“Killing the evil monster,” the woman said, nodding.
“No. That’s what I wrote, thinking it more understandable than what he did do… and what that was I cannot say: you would have to have been there and experienced it. But he died, and released me from my oath—or so I thought. As you see I sought command. And this is what came of it.”
“You—oathbreaker?” That was the king, for whom command had no doubt come early and with no qualifications. “You seized your command against your oath to Gird?” No doubt, from the tone, what the king thought of that.
“At Gird’s death, he said he was wrong—about our peoples.” There was too much to explain, no way to make it clear. Luap found he could say nothing more, though his memories clamored for expression. “I thought,” he said finally, “that he meant I was free to bring my people here, and take command here—only here—if they agreed. And they did.” A long silence; he saw both faces clearly. “I was wrong,” he said then. “I thought I would be better than my ancestors; I was worse. And I don’t know what to do. Aris and Seri—” He could only hope that the woman now knew who Aris and Seri were. “—told me to pray, and when I prayed, I saw you.”
The king grimaced; the woman laughed—not cruelly, but in genuine amusement. “I doubt it will be so easy, Luap, but are you willing to try?”
“Try what?”
“If you got into this by taking command you should not have had, relinquish it.”
“How?” How could anything lift that weight from his shoulders? Who would take it? Yet he longed to hand it over, all his pride with it—anything, if only the wrongs he had done could be undone.
She grinned at him, and he could not help but feel better. “There is a king,” she said. A real king, she did not say, but meant. “Would you follow such a king?”
That was the king he would like to have been; a last stab of envy took his breath, a last certainty that that king had had an easier life, and then he felt the tears running down his face. “I would,” he said.
“Then be the luap you were: give Falkieri, Lyonya’s king, command, and obey him.”
Could he trust this stranger seen in a dream? Luap shrugged; he could not trust himself—this man, he was sure, could be no worse, not if he had a—what had she said, “paladin of Gird”?—to help him. “I will,” he said, and looked the king in the eyes. The king looked back; Luap would have flinched if he could, but then the king’s eyes warmed.
“Tell me about your people,” he said. “Tell me about your land, and what you know that might help us save them.”
“This is what you must do,” the king said finally. Luap nodded. He felt eased, though it was not over. “Your people must go— now—tonight—with your paladins to guard them.”
“My paladins?” He had no paladins he knew of, nothing like that woman with her strange ornament and her laughing eyes.
“Paks says your Marshals are paladins: Seri and Aris, is it? Yes. They must go with them, or your people have no chance at all. Then you will need some for a rear guard, who cannot expect to escape.”
“The militia, I suppose,” said Luap. His lips felt stiff. Seri’s militia, he might as well have said, for he had had nothing to do with it for years.
“You will stand guard,” the woman said. “Where we found you, on the stone arch there above the entrance of your Hall.”
“There isn’t an arch,” he said. “The mountain falls sheer. The arches are in other canyons.”
She shrugged. “By the time we come, it will be there; I saw you as a vast guardian shape, protecting that approach and the upper entrance from all harm, in Gird’s name.”
Luap would have protested: he wanted death, not an eternity of waiting, of the memory of all his errors. He wanted to ask how long he would stand there, how many hands of years. But he had given his oath; this last short time he could be true to it. As if she understood, the woman smiled at him.
“You loved this land,” she said. “You will be able to see its beauty all those years.” She did not say how many; perhaps she did not know. Despite himself, through all his guilt, that brought him joy. It was a mercy too great, and bought at too dear a price; tears scalded his face again.
“And I will need the use of your royal magery,” the king said, as if asking for the use of a spoon or knife. “I must command your people, through you, and this is the only way.”
“I—very well,” Luap said, hardly able to speak. “Go ahead.” He was aware of his voice, speaking the king’s words, but it seemed to come from some distance, as if he hung suspended between the vision and the place his body stood. He heard himself explaining, asking for volunteers for the rear guard, directing everyone to go now, to snatch up only what they could carry. Aris and Seri looked stubborn, and would not have gone with the others if something— he could not know what—had not intervened; he saw their faces change. Sorrow fought with hope, reluctance with eagerness. Seri embraced each of her militia in turn, then turned to Aris; hand in hand they led the others out of the great hall.
Then the king’s magery and his own twined in the last acts of power, preparing the enchantments that would let his survivors rest, that would place him once more where he had first seen his kingdom and imagined himself a king.
He stood poised on a great stone arch on the eastern end of the mountain; he could feel neither heat nor cold, neither wind nor rain nor snow, neither hunger nor thirst. Above him, above the clouds that blew past in the seasons, the stars wheeled in their steady patterns; he knew them all. Beneath him, in the hollow heart of stone, his warriors rested at peace, until they should be called to rise again.
Beyond his mortal vision, but within his dream, on the dark night his watch began, he had seen the fragile human chain make its way down the canyon. He had seen the glowing figures of those he had not recognized as more than Marshals; he had heard the cries of those who fell; he had known that some lived, that some survived to reach far Xhim and the sea beyond, and a few—a very few— returned to the eastern lands to tell of a disastrous end to his adventure. But they had all been children when the stronghold fell, and their tales, though he could not know it, were dismissed as children’s make-believe and soon forgotten.
He knew when the Khartazh soldiers came to visit, and found demons abroad once more, and saw the western canyons fill up once more with brigands who preyed on the caravans of the west. He knew what they said, how they mocked the folk who had once lived there, who had disappeared so suddenly.
He stood guard on the stone, year after year and age after age, bound to that place by his own magery and the magery of those who built it. In time the iynisin retreated to their lairs of stone; in time the trees grew again, in time the snows and floods of years tore down the terraces and left the canyon once more “no good for farming,” as Gird had said, with all the soil so carefully placed scoured from the canyons to dry and bleach on the desert far below. In time the stone beneath him crumbled, leaving him suspended on a vast arch of stone. He could not tire, but he could hope for an ending, a completion of the pattern once begun, a better completion than he had himself designed.
He knew it would come, because he had begun it. The paladin would come, and restore the mageroads; the king would wake his warriors. Then his long watch would be over; he would be freed to go before the gods. He knew that would come, because the king had promised, and the paladin had given her word, and they were not liars: he could trust their oaths. It did not depend on his.
It is said in Fin Panir that the first paladins came out of the west, in a storm of light, riding horses so beautiful they hurt the eyes to see. A man and a woman, it is said, but no one remembers their names.
The End
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Elizabeth Moon, Liar's Oath
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