to face what dangers they must. We will not ask you for more strength than you have, Selis. You are a child, not a man."
"Then I would like to stay. I would like to—to not be so frightened, like all the rest."
"Good. Rahel, come hear Selis's oath. Say this after me, Selis: I ask protection of the Fellowship of Gird until I am grown, and swear to obey the Marshal of my grange as I would my own father, and accept his discipline if I am wrong."
"Don't I have to hold that thing?" asked Selis nervously, looking at the recess.
The Marshal laughed softly. "No, lad. The medallion in your hand will do well enough for you."
Selis repeated the oath without incident.
"Now," said the Marshal. "Since you disobeyed earlier, and brought trouble it took two Girdsmen to handle, here is your punishment." But he was smiling. "You will stand in the grange with us, until the next shift of watchers comes to keep vigil; can you do that, or are you too weak?"
"I can stand," said Selis, suddenly warm again.
"Lay the medallion where it was," said the Marshal. "And then take your place here." He pointed to one of the corners. "And here—" He had ducked into the passage and out again before Selis was quite aware of it. "You cannot stand there clad in bandages, like a half-wrapped corpse. Here's training armor, and a cloak. And hold this sword so. It won't be long until the change of watch: just stand so."
And Selis found himself blinking hard to stay awake, the padded canvas surcoat and long wool cloak warm against the fog. He could not believe it: he, the rabbit, with a sword in his hands, keeping vigil in a grange of Gird. When the watch changed, he fell asleep as soon as the Marshal laid him in a bed.
Author's Note on "Those Who Walk in Darkness"
What happens to minor characters when their small part is done? As I wrote the last part of The Deed of Paksenarrion, I had to tell the story of a traumatized boy who appeared briefly in Oath of Gold before I could settle into finishing the book. It appeared in my first two short-fiction collections, and later I put it up on the Paksworld website. So why here, again? Because sometimes those minor characters and minor side-stories connect with something years later. This story tells only the beginning of a lost boy's new life. How he grew up, what he did, how he influenced others didn't enter my head for years, until I was writing the end (and stories beyond the end) of Paladin's Legacy. There he was again, still a minor character whose life had intersected with a more prominent one years after the end of that series and before the events of "The Last Lesson." Will he ever come back to fill in the years between? I have no idea.
The Last Lesson
On the morning of half-Winter, nine hands of days before Midwinter Feast, seventeen young men who hoped to become Knights of the Bells sat around the long table at one end of the knights' salle with the Knight-Commander.
"Gentlemen, today we will consider the duel, both in law and practice." He looked up and down the table. Every year they looked younger to him. The light, the dark, the nobly born, the commoners...no girls this year. He pushed that away. None of his own daughters had wanted to be knights. No matter that both Falkians and Finthans knighted more women. He dragged his attention back to the day's lesson.
He cleared his throat and began. "You all know that dueling is forbidden by the Code of Gird. Yet you have all heard that duels are fought by Girdish men, despite stiff penalties if they are discovered. You may have been tempted yourselves to offer a challenge or answer one. I imagine you are curious about dueling. Perhaps you think it is much like any fencing practice."
He glanced around the table: a few smiles, a few nods. "It is not. The fencing practice you have had here is nothing like the dueling ground, gentlemen. However quick and strong you are, facing swords bated on edge or point under the eye of an instructor is very different from facing live steel in the hands of someone who means to spill your guts on the ground."
Now they frowned, most of them.
"You know this—it has been mentioned by your armsmasters—but you cannot understand as yet. Let me tell you about my experience."
He could feel their quickened interest. He rarely spoke of his own experience, any of it. He was the king's cousin, a Duke until his appointment as Knight-Commander of the Bells, still a member of the Royal Council. It was easy to imagine himself into those young, inexperienced heads: instead of a dull lecture on the law, they would hear an exciting story from a royal personage. So they thought.
"A few years before I took over the Bells," he said, "I fought a duel. I had of course been in battle before, so the feelings—the changes in myself—in facing live steel were not new to me, but they were to my opponent. It was his first duel." They would want to know who; he wasn't about to tell them, and he went on without pausing. "He was highly trained, very skilled, and—being so much younger than I—naturally faster in his movements. It reminded me of myself, in my first fight with live steel."
He paused, took a sip of water. It had been nothing like his first fight with live steel, really, but this was not about himself. And the young man who had faced him had certainly shared a bloodline and a naive arrogance much like his own at that age. He began again, sketching the progress of the duel...the first encounter, the first blooding, the pause for wounds to be bandaged, the return to the dueling ground, the next and the next.
"But then," the Knight-Commander said, "I saw what was happening to my opponent, and I understood that he was not longer able to master himself, no longer thinking clearly. It was up to me, as the elder, to do so." He paused again to look at the listening faces, all intent. "I stood up from my guard, dropped my blade, said I had finished, and thanked him, walking forward ready to shake his hand. He stared, stiff as stone for a moment, then switched his blade to his heart hand and shook mine." No need to say that the young man had burst into tears and thanked him.
"So you saved yourself," Soldan Masagar said, a faint edge of contempt in his voice. He was a baron's son from the northwest corner of the kingdom.
The Knight-Commander nodded. "It is true, I am alive now. But I did it not to save myself—but him."
"You mean—you could have killed him instead?" "Probably not, unless he slipped and fell," the Knight-Commander said. "Twenty years slows a man. He would have killed me...and it would have ruined him."
"I don't see that—it would have made his reputation as a swordsman." That was Parin, a Marshal's son from Elorran's old domain.
"As a murderer," the Knight-Commander said. "As a man to be feared and possibly hated. A man whose whole life would be marked by that duel, making his destiny more difficult, if not impossible."
"But you—but—" The young man's voice faded away in the face of the Knight-Commander's steady gaze.
"When I was young, I killed men," the Knight-Commander said. "I know what it does to a young man, to kill out of fear or pride or hot blood."
"But your reputation—"
"Could not suffer what his would, had he ended it—or had he killed me."
"If you think dueling is so bad, why did you agree?"
The Knight-Commander laughed. "I did not say I thought dueling was so bad, when it's first-blood only. The problem is, gentlemen, that it's hard to stop at first-blood when you are angry, when your pride has been hurt, or when you are too frightened." His expression hardened, and he looked from face to face. "And do not tell me, young hot-bloods, that you cannot be frightened. Anyone can be frightened, just as anyone can lose control in a temper. You can—you may—and some of you will—do terrible things in those situations. You think now you will not. Y
ou think now you will be steady as oaks, immobile as stones, but you have not been tested."
"My father says you were tested." Predictably, a Marrakai, second son of a second son. "But he won't tell me how."
"Indeed I was, and when I was younger than any of you. And I lived, which some of you would call victory and success. As far as the body goes, that is true. But in choosing life, in a desperate situation, I killed...more than I had need, it might be. It haunts me to this day, those lives lost."
Silence. The Knight-Commander watched face after face, touching each with his magery, tasting their reaction. Most were thoughtful, a little worried now about their own store of courage and resolution. Two were thoughtful another way. The baron's son from the far northwest, who had already expressed his distrust of mages. The Marshal's son from the old Elorran district, a little too eager for fame, a little too prideful of his Girdish heritage.
"How many of you," the Knight-Commander asked, "have ever chanced with live steel?"
Silence, glances exchanged.
"Come now," he said. "This is not a trap; I know how boys play with daggers and older lads with swords, if they can escape adult supervision. You will take no harm from honesty."
"I have," one said, and then another. Only a third, in this class—better than he'd expected.
"I hope you had the sense to wear protection," the Knight Commander said. "Since you are here, I suppose you did. And have any of you ever been on the dueling ground?"
Shaken heads, a chorus of variations on "No."
"Let me make it clear what that is like. Semmis—stand there." He pointed; the student named rose and moved quickly to the far end of the salle. "Take off your doublet and shirt." As he spoke, the Knight-Commander stood and removed his own tabard and doublet, then yanked his shirttails free and pulled his shirt over his head. There were gasps from a few, quickly stifled. Good. He knew what they were seeing—an old man's body, an old man's wrinkled spotted skin over muscles still hard, the mat of hair on his chest and belly gone as white as his beard, the scars of his battles still puckered, easily traced. "Galdin, you act as Semmis's second. Nellrin, you are mine. Seconds, go into the armory and bring out two identical fighting blades. Baren, Tamor, shut the doors to the salle; let no one in. Karden, fetch a sack of bandage rolls from the supply closet."