Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

Chapter 9

  Of Mara and the Spider

  ———

  Sturm settled the elf maiden after a few minutes, plying her with apologies and admitting that, yes, he was the most foolish boy on the continent and that to find a greater fool one would have to venture among the goblins in Throt. That apparently satisfied her for the moment. She sighed and nodded, then looked about her in dismay, as though the clearing in which she had lived for two months awaiting the convergence of the moons had suddenly become a real nest of spiders.

  “I can’t stay here,” she announced and ducked into the cabin. Sturm stood outside, shifting his weight from foot to foot, trying to appear useful. Off among the larick bushes, there was a slight movement, a shift in the underbrush, but when he turned to inspect it, whatever was moving and shifting had vanished.

  “Spiders,” he muttered. “I’ll wager everything turns to spiders, the girl and myself as well.”

  But she emerged most unspiderlike a moment later, her belongings bundled in a packet of cloth and vine and cobweb almost twice her size and slung across her shoulders like something unwieldy and wounded.

  “Well, you’ll be taking us home, then,” she asserted, her knees buckling beneath the weight of the bundle. Sturm reached out to help her, but she waved him away with a stagger.

  “Never you mind. I’ll set this upon the horse,” she ordered with a nod toward Luin, who stood cautiously at the edge of the clearing, still skittish from the commotion with the spider.

  “B-But you can’t, m’lady. You simply can’t,” Sturm protested. “She’s thrown a shoe and I can’t burden her.”

  In dismay, the elf girl dropped her bundle.

  “You mean we shall have to travel to Silvanost on foot?”

  Sturm swallowed hard. Though his bearings were none too good, he knew the larger geographies of the continent. Silvanost was five hundred miles away if it was a stone’s throw, and such a journey seemed impossibly long and arduous.

  “But I am bound only for the Southern Darkwoods,” he protested.

  She shook her head. “No longer. Now we are bound for Silvanost, to throw myself on the mercies of Master Calotte.”

  Sturm frowned in puzzlement.

  “The enchanter,” she explained dryly. “As you may recall, boy, my true love is still a spider.”

  They stood and stared at one another.

  “I’m … I’m sorry, m’lady,” Sturm muttered. “And more sorry still, in that my path lies only to the Southern Darkwoods. The far reaches of Silvanost are, I fear, beyond my … my resources. I have not the time. I may even be followed.”

  He coughed and cleared his throat.

  “Nonsense” she said, her voice cold and flat. “Silvanost could be across the world, and you would still have to take me there. So your honor tells you. What is it your people say? ‘Est Sularus oth Mithas’?”

  Sturm nodded reluctantly. “ ‘My honor is my life.’ But how did you know—”

  She laughed bitterly. “That you were of the Order? When it comes to the sword, nobody is as heedless as a Solamnic youngling. You may go to your Darkwoods and do what you will, but I shall be with you. And afterward, you will take me to Silvanost. It is that simple. You are bound by your silly Oath and Measure.”

  ’Tis a test! Sturm thought, with a rising fear. The elf maiden glared at him, angrily but innocently. After all, if Lord Wilderness can play so readily with the seasons and their changes, why would he not have allies—outlandish folk among the elves and the gods know what other folk—who would do his bidding readily?

  Doesn’t this creature also play a flute?

  And how would an elf know of the Solamnic Oath, which the Measure interprets in the light of helping the weak and the helpless?

  He glanced balefully at the girl, whose stare had not wavered. She seemed anything but weak and helpless.

  And yet Vertumnus would know, would hold me to the Oath and my honor, would test me further.…

  He shook his head. After all, what did Lord Wilderness know or care of honor? It was ridiculous to think such entangled thoughts, to see a green design behind this accident.

  “I’m sorry,” Sturm began.

  And his shoulder exploded in a ragged, knifing pain, next to which all of the other pains had been a slight twinge, a tingle.

  This is dying, he thought again, falling to his knees in front of the elf maiden, this is my delay, my cowardice, my dishonor.…

  And he thought nothing more.

  The elf maiden rousted him none too gently, shaking him until he wakened.

  Blearily Sturm looked up at the girl and remembered it all: the fight with the spider, the girl’s outrage, her story and plea, his refusal …

  And the pain that had followed, lancing and riveting and white-hot in his damaged shoulder.

  “Very well,” he muttered, his mouth dry and his throat prickling. “To Silvanost it is. But after the Southern Darkwoods, mind you!”

  Before the girl could reply, Sturm was on his feet, and with a swift, athletic turn, he had hoisted her bundled belongings onto his back.

  The pain in his shoulder had vanished, mysteriously and entirely. He wasn’t surprised. The hand of Vertumnus had touched everything about this wooded encounter, this evening of battle and music and promises and moonlight.

  Sturm grunted uncomfortably at the weight of the bundle. All of a sudden, his burden was five times as heavy, the road five times as long. He thought of Silvanost, there in the midst of the evergreen grove. He thought of the long trek over the Khalkist Mountains, through the Doom Range to Sanction along the Nerakan border, then down into Blode and south to the great forest. A passage through bandits and ogres, he had heard. Sturm almost hoped that Vertumnus would slay him on the first day of spring.

  Mara was her name, and the story she told was pure Kagonesti, full of magic and forbidden love and doom.

  “It started four years ago,” she explained, framing her answer to Sturm’s question as the two of them emerged from the evergreen copse. It was early morning, and the sun peeking over the eastern horizon was their guidepost.

  Sturm shifted the weight of the baggage on his back. Though it was barely sunrise, he was already weary, having wandered the groves all night, burdened by the gods knew what belongings. Mara followed him, leading Luin by the reins, and once or twice in the near distance, he had heard the unsettling sound of the spider, clambering from branch to branch.

  “Four years ago?” he asked idly. Fatigue warred with politeness. It was hard to attend to another story.

  “Down in Silvanost,” Mara continued, “where the High Elves rule, with their fairness and hazel eyes. Cyren was of the Calamons, scion to the noblest of families, while I was but a handmaiden to his cousin.”

  “I see,” Sturm said. He wasn’t sure he did see.

  “Obstacles right from the start. The course that never runs straight,” Mara explained.

  She paused, as though remembering. Sturm heard birds rising from the junipers behind him, rousted by the approach of something—no doubt the scion in question.

  “We first saw each other,” Mara continued, “at the Great Festival of Peace commemorating the signing of the Swordsheath Scroll. It happens every year, the festival, and every year it seems altogether new. The forest fills with lights beyond imagining, and torches lit in Qualinost and Ergoth mingle amid the trees.”

  Mara sighed. “It’s a glorious evening. As you might imagine, the females of the House Royal, daughters and servants all, are kept from the sight of the lads because … well, because it might make someone untoward.”

  She blushed and tugged thoughtlessly at Luin’s reins. The mare nickered and bowed her head in protest.

  “This time was the most glorious of festivals,” Mara said dreamily. “I remember his eyes—Cyren’s, that is. He stepped from the coracle, steadied himself on the soft banks of the Thon-Thalas, and with scarcely a pause, he entered the Dance of Dreams, the fifth and greatest dance of the festival
evening. You could tell by his dancing that he was highborn Qualinesti, but I studied his eyes as the cellos sounded. Brown they were, and as deep as the woods, his gaze so direct you would think that he never closed his eyes, never even blinked when he stared into the midday sun. Though I have seen them only three times since, I remember them as clearly as I do the lights in the forest or the tilting stars of Mishakal—the stars that I watched for months, waiting for the one night in five years.…”

  Sturm winced. The road to the Darkwoods looked longer and longer as Mara spoke.

  “But enough of that” Mara declared. “You asked how we came to last night and this pass.”

  Sturm shifted the bundle again. The eggs of spiders? Rocks? Houses? What was bound in the blankets and leaves and webbing?

  “Immediately Lord Cyren took a liking to me,” Mara said. “He paid court with his eyes in the altering light, in the song of the harp and the deep cello. But I was a servingmaid, my family a trophy of war. And though Cyren was handsome, I set aside thoughts of those eyes and those songs, for ours was a match too farfetched to imagine. And more than that, he was a strange and exotic one—almost without history, he was, from the far reaches of the forest, and of his many cousins, none had met him and few had heard of him.”

  She traveled on in silence, and it was a while before she spoke again.

  “Notes he sent me in the days that followed—notes borne on small leaf-boats such as a child makes as a plaything. He floated his messages downstream on the slow-moving Thon-Thalas as I stood in the current, thigh-deep in water, washing the clothing of my mistress. His words would scorn and tease and inveigle, luring me away with him.

  “There was a bridge, wrote Cyren, at the westernmost edge of the forest. If I were to consent to go away with him, I should meet him at the bridge by moonlight, and we would ride away together out of Silvanesti, over the Plains of Dust to a land where Kagonesti and Silvanesti are indistinguishable, where folk couldn’t tell High Elf from Wild Elf.”

  “There are such lands,” Sturm offered. “I do believe Solamnia is one of them.”

  “Even the Knights can tell elf from spider,” Mara retorted bitterly. “But that comes later in the story.

  “Let it be said now that Cyren Calamon of the House Royal sent his green fleet down the Thon-Thalas daily, and each night I would return to my mistress’s tower, leaving his notes unanswered. It is improper for a maiden to be so … forward. He persisted and persisted, until I knew that, had his intentions been dishonorable, he would have left off long ago. It was then I consented to meet with him—not at his bridge where the wood ended and the lands beyond our borders beckoned in freedom and wildness, but at a safer place, at the ferry west of Silvanost. It was a place out of sight from the marble fastness of the great encampment, where King Lorac and his daughter Alhana live in the Tower of Stars, and yet it was a place less … venturesome and hidden than the ones my new friend proposed to me.

  “We were foolish in our eagerness. Though our meetings were cautious, even proper, someone saw and someone disapproved. Perhaps,” she added ominously, “someone was jealous. And someone spread the story of our tryst through the House Royal. My duties were changed, the quarters of my mistress moved to the high chambers of the Tower of Stars. ’Twas an honor for her—an emptyheaded little fluff who thought her stature raised with her altitude, never quite aware that her newfound position at court had anything to do with her servantry. But it was torment for me.

  “So we suffered the months, both of us lonely, both of us yearning for escape and reunion, for a midnight flight to a place where lineage and ancestry mattered not at all.”

  “There is no such place!” Sturm exclaimed, then fell silent immediately, surprised at his vehemence. Mara didn’t seem to notice, her mind on the rest of her story.

  “The tale turns even darker here, Solamnic. For Cyren was barred from the Tower, and the high windows were beyond his reach unless he had the wings of a bird or could climb …”

  “Like a spider?” Sturm asked.

  “Like a spider indeed,” Mara said with a nod. “You see the plan, do you not? Well, know it for what it was—a foolhardy risk. As it has done for thousands of years, love sent the unwise heart to sorcerers. To Master Calotte went Cyren, in the darkest part of the forest, where Waylorn’s Tower lies gray and windowless, its shadow mingling with the shades of willow and aspen until all light, whether moon or sun, is blocked by leaf and branch and turret. They say the butterflies are black there, and that the squirrels have gone blind because it is so dark that they steer by smell and hearing alone, their eyes grown useless through the generations.”

  Sturm hid a smile. It sounded fanciful to him, this dark place of the mage. But he listened as Mara unfolded the sad end of the story.

  Under the guise of helpfulness, it seems, Master Calotte had hidden his own passion for Mara. An old elf, and to hear the girl tell it, unspeakably hideous, he held no more hope of winning her than she had in the sincerity of Cyren’s courtship. Nor would enchantment avail for old Calotte, for the House of Mystics had ways to tell when a creature was charmed or drawn or otherwise magicked, and the Silvanesti refused to honor a conjured marriage. But all things seemed possible if the old mage were crafty and circumspect.

  “It was simple,” Mara explained angrily as she and Sturm settled for the afternoon on a rocky knoll in the midst of the grasslands. “Simple to fool a trusting Cyren, who came to him in desperation. Simple, when someone is ready and willing, to transform him into any creature the mind can fancy or memory bring forth. Simple for Cyren it was to clamber up the side of the Tower of Stars, to the window where I sat waiting.”

  Mara smiled, stretching her legs on the hard ground. Sturm stood above her, staring out over the Solamnic plains, where deep in the eastern distances, he thought he saw the haze and shimmer of water. Were they near the Vingaard, or were these the mirages travelers reported from Thelgaard Keep to the City of Lost Names?

  “I was startled at first. If a spider twice your size perched on your windowsill, gibbering and beckoning you outside, you would be cautious, too.”

  Sturm nodded. “Cautious” hadn’t been the word that occurred to him.

  “But quickly Cyren made it known to me that he was no ordinary spider, but my true love transformed.”

  “How did he do that?” Sturm asked with a muffled smile, imagining the creature serenading in its shrill, inhuman voice, or weaving Mara’s name into the strands of its web.

  “Spun a ladder of sorts, he did. A scaffolding web, the druids call it, for upon it, the creatures raise web from tree to tree, the intricate spokes and spirals that draw down their quarry from the air. But it was only a ladder, this scaffolding. It dropped down the side of the tower sixty, seventy feet, from my window down into the dark of the branches below it.

  “By Branchala, I was frightened!” she laughed. “The moons were dark that night, so I could descend unseen, but it made me unseeing as well. Set one foot below the next as if I was wading into vipers, I did, but the next thing I know, my feet touch the grass of the forest floor and Cyren is rushing west toward Waylorn’s Tower, and stopping, and turning about, and spinning a strand of web behind him that I take up and follow like … like your mare following the rein.

  “So we passed through the woods, and eye saw me not, nor did ear hear me as we crossed the Thon-Thalas and made our way through a part of the forest I knew not, to a clearing at the foot of the tower.”

  She shuddered as the memory passed over her.

  “The moment I saw that the spellcraft was the doing of Master Calotte,” she said, “I feared for us—especially for poor Cyren. For I had seen this one look at me, too, with a look that made my blood crawl, and I feared that his aid had come at a dreadful cost. Nor was it a moment before we learned what we had to pay.”

  Mara stood up and, taking Luin’s reins, gestured to Sturm that the rest had ended, that the time had come to recommence the journey. Down from the knoll t
hey walked, Luin stepping gingerly behind them, the spider a rustling, muttering presence in the high grass as the elf maiden unveiled the last and darkest part of the story.

  “As you can certainly guess, Solamnic, the wizard refused to restore Cyren. He sat there, lodged in the notch of a forked oak, black and rotten and shadowed as his own heart.

  “ ‘Mara,’ he says, ‘sweet Mara. You know well how Prince Cyren can recover that form in which you so delight, and you know full well the cost.’ ”

  “Scoundrel,” Sturm muttered.

  “Cyren would have attacked him then and there!” Mara exclaimed. “Would have torn him apart and dripped cold poison into his wounds, had I not restrained him. But the death of Master Calotte, as far as we knew, would imprison poor Cyren forever in the form in which you see him today.”

  Sturm looked back at the elf maiden skeptically. Having grappled with Cyren himself, having seen the creature blubber and slink off into the woods, he wondered how truly difficult it had been for Mara to restrain the avenging creature.

  “Now,” Mara said, “we know better. But then we left Silvanesti as a place no longer safe for either of us: I, after all, had defied the will of the House Royal. So had poor Cyren, and his lot was worse, for his newfound form would make him prey to any hunter from the Hedge to the Bay of Balifor.

  “We wandered a year and another, in search of a way to lift the spell of Master Calotte. To sorcerers and shamans we traveled, as far south as the Icewall, west to the Tower of Wayreth in Qualinesti, then back again along a different and difficult path, through Bloten and Zhakar and Khurikhan, where elves are as unwelcome as spiders. Our third year found us on the plains of Abanasinia, where we took up for a while with a band of Plainsmen, whose seeress was a mere girl, a chieftain’s daughter of the Que-Shu tribe, subject to the falling sickness and deep trances, in which the grasslands sang to her and the stars reconfigured above her in the shapes of helix and harp.”

  “True prophecies, then,” Sturm observed.

  Mara nodded. “This … this Goldmoon,” she continued, “told us that the spell could be lifted only through music and the convergence of the moons above this very spot in the midst of the Plains of Solamnia.