* * *
While the Choiron Symod sipped mead and nibbled at a crust of bread for the form of the thing, hundreds of miles distant, Allystaire sipped wine and ate heartily while conversation bubbled and flowed around him.
Two of the longer tables in Timmar’s Inn had been dragged together to accommodate everyone: Allystaire, Idgen Marte, Torvul, Mol, and Gideon along one side; Chaddin and Landen on the other, with Cerisia and Rede between them and Garth and Audreyn beside. Two of Mol’s huge savory pies sat steaming on the middle of the table, with baskets of breads provided by Torvul flanking them. Bowls of butter and cheese and jugs of wine and beer were scattered anywhere there was room, and by the time they were all gathered, they turned to Allystaire, who set down his wine and the bread and cheese he was eating and stood.
“I will not keep you long from the food,” he said. “I do not mean to offer a blessing, or a benediction. There are those here better equipped for that than me, and there are at least three different faiths at this table. Mayhap four,” he amended, as his eyes passed over Rede. The man seemed thinner, more intense than when Allystaire had last seen him, practically vibrating with unspent energy. The former Urdaran monk resolutely refused to meet his gaze.
“And perhaps it is fitting that many faiths, and two Baronies long at war are represented here. Tomorrow, all of us will engage in the first step of the most important work we will ever do. We should not go to it on empty stomachs.”
There was a general, though muted, rumble of approval, then heaping servings of brown-crusted pie began filling bowls. Allystaire found himself too occupied with venison and turnip in onion gravy to pay much attention to most of what was being said. In fact, between bites he realized that he was hearing his name repeated.
Finally he looked up, swiping at his mouth with the back of his sleeve, to find Audreyn laughing lightly as she looked at him from across the table.
“Brother of mine, you always did pay more attention to your food than to your dinner companions,” she needled.
Allystaire laughed at her joke, and shrugged as he reached for his wine. “I apologize, Audreyn, but I protest that I come by it honestly. A man on campaign—”
“Has to eat what’s in front of him, while it’s hot, and as much as he can,” Audreyn said, fairly mimicking his voice and drawing laughter from the table. “You have said precisely the same words every time I needle you about your table manners.”
“Well, he is hardly wrong, Audreyn,” Garth said quietly.
She frowned at him and he turned back to his food, offering an apologetic shrug to Allystaire, who laughed.
“Ah leave him be,” Torvul said as he scooped gravy from his own bowl with a thick end of black bread. “He works twice as hard as any man I’ve ever known and sleeps half as much. Some sort of character failing, you ask me.”
“No,” Audreyn said, “it’s something he learned from Gerard Oyrwyn. If you want men to follow you, you need to show them you’ll work as hard as any of them. You do it with reserve, of course, at a distance.” She ate more slowly than Allystaire, more carefully, but not at all delicately.
“I do find myself wondering,” Garth said tentatively, “just what the Old Baron would think of all this talk of peace.”
“Not much, I think,” Landen offered from down the table. “In all the years of the Succession Strife, when did he ever strive for peace? He was as much a warmonger as my father.”
“Careful with your words, Baroness Delondeur,” Garth put in, setting his spoon down slowly. “I’ll not hear ill words spoken of that man.”
“Calm yourself, Lord of Highgate,” Allystaire said. “The Baroness is not wrong.” Garth turned disbelieving eyes to Allystaire, as did Audreyn. Allystaire responded by shaking his head sadly. “I loved Gerard Oyrwyn, but I was blind to his faults. Now I see they were much the same as the faults we have begun to take for granted here in the Baronies. He thought war was a natural thing. Honest, red-blooded sport. If he worried over the cost it took from his weakest folk, it never stopped him from going on campaign come snowmelt.” He shook his head. “No. I will not let thoughts of what the Old Baron might have done or not done slow me down or stay my hand when it comes to peace.”
“Well spoken, Arm,” Mol said, her voice instantly drawing all eyes to her. “Those kinds of allegiances are often accidents of birth, are they not?”
Cerisia frowned, delicately pushing her spoon around in her bowl. “What do you mean, accidents of birth? Do you discount the love of children for father, or of student for mentor, in Allystaire’s case?”
Mol chuckled. “I would think you’d had enough of sparring with me over dinner, Archioness. That you loved your Baron,” she said, indicating Allystaire and Garth, “or that you loved your father,” she went on, turning towards Landen, “is no kind of sin. It never could be. But we cannot let love blind us to fault in our friends or family or lead us to follow them where we ought not to go. The answer,” she said, anticipating Cerisia’s protest, “is not less love, but more. If we recognize that the men our Baron orders us to kill might be as worthy of love as the Baron himself, we find it harder to kill them, do we not?”
“You are a daunting conversation partner, Voice of the Mother,” Cerisia said, and though she smiled, the expression didn’t seem to reach her eyes. “I would give anything to know the deep connection you seem to have with your Goddess’s mind.”
“Only a fragment of it,” Mol replied. “And no, Archioness, I do not think you would. Even that is sometimes too much. Too loud.”
“What do you mean?” Most of the other diners leaned forward to listen as the two priestesses spoke.
Mol bought herself time to answer by carefully chewing a mouthful of venison pie. Finally, she said, “Imagine all the living things you encounter in the village attempting to speak to you, Archioness, and having to sort out the noise and learn how to respond back by yourself. It was not easy, and I was unprepared when it first came upon me.”
“I hesitate to question the miracles the five of you claim any longer, for I’ve seen too many of them, but when you say they speak, you mean literally?”
Mol smiled again, set down her spoon, then closed her eyes. After a moment there was a clattering on the stairs leading to the second floor, and the old hound that had often been at Mol’s side throughout the winter suddenly trotted to her chair With two fingers, the girl plucked a morsel of meat from the pie in her bowl and held it to the dog, who took it delicately from the girl’s hand and chewed it quickly. Mol’s hand settled onto the dog’s neck for a moment, and the hound settled at the side of the girl’s chair.
“You spoke to the dog?”
Mol nodded. “I asked her to come here. I had previously asked her to stay with Leah, who is upstairs and large with child, and to let me know if she needed for anything. So far she hasn’t.”
“And you can do this with any animal?”
“Most easily with animals we husband. Dogs, horses, cattle, sheep. The latter haven’t much to say. And cats like to make a show of not listening, but are happy enough to be spoken to. With birds, perhaps a little. Truly wild animals like wolves, or deer, though, I do not think so, though I haven’t tried. Even if they could hear me it would be very difficult for them to understand.” The dog settled under Mol’s chair, laying her grizzled old head upon her paws and closing her eyes.
“Fascinating,” Cerisia said. “Fortune’s servants are granted powers, but they are so much less than what the five of you bear.”
“There are a great deal more of you,” Gideon noted. “I theorize that the power the gods are able to distribute to their servants is roughly equal, so the more servants power is given to, the less power each must receive.”
“This is all getting a bit too scholarly for me,” Garth noted.
“Listen to Gideon whenever you get the chance, Lord of Highgate,” Allystaire
said. “He has done more than anyone else to challenge my own thinking.”
“Cold, Ally, if he can challenge you I don’t expect he’d much like talking to me,” Garth chuckled nervously.
“Perhaps the Lord of Highgate has a point,” Torvul rumbled, after setting down his cup from a long pull. “We ought to save the metaphysics and the scholarship and the theorizing about the limits o’ divine power.”
Chaddin frowned, and spoke for the first time to the table at large. “It seems to me if power is divine it isn’t limited.”
Allystaire reached for his winecup and drank as they considered the statement. When he set it down, he thought a moment, and said, “She has told me there are rules governing what She may do. And that there are things that are forbidden, even to Her. And,” he added, smiling ruefully, “that She cannot tell me what the rules are.”
“It is as I said.” Gideon sat up straighter, lifted his eyes from the table. “The gods may be vastly more powerful and complex than we are, and yet still limited, or perhaps we can only interact with a part of them in a meaningful way without being overwhelmed. It is an interesting theoretical question, but not a very practical one, such as, say, what is for dessert?”
There was a general chuckle around the table and went back to their dinners. Allystaire in particular found himself shifting a large second piece of pie, hen and leek and mushroom, into his bowl and eating it as quickly as he’d eaten the first.
Torvul eventually provided the answer to Gideon’s question by bringing out from the kitchen a huge basket of small, flat discs of hot pastry slathered in honey. “Crispels,” he announced, setting them down.
Allystaire grabbed himself a handful and popped one contentedly into his mouth, chewing slowly, washing it down with a sip of wine.
“Does this sort of feast cause any friction within your village? I mean, the servants of the Mother all having a special meal with the noble guests?” Cerisia delicately nibbled on the edge of a crispel after asking her question.
“No,” Mol said. “They’re staying away out of respect for the business we need t’do, not because they’re frighted or unwelcome. There’s no one in the village I’ve not cooked for, excepting those who just arrived, and nothin’ on this table not available to everyone.”
Allystaire felt a pang as he thought of the six score bottles of wine his sister had brought to him. A shaming regret at having given most of it away, though leavened with some guilt at having kept half a dozen bottles for himself. He consoled himself with a sip of the very same and let his eyes drift nearly closed with the pleasure of it mingling with the tastes of the savory pies and sweet pastries.
“I’ve not the time to bake every day, but I’d be happy t’show anyone interested how t’make these,” Torvul said as he popped a crispel into his mouth. “I’ve already shown Timmar but he’s waiting for new custom t’try ‘em out.”
“I am curious,” Cerisia admitted, “as to how goods are bought and sold here. What will I owe Timmar for having stayed so long, for example, and having eaten so much of his food?”
“That will be up to him,” Allystaire said. “Within the village itself.” His voice slowed and halted as he considered the disc of pastry cooling in his hands, the honey sticking to his fingers. “I am not sure I know.”
“The folk trade what they can spare for what their neighbor can spare, in the main,” Mol said. “Or they simply give what is needed where it is needed. I doubt a gold link’s worth of silver has changed hands from villager to villager all winter.”
“I have doubts about how big such a system can get, or how long it can last,” Gideon muttered, as he carefully wiped crumbs away from his mouth, having gone crispel for crispel with Allystaire. “But for now I think it is best. Silver brings evil with it.”
“You watch your tongue, boy,” Torvul said, garnering a bit of a chuckle from the other diners. “Don’t go draggin’ silver into all this talk. No evil in the metal herself, only in the men countin’ it.”
“The same could be said of steel or iron,” Allystaire said. “There is nothing evil in the things men make of them, only in the hands that wield them. All the same, the less need we have of any of them, the better.”
“I can drink to not needing steel, but never to silver or gold,” Cerisia said.
“Even he’s not mad enough t’try and drive the weight out o’the world,” Torvul grumbled. “The war and the poverty and the despair, maybe. But not the links.”
“Is that a challenge, dwarf?”
“I would think that ending a war that’s gone on longer than you’ve been alive would be enough, brother,” Audreyn said.
“For now,” Allystaire replied, “it will do.”
Landen laughed. “Just like that? Ending the bloody work of thousands, or trying to, and if you succeed, ‘it will do.’”
Allystaire shrugged. “Hope. Justice. Those were the two tasks She set me, to bring them back into the world. If there is anything more devoutly hoped for than an end to the Strife, I do not know what it is.”
“For the sky t’rain spirits and hail silver?” Torvul grinned at Allystaire over his cup, saluted him with it, drank, and the paladin couldn’t help but laugh.
“And justice, then?” Chaddin looking at him, setting his hands on the table.
“The same. The glory and the riches have gone too long to the men who need not bear the great burden of dying, son after father after grandfather. The living Barons and their lords and knights may not have made this war, but many of them think—as I did—that it is a fine thing, a high sport, a good test of who they are as men. Bring it to a stop, it does not line up the balances, but it stops it tilting the other way.”
Cerisia lifted her cup. “To peace, then? If we are all bound to this crusade, we ought at least to drink to it?”
Everyone at the table stood, lifted their cups and tapped them together, muttering or, in Torvul’s case, rumbling, the single word, “Peace.”
* * *
Allystaire claimed to need air, and in truth he wanted it, but as he stepped out into the cold night air, he simply moved a few paces away from the Inn’s door and waited. In truth he didn’t find himself waiting as long as he’d expected, for Rede exited soon after him, lifting his hands.
“I know you’re waiting for me, Arm.” His voice had gone thin and quavering, like it had been when Allystaire had first seen him, eyeless and fevered.
“Tell me why you are here, Rede.”
“I am fulfilling the charge the Shadow laid on me,” he replied. “And trying to earn my redemption.”
“Why do you think you need to do that here?”
The man stepped closer to Allystaire, still holding his hands out. “Because I can help you, Arm. I already have, once.”
“What do you mean?”
Rede’s head tilted to one side, and Allystaire had the impression of the man’s wide, intense eyes shining in the darkness, not blinking. “Have you not thought on why I brought your sister and her husband here? Or rather, how? How did I know to come to your aid?”
“An army, even a small one, does not cross a Barony the size of Delondeur without news of it spreading,” Allystaire said. “I assume you heard the rumors and guessed keenly.”
“I was not even in Barony Delondeur when it came to me. I was trying to spread Her word, do my work, north of the Ash, into Barony Vyndamere.”
Allystaire crossed his arms over his chest. “You tried to bring word of the Mother to the Islandmen who destroyed Barony Vyndamere, you mean?”
“Exactly that,” Rede said, his voice still with that quaver, as if there was too much energy in him that he needed to get into words. “Where better to go? Who better to spread the word among?”
“I am amazed you are still alive, Rede,” Allystaire said. “I would think that any village or settlement up there would have killed
you just as soon as look at you.”
“It is true that I was not welcomed among them,” he agreed, bobbing his head. “Not at all. But many thought me beneath killing, and most tossed me out to root in their middens, gave me no work, no chance to offer them any help.”
“Poor you,” Allystaire said, sneering. “Poor, cursed Rede, forced to spend the night reliving his blindness. Pardon me if my pity does not extend as far as you wish it would.”
“Not just my blindness, Arm,” Rede said. “In those nights I dreamt of blindness, yes. But my dreams brought back the gift my eyes had paid for.” The words tumbled out of him in a rush now. “It is weak and it is jumbled. Dark. Hard to parse, or to understand. The dreams are hardly worth it. That is why I knew to seek out your old Hall, your sister. I saw the place, I saw her, I knew that the Mother needed her. And that is what I can offer you, Arm. I can offer you the Inward Eye.”
Allystaire swung his arm out and seized Rede by the collar, dragging him away from the front door of the Inn. The man weighed almost nothing, skin stretched across his long bones, and Allystaire felt he could’ve lifted him clear of the ground with one arm. He swung him around as they went around the side of the building, the former priest offering no resistance, and Allystaire placed his hand around Rede’s throat, but lightly.
“Try to lie to me, Rede.”
“I haven’t spoken a word of a lie to you, Arm,” Rede said, his voice maddeningly calm and even. “Not a word.”
“Do you truly still see visions in your dreams?”
“I do. They are fragments of what the Inward Eye is meant to be.”
“Nothing can hide from it. That is what the old priest told me when you first came here. Is that true?”
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