“I’ll see to the horses,” he said, and went out. He was tempted to spend the night in the grange’s lean-to barn; the horses were friendlier than his companions. But they would probably think he was performing wicked magicks out here by himself; he had better not.
When he came back inside, he heard the murmur of voices; it ceased when they saw him. The Marshal’s own yeoman-marshal had joined them. He looked at Luap with the same accusing gaze, and Luap knew they had been discussing the wicked mageborn while he was outside. He found it hard to swallow his supper of ill-cooked porridge and heavy bread amid barbed comments about the luxuries he must be used to. He bit back one retort after another; his jaw felt sore. He tried to remind himself that all peasants weren’t like this—Dorhaniya’s Eris, for instance, or Cob or Raheli. But these three, and the present Marshal-General, exemplified everything he disliked about his mother’s people. By the time he rolled himself in a blanket on the floor (Binis, of course, had the spare pallet), he was thoroughly disgusted with them.
That day and night set the tone for the whole miserable journey. Binis felt the cold more than Luap, but remained convinced that he was using magery unfairly to keep himself comfortable. He had no way to prove he was not. As his anger grew, he would have used his magery that way if he had known how. He tried, surreptitiously, but succeeded only in giving himself a throbbing headache made worse by the glare off the snow. And he was just as cold as Binis, he told himself, but she wouldn’t believe it. He remembered, with a burst of satisfaction that he knew was unwise, that the woman whose complaints had driven Gird to a fit of rage had also been named Binis. It wasn’t the same Binis, of course, but this one might have been that one’s daughter. He didn’t ask. He preferred to imagine it, in the privacy of his own head.
They arrived, two days later than he had expected, in Cob’s grange. Here, at least, the welcome was as warm for Luap as for Binis. Cob, always lamer in winter, stumped awkwardly into the snowy lane to greet them.
“Luap, you look like a frozen sausage. Get off that horse, and come in to the fire. Vre—” That was his yeoman-marshal, a brisk young man. “Take their horses around back. Bring the packs inside. Ah, Luap, I’ve missed you. That scribe you left in charge is slower than a pregnant ox at a gate. And who’s this?” Luap explained that the new Marshal-General had insisted he have a yeoman-marshal escort. “You? What does he think he’s about? No insult to you, Binis, but no one needs to watch Luap. Alyanya’s grace, Gird trusted him. That ought to be enough for anyone.”
Luap took a step and staggered; he knew his feet were at the end of his legs, but he hadn’t felt his toes since the village before. Binis, looking from him to Cob with a scowl, had made it to the grange door. Cob shook his head.
“You’re going to look like me, if you keep that up. Need an arm?”
“No. I’m fine.” He could walk, if he kept a surreptitious eye on his feet to be sure where they were. He made it to the door, across the grange, and into Cob’s office. There a fire crackled busily on the hearth. Binis had already crouched beside it. Cob pulled a chair near, and waved Luap into it.
“Let him get his feet to the fire, yeoman-marshal—he’s twice your age.” Binis looked startled.
“But Marshal, he’s a mageborn—he can use magicks to warm himself…”
Cob snorted. “Does it look like it? Use your wits, Binis—he’s famished with cold, as bad as you are.” She looked at him, as if seeing him anew. Luap found it embarrassing.
“I’m warm enough,” Luap said. Cob’s welcome was as good as any fire, and his feet were already beginning to throb. Cob’s yeoman-marshal, Vrelan, came in with the packs.
“Shall I fetch something to eat, Marshal?” Vrelan sounded eager to prove himself; Luap realized he was very young, probably born after the war. Cob sent him to the local inn—Luap had not realized there was an inn—and turned back to Luap.
“So how is the settlement coming? Will you get a crop in this next year?” With that opening, Luap could explain that he had come for fertile soil, and needed only a little. Cob grinned. “Take what you like—we’ve plenty in the grange fields.”
“I can’t do that. The Marshal-General specified I was not to take so much as a clod from farmland or grangelands, only from waste ground.”
“Even if the Marshal offered?” Cob looked angry.
“That’s right, Marshal,” Binis said. Luap thought she would have been wise to hold her tongue. “That’s what I’m to do, watch to be sure he doesn’t take the wrong soil.”
Cob looked at her; Luap recognized the look Gird had given that other Binis and held his breath. But Cob was not drunk, as Gird had been; he merely shook his head. “I didn’t ask you,” he said. “And I don’t think that frog-eyed fool has the right to tell me what I can and can’t do with a bit of earth from my own drillfields. He wasn’t with Gird as long as I was.” It was exactly what Luap had hoped he would say, all the long, cold, miserable trip from Fin Panir, but now he felt a hollow open inside him. Cob meant what he said, and he could take his soil and go home—but that would leave Cob in a mess.
“No,” Luap said. “I didn’t come here to start a quarrel between you and the Marshal-General.”
“You didn’t start it,” Cob said, reddening. “That—” Luap was aware of Binis’s interest, her ears almost flapping wide on either side of her head. And Cob had been Gird’s friend, with Gird longer than almost anyone else still alive.
“No,” he said again, and let a little of his power bleed into it. On Gird it had not worked; on Cob and Binis it worked well. Both sat quiet and stared at him. “I will not disobey the Marshal-General’s orders on this, though I thank the friend who cared more to help me than advance himself.” Neither of them said anything, and he was afraid he had put too much power on them… but then Cob shook himself, like a wet dog.
“All right,” he said gruffly, not looking at Binis. “But I want you to know that I trust you. Now—where’s that boy with the food?” He got up and left the office to Luap and Binis. Luap stretched luxuriously. The fire’s warmth crept over him in exquisite waves; he could feel not only his throbbing feet, but a blanket-like warmth on his knees and thighs. He had not been this warm for days; the other Marshals had pushed Binis close to the fire. He glanced at her. One side of her face seemed flushed—from the fire or embarrassment, he could not guess.
“Are you warm enough?” he asked her.
“Did you really not have magicks for the cold?” she asked, without answering him.
“No,” Luap said. He was not really surprised at her question; from the little they’d talked he had discovered her to have a literal mind and a tenacious grasp of the trivial. “I’m glad of a fire,” he added, hoping this would divert her from the question he saw hovering on her lips. “If you are still cold, why not get a blanket?”
“I’m all right,” she said. “Are you really twice my age?”
She was so predictable. She would ask next if Meshi were really his friend, and if he had slept with her, and then why the mageborn had gone to his stronghold… and so on, no doubt for hours.
“I don’t know how old you are,” he said. She scowled at that, looking for trickery in it. “And I don’t really know my own years.” Which was not quite true, but saved discussing it. She scowled again, not because she detected a lie, but because she had not been answered.
“Is Meshi, that cook, really your friend?”
He uttered a silent prayer to any god who might be listening to bring Cob back into the room. She would go down the predictable list, and it would drive him to saying something he would regret. For the first time, he felt he really understood Gird’s rage that night in the forest. He answered all in a rush. “Yes, she’s my friend; we met during the war. And she’s not my lover and never has been, just as she said when you asked her.”
Binis looked shocked; Luap stared her down. Cob came in, followed by Vrelan with a kettle wrapped in cloths, which he unwrapped and put on the hearth.
“Better stew than I make; the inn’s cook has the true parrion. And new bread, and a pot of custard.”
“Marshal-General says Marshals should make their own meals,” Binis said primly. Luap closed his eyes a moment. Didn’t she realize—? Cob merely grunted, though his yeoman-marshal stared at Binis as if she’d sprouted green horns.
“I’ve cooked enough meals in Gird’s army to last me, yeoman-marshal. When there’s a good cook, who knows what she’s doing, and needs the trade, I’m not going to eat lumpy porridge and soggy bread to please someone as won’t get out of bed before midday. Gird could’ve milked a herd and ploughed two fields before Koris finishes breakfast.” He dished out stew for everyone, breathing a little hard, and handed Binis her bowl with a stare. “And you go ahead and tell him, Binis, all I’ve said—he knows how I feel about him, and I know how he feels about me. But when all’s said and done, he knows who fought beside Gird from the first day. I didn’t want to be Gird’s successor, but it was offered me. He had to argue his way into it.”
Binis turned redder than the fire could explain, and ate her stew without looking up. Luap burned his mouth on the first bite, and slowed down. Cob was right—the cook had a parrion. Mutton stew could be almost as bad as lumpy porridge, but this had a savor he liked. Cob pushed over a half-loaf of bread and a dish of butter.
“You spoil me,” Luap said, carefully not looking at Binis.
“No—we eat this well almost every day.” Cob buttered a hunk of bread for himself and stuffed it in his mouth. Luap winced inwardly. He liked Cob, but the man had never acquired even as much polish as Gird. When he had refused the Marshal-General’s position, he had apparently returned to his rural grange determined to be as much a peasant as possible.
Vrelan, meanwhile, sat in the corner opposite Binis, eating as rapidly as any hungry young man just past boyhood. He smiled shyly at Luap when their eyes met. He will want tales, Luap thought to himself. He will want stories of Gird, and stories of my distant land—he’s got those dreamer’s eyes.
Cob swallowed, then belched. “So—tell me, Luap, is that land what you hoped it would be?”
Luap nodded, and swallowed the stew in his mouth. “Yes— although it’s even colder than this. I’ve never seen snow so deep. Luckily we need not travel in it, and the stronghold itself doesn’t freeze. Though it’s not really warm, either.”
“Magic, is it?” This with a quick sidelong glance at Binis.
“No, the elves said it was the depth of stone. It stays about the same all year.” Luap scooped up more stew before it cooled. His feet had quit throbbing and he felt almost sleepy. “We spent the time before snow building terraces,” he went on. “Piled the rock up, had Arranha telling us how to level them.”
“I thought you’d just level the valley floor,” Cob said. “Isn’t it a small valley?”
“Small and steep. Not just the sides, the floor as well. Level the whole thing and the new floor would be halfway up the mountains at the low end.” Not quite, but it made a vivid image; Cob nodded, mouth pursed. “So we’re doing smaller terraces, none more than three men high at the low end. Most less than that—it’d take too much soil to fill them otherwise.”
“A lot of work,” Cob said. “And so few of you—I suppose you found a way to use your magicks?”
Luap grinned at him. Cob would not demand, from a friend, but he was as curious as anyone else. “Yes, we did, though it still takes a lot of sweat and blisters. I must admit, it’s good to see magery used the right way, for breaking stones and not people. And it keeps the few with magery too busy for mischief.”
Cob shot another glance at Binis, who had finished her stew and was munching the end of a loaf of bread. “When you’ve finished, yeoman-marshal, you and Vrelan take back this pot and then check the horses. You can trust me not to let Luap out of my sight.” His tone was pleasant but firm; she could neither resent that order, nor disobey it. Cob turned to Vrelan, “Since we have guests, get us a pot of their good ale, and see if they’ll send a loaf of bread fresh from the morning baking.” He gave the yeoman-marshal a few coins. Binis and Vrelan went out with the kettle, one cheerful and one scowling. When the outer door had shut behind them, Cob turned to Luap.
“There’ll be things you don’t want her repeating to the Marshal-General, I daresay, but you might share with an old friend. Tell me: did you find you had all the royal magery?”
For answer, Luap freed his light, and grinned at the expression on Cob’s face. “I know—I shouldn’t do that here, even though we are alone and you are a friend. You’re a Marshal first, and I’m not supposed to use my magery. But I thought you’d like to see it.”
“I’m glad for you, since you wanted it, but—glad to see it?—not really. Although it must be handy to have your own light, if you live underground. There are times I could use that. But—you built the terraces that way?”
Luap damped the light; the room seemed dark without it, despite the fire burning cheerily on the hearth. “We did,” he said. “Some of us—it’s strange, Cob, who has which magery. Our people have not tried to use it for work for a long time; I think that was a mistake. Some can move stones the size of this room—” Cob looked around, the whites of his eyes glinting in the firelight, as if worried that the room might take flight. “—And others can hardly shift a pebble. Most that have any magery at all can call some amount of light, enough to start a fire with. Aris, as you know, can heal. Were you in Council when he described his attempts to train others?”
“No. I missed that one.” Cob prodded the fire and laid another split log on it.
“To make it short, he’s found no one else who can do what he does. Some can heal lesser things, but at greater cost to themselves. He’s hoping that some of the children will have that talent, that he can find it early and train it.”
“I thought there was a girl—”
“Yes, so did the others—so did she, for that matter. It wasn’t really healing; she could convince people they were not feeling pain, but what caused the pain got no better… unless it would have anyway. A useful skill, certainly, and a better use of it than charming someone into handing over their purse, but not true healing. Aris has worked with her, so she now recognizes when she needs to call him in and when it’s safe to relieve the pain and wait for a natural healing.” Luap sighed. “It’s sad—the one magery we all wanted to have, that most people trusted, is the rarest. I had hoped to learn it; I can’t. And Aris, so gifted, has little else but his light.”
“I miss that lad,” Cob said, shaking his head. “He loved Gird so, and Gird loved him like a grandson.”
Luap felt a pang of envy and wrestled it down. Everyone liked Aris; he did himself. “We’re lucky to have him,” he said.
“And how’s Seri doing, out there with all you mageborn?”
“Well enough. She has Aris, after all; they’re still like two burs, though they don’t seem likely to marry.”
“Why not? Would you object?”
“Of course not,” Luap said. “But since they came back from that long journey, back when she was still a Marshal-candidate, they’ve been different. I can’t explain it, nor can the Rosemage, but we both recognized it.”
“It’s too bad,” Cob said. “I was hoping their child might combine the two of them. Squeeze Aris and Seri into one person, and you’d have quite a Marshal-General.” He stretched his legs to the fire. “You’re looking better, now you’ve eaten—that sour-faced yeoman-marshal you’re traveling with must have sucked the blood out of you.”
Luap laughed. “It’s not that. I didn’t know she didn’t ride, and she took it as an insult… and then she has trouble in the cold.”
“She’d have died in the bad winter camps of the war,” Cob said. “Or she’d have gotten over her foolishness. I hate to think of women like her becoming the next Marshals.”
“How’s Raheli?” That was the natural transition.
“Haven’t seen her since the Council when she spoke
for you. She’d mellowed a lot then, I thought. We talked a bit about Gird. I thought she should have been the next Marshal-General. She thought it shouldn’t go from parent to child—but she has no children, so I didn’t think that was a problem. She wouldn’t do it, though.”
“I thought the objection would come because—”
“Because she’s a woman? So did I, though I don’t agree. But she wouldn’t take it. She nominated me, in fact, but—I don’t know, maybe I should’ve done it. It just didn’t seem right. I knew Gird; he threw me flat on my back the first day he came into our camp, and I’m no more fit to take his place than… than a cow is. Nobody is, when you come to it, but I couldn’t.”
The door opened, and the two yeoman-marshals came in, shivering. “A wind’s got up,” Vrelan said “Old Dorthan says he reckons another storm’s coming.” Cob looked at Luap, his brows raised. Luap shrugged.
“I didn’t like the look of the sky behind us today, but that’s all I can say.”
“You’re welcome to stay all winter, if that’s what it takes,” Cob said. “But if a storm’s coming, we’ve some work to do, with two extra beasts in the barn. No—” Luap had started to stand, but Cob waved him back down. “If this is a big storm, your help will be welcome come morning, but stay warm now.”