Oath of Fealty

by Elizabeth Moon

  “It is,” Dorrin said. “And Selfer should hear it as well, for it bears on him as well as on me and you.”

  “Go on,” Kieri said, waving at chairs.

  Dorrin repeated what she had told Paks of her knowledge of magery. “Paks discovered I had more, but it had been blocked by a Knight-Commander.”

  “At Falk’s Hall when she was there,” the Knight-Commander said.

  “And now the Knight-Commander and Paks have released it.” Tears glittered in Dorrin’s eyes. “They think I should take instruction for some days before leaving, so that I will be better prepared to deal with my relatives and protect my people.” She glanced at Selfer, sitting bolt upright in his chair. “Selfer—I know you are Girdish and this may trouble you.”

  His brow furrowed. “Indeed, Captain. I was taught—and it’s in the Code of Gird—that magery is evil in intent and practice.” He looked down and then back up. “But I have known you these several years; I have seen you in war and peace, both in command and under command. You have been honorable, just, as kind as war allows. Paladins—” He looked at Paks. “They also have magery of a kind, though it comes from the gods. Wizards cast spells and mix potions; we do not consider them evil. The Elder Folk have powers we do not, and are not evil. I am trying—I want to—think differently about this.”

  Dorrin met his gaze. “Selfer, I do not want to press you to do wrong. You agreed to come with me not knowing about my magery—if it troubles you too much, then be free of that promise. It is my hope that I can protect you, and the others, from the evil intent of my relatives, nothing more.”

  Kieri watched closely; he could feel nothing like a glamour or charm from Dorrin, and yet he could feel those from his elven relatives when they used them. Selfer’s acquiescence, when it came, seemed wholly free.

  “Sir King,” the Knight-Commander said, “I know you have been daily in conference with Dorrin, but it is my belief that she and I and this paladin should retire from the palace to some quiet place where we can speed her mastery of her powers. I suggest the local Field of Falk, as she is Falkian.”

  “Selfer, you can manage the cohort alone, can’t you?” Kieri asked.

  “Yes, Sir King. Would it be helpful if I were to start the cohort on the way, and Captain Dorrin could catch up with us? One alone rides faster than the cohort can travel with supplies.”

  “A good thought, Selfer,” Kieri said. “How many days, do you think?” he asked the Knight-Commander.

  “Four or five. If you left day after tomorrow, you would certainly not come to the border before she caught up with you.” He turned to Dorrin. “Do you agree with our arrangements?”

  “Yes, Knight-Commander,” Dorrin said. Kieri thought she looked less tense than when she had arrived.

  “Then I will go and make arrangements with the Captain to make use of the Field.”

  “And I,” Paks said, “must needs get my pack. I’ll take yours, too.”

  Kieri looked at Dorrin after they all left. “Well, Captain … Duke Dorrin. You’ve surprised me before but … the old magery? In one way it is a relief to know you have it, given what you will face, but it’s still a shock.”

  “I’m sorry I never told you about the magery,” Dorrin said.

  Kieri shook his head. “You weren’t using it; it wasn’t important then.”

  “The Knight-Commander is most concerned that I not yield to a desire for vengeance—indeed he wishes me to use magery as little as I can, lest arrogance negate Falk’s support and open a gap into which the blood magery could penetrate.”

  “This Knight-Commander has not seen war himself,” Kieri said. “You and I both know the dangers of uncontrolled anger, but we also know what war requires. And this is war you face, Dorrin: treason, rebellion, a civil war, at worst. My advice to you is to use whatever force you need at the beginning. You are not like to use it for your own glory.”

  “I am of the same blood—I think he fears it will affect my judgment.”

  “He has not seen you in battle. I have. Here—let’s talk of it as if it were a Company campaign. Tell me what you expect to find, what your plans are.”

  Dorrin laid out the situation as she understood it, concise and crisp as all her briefings were. “And then there are the surprises—the things I can’t know ahead of time. I can’t know how many of the servants are complicit, for instance.”

  Kieri nodded. “Of course, but you know to expect the unexpected. I agree with your assessment and your plan is sound. Dorrin, the prince is right—though this will take all your will and all your skill, as well as that magery you now have, no one else could do it. I believe you can. Trust yourself. I do.”

  Kieri bade a final farewell to the cohort two days later, as Selfer led them out of Chaya, on the road to the river. No inspection this time—he was no longer their commander, and already their faces turned more naturally to Selfer than to him for orders. Selfer, his former squire, bowed instead of saluting.

  “My lord king. It has been an honor to serve you these few years …”

  “An honor you have well repaid,” Kieri said. “Go with Gird, Selfer, and Gird’s grace be with you.”

  “Thank you, Sir King,” Selfer said, bowing again. Then he mounted and rode to the head of the column, and the familiar commands started them on their way. Away. Forever.

  Kieri pushed that thought aside, and went back to work. The more he learned of the long breach between elves and humans, the more concerned he was that this might be a primary cause of Lyonya’s economic decline.

  Within the human community, those of part-elven blood most often sided with elves and accepted elven values. Here were the strongest opponents to his proposals for an effective military, the strongest proponents of isolation. They were, in general, content to see Lyonya stay as it was, or return to an imagined ideal past: a forest land of peaceful folk who had no quarrels, no wars, no “foreign luxuries.” A land where, as one put it, “We used to sit around the fire and sing, and the trees sang with us.”

  Those of pure-human blood—and especially those with magelord strains in their families—were most impatient with elven strictures, most annoyed by elven “arrogance,” and most interested in foreign trade. They wanted change, growth within and without. And yet, Kieri saw quickly, these had little experience outside Lyonya, and their notions of how other realms thought and acted were as naive as those of the part-elven.

  His elven relatives themselves were little help. They were, as Kieri judged them, just as impenetrably arrogant as many humans thought them. Convinced they were right, without being willing to explain why, quick to take offense if they thought they were not sufficiently honored, and at root pleased with the division between human and elven.

  “But you marry humans sometimes,” Kieri said to his uncle Amrothlin.

  “Humans are … irresistible at some stages,” his uncle said. “Some of them. It’s the very insubstantiality, knowing that they will fade and die in a day or two—as it seems to us. To share that vibrant life for the short time of their spring—it is a great pleasure. But then they’re gone and we are still here. It is as you with flowers. You plant them, cherish them for the few days they bloom, and then remember them fondly.” He smiled as if remembering some liaison of his own, and then shook his head. “Though flowers are not as demanding. But you see—for us, bearing children is a rare and wonderful event. With a human, it is easier.”

  “Except when it’s deadly,” Kieri said, thinking of his sister, who had died too young of early childbearing.

  “That angered us all,” Amrothlin said. “Our Lady was so wroth the taig trembled and all the trees in the Ladysforest dropped their leaves in sorrow at the perfidy of humans.”

  “And did you never consider that if you had told Aliam Halveric more plainly what you already knew about me, if she had known she had a brother—however unfit to rule at that time—she might not have felt the need to bear children so young.”

  Amrothlin jerked ba
ck, as if Kieri had hit him. “It is not our fault!” he cried. “She would not listen to our Lady; she was warned. It was those humans—”

  “Have you visited her bones, Uncle?”

  Again Amrothlin flinched. “Bones—we do not do that, as you surely know. She should not be there, hidden in stone: she should be set free—”

  “She was half-human, as I am,” Kieri said. “I have visited her bones, and I say it is not human fault alone that led her to her death. She grieved for her mother, who had left her to take me to see the Lady, and she grieved for me, the older brother who should have protected her. She was angry with you—with elves—because you cost her both mother and brother.”

  “We did not!”

  “No—but think. She was reft of more than half her family, for something that would have seemed—to a small child—no reason at all. All the work was left for her, all the care. She loved her father—he was all she had left—but you, I have no doubt, considered him as lightly as you do all humans.”

  Amrothlin shifted uneasily in his seat. “No—not quite—he was the king, after all.”

  “A king with no taig-sense, as you’ve said. For her, the only family she had left—”

  “She had us—”

  “Whom she did not know. Could not know, as she had known her mother and me.” Kieri felt the grief he had sensed in his sister’s bones. “She died of sorrow as much as childbirth, I believe. Determined to do her duty, but without much joy, if any. I blame myself, Uncle, for not escaping sooner, while you might still have considered me worthy—for not somehow finding a way to serve her, save her.”

  “I—never thought any of this,” Amrothlin said. “Her husband … her Council …”

  “They erred, and they suffered for it,” Kieri said. “So did the taig, and so did the kingdom. But I hold you, Uncle—you and all the elves, including my grandmother—partly responsible. Not that you asked my mother to bring me to the Ladysforest—that was innocently done, I am convinced. But that my sister felt abandoned and bereft—desperate enough to think risking her own death without need was her best way to prove herself—for that, we are all in part responsible.”

  “Not you,” Amrothlin said. “Not after what you endured.”

  “I was near enough healed by then, grown to manhood. I sensed secrets hovering around me, but did not press for answers—”

  “You would not have had them,” Amrothlin said.

  “I could have tried,” Kieri said. “And perhaps, if I had—perhaps that might have changed some minds. I didn’t, and that was part defiance. If no one would explain, I scorned to beg; I would make my own way—as I did. But that pride had its cost to more than myself.” He waited; Amrothlin said nothing. “What I’ve learned, Uncle, in a life you despise, is that everything we do has more than one consequence, and half those or more we never anticipate.”

  “That is elven thinking,” Amrothlin said. “And one reason why we are wary of acting in haste. It takes time—sometimes time that seems long to humans—to foresee all consequences …”

  “Delay also has consequences,” Kieri said. “Haste brings one set of hazards; delay, another. But I am not speaking only to chastise, but to insist that the breach between the peoples harms the taig and risks the entire realm.”

  Amrothlin opened his mouth to speak, but Kieri went on.

  “It must end, and both peoples must work to end it; healing this cannot be done by elves alone or humans alone. I am asking you, Uncle, to take the lead among elves.”

  Amrothlin might have been asked to swallow a bitter fruit, from his expression. Kieri waited, and finally Amrothlin said, “Who is the human to whom you have given the task of persuading humans?”

  “I have not decided yet,” Kieri said. “But as you are my uncle, my mother’s own brother, it seemed honorable to ask your help.”

  “You remind me of her,” Amrothlin said. “Of the ways in which she annoyed me.” But humor softened his tone. “I suppose I must. But please, do not choose Sier Carvarsin: it is not merely that he is more hasty and more … annoying … than others, but I cannot get past his appearance—that great lump on his nose, and the one on his cheek with those black hairs.”

  Kieri managed not to laugh, with some difficulty. “Uncle—”

  “It is shallow, you will say. But beauty is, to us, an outward sign of inward health and soundness. Carvarsin may be, for all I know, honorable and kind, but to me—to me he is a caricature of a human. Those lumps are like cankers on the trunk of a tree, signifying damage within.”

  “I will not choose Carvarsin,” Kieri said. “It is not my intent to make the task more difficult for you.”

  “On my part, I must ask how your work with Orlith is coming,” Amrothlin said. “I have what he tells me, but what does it feel like to you?”

  An intrusion into work of more urgency, Kieri thought, but he could not say that, not now. “It feels slow,” Kieri said. “I already feel the taig, so sitting still and trying to let it enter me, as Orlith says, does not—I mean, I cannot understand what it is to accomplish.”

  Amrothlin nodded. “I thought perhaps that was it,” he said. “You have taig-sense, but you do not know what can be done with it. Well … do you feel it more now than you did at first?”

  “I think so. I am not sure. I don’t think I feel it the way Orlith means. He asks me to feel the taig of individual trees—that is their life-force, is it not?”

  “Not exactly. Consider a tree—what do you think of? What do you see in your mind?”

  “A tree—the trunk, the branches, the leaves.”

  “That is not a tree,” Amrothlin said.

  “Well, and roots,” Kieri said.

  “Roots, indeed, but—a tree is and is not an individual. And you as well, of course.”

  “I’m sorry—?”

  “Orlith should have started with simpler explanations,” Amrothlin said. “A tree is not a thing, like this dish or the fruit in it—” He pointed. “A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you see. Roots to leaves, yes—those you can, in part, see. But it is more—it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.”

  “You mean … it’s all connected? I knew that …”

  “More than connected—” Amrothlin frowned. “It is hard to say in your speech. Your old humans had more words for it, the weaving of life’s fabric, they called it, but more specifically. You cannot rightly speak of a tree as an individual, apart from the earth in which it grows, the air it breathes, the sunlight that wakes it to life, the living things that surround it. And yet each tree is also an individual—we think of them as having personalities, you know. They have fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, throughout the forest; they have a history going back to the first Singing.”

  “I … think I understand.”

  “You do not now,” Amrothlin said. “But to grow to full kingship, you must. Orlith wants you to feel that—not know it with the mind—” He touched his head. “But feel it, know it in blood and bone. When you do, then you can not only feel the taig—discern, as you do now, whether it is healthy or not—but heal it and use it.”

  “Use?”

  “To raise the taig. When called by someone of power, the forest taig can act—can maze human senses, herd men almost as a shepherd herds sheep, even resist some evil forces: health against sickness, you might think of it.”

  “So … I go on spending a turn of the glass every day trying to feel more and more of the taig, is that it?”

  “Not so much trying … more letting the taig come to you. The taig is easily frightened at times—it is like a shy child. If you are patient, it will come. Orlith cannot teach you much more until you can touch smaller elem
ents than trees.”

  “How long will that take?” Kieri thought of all the other tasks awaiting him … and the possible need to have the taig on his side if an invasion came. And how could the taig be both easily frightened and any help against an invading army?

  Amrothlin laughed aloud. “Nephew-our-king … that is such a human question. It will take as long as it takes, and longer if you are impatient.”

  “I will do my best to be patient,” Kieri said. “But it would be impolite to teach patience to my Council by making them wait longer for our daily meeting.”

  “Neatly said,” Amrothlin said, with a warmer smile than usual. “And as courtesy is never haste, let us show them courtesy and begin.”

  That Council meeting and those following concerned mainly the coronation, now barely more than two hands of days away. Kieri himself found it hard to concentrate on other matters when the palace staff bustled about preparing guest rooms, taking down the winter hangings and pulling out formal decorations. Day by day the tension grew. A tailor came to measure him for the new clothes the occasion required. In one room, green-draped tables held a rapidly increasing array of gifts.

  Dorrin came for a last visit, early the morning she rode away, and eyed the changes with amusement. “Have you ever seen a coronation?” she asked.

  “The prince’s father’s,” Kieri said. “But in Tsaia the rituals are very different … as you will see, at Midsummer.” He led her into the room he now used as his study, and shut the door.

  “If I can,” she said. “If I can hold things together.”

  “What was the training like?”

  “It was … a delight,” Dorrin said. “Much easier than I expected, as if I were remembering skills, not learning them. Paks thinks it is the years I spent as your captain; the Knight-Commander thinks it’s my age and experience both, and Falk’s blessing.” She gave a quick precis of the tests she’d passed.

  “I agree,” Kieri said. “You learned to use power well; the form of power is not as important as your judgment and discipline.”