The Deed of Paksenarrion

by Elizabeth Moon

  * * *

  For the rest of that day, the king’s party rested before traveling. Those who had been killed were laid to rest with due ceremony; the enemy’s dead was piled and burned. Under the Marshals’ directions, the yeomen took control of the Pargunese and Verrakai prisoners, containing them at a distance from the king’s encampment. The horses of Dorrin’s cohort were found still waiting at the ridgetop to the east, penned, as Paks explained it, by the taig. Dorrin looked at her oddly, but said nothing more about it.

  In the morning, they set out for Lyonya again. Paks rode beside the king, at his request. With no pack train to slow them down, they made good time, and rode into Harway just at dark, where the Lyonyan Guard waited in formation to greet him. Bonfires flared as the king came into his own land; candles burned at every window, and torchbearers lined the streets. Both Marshal and captain came to bow before him. Paks saw distant fires spring to life, carrying the news across the darkness.

  The king said little: courteous words for those who greeted him, but nothing more. Paks saw tears glisten on his cheeks in the firelight. They stayed that night in Harway, the king at the royal armory, and Paks at the grange, to ease the Marshal’s memory of her earlier visit.

  By the time the king’s party reached Chaya, the last snow had melted away, filling the rivers with laughing water.

  “An early spring,” said the king, looking at the first flowering trees glimmering through the wood. “I feel the forest rejoicing.”

  “Do you?” Amrothlin, who had come to meet him, smiled. “That is well. Both the rejoicing of the forest, and your feeling it. Your elven senses wake: you feel the taig singing you home, and your response calls forth more song. So the season answers your desire.”

  The king looked across green meadows to the towering trees that made the palace seem small, a child’s toy. Tears glittered in his eyes. “So beautiful—they almost break the heart.”

  “This is the heartknot of the joining of elvenkind and man,” said Amrothlin. “We put what we could of our elvenhome kingdom in it. Be welcome, sir king, in your kingdom.”

  Between them and the city a crowd was gathering, pouring out of the city in bright chips of color like pebbles from a sack. The king’s party rode through a broad lane, past those who cheered, and those who stood silently, watching with wide eyes the return of their lost prince. Paks felt her own heart swell almost to bursting when the music began, the harps that elves delight in, horns both bright and mellow in tone, all singing the king home.

  That music followed into the palace itself, where the lords of Lyonya, the Siers and their families, waited to welcome the king. One by one they knelt to him, then stepped back. When old Hammarin came forward, he peered into the king’s face a moment, as if looking for the boy he had known, then reached to touch his hand.

  “Sir king—you do your father justice.”

  “You knew him?” asked the king gently.

  “Aye—and you as a tiny lad. Thank the gods you’ve returned, Falki—let me call you that just this once, as I used to do.” Then he stepped back, nodding, for his old knees were too stiff to kneel. When all had acknowledged him, the king turned to Paksenarrion.

  “Lady, your quest brought me to this court: is it discharged?”

  “Not yet, sir king.” Paks turned to the assembly. “You, in Council here, bid me find your lost prince and bring him. I have brought him now, and his sword proves him. Are you content?”

  “We are content,” they answered.

  * * *

  And of all the deeds of the paladin Paksenarrion, it is this for which she is best known in the middle lands of the Eight Kingdoms, for restoring the lost king to his throne, and thereby saving Lyonya from the perils of misrule and confusion. Which of her deeds most honored the gods she served, only the High Lord knows, who judges rightly of all deeds, whatever tales men tell or elves sing.

  In the chronicles of that court, it is said that the coronation of Falkieri Amrothlin Artfielan Phelan (for he kept the name he had used so long) was outdone in joy and ceremony only by his marriage some time later. Falkieri ruled long and faithfully, and in his time the bond of elf and man was strengthened. Peace and prosperity brought honor to his reign. And after him the crown passed to his eldest, and to her son and her son’s sons after.

  As for Paksenarrion, she was named King’s Friend, with leave to go or stay as she would, and when Gird’s call came, she departed for another land.

  THE END

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  About the Author:

  — From Elizabeth Moon's website:

  Where did you grow up?

  In extreme south Texas, 250 miles south of San Antonio. McAllen is 8 miles from the Mexican border, and about 60 miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico. We lived in a little frame house on Hackberry Street, which flooded every time there was a two-inch rain--our area was known as "Hackberry Lake" after rains. We had a Valencia orange tree in the back yard (the 1951 freeze killed the grapefruit tree), and bougainvillea in the front yard, along with a row of tall palms. I didn't see snow until a brief trip to Michigan in high school.

  What was your family like?

  My parents separated before I was born, and divorced shortly after. So my mother and I were the family; her father died when I was four. She was the sole support of our family; she worked in a hardware store until I was eight, then as a draftsman for a small oil company. She had been an aeronautical engineer during WWII, but no one was hiring women engineers in the 1940s and 1950s. I found both her jobs fascinating. In the hardware store, I could noodle around playing with all the hardware, draw huge pictures on the brown wrapping paper, and have the run of Main Street. Once she started working for the oil company, I had the chance to learn about geology, maps, and serious drafting.

  When did you start writing science fiction?

  Maybe a week after I started reading it...maybe a whole month went by. I'm not sure. I was always writing poetry and stories in those years, and it's hard to remember the point at which I first shifted from war stories to science fiction stories.

  Did you always want to be a science fiction writer?

  No. I wanted to be a scientist. Originally, I'd wanted to be an aeronautical engineer and test pilot, but I'm near-sighted and female...a strong bar to those ambitions in the 1950s. My own engineer mother insisted I didn't have the right kind of mind to be an engineer (she meant, I think, that I never followed directions in building with Tinkertoys or Lincoln Logs...I was always doing something else, usually weird and useless.) Anyway, I thought (even before reading SF) that perhaps as a scientist I could earn my way aboard something that went into space. Science fiction only reinforced the hunger for real science.

  So...how did you end up writing the fiction rather than leading the life?

  Math 100 at Rice University in the fall of 1963. That's the short answer, and it will have to do. Math 100 was (is?) the introductory calculus course for science-engineering majors, and the assumption was that you had had pre-calculus in high school. It was a theory class ("We know you already know how to work the problems...but now you're going to learn why it works...") My section was taught by someone who firmly believed in the mathematical inferiority of females, so when I finally asked for advice about finding a tutor the answer I got was "In my experience, girls can't learn calculus." Lots of girls could, and did, but this one couldn't--not then, anyway--and since the physics class used the calculus I was supposed to have learned in high school, there went the end of my Madame Curie illusion.

  This was not all bad. Learning early on to cope with stark failure and the death of a dream imparts a certain resilience later. It hurt like hell, and I lived over it. Other things have hurt like hell, and I've lived over them, too. Not a bad take-home lesson for a first year at college.

  Why did you join the Marines in 1968?

  This is usually two questions in the asker's mind: why did I join th
e Marines (instead of, say, the Air Force), and why did I join the military at all in the midst of the Vietnam War?

  The Marines are responsible for my joining the Marines. I'd always planned to serve in the military at some point (in fact talked to recruiters in high school, who told me to go on to college.) In my last year at Rice, I talked to recruiters from all branches. Three were congratulatory, almost fawning: they wanted me, they promised wonderful things. The Marine recruiter looked at me with narrowed eyes and said "You might make it through OCS." Irresistible.

  Why did I join the military at all in 1968? A more difficult and complicated question. I was not really a Sixties person (to put it mildly)--most of the liberal activists I knew came out of conventional homes; they were conventional even in their unconventionality. The same ones who, a year before, had been worried about wearing the right sweater with the right skirt now worried about whether their jeans had had enough trips through the washer to be properly faded, and if the tie-dyed shirt was the right new pattern of tie-dye. Kids like that had given me trouble all the way up because I was a child of divorce...so, as a cocky young adult, I wasn't inclined to listen to them. I wasn't going to let their opinion change my long-laid plans. Besides, I'd already lost high school friends in the war, volunteers in the years before the anti-war protests swept the college campuses. If you suspect that I was just as opinionated, cantankerous, priggish and arrogant as the kids I disagreed with...you're quite right. I was. So?

  How do you find time to write?

  I don't find time to write...I make time to write. Big difference. Defines writers who write from people who would like to have written but can't find time to write. Art is selfish; the book doesn't care about dishes, meals, clothes, dusting, cleaning, crusty toilets, streaky windows, neglected children, family, friends. I try to choose what to neglect (what, not who--a child and a spouse have to come first, if there's to be a family at all.) That means all my non-writer friends (and many of my writer friends) have neater, cleaner houses and prettier yards.

  Are you going to write another Paks book?

  If Paks will kindly come back into my head, I'll be glad to write another Paks book. But I won't fake a Paks book, and Paks rode out of my head at the end of Oath of Gold, not looking back.

  EDUCATION:

  B.A. History, Rice University, 1968

  B.A. Biology, University of Texas at Austin, 1975

  graduate work in biology, U.T. San Antonio, 1975-77

  EXPERIENCE:

  3 years in the Marines, mostly messing with computers

  6 years as a rural paramedic with a volunteer EMS

  4 years as elected official (city alderman)

  office assistant, rural medical clinic

  drafting

  math tutor

  choir member, choir director

  church youth leader

  volunteer teacher in public school (first-response course)

  all purpose small town volunteer (library board, chamber of commerce, etc.)

  LIFE SUPPORT:

  The writer's four basic food groups: salt, sugar, fat, and chocolate.

  To allow the necessary intake of the writer's four basic food groups in the amounts necessary for creative writing, without having to buy a fabric shop, takes exercise. I prefer mine in the form of swimming and horseback riding, with walking on scenic trails when available.

  Smoke chokes me; liquor tastes bad. Experience with migraine auras and thick glasses eliminated any desire for "mind-expanding" drugs...the sensation of the brain trying to push its way out (familiar to migraine sufferers) simply hurt. So did the flashing lights and weird flickers in the eyes.

  Classical music, both to hear and play or sing.

  Outdoor time, open country, or at least a view of the sky.