“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.
“Well.” Gird shook his head, refusing further debate on that subject. “You’re not going; I need you. And your people are not going out to your mysterious land, wherever it is. We will work through this; if I can lead peasants to war, surely I can lead them into peace. Although I remember Arranha saying that would be harder.”
Luap found the look on Arranha’s face worse than anything he might have said. He wanted to scream back at it, he wanted to run from it, he wanted to be what all these people wanted him to be… that they expected him to be without explaining beforehand. He was supposed to guess, to figure it out from the hints that were enough for others but had never been enough for him. He could always see more than one direction behind each hint, always see more and more complicated patterns radiating from a simple one. Arranha would say more light would help, but more light simply revealed more complexity, more ways to go wrong.
“What is the one thing you truly want?” Arranha asked, after a silence that seemed very long to Luap.
Cascades of images flowed through his mind, each begetting a dozen more. Each made of dark and light, color and its absence, lines and spaces, textures… “To be whole,” Luap whispered, into the hollow space of his dream, the secret chamber of his mind, to which no god’s voice had come. To have this space filled, this chamber habited, the voiceless voiced, the blind—but he was not blind; he had all Esea’s light he could tolerate, and what it revealed was emptiness. “To be whole,” he said a little louder, putting voice to something without a voice.
“To be something,” Arranha said. Nothing colored his voice, neither approval nor disapproval. “Or to do something? Or to have something?”
Luap sat silent, trying to keep his hands still. Arranha’s questions always had traps in them; that parallel series must mean more than it seemed, must be more than the reflection of his own words from Arranha’s mind. He had been, he thought, plain enough. He wanted to be whole, more than anything. But to be? Not do? What did he want to be whole for? Had he a purpose? Had he some other desire which this phrasing veiled?
He wanted… he wanted to hear that voice, the one he had not found in the chamber that lay in no visible mountain, the one no one could find but himself. He wanted to hear that voice say… but that was nonsense. Children hoped to hear adults praise them; children hoped for approval. He was grown, a man old enough to have his first grandchildren on his knee, if his children had lived. It came to him in a sudden storm that his son had been killed, not as a whim of the soldiers sent to command his mission to Gird, but because he was a son—a potential heir in time of rebellion. Why had he not seen this before? Because his grief for the boy had eased before the much harder grief of knowing how his wife and daughter suffered when he did not betray Gird?
In the memory of his children, his longing for something only children wanted ebbed, leaving him aware of nothing but exhaustion and the hollow he so desperately wanted filled. “To be whole,” he said finally to Arranha. In his own ears, his voice held convi
ction. “That’s all. And—and I don’t know what that would be. With magery, without… just whole.”
Arranha’s expression softened. “I wonder sometimes if any of us have understood what your boyhood was like. Did you have any feeling of being in a family?”
“No.” Luap swallowed. “Or I supposed I may have, very young, but not later. I never knew where I fit; I never knew exactly what they wanted, except that I wasn’t right.” He did not try to express the memories that flooded him now: other children had brothers and sisters, parents, a pattern into which they fit. All those patterns excluded him; he had been defined, he realized, by negatives. You’re not my brother, one boy had said, shoving him away when he would have made friends. He had learned not to ask the adult men if they were his father; he had learned not to ask women if they were his mother. When he had asked those questions, in his innocence, he had been thrust away: you are not my son, you are not my child. He had learned not to ask the most important questions that crowded his head, for that would risk the little he did have, the little he did know. And in the unknown spaces, he could make up his own answers, safe as long as he did not ask, did not seek the truth, which always told him what he was not. His dreams were not lies if he did not ask.
Arranha stared at his own hands as if they were new to him. “I have been an outcast most of my life—causing trouble, as Dorhaniya told you, even as a young man—but at least I always knew what I was an outcast from. I knew my father’s face, my mother’s hands; I scuffled with my brothers, teased my sister… and I cannot imagine what it would have been like without them. Would I have gone my own way, if I had not been sure what that was? What I was? Have I taken pride in being true to my own vision without realizing how lucky I was in having such a vision?”
“For some,” Luap said, looking down, “the truth is a blessing. For others, the truth can only be pain.”
“Surely not!” Arranha’s voice shook. “Even if it seems painful, the truth is better than lies; light is better than darkness.”
Luap did not argue. He had lost that argument a long time ago, as a small child. Safer to guard his dreams, his private corners of the mind, his small comforts: what truth could improve them? In his mind, Gird could be the loving father he had never had; in truth Gird loved him no more than anyone else, perhaps less. How could the truth be better? What could anyone build from truths that only took away, that never gave?
But he felt Arranha’s gaze on him as he would have felt the sun’s heat. For all his apparent gentleness, for all his mild good humor, the old man had his passions, truth and light among them. “You cannot be whole without truth,” Arranha was saying. “You cannot be whole without the light.”
But he was wrong. What would make me whole, Luap thought, is something to fill the dark places, the inside places that have never seen light.
For some days, he and Gird trod gingerly around each other, much like lovers who have quarrelled and want to make up. Luap said little, but remembered to say that little pleasantly, allowing no hint of his misery to color his voice. He drove himself in his work, beginning at the first hint of daylight, writing until his hand cramped and his arm ached, until he could scarcely stand. Gird gave his orders quietly, commended Luap on the neatness of the finished scrolls, asked necessary questions about accounts. And as time passed, Luap felt they were easier with each other. Gird would accept the help of a flawed luap as he would have used a flawed tool if a good one were not available. He himself basked in a gentle melancholy—resigned to his failure, to a future in which he satisfied no one, achieved nothing he wanted, never found trust or acceptance. He could at least be better than Gird’s fears, if not as good as his hopes.
In this mood, he found strange pleasure in visiting Dorhaniya and enduring her mild scoldings, in seeing the Rosemage’s doubts flickering in her eyes, in noticing how Arranha worried. He might not be what they wanted, but he had their attention. Perhaps it was not possible to be what they wanted—those several contradictory things they wanted. Perhaps the best he could hope for was their continuing interest and attention. It wasn’t the trust he craved, but it was better than being ignored.
He had fallen into a reverie one day, staring blindly out his window as he stretched his fingers to ease a cramp, when he felt someone watching him. He turned. Aris stood beside the door, one foot hooked on the other ankle.
“You seem tired, sir,” the boy said. He had grown at least a head in the past year, and was as skinny as ever.
“A cramp in my hand,” Luap said, smiling. “A problem all scribes share.”
“Would you like me to heal it?”
Luap stared. Would he expend his power on so small a thing? “No, Aris,” he said. “It doesn’t matter; it’s just a nuisance.”
“Father Gird asked me to see if I thought you had the healing magery,” Aris said. “I told him I thought you would know best yourself, but he said he had forbidden you to try.”
“Yes,” Luap said with difficulty. “He did.” Something about Aris’s posture communicated unease, though he seemed relaxed. “And what do you think?”
“I… don’t know, sir. Do you want that magery?”
I want all magery, Luap thought, and hoped it did not show in his face. “Yes,” he said. “I would like to heal the sick and injured, as you do—it would be a great good. But I know so little of my powers I cannot say if this is one of them.”
“Do you want me to attempt to find out?” The obvious answer was Yes, of course, but for some reason the obvious answer did not come. Why had Aris asked, instead of simply obeying Gird’s request? Was he trying to convey another message?
“Can you?” Luap asked. “What would it take?”
Aris untangled his ankles and came into the office. “I’m not sure, sir. Perhaps if I held your hands—but I don’t know if that would work. I’ve never done this before.”
Reassuring. Luap wondered if he’d told Gird that, and how Gird expected to get useful information from so young and inexperienced an examiner. The proof that one could heal was a healing: what did it matter what a boy thought of the possibility? But it did matter; he could feel his heart pounding in his chest at the very thought of it. If Aris, whom Gird trusted, said he had the healing magery, surely Gird would let him learn to use it. He held out his hands for Aris to touch. The boy took them, his own hands warm and dry, their bony length promising size and strength later.
“Did you ever feel your hands itch when you were near someone hurt?” he asked. Luap shook his head. Aris peered at his palms. “You have scars here—what happened?”
“Burns,” said Luap. He felt sweat start in his hair, under his arms. He did not want to remember that, not now. “When I first came to Gird’s army,” he said quickly, as if speed would protect him from the memory, “I had burned hands. They—the men who came to my farm—they burned them.” He blinked away the tears and looked up to find Aris’s bright eyes watching him steadily.
“I’m sorry,” Aris said, almost whispering. “I can’t do anything now. But perhaps that’s why you don’t feel it.”
Luap sat back, shaken. What did the boy mean? That he had the healing magery, but didn’t feel it because of the burns? That he had once had it, but the burns had destroyed it? Aris still held his hands, and now Luap felt a slow, langorous warmth moving through his own fingers and wrists, up his arms to relieve tension in the elbows he had not even known he felt. Then it receded, and he felt a coolness replacing the warmth. His own magery rumbled inside him like a simmering pot just coming to boil, and he shunted it aside. His head throbbed a moment, then eased.
“It hurts you not to use it,” Aris said. “Does Gird know?”
“Do I have the healing magery?” Luap countered. Gird was this boy’s hero; he would not complain of Gird.
“I don’t know,” Aris said, releasing Luap’s hands. Luap flexed his fingers: no cramp now, nor any residue of tension. “I feel great power, but it’s not like mine. That doesn’t mean it’
s not the healing magery,” he said quickly. “I can’t tell.”
And since he could not tell, Gird would not release him from his oath, and the power would continue to fret in its cage. Luap hoped the boy would not feel his frustration. He did not want to come between Gird and Aris, though he would have liked to convince Gird that his own magery had some good purpose.
Aris left, to report to Gird, and Luap stared blindly out the window. So long as Gird refused to see how many of his people— our people, Luap reminded himself—did not want his vision of peace, he could do nothing. He had to abide by his oath, even when Gird thought him foresworn, and hope that things would change. Either the peasants cease hating the mageborn—which he felt would never happen—or Gird recognize the problem and let him take the mageborn to safety somewhere else. Not somewhere, but there—to his own land that he had found.
In the meantime—he picked up his pen and went back to work— in the meantime he must be Gird’s most loyal assistant and scribe. The work would ease his mind; it always did. And if nothing changed, if he spent his life this way, it could have been worse spent. He knew that; he accepted it, struggling to crush the doubts and desires that rose from his magery.
Chapter Ten
Luap and the Rosemage met on the road below Fin Panir; he had been to a barton with a message from Gird to its yeoman-marshal, and saw her coming along the road. He drew rein and waited for her. She looked best, he always thought, on horseback, her slenderness all grace, her innate arrogance appropriate to the task of mastering her mount. She wore her old armor; she often did, riding out, though it made her more conspicuous than he would have thought comfortable. Perhaps she did not think of it. But on this day, hot and sticky, he wondered how she bore the heat. As she came nearer, he saw the flush of sunburn on her cheek, on her nose.
Before he could say anything, she said, “I was a fool to wear armor on such a day, with no reason.” Her gloves were dark with sweat. “Although I suppose I could consider it proper training. That’s what I was taught: you don’t know the day you will need to fight, so you must be trained for cold and heat both.”