Surrender None
Elizabeth Moon


WHY WE FIGHT
“You lost children?” Others shushed that voice, someone in a leather cloak, but 
Gird answered it, counting them on his fingers.
“My first two sons died of fever; the lord refused us herb-right in the wood. My 
wife lost two babes young, one from hunger and one from fever. My eldest 
daughter they raped; killed her husband. The babe died unborn. My youngest son 
they struck down; he lives. Another daughter they struck down, breaking her arm; 
I know not if she lives or dies. And my brother’s children, that I’d taken in: 
two of them dead, by the lords’ greed. And that’s children. I lost friends, my 
parents, my brother.
“You ask yourselves: if they can take one child, will they stop there? Will all 
your submission, all your obedience, get you peace and enough food? Has it ever 
worked? You can sit here and let them take you one by one, or you can decide to 
fight back.”






Acknowledgements
Too many people helped with technical advice and special knowledge to mention 
all, and leaving any of them out is unfair. But special thanks to Ellen McLean, 
of McLean Beefmasters, whose stock has taught me more than a college class in 
Dairying ever did, to Joel Graves for showing me how to scythe without cutting 
my ankles off, and to Mark Unger for instruction and demonstration of 
mixed-weapon fighting possibilities. Errors are mine; they did their best to 
straighten me out.



Prologue
^ » 
The Rule of Aare is rule one:
Surrender none.
“Esea’s light on him,” muttered the priest, as the midwife mouthed, “Alyanya’s 
sweet peace,” and laid the wet pink newborn on his mother’s belly. The priest, 
sent down hurriedly in the midst of dinner from the lord’s hall, dabbed his 
finger in the blood and touched it to a kerchief, then cut with silver scissors 
a lock of the newborn’s wet dark hair, which he folded in the same kerchief. 
With that as proof, no fond foolish peasant girl could hide the child away from 
his true father. The stupid slut might try that; some of them did, being so 
afraid of the lord’s magic, although anyone with wit enough to dip stew from a 
kettle ought to realize that the lords meant no harm to these outbred children. 
Quite the contrary. With a final sniff, the priest sketched a gesture that left 
a streak of light in the room long after he’d left, and departed, to report the 
successful birth. Not a monster, a manchild whole of limb and healthy. Perhaps 
this one would inherit the birthright magic… perhaps.
Behind, in the birthing room, the midwife glowered at the glowing patch of air, 
and sketched her own gesture, tossing a handful of herbs at it. It hung there 
still, hardly fading. The new mother grunted, and the midwife returned to her 
work, ignoring the light she was determined not to need. She had the healing 
hands, a legacy of a great-grandmother’s indiscretion in the days when such 
indiscretions meant a quick marriage to some handy serf. She hardly believed the 
change, and having a priest of Esea in the birthing room convinced her only that 
the high lords had no decency.
In the lord’s hall, the infant’s future was quickly determined. His mother could 
be his nurse, but his rearing would be that of a young lord, until his ability 
or lack of it appeared.
The boy showed a quick intelligence, a lively curiosity; he learned easily and 
could form the elegant script of Old Aare by the time he had seen six midwinter 
festivals. He had no peasant accent; he had no lack of manners or bodily grace. 
He also had no magic, and when the lord lost hope that he might show a useful 
trace of it, he found the boy a foster family in one of his villages, and sent 
him away.
It could have been worse. His lord provided: the family prospered, and the 
youth, as he grew to be, had no trouble finding a wife. He would inherit a 
farmstead, he was told, and in due time he had his own farm. With his father’s 
gifts, he started well above the average, and as well he had the position of a 
market judge in the nearest town. It was not enough to live on, but it 
supplemented his farm’s production. He knew he was well off, and shrugged away 
the hopes he’d once had of being adopted into the lord’s family. Yet he could 
not forget his parentage, or the promise of magic.
  
In the year of his birth, and far away, the boy already lived who would make his 
parentage worthless.



Chapter One
« ^ » 
“You’re big enough now,” said the boy’s mother. “You don’t need to be hanging on 
my skirts any more. You’re bold enough when it’s something you want to do.” As 
she spoke, she raked at the boy’s thick unruly hair with her fingers, and wiped 
a smudge of soot from his cheek. “You take that basket to the lord’s steward, 
now, and be quick about it. Are you a big boy, or only a baby, then?”
“I’m big,” he said, frowning. “I’m not scared.” His mother flicked her apron 
over his shirt again, and landed a hand on his backside.
“Then get on with you. You’re to be home right away, Gird, mind that. No playing 
about with the other lads and lasses. There’s work to be done, boy.”
“I know.” With a grunt, he lifted the basket, almost hip-high, and leaned 
sideways to balance the weight; it was piled high with plums, the best from 
their tree. He could almost taste one, the sweet juice running down his throat…
“And don’t you be eating any of those, Gird. Not even one. Your Da would skin 
you for it.”
“I won’t.” He started up the lane, walking cantways from the weight, but 
determined not to put the basket down for a rest until he was out of sight of 
the house. He wanted to go alone. He’d begged for the chance, last year, when he 
was clearly too small. And this year, when she’d first told him, he’d—he frowned 
harder, until he could feel the knot of his brows. He’d been afraid, after all. 
“I’m not afraid,” he muttered to himself. “I’m not. I’m big, bigger than the 
others.”
All along the lanes he saw others walking, carrying baskets slung over an arm or 
on a back. A handbasket for each square of bramble-berries; an armbasket for 
each tree in its first three years of bearing; a ruckbasket for each smallfruit 
tree over three years, and a back-basket for apples in prime. Last year he’d 
carried a handbasket in each hand: two handbaskets make an armbasket, last 
year’s fee. This year was the plum’s fourth bearing year, and now they owed the 
lord a ruckbasket.
And that leaves us, he thought bitterly, with only an armbasket for ourselves. 
It had been a dry year; most of the fruit fell before it ripened. He had heard 
his parents discussing it. They could have asked the lord’s steward to change 
their fee, but that might bring other trouble.
“It’s not the name I want, a man who argues every measure of his fee,” said his 
father, leaning heavily on the table. “No. It’s better to pay high one year, and 
have the lord’s opinion. ’Tis not as if we were hungry.”
Gird had listened silently. They had been hungry, two years before; he still 
remembered the pain in his belly, and his brother’s gifts of food. Anything was 
better than that. Now, as he walked the lane, his belly grumbled; the smell of 
the plums seemed to go straight from his nose to his gut. He squinted against 
the bright light, trying not to think of it. Underfoot the dust was hot on the 
surface, but his feet sank into a coolness—was it damp? Why did wet and cold 
feel the same? He saw a puddle left from the rain a week ago, and headed for it 
before remembering his mother’s detailed warnings. No puddles, she’d said; you 
don’t come into the lord’s court with dirty feet.
The lane past his father’s house curved around a clump of pick-oak and into the 
village proper. Gird shifted his basket to the other side, and stumped on. Up 
ahead, just beyond the great stone barn where the whole village stored hay and 
grain was the corner of the lord’s wall. The lane was choked with people waiting 
to go in the gate, children younger than Gird with handbaskets, those his own 
age with armbaskets, older ones with ruckbaskets like his. He joined the line, 
edging forward as those who had paid their fee came out and left room within.
Once inside the gate, he could just see over taller heads one corner of the 
awning over the steward’s table. As he tried to peek between those ahead of him, 
and see more, someone tapped his head with a hard knuckle. He looked around.
“Good looking plums,” said Rauf, Oreg the pigherd’s son. “Better than ours.” 
Rauf was a hand taller than Gird, and mean besides. Gird nodded, but said 
nothing. That was safer with Rauf. “They’d look better in my basket, I think. 
Eh, Sig?” Rauf nudged his friend Sikan in the ribs, and they both grinned at 
Gird. “You’ve more than you need, little boy; that basket’s too heavy anyway.” 
Rauf took a handful of plums off the top of the basket, and Sikan did the same.
“You stop!” Gird forgot that loud voices were not allowed in the lord’s court. 
“Those are my plums!”
“They may have been once, but I found them.” Rauf shoved Gird hard; he stumbled, 
and more plums rolled out of the basket. “Found them all over the ground, I did; 
what’s down is anyone’s, right?”
Gird tried to snatch for the rolling plums. Sikan kicked him lightly in the arm, 
while Rauf tipped his basket all the way over. Gird heard some of the other boys 
laughing, a woman nearby crying shame to them all. The back of his neck felt 
hot, and he heard a wind in his ears. Before he thought, he grabbed the basket 
and slammed it into Rauf’s face. Sikan jumped at him; Gird rolled away, kicking 
wildly. In moments that corner of the courtyard was a wild tangle of fighting 
boys and squashed fruit. The steward bellowed, the lord’s guards waded into the 
fight, using their hands, their short staves, the flats of their swords. And 
Gird found himself held immobile by two guards, with Rauf lying limp on the 
stones, and the other boys huddled in a frightened mass behind a line of armed 
men.
“Disgraceful,” said someone over his head. Gird looked up. The lord’s steward, 
narrow-faced, blue-eyed. “Who started it?”
No one answered. Gird felt the hands tighten on his arms, and give a shake. 
“Boy,” said a deeper voice, one of the men holding him. “What do you know about 
this. Who started it?”
“He stole my plums.” Before he spoke, he didn’t realize he was going to. In the 
heavy silence, with Rauf lying still before him, and the courtyard a mess of 
trampled fruit, his voice sounded thin. The steward looked at him, met his eyes.
“Your name, boy? Your father?”
“Gird, sir. Dorthan’s son.”
“Dorthan, eh? Your father’s not a brawling man; I’d have thought better of his 
sons.”
“Sir, he stole my plums!”
“Your tribute… yes. What was it, this year?”
“A ruckbasket, sir. And they were fine plums, big dark ones, and he—”
“Who?”
Gird nodded at Rauf. “Rauf, sir. Him and Sikan, his friend.”
“Anyone else see that?” The steward’s gaze drifted over the crowd of boys. Most 
stared at their feet, but Teris, a year older than Gird and son of his nearest 
neighbor, nodded.
“If you please, sir, it was Rauf started it. He said they were good plums, and 
would look better in his basket. Then he took some, and Gird said no, and he 
knocked Gird aside—”
“Rauf struck the first blow?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Anyone else?” Reluctant nods followed this. Gird saw a space open around Sikan, 
who had edged to the rear of the group. Sikan flushed and moved forward when the 
steward stared hard at him.
“It wasn’t so bad, sir,” he said, trying to smile around a bruised lip. “We was 
just teasing the lad, like, that was all.”
“Teasing, in your lord’s court?”
“Well—”
“And did you hit this boy?” The steward pointed at Gird.
“Well, sir, I may have—sort of—sort of pushed at him, like, but nothing hard, 
not to say brawling. But he’s one of them, you know, likes to make quarrels—”
The steward frowned. “It’s not the first time, Sikan, that you and Rauf have 
been found in bad order.” He nodded at the men behind Gird, and they released 
his arms. Gird rubbed his left elbow. “As for you, Gird son of Dorthan, brawling 
in the lord’s court is always wrong—always. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” There was nothing else to say.
“And you’re at fault in saying that your plums were stolen. They were your 
lord’s plums, owed to him. If Rauf had given them in, the lord would still have 
them. Instead—” The steward waved his hand at the mess. Very few whole fruit had 
survived the brawl. “But your family has a good name, young Gird, and I think 
you did not mean to cause trouble. So there will be no fine in fruit for your 
family… only you, along with these others, will stay and clean the court until 
those stones are clean enough to satisfy Sergeant Mager here.”
“Yes, sir.” And he would be late home, and get another whipping from his father.
“Now as for you, Sikan, and Rauf—” For Rauf had begun to move about, and his 
eyes opened, though aimlessly as yet. “Since you started trouble, and moreover 
chose a smaller boy to bully, you’ll spend a night in the stocks, when this work 
is done.” And the steward turned away, back to his canopy over the account table 
where the scribes made marks on long rolls of parchment.
Gird found the rest of that day instructive. He had scrubbed their stone floor 
often enough at home, and scraped dung from the cowshed. But his mother was no 
more particular about the bowls they ate from than Sergeant Mager about the 
courtyard stones. He and the other boys picked up pieces of the squashed fruit 
and put them in baskets—without getting even a taste of it. Then they carried 
buckets of water—buckets so large that Gird couldn’t carry one by himself—and 
brushed the stones with water and long-handled brushes. Then they rinsed, and 
then they scrubbed again.
Just when Gird was sure that the stones could be no cleaner had they just been 
quarried, the Sergeant would find a scrap of fruit rind, and they had it all to 
do over again. But he did his best, working as hard as he could. By the time the 
Sergeant let them go, it was well past midday, and Gird’s fingers were raw with 
scrubbing. He called Gird back from the gate for an extra word.
“Your dad’s got a good name,” he said, laying a heavy hand on Gird’s shoulder. 
“And you’re a good lad, if quick-tempered. You’ve got courage, too—you were 
willing to take on those bigger lads. Ever think of being a soldier?”
Gird felt his heart leap. “You mean… like you?”
The sergeant laughed. “Not at first, of course. You’d start like the others, as 
a recruit. But you’re big for your age, and strong. You work hard. Think of it… 
a sword, a spear maybe… you could make sergeant someday.”
“Do you ever get to ride a horse?” That was his dream, to ride a fast horse as 
the lords did, running before the wind.
“Sometimes.” The sergeant smiled. “The steward might recommend you for training. 
A lad like you needs the discipline, needs a place to work off his extra energy. 
Besides, it’s a mouth less to feed at home.” He gave Gird’s shoulder a final 
shake, and pushed him out the gate. “We’ll have a word with your dad, this next 
day or so. Don’t start trouble again, eh?”
“Holy Lady of Flowers!” His mother had been half-way down the lane; she must 
have been watching from the house. “Gird, what did you mean—”
“I’m sorry.” He stared at the dust between his toes, aware of every rip in his 
clothes. They had been his best, the shirt actually new, and now they looked 
like his ragged old ones. “I didn’t start it, Mother, truly I didn’t. Rauf stole 
some plums, and I thought we might have a fine—”
“Effa says Rauf hit you first.”
“Yes’m.” He heard her sigh, and looked up. “I really didn’t—‘
“Gird—” She put a hand on his head. “At least you’re back, and no fine. Effa 
says the steward didn’t seem angry, not like she thought he would be.”
“I don’t think he is.” Suddenly his news burst out of him. “Guess what the 
sergeant said—maybe I can train to be a soldier! I could have a sword—” Excited 
as he was, he didn’t notice her withdrawal, the shock on her face. “Sometimes 
they even ride horses, he said. He said I was big enough, and strong, and—” Her 
stiff silence held him at last; he stared at her. “Mother?”
“No!” She caught his arm, and half-dragged him down the lane to the house.
The argument went on all evening. His father’s first reaction to the story of 
the plums was to reach for his belt. “I don’t brawl,” he said. “And I didn’t 
raise my sons to be brawlers.”
Arin, as usual, stood up for him. “Da, that Rauf’s a bad lot, you know that. 
So’s the steward: they’ve got him in stocks this night, and Sikan too.”
“And I’ll have their fathers down on me, did you think of that? Oreg’s no man to 
blame his own son, even if Rauf tells the tale aright. If Gird hadn’t fought 
back, Oreg would’ve known he owed me sommat, a bit of bacon even. And Sikan’s 
father—I want no quarrel with him; his wife has the only pardon for dyecraft in 
this village. As for this way—it’s no good. We can’t be fighting each other; the 
world’s hard enough without that. They’ll have to know I punished Gird, and I’ll 
have to go to them and apologize.”
So it was a whipping on top of his bruises, and no supper as well as no lunch. 
Gird had expected as much; he saw from Arin’s wink that he would have a scrap to 
eat later, whatever Arin could sneak to him without being caught. But his father 
was as unhappy as his mother to hear of the sergeant’s offer of training.
“It’s never good to come into notice like that. Besides, we follow the Lady: 
would you take sword against your own folk, Gird? Break the village peace in 
blood and iron?” But before he could decide whether it was safe to answer—the 
answer he’d thought of, while waiting for his father to come from the fields—his 
father shrugged. “But if the steward comes, what can I say? They have the right 
to take you, no matter what I think about it. The best I can hope for is that 
the steward forgets it.”
The steward did not forget. Gird spent the next day wrestling with the family’s 
smallest scythe—still too long for him—mowing his father’s section of the 
meadow. He knew he’d been sent there to get him out of sight, away from the 
other village boys. He knew his mother had baked two sweet cakes for Rauf’s 
family and Sikan’s, and his father had taken them over in the early morning. It 
was hot, the steamy heat of full summer, and the cold porridge of his breakfast 
had not filled the hollows from yesterday’s fast. But above him, in the great 
field, his father was working, able to see if he shirked.
He kept at it doggedly, hacking uneven chunks where his brother could lay a 
clean swathe. There had to be a way. He paused to rub the great curved blade 
with the bit of stone his father had given him, and listened to the change in 
sound it made on different parts of the blade. When he looked sideways up the 
slope to the arable, he saw his father talking to another of the village men. 
Gird leaned on the scythe handle, the blade angled high above him, and picked a 
bur from between his toes.
When he looked again, his father had started back up the arable. Gird dared not 
move out of the sun to rest, but he tipped his head back to get the breeze. 
Something rustled in the tall grass ahead of him. Rat? Bird? He scratched the 
back of one leg with the other foot, glanced upslope again, and sighed. Someday 
he would be a man, and if he wasn’t a soldier, he’d be a farmer, and able to 
swing a bigger scythe than this one. Like his father, whose sweeping strokes led 
the reapers each year. Like his brother Arin, who had just grown out of this 
scythe. He grunted at himself, and let the long blade down. Surely he could find 
a way to make this work better.
By nightfall, with all his blisters, he had begun to mow a level swathe. He’d 
changed the handles slightly, learned to get his hip into the swing, learned to 
take steps just the right length to compensate for the blade’s arc. The next 
day, he spent on the same patch of meadow. Now that he had the knack of it, he 
was half-hoping the steward would not come. He would grow up a farmer like his 
father, leading the reapers in the field, guiding his own oxen, growing even 
better fruit…
It was the next day that the steward came at dusk, when his father had come in 
from the fields, and Gird had begun to feel himself out of disgrace as far as 
the family went. The children were sent to the barton out back, while the 
steward talked, and his father (he was sure) listened. He wanted to creep into 
the cowbyre and hear for himself, but Arin barred the way. He had to wait until 
his father called him in.
There in the candlelight, his father’s face looked older, tireder. His mother 
sat stiffly, lips pressed together, behind her loom. The steward smiled at him. 
“Gird, the sergeant suggested that you were a likely lad to train for soldier: 
strong and brave, and in need of discipline. Your father will let you choose for 
yourself. If you agree, you will spend one day of ten with the soldiers this 
year, and from Midwinter to Midwinter next, two days of ten. It’s not soldiering 
at first, I’ll be honest with you: you’ll work in the barracks just as you’d 
work here. But your father’d be paid the worth of your work, a copper crab more 
than for fieldwork. And the following year, you’d be a recruit, learning 
warcraft, and your father will get both coppers and a dole off his fee. ’Twould 
help your family, in hard times, but your father says you must do as you wish.”
It was frightening to see his parents so still, so clearly frightened 
themselves. He had never really understood them before, he felt. Behind him, in 
the doorway, Arin and the others crowded; he could hear their noisy breathing. 
Could soldiering be so bad as they thought? All his life he’d seen the guardsmen 
strolling the village lane, admired the glitter of their buckles, the jingle of 
their harness. He’d been too young to fear the ordersticks, the clubs… he’d had 
strong hands rumpling his hair, when he crowded near with the other boys, he’d 
had a smile from the sergeant himself. And the soldiers fought off brigands, and 
hunted wolves and folokai; he remembered only last winter, cheering in the snow 
with the others as they carried back the dead folokai tied to poles. One of them 
had been hurt, his blood staining the orange tunic he wore, but the world was 
hard, and there were many ways to be hurt.
He wanted to stand on one leg and think about it, but there stood the steward, 
peering at him in the dimness with eyes that seemed to see clear into his heart. 
He’d never spoken to a lord before, exactly. Was the steward a lord? Close 
enough.
“It would not be a binding oath,” the steward said, a little impatiently. Gird 
knew that tone; his father had it when he asked who had left the barton wicket 
open. It meant a quick answer, or trouble. “If you did not like it, you could 
quit before you started the real training…”
Gird ducked his head, and then looked up at the steward. From one corner of his 
vision he could see his father’s rigid face, but he ignored it.
“Sir… steward… I would be glad to. If my father allows.”
“He has said it.” The steward smiled, then. “Dorthan, your son Gird is accepted 
into service of the Count Kelaive, and here is the pirik—” The bargain-sum, Gird 
remembered: not a price paid, as if he were a sheep, but a sum to mark the 
conclusion of any bargain. The price was somewhat else.
The very next morning, Gird left at dawn to walk through the village to the 
count’s guards’ barracks. None of his friends were out to watch him, but he knew 
they would be impressed. The guard at the gate admitted him, sent him straight 
across the forecourt to the barracks. The guards were just getting up, and the 
sergeant was crosser than Gird remembered.
“Get in the kitchen first, and serve the food; then you can clean for the cooks 
until after morning drill. I’ll see you then. Hop, now.”
The porridge was much like their own, if cooked in larger pots and served in 
bigger bowls. Gird carried the dirty bowls back, and scrubbed them, under the 
cook’s critical eye, then scrubbed the big cookpots. Then it was chop the 
onions, while his eyes burned and watered, and chop the redroots until his hands 
were cramped, and then fetch buckets of clean water. All the while the cook 
scolded, worse than his oldest sister, while mixing and kneading the dough that 
would be dumplings in the midday stew. The sergeant came in while Gird was still 
washing down the long tables. “Right, lad. Now let’s see what we’ve got, here. 
Come along.” He led Gird out the side door of the kitchen, into a back court, a 
little walled enclosure like a barton with no byres. In one corner was the 
kitchen well, with the row of buckets Gird had scrubbed neatly ranged along the 
wall.
The sergeant was just as impressive as ever, to Gird’s eye: taller and broader 
than his own father, hard-muscled, with a brisk authority that expected absolute 
obedience. Gird looked at him, imagining himself grown into that size and 
strength, wearing those clean, whole, unmended clothes, having a place in the 
village and in his lord’s service more secure than any farmer.
“You’re a hard worker, and strong,” the sergeant began, “but you’ll have to be 
stronger yet, and you’ll have to learn discipline. Begin with this: you don’t 
talk unless you’re told to, and you answer with ‘sir’ any time I speak to you. 
Clear?”
Gird nodded. “Yes… sir?”
“Right. You’re here to learn, not to chatter. Dawn to dusk, one day of ten… can 
you count?”
“Not really, sir.”
“Not really is no. Can’t count sheep, or cows?”
Gird frowned. “If they’re there… but not days, sir, they don’t stay in front of 
me.”
“You’ll learn. Now, Gird: when you come here, you must be clean and ready to 
work. If you can’t wash at home, come early and wash here. I’ll have no ragtags 
in my barracks. Is that your only shirt?”
“No, sir, but th’other’s worse.”
“Then you’ll get one, but only for this work. Do you have shoes? Boots?”
Gird shook his head, then remembered to say “No, sir.” Shoes? For a mere lad? He 
had never had shoes, and wouldn’t until he wed, unless his father had a string 
of good years.
“You’ll need them later; you can wear them here, but not at home. Did you have 
breakfast at home this morning?” Of course he had not, beyond a bit of crust; 
the porridge had just gone on when he walked up to the barracks. The sergeant 
hmmphed at that. “Can’t grow soldiers on thin rations. I’ll tell the cook, and 
you’ll eat here all day on your workdays. Now—about the other boys. I want no 
brawling, young Gird, none at all. If they tease you about going for soldier, 
you learn to let it pass. No threats from you, no catcalling at Rauf or Satik or 
whatever his name was. You’ll be where they can’t bother you, if you keep your 
nose clean. Hothead soldiers cause more trouble than they’re worth; you have 
your chance, for you and your family: earn it.”
An answer seemed required; Gird said “Yes, sir.”
The rest of that day was more chores and little that Gird could see as 
soldiering, although he did see the inside of the barracks, with the lines of 
wooden bunks and thin straw mattresses, the weapons hung neatly on the walls, 
the jacks (inside! He wondered, but did not ask, how they were cleaned. Surely 
they were cleaned; they smelled less than his own family’s pit.) He swept a 
floor that seemed clean enough already, carried more buckets of water to the 
cook, ate a bowl of stew larger than his father ever saw for his lunch, washed 
dishes until his hands wrinkled afterwards, fetched yet more water (he felt his 
feet had worn a groove from the well to the kitchen door) and sliced yet more 
redroots, had a huge slab of bread and a piece of meat for supper, and was 
allowed to stand silent in a corner and watch the ordered marching that preceded 
the changing of watch before dusk.
He ran home along the dark lane his bare feet knew so well, bursting with 
excitement. Meat! He didn’t know if he would tell them, because they would see 
no meat until harvest… but it had tasted so good, and the stew and bread had 
filled all the hollows in his belly. He burped, tasting meat on his breath, and 
laughed.
They were waiting, and had saved a bowl of gruel and hunk of bread for him; he 
felt both shamed and proud when he could give it to the others.
“So—they’ll feed you well?” His mother wasn’t quite looking at him, spooning his 
share carefully into other bowls.
“Yes. Breakfast too, but I must get there early.”
“And do you like soldiering?” she asked, a sharpness in her voice.
“It’s not soldiering yet,” he said, watching the others eat. “I helped the cook 
today, chopping onions and carrying water… I carried enough water for two days.”
“You can carry my water tomorrow,” his mother said. His father had yet said 
nothing, watching Gird across the firelight as he ate.
  
The time from summer to Midwinter passed quickly. One day in ten he rose before 
dawn, at first cockcrow, and ran up the lane to the gate where the guards now 
knew him by name and greeted him. Into that steamy kitchen, larger than his own 
cottage, where the cook—never so difficult as that first day—gave him a great 
bowl of porridge before he served the others. As the days drew in with autumn, 
that kitchen became a haven, rich with the smells of baking bread and roasting 
meat, savory stews, fruit pies. It was a feast-day, however plain the soldiers 
found the food (and he was amazed to hear them grumble), he had his belly full 
from daylight to dark. With a full belly, the work went easily. Hauling water, 
sweeping, washing, chopping vegetables, chopping wood for the great hearths. He 
learned the names of all the guards, and knew where everything was kept. Two of 
them were recruits, one from his village and one from over the fields sunrising, 
tall boys he would have thought men if he hadn’t seen them next to the soldiers. 
He began to learn the drill commands as he watched.
The other nine days passed as his days always had, in work with his family. He 
was growing into the scythe, or managing it better, and he was allowed in the 
big field for the first time. Arin took him up to the high end of the wood, 
where the village pigs spent the summer rooting and wallowing, to help gather 
them into the lower pens. They ate their meager lunch in a rocky cleft up higher 
than others ever came, a place Arin had shown him the first year he went to help 
gather pigs. He spent a few days nutting in the woods, with his friends, 
laughing and playing tricks like the others. They all wanted to know what he was 
learning. When he explained that so far it was just work, like any work, they 
wondered why he agreed.
“It will be soldiering,” Gird said, leaning back against a bank and squinting up 
at one of their favorite nut trees. “And in the meantime, it’s food and coppers 
for my family—what better?”
“Good food?” asked Amis. He was lean and ribby, as they all were that year.
Gird nodded. “Lots of it, too. And that leaves more—”
“Can you take any home?”
“No.” That had been a disappointment, and his first disgrace. Sharing food was 
part of his life: everyone shared, fast or feast. But when he tried to take home 
a half-loaf being tossed out anyway, it had brought swift punishment. “The 
sergeant says that’s stealing. They’re getting enough for me, he says, more than 
I’m worth. That may be so, though I try. But not one crust will they let me take 
out, or a single dried plum.” The stripes had not hurt as much as knowing he 
could not share; he had not told his father why he’d been punished.
Terris made the closed-fist gesture against evil. “Gripe-hearts, is what they 
are. You watch, Gird, they’ll turn you against us.”
“Never.” Gird said it loudly, though he could already sense a rift between him 
and his friends. “I can share from my own, when I earn my own: then you’ll see. 
Open heart, open hands: the Lady’s blessing.”
“Lady’s blessing,” they all said. Gird made sure to put a handful more than his 
share into the common sack, that would go up to the count’s steward as their fee 
for nutting in those woods.
At Midwinter Feast, he stood once more before the steward, this time in the 
Hall, and agreed to his next year’s service. His father had stayed home, 
shrugging away Gird’s concern for his cough. Two days in ten, he thought, they 
will not have to feed me, and there’s the coppers besides. He was proud of the 
thought that his pay might help with the fieldfee.
Two days in ten made one in five. In the short days of winter, the sergeant set 
him to learning counting and letters. Gird hated it. Sitting with cold feet and 
numbed hands over a board scrawled with mysterious shapes was far harder than 
fetching water from the well, even when that meant breaking the ice on it first. 
At home he could read tallies well enough, the notched sticks all the farmers 
used to keep count of stock and coin. But here were no helpful hints… you could 
not tell, from the words, who wrote them. Without the clue that this tally was 
Oder’s… when everyone knew that Oder had only a double-hand of sheep… you had to 
know all the words and numbers to find out what it said.
Some of the men laughed unkindly at his struggles. “Thickhead,” said one, a 
balding redhead whom Gird had rather liked before. “Perhaps the knowledge could 
get in, if we cracked it open for you?”
“More like his little wit would fall out,” said another. “He thinks with his 
hands and feet, that one, like most peasants.”
Gird tried to concentrate on markings that seemed to jump and jiggle about in 
the flickering candlelight. Was the sign for three supposed to stick out this 
way, or that? He wiggled his fingers, trying to remember. The sergeant’s sword 
was on the same side as that hand… he shook his head, confused once more.
“Here,” said the redhead, handing him two pebbles. “Put this in your hand—no, 
that hand—and hold it there. Now call that your left hand, eh? Stonehand. Some 
signs are stonehand, some are empty hand—you can remember that much, can’t you?”
He might have, but he was angry. He clenched his teeth against the temptation. 
The sergeant intervened. “Let him alone, Slagin. The stone’s a good idea, but 
leave the rest of it. Some boys take longer, that’s all. All right, Gird, the 
cook needs more water.”
By spring, the two days in ten of plentiful food had begun to show. He had 
always been heavier built than most of his sibs. “More like my brother,” his 
father had said, of an uncle dead before he was born. Now his broader frame 
began to carry thicker muscle. He had grown another two fingers up, and was 
straining the seams of his shirt. And that summer he carried a ruckbasket of 
plums without difficulty.
All that year, Gird worked his two days in ten, and his family settled into the 
knowledge that he would almost certainly become a soldier. His father continued 
to teach him the crafts and skills of farming, but with less urgency. His mother 
let out his old shirt, and made a new one, without pleading with him to stay 
home. His brothers admitted, privately, that life was a bit easier when he got 
part of his food elsewhere, and the coppers came in on quarterdays. Rauf tried 
once to tease him into a fight, calling him coward when he backed off; a few 
months later he noticed that Rauf crossed the lane to avoid him. And his friends 
seemed glad to see him, when any of them had time off for foolery, which wasn’t 
often.
So at Midwinter, he gave his oath to the steward, and entered training as a 
recruit, to sleep in the barracks with the others and learn the arts of war.



Chapter Two
« ^ » 
“Your oath to the steward’s one thing,” said Sergeant Mager. “It’s me you’ve got 
to satisfy.”
Gird, along with three other recruits, all from other villages, stood uneasily 
in his new orange uniform while the sergeant stalked back and forth in front of 
them. The other soldiers were inside, enjoying the Midwinter Feast. They were in 
the little back courtyard he knew so well, with an icy wind stiffening their 
skins.
“If you make it through training,” the sergeant went on, “you’ll give your oath 
to our lord or his guardian. You’ll go where he sends you, and fight his 
battles, the rest of your time as soldier. Some of you—” He did not look at 
Gird. “—some of you started your training as boys. But you needn’t think you 
know much yet. You all start level.”
Level meant the bottom. The senior recruits, that Gird had seen cuffed and 
bullied by the older men, now cuffed and bullied the new ones. Gird was no 
longer the cook’s helper, but he still hauled buckets of water, scrubbed floors, 
and now had his uniform to keep clean and mended, besides. The boots that went 
with it kept his feet from the snow, but chafed badly until he learned how to 
pack them with oily wool. He had never had to do anything to a bed but fall into 
it and fight his brothers for the cover: now he had to produce as neat a 
mattress, as tightly rolled a blanket, as the others. And, lacking a boy to do 
the work, all four new recruits washed dishes.
Yet none of them complained. Like Gird, they had all been peasants’ sons, only 
one of them the son of a free tenant. It was worth all the abuse to have a full 
belly all winter long, somewhere warm to sleep. Gradually they got used to 
having enough to eat, a bunk each, with a warm blanket, whole clothes that fit, 
boots.
Gird had been hoping to move quickly into training with weapons, but the 
sergeant had other priorities. They would all, he said firmly, with a hard look 
at Gird, learn their letters well enough to follow simple orders. They would 
learn to keep count, so they could help the steward or his agents during 
tax-time. Ifor, who had been sent from the nearest trading town, could already 
read a little, and use the pebble-board for figuring. He didn’t mind the daily 
session with letters that was still torture to Gird.
“You’ll never make sergeant, Gird, if you don’t learn this,” the sergeant 
warned. Gird was beginning to think he didn’t care, if making sergeant meant 
making sense of reading and writing and numbers. He could see, as clear as his 
hand on the table, how many legs two sheep had, but trying to think of it and 
write it down made the sweat run down his face. He was the slowest in this, as 
he was strongest in body. The sergeant insisted that it didn’t have to work that 
way, that many strong men were quick-minded in learning to read. Gird eyed the 
others wistfully, wondering what the difference was inside their heads. He 
struggled on. He knew all the marks, now, that stood for numbers and sounds; he 
could read the simplest words, and write his own name in awkward, shaky letters. 
But it got no easier, for all his labors.
Besides that, they had to learn about their lord’s domain: the correct address 
for the lord himself, for the steward, for the various officers who came through 
on inspections. The names of all the villages, and the headmen of each, and the 
sergeants in all the places the guard was stationed. Once in the lord’s guard, 
they might be sent anywhere within his domain. Most men served away from their 
homes, at least until they were well along in service. Gird had never really 
considered the possibility that he might leave and never come back. Going off to 
war was one thing, but leaving this village—the only place he’d ever known—to 
make a life somewhere else—that was new and disturbing. He frowned, but said 
nothing. At least this was better than reading and writing. The lists went on 
and on. They had to know the right name for each piece of equipment in the 
barracks, from the tools used on the hearth to the weapons hung on the walls. 
Each weapon had not only a name, but a name for each part—for each movement with 
which it could be used—for the command given to make each movement.
When they did begin what Gird recognized as soldier’s training, it was hardly 
different from the games boys played. Wrestling—he had wrestled with the other 
lads all his life. He was good at it. When the sergeant asked him if he thought 
he knew how, he answered briskly that he did, and stepped out. Someone chuckled, 
but he ignored it. They laughed at everything the new recruits did, good or bad. 
He eyed the balding redhead he’d been told to work with, and cocked his arm, 
edging in as the boys always did. Something like a tree trunk suddenly grabbed 
him and he felt himself flying through the air, to land hard on the cold stone 
floor.
“It’s not a game, any more,” said his partner mildly. “Try again.” Some five 
falls later, when Gird was breathless, bruised, and much less cocky—and the 
other man had hardly broken into a sweat— the sergeant called a halt.
“Now you know what you don’t know. Convinced?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Remember: if we have to crack your head to let in wisdom, we will.” The 
sergeant was serious, but Gird grinned at that. It made sense. His father said 
much the same, and he’d known all his life that his own head was considered 
harder than most.
Besides wrestling, there was drill. Gird found he liked that, although he had 
trouble with some of the sequences, and more than once turned in the wrong place 
and got trodden on. And pounded, when the sergeant caught up with him. But when 
it worked, when all the separate individuals merged into one body, and the boots 
crashed on the stones together, it sent shivers down his backbone. This was 
really soldiering, something the village folk could watch and recognize, 
something to show off. If the sergeant ever let them past the gates, which he 
had not for tens and tens of days.
One late winter day, shepherds came to ask the guard’s help in hunting a pack of 
wolves. The steward agreed, and the sergeant, now mounted on a stout brown 
horse, led them all out into a miserably cold, bleak day with neither sun nor 
snow to commend it. Gird marched for the first time in uniform down the lane 
past his cottage, where his younger sister peeked through the leafless hedge and 
dared a shy wave. He could not wave back, not with the sergeant’s eye on him, as 
it surely was, for all he rode ahead. But he knew she watched, and admired her 
older brother, and someday all the others would too. He could imagine himself 
receiving admiring glances from all the villagers, when he saved their stock 
from wolves or folokai, or protected them from brigands.
Gird enjoyed the wolf hunt, though it meant that he and the other inexperienced 
ones spent three whole days trudging through cold damp woods and across even 
colder wet pastures, looking for wolf signs. It was not until much later that he 
realized the sergeant never expected them to find any—that’s what the gnarled 
old tracker with his hounds was for—but it kept them out of trouble and far away 
from the actual hunt. They returned in the glow of a successful hunt, behind the 
lucky ones who had actually killed two wolves and so got to carry them through 
the village (Gird and the other recruits had carried them most of the way back, 
while the hunters themselves told and retold exactly how each spear had gone 
into its prey.)
With the coming of spring, they spent more of their time outside, and more of it 
in things Gird recognized as soldierly. Marching drill, and long marches across 
the fields and pastures. Archery, not with the simple and fairly weak bows his 
own people used for hunting small fowl in the woods, but with the recurved bows 
that took all his strength to draw. They learned the use of stick and club, 
facing off in pairs and later with the older recruits in sections. Gird 
collected his fair share of bruises and scrapes without comment, and dealt as 
many.
Days lengthened with the turning year. Soldiers as well as farmers had to put in 
their due of roadwork, and Gird’s weapon on that occasion was a shovel. He 
hesitated before jamming it into the clogged ditch: was this like a plow? Did he 
need to perform the spring ritual of propitiation before putting iron in 
Alyanya’s soil? He muttered a quick apology as he saw the sergeant glare his 
way. It would have to do. He meant no disrespect, and he had brought (on his own 
time) the sunturning flowers to the barracks well. Although the sergeant had 
brushed them away without comment, surely the Lady would understand.
He might have known his mutter would not go unnoticed. Even as he tossed the 
second shovelful of wet clay and matted leaves to one side, the sergeant was 
beside him.
“What’s that you said, Gird?”
“Just asked the Lady’s peace, sir, before putting iron to ’er.”
The sergeant sighed, gustily, and looked both ways to be sure the others were 
hard at work before he spoke. “Gird, when you were a farmer’s brat, you paid 
attention to the Lady, and no doubt to every well-sprite, spring spirit, and 
endstone watcher. I’ve no doubt who it was tied that bunch of weeds to the 
wellpost.”
Gird opened his mouth to say it wasn’t weeds at all, but the proper flowers, 
picked fresh that morning, but thought better of it.
“But now you’re a soldier, or like to be. You need a soldier’s patron now, Gird, 
not a farmer’s harvest matron. Gods know I’m as glad of the Lady’s bounty as 
anyone, and I grant her all praise in harvest time. It’s right for farmers to 
follow all the rituals. But not you. Will you stop to ask the Lady’s blessing 
every time you draw steel, in the midst of battle? You’ll have a short life that 
way.”
“But sir—”
“You cannot be both, Gird, farmer and soldier. Not in your heart. Did your folk 
teach you nothing of soldiers’ gods?” Gird shook his head, still shoveling, and 
the sergeant sighed again. “Well, ’tis time you learned. Tir will take your oath 
in iron, same as mine, and asks nothing but your courage in battle and your care 
for your comrades. The lords say he’s below Esea, their god—” He peered at 
Gird’s face, to see if he understood. Gird nodded, silently; his father had had 
a lot to say about Esea—a foreign god, he’d said, not like their own Lady, and 
not like the Windsteed. “But to us it doesn’t matter,” said the sergeant. “He’s 
god enough for me, my lad, and that should be enough for you. Think about it. 
And no more flowers around my well, is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.” He had not thought soldiers that different. Everyone knew the 
capriciousness of the merin, the well-sprites… how the water rose and fell, 
regardless of local rains, how even its flavor changed. Had that well in the 
barracks yard gone years without proper care? He was sure the water had tasted 
sweeter after his offering. But he could not argue with his sergeant.
After the roadwork, after the bridge repairs that followed the spring rains, the 
recruits had their first chance to mingle with the villagers. Gird spent most of 
that time helping his father and brothers with their work, but found an hour now 
and then to meet with his old friends. At first they were properly impressed 
with his growing strength and martial skills, but that didn’t last long.
“It’s not fair,” said Tens, when Gird had thrown him easily for the third time 
one evening. “You’re using soldier’s tricks against friends, and that’s not 
fair.” He, turned away. So did the others.
“But I—” Gird stared at their backs. He knew what that meant.
If they shut him out, he would have no one in the village but his family. And 
his family, just lately, had been irritating him with complaints about his 
attitude. If the sergeant forbade him to remember all the Lady’s rituals, his 
family insisted that he perform them all perfectly. He could not lose his 
friends: not now. “I—I will teach you,” he offered. “Then it would be fair.”
“Would you, truly?” Teris turned around again.
“Of course.” Gird took a deep breath. The sergeant might think he knew 
nothing—or that’s what he kept saying—but here he knew more than any of them. 
“We can say we have a guard unit—we can have a sergeant, a captain—”
“I suppose you’ll want to be captain,” said Kev.
“If he’s teaching us,” said Teris, shrugging, “he can be captain. For awhile.”
“We need a level field,” said Gird. He would teach them marching, he thought to 
himself. Maybe if he taught them, he wouldn’t forget the commands himself. 
Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered an oath not to teach “peasants 
and churls” the arts of war. But marching in step wasn’t an art of war. They’d 
all tried it when they were little boys; they just hadn’t known how to do it 
right. And wrestling wasn’t an art of war; no one fought battles by wrestling. 
And archery… all boys played with archery. Nonetheless, he took care that the 
level field they decided on was well out of sight of the guard stations.
In a few weeks, Gird’s troop of boys was moving around the back horse pasture 
with assurance. Bit by bit, as he learned from the sergeant, he transferred 
knowledge to the boys.
“The little groups are called squads,” he said one day. “We have enough to have 
three of them; it’s like pretend armies. Every squad has a leader, and marches 
together, and you can do real things with it.” They built a sod fort in the 
field, and practiced assaults. Teris, in particular, had a gift for it; he 
remembered everything Gird told him, the first time.
Now, rehearsing his new knowledge with his friends, Gird felt that his life as a 
soldier was well begun. That first summer as a recruit, he spent all his free 
time with them; he saw no reason why their old friendship should ever end. He 
wished he could show them off to the sergeant. If he could train them, he had to 
be learning himself, didn’t he?
But as time passed, Gird’s friends were working too hard in the fields to have 
time for boyish play. First one, then another, failed to turn up for drill, and 
then the others refused to do it. They wanted to lie in the long grass and talk 
about things Gird didn’t know: whose brother was courting whose sister, which 
family might have trouble raising the field-fee this year, all that timeless 
village gossip. When he tried to argue them into drill or wrestling, they simply 
looked at him, a look the sergeant had taught him to think mulish and stupid. He 
gave in, since arguing would not serve, and wished he could live in two places 
at once.
After harvest, he had less time off himself, and rarely came into the village 
all that winter. The recruits had begun to learn sword-work, and even Gird knew 
that he could make no excuse for teaching his friends to use edged weapons, even 
if they had had them to practice with. No one did; the strictest of the laws 
forbade any but soldiers to have weapons, and even the free smiths feared the 
punishment for breaking that law. Besides, the sergeant still insisted that he 
keep trying to learn to read and write. None of his friends could, or cared to. 
His father admitted that reading was a useful skill, but wasn’t at all sure that 
it was right for a farmer to know. Gird opened his mouth to say “But I’m not a 
farmer!” and shut it again. That was the whole point, and they all knew it.
There were other barriers growing, too, between them He could not tell them what 
the sergeant said about Alyanya, or what he felt himself. Even the rituals of 
harvest had seemed a little silly; the twisted wisps of straw, the knotted yarn 
around the last sheaf, all that was peasant lore, far removed from his future as 
a soldier. He felt guilty when he listened to the other soldiers’ jests; those 
were his people, his family and extended kin. Yet he wished that the villagers 
would somehow impress the soldiers—would somehow be more soldierly, so that he 
could feel pride in them.
And there was the matter of soldiers’ discipline. For himself, Gird could stand 
a few buffets when he made a mistake, a few lashes for coming back drunk from 
the harvest festival trying to sing “Nutting in the Woods.” Being clouted by the 
others was no worse than being mauled by Rauf and the older boys when he’d been 
younger. For that matter, many families were almost as rough; his father had 
taken a belt to him more than once, and his oldest brother had pummeled him 
regularly before he married and moved away.
What he did not like was having to do the same to others. When Keri, a lad from 
one of the distant villages, mishandled a sword, and the sergeant had them all 
join in the punishment, Gird told himself that someone who couldn’t stand a few 
buffets wouldn’t stay strong in battle, but he didn’t like to think which bruise 
on that battered face had come from his fist. He got a reputation for being 
strong enough but unaggressive, a little too gentle. The sergeant shook his head 
at him after seeing him flinch from Keri’s punishment. “And I thought you’d be 
the quarrelsome sort, glad enough to clout others. Well, better this way, as 
long as you don’t mind killing an enemy. But mind, lad, soldiering’s not for the 
faint heart or weak stomach.” He was sure he would not mind a battle; it was 
having to hit someone helpless that made him feel sick to his stomach. This was 
another thing he could not share with boyhood friends; he knew they would not 
understand.
Past Midwinter Feast, in the slack of late winter, he found another troubling 
presence in the barracks. Three of the soldiers, all from Finyatha and rotated 
here from the count’s household, favored Liart. Gird had never heard of Liart 
before that second winter, when he came back from the jacks one night to find 
the three crouched before the hearth with something that whimpered between them. 
When they heard him, one of them whirled.
“Get away!” he’d said. “Or by Liart’s chain, you’ll rue it!” He had gone to the 
sergeant, unsure, and seen the sergeant’s face tighten.
“Liart, is it? Liart’s chain? I’ll give them Liart’s chain!” And he had stormed 
out, bellowing. But in the end he had gone to the steward, and come back shaken. 
“A god of war is a god of war,” he’d said then, in the bleak light of a winter 
morning. “Our lord approves, if someone chooses Liart for patron.”
Gird tried to ask, and was sworn at for his pains. Then, later, one of the other 
men, Kadir, explained. “Liart’s followers buy his aid with blood; ’tis said he 
likes it best if it comes hardly… d’you see?” Gird didn’t, but knew he didn’t 
want to know. “Liart’s chain… that’s the barbed chain, like the barbed whip they 
use on murderers, up in Finyatha. Some lords use it, more than used to. Mostly 
it was thieves and outlaws, in the old days, so I heard. But the thing is, Gird, 
don’t you be asking trouble of Liart’s followers; they’ll torment you as glad as 
anyone, if you bring notice to them. I’d be careful, was I you.”
A few days later he found a short length of barbed chain on his bunk, as they 
came in for inspection. The sergeant’s eyes met his; he took his punishment 
without complaint; they both knew he had not put it there. He himself had 
declared for Tir, as his sergeant had suggested the previous summer, although he 
had not yet given his oath of iron. That would require a Blademaster, and the 
sergeant said they would have the chance after they’d given their final oath to 
the lord when training was over. The sergeant had told him what was lawful for 
him to know, though, and it was very little like anything the villagers taught.
So when the days lengthened again into spring, there were many things he could 
not share with old friends. They would have questions he could not answer—that 
was the best face he could put on it. Likely it would be worse. And he himself, 
as tall now as any of the guards, would be promoted from recruit come Summereve, 
when the lord was home from Finyatha.
Later he would remember that spring as one of the happiest times of his life, 
drenched in honey. He was young and strong and handsome; when he walked along 
the lanes to visit his family, with the brass badge of his lord’s service shined 
and winking in the sun, the little children smiled and waved at him, tagging 
along behind. “Gird,” they called. “Strong Gird… carry me, please?” Girls near 
his age glanced at him sideways; he felt each glance like a caress. Boys too old 
to tag him like the younger children watched nonetheless, and when he stopped to 
speak to someone they’d come close. “Is it hard to be a soldier, Gird?” they’d 
ask. And sometimes he told them tales of the barracks, and watched their eyes 
widen.
Once, twice, he had leave to go to the gatherings in the sheep-folds around, 
where the young men and girls met and danced. He was too young yet—he merely 
watched—but he enjoyed the music, and the respectful, if wary, glances. His old 
friends still joked with him, cautiously, but none ventured to wrestle or match 
arms. He didn’t mind that; he didn’t want to hurt them, and he knew now that he 
could.
Even at home, it was a good spring. His father’s eyes still showed concern, but 
his older brothers were clearly proud to have a brother in the guards. Other 
lads his own age were still “lads” only—too young to marry, too young to inherit 
a farm, and most were younger sons. “Sim’s boys” or “Artin’s boys,” they were 
called, in lumps like cattle. But he, Gird son of Dorthan, he had a name for 
himself in the village, and a nickname to match, for even the veterans called 
him “Strong Gird.” And on his rare days off, when he helped his father and 
brothers on the farm, he knew he deserved that nickname: he could outlift any of 
them, could haul more wood and dig a longer line of ditch. Now he could handle 
the longest scythe they had, and mow as level a swathe as his father.
“I can’t say they’ve spoiled you for work,” his father said one of those nights, 
when Gird was enjoying a last few minutes by the fire before walking back to the 
barracks. “You’re a good worker; you always were, from a little lad. You’re 
strong, and you’ve no foolish ideas about it. But I still wish— ” He left the 
wish unfinished. Gird knew what he would have said, but he had never understood 
it. He would never forget his family, the people of his heart.
And, strong as he was, he wouldn’t die in battle far away—he would come home to 
them. Couldn’t they understand that?
“I’ll be all right, Da,” he said, patting his father’s shoulder. “I’ll be good, 
and someday—” But he could not name his private dream, not then. It trembled on 
the edge of his mind, half-visible in a cloud of wishes too vague to express. He 
would do something wonderful, something that made the village and the sergeant 
both proud of him. Something very brave, that yet hurt no one but bad men, or 
monsters.
“Go in peace, Gird, as long as you may,” his father said. “I pray the Lady 
forgives your service of iron.”
His father always said that, and it always annoyed him now. Alyanya, the Lady of 
Flowers, the Lady of Peace, the Lady whose permission they must have each spring 
to touch the land with plow or spade—Gird thought of her in his mind as a more 
beautiful form of the village maids. Rahel, maybe, with shining hair down her 
back, or Estil whose perfect breasts swung dizzyingly with every stroke of the 
scythe during haying. Those girls, those flower-scented soft-skinned girls with 
their springtime bodies swaying along the lanes, those girls didn’t mind his 
“service of iron.” No, he had seen them glance, seen them smile sideways at him, 
while farm lads his age received no flicker of eyelash at all.
And surely the Lady herself, whatever else she was, understood the need for 
soldiers—surely she also admired broad shoulders, strength, the courage of a man 
with bright weapons in his hand. The sergeant had told him an old tale about 
Alyanya and Tir, in which the Lady had her Warrior guardian, and was glad of his 
service. He had never heard such a tale at home, but it made sense, the way the 
sergeant told it. That the iron of plow and spade was but another form of the 
iron of sword and spear, and the Lady’s consent to one was as gracious as her 
consent to the other. “Bright harvest,” the sergeant’s tale had sung, “born of 
this wedding, child of this marriage—” Girl and Lady, he thought to himself, 
both know and want the strong arm, the bright steel. But he did not argue with 
his father, as he had once the year before. His father was a farmer, born and 
bred, and would die as a farmer— may it not be soon! he thought piously—and he 
could not expect a farmer to understand soldiers’ things.
He walked back through the late-spring night, with starlight glittering in the 
puddles alongside the lane, as happy as he could imagine being. He was Gird, the 
local farmer’s son who had made good, had made a place for himself in the lord’s 
household, by the strength of his arm and the courage of his heart.
  
Then the lord count arrived from the king’s court. All the guards stood rigid in 
the courtyard for that: Gird in the back row, with the other recruits. Tall as 
he was, he had a good view of the cavalcade. A halfsquad of guards, looking 
somehow older and rougher than those he had met, on chunky nomad-bred horses, 
followed by two boys that looked younger than Gird on tall, light-built mounts. 
Behind them, a prancing warhorse with elaborate harness embroidered and stamped 
on multicolored leathers. And on the warhorse, their lord—Gird’s liege lord, 
Count Seriast Vanier Dobrest Kelaive—a sour-faced young man in orange velvet, 
black gloves, tall black boots, and a black velvet cap with an orange plume. He 
looked, Gird thought, like a gourd going bad in storage—a big orange gourd 
spotted with fungus.
Immediately he suppressed the thought. This was his lord, his sworn liege, and 
for the rest of his life he would be this man’s loyal vassal. His eyes dropped 
to the horse, the saddle, the tall polished boots. There were his spurs, the 
visible symbol of his knighthood, long polished shafts and delicate jewelled 
rowels. The steward came forward; the squires dismounted, handing their horses 
to grooms. One of them held the lord’s bridle; the other steadied the off 
stirrup while he dismounted. Gird watched every detail. So far he had not had a 
chance to ride more than the mule that turned the millsweep. But in watching the 
horse, he heard everything, heard the steward’s graceful speech of welcome, the 
curt response.
He knew, as did they all, that the young lord had been educated at the king’s 
court in Finyatha; this year, at Summereve, he would take over his own domain, 
and the steward’s rule would end. Everyone had liked that idea—or almost 
everyone—and had told one another tales of the steward’s harshness. A young 
lord, they’d said, their own lord, living finally on his own domain, would 
surely be more generous. The steward would have to do his bidding, not make up 
orders of his own.
But now, seeing the young lord in person, Gird had a moment of doubt. For all 
the complaints he’d heard of the steward’s harshness, most years no one went 
hungry. The sergeant had told him of other lands where brigands or war brought 
famine. Here, despite the fees, a hardworking family could prosper, as his had, 
with one brother tenanting his own cottage, and Arin soon to marry. Would things 
be better under the young count?
Still, Summereve, only a few days away, would bring a great day for both of 
them. The lord’s investiture, in the moments after midnight. He could not 
imagine what solemn rituals gave one of the lords dominion; the sergeant made it 
clear that it was none of their business. Perhaps the sergeant himself had never 
seen. Village rumor, he remembered, had it that the lords gained their great 
powers when they took office. But he had never seen any lord, or anyone with 
powers beyond the steward’s ability to ferret out the truth when someone lied. 
He could not begin to imagine what kind of powers their young lord might have, 
or use. He pulled his mind back from this speculation to his own prospects. His 
promotion from recruit to guard private, the next afternoon, would be part of 
the lord’s formal court, the first occasion on which the count would show his 
wisdom and ability to rule well. Gird had his new uniform ready, had every bit 
of leather oiled and shining, every scrap of metal polished. He let his eyes 
wander to the rest of the entourage. Behind the lord’s horse came others equally 
gaudily caparisoned: young nobles in velvets and furs, sweating in the early 
summer heat. Young noblewomen, attended each by maids and chaperons, riding 
graceful horses with hooves painted gold and silver. They began to dismount, in 
a flurry of ribbons and wide-sweeping sleeves, a gabble of voices as loud and 
bright as a flight of birds in the cornfield. As the young lord passed his 
steward’s deferential bow, and led the party into the house, Gird felt a surge 
of excitement. The real world, the great world of king’s court, the outside 
world he had never seen, had come to him, to his own village, and he would be 
part of it.



Chapter Three
« ^ » 
Behind the main mass of the lord’s hall lay the walled gardens. To the east, the 
fruit orchard, with its neatly trimmed plums and pears, its rare peach trained 
against a southern wall. To the west, the long rows of the vegetable garden, 
mounds of cabbage like a row of balls, the spiky blue-green stalks of onions and 
ramps, the sprawling vine-bushes of redroot. Ten-foot stone walls surrounded 
each garden, proof against the casual thief and straying herdbeast. But not, of 
course, against the daring of an occasional boy who would brag the rest of his 
life about a theft of plum or pear from the lord’s own garden.
Meris, son of Aric, now the tanner’s apprentice, had taken a plum the year 
before, but it was partly green. This year, he determined to take a sackful, and 
share them out, and they would be ripe ones, too. The lord’s best plum tree, as 
Meris knew well (for his uncle was a skilled pruner of trees, and worked on 
them), was the old one in the middle of the garden, the only survivor of a row 
of plums grafted from scions of the king’s garden in Finyatha. Its fruit ripened 
early, just before Summereve, medium-sized reddish egg-shaped plums with a 
silver bloom and yellow flesh.
It seemed to him that the young lord’s arrival would be an excellent time to 
make his raid. The lord and his retinue would be busy, and nearly everyone else 
would be watching the excitement in the forecourt. So as soon as the first horns 
blew across the field, signalling the approaching cavalcade, Meris left off 
scraping the hair from the wet hide he was working on, and begged his master to 
let him go.
“Oh, aye, and if I don’t you’ll be so excited you’ll likely scrape a hole in it. 
Very well… put it back to soak, and begone with you. But you’ll finish that hide 
before supper, Meris, if it takes until midnight.”
With the prospect of a belly full of his lord’s best plums, a delayed supper was 
the last thing Meris needed to worry about. He grinned his thanks and darted 
from the tannery. He had hidden what he needed behind a clump of bushes on the 
east side of the lord’s wall… a braided rawhide rope with a sliding loop. Other 
boys used borrowed ladders, and he’d heard of the smith’s boy using some sort of 
hook tied to rope, but he had found that the looped rope could nearly always 
find a limb to fasten on. With a little support from the rope, and the skill of 
his bare feet on the rough-cut stone walls, he had always managed to get over. 
And the rawhide rope, without a hook or other contrivance, never attracted the 
suspicious attention of the guard. Once they’d found it, and he watched from the 
bushes as they shrugged and left it in place. A herdsman’s noose, they’d said, 
dropped by some careless apprentice. Let the lad take his master’s punishment, 
and braid another.
He waited, now, in the same clump of bushes, watching people stream by from the 
eastern fields. Soon no one passed. He heard a commotion around the wall’s 
corner, from the village itself. Let it peak, he thought. Let the lord arrive. 
He waited a little longer, then glanced around. No one in sight, not even a 
distant flock. He swung the noose wide, as he’d practiced, and tossed it over 
the fence. He heard the thrashing of leaves as he pulled, and it tightened. He 
tugged. Firm enough.
Standing back a bit from the base of the wall, he threw himself upward, finding 
a toehold, and another. Whenever he found nothing, he used the rope, but most of 
it was skill and scrambling. At the wall’s top, he flattened himself along it 
and gave a careful look at the hall’s rear windows. Once he’d been seen by a 
servant, and nearly caught. But, as he’d expected, nothing moved in those 
windows. Everyone must be watching the forecourt, and the young lord’s arrival. 
He pulled up his rope, and coiled it on the top of the wall. He could gain the 
wall from the inside by climbing one of the pears trained along it; he needed 
the rope only for getting in. This time, though, he planned to use it to lower 
the sack of stolen fruit on his way out. He checked his sack, took another 
cautious look around, and climbed quickly down a pear tree to the soft grass 
under the trees.
He heard a blast of trumpets from the forecourt, and grinned. Just as he’d 
planned: complete silence in the gardens, and everyone out front gaping at the 
lord. Silly. He was going to be there long enough for all to see, so why bother? 
Meris glanced around, still careful. No sign of anyone. One of the gates between 
the fruit orchard and the vegetable garden was open; he could see the glistening 
cabbage heads, the spikes of onion.
He moved forward. None of the pear trees had ripe fruit, but all were heavy with 
green pears. One of the golden plums was ripe; a single fruit lay on the grass 
beneath. Meris snatched it up and bit into it. Sun-warm and sweet, the juice 
slid down his throat. He spat the pit into the grass and plucked several of the 
golden plums for his sack. He took a few red plums from another tree, and then 
found himself at the old one, the “king tree” as his uncle called it.
It was loaded with ripe and overripe plums; clearly the steward had decided to 
leave it for the young lord’s pleasure. Ordinarily, Meris knew, the trees were 
picked over every day to prevent loss to bird and wasp. But here the limbs 
drooped, heavy with plums, and the grass beneath was littered with fallen fruit. 
Wasps buzzed around these; the air was heavy with the scent of plum. Meris 
stepped forward, careful of the wasps beneath, and started picking.
He had nearly filled his sack, when he heard a door slam at the far end of the 
garden. He looked over his shoulder. Surely the welcoming ceremonies would have 
taken longer than this! He could see nothing between the trees, but he heard 
voices coming nearer. To go back, he would have to cross the central walk, in 
clear view of whatever busybody gardener had come back to work. But on this 
side, only a few steps away, was the open door to the vegetable gardens. He 
could outrun any gardener, he was sure, but he might be recognized. If he could 
hide for a little…
Quietly, he eased through the garden door, still without seeing whose were the 
oncoming voices, and found himself in unknown territory. To his left, rows of 
cabbage and onion stretched to the rear of the stable walls. Ahead were the 
beanrows, tall pole frames with bean vines tangling in them, only waist-high at 
this season. In a few weeks the beanrows would have been tall enough, but right 
now he’d have to crawl in between the poles. Scant cover, and once he was among 
them, a long way to any of the walls. On his right, the low matted redroots, 
with gourds beyond them, and some feathery-leaved plants he’d never seen before. 
The wall he’d come through was covered with some sort of vine; it had orange 
flowers and was trimmed off a foot or so below the wall-height. He saw no one, 
in the whole huge garden, but he saw no place to hide quickly if someone came, 
in.
He flattened himself against the wall by the open door, and listened. Guards, 
they sounded like, rough voices. Perhaps the lord had sent them to check on 
everything—though Meris thought he should have trusted his local sergeant. The 
voices had passed beyond, and then he heard them coming back, heard the steady 
stride, the faint chink of metal on metal. Guards, sure enough. He dared a look, 
saw a broad back in the orange and black striped tunic, no one he recognized. 
Guards who had come with the young lord, then. They were through; they passed 
by, and kept going. He listened to their heavy step all the way down the main 
walk.
He grinned to himself. His luck was holding. In a mad impulse, he darted forward 
and yanked two onions out of the ground and stuffed them in his sack. And a 
ramp. Ramps, the onion cousin that none of the peasants was allowed to grow, 
brought from the old south, so they’d always heard, and sold sometimes on market 
days for high prices—he would have a ramp of his own, the whole thing. He might 
even plant it, under the forest edge, and grow more. Then he stood up.
“Hey—you there!” In the time it had taken him to pull a ramp, one of the 
gardeners had entered by the stable doors. Meris did not wait to see what would 
happen; he bolted straight for the door into the orchard. Behind him, the 
gardener’s yell had started others yelling. He slammed the door behind him and 
threw the latch; it might slow them an instant. Then he was off, running between 
the trees as hard as he could pelt, the sack of stolen fruit banging his thigh.
He hardly saw the group of people strolling along the main walk before he had 
run into them, knocking one man flat. He heard high-pitched cries, and deeper 
yells of rage, and kept going, knocking aside someone’s grab at his arm. It 
seemed the orchard had grown twice as wide; tree limbs thrashed his face. Behind 
him now were the heavy feet of guardsmen as well. When he came to the wall, he 
swarmed up the pear tree as fast as a cat fleeing a wolf, and gained its top, 
Here he paused a moment. The guards were too heavy for the pears; they’d never 
be able to climb so high, he thought. Of course, they’d bring ladders… He caught 
a flash of bright orange between the trees below, and someone yelled. Hardly 
thinking, he snatched an onion from his bag and fired it at the shape. Another 
bellow; he turned to leap into the thicket below. He’d have to risk mashing his 
fruit. He had no time to lower it carefully; in fact, he’d have to run off 
without it if he didn’t want to be caught.
  
The sergeant kept them on parade in the forecourt even though the young lord had 
gone on into his hall. He might come back out; besides, the peasants were still 
milling about in the lane near the gates. When the noise began, a reverberant 
yell from somewhere deep in the hall, the sergeant sent squads in at once, one 
through the hall itself. Almost as soon as they disappeared into the hall, they 
came boiling back out again, running for the gates. Gird, with the other 
recruits, knew that something had happened, but not what; the sergeant silenced 
them with curses when they asked, and finally sent them off to the barracks. 
There they shifted from foot to foot, nervous as young colts in a pen. They 
dared not sit on the bunks made ready for inspection; they dared not do 
anything, lest it be the wrong thing.
Not long after, they were called back. The sergeant looked as grim as Gird had 
ever seen him; no one dared speak. He hurried them into formation, marched them 
once more to the forecourt. This time they were told to form a line dividing the 
forecourt in half. On one side, the lord and his steward, and the guardsmen. On 
the other, the villagers, crowding in behind Gird and the other recruits. And 
between them, his shirt torn half off his back, Meris son of Aric.
Gird stared at the scene before him, bewildered. He had known Meris all his 
life; the younger boy had a name for mischief, but Gird had thought him safely 
apprenticed to the tanner. What could Meris have done, to cause such an uproar?
The boy, held tightly by two guardsmen, stood as if lame, leaning a bit to one 
side. Gird could see a bruise rising over his eye. On the far side of the court, 
the lord started forward, slapping one black glove against the other. The 
steward laid a hand on his arm, was shaken off with a glare, and stepped back.
“What’s his name?” asked the lord. No one answered for a moment; Gird thought no 
one was sure who should, or how the young lord should be addressed. Then the 
steward spoke up.
“Meris, son of Aric,” he said. “A tanner’s apprentice.”
The young lord flung a glance back at the steward, and nodded. “Meris, son of 
Aric… and is Aric here?”
“No, my lord. Aric is a herdsman; your cattle are in the pastures beyond the 
wood right now; he is with them.”
“And the tanner, his master: where is he?”
A movement among the villagers, and the tanner stepped forward. “Here, sir.”
“Sir count, churl.” The lord looked him up and down. “A fine master you are—did 
you teach your ’prentice to thieve, is that it?”
“Sir?” The tanner’s face could not have been more surprised if he’d found 
himself dyed blue, Gird thought. The young lord barked a contemptuous laugh at 
him.
“You mean to claim you did not know where he was? You did not know he was 
stealing fruit from my orchard? From the way he ran straight for that pear tree, 
I daresay had done it often before. You know the law: a master stands for his 
apprentice’s misdeeds—”
“Stealing fruit?” Gird did not know the tanner well; the man had moved into the 
village only three years before, when old Simmis had died and left the tannery 
vacant. But he seemed honest enough now, if perhaps none too bright. “But he 
begged the time off to see your honor’s coming—”
“While you, I presume, were too busy to see your liege lord’s arrival, or to 
supervise your apprentice properly?”
The tanner looked from lord to steward and back again, seeing no help anywhere. 
“But—but sir—I didn’t know. I thought he—”
“You should have known; he was your apprentice. Be glad I don’t have you 
stripped naked and in the stocks for this; the steward will collect your fine 
later.” The lord smiled, and turned to the boy. “And as for this young thief, 
this miscreant who was not content to steal my fruit, but boldly assaulted my 
person—you’ll climb no more walls, and steal no more fruit, and I daresay you’ll 
remember the respect you owe your lord to the end of your life.” The steward 
moved, as if he would speak, but the young count stared him down. “It is your 
laxness, Cullen, that’s given these cattle the idea they can act so. You should 
have schooled them better.”
The courtyard was utterly silent for a long moment. Then a soft murmur began, 
like the first movement of leaves in a breeze, rustling just within hearing. 
Gird felt a wave of nausea, as he realized with the others that the young lord 
intended far worse than the steward ever had. Even now he could not believe that 
Meris had assaulted the lord: Meris had never assaulted anyone. His mischiefs 
were always solitary.
It was then, as his eyes slid from one to another, not quite meeting anyone’s as 
their eyes avoided his, that he noticed the pin clasping the young count’s 
cloak. A circle, like the symbol of Esea’s Eye, the Sunlord, but sprouting 
horns… like a circle of barbed chain, the barbed chain the followers of Liart 
had left on his bunk. And those three, of all the soldiers, were untroubled by 
the count’s malice… were eager, he realized, for whatever the count wanted.
What the count wanted, as events proved, was threefold; to terrorize his 
peasantry, to impress his friends from the king’s court, and to leave Meris just 
enough life to suffer long before dying. Long before the end of it, Gird and 
many others had heaved their guts out onto the paved court, had fallen shaking 
and sobbing to their knees, trying not to see and hear what they could not help 
seeing and hearing. Not even his sergeant’s fist on his collar, the urgent “Get 
up, boy, before it’s you—” could steady him. He staggered up, shook free of the 
sergeant’s hold, and bolted across the empty space into the crowd, fighting his 
way to the gate like a terrified ox from a pen.
He had moved so suddenly, with so little forethought, that no one caught him; 
behind him the villagers reacted to his panic with their own, screaming and 
thrashing away from the scene of torture. That kept the rest of the soldiers 
busy, though Gird didn’t realize it. He ran as if he could outrun his memories, 
down the long lane past his father’s cottage, out beyond the great field, the 
haymeadows, fighting his way blindly through the thickets beside the creek, and 
through the rolling cobbles to the far side. Then he was running in the wood, 
staggering through briar and vine, falling over the gnarled roots of the old 
trees to measure his length again and again. He never noticed when his uniform 
tore, when thorns raked his arms and face, tore at his legs. Higher in the wood, 
and higher… past the pens where they fed the half-wild hogs, past the low hut 
where the pigherder stayed in season. He startled one sounder of swine, so they 
snorted and crashed through the undergrowth with him for a space. Then he was 
falling into another branch of the creek, and turning to clamber upstream, 
instinct taking over where his mind couldn’t, his legs finally losing their 
stride to let him topple into the rocky cleft his brother Arin had shown him all 
those years ago.
For some time he knew nothing, felt nothing, and the hours passed over him. He 
woke, with a countryman’s instinct, at dusk, when the evening breeze brought the 
hayfield scent up over the wood, and tickled his nose with it. He ached in every 
limb; his scratches burned and itched, and his mouth tasted foul. Until he was 
up on his knees, he did not remember where he was, or why— but then a spasm of 
fear and shame doubled him up, and sourness filled his mouth. He gulped and 
heaved again. Meris, a boy he had known—a lad who had tagged behind him, more 
than once—would never walk straight again, or hold tools, and he had worn the 
uniform of the one who had done it.
He could hear his mother’s voice ringing in his head. This was what she’d meant, 
about taking service of iron, and leaving the Lady of Peace. This was what his 
father had feared, that he would use his strength to hurt his own people. 
Scalding tears ran, down his face. He had been so happy, so proud, only a few 
days before… he had been so sure that his family’s fears were the silly fears of 
old-fashioned peasants, “mere farmers,” as the sergeant so often called them.
  
Arin came to the cleft before dawn, sliding silently between the trees. “Gird?” 
he called softly. “Girdi—you here?”
Gird coiled himself into an even tighter and more miserable ball as far back as 
he could burrow, but Arin came all the way in, and squatted down beside him.
“You stink,” he said companionably, one brother to another. “The dogs will have 
no trouble.”
“Dogs?” Gird had not thought of dogs, but now remembered the long-tailed hounds 
that had gone out with the tracker after wolves.
“I brought you a shirt,” said Arin. “And a bit of bread. Go wash.” The very 
matter-of-factness of Ann’s voice, the big brother he had always listened to, 
made it possible for him to unclench himself and stagger to his feet. He took 
the shirt from Arin without looking at it, and moved out of the cleft before 
stripping off his clothes. In the clean chill of dawn, he could smell himself, 
the fear-sweat and vomit and blood so different from the honest sweat of toil. 
Arin smelled of onions and earth. He wished he could be an onion, safe 
underground. But the cold water, and a bunch of creekside herbs crushed to scrub 
with, cleansed the stench from his body. His mind was different: he could still 
hear Meris scream, still feel, as in his own body, the crack of breaking bones.
“Hurry up,” said Arin, behind him. “I’ve got to talk to you.”
Gird rinsed his mouth in the cold water, and drank a handful, then another. He 
pulled on the shirt Arin had brought; it was barely big enough across the 
shoulders, and his wrists stood out of the sleeves, but it covered him. Arin 
handed him the bread. Gird had not thought he was hungry, but he wolfed the 
bread down in three bites. He could have eaten a whole loaf.
By this time it was light enough to see his brother’s drawn face, and read his 
expression. Arin shook his head at him. “Girdi, you’re like that bullcalf that 
got loose and stuck in the mire three years ago—do you remember? Thought he was 
grown, he was so big, but once out of his pen and in trouble, he bawled for help 
like any new-weaned calf.” Gird said nothing; he could feel tears rising in his 
eyes again, and his throat closed. “Girdi, you have to go back.” That opened his 
eyes, and his throat.
“I can’t!” he said, panting. “Arin, I can’t—you didn’t see—”
“I saw.” Arin’s voice had hardened. “We all saw; the count made sure of it. But 
it’s that or outlaw, Girdi, and you won’t live to be an outlaw—the count will 
hunt you down, and the fines will fall on our family.”
It was another load of black guilt on top of the other. “So—so I must die?”
“No.” Arin had picked up a stick, and poked it into the moss-covered ground near 
the creek. “At least—I hope not. What your sergeant said was that if someone 
knew where you were, and if you’d turn yourself in, he thought he could save 
your life. And we’d not lose our holding. The steward… the steward’s not with 
the count in this. You saw that. But you have to come in, Gird, on your own. If 
they chase and capture you—”
“I can’t be a soldier,” said Gird. “I can’t do that—what they did—”
“So I should hope. They don’t want you now, anyway.” Even in his misery, that 
hurt. He knew he’d been a promising recruit, barring his slowness in learning to 
read; he knew the sergeant had had hopes for him. And now he’d lost all that, 
forever. His stomach rumbled, reminding him that he’d also lost plentiful free 
food. “We can use you,” Arin went on. “We always could.”
His mind was a stormy whirlwind of fear and grief and shame. He could imagine 
what the sergeant would say, the sneers of the other men, the ridicule. And 
surely he would be punished, for disgracing them so, and breaking his oath of 
service. Would he be left like Meris, a cripple? Better to die… and yet he did 
not want to die. The thought of it, hanging or the sword in his neck—and those 
were the easy ways—terrified him. Arin’s look was gentle.
“Poor lad. You’re still just a boy, after all, aren’t you? For all the long arms 
and legs, for all the bluster you’ve put on this past spring.”
“I’m—sorry.” He could not have said all he was sorry for, but a great sore lump 
of misery filled his head and heart.
“I know.” Arin sighed. “But I’m not sorry to think of you working beside me, 
Gird, when this is over. Come now: wash your face again, and let’s be going 
back.”
He felt light-headed on the way, but the stiffness worked out of his legs 
quickly. His soiled uniform rolled under his arm, he followed Arin down paths he 
hardly remembered.
“We need to hurry,” said Arin over his shoulder. “They were going to start 
searching again this morning, and I’d like to get you down to the village before 
they set the dogs loose.”
“What—what happened, after—
“After you bolted? Near a riot, that was, with everyone screaming and thrashing 
about. It took awhile to settle, and the count had more to think of than you. 
Then your sergeant came to our place, and talked to father. Said you’d deserted, 
and they’d have to hunt you unless you came back on your own, and even if you 
did it might go hard with you. He didn’t like the count’s sentence on Meris any 
more than the rest of us, but… he had to go along. He took out a few of the men 
late in the evening, calling for you. I was sure you’d come up here.”
“I didn’t think,” said Gird. “I just couldn’t stand it—
“Mmm. Then the steward came, after dark.” Arin stepped carefully over a tangle 
of roots and went on. “Said we’d lose the holding, the way the count felt. He’d 
come down to show off his inheritance to his friends from court, all those fine 
lords and ladies, and then Meris hit him with an onion—”
“He what!”
“That’s right. You probably don’t know what really happened. Meris was stealing 
fruit, thinking everyone would be busy out front, but the count wanted to show 
the ladies the garden, and hurried through. So when Meris was spotted, he ran 
straight into the count and knocked him flat, in front of his friends, and then 
fired an onion at him from the top of the wall. Probably thought it was a guard. 
Poor lad.”
Gird was silent, thinking what sort of man would cripple a boy for such a 
ridiculous mistake.
“He was wrong, of course, and now we’re all in trouble, from the steward on 
down, but—” Arin flashed a grin back over his shoulder. “At least you didn’t 
take part in it—and if they want to call it cowardice, well, I say brave men 
have better to do than batter rash boys into ruin.”
“I don’t want to die,” said Gird suddenly, into the green silence of the wood.
“No one does,” said Arin, “but sick old men and women. Did you think a soldier 
would never see death?”
“No, but—but I didn’t think it would be like this. If it is, I mean.” He didn’t 
expect an answer to that, and got none. Early sun probed through the leaves, 
shafts of golden light between the trees. The wood smelled of damp earth, herbs, 
ripening bramble-berries, a whiff here and there of pig or fox or rabbit. He was 
afraid, but he could not shut out the richness of the world around him, the 
springy feel of the leafmold under his feet. Air went in and out his nose 
despite his misery.
They came to the straggling end of the lane without being seen. Gird hesitated 
to follow Arin into the open, but his brother strode on without looking back, 
trusting him. He could see no one, but a distant shepherd far across the fields. 
Up the lane toward the village. Now he could see the first cottages, his 
father’s well, the lane beyond, the great fields to his right. A few women at 
the well, someone (he could not tell who) behind the hedge in front of their 
cottage.
Arin spoke again. “It’s better if you go alone, Gird. Can you do that?”
Cold sweat sprang out all over him. Alone? But he knew Arin was right. The 
sergeant and steward would know that his brother had gone to bring him in—the 
whole village knew already—but if he went the rest of the way alone it could go 
unspoken. Less chance that more punishment would fall on Arin.
  
The soldiers were just starting out from the gates when he came in sight of 
them; the sergeant must have delayed as long as he could. They paused, and the 
sergeant gestured. Gird walked on. His legs felt shaky again, and it was hard to 
breathe. When he was close enough, he didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t 
salute, not with his filthy uniform under his arm, and a peasant shirt on his 
back. The sergeant’s face was closed, impassive.
“Well, Gird,” he said.
“Sir,” said Gird miserably, looking down at his scuffed and dirty boots. He 
forced himself to meet the sergeant’s eyes. “I—I was wrong, sir.” One of the men 
guffawed; the sergeant cut it short with a chop of hid hand.
“You broke your oath,” the sergeant said. He sounded weary and angry together, 
someone who had come near the end of his strength as well as his patience. 
“Right in front of the count himself—” He stopped. “You’re carrying your 
uniform? Right. Give it here.” Gird handed it over, and the sergeant took it, 
his nostrils pinched. “Take off your boots, boy.” Gird stared a moment, then 
hurried to obey. Of course the boots were part of the uniform; he should have 
thought of that. His feet, pale and thin-skinned from more than a year of 
wearing boots daily, found the dusty lane cool and gritty. The sergeant jerked 
his head at Keri, one of the other recruits, who came to take the boots, and the 
uniform both. “We’ll burn them,” said the sergeant. “We want nothing tainted 
with cowards’ sweat.” Gird felt himself flushing; the sergeant nodded at him. 
“Yes, you. You were wrong, and so was I, to think you’d ever make a soldier. I 
should have known, when you flinched from it before…” His voice trailed away, as 
the steward came out the gates with the village headman.
The steward gave Gird the same sort of searching look. “So. He came back, did 
he? Or did you track him down?”
“He came back, sir. Brought his uniform; he’d got a shirt from somewhere.”
The steward looked Gird up and down. “It’s a bad business, boy, to break an 
oath. Hard to live down. Reflects on the family. The count would make an example 
of you, but for the sergeant’s report: you’re strong, and docile, and will do 
more good at fieldwork than you will feeding crows from the gibbet. See that you 
work, boy, and cause no trouble. One more complaint of you, and your family’s 
holding is forfeit.” He turned to the headman, ignoring Gird.
The sergeant said, “You heard him. What are you waiting for? Get along to work, 
boy, and thank your Lady of Peace that you still have the limbs to work with. I 
wouldn’t mind laying a few stripes on your back myself.”



Chapter Four
« ^ » 
In time Gird thought the stripes would have hurt less. He walked back to his 
father’s cottage, that bright morning, with his feet relearning the balance of 
walking bare, and his skin prickling with the knowledge that everyone knew he 
had been disgraced. Had disgraced himself, he reminded himself firmly. That 
first time along the lane, no one said anything, though he was aware of all the 
sidelong glances. He made it home without incident, to find Arin waiting for 
him.
“You’re to clean out the cowbyre,” said Arin, handing him the old wooden shovel. 
“He thinks it better if you keep out of sight.”
Gird glanced at his mother, busy at her loom. Her expression said “I told you no 
good would come of it,” as clearly as if she’d spoken aloud. His youngest sister 
Hara had obviously been told to keep quiet. He wondered if she’d been the one 
peeking through the hedge earlier. Probably. He took the shovel and went to 
work.
Across the barton, Arin was mending harness. Beyond the barton wicket, Gird 
could see a cluster of men in the greatfield. Midmorning now; they’d stopped 
work for a chat and a drink. He shoveled steadily, piling the dirty straw and 
manure in the basket, to drag across the barton and toss on the pile just beyond 
the gate. He wasn’t sure why Arin was staying close—did they think he would run 
again? And Arin hadn’t asked what happened up at the manor gates. Gird felt as 
touchy as after his first sunburn each spring. Every glance Arin gave him seemed 
to be made of flame.
At noon, Hara passed through the cowbyre with their father’s lunch wrapped in a 
cloth; she gave Gird a cool nod that cut him to the bone. Arin stopped punching 
holes and lacing straps together, and stretched. He smiled; by then Gird was not 
sure what that smile meant.
“Come on, then, long-face. It’s not what you’re used to, but it is food.” Arin 
hardly needed to wash, but Gird was muck to the knees and elbows. He remembered 
to flick a spatter of clean water out for grace, and washed carefully enough to 
please the sergeant before going in to get his bowl of mush. It hardly seemed to 
touch his hunger, but then the look on his mother’s face tightened his throat so 
that he could not have swallowed another bite.
By late afternoon, he had cleared the cowbyre, and when the cowherd brought the 
animals back to the village, and Arin led their own three into the barton, he 
had the stalls spread with fresh straw. He washed up quickly, and started 
milking. He had always liked the cows, even the crook-horned red cow who slapped 
his face with her dirty great tail and did her best to tread in the bucket. His 
father appeared as he was milking the second, but said nothing before going on 
inside. Gird leaned his head into a warm, hairy flank, and let his hands 
remember the rhythmic squeeze and pull that brought the milk down quickly and 
easily. The milk smelled good, no taint of onion or wild garlic. He leaned 
closer, and gave himself a warm, luscious mouthful.
“I saw that,” said Arin, from around the rump of the third cow.
“You know better.” It was the old bantering tone of their boyhood, but it didn’t 
seem the same.
“Sorry,” said Gird, wishing he weren’t so conscious of the taste of that milk, 
the richness of it. Their milk was traded to the village cheesemaker; grown men 
did not drink milk. He felt he could drink the whole bucket. He finished the 
last quarter, and carried the bucket into the kitchen. From there he could hear 
the voices in the front room: his father and the steward. What now? he wondered. 
But his mother, square athwart the kitchen hearth, sent him back to the barton 
with a wave of her spoon.
He ranged around it, doing every chore he could think of, until his father 
called him in. It was much like the night the steward had visited to offer him 
the chance to train: his mother and father sitting stiffly on one side, and the 
steward at their single table. Arin followed him in. Hara, banished to the 
kitchen, was as close to the door as she could be, and not be seen by the 
elders.
“You should know,” said the steward without preamble, “what your rashness will 
cost your father. He must appear at court, the afternoon of the count’s 
investiture. I have spoken with the count, and pled what I can: your youth, your 
father’s record of work, your brothers. But the fact is, the count is angry, and 
with reason. And your father, head of your family, will be fined. I came to tell 
him, that he might have it ready to pay, and save himself a night in the 
stocks.”
Gird met his father’s eyes. His father in the stocks? For his running away?
“You will attend as well, boy, and it may be the count will have something to 
say to you. He is your lord; he may do as he pleases. Remember your rank, and 
try—” the emphasis was scornful, “to cause no more trouble.”
When the steward had gone, Gird’s father patted his shoulder. “It’s all right, 
Gird. You’re here, and alive, and—it’s all right.” Gird knew it was not. For the 
first time in his life, he realized that he could do harm he could not mend. He 
felt at once helpless and young, and far removed from the boyish confidence of a 
few days before.
“What—how much is the fine?” he asked.
His father cleared his throat. “Well. They want repaid all they spent on your 
training. It’s all in the steward’s accounts, he says. Food, clothing, the 
coppers he sent me, even barracks room. And then a fine for oath-breaking—” Gird 
had never really mastered figures, but he knew he’d worn clothes worth far more 
than his family could have bought him. And eaten more, of better food. His 
father turned to Arin. “I’ll have to ask you—”
Arin nodded. “Of course. Will it be enough?”
His father scrubbed at his face with both hands. “We’ll see. Gird, you were too 
young before: come here, now, and see where our coins lie hid.”
He had known it was under some stone in the fireplace; everyone hid valuables 
that way. But not which—and before his father levered out the stone, he would 
not have suspected that one. Within was a leather pouch, and in that his 
father’s small store of coppers and silvers. His father counted it out twice.
“I saved most of your wages, for Ann’s marriage-price, and Hara’s dower. There’s 
a hand of coppers, and another hand of coppers. But a fine of double the 
fieldfee—that’s a silver and a hand of coppers, and doubled—” He laid it out as 
he spoke, handling the coins as gingerly as if they were nettles to sting him. 
Gird held his breath, thinking of the hours of labor, baskets of fruit and 
grain, that each represented. “And the uniforms—” The last of the coppers went 
into a row, and his father frowned, shaking his head. ‘ Tis not enough, even so. 
They might have let you keep the boots, at least, if we must pay for them.“
“How much?” asked his mother.
“Eight copper crabs, and that’s if the count holds to the steward’s say. I doubt 
he will. It’ll be a sheep, then, or a furl of cloth.”
“I have a furl, set by,” his mother said. “It was for—”
“No matter what it was for,” said his father harshly. “It is for Gird’s life, 
now.”
“I know that,” said his mother. Gird watched as she opened the press that stored 
her weaving, and pulled out a rolled furl of cloth. His father touched it 
lightly, and nodded.
  
“We’ll hope that will do,” he said.
The lord held court in the yard, with the count seated beneath an awning striped 
orange and yellow. None of his noble friends was with him; having sat through 
his investiture at midnight, they had all slept late.
Despite Gird’s father’s oath to the steward that they would appear, one of the 
soldiers came that morning to march them up to the manor gates. He had 
studiously ignored Gird; others had not, small children who had stared and 
called and been yanked back within cottages by their mothers. Gird’s feet were 
sore, not yet toughened to going bare, and his shirt had already split. His 
mother had patched it the night before. He was acutely aware of the patch, of 
his bare feet, of the difference between Gird, Dorthan’s son, peasant boy, and 
Gird the recruit.
That contrast was sharpened when he watched the other recruits accepted into 
service as they gave their oaths to the count, and pinned on the badges of guard 
private. None of them met his eyes, not even Keri. One by one they came forward, 
knelt, swore, and returned to the formation. Gird’s heart contracted. For one 
moment he wanted to throw himself before the count and beg to be reinstated. 
Then his roving eye saw the stocks, with the stains of Metis’s blood still dark 
on the wood.
Another case preceded theirs. The steward had intended it, Gird knew, as the 
ritual single case the new lord must judge; he had saved it back from the spring 
courts. Now he rushed the witnesses through their stories of missing boundary 
stone and suspected encroachment on someone’s strip of arable. Clearly not even 
the plaintiff and defendant thought it was as important as before, compared with 
Gird and his father. The count concurred with the steward’s assessment, and the 
loser didn’t bother to scowl as he paid his two copper crabs to the winner, and 
another to the count.
Then it was their turn. The steward called his father forward; Gird followed two 
paces behind, as he’d been bidden. To his surprise, the sergeant came too.
The count’s face was drawn down in a scowl of displeasure that didn’t quite 
conceal an underlying glee. The steward began, explaining how Gird had been 
recruited.
“A big, strong lad, already known as a hard worker. He seemed brave enough then, 
as boys go—” He turned to the sergeant.
“Willing to work, yes. Obedient, strong… not too quick in his mind, my lord, but 
there’s good soldiers enough that can’t do more than he did. Never gave trouble 
in the barracks.”
“And he gave you no hint of his… weakness?” The count’s voice this day was 
almost silken smooth, no hint of the wild rage he’d shown before.
The sergeant frowned. “Well, my lord, he did in a way. He didn’t like hurting 
things, he said once, and he never did give up his peasant superstitions. 
Flowers to the well-sprite, and that sort of thing.”
“Complained of hard treatment, did he?”
“No, my lord. Not that. Like I said, a willing enough lad, when it came to hard 
work, not one to complain at all. But too soft. I put it down to his being 
young, and never from home, but that was wrong.”
“Indeed.” The count stared at Gird until he felt himself go hot all over. “Big 
lout. Not well-favored, no quality in him. Some are born cattle, you know, and 
others are born wolves. You can make sheepdogs of wolves, but nothing of cattle 
save oxen in yokes. He looks stupid enough. I can’t imagine why you ever 
considered him; if you want to stay in my service, you’d best not make such 
mistakes again.”
“No, my lord,” said the sergeant and steward, almost in the same breath.
“Well,” said the count, “to settle young oxen, put stones on the load. You had a 
recommendation, steward?” The steward murmured; Gird heard again the terms his 
father had told him. The count nodded. “Well enough, so far as it goes, but not 
quite far enough. Let one of my Finyathans give the boy a whipping, and if his 
father wants him whole, let him pay the death-gift for his life. Else geld the 
young ox, and breed no more cowards of him.” His eyes met Gird’s, and he smiled. 
“Do you like my judgment, boy?”
Beside him, his father was rigid with shock and fear; Gird bowed as well as he 
could. The death-gift for a son was a cow and its calf that year. A third of 
their livestock gone, or his future sons and daughters. He knew his father would 
pay, but the cost!
The steward muttered again; the count shook his head. “Let the father pay now. 
What is it to be, fellow?” Gird’s father stepped forward, and laid the pouch of 
coins, and the furl of cloth, on the table. The steward took the pouch and 
counted the coins quickly.
“The cow?” he said without looking up. Gird’s father nodded, and the steward 
noted it down. “Go fetch the cow,” he said brusquely.
“Sir, she’s with the cowherd—”
“Will you fetch the cow or not?” The steward’s face was white. “It’s all one to 
me whether you have grandsons from this boy.”
Gird’s father bowed. “I’ll go now, sir, may I?” he said, his voice trembling, 
and backed away. The count laughed.
“Tis no wonder the boy’s a coward, with such a father. At least he’s docile.” 
The count waved a hand, and one of the Finyathan guards went off, to return in a 
few moments with a long rod bound in leather. “And you, sergeant, as you erred 
in choosing him, I don’t doubt you’d like a chance to leave your mark on him?”
Whether he wanted to or not, Gird could not tell, but the sergeant had no 
choice. That much was clear. Nor did he. He went to the stocks without 
resistance, hoping he could keep from crying out. He felt the scorn more than 
the blows, but the Finyathan guard, when the sergeant gave up the rod to him 
after four or five stripes, had evident delight in his work. The count watched, 
leaning on one elbow and chatting to the steward without taking his eyes off 
Gird’s face. By the time his father came back with the cow, Gird had bruises and 
lumps from more than the rod. He had closed his eyes before they swelled shut, 
not wanting to see his former friends in the guards as they joined in.
He woke face-down in a puddle of water that had been thrown over him, with the 
count’s waspish voice saying “Take the oaf away, and pray I forget all this.” 
His father’s arm helped him up; outside the gates Arin too waited, to help him 
home.
His head rang. He could not have made it without help. His mother and Hara 
cleaned the blood off, and muttered over the damage done to the shirt. The rest 
of that day and night he lay wrapped in a blanket, sipping the bitter brew his 
mother spooned down him at intervals. For himself, he’d have been glad to have 
wound-fever and die of it, to be at peace, for his old dreams tormented him like 
haunts, making mock of his pride. He twisted and groaned, until Arin woke and 
held him.
“It’s all right, Girdi. It’s over now.” But it was not over, and wouldn’t be. He 
was sour with his own sweat, disgusted with himself, and shaking with fears he 
could not express. If things had gone so wrong so fast, what was safe? Arin’s 
reassurance meant nothing. He remembered the look on the count’s face, the 
delight in cruelty. He might have been killed—really killed—his life had hung on 
the count’s whim.
The next morning he forced his stiff, aching body out of bed. He was not sure he 
could work, but he knew he must. His mother had yet to remake his shirt from the 
ragged scraps left after his punishment, so she insisted he stay indoors. His 
father and Arin agreed. Indoors, then, he worked—back to childhood, he thought, 
scrubbing the stone hearth, washing dishes and pots, carrying buckets of water 
from the well. It was hot indoors, breathless as Midsummer usually was. Sweat 
stung in the welts and scrapes; he ignored it, shrugged away his mother’s 
attempt to put a poultice on the deepest ones. She glared at him.
“You may want a fever, to get out of work, but we’ve no time for that, lad. 
Stand you there and no more shifting, while I clean this out again.” He felt 
himself flush, but stood. What else could he do? He had forfeited his chance to 
adult status. Her fingers were gentler than her voice. The sharp fragrance of 
herbs worked its way past his misery for a few moments as she stroked the heavy 
ointment on his back. “ ’Tis a bad world, lad, where such things happen. But you 
see what comes of taking iron to mend them. Remember this: no matter how bad it 
seems, soldiering makes it worse. It always comes hardest on those with the 
least. Mind your father, keep out of the lord’s eye: that’s best. Notice brings 
trouble, no matter if it seems good at first. Remember what tree the forester 
chooses.”
He’d heard that often and often before. It was not in the Lady’s ritual, but it 
was the village’s favorite truth: notice brings trouble. As bad to be always 
first in reaping as always last; as bad to be richest as poorest. The tall tree 
catches the forester’s eye, and the fattest ox suggests a feast. He had never 
liked it, since he could not have hidden among others even if he wanted to. 
What, he had wondered, was the tall tree supposed to do? But his trouble would 
prove the truth as far as the village was concerned, and he expected to hear it 
many times again.
He was young and strong and healthy; his body healed quickly and he was soon 
hard at work with his father. But he could not escape the knowledge that he had 
brought trouble to his family. They had been prosperous, for peasants: three 
cows, eight ewes, extra cloth laid away, the copper and silver coins that took 
so long to earn. His father had had a good reputation with the steward, and had 
no enemies in the village itself.
Now Arin could not marry until they earned the marriage-fee, but before that 
came the field-fee and house-fee, and the harvest taxes were coming soon. He 
could help with the work, but he had to eat, and he brought no more land with 
him, on which more crops could grow, or beasts graze.
His father said nothing of this. He had no need to say it; Gird knew precisely 
what it meant, what it would cost them all in labor and hunger to regain even a 
scrap of safety. His feet toughened quicker than his mind. Daylong in the fields 
he caught the tail end of comments that seemed intended for his ear. The other 
men said nothing near his father, but left him in no doubt what they thought. 
Young lout, they said, set himself up for a soldier and then shamed us all with 
his weakness. He knew some of them had been as sickened as he, but if they 
remembered it at all, they didn’t say so around him. It was convenient to blame 
it all on him. He knew, on one side of his mind, that this had always happened 
so, that once he had done the same, but it still hurt. His former friends stayed 
away from him, whether because of their fathers’ orders or their own scorn he 
didn’t know, and soon didn’t care. He was in a deep wallow of misery, just like 
the bullcalf in the bog Arin had mentioned.
In that first month of trouble, between the event and the harvest, only one 
mercy intervened. The young count and his entourage left to visit another of his 
holdings, and the steward conveniently forgot to put Gird on the workroll. In 
the required workdays, he could work his family’s garden and fieldstrip, while 
his father and Arin worked the greatfield for the count. And he could do 
day-labor for anyone hiring work done, taking his pay in a meal away from home 
more often than hard coin. Most of this was unskilled labor, fetching and 
carrying. Gird carried water for the masons brought in to raise the count’s 
orchard walls, and lugged baskets full of clay and broken rock. It was hard 
work, even for someone of his strength, and he soon felt the difference the 
change in food made. He came home so tired he could hardly eat, and fell onto 
the bed as soon as he’d cleaned his bowl.
At harvest, Gird could not avoid the other men and boys. Harvest time gathered 
in more than crops; the village people worked together and celebrated together, 
and the year’s stories began to form into chants and tales that would be retold 
over and over during long winter nights. It was no fault of Gird’s that his 
disgrace so neatly fit the measures of an old song, “The Thief’s Revenge” and 
needed but little skill to change a few words. He never knew who sang it first, 
but its jangling rhymes followed him down the lanes. “He gave a cry and ran 
away, as fast as he could run—” jibed the little boys. “Eh, Gird, can you outrun 
a fox? A pig?”
Now his former friends had their own say. A shrug, a wink between them, a 
shoulder turned to him. Teris even said “If you were going to make such a fuss, 
you could at least have saved Meris,” which was completely unfair. He could not 
have saved Meris; no one could. They hadn’t. But they blamed him for Meris, and 
for trying and failing. Some—Amis among them—said nothing, just watched him. 
Were they waiting for him to defend himself, to argue? But he had nothing to 
say. He was too tired to argue, too hungry and too miserable.
The girls never looked his way at all, and he was sure they laughed about him in 
their little groups. He was careful not to watch them openly and court more 
ridicule, although he had come to the age where the mere sight of a girl leaning 
to pull a bucket from a well could send his blood pounding. It was slightly 
easier to ignore the girls if he wasn’t with the boys. He quit trying to talk to 
anyone, soon, and kept to his own family.
With all they had lost, that winter was hard. They could not afford to butcher 
an animal for winter meat; they would need every calf and lamb next spring to 
pay the fieldfee. Gird’s scanty earnings had gone for the fall taxes, along with 
two of their sheep. That meant less wool next spring, for his mother to spin and 
weave, and less cloth to trade or sell. At least they had fodder in plenty, for 
that had been gathered before they lost the extra animals. And Gird roamed the 
wood bringing back loads of firewood and sacks of nuts. He avoided the nutting 
parties of the other boys and young men, avoided the last autumn gatherings of 
dancers at the sheepfold.
Later, he remembered that winter as the coldest, hungriest, and most miserable 
of his life, although he knew that wasn’t true. There was no real famine; they 
had beans and grain enough, some cheese. Except for the ritual cold hearth at 
Midwinter, they had a good fire yearlong. His mother had managed a whole shirt 
for him, pieced out of scraps, and he had rags enough to wrap his feet. It was 
the sudden difference, from more than enough to barely enough, that made it seem 
so bleak.
Meris died in the long cold days after Midwinter. Gird had tried to visit him 
once, but his family, suffering under a heavy fine as well as Meris’s injuries, 
wanted no contact with another unlucky boy. Meris had had few friends, but those 
boys loosed their frustrated rage on Gird when they caught him alone, and 
battered him into the snow. He might have fought back, to ease his own 
frustration and grief, but one of them got a bucket over his head. The guards 
heard the noise, and broke it up; when Gird wrestled the bucket off his head, 
the sergeant was standing there sucking his teeth speculatively. He said 
nothing, just watched, as Gird made it to one knee, then another, and staggered 
off down the lane.
That was the last direct assault, but by then Gird was convinced that everyone 
was against him. The next time he got a bit of work, and a copper crab, he took 
it to the smelly leanto behind Kirif’s cottage, where a couple of other men 
hunched protectively over mugs of sour ale. He knew it was wrong. He didn’t 
care. For a crab he got more ale than his head would hold, mug after mug, and 
his father found him snoring against the wall.
That loosed his father’s tongue, where the other had not. “A sot as well as a 
coward! I didn’t work so hard to save a drunken oaf, lad; this had best be the 
last time you spend our needs on your own pleasure.” It didn’t feel like 
pleasure then; his head was pounding and his stomach felt as if it never wanted 
food again. His father was not finished, however. He heard the full tale of his 
misdeeds, from the time he’d run off to follow Arin on the pighunt as a child, 
to the stupidity of going for a soldier, right down to his selfishness and 
sullenness in the past months. He had not told his father about Meris’s friends 
attacking him, or what Teris had said; he realized that it wouldn’t do any good 
now.
He felt almost as guilty as his father seemed to want. It was his fault, no 
getting around it, and if some of the consequences weren’t fair, nothing ever 
had been. Only one of the gods cared about fair, that he knew of, and the High 
Lord was far away, nothing much to do with the village folk or the soldiers, 
either one. He went back to work doggedly, determined to pay back enough of the 
debt he owed so that Arin could marry within a year. He didn’t visit the aleshop 
until after Midsummer, and then with a basket of mushrooms to trade, not good 
coin his family could use. And he stopped with a single mug, that put a pleasant 
haze between him and the other villagers.
Arin’s wedding briefly lightened his miseries, for his favorite brother would 
include Gird in the celebration despite anything he’d done. “Besides,” Arin 
said, “you’ve worked hard to get my fee together. You might have done much less; 
it wasn’t all your fault, after all. I know I can depend on you.”
For a wedding, all quarrels ceased. Oreg even donated a pig to the feast. Gird 
was old enough to wait in the barton with the men, to watch his brother’s dance, 
and join the drinking afterwards, when the newlyweds were safe abed and women 
were cleaning up the last of the feast. This was not like Kirif’s leanto; here 
was a cask of the strong brown brew from a neighboring vill, and hearty voices 
singing all the rollicking old songs he’d grown up with, from “Nutting in the 
Woods” to “Red Sim’s Second Wife.” He had enough ale to soften the edges of any 
remarks about him, and joined his loud voice to the others without noticing 
anyone’s complaint.
But this did not last. Arin and his wife took over the bed he had shared with 
Gird, as was only right; Gird slept on the floor near the hearth that winter. 
Arin’s wife, soon with child, began to have the childsickness, waking early 
every morning to heave and heave, filling the cottage with the stink of her 
illness. Gird, now on the work rolls, had his own duties to fulfill when the 
required days came around; he could no longer replace his brother and free one 
worker for the family. When Arin’s first child was born, another mouth to feed, 
they had not yet put by enough for the fieldfee. That year was leaner than the 
one before.
Soon Gird felt that he would never get anywhere at all. Arin’s wife lost a 
child, but was soon pregnant again. As hard as they all could work was barely 
enough to feed them; they had no chance to save towards replacing the sheep or 
cow Gird had cost them. Year flowed into year, a constant struggle to survive. 
Gird could not miss the gray in his father’s hair, the cough that every winter 
came sooner and lasted longer.



Chapter Five
« ^ » 
“I don’t see why you care.” Gird hunched protectively over his mug. The mood 
Amis was in, if he turned around to argue, Amis would grab it away. He didn’t 
have anything to trade for another, and this one would barely fuzz the edges of 
his misery.
“You’re turning into a drunk,” said Amis, far too briskly. “It’s been what—three 
years?—and all you do is work and drink—”
“And eat,” said Gird. “Don’t forget that—they tell me all the time at home.”
“And eat. You never come out with us—”
Gird shrugged, and took a swallow. Worse than usual, it tasted, but the bite in 
his throat promised ease later. “You may want me; the others don’t.”
“It’s past, Gird. So you’re not a soldier, so what? We didn’t like it that much 
when you were—”
“That’s true. You don’t much like anything I do: fight or not fight, run or not 
run, drink or not drink. If I gave up ale, Amis, would that make me friends? Not 
likely.”
“You know what I mean. Drink for celebration, yes—with all of us, a lot of 
singing and dancing and rolling the girls—but not this way. Come with us 
tonight, anyway.”
Gird swallowed the rest of the mug he allowed himself, and tried to think past 
the rapidly spreading murk in his head. Walk across the fields to some 
sheepfold, listen to a wandering harper play, dance with—it would have to be 
girls from the other village, none from here would have him. And then back by 
daybreak, to work— his feet ached, his back ached, all he wanted was his bed. 
But at home his father’s eyes would question silently: what did you take, to 
trade for that drink? What will you take next? It was my own, he answered that 
unspoken question. I found the mushrooms, I picked them when you were resting, 
it’s my right—
“All right,” he said gruffly. Amis grinned at him, steadied him as he stood. He 
did not look to see the reactions of the other men drinking in Kirif’s hut; he 
thought he knew exactly what he’d see if he did.
Somewhere on the walk, two others joined them: Koris and Jens, he’d known them 
all his life. His skin prickled; he was sure they were none too happy to find 
him coming along. But nothing they said led that way. It was all the common talk 
of their village, Jens courting Torin and her father’s dislike of it, a wager 
between Koris and his older brother on the sex of an unborn calf, Teris’s 
problems with his wife’s mother, how the last spring storm had damaged the young 
fruit on the trees. The thought passed through his mind that, but for subjects, 
it was much like the talk of his mother and aunt and sisters, that nearly drove 
him mad when he had to be indoors listening to it. For all that Jens and Koris 
talked of the girls, while Effa and Hara talked of the boys, it was the same 
talk. Who liked, who spurned, who loved secretly—who would be honest, and who 
lied in all encounters—whose work could be trusted, and who put rotten plums in 
the bottom of the basket.
He said nothing, having nothing to say, as the cool night air gradually blew the 
fumes of ale away. They were walking over the higher pastures sunrising of the 
village—east, as the lords called it. Under his feet the turf made an uneven 
carpet; overhead the spring stars blossomed as the night darkened. It had been a 
long time since he’d been out in the dark looking up, his gaze unmisted by 
drink. Some night-blooming plant—he knew he should know the name, but he’d 
forgotten—spread rare perfume on the air, and every lungful he took in seemed 
important, as if it carried a secret message.
They could see the sheepfold from the ridge, dark against the leaping flames of 
the fire built in the outer enclosure. As they came down the slope, the harpsong 
came to greet them, first the more carrying notes, then all of them, a quick 
rhythm that made them hurry. It ended, and voices rose in noisy swirls of 
greeting, flirtation, argument. Gird lagged as the others moved forward. He saw 
Jens edge toward a darker corner. There was Torin, who must have come earlier 
with her friends. Koris glanced back at him, and Gird stepped into the brighter 
firelight, not quite sure what he was going to do. He hadn’t been to one of 
these since he was old enough to be serious about it. Boys the age he’d been 
lounged against the low stone wall, or crouched atop, knocking elbows and joking 
about the older ones.
At least three times a growing season, from early spring to fall, the young 
unmarried men and women of five villages met at this communal sheepfold. Gird 
had no idea how the dates were set, only that the word would spread through the 
young men—tomorrow night, tonight—and those who wished would go. One cold autumn 
evening, the first year he’d gone, there’d been only three young men and two 
women, and the music had come from a ragged lad playing a reed pipe. Usually 
there were more, and always someone from outside, a stranger, to play the music 
they danced to. But he had not come since he left the guard’s training.
He heard someone say his name, across the fire, and his head jerked up. He 
couldn’t see who, even when he squinted against the flames. So. They’d heard the 
story too, no doubt, and it would all be told over again. He glared at the coals 
beneath the burning wood, that half-magical heap of colored lights and 
mysterious shapes that seemed to be struggling to say something. A long hiss 
ended in a violent pop, and he jumped.
“I wonder what it said that time.” The girl’s voice held humor, as well as 
warmth. Gird didn’t look at her.
“What all fires say,” he said.
“Here’s home and safety,” she said. And then, surprisingly, “Here’s danger; 
here’s death.”
Gird turned. She had a broad face, boldly boned for strength, not beauty, and 
all he could tell of her coloring in that uncertain light was that she was 
darker than he. Big capable hands held the ends of her shawl; she looked like 
any other young woman. Except for those eyes, he thought, watching the perfect 
reflection of the fire in them. Except for the mind that said those words.
“You’re Gird,” she said. “The one who left the guards.”
“Yes.” He wished he hadn’t looked at her.
“Are they hard on you?”
He looked again, once more surprised. “Now?” She said nothing, and he wondered 
whether he dared be honest. Silence lengthened. No one else came near them; he 
could feel no other attention, no other pressure than her quiet interest. “At 
first,” he began, “it was worst on my family—my father, my brothers—” He told 
her about that, the fines they’d had to pay, the extra labor on the roads. She 
said nothing, only nodding when he broke off. Tentatively, warily, he told her 
more. The guards themselves had bothered him least— even now that surprised him, 
that the sergeant, after that one explosion, had been fair, if distant, and the 
other soldiers neutral. “I’m just another farmer’s son to them. They don’t 
bother me, if they see me; they treat me no differently than the others. They 
never teased—” His head went down, remembering those who did, whose taunts he 
could not answer.
“It’s like rape,” she said. He stared at her, shocked and ready to argue, but 
she was still talking. “They blame the blameless, the victim: they always do. 
When the young count’s houseparty went hunting our way, and one of them took my 
cousin, took her there in the street just for the excitement of it, everyone 
blamed her. My aunt said ‘Oh, if you hadn’t loitered there,’ and the lad who 
loved her—or said he did—had nothing to say but blame. All her fault, it was, 
but how could she help it? They blame you, for not preventing what they never 
moved to prevent.”
“But I wasn’t—”
“Not your body,” she said, in a tone that meant he should have understood. Then, 
“Never mind. If you’re not killed, you’re still alive; so my cousin said, and 
married elsewhere a year later, after the babe died. She survived; you will; 
that’s how we all live.”
“It’s not right,” Gird said, in a voice that he remembered in himself from years 
past.
Her brows went up. “Are we gods, to know right and wrong beyond the law? I hate 
the way it is, but no one made me a lord.”
He would have answered, or tried to, but the music began again. At close range, 
the harp drowned out soft words, and the others had begun a song. Gird didn’t 
know it, but the girl did.
“Fair are the flowers that bloom in the meadowsFair are the flowers that bloom 
on the hillEach spring brings more to brighten the seasonEach winter snowstorm 
the bright flowers kills—”She had a husky singing voice, melodic but not strong, 
that clung to the melody like a peach to a twig, half-enfolding it. Gird could 
feel her singing along his body, a warm, slightly furry touch. He wanted to sing 
with her, at least hum the melody, but his throat was too tight. Another song 
followed that one, this time an even sadder lament that they all knew. He sang, 
feeling his voice unkink and lengthen into the line of the song; her voice 
rolled along beside, rich and mellow. At the end of the many verses, he realized 
that others had fallen silent to listen, and at once his voice broke harshly, 
ruining the ending. Someone laughed, across the firelight; Gird flinched as if 
he’d been slapped, but the girl’s hand was on his arm.
“Never mind,” she said, under cover of the harper’s quick fingering—it would be 
a jig, this time, and someone had found sticks to patter. Without really looking 
at the girl, Gird eased back to the angle between wall and fold, not at all 
surprised to find she had come with him. She stood closer than he found really 
comfortable; he could have put his arm around her and found her no closer.
“You know my name,” he said, gruffly, unwilling to ask what she might refuse to 
answer.
“I’m Mali, from the village near the crossing—some call it Fire-oak.” He 
remembered that name, from his guards’ training; with the name he called up the 
location, the number of families, all the details he’d been taught. It surprised 
him; he didn’t know he could remember all that. He looked down at her.
“You knew of me—”
She shrugged, and the shawl slipped back from dark hair. Something marked the 
side of her face: a scar, a birthmark. Hard to see in that light, but he could 
just make out a paler path across her cheek. “Most do; that kind of tale 
spreads. But Amis told me of you, and your past before the Guards. So I wanted 
to see you, see what they’d made of you.”
“A failure,” Gird said, then jumped as she slugged his arm. Hard: he would have 
a bruise there.
“Only you can make yourself a failure—and you a great strong lad with a head of 
solid stone—”
He was wide awake, now, as if he’d been dipped in a well. “What are you, some 
foretelling witch—?”
Firelight and shadow moved on her face; he could not read her expression. “I? 
I’m a farmer’s daughter, as you’re a farmer’s son. I’m headstrong too, so they 
say of me, and a dangerous lass to cross. If you married me you’d have a strong 
mother of your children, and a loyal friend—”
“Marry—I can’t marry—I’m—”
“A whole man,” she said. Gird could feel his ears go hot; he wanted to grab her 
and shake her, or disappear into thin air. He knew he was whole; his body was as 
alive to her as his ears, and far more active. Was this how girls his age 
bantered? Surely she was bolder than the others.
“I’m sorry,” she said then, in a quiet voice. He could feel her withdrawing 
without actually moving; she slid the shawl back over her hair. The withdrawal 
pierced him like a blade. He could not stand if it she left.
“Wait!” he said hoarsely. “I—you—I never heard anyone—”
“It’s no matter.” She wrapped the shawl tightly around herself, hugged her arms. 
“I’m overbold and wild; I’ve been told often enough. But I’d heard of you, and 
how you had changed, refusing your friends. I thought perhaps I could help, 
being a stranger—”
“You did.” Gird rubbed his own arms, feeling the texture of his clothes and skin 
for the first time in—when?—years? He felt alive, awake, inside and out, and not 
only in that way which proved men whole. His skin tingled. “I’m—I’m awake,” he 
said, wondering if she’d understand. Hot tears pricked his eyes; his throat 
tightened again.
She was looking at him, dark eyes hard to see in that flickering firelight—but 
he could feel the intensity of her gaze. “Awake?”
“It—oh, I can’t talk here! Come on!” Without thinking, he grabbed her arm and 
led her around the wall to the entrance. She had stiffened for an instant, but 
then came willingly, hardly needing his guidance. He barely noticed someone by 
the gate turning to look, and then they were out beyond the walls, on the open 
fields, with the firelight twinkling behind them and stars brilliant overhead.
He stopped only when he stumbled over a stone and fell, dragging her down too. 
He had been crying, he realized, the roaring of blood in his ears louder than 
any night sound, the smell and taste of his own tears covering up the fragrance 
on the wind. She had pulled free when he fell, and now crouched, a dimly visible 
shape, an armspan away. When he got his breath at last, he sat up; she did not 
move, either towards him or away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t—I’ve never done that before—”
“I should hope not.” The tone carried tart amusement, but not hostility.
“I had to get away—I couldn’t talk about it there, with those—”
“Only a few of them would still mock you, Gird.”
“It’s not that. It’s—oh, gods, I’m awake again! I didn’t know I wasn’t. I didn’t 
know I’d gone so numb, and now—”
“Does it hurt, like a leg you’ve sat on too long?” He drew a long breath, trying 
to steady his breathing. “Not— hurt, exactly, though it does prickle. It’s more 
as if I’d been sick, shut indoors a long time, so long I forgot about the colors 
outside, and then someone carried me out into spring.” He turned to her, wishing 
he could see her expression. “Did you mean that about marrying?”
To his surprise, she burst out laughing, a joyous rollicking laugh that he could 
not resist. He didn’t know why it was funny, but he laughed too. Finally, after 
a last snort, she quieted down, and apologized.
“I shouldn’t laugh at you, I know that, but for someone just waking after long 
illness, you do move fast. Was this how you courted the girls, back when you 
were in the guards?”
“I didn’t, back then—I was too young.” Even in starlight, he could see that 
she’d let the shawl slip back again, revealing her face. His body insisted that 
he was not too young now; he tried to stay calm. “Mmm—would you sit with me?”
She moved closer, spread her skirts, and sat down almost hip-to-hip. “I thought 
I was, with you the closest person to me on this whole dark night.”
She had a scent he had not noticed before; now it moved straight from his nose 
to his heart. Did all women smell like this? He cursed himself for a crazy fool, 
to have wasted the years in which he might have learned how to court such a 
girl. He clenched his fists to keep from reaching for her.
“But surely—” His voice broke, and he started again. “But surely you have 
someone—someone in your village—?”
Her low chuckle warmed his heart. “Alas no, Gird. For I’m the forward, 
quick-tongued lass you heard tonight; I will not guard my tongue for any man’s 
content, though I swear by Alyanya there’s no malice in it. And though I’m big 
and strong enough, and a good cook, I’m not much for threadcraft. My spinning’s 
full of lumps, and my weaving’s as bad as a child’s. My family’s parrion has 
always been in threadcraft, though my great-aunt taught me her parrion of 
cooking—she said I’d been born with a gift that way.”
“My mother and sisters have threadcraft enough,” Gird said. “But a parrion of 
cooking they’d welcome, even more in herblore than bakecraft.” He could hardly 
believe they had come so fast to discussion of parrions. Wasn’t that the last 
part before formal betrothal? He could not remember; he could not think of 
anything but the girl herself—Mali, he reminded himself firmly—and the smell and 
feel of her.
“Mine is that,” she said, the weight of her coming now against his arm; he 
shifted it around her shoulders, and she leaned into him. Where she touched him, 
her body seemed to burn right through their clothes; he felt afire with longing 
for her. It was a struggle to speak calmly. He took another long breath of the 
cold, clean night air.
“Your father?” Gird thought it likely her father wouldn’t agree, given his own 
reputation. But she shook her head, in the angle of his arm, where he could feel 
it.
“Grandmother’s our elder, and village elder too—the magelords don’t like it, but 
they agreed. She’ll be glad enough if anyone wants me, and you’re a farmer’s 
son, in the same hearthing. But what of your mother?”
“She’ll be happy.” He leaned closer, to smell her hair. Was he really talking of 
marriage with someone met just this night, and by firelight? Could she be a 
witch—or, worst of all, a magelady pretending to be peasant, disguised by her 
magic?
“I have to tell you about this,” said Mali, struggling upright for a moment. He 
looked at her; she had one hand to the mark on her face. “I’m no beauty, besides 
my loud tongue. Many call me ugly, for this scar if nothing else.”
“What happened?” It was a chance to breathe, to remind himself of the customs of 
his people.
Mali made a curious noise that Gird could not interpret, somewhere between a 
sniff and a snort. “I wish I could claim it came from defending my cousin 
against the magelords—it happened the same day—but in fact it was my own 
clumsiness. I was carrying a scythe to my brother in the fields, and tripped. 
When I came running back, looking for sympathy, there was my cousin in the lane. 
No one had time for me then, and no wonder. I thought to save my grandmother 
trouble by treating it myself, but failed to put herin in the poultice, so it 
scarred. My own fault.” She laid her warm hand on his. “But I will understand if 
you change—I mean, it’s not fair. I’ve landed on you this night like a fowler’s 
net on a bird. You must have a free choice, a chance to make up your own mind. 
See me in daylight and then if you still wish—‘
Contending thoughts almost silenced him. Gird eyed her. “Is it that you think 
you can get nothing better than the coward of the count’s own village? Was I 
just a last chance for you, is that what you’re saying?”
She sat bolt upright. For an instant he thought she was going to hit him again; 
the place she’d slugged him before still ached. “You fool! If you don’t want me, 
just say so. Don’t make it my fault.”
“I didn’t—
“You did.” She was breathing fast, angry, and he waited. Finally she went on. “I 
was curious. I’d heard—what I told you. For myself, barring I like a roll as 
well as anyone, I’d live alone rather than marry anyone’s last chance. Then 
meeting you—Amis said you were gentle, but he didn’t say how you sang.” Her 
voice trailed away. “And you’re no coward, whatever you think.”
“You don’t think a man knows himself best?”
Laughter burst out of her again. “Who could? Can water know it’s wet, or stone 
know it’s hard? What could it measure itself against? I know my feelings, but my 
grandmother knew I was meant for herblore, not needlecraft or weaving. So with 
you—did your father or mother think you would make a soldier?”
Surprise again. “I—don’t know. Not really, I suppose, although they feared I 
could be—”
“Cruel?” He could see her head shake in the starlight. “No, not like that. You 
can do what you must, but you take no pleasure in giving pain.” He was eased by 
that, and his suspicions fled. A strange girl, like no girl he’d known (but what 
girls had he known?) but not a cunning one. If she said she liked him, then she 
did. Gird cleared his throat.
“I would like to—” Lady’s grace; he didn’t even know how to ask. But Mali had 
moved nearer to him again, her shoulder against his, her fragrant hair once more 
against his face.
“You should wait until sunrise,” she said. “You might change your mind.”
Gird laughed. “Sunrise,” he said, “is too far away. Or do you want to go back 
and find witnesses to make it formal?”
“I want no witnesses,” she said, in a low voice that was almost a growl. “Not 
for this.” She folded her shawl, and lay back upon it, arms wide. “I swear by 
the Lady, that for this night I am content.”
And content were they both by sunrise. Gird had thought he knew how it went 
between men and women; it was no secret after all, and any child saw it often 
enough growing up. But Mali’s body, sweet-scented and warm on the cool hillside 
grass, was nothing like his imaginings—or far more. He could not get enough of 
touching her smooth skin, her many complex curves all ending in another place to 
enjoy with tongue and nose and fingers. And she, by all evidence, enjoyed it all 
as much as he did. They had fallen asleep at last, to be wakened by the loud 
uneven singing of Gird’s friends on their way home. Mali chuckled.
“They want to let you know it’s time to go, but without interrupting. You know, 
Gird, they are your friends. You must forgive them someday.”
Right then he would have forgiven anyone anything, or so he felt. A pale streak 
marked distant sunrise. With a groan, he pulled his clothes together. “I don’t 
want to leave.”
Mali was already standing, shaking out her shawl. “If you wish, you know where.”
“You know I want to marry you.”
“I do not know. I know you enjoyed my body, and I enjoyed yours, but there’s 
more to marriage than that. But I like you, Gird. I say that now, after hearing 
you sing, laugh, and cry—more than many girls do, before they wed. Look on my 
face in daylight, and decide.” She turned away to start home. Gird caught her 
arm.
“Why not now?”
“What of your work today? What of your family? Go home, lo— Gird. Go home and 
think whether you want a big, clumsy, loud-voiced wife with a scarred face. If 
you do, come see me in daylight. Ask me then—”
“I’m asking now!”
“No. I’ll not answer now. Daylight for both of us then.” And she pulled away and 
was gone. Gird stared after her, then followed the distant voices of his friends 
toward home.
He caught up with them within sight of home. By then it was light enough to see 
their expressions; he could feel himself going red. Amis elbowed Jens.
“You see I was right. He just needed to get a little fresh air—”
“He got more than fresh air, I’ll warrant. Look at his face. If I’d gone out 
like that with Torin—”
“You wouldn’t. You’ll be learning how in your marriage bed, Jens.”
“I know how.” Jens shoved Koris, who shoved back. “It’s just that with her 
father—”
“Come on, Gird,” said Amis, throwing an arm around his shoulders. “Tell us—you 
drag the girl out in the middle of the dancing, did you just throw her on the 
ground, or what?”
He could hear the undertones in their voices—they weren’t sure if he was going 
to be angry, or sulk, or what. He felt like singing, and instead burst out 
laughing.
“That’s new,” said Amis. “I like that—Gird laughing again.”
“Be still,” he said, ducking away from Amis’s arm and the finger that was 
prodding his ribs. “You were right: I admit it. I needed to go dancing—”
“You didn’t dance,” said Jens.
Gird shrugged. He could feel more laughter bubbling up, like a spring long dry 
coming in. “I did well enough,” he said.
“Watch him go to sleep behind the hedges today.” Koris grinned, but it had no 
bite to it. “You may be tired by nightfall, eh?”
Gird grinned back. He felt that the bad years had never happened; he felt he 
could work for two days together. He drew a long breath—sweet, fresh air of 
dawn—and said nothing more. He had never expected to be happy again, and now he 
was.
He came in through the barton, aware of the stale, sour smell of the cottage 
after the freshness outside. All very well to fall for a girl, to marry her—but 
where would they sleep? He’d have to build a bed. He’d have to earn the marriage 
fee for the count, and the fee to her family for her parrion. He’d have to—
“You’re looking blithe this morning,” said Arin, from the flank of the red cow. 
Milk hissed into the bucket. Arin’s voice had sharpened, in the difficult years, 
but he sounded more worried than angry.
“Sheepfold last night,” said Gird. He took down the other milking stool, and a 
bucket.
“You? I thought you’d gone to Kirif’s.”
Gird washed the cow’s udder with water from the stable bucket and folded himself 
up on the milking stool. The brindle cow flapped her ears back and forth as he 
reached for her teats, and he leaned into her flank and crooned to her. “Easy, 
sweetling—I was at Kirif’s first, and then Amis came along and we went over to 
the fold—”
“Good for you,” said Arin. “Meet anyone?”
He might as well admit it; it would be all over the village by the time they 
came to the field. “You always meet someone at the fold,” he began, but he 
couldn’t hold the tone. “Someone,” he said again. “Arin, there’s a girl from 
Fireoak—”
“Where?”
“Fireoak. Sunrising of here. You know, Teris’s wife’s sister married into 
Fireoak. And her parrion is cooking and herblore—”
“Teris’s wife’s sister?” said Arin, with maddening cooless.
“No. Mali’s parrion. The girl I met.”
“Arin’s eyebrows went up. ”You were talking parrions? In one night?“
“We did more than talk,” said Gird, stripping the first two teats and going on 
to the next.
“You can’t mean—you’re not betrothed? Gird, you know you have to ask—”
Gird grinned into the cow’s flank and squirted a stream of milk at Arin, who had 
come to stand by her hip. “Not betrothed, but more than talk. Lady’s grace, 
Arin, you know what I mean. And I will ask for her, just you wait.”
“But are you sure? The first time you’ve been out with the lasses since before—” 
he stopped short, and reddened. Gird laughed.
“Since before I left the guards, you mean, and you’re right. So you think it’s 
like a blind man’s first vision, and I should wait and see? So she said, but I 
tell you, Arin, this is my wife. You’ll like her.”
“I hope so,” said Arin soberly. “Best tell Da.”
“After milking.” He finished the brindle cow, and took both buckets into the 
kitchen.
His mother gave him one look and said “Who?” Gird looked at her. “Is it so 
obvious?”
“To a woman and a wife? Did you think I was blind, lad? No, you’re a lad no 
more. Man, then. You’ve found a woman, and bedded her, and now you want to 
marry.”
“True, then. What d’you think?”
She looked at him, a long measuring look. “About time, I think. If you’re ready. 
You’ve spent long enough sulking—”
“I know,” he said, to forestall what was coming. She shook her head at him, but 
didn’t continue the familiar lecture.
“Well, then—I don’t know where the fee’s coming from, but you can earn that. 
What’s her parrion?”
“Herbcraft and cooking.” He held his breath; his mother had always talked of 
finding a wife with a parrion to complement hers: another weaver or spinner, 
perhaps a dyer.
“Well enough. No lad—man—takes advice of his mother, but you think now, Gird—is 
she quarrelsome? The house will be no larger for cross words.” That was said 
low; Arin’s wife was still in the other room, and she had brought, his mother 
had said once, a parrion of complaining.
“Not—quarrelsome.” She had said she was freespoken, but nothing in her voice had 
sent the rasp along his skin.
“Best tell your father.” She gave him a quick smile. “If she’s brought you 
laughter again, Gird, I’ll give her no trouble. It’s been a long drought.”
His father, still hunched over his breakfast, brightened when Gird told him. 
Arin’s wife said nothing, briskly leading her oldest out the front door. His 
father leaned close.
“Comely, is she?”
“She’s—” Gird could not think of words. She had been starlight and scent, warmth 
and strength and joy, all wrapped in one. “She’s strong,” he offered. His father 
laughed.
“You sound like the lad you were. Strong didn’t give that gleam to your eye, 
I’ll warrant. There’s more to the lass than muscle. When will you go to her 
father?”
“Soon. I—I’m not sure.”
His father whistled the chorus of “Nutting in the Woods” and laughed again. 
“Young men. By the gods, boy, I remember your mother—” Gird was shocked. His 
mother had been his mother— that capable, hard-handed woman in long apron, 
spooning out porridge or carding wool or weaving—all his life. His father had 
gone on. “Hair in a cloud of light around her face, and she smelled like—like—I 
suppose all girls do, in their spring. Never a young lad can resist that, Gird; 
we all go that way, rams to the ewes and bulls to the cows, and spend the rest 
of our days yoked in harness— but it’s times like this make it worthwhile.”
“Eh?” He had not followed all that; his father’s words brought back Mali’s 
scent, as if she stood next to him, as if she lay—and he pulled his mind back 
with an effort.
His father thumped the table. “To see sons ready to wed themselves, strong sons: 
that’s what’s worth the work, Gird. To see you with your eyes clear and your 
mind on something but the past.”
Gird shrugged. The self of yesterday, the self that had had nothing to hope for, 
was gone as if it had never lived.
“’Tis the Lady’s power,” said his father. “She can bring spring to any field.” 
This no longer embarrassed Gird; he had returned whole-hearted to his family’s 
beliefs.
His visit to Fireoak began auspiciously. Mali’s own mother had seen his mother’s 
weaving at the tradefair years before.
“She has the parrion for the firtree pattern,” the woman said. She was as tall 
as Mali, but spare, her dark hair streaked with gray. “If she has not the 
parrion for the barley pattern, I would be glad to trade.” Gird knew that his 
mother had wanted the barley pattern for years, and had never been able to work 
it out herself. She had bestowed the firtree pattern on Arin’s wife’s aunt; 
surely she would trade with his wife’s mother. He nodded: no commitment, but 
possibility.
Mali herself was kneading bread, her arms flour-smudged to the elbows. The scar 
she’d told him of was obvious enough, along the right cheek, more broad than 
deep. He didn’t care; he had known he would not care. It was hard to be that 
close to her, in the same air, and not holding her. Her eyes twinkled at him: 
agreement. Then she looked back at the bread dough and pummeled it again. He 
could feel once more her fist on his arm, the strength of her. She was strong 
inside and out; his knees weakened as he remembered the feel of her body all 
along his on the starlit grass.
“Mali’s not the quietest girl,” said Mali’s father. He was not so dark as Mali 
and her mother, a brown square man with a graying beard, almost bald. “She’s got 
a quick tongue.”
“Gird knows that,” said Mali, flipping the dough and slamming it down again.
“Like that,” said her father. Gird smiled at him.
“Better a quick tongue than one full of malice,” he said, misquoting the old 
proverb on purpose.
“Oh, aye, if it’s not quick into the pot. Good cook; her parrion’s valuable.” 
That began the bargaining phase. A daughter’s parrion was a family’s most 
valuable possession, the secrets and inherited talent of generations of women 
passed to a chosen carrier. A valuable parrion enriched the household gaining 
it, and impoverished those left behind. The lords’ fee for marriage was the same 
for all of the same rank, but he would owe Mali’s family for her parrion.
At least it meant that her family found his acceptable, and she must have agreed 
as well. Despite all the lords had done, the people had never come over to 
thinking that girls had to go where their families bestowed them. Marriage was, 
in the old rituals, the mingling of fires on a hearth—and if either failed to 
kindle, the marriage could not be.
Arin had come along for the bargaining phase, since Gird was neither holder nor 
heir. Gird and Mali escaped to the smallgarden, there to stand awkwardly staring 
at each other, in full view of her village. An amazing number of people seemed 
to need to go back and forth in the lane. Gird knew none of them, but noticed 
the same small boys driving the same goats up and down, a girl in a red skirt 
carrying a basket—full, then empty, then full again—past the gate. Mali finally 
began to laugh.
“It’s true—they’re just seeing how long we can stand here, and expecting one of 
us to turn tail and run.”
“The scar doesn’t matter.” The words were out before he thought; she flushed and 
it showed whiter. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“No—I’m used to it. I thought you’d come anyway, and I thought you’d still—but 
I’m blushing because it’s my fault.”
“Fault?”
She looked away past his shoulder. “I had heard of you; I went there to meet 
you, and no one else. And meeting you, I wanted you—and then—”
“And then I wanted you. So?”
“So—I still want you, but—don’t bring it back to me, years from now.”
“No.” He moved closer to her, ignoring the women now carrying buckets past on 
their way to the well. “No, it was meant. The Lady meant it, maybe, or some 
other god.” He put his arm around her waist, and she leaned on him. He could 
have carried her off to the barton, then and there, but Arin came out looking 
pleased.
“So—we have work to do, Gird, to earn your fees.”
He knew he had turned red; he could feel the heat on his face. “Ah—yes. Mali—”
“Don’t tarry,” she said. Then she leaned against him again, and kissed him, and 
whispered in his ear. “We may have a Lady’s blessing already.”



Chapter Six
« ^ » 
The only awkwardness came when he had to bring Mali before the count’s steward, 
to have her transferred on the Rolls. Luckily the count himself was not in 
residence, but the steward might have decided to invoke the rule himself.
“So—you’re marrying, young Gird?”
“Yes, lord steward.” Gird kept his eyes down.
“About time—you’ve loafed long enough.” The voice was chilly; Gird watched the 
fingers holding the pen tap on the edge of the parchment. “Look up at me, boy.”
The steward’s face was older, grayer, but otherwise unchanged. Gird met those 
ice-blue eyes with difficulty.
“You brought the marriage fee?” Gird handed it over, the heavy copper coins 
slipping out of his hands much faster than they’d come in. “And this is the 
girl—” The steward looked her up and down, and then glanced at Gird. “You chose 
strength, eh? A good worker, I’ll be bound—none too pretty—” Gird felt his ears 
burning; Mali’s face had gone mottled red. Her scar stood out, stark white, from 
brow to jawline. “Wide hips—good bearer. Any mageblood in your line, girl?”
“No, lord steward.” Her voice was husky, almost a growl.
“No, I daresay not. Nor would breed mages, is my guess. Waste of his lordship’s 
time, your sort, bar the fun of it.” The steward looked back down at the 
parchment. “Mali of Fireoak, daughter of Kekrin, son of Amis, wed to Gird of 
this village, son of Dorthan, son of Keris. Fee paid, permission granted to farm 
with Dorthan. That’s all then.”
They ducked their heads and went out quickly, both of them flushed and angry, 
but too wise to speak of it. First to Gird’s father’s house, for Mali to lay her 
first fire on the greathearth; every old grannie in the village was there to cry 
the portents of that flame. Gird held his breath. She put the splinters down in 
the Star pattern, and above them the tripod of fireoak, brought from her own 
family’s hearth, and then struck the flints. Once—would have been too soon. 
Twice—a fair omen, but not the best. On the third strike, a spark leapt from her 
tools to the tip of the fireoak splinters, and kindled living flame. Now she 
moved quickly, laying the rest of the fire in ritual patterns: this twig over 
that, this herb, a twist of wool from her father’s sheep, an apple-seed from 
their tree. The grannies muttered and flashed handsigns at each other; Gird was 
worried, but his mother smiled happily. It must be all right, then.
He and the other men left then, trudging through the back kitchen, then the 
cowbyre, into the narrow, cramped barton where the women had laid out the 
wedding feast on planks. This would be the refusing, he knew: Mali’s parents 
would come, and try to persuade her to go home. She would first refuse them, 
with the door open, then—when they argued longer—close and bar the door to them. 
After a ritual greeting to her mother-in-law, and a prick of the finger to get 
two drops of blood, one for the fire and one for the hearthstone, her parents 
would knock again. And now, as a member of this household, she would greet them 
as honored guests.
All this time, Gird endured the jokes of his friends and his brothers and 
father. He had heard such jokes all his life, finding them funny once he was old 
enough, but now, waiting for Mali to become his wife, and not her parents’ 
daughter, he was not amused. What did these grotesque fantasies have to do with 
Mali? He swiped irritably at his brother, when Arin tried to tie the traditional 
apron on him.
“You have to, Gird. You’re her husband now; don’t you want children?”
Gird looked at the apron, its ancient leather darkened by generations of 
celebrants. It was ridiculous. Bulls didn’t need such a thing; why did the gods 
demand it of humans? He could remember sniggering in the corner when Arin danced 
in the apron, and wondering how his brother could approach his wife in his own 
skin afterwards. His friends had come nearer, warily, ready to help Arin force 
him into it if necessary. He sighed, and let his arms fall.
“All right. But I still think—” He said no more; their hands were busy with 
thongs and lacings. “I wonder how old this custom is—”
Mali, when she came out, bit her lip to keep from laughing. At least, he hoped 
that was suppressed laughter on her face. He felt a fool enough, strutting 
around like a young bull first meeting heifers, and nearly as big. She wore the 
maiden’s vest of soft doeskin embroidered with flowers, laced tightly behind, 
where she could not reach it, a tradition as old as his apron. The men began to 
stamp the beat, their deep voices echoing off the barton walls as they chanted. 
Gird stamped as hard, feeling his face redden, hating it—but the old rhythm 
began to move him.
The steps were only partly traditional: part was each new-married man’s 
invention. The jiggling thing on the apron was ridiculous, yes—but it was not 
merely ridiculous. Gird strutted the length of the barton, whirled, skipped a 
step, backed—and closed on Mali. Her eyes were bright, twinkling with laughter; 
she glanced down, pretended shock, looked skyward and reeled backwards, to catch 
herself with a clutch at Gird’s shoulder. The watchers howled. She snatched her 
hand back, a maiden caught in indiscretion, and turned away. Gird circled her, 
faced her again, put his hands behind his back and waggled his hips. For an 
instant she grinned delightedly, then covered her face with her hands, brushed 
past him close enough for her skirts to catch on the apron, and then leaped like 
a startled deer.
Clearly, the dance was not embarrassing Mali—she played into the jokes as 
heartily as most men. Gird took heart, then. They could make their families 
laugh—their private joke, if their red faces came from exertion, and not from 
the shouts and laughter of others. They spun it out, circling and dodging 
between others and the tables, playing parts they only half understood. When 
they were both dripping sweat, Gird gave her a little nod, and his next rush 
carried them both into the cowbyre, where a stall had been laid with fresh straw 
for this occasion.
Here she had to unlace his apron, and he to unlace the maiden’s vest she wore, 
to replace it with the matron’s looser vest, his wedding present to her. Her 
fingers on his legs, his waist, brushed tantalizingly; the apron would be hardly 
more obvious than his response if she didn’t hurry. He fumbled with the vest 
lacings.
“Did they have to lace it so tightly?”
“That was my sister,” said Mali, breathless. “She wanted to see me faint, I 
think. Don’t break the laces, remember.” If he broke the laces, they’d have to 
give her family a sheep. He grunted and worked carefully. Finally the last knot 
came loose, and Mali drew a deep breath. “Ahh. Better.” She worked her arms out 
of the vest carefully, and turned to him.
Gird handed her the matron’s vest his mother and sisters had made. “You’d best 
get this on, if you don’t want to spend the rest of the feast in here.”
Mali chuckled as she looked him up and down. “Eager, are you?” She twitched her 
shoulders, putting the vest on, and Gird felt his pulse quicken. “But we’d 
better hang these out, or they’ll come in to help.”
“I’ll do it,” said Gird. The apron and vest had to be returned to each family, 
and the first step was to hang them on the appropriate pegs outside the cowbyre. 
A roar greeted him as he came out and put them up. Two of his friends were ready 
to grab him and keep him out, but he was quicker and managed to dart back into 
the stall with Mali.
Someone outside began another song, in which the women joined as well. Mali 
hummed the melody, and sat swaying a little back and forth. Gird stared at her. 
He wanted her—wanted her even more than on a hillside in the dark—but on the 
other side of the wall the whole village was waiting for this. It was one thing 
to be roused by someone else’s marriage rites, he was discovering, and quite 
another to fulfill all the rituals with everyone watching him. Or not exactly 
watching, but not indifferent, either.
Then Mali turned away, and burrowed into the straw. Gird watched, bemused. There 
was nothing in this stall; he’d cleaned it himself, that morning, and laid the 
clean straw carefully. Mali grunted, and came up with a stoppered jug and 
something wrapped in a cloth.
“You are a witch.” Gird pulled the stopper out when Mali passed him the jug. He 
sniffed. “What’s this?”
“My aunt’s favorite. And I’m not a witch, but you don’t know all the rituals. 
Groom prepares the stall, but the bride bribes her new mother-in-law to supply 
it.”
Gird sipped cautiously; a fiery liquid ran down his throat and made him blink. 
“Lady’s blessing—that would bring—”
“Trouble if the lords knew of it.” Mali took a swig, and opened her eyes. “My. 
No wonder she wouldn’t let me taste it before.” She unwrapped the cloth, and 
Gird saw a half-loaf of bread and some cheese. They ate quietly for the rest of 
that song, and the beginning of the next. Then either Mali’s aunt’s potion or 
Mali herself—warm and spicesmelling beside him—drove out his lingering 
embarrassment. He rolled toward her on the clean straw, and she embraced him. It 
was as satisfying as the first time, even when he roused to the ring of faces 
peering down at them.
“You went to sleep,” Amis said, grinning. “We could hear you snore all through 
the singing.”
Gird looked past them at the opening; it was nearly dark. Mali, her skirts back 
down around her knees, started rebraiding her hair. When he looked at her, she 
winked, and wrinkled her nose. “Well,” he said, “did you eat all the food, or 
can we have some?”
They had to lead more dancing, that night, in the final Weaving that took them 
in and out of every cottage in the village, and around all three wells. Then at 
last it was over: all the food eaten, all the songs sung, all the dances danced, 
and a few hours to sleep (this time only sleep) until dawn brought work and 
their first day as a married pair.
Despite his mother’s approval, Gird had worried about Mali’s quick tongue in the 
house, when she had to share that cramped kitchen with two other women and the 
children. His mother’s health had begun to fail; she was querulous sometimes, 
and Arin’s wife could never weave to suit her. But Mali left the loom alone, and 
took over all the kitchen work. The other two had no more scouring and scrubbing 
to do, no more washing of pots or kneading of dough. Gird had never known how 
much difference a parrion for cooking could make. All women cooked, and many 
men; food was food. Now he realized that food differed as much as weaving. 
Mali’s bread was lighter, her stews more savory, her porridge smooth, neither 
lumpy nor thin. She gathered herbs in the wood, and hung them to dry; they gave 
the cottage a different, sharper smell. She even knew how to make cheese.
With no kitchen work to do, Gird’s mother could concentrate on weaving, and let 
Arin’s wife do all the carding and spinning. They traded Mali’s cheese for extra 
wool; his mother sent three furls to the trading fair in the next village, which 
brought them precious coppers, almost as much as the marriage fee even that 
first year. Gird’s mother had always liked weaving better than anything else. 
Now she produced furl after furl, trading to the dyer for skeins of colored 
yarn, rich golds and reds and dark green. With those, she could weave patterned 
cloth that brought a higher price, combining the barley pattern Mali’s mother 
had taught her with color.
The other cheesemaker in the village was getting old, and people began to bring 
Mali milk. She traded herbs to the older cheese-maker for one of her tubs, and 
made more cheese. For every five, a hand, she could keep one. Her cheese was not 
as good as some, she admitted—she would not try to sell it at a tradefair—but in 
the village it brought them what they needed to feed the extra mouths.
Gird’s first child was born just after Midwinter. Mali had gathered the herbs 
she said she needed back in the summer, and as usual the village grannies came 
to help with the birthing. Gird had not realized how much his status would 
improve, first as a married man, and then as a father. Now all the grown men 
spoke to him by his own name. In the rest breaks they would wait for him before 
starting a conversation. Teris, who had been married more than a year, now 
treated him as an equal, an old friend. For a few days he resisted this, 
remembering Teris’s accusations. One bleak day when they were both in the 
cowbyre, Mali wormed the old quarrel out of him, and counseled forgiveness.
“You can’t change the past, love. If he’s a good friend now, why not?”
Gird found that his old grudge looked very different when he got it out and 
tried to explain it to Mali. “You make everything so simple,” he complained.
“It’s not simple, but it’s over. He erred, back then—did you never err?”
“You know I did, but—”
“Well, then, let be. He blamed you unfairly; if you refuse his friendship now, 
you’ll be blaming unfairly.”
“Are you ever angry?” He looked down at her; she had the baby at her breast, and 
he could smell her milk and the baby’s scent overlaying her own.
Mali knotted her brows, thinking. “Angry… yes. When things happen, not later. If 
I’d been here, and seen someone hurting you, then I’d have been angry. 
Otherwise—’tis like a bit of old milk in the pan that sours the new. All life 
would sour if we held anger. So I yell, and throw things, and scour it all away, 
right then, so the next day won’t sour.”
“But when things aren’t right—”
Mali shifted the baby to the other breast; he noticed how the baby’s sucking had 
changed the shape of her nipple before she pulled her vest across to cover it. 
“Is this about Teris, or something else?”
Gird chuckled; he wasn’t sure why. “Something you said that first night. And 
talking with the men in the village council. Things have changed since my father 
was a young man, and more since his father’s day. And not for the better.”
“Taxes?” Taxes were up again, the field-fee higher for the third year in a row.
“Not only that.” Gird rolled on his back and tried to think. “The law itself has 
changed. Old Keris was telling us yesterday about the way it was back then. No 
guards here, for one thing, and fewer everywhere. No lockups. No stocks, no 
whippings.”
“Old men always think their youth was golden,” said Mali, stroking the baby’s 
back.
“He saw the lords’ magic himself, he said.” Gird looked for a reaction to that 
and got it; Mali stared at him, shocked that he would speak of it openly. “He 
said they used to show it all the time, use it for aid in drought and storm.”
“What was it like?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“He saw them call rain, he said. Bring clouds out of a clear sky, gather them up 
as a shearer gathers the tags of fleece, and then call rain down.” Gird cleared 
his throat and looked around. No one else was in hearing. “He said, too, that 
the old lords would warm the heart to see, not like our count. That everyone 
wanted to please them.”
“Old men’s tales,” said Mali, but without conviction.
That year the spring rains came timely, and a rich harvest rewarded their 
labors. Arin’s wife had another baby in the fall; by Midwinter, Mali told him 
she was pregnant again. The cottage seemed to bulge at the seams already…
  
The dun cow lowed, her hoarse voice as loud as if she’d been in the cottage. No, 
she seemed to cry. No, no, no… o… o. Gird palmed his burning eyes and wanted to 
groan a refrain to it. No. He was not ready to get up and help that cow; he 
wanted to lie where he was and sleep. But the cow was not giving up; with the 
stubborn insistence of a deprived bovine, she let out another long plaint. Most 
cows tried to edge furtively into the woods when about to calve, but this one 
wanted someone there… yet refused to do it where it was convenient. Gird rolled 
on his back, grunting at the ache in his shoulders from plowing, and slowly sat 
up. He heard his father’s harsh breathing, the catch in every inhalation. One of 
the children snored: probably Rahel. The cow called again, this time answered by 
the two in the cowbyre. Gird stifled an oath, and sat up, feeling around on the 
floor for his boots.
Outside, the predawn light in the sky only made the barton itself darker. Gird 
carried a splinter of oak from the fire, its tip bright orange, almost flaming 
in the breeze of his movement. Tucked in his tunic was the scrap of candle he’d 
light if he needed it when the time came: no use to waste candle if daylight 
came before the crisis. The dun cow had stayed out of the byre last night, as 
she did every time she calved. She would be in the thicket near the creek, if he 
was lucky. Outside the barton, the lower meadow looked silver-gray under a sky 
sheened with dawn. Heavy spring dew wet his boots through before he came to the 
thicket, guided more by the cow’s voice than his sight, though it grew lighter 
moment by moment.
In among the gnarled and twisted scrub, though, he could barely see, and 
staggered more than once over root or stone. Stupid cow, he thought, as he had 
thought for three years now. Staying out in the cold and dark, hiding yourself 
in the thicket, when you know you’ll want my help. There she was, a large hump 
of shadow among lighter, flickering shadows. Down already, grunting and panting, 
her tail thrown back out of her way. He pulled out the candle, found a smooth 
stone to set it on, and with a wisp of dry grass and breath, blew the splinter 
into a flame. The cow’s big eyes reflected it, making three flames where there 
had been one. For a moment his mind wandered: did the cow see a reflection of 
flame in his eyes? Was that why she looked afraid? He lit the candle, picked it 
up, and walked closer, crooning to the nervous cow. Have a heifer, he begged 
silently. Have a heifer this time. A contraction moved across her girth; a bulge 
extruded below her tail. A pearly blot inside… a hoof. That was good, unless the 
other leg was back. He couldn’t quite see. Another contraction, and he could: 
two hoofs and a nose. A normal delivery, so far, with the shiny black nose 
already free of the sack. Now it was light enough to see the shapes he needed to 
see. He tipped the candle, quenching it against the damp grass with a hiss, and 
tucked it back into his tunic. His feet were cold. The cow groaned again, a 
softer sound but eloquent of struggle. Gird stroked her flank, and began the 
calving chant.
“So, cow, gentle cow, quiet cow, so… Birth calf, milk calf, little calf grow… so 
cow, kind cow, good cow, so… Life come, growth come…”
Another contraction, and another, this one longer, pushing the shoulders out. 
The shoulders came, all in a rush, as always, and the wet calf lay still a 
moment, hind end still in the cow. Then the rest of the body followed. The cow 
made a noise Gird never heard save in those moments after calving, almost a 
murmur. The calf’s ear flicked. With a lumbering rush, the cow heaved herself 
up, and the cord broke. She shook her head at Gird, who went on chanting until 
the wildness left her eyes, The cow nosed around the calf, licking it clean of 
the birth sac, licking it dry, murmuring, encouraging. The dun cow was a good 
mother cow. The calf shook its head, waggling both ears, and tapped its tiny 
front hooves on the ground as it tried to figure out how to stand. The cow 
licked on, still murmuring. The calf pushed one front leg out, then another, and 
heaved itself to a sitting position, then fell over. But it tried again, and 
again, its ridiculous little ears flicking back and forth with each effort. And 
it was a heifer, the year’s good luck, for he could keep it.
Gird was never sure what made him look away from the calf, to glance between the 
knotted limbs of creek plum and hazel, but there across the meadow walked a 
creature of grace and light. Tall, lithe, so inexpressibly lovely that his 
throat closed. What was it?
The creature turned, as if feeling his glance, and looked toward him. A voice 
came, bell-like but slightly discordant.
“And what are you thinking, human, alone before dawn on this unlucky day?”
Gird could find nothing to say, only then remembering that it was the spring 
Evener, the day and night of equal length, when the creatures of night ruled 
until truedawn, and the creatures of day could not wander the dusks unscathed.
“The cow called,” he said finally. The black-cloaked figure came nearer, hardly 
seeming to touch the ground.
“The cow called. Cattle to cattle: as your masters would say of you. Less than 
cattle, we think you, worse.”
He could see the face now, inhuman but beautiful with a beauty that called human 
hearts and eyes. Pale against the black cloak, wide eyes starry bright. Was this 
a treelord? He had heard tales of them but no one he knew had ever seen one.
“No, I am not one of those dreamsoaked lost singers,” the figure said. Gird 
shivered. He had said nothing; it had picked the thought out of his mind. “I am 
what they were, and should have stayed, had they any pride or wit at all. Your 
kind, when they know us at all, call us kuaknom.”
He had never heard that word. Kuak, that was the old word for tree—and the nomi 
were the windspirits that hated order and served chaos. Kuaknom: that would be—
“Old lords,” said the being, now just outside the thicket. “Very old, human 
slave. Firstborn of the elder races, lords of power and darkness—”
“The fallen treelords,” Gird said, having finally put it all together. The 
treelords who had quarreled with Adyan the Maker, so the tales went, and turned 
against their kin, and riven the forests that used to cover the land in a great 
battle.
“Not fallen, little man,” said the kuaknom, with a smile that sent ice to Gird’s 
heart. “Not fallen—but changed. And on this night, until truedawn, those witless 
enough to wander abroad are our lawful prey. You, little man—”
Gird flinched as the kuaknom reached for him. The cow grumbled, in the way of 
new mother cows, and rattled her horns against the hazels. And a shaft of red 
sunlight, sharp as an arrow, stung his eyes; he flung up his hand, and the 
kuaknom backed away, muttering in its own language. Then again, to him:
“You are safe, human, by that one gleam of sun, but I curse you for it. May your 
loins wither, and your beasts fall sick, and the strength of your arm fail when 
you need it most.” Even as Gird squinted against the sunlight, it was gone, a 
shadow across the field.
He sat a long time, bemused, until he heard Raheli’s shrill voice calling for 
him. Was such a curse dangerous? Would he die, lose his manhood, his cattle, his 
strength? The cow continued to groom and nurse the calf, who showed all the 
sturdy life of a healthy young bovine.
  
Nothing befell to make him think the curse had force until the following winter. 
He had consoled himself that it was, after all, delivered in sunlight, which 
ought to make the words of the dark powerless. He had given more than his usual 
share to the rituals of Alyanya and even contributed freely to the lords’ 
offering to Esea. Esea was, after all, a god of light, who might be expected to 
offer protection against the powers of darkness. When the rest of the year went 
well (the other two cows also calving heifers), he counted himself lucky.
But that was the winter of the wolves, the worst that had been seen since Gird’s 
childhood. It began even before Midwinter. They had heard the wolves howling 
night after night, but none of the stock had yet been touched. The headman had 
gone to the steward, asking the guards’ help to hunt the pack, but the steward 
had refused. Some of the men had gone out to the more distant folds, to help the 
shepherds watch. Arin went, over his mother’s objections, twirling his long 
staff and grinning at Gird as he walked away.
Gird was hauling dung to the pile when he heard the shouts. He hauled himself to 
the top of the barton wall. There they came, across the snow, a cluster of men 
moving awkwardly. Carrying something—no, someone—he slid down, and went through 
the cottage without stopping to speak. His father was already out in the lane. 
Together they moved toward the group—and then he could see it was Arin they 
carried, Arin whose blood stained his clothes and dripped scarlet on the snow.
They got him into the house and stretched on the table. Gird felt his own heart 
pounding, slow but shaking his whole body, as he saw Arin’s wounds. Then his 
mother pushed him aside.
“Go fetch water,” she said. And to Arin’s wife, “Get those children out of 
here—into the kitchen—”
Gird went out to the well; the men stood around silently, shoulders hunched 
against the cold. He lowered the bucket into icy black water and drew it up. As 
he turned to carry it in, Amis turned to him. “Is he—?”
Gird shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Kef’s gone for the steward,” Amis said. Gird nodded and went back inside with 
the bucket. Coming in the clean air, he could smell the blood as if it were a 
slaughterday. He gave the bucket to Mali, who reached for it, and went to stand 
behind his father.
Arin had long bleeding gashes on his legs and arms; one hand was badly mangled. 
“He was trying to choke one of them with it,” offered Cob, one of the men who 
had carried him in. Gird’s mother said nothing; she and Mali were cleaning the 
wounds with one of Mali’s brews, and wrapping them with the cloths the women 
kept. Arin looked as white as the snow outside against the dark wood of the 
table; he did not move or speak. “He bled all the way back,” said Cob, into the 
silence.
Gird’s mother gave him a fierce look. “You might have tied these up then,” she 
said.
Cob spread his hands. “We had nothing but our dirty clothes; I would not give 
him woundfever.”
Gird’s mother opened her mouth and shut it with a snap. Gird could imagine what 
she would have said to him. But Cob had done the best he knew, and Cob was not 
her son.
The door opened, and someone coughed. Gird turned. The steward was there. No one 
said anything; the steward came nearer. In the dim light his face was stern as 
usual, but Gird thought his eyes softened when he saw Arin’s wounds.
“Wolves, or folokai?” he asked.
“Wolves, sir,” said Cob. “At the sheepfold, they were, and Arin come to drive 
them off—”
“Alone?” asked the steward.
“No, sir. But he went first, and it seemed the wolf drew away— just the one, 
that we could see. He went to chase it a bit, and that’s when the pack ran at 
him, and then the rest of us ran out with torches, and drove them off him.”
The steward moved closer yet. Gird’s mother put out a hand, as if to stop him, 
and drew it back. The steward laid his hands on Arin’s shoulders.
“Heal him, sir?” asked Gird’s mother in a choked whisper.
The steward looked startled, then shook his head. “No, I can’t do that—I have 
not the power.” He looked closely at Arin’s wounds. “I doubt he’ll live—he looks 
to have lost too much blood—”
“No!” Gird’s mother grabbed at his sleeve. Gird felt his heart contract with 
pity for her and Arin both. “It’s not fair—he alone against the wolves—”
The steward pulled free. “I’m sorry. It’s a shame—I’ll take his name off the 
work rolls—if he lives, he’ll be unfit to work until well into summer. If he 
dies, I’ll remit half the death fee; he deserves that much.”
“And more,” someone muttered behind Gird. The steward’s head came around, but 
the mutter had been too low to identify. Even Gird had no idea who it was.
“And I’m sending down a sheep,” said the steward. “He will need meat broth to 
mend, if he can.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Gird’s father. His mother nodded. The steward glanced 
around the room, as if looking for an excuse to say something else. His gaze lit 
on Gird.
“At least you have another son, a strong one. And this one— Arin, is it?—has 
sired already, hasn’t he?”
A wave of hot fury rolled over Gird. He knew the lords considered them cattle, 
but the steward rarely made it so clear. Arin had bred; Arin’s children lived; 
Arin himself—the laughing, steadfast, honest brother who had saved his own life 
more than once—that Arin did not matter to the steward, and even less to the 
lord who ruled the steward. He himself was just another bullcalf; if he died, 
the steward would shrug as easily. By the time he’d mastered his anger, the 
steward had left, and the other men not of the family. Gird’s oldest living 
brother, a cottager in his own holding, had come; he and Gird stood beside the 
table.
Arin opened his eyes and stared vacantly at the ceiling for a moment. Then his 
eyes roved until he met his mother’s. “Lady bless you,” he said. “This is home?”
“Home,” she said. “We’ll soon have you well…”
“Not so soon.” His voice was so weak Gird could hardly hear it. “If I die—”
“You will not die!” Arin’s wife had come back in, and clasped his hand.
“If—you will take care of the children?” He looked at Gird, not his older 
brother or father, and Gird answered, feeling in an instant the weight on his 
shoulders.
“I will, as my own.”
“Good. The wolf—I was—frightened.” His eyes sagged shut, and his head rolled 
sideways.
It was late that night before he spoke again. By then the sheep had come, a 
carcass already cleaned, and Mali had a broth cooking, rich with herbs as well 
as meat. By then, too, they knew the old tracker and the guards had already gone 
after the wolves. Too late, Gird thought bitterly. But he held his tongue. Arin 
roused briefly, asked for water. He could not lift his head to drink; Gird put 
an arm under his shoulders and lifted him. He could feel the heat through his 
shirt. Was it a good sign, that Arin was warm again, or a bad sign of 
woundfever? He didn’t know. He felt the trembling of Arin’s muscles as he drank; 
when his mother had wiped Arin’s mouth, Gird let him down as gently as he could, 
and pulled the blanket straight. Arin’s eyes were bright, but not quite focused.
“Issa?” His wife moved up and took his good hand. “I will try, but—I am afraid 
the wolves have done for me.”
“No—” she breathed.
“Yes. You will have a place here. Gird will take care of you.”
“Arin—” began his father. Arin interrupted him, talking in broken phrases, 
without heeding any of them.
“I saw—a place—the Lady’s garden. Flowers in the snow. Gird. Little 
brother—remember what I said.”
“Yes, Arin,” said Gird. He had no idea which of the things Arin had said over 
the years had come to him now, but he would forget none of them.
“You are more a soldier than you know. But don’t give up the Lady’s bounty, 
Gird.”
“I won’t.” His vision blurred, and he realized he was crying. It felt strange to 
be looking down at Arin. Arin’s eyes roved, and found his father’s.
“You—told me not to go—” he murmured. His father shrugged. Gird looked at him 
sharply. Could he say nothing? But the firelight glittered on the tears that ran 
down his face. Although tears were nothing unusual among the village men, Gird 
was still surprised. His father cried rarely; now his shoulders shook with 
silent sobs. “Don’t cry,” said Arin, quite clearly. “I chose, or the Lady chose 
my time—” He said nothing more; his eyes closed. Gird watched the blankets for 
the rise and fall of breath.
In the hours of watching that night, in the flickering firelight, as their words 
to each other gradually failed and all was silence but for the snoring of Arin’s 
oldest and the thin wail of Gird’s youngest when he woke hungry in the turn of 
night, Gird felt the weight of manhood settle on his shoulders. He looked from 
face to face, seeing in the exhaustion of his father’s the truth that he was 
now— must be now—the head of their family, in fact if not in law. Here, in this 
room: all that his father had made was now his to protect, support, defend.
When Mali had fed the baby, she came to sit beside him, her hand on his. He 
looked into her eyes, and saw her absolute confidence that he could do what he 
must, that they were safe with him. It was not true. He felt simultaneously the 
cold menace without, all that winter stood for, of famine, wolves, cold, even 
the lords’ ravaging taxes, and the cozy seeming security within. How could he 
stand between, one mortal man? Cold sweat came out on his face; he felt himself 
shiver as if someone had poured a bucket of icy water over him. Mali squeezed 
his hand. Her warmth, her strength leaned against him. He was not alone, 
then—there was another pair of arms, another strong back. Enough? It had to be 
enough. He could feel through his skin her awareness of his feelings, and her 
impossible joy that fought all his despair with laughter. His fear did not 
frighten her, nor his weakness weaken her.
Arin was still alive at dawn, when Gird and his father began the day’s work. 
Gird eyed his father, noticing what he had not before— how weak his father had 
become in the past few years. That great frame had bent; the broad hands that 
had frightened him were stiff, knobby with swollen joints. His bush of yellow 
hair had gone gray. Had this begun while Gird was sulking, before his marriage, 
Gird wondered? Not that it mattered; somehow his father had become an old man.
All that day, he thought about it while doing his work. Sim would not come 
back—some old quarrel that had been far over his head when he was a boy had sent 
Sim out to make his own way. Now that he had cothold, he would be a fool to give 
it up. And if Arin died—he hoped fiercely that Arin would not die, but knew that 
hope alone could not save him. If Arin died—when Arin died, since even if he 
lived through this he might die before Gird another way—Gird would have it all 
to care for. Arin’s wife Issa—the children—Mali—his own children now and to 
come—his parents. In the bleak light of that late-winter day he admitted to 
himself that his parents might not live long.
Arin lived another two days. He said nothing more that they could follow, 
although once the fever rose he muttered constantly, tossing and turning 
restlessly. He could not drink the broth Mali had made; Gird was almost ashamed 
to take a bowl of it, but they could not waste food. The sheep was already dead. 
They all drank quietly, avoiding each others’ eyes and trying not hear Arin’s 
moans.
Not long after Arin died, just after the first thaw, Gird’s father dropped 
suddenly one day, and lay twitching. By morning he, too, was dead. The steward 
came again, to value the cottage and the lord’s property therein. Gird had the 
death-fee to pay, part in coin and part in livestock—his precious heifers, two 
of them—and then the steward confirmed him in his father’s place, as “half-free 
tenant of this manor,” whose clothes and few personal tools might be handed down 
to his heir. The rest—the land, the cottage, the livestock, the major tools such 
as ox-yoke, plow, and scythe—were the lord’s and he was “allowed” to use them.



Chapter Seven
« ^ » 
He loved the feel of the scythe, the oiled wood smooth under his hands, the long 
elegant curve ending in its shining blade. Facing the uncut grain, with the sun 
over his left shoulder throwing his shadow ahead of him, he paused for the first 
of the harvest prayers.
“Alyanya, gracious Lady, harvest-bringer…” That was the oldest reaper, away on 
the other end of the field, to his right.
“Lady of seed and shoot, Lady of flower and corn…” That was the oldest granny in 
the vill, holding a wreath of harvest-daisies high.
“As the seed sprouts, and the green leaf grows, as the flowers come, and the 
seed swells…” And that was the Corn-maiden, who would wear the wreath while they 
reaped.
“So we with our blood offer, and you with your bounty reply…” All the reapers, 
their response ragged with distance, but sincere— and Gird with the others had 
nicked the heel of his palm with the scytheblade, and squeezed a drop of blood 
to flick on the ground. Then he smeared the rest on the blade itself, to return 
his strength to the cut grain. Garig, the headman, blew a mellow note on the 
cow’s horn, and the harvest began.
Gird swung back his scythe and swept it forward and around. The wheat fell away 
from his stroke, as if swept by a gust of wind. Step forward, swing, sweep… and 
another swathe turned aside for him. That old rhythm reclaimed him, required—so 
early in the day—hardly any effort. Step, swing, sweep, return. Step, swing, 
sweep, return. On one side the standing grain, and before him the diminishing 
row he worked, and on his left side the bright stalks lying with their heads on 
the short green grass. The ripe wheat gave up a smell almost as rich as bread 
baking. Beneath the stalks lay a secret world, tiny runs that showed as he 
worked his way along.
He looked up, to see his way, and realized he was nearly halfway. Pakel, the 
oldest reaper, was only a third along his row—but no one expected him to be 
fast, not at his age. Still, he moved as smoothly as ever, and Gird knew he 
would be working just that well at day’s end. Gird went on. Step, swing, sweep, 
return.
Something flickered in the stalks ahead of him, and he smiled. So the little 
ones, the harvest mice, had realized their day was come? He took another stroke, 
and another. Another mousetail, just escaping his blade to leap deeper into the 
wheat.
Gird reached the end of his row long before Pakel was through. He stopped to 
whet his blade from the stone looped to his belt. Behind him, three men worked 
on the half-field he’d begun, in staggered rows, as three others followed Pakel. 
It was the custom to harvest in halves, all reapers in each half working the 
rows one way, to “fold the field” as it was said. Gird walked back up, outside 
the fallen grain, and took a pull from the water jug one of the women held. He 
didn’t need it yet, but it was wise to drink on every row. Then he began another 
row behind the last man on his half.
The little cut on his hand itched, as it always did. The sun was higher, and the 
smell of the ripe grain richer. A little breeze ruffled the wheatears and 
brought up the green smell of the haymeadows nearer the river. Step, swing, 
sweep, return. This was the best time of the harvest-day, when he had one swathe 
down, and his body had warmed and loosened to the work. The scythe swung and 
sliced almost on its own; his body was merely the pivot for its swing, leaving 
his mind free to wander. He enjoyed the evenness of his cuts, the smooth stubble 
he left behind, the proof of his skill. He saw every tiny blossom of the weeds 
within the grain: the starry blue illin, the delicate red siris, like drops of 
blood. Overhead arched a cloudless sky, a harvester’s boon, and out of it came 
the song of a kiriel, sweet and piercing. He felt the prickle of stubble on his 
feet, the sleeves of his shirt on his arms as they swung.
This—not the other—was the right use of his strength. He felt as if he could 
swing the scythe forever without tiring. Row after row, selion after selion, 
flowed away behind him. The sun’s heat, which a few years ago had worn him down 
by midday, now seemed to give him its energy. He remembered, as clearly as if it 
had been that morning, the first time he’d taken a scythe to swing. Arin’s 
scythe, that had been, and his first cuts down in the haymeadow had been ragged 
as if he’d ripped at the grass with his hands. Now Arin was three years dead, 
and he was the leading reaper, the strongest man in the village, able to provide 
for his own and his brothers’ children as well. He did not let himself think of 
the children who had died, his two eldest sons, one of Arin’s, in a fever. It 
might have been that kuaknom’s curse, or chance, but it was over.
He stopped to drink at the end of the row, and rubbed his hands together. He 
could just feel the pressure at the base of his thumbs from the grips; the right 
had shifted. He spat on the handle and worked the grip back and forth slightly. 
There. He tapped a splinter under the bindings to tighten it, and swung the 
scythe lightly to check… yes.
Across the field he could see Arin’s oldest lugging water up to the 
fieldmasters. Another selion or two, and it would be time for the noon break. He 
was not tired, but he was hungry, his belly reminding him how long it had been 
since that crust of bread before dawn. He could smell cooking food even over the 
rich smell of ripe grain around him. They were supposed to lunch on the lord’s 
bounty when harvesting the great field, but that bounty had been less each year. 
Back before Arin’s death, it had meant meat as well as bread, and barrels of 
ale. In his childhood he remembered harvest meals of roast meat, bread, cheese, 
and sweet cakes, heavy with honey and spices. Last year, bread and meat broth 
only; the men had grumbled, but what good did that do? The steward would not 
kill one of the lord’s sheep or cows for grumbling alone. He had not grumbled; 
he could not afford to, with two families to support. It did no good to become 
known as a grumbler. He’d eaten his bread and broth, taking an extra helping 
while others complained.
He looked ahead critically. They might finish the great field in two days, at 
this pace, and then begin the harvest of the individual strips. Would the 
weather hold? It had been a dry spring, and they’d all prayed for rain, but rain 
now would add nothing to the harvest.
At the noon meal, the steward handed out round dark loaves and bowls of thin 
soup. This year no one grumbled. Gird ate silently, steadily. The more he could 
take of the lord’s bounty, the better for his family. Arin’s boy, as a water 
carrier, could eat with the harvesters this year. He came to sit by Gird, a boy 
as quiet and shy as Arin had been cheerful and open. Gird wondered if seeing his 
father die had changed him—but he’d been a quiet baby, for all that.
“Mali’s coming out to bind,” said the boy—Fori, his name was, though they seldom 
called him by name. He was “Arin’s boy” to the whole village. Gird frowned.
“She should not: she’s too near her time.”
“Ma has the sickness,” said Fori, ducking his head. Gird sighed. Issa loathed 
fieldwork, and although she was not as good a weaver as his mother had been, she 
would spend all her time at the loom. Leaving all the other work for Mali, Gird 
thought—but she also had the sickness, no one could deny it. No one with the 
sickness could come into the harvest field; throwing up on the first day of 
harvest was the worst of bad luck. And it was no fault of Fori’s, what Issa did 
or did not do. But he worried about Mali. Big and strong as she was, every child 
seemed to take more out of her; she had not looked well this time.
“Make sure she has enough water,” said Gird. Fori nodded. He had not finished 
his bowl of soup, but sat dangling his hands.
“Eat! You take all you can get, lad.” The boy slurped up the rest of his soup.
“It’s not as good as Mali’s,” he said through a mouthful of bread.
“No, but Mali didn’t have to cook it. It’s not from our stores. When you’re 
doing the lord’s work, you feed from his bounty: that’s custom.”
Gird followed his own advice, and went back for more. At least the steward 
wasn’t stinting them on amounts—no one frowned when he picked up another 
half-loaf of bread and refilled his bowl.
When he was full, he lay back in the shadow of the old fireoak at the field’s 
corner until the horn blew. The afternoon’s work was always harder: the field 
seemed to swell with heat, lengthening every selion. Gird was soon back in the 
rhythm of the work. His mind seemed to hang on every close detail now, unwilling 
to soar abroad as it had in the morning. His shadow, at first a squat dark 
figure close beneath him, lengthened with the hours. He was still far ahead of 
the others, overtaking one after another on their selions, and swinging away 
beyond them. Yet no one minded: he was, he sensed, their pride as well as his 
own. Gird Strongarm, they said, grinning as he came past.
On the outer edges of the field, the women and older girls were binding the cut 
grain into shocks. None of his or Arin’s girls were old enough yet: only a woman 
who had bled could gather in harvest. But he could see Mali’s peaked hat busy 
among the others. Some years she worked first among the women, almost as much 
faster than others as he was. This year, she lagged, slowed by the coming child 
that made bending difficult.
By dusk, when he could feel the damp coming out, more than half the great field 
was down. Now the men joined the women in binding the last grain. Again tonight, 
they would eat the lords’ bread and meat—if there was any meat, Gird thought. 
Surely there would be. He found Mali, and led her up to the serving line. She 
moved heavily, and beneath the day’s sunburn, her skin was pale.
There was meat, although the steward’s men doled it out one slice to a loaf of 
bread. A pottage of beans, cheese, and a wooden cup of ale completed the meal. 
“No sweet cake?” Gird heard someone ask. The steward’s men said nothing, handing 
a serving to the next in line.
“I heard the steward tell the cooks they need not kill another sheep—that the 
great field would be done early enough that there’d be no evening meal 
tomorrow.” Mali kept her voice low.
“What?” Gird stared at her. “That’s—we can’t be done by noon, and if we work the 
afternoon, he has to feed us.”
Mali, her mouth full of meat, merely shrugged. Gird tore off a hunk of bread and 
chewed it, thinking hard. The custom had always been to feed them for any part 
of a day spent on the lords’ work. When they finished harvest a bit early, they 
had time for a rest before the meal, even a bit of singing. He worked his way 
through the bean porridge, which lacked the flavor of Mali’s, and wondered what 
could be done.
As it happened, Mali was not the only one to have heard the steward’s words. The 
men gathered cautiously after dark, in the lane near Gird’s cottage.
“Not fair,” said Teris. “We work faster, and they punish us—”
“So we can work slow, if Gird can hold back,” said Amis’s uncle.
Gird felt himself flushing. “It’s not my fault,” he said.
“No one said it was. But if being fast loses us a feast, maybe being slow will 
get it back.”
“ ’Course, he’s already told the cooks,” said Amis. “Might be even if he has to 
feed us, it won’t be much. No meat, anyway. And he’d be angry with us. Is it 
worth that?”
“Where’s Garig?” asked Pakul. “What does he think?”
“Garig’s in the steward’s back pocket,” said someone too softly to make out.
“We can’t do aught without him,” said Gird. “It’s not fair, I’ll stand to that, 
and do what I can, but we need Garig. It’s only he can speak for us to the 
steward, anyway.”
  
“I’ll say what I can,” Garig sighed, though, and Gird was sure he’d come back 
with nothing. “The steward— the steward’s told me some of it.”
“Of what?”
“What’s gone wrong. There’s a place—somewhere far off, I don’t know—where the 
lords come from, back when they come. It’s where they traded, over the 
mountains. It’s gone.”
“Gone? How can a place be gone?”
“Raided, I suppose, like a town the nomads have burned. Anyway, the lords got 
gold and jewels that way, and now they don’t.”
“So what’s that got to do with us?” asked Teris. “We need to eat, same as 
always, and it’s always been if we do the work on the lord’s field, he feeds 
us.”
“The count’s squeezing him,” said Garig. “So he’s squeezing us— that’s the truth 
of it. He has to send more—”
“We can’t.” Mutters of agreement with that, a low voiced growl. “Might’s well 
join the Stone Circle—”
“None o’ that!” Garig’s voice rang out. “We’ll have none o’ that talk here. 
D’you want the guards down on us? They’re outlaws, no better than brigands, that 
bunch.”
Gird agreed, but silently. He had heard more than one mention of the Stone 
Circle in the past two years. All he knew about them came from such brief 
encounters. The steward had warned Garig that anyone found helping a member of 
the Stone Circle would be turned out, if not killed outright. According to him, 
they were lawless, lazy farm lads who tried to get higher wages by threatening 
the farms—burning grain and hayfields, tacking herds in pasture, and so on. The 
other stories Gird had heard were of young men who saw no chance of marrying or 
having a place to farm—whose families could not spare the food, no matter how 
hard they worked. He tried not to think about it, about the disappearance of 
four or five younger sons from his own village in the past three years. 
Somewhere, the stories went, was a great circle of stones bigger than any mortal 
man could move, and into that circle fell miraculous showers of grain and fruit, 
more than enough for all who came. And the stones protected anyone who found the 
way inside, that was in the tales too. From that mysterious place, the movement 
took its name, promising peace and plenty in the days when “all men are stones 
of the circle, and none must run and hide.”
“I’ll speak to the steward,” Garig said, sounding more angry than understanding. 
“I’ll try—but no promises. And if there’s slacking tomorrow, we could all be in 
trouble.”
The men stood awhile in the lane, grumbling softly, when Garig had gone into his 
cottage and slammed the door. Gird was glad enough to stand there, in the warm 
darkness. Inside his own cottage, Issa’s sickness fouled the air, and the 
children bickered over their meager supper. He tried to tell himself that they 
were doing all right, better than some others, but it was poor comfort.
The next day, Gird worked as slowly as he could. Garig had said that the steward 
had consented to another evening feast, if the work took them past 
mid-afternoon. Mali could not come, but Issa was doing her best raking up the 
fallen heads of grain into baskets. He was worried about Mali. She had not 
looked really well since losing the one of the twins. This baby should be her 
last—would be, if he had to force the herbs into her himself. He grinned at that 
thought. Mali might be weaker, but she was as headstrong as ever.
They finished the greatfield before dark, but not long before. Gird noticed that 
everyone came to the feast quietly, with none of the usual songs and laughter. 
There was meat, sure enough—not abundance, but some, and plenty of bread and 
cheese. He made sure that Fori and Issa ate heartily, and stuffed himself. 
Tomorrow he could begin cutting their own strip, grain that would feed them and 
help pay the fieldfee.
It was dark, the thick dark of a cloudy night, with enough wind to keep the 
leaves rustling uneasily.
“What?” Gird asked softly.
“We want to talk to you.” That was Teris, he could tell. Gird sighed.
“Do you have nothing better to do than—”
“Shhh. Not here. Come along with us.”
“Who’s us?”
“I told you he’d make trouble.” Tam’s voice, this time.
“I’m not making trouble. I just want to know what—”
“Come on.” Teris had his arm, and shook it. “We’ll talk, but someplace safe.”
Gird let Teris lead him along the lane, between two cottages that he was sure 
were Garig’s and Tam’s, and down between a barton wall and the gurgling stream. 
The night air smelled wet and green; he could pick out scents he never noticed 
by day.
“There’s someone here needs to talk to you,” Teris said. Gird felt his heart 
begin to pound. Someone in the dark, someone he didn’t know? He remembered all 
at once that Teris’s mother was reputed to be a dire witch, laying curses on 
those who crossed her. “Go on,” Teris said into the darkness. “Ask him.”
Someone he could not see cleared his throat and said “Teris says you know about 
soldiering.”
“No.”
“Yes,” hissed Teris, “You do.”
“We need—we want someone to teach us.”
“Who?” asked Gird. He thought he knew already. Instead of a spoken answer, he 
heard the click of stone on stone, and then felt a stone pressed into his palm.
“You know,” said the voice. “The farmer’s only hope… the only thing what won’t 
burn in the fire that’s coming…”
“But you’re not soldiers,” he said. “You don’t—”
“We need to know how. We’re getting enough, almost, now—if we only knew how to 
fight, and had weapons—”
“It won’t work.” Even here, where he was sure no one listened, he kept his voice 
low. “Running at ’em in a mob, like—they’ll just ride over you and ride over 
you—”
“We have to try.” His eyes were more used to the dimness; he could just make out 
Tam’s face and the gleam of his eyes. Tam’s weaker eye wandered off-focus, then 
came back. “We can’t be soldiers; we don’t have the training—”
“You!” Gird snorted. Tam couldn’t throw a rock straight, let along make a 
soldier. “You’ll just be killed, and they’ll take it out of your families and 
the rest of us. Use sense, man! You’d have to know how to march, how to use your 
weapons together—”
“You could teach us,” said the stranger, now a hunched black shape against the 
faint gleam of the water. “You were teaching them to march, Teris said. It was 
forbidden, but that didn’t stop you. And then—”
No one had brought up his cowardice to him for years. They’d accepted him, he 
thought, once he grew up and married, once he was bent to the same lash as the 
rest of them. What had they told this stranger, that his voice changed when he 
said “And then—?”
“I—can’t,” he said hoarsely. “I—I don’t remember enough of it.”
“You remember enough to know that an untrained mob is hopeless. You can’t have 
forgotten it all. I didn’t.” Teris again, hectoring as usual.
“I—”
“You’re scared still, aren’t you? After all these years—”
“He was my friend!” It came out louder than he meant, and he muted the rest of 
it. “I could not be part of what did that to him. That’s why I ran, and if you 
want to call that cowardice, fine.” He had never explained it to his friends 
before. Now the words poured out of him. “If you think I feared blood or pain, 
why d’you think I stayed in ’til then? If you remember so well, Teris, you must 
remember the beatings I got. You saw my bruises.”
“Well—yes. But they said—”
“They called it cowardice, and my father bade me accept that. ’Twas hard enough 
on us, without causing more trouble. And that’s what’s really wrong with 
them—that they’d think cowardice is not wanting to cause pain.”
“But you haven’t joined—” and the stones clicked again.
“No. I had the family to think of, not just my own but my brother’s. Once 
already I’d caused them all trouble; my mother died of the young lord’s enmity, 
when he refused us the herb-right in the common wood. And the Stone Circle when 
it started was young lads, unmarried and mostly orphans: they had no family to 
suffer if they were caught.”
“So—?”
Gird sighed. That bleak vision of his nightmares edged nearer, tried to merge 
with reality. “So—who will feed my wife, my children, if I go off to teach the 
Stone Circle how to march in step? Who will plow the field, or tend the beasts? 
If it could happen, and an army of peasants took the field, who would feed them? 
Some must plow and plant, some must spin and weave, or that army would die 
hungry and ragged, too weak to fight the spears.”
“Is that what you plant for? That army, or your family alone?”
Gird spat rudely at the stranger’s feet. “I plant for the lord, like all the 
rest, and we live on the spillage from the tax-cart—dammit, you ask questions 
like the steward laying blame for a cracked pot! You know my name, but hide 
yours; why should I listen to you?”
The stranger’s head moved, as if listening for something, then gave Gird a long, 
neutral stare. “You know it’s getting worse. You know we have no chance to 
resist without the knowledge you have. And you sit there, smug as a toad, giving 
good reasons to a bad argument—why shouldn’t I put a thorn in your backside? You 
think I have no family, or these others? Those lads who joined Stone Circle 
years back are fathers now, just as you are. Those that didn’t rot on the 
spikes. You think your children will thank you, for leaving them helpless before 
enemies?”
“They would not thank me for throwing them in prison to starve, either.”
“Take ’em with you.”
“No.”
“At least tell us something, something we can use.”
“I—” Gird looked around; there were four or five crouched nearby. He was sure of 
Teris and Tam, but not the others. Was Amis there? He could not tell. “I don’t 
think it will work, even if I taught you—even if real soldiers taught you. The 
best way for us is to work and keep our peace; what you do only makes the lords 
angrier, raises the taxes higher—”
The stranger growled, and stood. Gird stood too, and they faced one another a 
long moment. Then the stranger laughed softly. “It’s coming, Gird, whether you 
like it or not—you will see, and I hope you see before you suffer more deeply 
than a man can stand. I lost family; I would not wish that on anyone. My name is 
Diamod, when you want to find me again.”
Gird turned away, wondering if they would let him go. No one touched him. He 
felt his way along the wall of Tam’s barton, and then let his feet remember the 
way along the lane to his own cottage. Teris. Tam. Three or four others, who had 
not spoken so that he could not know who they were. Did they think he would tell 
Garig or the steward? His heart ached at that. His hands ached to strike 
something, anything. He would help them, if he had no family to think of. He 
could imagine himself teaching them as he had taught Teris and Amis and the 
others. But he could not risk Mali and Issa and the children.
He got back to bed without waking anyone up, and fell into heavy sleep. Dreams 
troubled him. In his mind’s eye, he could see them, ragged, workworn, scarred, 
hungry, running in uneven clumps and strings to strike at the horsemen with 
their poles and scythes, their sickles and clubs. Behind the horsemen, the 
lords’ army waited, trained soldiers in good armor, with their sharp swords and 
pikes. But they had nothing to do, for the horsemen could deal with the 
peasants. At the end— He woke with a jerk and a chopped-off cry. Beside him, 
Mali turned over and groaned softly, then snored.
In the thick darkness of the cottage, he seemed to see the past years as a 
painted streamer like the ones the lords sometimes carried on horseback. Hard 
work and hunger now, yes—but he had known hard work and hunger as a child. Yet 
his children were thinner than he had been, hard as he worked. He had never 
accumulated the store of coppers and silvers that his father had had beneath the 
hearthstone when it was needed. If something did happen with his own children, 
or Arin’s, he would not be able to do what his father had done.
The next morning, he was still thinking about it as he shoveled manure. What 
could he do? He could not imagine sneaking away from the village some nights, to 
train Stone Circle members, coming back at dawn to work, but he could not 
imagine taking his whole family into an uncertain future, either. He was mulling 
this over when he heard shouts from the lane, and the heavy roll of hoofbeats.
He went through the kitchen to find Mali and Issa and the children starting out 
the front door.
“Get back!” he shouted. They made way for him. He could see, now, people in the 
lane nearer the center of the village. Amis was headed out his front gate, and 
Gird moved slowly toward his own. He could hear the loud complaints, the 
bellowed orders of the guard sergeant, the cries of children. It must be the 
Stone Circle man, Diamod, he thought, but he didn’t see him. Had someone seen 
him? Reported him? He realized suddenly that his friends might think he had, if 
that was indeed who the guards were after.
It looked as if the guards were trying to search each cottage and barton. The 
noisy crowd surrounded them, not actually resisting but somewhat obstructive. 
The guards, some mounted and some afoot, moved toward Gird’s end of the village. 
Now he could see faces he recognized, guards and villagers alike. An old woman, 
Teris’s mother, was arguing with one of the soldiers, clinging to his arm, 
shaking it. He wrenched free of her and she staggered away, to be caught by her 
daughter. A child darted out into the lane ahead of the horses, and Amis went 
after him. The soldier riding the lead horse yelled something at him; Amis, 
intent on the child, shook his head and lunged forward.
Although he was behind the others, hardly out of his own door-yard, Gird saw 
exactly what happened. The soldier’s arm moved, and Amis turned, his shoulder 
already hunching against the expected blow. The soldier’s mace caught Amis full 
in the face, that familiar flesh disappearing instantly in a mush of blood and 
broken bone. One tooth flew free, a chip of white spinning in the hot sunlight 
before it fell out of sight behind the other bystanders. Gird felt something 
prick his hand, and looked down to see the handle of his shovel broken like a 
dry stick; he opened his hand and let the pieces fall.
As if in a dream, all motion slowed. One by one those at the back of the crowd 
turned to run, their eyes white-rimmed, their mouths open. Even before Amis fell 
to the ground, they had opened a path for the soldiers, those in front 
scrambling back, afraid to turn, afraid… and the soldiers’ horses, their high 
necks streaked with sweat, ridged with lather where the reins rubbed, setting 
their ironshod hooves down one by one, so slowly that it seemed they could 
hardly catch the terrified fugitives. Amis lay huddled, blood pooling in the 
lane, soaking into the dust, both hands covering his ruined face. One of the 
horses, bumped hard by another, placed a front hoof in the center of his back so 
slowly, with such precision, that Gird had to believe it was a deliberate 
choice. He could hear a terrible crunch over the other sounds, the thunder of 
hooves, the screams—
And motion returned to normal, the crowd flowing back along the lane in a panic, 
the leaders running flat out, arms wide. Behind, the horses surged, the soldiers 
yelled, their weapons slicing from side to side. Gird stepped back, between the 
plum trees; it was all he had time for before they were past, horses bumping and 
trampling over the slow and clumsy, in pursuit of the fleetest. From the corner 
of his eye, he saw Diamod, cause of the whole incident, slipping quietly from 
the back of Amis’s cowbyre to make his way over the fields.
Gird swallowed the same bolus of rage and fear that he had chewed and swallowed 
so often before. Now it was Amis on the ground, dead or dying he was sure and 
then it had been Arin torn by wolves, and before that Meris.
Amis breathed in difficult, jerky snorts. Gird laid his hand against his neck; 
the pulse was thin, irregular. Was Amis conscious at all? He should say 
something. What could he say?
“Amis? Can you hear me?” Stupid enough, but something. Amis’s hand twitched; 
Gird laid his own over it.
“You’ve got to do something!” That high voice was Eso, always ready for someone 
else to do something. “Get him to safety—wash his face—”
“Be still,” growled a deeper voice. Amis’s father. He knelt beside Gird, his 
face as gray as his beard. His hands shook as he reached out to his son. “Is 
he—?”
“He’s dying—I saw the mace hit his face, and a horse trampled him— ” Gird 
gestured at the pulped mess of Amis’s back.
“And if they come back, they’ll but hurt him more.” Amis’s father held his son’s 
slack hand. “Gird—get a plank or bench.”
Gird nodded, and backed away on his knees. He shivered, nauseated, and barely 
made it to the trampled verge before throwing up, the morning’s food and a 
life’s bile together. Then he went into the front room, where Mali stood with 
her fist against her mouth, white as milk, and ripped the legs off one of the 
benches without a word. The long plank banged against the doorpost as he went 
out, and he almost lost control again. Amis. Kindly, cheerful, steady Amis, who 
had taken him to the sheepfold gathering to meet Mali—who had farmed alongside 
his strip for ten years, who had never done one thing wrong but be where a mace 
could destroy him—
Amis’s father and Gird wrestled Amis onto the plank; that long, lanky body felt 
wrong, as if it were a boneless sack of seedcorn. He was still breathing, a 
hoarse rattle, in and out, that bubbled the blood on his face. What had been a 
face. Gird thought of the cheerful brown eyes, the nose lopsided from a cow’s 
kick, the wide mouth.
Amis’s wife had fainted; Mali sat beside that crumpled heap, comforting the 
younger children, as Gird and Amis’s father carried him through, all the way 
into the barton. There they sponged the blood off his back, rolled him over. 
Gird turned his head aside and retched again. They could do nothing. Amis’s 
breathing filled the barton with pain. One of his brothers came, and stood 
beside them, watching. Amis’s wife, finally, biting her kerchief, holding their 
youngest baby close. Mali came to stand behind Gird, and put a hand on his 
shoulder.
Amis never woke, and when he finally quit breathing Gird could not at first turn 
away. Only the noise of the returning Guard, angry voices and the clash of 
weapons in the lane, loosened the paralysis that had locked his joints in place. 
He stayed calm in the turmoil that followed, giving his evidence to the steward 
in a slow, deep voice that came to him for that occasion. Amis had never been 
known as a troublemaker; his lunge at the guard’s horse was a grab for the child 
who had run unknowing into danger. The steward nodded, shrugged, remitted part 
of the death-fee, and evicted Amis’s wife to live with Amis’s father. Another 
family, strangers relocated from another vill, moved into it.
And Gird put a sack of grain at the far edge of the wood, with two stones on top 
of it. It was gone the next day.



PART II



Chapter Eight
« ^ » 
The first scream brought him out of his musings; he looked across the ploughed 
strips to see nothing at first. Perhaps someone had spilled a kettle of hot 
water. He scratched the back of one leg with his other foot, and clucked to the 
oxen. They leaned into the yoke. Then another shriek, one he would have known 
anywhere. Raheli! He dropped the plowhandles, and started across the field at a 
run. Then the horses came, from between the cottages, and crashing through the 
back gate of his barton. Lords’ horses, with the bright orange and green and 
yellow he had seen going in the manor gates the day before. Another scream, and 
another, shriller—one of the little girls? He had yelled himself before he 
realized it, a deep roar of rage and pain. Up the field, another plowman 
answered.
“Stop, you!” yelled one of the riders, waving something at him. Gird paid no 
mind, charging toward his own gate. Now he could hear a man’s voice, yelling, 
and more screams down the lane. The same rider yelled “Guards! Ho!” The horsemen 
closed toward him, the horses plunging with excitement. Behind them now he could 
see footsoldiers in Kelaive’s bright orange. The sun glittered on their helmets, 
on riders’ buckles and saddlefittings, on the stubble of last year’s grain. Gird 
took a breath, slowing to see how he might get by. Now one of the riders was 
above him, the tall dark horse snorting and prancing.
“Get back, fellow!” the rider said. Gird peered up at a narrow pale face. “It’s 
nothing to do with you. Get back to work!” The voice had fear in it, as well as 
arrogance. Was he armed? Gird tried to circle the horse, but the horse spun, and 
blocked him. “Get back!” the man said, louder. Gird looked aside; the guards 
were almost on him, their cudgels ready. Another scream, this one a man’s 
death-cry, ending in a gurgle. Gird flinched, and shivered— it had to be Parin, 
he was the only one inside. His belly churned; his vision blurred. Then pain 
stung him awake; the rider had slashed his back with a whip. He spun, fury once 
more driving out fear, but the guards had him, four of them. For all he could 
do, it was nothing—they had him face-down in the fresh-plowed furrows, choking 
on dirt, two of them on his back, as the screams went on—and then died away. 
When they let him up, the other plowmen were back at work, and the riders were 
gone, and the grim-faced guard sergeant gave him his warning.
He knew before he came inside what he would find. The shattered barton gate, the 
ewe he had brought in for nursing lying dead in the barton, her guts strewn 
wide, their one pig gone, the cottage doors smashed, the great loom broken: that 
was bad enough. But there lay Parin, his face one curdled mess of blood and 
shattered bone, and there lay Raheli, naked, the slight bulge of her belly that 
had promised so much to her and Parin. He knelt beside her, so full of grief he 
could not breathe. When he felt that first warm breath on his hand, he could 
hardly believe it. Alive? After the blow that had split her face all down one 
side, and drenched her in blood? After that blade or another had bared her ribs 
on one side, and sliced deep into her hip? After the beating, and the rape? He 
looked at the body he had not seen since she became a woman. Even at that 
moment, he noticed—and hated himself for noticing—the white beauty of her skin, 
the full young breasts, the long curve of back and thigh now streaked with 
blood. Her breath touched his hand again, and he drew a long shaky breath of his 
own. Alive. He had to do something—
He looked around the room again, seeing destruction everywhere, and out the 
front door, now splintered—something stirred, there. He could not leave Raheli, 
but he must; he had to get water, rags, something. He stood too quickly and his 
head spun. Staggering, he made it to the door and then crouched, heaving all he 
had eaten into the trampled torn dirt of the yard.
Then he looked up and saw the rest of it.
She must have been at the well, for the blood trail started there, and the water 
jug lay broken beside it. Girnis lay sprawled between the well and door, her 
slight body twisted as if she’d been thrown against the wall. And Pidi, where 
was Pidi? Gird found him on the far side of the well, fists jammed into his 
mouth, trying not to cry; a hard blue knot on the side of his head and a welt on 
his back.
He was shaking with rage and grief; he could hardly lower the bucket to the 
water. The weight of it full dragged on him, steadied him; he got it up, and 
scooped a handful for Pidi, who said nothing but drank it.
“Stay here,” he said to the boy; Pidi nodded. Gird went to Girnis; she was 
alive, but unconscious. Her left arm was crooked, and swelling: broken. He 
glanced around for something to splint it with, and caught sight of someone, a 
kerchiefed head, over the sidewall.
It disappeared; he did not call. He found a piece of the splintered door, and 
tore a strip from his tunic. Girnis did not stir when he handled her broken arm. 
Should he carry her inside? No. Girnis would do well enough out here until she 
woke, he thought, and knew that he wasn’t thinking as well as he should. But 
Raheli needed him. He took the bucket inside, breathing hard through his mouth. 
The cottage stank of blood and brains and slaughter. He had killed animals more 
cleanly—but he could not stop to think of that.
Raheli’s face, if she lived, would have a scar from hairline to jaw. He was not 
sure she would live. The blade that had cut her had gone through into her mouth, 
come near her eye—might have broken her jaw or her cheekbone as well, he 
couldn’t tell. Raheli had had the parrion of herbal wisdom from Mali; it was not 
his knowledge. Blood pooled under her head; her scant breaths gurgled. Blood in 
her mouth, what if she choked? He looked wildly around, and this time found the 
scattered bedding, the cooking cloths for straining, the cloths for women in 
their time. As quickly as he could, trying not to think beyond the immediate 
wound, he pressed the cleanest rags into her wounds. The long shallow gash along 
her ribs had nearly quit bleeding anyway; the deeper wound where the blade had 
met her hip oozed steadily, reddening the cloth. Her face—her face was hopeless, 
he thought at first, as blood soaked one cloth after another.
“Gird?” He jumped, swore, and turned to glare at the light that poured in the 
broken door. Then he saw it was a woman, though he could not make out her face 
against the light. “Is—is Raheli alive?”
“Just.” His voice grated and broke; he wanted to burst into tears. Hard enough 
to be alone with this, but harder with someone else.
“Let me see.” She came up to him, and now he could see it was Tam’s aunt, old 
Virdi. Her breath hissed out. “Aahhh—Lady’s Peace, she’s bad—”
“I know that.” He had never liked Virdi, but she had the healing in her hands, 
so his mother had said. And no scorn to her for not saving Mali—healing in the 
hands was nothing in a plague of fever.
“The lord, he did this?” He thought he heard derision in her voice, and 
bristled. Next she would ask why he’d let it happen. But when he glared at her, 
her eyes were soft, not accusing at all.
“He did. I was—plowing. They—” He could not go on.
She nodded. “I saw across the fields—the guards knocked you down, there were too 
many. Lady’s Curse on Mikrai Pidal Kevre Kelaive: may he never know peace.”
He had never heard a woman lay a curse before, but there was no doubt Virdi had 
done just that. So simple? He shivered, suddenly cold. Her hand touched his 
head, dry and chill as a snake.
“Near broke your head, they did, too—” He had not realized that he’d been hit, 
but where she touched him was a heavy pain— and then it was gone, and she was 
rubbing her hands briskly on the hearthstone. She gave him a quick smile. “Rock 
to rock; the hearthstone’s strong enough.” She pointed, and he saw a little 
crack he didn’t remember seeing.
Her hands on Raheli’s head hardly seemed to have weight; they hovered, touched 
as light as a moth on a nightflower, retreated. She sighed, then lifted the 
cloths he’d laid on that torn face, and hissed again. “Get more water—and—” a 
quick look at the hearth, now fireless, “—go to Tam’s, and bring a live coal.”
“But will she die while I’m—?” Gird didn’t finish the question, for she 
interrupted.
“Not if you’re quick about it.” She had poured the remaining water in the bucket 
into the one unbroken pot, and he took the bucket and went out. Pidi still 
crouched by the well, but now he was crying, shoulders heaving. Gird drew 
another bucket of water, and found the dipper somehow unbroken, caught in the 
hedge. He squatted beside Pidi.
“Come on, lad—let me see—” Pidi looked up, eyes streaming. “I—I couldn’t—” He 
winced as Gird touched the lump on his head. “You couldn’t stop them. Neither 
could I.”
“But—but they—they hurt Raheli—and Parin tried to fight—”
“Pidi, listen. I have to get fire. Can you stay here?”
“Raheli? And—and Girnis! They—hurt her too!” The boy grabbed Gird’s arm with 
both hands, threatening to overturn the bucket. Gird set the bucket carefully 
aside and gathered up his youngest child, letting him sob. He wanted to do that 
himself, would have given anything for a strong shoulder to cry on, but all the 
ones he’d known were gone. He patted the boy’s back, carefully avoiding the welt 
on it, and carefully not thinking. Enough to comfort one who could be comforted. 
“I’m so sorry,” the boy was saying between sobs. “I’m so sorry—”
“It’s not your fault.” Gird tried to keep his voice steady, soothing, as if Pidi 
were a sheep caught in a briar, a cow with her head through a gap. Finally sobs 
quieted to gulps. Gird unhooked the boy’s hands and moved him away far enough to 
see his face. “Here—let me wipe that for you—” Pidi nodded, mouth set tight, and 
Gird cleaned his face. “Now—I still have to go get a firestart, from Tam’s 
house. Will you stay here quietly?” Pidi nodded, solemnly, tears threatening 
again. “I’ll be back,” said Gird. Pidi said nothing.
He saw no one on the way to Tam’s cottage, though he was aware of a stir in the 
village, of people watching him and ducking from his sight. All the doors were 
shut. He knocked on Tam’s door, and Tam’s wife, white-faced, opened at once. She 
paled even more when she saw the blood on his clothes.
“Virdi sent me for a firecoal,” he said, as calmly as he could. Tam’s children 
were huddled around the hearth, silent and staring. “Our fire’s out.” Tam’s wife 
nodded. Without saying a word, she went to her hearth, and took a burning brand, 
far bigger than the custom was. She offered it with a stiff little bow, and he 
took it gingerly.
In the sunlight, the flame was pale, hardly visible; he could feel the heat of 
it as it blew back toward his face. He knew by that he was walking fast, too 
fast. Pidi waited in the yard, sitting now by Girnis. He nodded to the boy, and 
stopped to pick up some splinters of the door.
Inside, Virdi had Raheli’s face clean of blood, but for the wound itself. She 
had her hand over Raheli’s cheek, her expression withdrawn. Gird stepped 
carefully around her and laid the only fire pattern he knew, the shape the men 
used in the open. The brand from Tam’s house lit it instantly, and warmth 
returned to his hearth. He went back out for the bucket, and picked up more 
wood. For an instant, he wondered if it was bad luck to burn doorwood, but then 
shrugged. How much worse could his luck be? He put the bucket down beside 
Raheli, and laid the wood carefully on the fire.
“Is there a boiler left?” asked Virdi suddenly. Gird looked around the chaos in 
the room, and then went to check in the back room. There he found a single metal 
pot, the one Mali had used for steeping her herbs, dented but still whole. He 
took it to Virdi, who nodded. “Good. Start heating water in it—put it near the 
fire, but not in it. And then clean your hands. I’ll need your help.”
They had Raheli’s wounds bound, and her body covered with the cleanest cloth, 
when the steward came. All that time anger had grown in Gird’s heart, anger he 
had controlled so long that he had half-forgotten some of it. Now it grew as 
swiftly as a summer storm-cloud, filling him with black rage. He had tried so 
hard: he had suffered so much already. In spite of all he had brought up three 
of his own children, and two of Arin’s—he would have had his first grandchild 
the next year—and the lords could not let even one hardworking farmer alone, in 
peace.
Yet when the steward came—an old man, now, slightly bent but still capable of 
rule—Gird said nothing of it. He heard what he expected to hear: he, as head of 
his household, would bear the penalty for his son-in-law’s attack on the count’s 
son and his friends, and for his own attempt to get to his cottage to defend 
them. The loss of the cottage he expected, immediate eviction, fines, loss of 
all “so-called personal” property, damages assessed for the breakage of the 
lords’ property in the cottage.
“The count remembers you,” the steward said slowly, his eyes drifting from the 
broken loom to the smashed door. “He will be content, he says, if you sign 
yourself and all your children into serfdom, become his property in name as in 
fact.” He paused, and his voice lowered so that Gird could hardly hear it. “Were 
I you, Gird, I would flee: he’ll name you outlaw, but you would escape for a 
time. Otherwise—you well understand what kind of man he is; he would take 
delight in all you fear, in far worse than you have seen, in this manor. I have 
done all I can.”
“You serve him.” That was all Gird dared say, and he clamped his mouth on the 
rest of it.
“I serve him—I gave my oath, long ago, to the count’s father; had he not died 
young—but that’s no matter. I break my oath by this much—to warn you, to say 
that for this night I can promise you no pursuit. Say you will clean and mend 
what you can by midday tomorrow, when you must be evicted: I will tell him 
that.”
It was all the kindness left; years later Gird realized what the steward risked, 
and what he would suffer if anyone found out what he had done.



Chapter Nine
« ^ » 
All the times he had thought about leaving, it had never been like this. He had 
imagined sending the children away somewhere (but where?), going himself to join 
the little band of rebels he had first met—but not this terrifying journey. He 
was sure they were leaving a trail a child could follow through the narrow wood. 
Anyone would expect him to go that way—but what other way was there? He could 
not have strolled past the manor itself with Raheli on his back.
It still worried him that he’d left the cottage such a wreck. It wasn’t his 
fault, he knew that, but a lifetime’s work and care nagged at him. He should 
have—
Ahead, two rocks clacked sharply together. Gird halted, breathing hard. Behind 
him, he could hear Fori’s breathing as well, on the other end of the litter. 
Raheli was heavier than he’d guessed. Pidi, beside him, glanced up and Gird 
nodded. Pidi clicked two pebbles in his hand, mimicking the stones’ sound. 
Another clack, this a triple. Pidi replied with the triple of triples Gird had 
taught him. Trouble, that was. Danger, trouble, need help—any of those.
Raheli moved on the litter, and moaned softly. Gird looked over his shoulder. 
Blood had seeped through the pack of moss on her face, staining it dark. He 
heard a twig crack, and looked ahead. There were three, coming down the slope. 
One was Diamod. He could have wished it was someone else.
“Gird—what is it?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Only the rock signals of trouble, that someone was needed. Yours?” Diamod 
looked past him at the children.
“Aye. My daughter’s hurt bad; they killed her husband. Outlawed me, for what he 
did, and for trying to get to her—”
“I’m sorry.” Diamod actually sounded sorry; Gird had been half-certain that he 
would dare amusement or scorn. “So—you’re fugitives now?”
“Yes. I don’t know if Rahi will live—”
“Later. Now we must get you away.” Diamod waved the other two men forward, and 
they took the handles from Gird and Fori.
“These are smooth!” said one, clearly surprised.
Gird hawked and spat. “Scythe and shovel handles,” he said. “I’m outlawed 
anyway; might’s well bring something useful.”
Diamod grinned at him, then sobered as he looked at the others. “Are all these 
coming?”
“Fori’s my brother’s son. His wife died last year, in childbirth. The other two 
are mine, and have no place in that village.”
They set off again, faster for the unwearied strength of the two men carrying 
Raheli. Gird strained his ears backwards, expecting to hear any moment the cry 
of hounds, horses’ hooves crashing in the leaves behind them. But he heard 
nothing, only their own hard breathing, their own footsteps.
They followed the water up out of the wood, past the cleft Arin had shown Gird 
all those years ago, where the Stone Circle visitors had waited for so many 
nights. Up a narrow, rocky defile, and carefully around the west slope of the 
hill, keeping as much as possible to the low scrub. Gird looked up once or 
twice, seeing folds of land ahead he did not know, but looked back oftener. When 
would the pursuit come, and how bad would it be?
By noon, when the sun baked pungent scent from the scrub, they had found another 
watercourse, this one winding away to the south. Along its banks low trees 
formed dense cover. Diamod lagged far behind, watching for pursuit, as the 
others paused for a brief rest. Gird dipped water from the creek, and bathed 
Raheli’s face.
She was awake again, lips pressed tightly together, eyes dull. He did not want 
to speak to her—what could he say?—but she questioned him. “Where—are we?”
“South of the village, beyond the hill. We had to leave, Rahi.”
“Parin—they killed him—”
“Yes.”
Her hand strayed to her belly, as if feeling for the child within. “I—don’t want 
to lose the baby—”
“Virdis said you would not, unless you got fevered. She gave me herbs for you.” 
He dug into the roll of clothing and bandages for the little packet of herbs. 
Rahi shook her head.
“I’m fevered now—I can tell. If I lose it—” Her voice trailed away, and her eyes 
fixed on some distance Gird could not fathom. Then she looked at him directly. 
“The little ones?”
“Pidi has a lump on his head, but he’s all right. It would take more than a lump 
to damage him. Giri has a broken arm. Here— you need to drink—” Gird lifted her 
as gently as he could, but Rahi flinched and moaned. He could feel her fever 
burning through the wrappings Virdis had put around her. She sipped a little 
water, then shook her head. He laid her back down. She alone, of all his 
children, reminded him of Mali—she had that same hair, the same quick wit. He 
could not lose her. But her fever mocked him. Of course he could lose her, as he 
had lost his parents, his brother, his brother’s wife, the babies that had died. 
He could lose her quickly or slowly, as the fever raged or died, or as pursuit 
caught them.
He looked around at the others. Giri, her arm bound tightly to her side, looked 
pale and sick; she had never been as strong as Rahi. Pidi, whose lump had 
matured into a spectacular black eye, sat watching Gird alertly. Fori, much like 
Arin but with Issa’s slender build, sat hunched with his head down, breathing 
heavily.
“Fori?” Gird put a hand on his shoulder, and Fori jumped. When he looked up, his 
face was streaked with tears.
“I should have stopped them,” Fori said, through sobs. “I—I should have been 
there.”
“I, too—but we weren’t. And if we had been, we’d have been dead as Parin is 
now.”
“But she’s—”
“Your cousin, and my daughter.”
Diamod came back before he could say more, breathing hard as if he’d been 
running a long way. “I saw guards on the near side of that first hill, moving 
slowly. Not the way we’d come, exactly— I don’t think they have a trail. But we 
can’t stay here. We must move under cover, and keep moving.”
This time Gird and Fori took the litter again, and the other two men took their 
bundles. One of them led the way southward, summering as Gird thought of it, 
keeping them along the creek bank as the water deepened and broadened, then 
leading them eastward, sunrising, up a tributary. Diamod lagged behind, 
overtaking them again near dark, when they’d stopped under a clump of pickoak 
where a spring came bubbling up from the rocks.
“They didn’t follow,” he said, before anyone asked. “They’ve put someone up on 
the hill—I saw a glitter up there—but no sign of real pursuit. We must stay out 
of sight of that hilltop, and no fire, but we can think now where to take 
the—your daughter.”
Gird hoped his face did not show all he felt. “She’s fevered now,” he said, 
ducking his head. Raheli had said nothing, all the afternoon, but she seemed to 
be in a sick daze. He had gotten her to drink a little twice, but nothing more.
“She needs shelter, and a healer. Have you any family in another village?”
Gird shook his head. “Only my wife’s—my dead wife’s—family, over in Fireoak. But 
I don’t know where that is from here, and even so they might not take her.”
One of the other men turned to him. “Fireoak? My sister married into that 
village. They don’t have much trade, those folk, but they’re kindly.”
“We can find Fireoak easily enough, but it will be days of careful travel. We’re 
a day or more from the sheepfold where the dances are.”
Gird nodded. “I know that.”
“For healthy men it would be a day’s journey, but carrying her, and with the 
others, it will be two, I think. Then from there to Fireoak is—”
“A day, like this. But it’s the only shelter between, that fold.”
  
Mali’s parents, like his own, had been dead some years, but her brother was 
alive. He squatted beside the litter and laid a hand on Raheli’s head.
“Mali’s child?”
“Aye.” Gird felt restless, in here where he could not see.
“We heard there’d been trouble your way. Your name was mentioned.” Gird was sure 
it had been, if the guards had been by. “They said a man died—?”
“Rahi’s husband, Parin. He was inside; he tried fight them off.”
“Mmm. And you?”
He felt the rush of shame again. “I was out plowing—when I heard her scream, I 
tried—but the guards got me—”
Mali’s brother shook his head. “None o’ us can stand against them. It’s no blame 
to you. Well. I reckon we can take her in, see if she heals—and the younger 
girl?”
“Has a broken arm.”
“She’s welcome here too. The lords come here rarely, and one woman—one girl—but 
the thing is—”
“You can’t let us stay. I know that.” Gird sighed, heavily. “I— I’m an outlaw 
now, we both know that. Trouble for you. But if you’ll care for them—”
“We will.”
“Then I’ll leave now, before I bring trouble.”
“Will you tell us where?”
“No. What you don’t know, you won’t be withholding. If Rahi lives, I may come 
through again sometime.”
Mali’s brother nodded. “I can give you a bit of food—”
“Save it for Rahi—I’m giving you two more mouths to feed, maybe three if she 
doesn’t lose the child—”
“Never mind. We’re glad to help Mali’s daughters. May the Lady’s grace go with 
you.”
Gird almost answered with a curse—what grace had he had from the Lady this 
several years?—but choked it back. The man meant no harm, and maybe the Lady 
meant no harm either. He and Fori eased out of the barton, keeping close to the 
walls and low, until they came between the hedges that edged the fields of 
Fireoak. Back up the grassy lane—the plough-team’s lane, he was sure—to the 
heavy clump of wood that reminded him of the way the wood had been when he was a 
child. Here no lord had thinned it, and the oak and nut trees made a vast shade.
Diamod was waiting, with Pidi; the others had disappeared. Gird and Fori scooped 
up the sticky paste of soaked grain, and ate it from dirty fingers. For the 
first time, Gird felt like a real outlaw. No fire, no shelter, no table or 
spoons—only the knife at his belt, and the farm tools he had carried away.
“And now?” Diamod asked. “What will you do now?”
Gird looked sideways at him. “What is there to do, but try to live and fight?”
“You had said you were thinking of teaching us what you knew of soldiering.”
Gird wiped sticky fingers in the leafmold, and scowled at the result. “I had 
some ideas, yes. But your people—were they all farmers before?”
“Most of them. I was a woodworker, myself. There’s a one-armed man who was a 
smith, but crippled for forging long blades.”
“But most have used farming tools, sickles and scythes and shovels and the 
like?”
“Yes—but why?”
Gird had crouched by the trickle of water to scrub his hands clean; now he 
flipped the water from them, and leaned back against a tree. Something poked him 
in the back, and he squirmed away from it.
“You can’t fight soldiers as an unarmed mob; we know that already. It takes too 
many—and too many die. Drill would help; having a plan and following it, not 
rushing around in a lump. But weapons—that’s the thing. We’ll never get swords 
enough, not with the watch they keep on smiths. I’d thought of making weapons 
from the blades of scythes or sickles, but that too would take a smith willing 
to work the metal, and then training to use them. I had just begun sword 
training myself; I’m not any good with a sword.” He paused to clear his throat. 
Diamod was scowling, and now he shrugged.
“So? Are you still saying there’s no way peasants can defend themselves?”
“No. What I’m saying is we have to use what we have. The tools the men are used 
to—the tools we can make, or that we have already—and then learn to use those 
tools for fighting.”
Diamod looked unconvinced. “Are you saying that ex-farmers with shovels can 
stand up to soldiers with pikes and swords?”
“If we can’t, then we’re doomed. I don’t know if they—we— can. But we have to 
try.”
“And you’ll teach us.”
“I hope so. There’s something else—”
“What?”
“Just an idea. Let me tell the others about it later.”
Diamod led Gird, Fori, and Pidi through the woods that lay between Fireoak and 
the next holding to the east. Gird tried to keep in mind how they had come, but 
soon found all the trees, trails, and creeks blurring in his mind. That night 
they spent in the wood, eating another cold meal of soaked grain. The next day, 
they followed a creek most of the day, coming at last to a clearing where the 
creek roared down a rocky bluff. At the foot of the waterfall, a rude camp held 
a score of men.
In the center of the camp was a circle of stones around the firepit, symbolic of 
their name, but actually used for seating. The lean blackhaired man who appeared 
to be the leader did not rise from his stone when Diamod led Gird forward.
“So this is Gird of Kelaive’s village, eh?” The man looked worn and hungry, as 
they all did. Diamod started to speak, and the man waved him to silence. “I’ll 
hear Gird himself.”
Gird stared at him, uncertain. So many strangers—not one familiar face beyond 
Fori and Pidi—upset him. He could not read their expressions; he did not know 
where they were from, or how they would act.
“Have you ever been out of your vill before?” asked the man, less brusquely.
“Only to trade fair, one time, and to Fireoak when I was courting,” Gird said. 
The man’s voice even sounded strange; some of his words had an odd twang to 
them.
“Then you feel like a lost sheep, in among wild ones. I know that feeling. 
Fireoak’s in your hearthing, anyway—hardly leaving home and kin, like this. 
Diamod has told us about you—that you sent grain, the past few years, after your 
friend was killed—”
“Amis,” said Gird. It seemed important to name him.
“And now you’ve run away to join us. Why?”
Gird got the tale out in short, choked phrases; no one interrupted. When he 
finished, he was breathing hard and fast, and the others were looking mostly at 
their feet. Only the blackhaired man met his eyes.
“Outlaw—this is what you chose. After telling Diamod you would not consider it—”
“While I could farm,” Gird said. “Now—”
“You can’t farm here,” the man gestured at the surrounding forest. “So what 
skills do you bring us?”
Gird was sweating, wishing he could plunge away into the trees and lose himself. 
What did these men want? Were they going to grant him shelter or not? “I thought 
I would do what Diamod asked before: teach you what I know of soldiering.”
Someone snickered, behind him. The blackhaired man smiled. “And what do you know 
of soldiering, after a lifetime spent farming? Did you bring swords, and will 
you teach us to use them? Or perhaps that scythe slung on your back will turn to 
a pike at your spellword? Diamod told me he had found someone, a renegade 
guardsman, he said, to teach us soldiers’ drill, but what good is drill without 
weapons?”
The tone of the questions roused his anger, and banished fear. “Without drill 
you couldn’t use weapons if you had them. With it— with it, you can use whatever 
comes to hand, and make a weapon of it.”
“S’pose you’ll lead us into battle wi’ sticks, eh?” asked one man. Others 
chuckled. “Fat lot of good that will do, a stick against a sword.”
“It can,” said Gird, “if you’ve the sense to use it like a stick, and not try to 
fence with it.” This time the chuckles were fewer; he could see curiosity as 
well as scorn in their faces.
“ ’Course,” said the black-haired man, “we’ve only got your word for it, that 
you can fight at all.”
“That’s true.” Gird relaxed; he knew what would come of this. They wanted to see 
what Diamod had dragged in, but it would be a fair fight. “You want to see me 
fight?”
“I think so.” The blackhaired man looked around at the others. “Aye—that’s what 
we want. Show us something.”
“Let’m eat first, Ivis,” said one of the other men. “They been travelin’ all 
day.”
“No guest-right,” the blackhaired man scowled. “Until this Gird proves what he 
is or isn’t, I’m not granting guest-right.”
“No guest-right,” said Gird. He was surprised to find outlaws following that 
much of the social code. Food was more of the soaked grain, and a cold mush of 
boiled beans. Looking around, Gird saw only the one firepit, and no oven. The 
blackhaired man unbent enough to explain.
“Sometimes the lords hunt this wood, and their foresters use this clearing. So a 
fire here is safer than one elsewhere in the wood; folks is used to seeing smoke 
from about here. We tried to build an oven once, but they broke it up when they 
found it.”
“Where do you go when the foresters come?” asked Gird.
“That you’ll find out after you fight. If you convince us to let you stay.”
When Gird had eaten a little, he stood and stretched. The others went on eating, 
all but a strongly built man a little shorter than he was. Gird glanced at the 
black-haired man, who grinned.
“You’ll fight Cob; he’s our best wrestler. Used to win spicebread at the trade 
fair that way, as a lad. Show us how a soldier fights, but no killing: if you’re 
good, we can’t afford to lose you or Cob.”
“All right.” Gird had seen Cob’s sort of wrestler before; he would be strong and 
quick. But the sergeant had taught his recruits many ways to fight hand-to-hand, 
and which ones were best against which kind of opponent. Gird watched Cob crouch 
and come forward in a balanced glide, and grinned to himself.
Although he knew what to do, it had been a long time since he’d done it. He got 
the right grip on Cob’s arm, and put out his own leg, but his timing was just 
off, and Cob twisted away before he was thrown. Gird avoided Cob’s attempt at a 
hold, but the effort threw him off balance and he staggered. Cob launched 
himself at Gird, knocking him sideways, and threw a leg across him quickly. Gird 
remembered that—it took a roll, here, and a quick heave there, and suddenly he 
was on top of Cob. Under him, the man’s muscles were bunched and hard. He was 
not quitting. Gird did not wait for Cob’s explosion, but rolled backwards 
suddenly, releasing his grip. Cob bounced up and charged. This time Gird was 
ready; he took the wrist of the arm Cob punched at him, pivoted, and flung Cob 
hard over his shoulder onto the ground.
Cob lay blinking, half-stunned. Gird heard something behind him, and whirled in 
time to catch another charge, even as the blackhaired man said “Triga—no!” 
Triga’s mad rush required no great skill; Gird used the man’s own momentum to 
send him flying as well. He landed hard and skidded an armlength when he landed.
Cob whistled, from his place on the ground. “You could’ve made money with that 
throw, Gird. Teach me?”
Gird looked at the blackhaired man. “Well?”
“Well. You can fight—not many overthrow Cob. I’m sorry about Triga, but glad to 
see you have no trouble with him. We can use those skills.”
“And the rest?”
The blackhaired man frowned slightly. “I am not the only leader, the Stone 
Circle is made of many circles, and each has its own. You must convince us all 
that this is something we need, and can use. I still do not see how sticks and 
shovels will let us stand against soldiers with sharp steel.”
Gird started to say that he wasn’t sure, but realized that these men didn’t want 
to hear that. Those eyes fastened on his face wanted certainty, confidence, the 
right answer. The only answer he was sure of was drill. “You have to start with 
drill,” he said. He knew they could hear the certainty in his voice about that. 
“You have to learn to work together, move together. Let me show you.”
“Now?” someone asked, as if it were absurd to start something new so late in the 
day.
“You can’t start sooner,” said Gird, quoting the old proverb. Several of the men 
chuckled, but it was a friendly chuckle this time.
“Start with me,” said the blackhaired man. “My name’s Ivis.” He stood and the 
rest stood also. Cob, cheerful despite his fall, had climbed to his feet, and 
reached a hand down to Triga.
Gird took a deep breath and tried to remember the expression on his sergeant’s 
face. “The first thing is, you line up here.” He scratched a line in the dirt 
with his toe. “You, too, Fori—come on. Pidi, just stay out of the way. Two hands 
of you here, and two behind, an armslength.” That would make two ranks of ten.
When the front ten had their toes more or less arranged on the line he’d 
scratched, he looked at them again. They slouched in an uneven line, shoulders 
hunched or tipped sideways, heads poked forward, knees askew. Triga was rubbing 
his elbow. Those behind were even more uneven; they had taken his armslength 
literally, and the short ones stood closer to those in front than the tall ones. 
This was going to be harder than he’d thought. His boyhood friends had been 
eager to play soldier.
“Stand up straight,” he said. “Like the soldiers you’ve seen. Heads up—” That 
sent one of them staggering, as he jerked his head up too far. Someone else 
chuckled. Ivis growled at them, and they settled again. Gird did not like their 
expressions: they weren’t taking this seriously at all. Only Fori and Cob and 
Ivis looked as if they were even trying. “You three—” he said, pointing to them. 
“You get together here in the middle. And you others—look at them, how they’re 
standing. Like that is what you need. Feet together, toes out a little. Hands at 
your sides. You in the back row, make a straight row—” Gradually they shifted 
and wiggled into something more like military posture. Gird wondered if he had 
looked like that at first. Maybe this was the best they could do, for now.
“Now you have to learn to march.” He glared, daring anyone to laugh. No one did, 
but he saw smirks. His old sergeant would have had something to say about that, 
but he had never dealt with outlaws, either. “You all have to start with the 
same foot—”
“Like dancing?” asked Cob. Gird stopped, surprised. He’d never thought of it as 
like dancing, but all the dances required the men to step out with the same 
foot, or they’d have been tripping each other. He thought his way into the 
harvest dance he had led so many times. Wrong foot.
“Like dancing,” he said finally, “but not the same foot. The other foot, from 
the harvest dance.” Surely they all danced it the same way. “Think of the dance, 
and then pick up the other foot.” Slowly, wavering, one foot after another came 
up, until they were all teetering on one foot. All but two had the correct foot. 
Those looked down, saw they were wrong, and changed feet. “Now one step 
forward.” The double line lurched towards him, out of step and no two steps the 
same length. Gird felt a twinge of sympathy for his old sergeant. Had it been 
this difficult? “Straighten out the lines,” he said.
He kept them at it until his voice was tired. By then they could break apart and 
reassemble in two fairly straight lines, and they could all pick up the same 
foot at the same time. But when they walked forward, their uneven strides 
quickly destroyed the lines. He was sure they could have danced it, arms over 
each others’ shoulders, but they couldn’t fight in that position. He’d told them 
that, and a few other things, and remembered some of the words his sergeant had 
used.
They were ready to lounge around, eating their meager supper, but Gird 
remembered more than his sergeant’s curses.
“We must learn to keep things clean,” he said.
“Clean!” Triga had scowled often; now he sneered. “We’re not lords in a palace. 
How can we be clean—and why should we?”
“Soldiers keep themselves clean, and their weapons bright. I spent my first days 
in the guard scrubbing the floor, washing dishes, and scouring buckets. First, 
it keeps men healthy—you all know that—and protects against fevers. And second, 
it means that you know your equipment will work. A weapon’s no good if the blade 
is dull. And third, I stink bad enough to tell any forester there’s a poor man 
here: so do you all, after the drill. D’you want hounds seeking us? It’s warm 
enough: we should all bathe.”
Sighing, Ivis and Cob heaved themselves up, and the others followed. Gird led 
them to the waterfall. Once well wet, the men cheered up and began joking, 
splashing each other. Pidi had found a clump of soaproot, and sliced off 
sections with his knife. Soon the creek was splattered with heavy lather.
When Gird felt that the grime and sweat of the past days was finally gone, he 
washed his clothes as best he could, and saw the bloodstains from Parin and Rahi 
fade to brownish yellow. The other men watched him, curious, but some of them 
fetched their own ragged garments and tumbled them in the water. Gird smiled 
when he saw them laying out the wet clothes on bushes, as he was doing. Diamod 
brought him a clump of leaves.
“Here—rub this on, and the flies will stay away. Otherwise you’ll be eaten up by 
the time your things are dry.”
“I should’ve washed clothes first—now it’s near nightfall. But I have a spare 
shirt.”
“Most of them don’t.”
But even in dirty clothes, the men stank less, and carried themselves less 
furtively. Gird, with a clean shirt tickling his bare knees, suggested another 
change in their customs.
“Why not bake a hearthcake on one of these stones? ’Twouldn’t be bread, exactly, 
but it would be hot, and cooked—
“If we had honey we could have honeycakes, an’ we had grain,” said Triga. Gird 
began to take a real dislike to Triga.
“There’s always bees in a wood,” he said crisply. “And stings to a bee, for all 
that.”
“There’s none knows how to make the batter, Gird,” said Ivis. “We’ve no mill or 
flour. All we know is crush the grain and soak it—if you know better, teach us 
that.”
Gird thought of the millstones left behind—but he could not have carried them 
and Rahi. He looked at the stones used as seats, and found one with a slightly 
hollowed surface. Then he went to the creekside, and looked for cobbles. He 
could feel the other men watching him, as if he were a strange animal, a marvel. 
But millstones, the cottage millstones, were no different. A hollowed stone, 
like a bowl, and the grinder. Some people had flatter ones, with a broader 
grinder. It had to be fine-grained stone, and hard. He picked up several cobbles 
he liked, and hefted them, felt along their smooth curves with a careful finger. 
Yes.
Ivis had the grainsack out for him when he returned. Gird wondered if it was 
grain he’d grown, or someone else’s contribution. It didn’t matter. He dipped a 
small handful, and poured it onto the stone, then rubbed with the cobble. It 
wasn’t the right shape— neither the bottom stone nor the grinder—and the 
half-ground grain wanted to spit out from under and fall off. He worked 
steadily, ignoring the others, pushing the meal back under the grinder with his 
finger. He was careful not to lick it, as he would have at home: thin as they 
all were, they must be keeping famine law, when all the food was shared equally.
When the first handful was ground to a medium meal, he brushed it into a wooden 
bowl that Ivis had brought. It was not enough to make any sort of bread for all 
of them, but he could test his memory. Cob brought him a small lump of tallow, 
and he took a pinch of salt from the saltbag he’d brought himself. Meal, water, 
fat, salt—not all he liked in his hearthcakes, but better than meal and water 
alone. He stirred it in the wooden bowl, while the fire crackled and Pidi 
brushed off the flattest of the stones facing the firepit. The tallow stayed in 
its lump, stubborn, and Gird remembered that he needed to heat it. He skewered 
it on a green stick, and held it over the fire, catching the drips in the bowl.
Finally it melted off, and he stirred it in quickly. He felt the stone, and 
remembered that he should have greased it. The stick he’d used for the tallow 
was greasy now; he rubbed his fingers down it, and then smeared the stone. The 
stone was hot, but was it hot enough? He poured the batter out. It stiffened 
almost at once, the edges puckering. Hot enough. With his arm, he waved heat 
toward it, to cook the upper surface. Mali had had the skill to scoop up the 
hearthcakes and flip them, but the only times he’d tried it, they’d fallen in 
the fire.
The smell made his mouth water and his belly clench. He looked up, and saw 
hungry looks on all the faces. Now the upper side was stiff and dull—dry, and 
browning. He hoped he’d put enough tallow on the rock, He slid a thin twig under 
it, and it lifted. He got his fingers on it—hot!—and flipped it to Ivis. Ivis 
broke it in pieces— each man had a small bite—and then it was gone. But if his 
fighting had gotten their respect, this had gotten their interest.
“I thought you were a farmer, not a cook,” said Ivis.
“My wife was sick a lot, that last few years.” Gird gestured at the bowl. “May I 
give my son that?”
Ivis nodded. “Of course. It’s fair; he had none of the hearthcake itself.” Pidi 
grinned and began cleaning the batter from the bowl with busy fingers and agile 
tongue. “But tell us—what do we need?”
Gird thought about it. “Millstones—we can use this, but we can’t carry it along, 
not if the foresters come here. But we can put millstones in another place, if 
you have a particular place.”
“Where I came from, we all had to use the lord’s mill,” said Ivis.
Gird shrugged. “That was the rule for us, too, but most of us had handmills at 
home. Always had. The lord’s mill was a day’s journey away—we had no time for 
that. And then if you did go, you’d have to wait while he ground someone else’s, 
and might not get your own back. Anyway, we can have millstones for hand 
milling—it’ll take time, is the main thing. We can’t have bread every day. 
Tallow, we need, and a bit of honey if it’s available. Salt—I brought some with 
me, but we’ll need more—”
“There’s a salt lick downstream a bit,” said Cob. “I can show you.”
“And if we want lightbread, we’ll need a starter. Do you ever get milk?”
“D’you think we live in a great town market, where we can buy whatever we like?” 
asked Triga.
From the tone of the response, others were as tired of Triga’s complaints as 
Gird was. Gird waited until the others had spoken, then said “No, but I think 
you’re not so stupid as you act.” Cob grinned. Triga, predictably, scowled. Gird 
turned back to Ivis. “How long have you lived out here?”
“Me? A hand of years—five long winters. Artha’s been here longer, but most don’t 
stay that long. They move on, or they die.”
“You’ve done well, on beans and grain.”
“There’s more in the summer. We find herbs, do a little hunting, rob a hive once 
a year—no one wants to do it more, with all the stings we get. We do get milk 
sometimes, when we venture in close to a farmstead. Not all of us, o’ course. 
Milk, cheese, trade honey or herbs for a bit of cloth…”
Cloth, in fact, was one of the hardest things to come by. Gird, remembering his 
mother’s hours at the loom, and the value of each furl, did not wonder at this. 
To share food was one thing; to share the product of personal skill was another. 
The outlaws had learned to tan the hides of beasts they hunted—“Stick ’em in an 
oak stump that’s rotted and got water in it”—but good leather took more than 
that; many of the hides rotted, or came out too brittle to use for clothing.
As he listened to Ivis and Cob, and thought about all that this group needed, he 
thought back to his sergeant’s comments about the importance of supply. Soldiers 
did not grow their own food, or raise their own flocks, or build their own 
shelters—this, so they could have the time to practice soldiering. But these men 
would have to do it themselves. Could they do that, and learn to be soldiers as 
well?



Chapter Ten
« ^ » 
The next morning, Gird realized that the others were all looking to him for 
leadership, and not only in military training.
“Do we work on drill before breakfast, or after?” asked Ivis.
“After,” said Gird, to give himself time. His clothes were still damp; he turned 
them over and hoped the morning sun would dry them. Then he eyed the trees, and 
realized it would be a long time before the sun came into the clearing. 
Breakfast was another cold mess of soaked grain. Gird was already tired of it. 
He was spoiled, he supposed, by having had a wife and daughter with a parrion 
for herbs and cooking. Pidi leaned against him as he ate, and Gird put an arm 
around him. He wished he could have left the boy with Mali’s brother—he was 
really too young for this. Fori sat on Gird’s other side, carefully not leaning, 
but clearly nervous among so many strangers.
“Do you have a plan beyond training us?” asked Cob. Gird glanced at Ivis, who 
seemed interested but not antagonistic.
“When Diamod first came to our village,” Gird said, “he wanted to learn 
soldiering. Wanted me to teach all of you. I thought he meant you had a 
plan—whoever your leader was.”
“We’ve tried things,” Ivis said. “And the other groups—I know they have. 
Captured a guards’ store house, one did, and burned it out, but that brought 
more guards, and they took prisoners—finally killed them. Robbed a few traders, 
but that’s—we don’t like to be brigands; that’s not what we’re here for.”
“And that is?”
Diamod leaped into the discussion. “We’ve got to be the peasant’s friend—free 
the peasants, somehow, from the lords—”
“That won’t happen!” Triga stamped his foot in emphasis. “There’s always been 
lords and peasants. But if we can make them understand they have to be fair—”
“Now that is what will never happen.” Cob stamped both feet. “Lords be fair 
indeed! They wouldn’t know how, and why should they? Nay, ’slong as we’ve got 
the lords over us, they’ll do their best to keep us down, and take every bit 
they can. Does the farmer leave the sheep half a fleece, or feed a cow and not 
milk her?”
“A good farmer leaves the beasts alive and healthy,” muttered another man. Gird 
could tell this was an old argument, comfortable in their mouths as their 
tongues were. He knew its byways as well, having heard them all in his own 
village. He cleared his throat, and to his surprise they all quieted and looked 
at him.
“You have no plan,” he said, as if musing. “One wants to teach the lords how to 
rule, and another wants to end their rule, and I suppose some of you would like 
to go and live peacefully far away, if you could.”
“Aye—” More than one voice answered him.
“I used to think,” Gird went on, “that it was best to work hard and live within 
the lords’ laws. That if a man worked hard enough, honestly enough, everything 
would be right in the end. That’s what my father taught me, and times I did 
other than he said, we all suffered for it. I determined to follow his advice, 
and trust he was right. But I was wrong.” He paused, and looked around. Pidi was 
trembling a little in the arc of his arm; Fori’s face was set. The others 
watched him closely, and did not move. “I told you a little—about my daughter 
and her husband—but not all that led me here. It began long before, and over the 
years I built a wall of the stones I swallowed—stones of anger and stones of 
sorrow. A wall to keep myself at peace, and safety within—and it did not work.” 
He ran a hand through his thinning hair, and scrubbed his beard. “I don’t know 
if any law is fair, but the law the lords put on us is not fair, and no man can 
live safe under it. I don’t know if all the lords are alike, but some of 
’em—Kelaive, for one—are not only greedy, but cruel. They like to hurt people; 
they like to see people suffer. Such men cannot rule wisely, or fairly. And when 
such men rule, no one can live an honest life.” He drew a long breath, gave Pidi 
a squeeze, and then pushed him gently away. He could not say what he was going 
to say, with his arm around his youngest child.
“I have taken that wall down,” Gird said. “Those stones—those stones I will 
throw at our enemies. Those stones, which I bring to this circle—because the 
Lady herself cannot give us peace unless we drive off the alien lords who rule 
us.”
“But we can’t,” said Triga. “We are too few—”
“Now, in this place, yes: we are too few. But there are more farmers than lords, 
more servants than lords. Few have joined you, as I did not join you, because 
they too think we are too few. They do not wish more trouble than they have. But 
if we can show success, they will come. I’m sure of it.”
“Yes!” Cob stamped his feet again. “Yes, you’re right. Gird’s right,” he said to 
the others. Most were nodding, smiling, clearly pleased with what Gird had said. 
And Gird, putting his arm around Pidi again, wondered if he could possibly 
perform what they were sure he had promised.
Serious planning began after a short review of yesterday’s drill. He had 
realized that the clearing was really too small and too cluttered for serious 
drill; he could not march his two lines of ten five steps without someone having 
to step over or around a log or stone. And in the noise they made while 
drilling, a squad of mounted guards could have ridden up on them without anyone 
noticing.
“Do you have anyone out looking for foresters?” he asked Ivis.
“Usually someone goes downstream, and someone goes upstream,” Ivis scratched his 
jaw and looked thoughtful. “We use stone clicks for signals. But today everyone 
wanted to hear what you said.” In other words, Gird thought, just when it was 
most dangerous, they had no guard set. That would have to change.
“What about at night?”
“No, no one goes out at night. The foresters don’t travel at night.”
“But—” He wondered how far to go. Would Ivis be angry? It had to be said. “At 
night, you could see the glow of their fire— smell smoke or cooking food—and be 
warned.”
“I suppose.” Ivis didn’t look eager to wander the forest at night; Gird could 
understand that. But Diamod had seemed to like sneaking about the village—maybe 
he could. He glanced at Diamod, who smiled brightly. He still did not understand 
Diamod, and he wondered if he ever would. The other men seemed to feel the way 
he felt—would have felt, if he’d left home under any other circumstances, he 
reminded himself. They were here because they had to be. But Diamod seemed to be 
enjoying himself.
“Someone should go out now, and be sure no foresters are coming,” he said to 
Ivis. Ivis nodded, but did nothing. “Who will you send?” Gird asked.
“Me? But you’re—”
“Do you want me to take over as leader? Is that what you’re saying?”
Ivis sat silent a long moment, his face somber. Then he looked Gird in the face. 
“I haven’t done much,” he said. “Just—just tried to keep them together—talk to 
farmers about food—but I don’t feel like a leader. I never did. They started 
listening to me after Rual died, but I never wanted it. They’re used to me, but 
you’ll do better.”
“It’s not something you and I should decide,” Gird said, almost before he 
thought it. “If this is about fairness, and ruling fairly, then they should have 
a say.”
“Triga will quarrel,” said Ivis. Gird shrugged.
“Let him quarrel. He won’t do more; he didn’t like landing on the ground.” He 
looked around at the others, now lounging around the clearing in the attitudes 
of men trying to hear a private conversation without seeming to listen. “Ivis 
and I were talking,” he began, not raising his voice. They edged closer. “He 
asked me if I wanted to be leader.”
“You! We don’t even know you,” Triga said. Predictable, Gird thought. He’s so 
predictable.
“Quiet now—you can argue later.” He put a bite into his voice, and Triga 
subsided. The others were attentive; he could not tell if they approved or not. 
“Ivis—do you want to tell them what you said to me?”
Ivis swallowed, gulped, and finally repeated most of what he’d said. “I think 
he’d be a good leader,” he finished. “He’s strong, and he has a plan. And he 
knows more than just soldiering. I’d rather follow him.”
“And I,” said Cob quickly, giving Gird a wide grin. “I want to learn how to 
fight like that.”
“Yes,” said some of the others, and “Gird—let’s have Gird.” Triga was 
obstinately silent until everyone else had spoken. They all looked at him, and 
he turned red.
“Come on, Trig,” said Cob. “You know you want to—it’s just your stubbornness.”
“What if he’s a spy?” Triga said. “How do we know he isn’t a guard in disguise?”
“I’m not that stupid!” Diamod glared at him. “I was in his village: I met his 
friends. They told me a lot—” He gave Gird a long look, steady and measuring. “A 
lot about his past. They couldn’t all have been lying. He’s a farmer and a 
farmer’s son, and if you think he’s not, you can argue it with me. Knife to 
knife.”
“Enough,” Gird said. “We can’t be spilling each other’s blood over little 
quarrels, if we want to fight a war. Triga, d’you think Diamod’s lying?”
“No.” It was a sulky no.
“Do you think I am? I’ll have no one in my army that thinks I’m a liar.” He felt 
ridiculous, speaking of an army when what he had was twenty ragged, hungry, 
untrained men and one boy, but he saw the others straighten a little. If coward 
was a word to make men flinch and bend, maybe army was a word to straighten 
their backs and make them proud. He saw Triga’s face change, as he realized that 
he might actually be thrown out of the group. Fear and anger contended; fear 
won.
“No—I don’t think you’re lying.” Slightly less sulky, and somewhat worried.
“These others agreed to have me as their leader—do you?” He kept his eyes locked 
on Triga’s; he could feel the struggle in the man.
“I suppose. For awhile. We can see.” Cob and Diamod looked angry, but Gird shook 
his head.
“That’s fair. You don’t completely trust me, but you’re willing to give me a 
chance.” Triga’s jaw dropped in surprise; he had been braced for an argument. 
Gird looked around at the others. “I told Ivis I would not take the leadership 
on his word alone. You have all chosen, as you have a right to do—and I thank 
Triga for trusting as far as he can. None of us can do more than that.”
The others sat back, their expressions ranging from puzzled to satisfied. Triga 
said nothing, but looked as if he were chewing on a new idea.
“Now, We need to send out watchers, to let us know if anyone comes. Ivis says 
you usually had two; I’d like to send four—two of you, and my son Pidi and my 
nephew Fori. They need to learn the forest.”
“It’s my turn,” said Ivis. “And Kelin—” Kelin was a slight brownhaired man with 
one shoulder higher than the other. He did not quite limp when he walked, but 
his stride was uneven. Gird nodded.
“Pidi knows many useful herbs,” he said. “My daughter taught him.”
Kelin grinned. “Then let him come with me: all I know is flybane and firetouch. 
And sometimes I miss firetouch until I’m already itching.”
“Three pairs of clicks,” said Ivis, as they left. “That’s the danger signal. 
”You pass it on, whichever way it comes, and move away from it. Cob knows the 
trails.“
When they had gone, Gird surveyed the clearing itself. If they had to leave it 
untouched, so that foresters who used it would not know they’d been there, he 
could not move the logs and stones used for seating to give more room for drill. 
They really needed a campsite the foresters did not use. This one could become a 
trap, particularly if his people became effective against the lords. So what did 
he need in a campsite? He thought about that as he roamed the clearing, pacing 
off distances, and trying to listen for clicks.
Water. Good drainage, and room for the jacks trenches he would have them dig; 
the disgusting stench just behind a trio of cedars was entirely too obvious. 
Level ground, uncumbered, for drill, but enough trees for cover. A cave would be 
nice, shelter from weather and a place to store food and equipment. While he was 
asking, why not a forge with a skilled smith? He remembered that Diamod had said 
one of the men had been a smith, a one-armed man— there he was. His name was 
odd, a smithish name: Ketik.
“Ketik—”
“Aye.” He had a rough voice, and stood canted a little sideways, as if missing 
the weight of his arm. The stump was ugly, a twisted purple lump of scar. He 
wore no shirt, only a sleeveless leather jerkin.
“If we found another campsite, what would we need for a forge?”
Ketik stared at him out of light-blue eyes. “A forge? Don’t you see this arm? 
I’m no smith now.”
“If we had what is needed, couldn’t you take an apprentice? Teach someone?”
Ketik snorted, a sound half-laughter, half-anger. “Could you teach someone to 
swing a scythe by telling them? Wouldn’t you have to show them? Do you think 
smithery is so simple?”
“Not simple at all,” said Gird quietly. “It is a great mystery, and our village 
had no smith at all. We shared one with Hardshallows. But we will need a smith—”
“And not all are weapons smiths,” Ketik said.
“I know. What I’m thinking of wouldn’t take a swordsmith. But we would have to 
have our own forge.”
“A good fireplace,” Ketik said rapidly. “Fuel—fireoak is best. Someone to make 
charcoal, because you’d need to be able to refine ores sometimes. Leather for 
the bellows, and not the rotting, stiff mess these idiots make in old tree 
stumps. Real leather, properly tanned. Tools, which means iron: ore or lump iron 
from some smelter. Both are illegal. An anvil. Someplace with water, too, and a 
way to disguise the smoke. Satisfied?”
“We will need to move anyway,” Gird said. “We might as well look for what we 
need.”
“What we need is the gods’ blessing and a fistful of miracles,” said Ketik. He 
sounded slightly less irritated now, as if challenging Gird had eased his mind.
“You’re right,” Gird said. “But though we need Alyanya’s blessing for a good 
harvest, we still have to plow and plant and weed and reap.”
Ketik laughed aloud. “Well—you may be the leader we need after all. I never 
heard of a one-armed smith teaching smithery, but then I never heard of a farmer 
teaching soldiering, either.”
Triga had come close while they were talking; now he said, “I said last autumn 
we should find a new campsite.”
Gird nodded, ignoring the rancorous tone. “Did you find someplace you thought 
would be good?”
“Me?” Triga looked surprised. “They wouldn’t listed to me.”
“If you already know a place—”
“I know another place than this, but it might not be what you want.”
“How far is it?”
“A half-day, maybe, or a little longer.” He pointed across the stream. 
“Sunrising. It’s swampy; the foresters never go there.”
Gird opened his mouth to say that the last thing they needed was a swamp, and 
closed it again. If Triga was trying to be helpful, why stop him, “I think we’ll 
need more than one place, but that sounds useful. If we’re pursued—”
“It’s like a moat, I thought,” said Triga.
“As long as we have a bridge over it—one they can’t see.”
“Gird—about the grain—do you want us to grind more today?” That was Herf, who 
had been tending the fire when Gird awoke. Triga looked sulky and opened his 
mouth; Gird shook his head. “Triga, tomorrow or the next day I’d like to see 
your swamp. Right now, though, the grain comes first.”
Triga said “I could go look for a path through the swamp.”
“Good idea.” Gird had never seen a swamp, and had no idea what one would look 
like. Were they flat? Sloped? Did they have high places that were dry? “If you 
find a dry place inside it,” he said slowly, “like the castle inside the moat—?”
“I’ll look.” Triga actually seemed cheerful—for him—as he waded across the 
stream and turned to wave back at them. Gird shook his head and turned to Herf.
“Now. How much grain do we have?”
When Herf showed him their meager food stores, and the way they were kept, Gird 
could hardly believe the band had not starved long ago. Sacks of grain and dry 
beans were sitting on damp stone under a rainroof made of small cedars with 
their tops tied together. Gird prodded the bottom of the sacks and felt the 
telltale firmness of grain rotted into a solid mass. Beans had begun to sprout 
through the coarse sacking. Herf had tried to store onions and redroots in a 
trench, but most of them were sprouting.
“I know,” he said in answer to Gird’s look. “Once they sprout, the redroots are 
poisonous. But I couldn’t dig them in any deeper here, without proper tools. The 
ground’s stony.”
“Well.” Gird squatted beside the trench, and brushed the leaf-mold off a healthy 
redroot sprout. “My da used to tell about his granda’s da—or somewhat back 
there—about the time before the lords came, when our folk grew things in the 
woods.”
“In the woods?”
“In fields, too, the grain—of course. But redroots and onions and such—some we 
don’t grow now—along the streams, and in the woods. We can’t eat these—maybe we 
should plant them now, and harvest in the fall.”
“We can still eat the onions—”
“Some of them, yes. But why not plant the others? Spread ’em around in the 
wood—no one’d recognize them as plantings, and they’d be where we knew—”
Herf frowned, thinking hard. “Then—we could grow the greenleaves, too, couldn’t 
we? Cabbages, sorli—”
“Maybe even sugarroot.” Gird poked at the leafmold. “This here’s good growing 
soil for some crops. Herbs, greenleaves—grow ’em along the creekbank, we could. 
You know how hard it is to haul water to the greenstuff in summer—we could plant 
it where it needs no help.”
“Aye, but breadgrain and beans—we can’t live on greenstuff and redroots alone.”
“Right enough for now—you get your grain from farmers, right?”
“Or steal it from traders—but that’s rare.”
“When we take it from farmers, they go hungry—so we can’t afford to let any 
rot—”
“It’s the best I could do!” Herf puffed up almost like a frog calling.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t. But if we find a new campsite, maybe we can do 
better. Besides—did you ever see the big jars the lords use?”
“Jars?”
“Aye. Brown, shiny on inside and outside. Like our honeypots but bigger. They’re 
almighty heavy and hard to move, but grain and even meal stay dry inside them.”
“And where would we get such? We don’t have a potter.”
Another miracle to wish for, thought Gird. They needed some pots—at least small 
ones. In his mind’s eye, his future campsite had sprouted another fireplace, 
although it wavered as he looked at it. He’d never seen a potter’s workshop. He 
knew they had a special name for the hearth in which they cooked their pots, but 
not what it looked like. But he could see as clearly as if he stood there the 
kitchen of the guard barracks at Kelaive’s manor, with the great jars of meal 
and beans, the huge cooking kettles, the shiny buckets, the longhandled forks 
and spoons, the rack of knives. If he was going to have an army, he would have 
to have a kitchen capable of feeding it—and storerooms—his head ached, and he 
shook it. What he had was a sack and a half of grain, some of it rotted, less 
than a sack of beans, a few sprouting onions, and redroots that might be edible 
in half a year. An open firepit, two or three wooden bowls, the men’s belt 
knives. He sighed, heavily, and heaved himself up.
“All right. We’ll grind some of that grain, and make hearthcakes tonight. But 
we’re going to need more grain, and I know the villages are short right now. 
Some of the men hunt, don’t they? How often do they bring anything back?”
“Not that often. There are only two bows, not very good ones, and the arrows—”
“Are as bad. I can guess that. Anyone who can use a sling, or set snares?”
Herf shook his head. Gird added those skills to the list in his head, and told 
himself not to sigh again. It would do no good. He wished he hadn’t sent Fori 
off; the lad had a talent for setting snares, and had once taken a squirrel with 
his sling. Come to think of it, slings could be weapons too.
“All right.” He raised his voice. “Come here a bit, all of you. There are some 
things need doing.” The men came closer, curious. “If we’re going to be an 
army,” he said, “we have to organize like soldiers. Food, tools, clothing—all 
that. We’re starting with what we have. The first thing is to get all the rotten 
grain and beans apart from what’s good, and protect the good from the wet. Then 
we’re going to plant the sprouted redroots, scattered along our trails, so that 
we’ll have them next fall. They’ll get bigger, you know, and double or triple 
for us. Who here has used a handmill?” That was usually women’s work, although 
many men helped grind the grain. Two hands raised. Gird nodded at them. “Herf 
will give you the grain—you saw how I did it yesterday. We’re making enough 
hearthcakes for everyone tonight. Unless the foresters show up, of course.
By midday, all the clothes washed the previous evening were dry. Gird pulled on 
his trousers happily; he did not feel himself with his bare legs hanging out. 
The two volunteer millers had produced almost a bowlful of meal, and Herf had 
used Gird’s clean shirt to hold the little good grain in one sack while he 
scraped out the spoiled and turned the sack inside out. The bottom end was 
beginning to rot. Without Gird having to suggest it, Herf decided to rip out the 
stitching there and sew the top end shut, so the weakest material would be at 
the opening. Since he seemed to know how to use a long thorn and a bit of twine 
to do it, Gird left him alone. Two other men had gone out in both directions 
along the creek, with the sprouted redroots, and were planting them. Gird 
reminded them that there was no good reason to plant them close to that 
campsite, since they would be moving somewhere else.
Fori appeared unexpectedly in midafternoon with a pair of squirrels he’d knocked 
down, showing off to Ivis with his sling. He had skinned and gutted them 
already, and had the skins stretched on circles of green wood. Gird grinned at 
him, delighted. But two squirrels would hardly feed twenty hungry men—they had 
no soup kettle.
Herf had the answer to that, showing Gird how hot rocks dropped in a wooden bowl 
could make the water hot enough to cook without burning holes in the bowl. By 
this time, he had all the good grain in one sack, and the dry beans separated 
from the damp, sprouting ones. Gird had wondered if they could also grow beans 
in the wood, but beans liked a lot of sun. Reluctantly, he had buried the smelly 
remnants of spoiled grain and beans. Now Gird sliced up onions, his eyes 
watering and burning, to go in with the squirrels and one dry, wrinkled, 
unsprouted redroot. Herf added the beans he’d put on to soak that morning.
The guards came back in the dusk to the smell of roasting hearthcakes and 
squirrel and bean stew. Gird had already found another, besides Diamod, who 
would be willing to stand night guard; these two had eaten, and when Ivis and 
Kelin returned with Pidi, the night guards went out. Gird had also drilled the 
others, in the afternoon, and insisted on their cleaning up. He was pleased to 
notice that Ivis and Kelin stopped to wash hands and face in the creek before 
approaching the fire.
They had only three bowls to eat from; these passed from one to another, along 
with the two spoons. But compared to the night before, it was a festive meal. 
Even Triga made no complaint. Ivis came to sit by Gird, and said, “I made the 
right choice.”
“It won’t always be like this,” Gird said, thinking of all the things he had to 
do. “We were lucky that Fori got those squirrels.”
“But it feels different.” Ivis wiped his mouth with his tattered sleeve and 
grinned, teeth bright in the firelight. “You know what to do.”
Across the fire, Fori was basking in the praise of older men; Pidi was showing 
Herf the herbs he had brought back in his shirt. They were feeling at home here; 
Gird wondered if the young adjusted more easily. He was not sure what he felt. 
The blinding pain when he thought of Rahi was still there; when it hit, he found 
himself turning in the direction of Fireoak, willing himself across the woods 
and fields between to be with her. She might be dead by now, or still struggling 
in fever. He could not know.
He was beginning to know the men around him, and already knew that several of 
them would have been friends if they’d grown up in the same village. Cob 
reminded him of Amis, with his matter-of-fact friendliness. Ivis was more like 
Teris—responsibility made him truculent, but once freed of it, he was amiable 
and mild-tempered. Gird told himself that these were mostly farmers—men like 
those he’d known all his life—and in time would be as familiar as the men of his 
village, but for the moment he could not quite relax into kinship with them.
That night before he dropped off to sleep, he made an effort to speak 
individually with each of them, to fix their faces and names in his mind. Then 
he burrowed into a drift of leaves, with Pidi snuggled close to his side. It was 
still hard to sleep, in the open, knowing he had no cottage to return to, but he 
was tired, and the strain of the past few days overcame him.
The next morning brought complications. Instead of cool spring sunshine, the sky 
was cloudy, and a fine misty drizzle began to penetrate their clothes. The foul 
stench of their ill-dug jacks oozed across the clearing. Gird was sure they 
could smell it in the next village, wherever that was. He wrapped his leather 
raincloak around the sacks of grain and beans. The night guards arrived back at 
camp hungry, while Herf was struggling with the fire. Smoke lay close to the 
ground, making them all cough. After the previous night’s feast, plain soaked 
grain seemed even more dismal than usual. Gird’s joints ached; he wished 
fervently for a mug of hot sib. He heard low grumbles and mutters, and Triga’s 
voice raised in a self-pitying whine.
This would never do. Gird strode back into the center of the clearing as if the 
sun were shining and he knew exactly what to do. The men looked up at him, 
sour-faced.
“Triga, what did you find yesterday?” Triga, interrupted in mid-complaint, 
looked almost comical. Then he stood up.
“I found that swamp I told you about—” Someone groaned, and Triga whipped around 
to glare in that direction.
“Never mind,” said Gird. “Go on—and you others listen.”
“I walked all around it—that’s why I came back so late. There’s three little 
creeks goes into it, and two comes out. I don’t know what the middle’s like 
yet—there wasn’t time—”
“Good. That’s where we’ll go today.”
“All of us?” Herf asked. “It’s raining.”
“It’s raining here, too,” Gird pointed out. “You’ll get just as wet sitting here 
complaining about the rain, as walking along learning something useful. Maybe 
we’ll find a cave, and can sleep dry.”
They didn’t look as if they believed him, but one by one his fledgling army 
stood up. He grinned at them.
“But first,” he said. “We’re going to do something about that.” And he pointed 
toward the jacks. “It stinks enough to let anyone know a lot of men have been 
here, and it’s making us sick as well.”
“We don’t have no tools,” someone said. Kef, that was the name. Gird grinned 
again.
“I brought a shovel, remember? I’ll start the digging, but we’ll all be doing 
some—because there’s more to it than just shoveling.”
He had spotted a better site the day before. Now he took his shovel and tried 
it. Here a long-gone flood had spread across the clearing below the waterfall, 
and left a drift of lighter soil, almost sand. He started the trench he wanted, 
and gave the shovel to Kef. “That deep, and straight along there,” he said. They 
really needed a bucket, too, but they didn’t have one. He’d have to use the 
wooden bowls for the ashes. The men watched as he scooped ashes and bits of 
charred wood from the side of the firepit into one of their bowls. “You, too,” 
Gird said, pointing at the other bowls. “We’re going to need a lot of ashes.”
“But I though ashes only worked in a pit,” said Ivis.
“Best in a pit. But a trench is like a little pit. Ashes on top, then dirt, 
after you use it.”
“Every time?”
“Every time—or it won’t work. The guards kept a pot of ashes in the jacks; I 
started doing that at our cottage later, and ours smelled less than most.” He 
looked at them, noticing the squeamish faces. “The worst part,” he said 
carefully, “is going to be burying what’s already there.” He was pleased to note 
that no one asked if they had to.
It took longer than he’d hoped,with only the one shovel and small bowls to carry 
ashes, but at last they had the worst of the noisome mess buried, strewn with 
ashes, and a new bit of clean trench for that morning’s use. Gird covered it up 
himself when they were all done, and marked the end with a roughly cut stake 
poked in the ground.
“Now we clean up,” Gird said, “and then we go look for Triga’s swamp. He’s 
right—if we can find a safe way into it, that the foresters and guards don’t 
know, it could be a very handy place.”



Chapter Eleven
« ^ » 
Triga led the way, with Gird behind him, and then the others. Gird had asked 
Ivis to be the rear guard, staying just in sight of the others. Within the first 
half-league, he was wondering how this group had survived undetected so long. 
They talked freely, tapped their sticks against trees and rocks as they passed, 
made no effort to walk quietly. Finally Gird halted them.
“We’re making more noise than a tavern full of drunks. If there’s a forester in 
the wood anywhere, he’s bound to hear us.”
Ivis turned a dull red. “Well—Gird—we don’t like to come on ’em in surprise, 
like—”
“The foresters? You mean they know—”
“It’s sort of—well—they’d have to know, wouldn’t they? Being as they have to 
know the whole wood. But what they don’t actually see they don’t have to take 
notice of. My brother’s one of them, you see, and—”
“And on the strength of one brother, you trust them all? What about the guard?”
“Oh, the duke’s guard is a very different matter—very different indeed. But they 
don’t venture into the wood except when the duke’s hunting. And then they’re 
guarding him, not poking about on their own.”
“And—duke? Your lord isn’t Kelaive?”
“Gods, no! I’ve heard about him, even before you came. Our duke’s Kelaive’s 
overlord, just as the king is his.”
“So the foresters of this wood know that a band of outlaws lives here, and 
expects you to make enough noise coming so they can avoid you. What if they 
change their minds? Surely your duke’s offered a reward.”
“My brother wouldn’t take a reward for me,” Ivis said earnestly. “And if he 
captures the others, there I’d be, right in the middle.”
“What if he’s transferred, or killed, or one of the other foresters gets 
greedy?” Ivis said nothing in answer; from his expression, he had thought of 
this before and tried to forget it. Gird looked at all the others. “Listen to 
me: an army does not go about expecting its enemies to get out of the way. We 
can’t fight like that. Cannot. Perhaps Ivis’s brother has enough influence on 
the foresters of this wood, but we will not always be in this wood. We have to 
leave it someday, and you must know how to move quietly. And we must be alert—we 
must find the foresters before they find us, and never let them know we were 
near. Understand?” Heads nodded, some slowly. “Now—the first thing—no talking 
while we march. No banging on stones or tree limbs. Walk one behind the other, 
far enough that if one man stumbles, the others don’t fall too. Triga, you 
should be far enough ahead that I can just see, and you shouldn’t be able to 
hear us—you listen for anyone else. If you go too fast, I’ll click pebbles 
twice; if I click three times, stop. You give two double clicks if you hear 
foresters. Ivis, if you hear anything behind us, give two double clicks. The 
rest of you—if you hear two double clicks, stop where you are and do not make a 
noise. Clear?”
Again, heads nodded. Gird hoped that there were no foresters out that day, so 
they could get in at least one practice before it was needed. He waved Triga 
ahead, waited until he was almost out of sight on the narrow trail, and started 
off himself. Behind him, the noise of the others was much less, although he 
could hear an occasional footfall. Triga led them fairly quickly, and Gird had a 
time keeping him in sight and avoiding obvious noisemakers. But his followers 
grew even quieter, as if they were listening for themselves, and learning from 
their own noise how to lessen it.
The double-click he had been half-waiting for startled him when it came. The 
others had frozen in place; Gird took a final step and a stick broke under his 
foot. He grimaced, and looked back along the line. Cob, behind him, grinned, 
wagged his head, and made the shame sign with his fingers. Gird shrugged and 
spread his hands. When he looked ahead, Triga had stopped just in sight. Gird 
could hear nothing now but the blood rushing in his own ears, and the faint 
trickle of water somewhere nearby.
The click had come from behind him, and now he saw a stirring in the line, 
silent movement as one man leaned to another and mouthed something. Gingerly, 
Gird took a step back toward Cob, placing his feet carefully on soggy leaves and 
moss. Cob leaned back to get the message, then forward to Gird.
“Ivis. Said we were a lot quieter, but should practice stopping. He may do it 
again.”
Gird wished he’d thought of suggesting it, but at the same time wanted to 
clobber Ivis. His heart was still racing at the thought of being caught by 
foresters. He nodded, instead, and murmured “Tell him not too many—we have a 
long way to go.” Cob nodded, and passed the message back. Gird waited what he 
thought was long enough for it to reach Ivis, then waved Triga on, and started 
again himself. He almost trod on the same stick, but managed to stretch his 
stride and avoid it.
Triga’s swamp, when they came to it, appeared first as softer mud in the trail, 
and then a skim of sib-colored water gleaming between the leaves of some 
low-growing plant with tiny pink flowers. Ahead was an opening in the forest, 
with tussocks of grass growing out of the water.
“We have to turn here, if we’re going around it,” said Triga softly to Gird. The 
others had come up, but were squatting silently in the dripping undergrowth on 
the dryest patches they could find.
“Have you ever been out in it?”
“When I was a lad, once. There’s someplace out there with plum trees; I could 
smell the flowers.”
Gird sniffed. It was just past blooming time for the plums in his village, but 
wild plums came both earlier and later. He didn’t smell any.
“Did you find the trees?”
“Finally—after I got wet to the thighs, and then when I got home my da beat me 
proper for running off from the goats—but there’s a dry hummock somewhere, with 
plums.”
“Right out in the middle, I’ll bet,” said Cob. “O’ course, we’re already wet.”
“There used to be a path partway in,” said Triga. “Follow me and step just where 
I do.” And with that he was off again. The others fell into line.
Triga’s way led alongside the bog, and finally came close enough so that Gird 
could see how big it was. Despite the drizzle and fog, he could just make out 
the forest on the other side, a dark massive shadow. In the bog itself were 
islands crowned with low trees tangled into thick mats. After a short time, 
Triga came out from under the trees, and stepped onto one of the tussocks. It 
trembled, but held him up as he took two steps and hopped to another. Gird 
looked at it distrustfully. How deep was that dark water? And what was under it?
“One at a time,” he said, and reached a leg across to the black footprint Triga 
had left. He didn’t like the way his foot sank in, and stepped quickly to the 
gap between tussocks. The mud sucked at his feet, and let go with a little plop. 
Across the gap, and onto another tussock. Now he was out in the open, where 
anyone could see him—anyone sitting snug under the forest edge, for instance. 
His neck prickled. One of Triga’s footprints had a finger of murky water in it; 
when Gird stepped there, his foot sank to the ankle.
“I don’t like this,” said someone behind him, and someone else said “Shhh!” 
Their feet squelched on the wet ground, and Gird cursed silently as icy water 
oozed through his boot.
Only six of them had started into the bog, when the first foothold gave way and 
Herf found himself hip deep in cold, gluey muck. He yelped; three gray birds 
Gird had not noticed fled into the air with noisy flapping wings and wild 
screeches. Triga stopped and looked back, grinning. Gird said “Wait!” as softly 
as he thought Triga would hear.
They could not explain what happened without talking; Gird sweated, but endured 
the noise as best he could, while they established that yes, Herf had stepped 
carefully in the now-sinking footprint, and yes, all the footprints had been 
getting wetter, and no, it was clear that nobody else could make it. Herf, 
sprawled across the tussock with one leg stuck in the mud, was grimly silent.
“All right,” Gird said finally. “First we get Herf out, and back on solid 
ground. Then all of you in the forest start circling the bog, and looking for 
other ways in. Don’t get stuck.”
“Don’t walk on moss,” Triga added. “It looks solid, but it won’t hold you up.”
“We can’t come back the way we came in,” Gird went on. “So Triga will have to 
find us a way across. And now we know that a group trying to follow us would bog 
down—”
“Although the tracks are easy to see,” said Cob.
“Right. If we use this, we need a way in that we can all take, and that they 
can’t see.”
Getting Herf loose was no easy matter, and involved five men getting themselves 
wetter and muckier than they had intended. Two more got stuck, although not as 
badly.
In the meantime, Gird and the others perched on tussocks noticed that water was 
creeping up around their feet. “We have to keep moving,” Triga said, 
unnecessarily, and went on, aiming for one of the brush-covered islands. By the 
time all of them had made it there, to crouch under the thick tangle of limbs 
and new leaves, they were mud to the knees and breathless.
“I didn’t know it would be worse with more than one,” said Triga. Gird accepted 
that as an apology, and nodded. At least some of the little trees were plums, 
tiny fruits just swelling on the ends of their stems. Water dripped on him, 
sending an icy trickle down the back of his neck and along his spine. He hoped 
his raincape was keeping the grain and beans dry. If he had to be wet and cold, 
it should be for a good purpose.
“We’d better go on,” he said. “And if there’s a way for each of us to pick his 
way safely—that might be better than stepping in your tracks.”
“It’s that kind of grass.” Triga showed them again. “Not that other, with the 
thinner blades; it grows on half-sunk moss, and you can go right through. This 
stuff is usually half-solid, but you have to keep moving. Try to pick your way 
several tussocks ahead, so you don’t have to stop except at places where trees 
grow. All those are safe. I think.”
“Look at this,” Cob said. He pointed to a delicate purple flower on a thin 
stalk. “I never saw anything like that.”
“They grow in bogs,” Triga said. “A little later, the whole bog will be pink 
with a different flower—the same kind, but larger. The purple ones grow only on 
the islands.”
Gird looked at him. This sounded less and less like the knowledge gained on one 
clandestine visit as a child. Triga reddened.
“No one could find me here,” he said. “I used to come here a lot, before I left 
home.”
“And not after?”
“The others didn’t want to see a swamp, they said.”
“Well, we’re seeing it now. What else do you know about it?”
Triga began to lead them across the little island to the bog on the far side. 
“There aren’t many fish, for all this water. Lots of frogs, though, and little 
slick things like lizards, but wet. Birds— different kinds you don’t see 
anywhere else. Some of them swim in the bits of open water, and dive. Most of 
them wade, and eat frogs and flies. Flowers. One island has a wild apple grove, 
and one has the best brambleberries I’ve ever eaten. Wild animals: something 
like a levet that swims, long and sleek, and levets, of course. Rabbits 
sometimes—I’ve surprised them grazing the grass on the islands. Deer come to the 
edge to drink and once I saw one where the apples grow. They jump very fast and 
carefully.”
They began to cross to the next island, this time picking individual ways, with 
much lurching and staggering. But no one fell in the mud, and they all arrived 
safely and somewhat drier, but for the rain. This island had fewer trees, and 
starry blue flowers as well as the tall purple ones.
“In midwinter,” Triga said, as if someone had asked, “the bog may freeze on top, 
but you still can’t trust the moss. If the ice is thick enough to walk on, then 
it’s safe, but not otherwise. Most years it freezes that hard after Midwinter. 
But the thaw comes early—I don’t know why—and I’ve put a leg through the ice 
more than once.”
This time they did not pause, but went on across the island and back onto the 
bog. Gird lurched and barely kept himself from falling into the muck.
“I’m thinking this might make a better farm than a castle,” he said.
“Farm?” Triga glanced back at him, teetered, and regained his balance.
“Plums, apples, brambleberries, all guarded by this muck. I’d wager that in full 
summer the flies are fierce.”
“So they are. The worst of them aren’t out yet, the big deerflies.”
“Onions would grow on the edges; redroots on the islands.”
“Some of these grasses have edible seeds,” Triga said. “My mother’s father, he 
showed me some of ’em. As much grain as wheat, almost. That’s what the birds 
come for, the swimmers.”
Gird was about to ask how the swimmers could find space to swim, when they came 
to a stretch of open water. Under the dark sky, with the drizzle falling, it was 
impossible to tell how deep it was. “Now what?”
“We’ve gone too far down. Turn up this way, upstream.”
Gird could not see any movement in the water; it lay blank and still, dimpled 
like hammered pewter by the falling rain. Grunting, he followed Triga to the 
right, trying to pick his way. Eventually that space of water narrowed, and 
narrowed again, until he could leap across to a tussock that lurched under him. 
He grabbed the tallest stalks, and managed not to fall. Something hit the water 
with a loud plop behind him; he broke into a sweat again.
“Frog,” said Triga. “Big one—he’d be a good dinner.”
“You eat frogs?”
“What’s wrong with that? They’re good.”
Gird shuddered, and tried to hide it. That was the explanation for Triga’s 
attitude, he was sure. Anyone who would eat frogs would naturally be quarrelsome 
and difficult. “They’re… cold. Slimy.” He remembered very well the little 
well-frog he’d caught as a boy: the slickness, the smell, the great gold eyes 
that looked so impossible. His father had shown him frogspawn down in the creek, 
and he’d prodded it with a curious finger. It had felt disgusting.
Triga shrugged, looking sulky again. “It’s better than going hungry. Food’s 
food.” He gave Gird a challenging look. “I ate snakes, too.” Gird’s belly 
turned. What could you say to someone who ate snakes and frogs?
“You eat fish, don’t you?” asked Triga, pursuing this subject with vigor.
“I had a fish once.” Gird remembered the bite or two of fish that he had eaten 
on his one trip to the trade fair as a youth. They had bought a fish, all of 
them together, and tried to cook it over their open fire. He could barely 
remember how it had tasted, though the smell was clear enough. It hadn’t been as 
filling as mutton. He met Triga’s expression with a grin. “The fish in our creek 
were about a finger long—the little boys caught them, but no one ate them.”
From the looks on the others’ faces, Triga’s revelations about fish, frogs, and 
snakes were explaining his behavior to them as well. As if he’d realized that, 
he led them on faster, landing with juicy splashes on his chosen tussocks. Gird 
followed at his own pace, carefully. Snakes, too. There might be snakes out 
here, worse snakes than the striped snakes that wove through the stems of the 
grain, or the speckled snakes by the creek. He wanted to ask Triga how big the 
snakes in the bog could be, but he didn’t want to admit he didn’t know. Did they 
swim?
A sweet perfume broke through his concern about snakes, and he realized they 
were almost to an island whose scrubby gnarled trees were covered with palepink 
blossoms. Apples. Gird drank in the delicious scent, so different from the rank 
sourness of the bog itself, or the faintly bitter scent of the purple flowers. 
He climbed onto the rounded hump of solid ground with relief. Triga had thrown 
himself flat on dripping grass, and seemed back in a good humor; he smiled as 
Gird and the others crawled under low, snagging limbs to join him.
“This was always my favorite,” he said. “Wild apples here, and crabs at the far 
end, two of them.”
Gird crouched beside him. “What I don’t understand is what made the islands. Why 
isn’t the bog all bog?”
Triga shrugged. “I don’t know. The way each island has its own trees and 
flowers, it’s almost like a garden—as if someone planted them that way. But who 
or why I have no idea.”
“Are any of the islands large enough for a camp?”
“No—probably not. I thought so, but now I see just six of us on one of them, I 
realize they’re too small. The biggest has nut trees— not as tall as most nut 
trees—that would give good cover around the edge. But I think even twenty of us 
would crowd it. Certainly if you’re going to be finicky about the jacks. Out 
here I always perched over open water.”
The drizzle had stopped, but the apple limbs still dripped cold water on them. 
Gird looked out between the twisted trunks and caught a gleam of brighter light 
glinting from water and wet grass. It reminded him of something. He sat quiet, 
letting the memory come… he’d been crouched under another thicket, another time… 
dawn, it was… and the shadow had come, the thing that claimed kinship with the 
elder singers, but claimed also to be different. Kuaknom, it had been. Gird 
looked across the wet and dripping bog, now slicked with silver as the sun broke 
through for a moment. There across the uneven wet mat of moss and grass was an 
island, its trees like miniatures of the forest, bright flowers shining along 
its shore.
“I know who planted this,” he said. It had come to him, with the beauty of the 
moment, the glittering, brilliant colors outlined in silver light.
“Who?” asked Triga.
“The singers. The old ones.” He shivered as he said it. Was it bad luck to name 
them? Would it bring the illwishers here?
“You know them?” asked Triga, sitting bolt upright.
“No… no, but I know the tales. And I met one of their—the ones that went wrong, 
the kuaknomi.”
“Gods take the bane!” Triga flicked his fingers twice, throwing the name away. 
“Don’t speak of them!”
“But the others. I know they did. A garden, you said, each island like its own 
bed of flowers or fruit. I don’t really like it, Triga, but it’s very 
beautiful.”
“Even the frogs?”
“Even the frogs.”
The sun vanished again behind low clouds, and by the time they reached the far 
side of the bog, a light rain was falling. Cob scraped the muck from his worn 
boots with a handful of moss.
“I never thought I’d be so glad to find a muddy trail in a forest,” he said. 
“And now we have to walk all the way back around to get home.”
Gird gave him a warning look, and he was quiet. They all were, listening to the 
many sounds of the rain, the almost musical tinkling of the drops of water in 
the bog, the soft rush of it in the leaves overhead, the plips and plops of 
larger drops falling to the forest floor. Where, Gird wondered, was the rest of 
his troop?
Rock clicked on rock somewhere in the wet distance. One click. What was that? 
Gird peered around, seeing nothing but wet leaves and treetrunks. His heart 
began to pound heavily. He blinked rain off his eyelashes, and wished fervently 
that he’d let the damned grain rot, and taken his leather cape along. Then at 
least he wouldn’t have rain crawling through his hair, trickling down his neck. 
He didn’t mind arms and legs; he was used to being wet— but not his head. From 
the expressions the others had, none of them liked it. Hats, he thought to 
himself. We have to make hats, somehow. Every summer the women had plaited grass 
hats that lasted the season; they threw them away after harvest.
“Were we quiet enough?”
Gird leaped up and barely stopped the bellow that tried to fight its way from 
his throat. Ivis was grinning at him, along with the rest of the men who had 
gone around the bog. Rage clouded his vision for a moment as his heart raced. He 
felt he would explode. They were all watching, with the wary but smug look of 
villagers who have just outwitted a stranger. Another cluster of raindrops 
landed on his head, cold as ever, and it was suddenly funny. They had outwitted 
him, as fair as any trick he’d ever seen.
“You—” he began, growling over the laughter that was coming despite his rage. 
“Yes, damn you, you were quiet enough.” A chuckle broke loose, then another. 
“Now let’s see how quietly you can march home, eh?”
They were not as quiet, for the rainy spring evening began to close in fast, and 
they had to hurry. When they came to the clearing, Gird was glad he’d told Pidi 
to stay and mind the fire; they all needed to crowd near the glowing coals. Pidi 
had cooked beans, flavored slightly with the herbs he’d gathered.
Next morning was damp and foggy, but not actively raining. Gird woke stiff and 
aching, with a raw throat. Around him, the others were still sleeping, Pidi with 
the boneless grace of all small children. Gird pushed himself up, cursing 
silently, and crouched by the fire-pit. He held out a hand to the banked 
fire—still warmth within. But dry fuel? He peered around in the dimness. 
Someone—Pidi, he supposed—had made a crude shelter of stone, and laid sticks in 
it. They might be drier than the rest. He poked the fire cautiously with one of 
them, uncovering raw red coals. After a moment, the end of the stick flared. Dry 
enough. He yawned until his jaw cracked, then coughed as the raw air hit his 
sore throat. Sleeping wet in wet clothes—he hadn’t done that for years. He’d 
never enjoyed it.
Alone in the early morning gloom, he let himself sag into sour resentment. 
Forget the hot sib. What he needed was a good stout mug of ale. Two mugs. Maybe 
they could build barrels and brew? No, first they had to have a dry place to 
sleep. A drop of cold water hit his bald spot. No, first they had to have hats. 
He added more sticks to the fire. Some of them steamed, hissing but enough were 
dry to waken crackling flames. Someone across the clearing groaned, then 
coughed.
“Lady’s grace, I hurt all over,” he heard someone say. He felt better. If he 
wasn’t the only one, it didn’t mean he was too old for this. Another groan, more 
coughs. “I’d give anything for a mug of ale,” said another man. “Sib,” said 
someone else. “Anything but beans or soaked wheat,” said yet another. Gird felt 
much better. The soldiers had grumbled in the barracks, when he was a recruit. 
They’d grumbled when it rained and they had to work in it; they’d grumbled when 
it was hot and sweat rolled out from under their helmets. Grumbling was normal. 
He was normal. And he knew exactly what the sergeant had done about grumbling.
“Time to get up,” he said briskly.
A startled silence. A low mutter: “Gods above, he’s up. He’s got the fire 
going.” He heard more stirrings, and turned to see men sitting up, clambering to 
their feet, rolling over to come up on one elbow. He grinned at them.
“Can’t fight a war in bed,” he said. Utter disbelief in some faces, amused 
resignation in others. Pidi, who had not walked to the bog and back, came over 
to the fire, all bright eyes and eagerness.
“I found most of the roots and barks for sib.” He showed Gird a small pile which 
Gird would not have recognized. “There’s no kira in sight of camp, and you told 
me not to leave—”
“Good for you,” said Gird. “Do you know how much of each?” He certainly didn’t. 
Pidi nodded.
“But it takes a long time. Do you want me to start it?”
“Go ahead. We need it.”
While Pidi started the sib, Gird went off to the new jacks trench, along with 
several others. Already the camp smelled better, he thought. Certainly the men 
looked better, even grumpy and stiff as they were. That hike in the rain had 
accomplished something.
“We need to set up work groups,” Gird said without preamble, as they gathered 
near the fire. “A hand to each group—” They began shuffling themselves into 
clusters of five. Gird had thought of assigning them to groups, but decided to 
let them pick their partners—for now, at least. With his knife, he shaped chunks 
of bark peeling from a fallen limb into the familiar tallies of the farmer. “One 
notch for food, two for tools, three for camp chores. Two groups get a food 
tally, and one hand each for the others. We’ll drill after breakfast, then the 
groups go to their assignments—”
“What’s food for?” asked Triga. “We’re the ones get to eat?” No one laughed. 
Gird shook his head.
“Those with a food tally go looking for food: hunt, gather herbs, tend the 
things we plant, later. Ivis, how did food donated by farmers come to you? Did 
someone tell you it was there, or did you go ask?”
“Every so often someone would come to the wood, and leave a feathered stick in a 
certain tree—that’s for Whitetree, the nearest. Fireoak usually brought the food 
itself, put it just inside the wood. Diamod traveled about so much, he’d know, 
or he’d see it and bring it in, or come get us to carry it. And sometimes, when 
things were very bad, one of us’d sneak into the village and beg.”
“Which is dangerous for them and for us both. And I suppose too much hunting 
would bring the foresters, wouldn’t it?”
“Aye. They don’t mind rabbits and hares and such, but the duke likes his deer 
hunts.”
“Well, we’ll have to do something. Fori’s good with his sling, and he can set 
snares: that’s something you can all learn. We need a better way to let the 
villagers know when we need something, and what it is. With a few more tools, we 
might be able to gather more food and lean on them less.” Gird handed the first 
food tally to the group Ivis was with. “You know the local village; you’ve got 
kin there. Find out what they can send, and when. What is the most trouble to 
them. When they’ve had trouble, and what gave them away. If they can’t send 
food, find out if they can send sacks, boxes, a bucket—anything we can use to 
store or prepare the food we have. Even little things: a small sack is better 
than none.”
“The other food tally.” Gird handed it to the group Fori was with. “Go some 
distance away from this camp, and then look for anything edible you can find. 
Birds’ eggs, birds in the nest, rabbits, squirrels—most creatures are having 
young about now; look for their hiding places.”
“Frogs?” Triga was not in that group, but he spoke up anyway.
“When you’re carrying the food tally, you can catch us frogs, Triga,” Gird said.
“And you’ll eat them?”
Gird swallowed hard. “I’ll do my best. Now—you are with the tool tally. You all 
know we need a lot of things we don’t have. Another shovel, axes, chisels. A 
shepherd’s crook would be handy for pulling down vines with edible berries; a 
drover’s stick for beating nuts from the nut trees next fall. We need pots to 
cook in, bowls to eat from, baskets or sacks to carry what our gatherers find, 
spoons, buckets, rope: every one of these will help us make more of what we 
need. Whoever holds the tool tally will work for that day on one of the things 
we need.”
“I can make baskets,” Triga said. Everyone stared at him; usually women made 
baskets. He reddened. “I used to plait the grasses in the bog,” he said. “First 
just for something to do, and then to see what I could make.”
“Could you make a basket from anything around here?” asked Gird. He did not want 
to make another trek to the bog so soon.
Triga stared around, uncertain. “Maybe… I can try… but it may not work right the 
first time.”
“That’s all right. If you find a way, it’s time well spent. Any of the rest of 
you like to whittle?” One man raised his hand. “Good— why don’t you start 
whittling some spoons, and bowls if you find the right chunks of wood. You 
others try it—anything’s better than nothing.”
“What about the guard we send out to listen for foresters?” asked Ivis.
“From the last group, those with camp chores tally. Two go out, and three will 
have plenty to do here. Gathering wood for the fire, tending the fire, and some 
other things I’ve thought up. But first— we didn’t do any drill yesterday, so 
let’s line up.”
This time they lined up quickly and almost evenly. They all started on the same 
foot, and they marched almost in step from the firepit to the stream, still in 
lines. Wavery lines, but lines. Gird showed them how to turn in place to the 
right and left, and then had them march around the camp as a column of twos. 
They had to weave in and out of trees, and they were soon out of step, but the 
pairs did manage to stay side by side. By this time Gird was warm and had worked 
the stiffness out, so he sent the two groups with food tallies off, and picked 
two guards from the camp chores group. One of the remaining three he sent in 
search of the driest wood he could find, one sat by the fire, and Gird beckoned 
to the last.
He had had the idea that they could weave lengths of wattle, as he’d used for 
the barton gate, and the fence between his smallgarden and his neighbor’s. 
Wattle laid at an angle against a log might give some protection from wet. He 
explained what he had in mind to Artha, a very tall, loose-jointed man nearly 
bald on top. Artha had vague, hazy blue eyes, and the least initiative Gird had 
seen.
“But I don’t—that wattle, now, we allus made it wi’ the sticks i’ the ground, 
like. Put the sticks down in the wet mud, my granda he said, and then put the 
vines through, back and forth, back and forth—”
“But the sticks don’t have to be in the ground,” Gird said. The times he’d 
mended his gate, without ever taking it down, he knew that. Artha stood 
slack-handed, his jaw hanging. Gird realized that this was going to take 
firmness, as if Artha had been a child. “Artha, bring me some sticks, about so 
long—” He spread his arms to show the length.
“All right, but I dunno how you’ll do it lessen you put them sticks in the mud 
first—”
“Never mind, just bring me the sticks.” Artha ambled off, and Gird searched up 
and down the streambank until he found a willow sprouting multiply from the 
muck. He cut the pliant sprouts and stacked them.
By midday, Gird looked around the busy campsite and smiled to himself. The 
voices he heard all sounded content; one man was even whistling “Nutting in the 
Woods.” His sergeant and his father had both been right: idleness was a fool’s 
delight, and work brought its own happiness. Triga had created one lopsided 
basket from the same willow sprouts Gird was using, and then torn it down to 
make it “right” as he said. Now he was halfway through again. It didn’t look 
quite like any basket Gird had seen, but it was going to be a useful size, he 
could tell. The man who liked to whittle—Kerin, that was—had turned out three 
recognizable spoons. He’d pointed out that he needed something to rub them with, 
to finish them, and one of the others had experimented with Gird’s collection of 
cobbles. Gird and Artha had made one length of wattle, not quite an armspan wide 
by twice that in length. Gird held it up to the light: it would no more keep 
water out than a basket, he thought. But it would support something else. 
Leaves? A deerhide?
Late afternoon brought the food gatherers back. First came the hunting and 
gathering group, with a miscellany of edibles. Birds’ eggs from different kinds 
of nests: small, round and beige, pointy and blue with speckles, streaked with 
brown on beige. They’d found a rabbit’s burrow, and while the blind, squirming 
kits had been very small, there were eight of them. Fori had knocked another 
squirrel out of a tree, and they’d found a squirrel nest—but that led to near 
disaster, when Fori, precariously wrapped around the slender bole, had met a 
furious mother squirrel face to face. Fori had come down faster than he went up, 
losing skin off his arms. “But I have a nose, still,” he said. They had also, on 
the advice of one of the others, dug up the roots of the thick-leaved grasslike 
plants that grew along the stream lower down. One man had the bight of his shirt 
full of last fall’s nuts: some were rotting or sprouting, but some were still 
whole and sweet.
Ivis’s group had come back with little food, but other important treasures. 
“Gars says he never used his granda’s old stone tools— even his granda 
didn’t—but look—” and he emptied a well-worn, greasy leather sack. Gird looked 
at the odd-shaped bits of stone curiously. He could remember seeing clutter like 
that in someone’s cottage… and old Hokka had used a sickle set with tiny stone 
blades. But he’d never used stone tools himself. “They’re sharp,” Ivis said, as 
if he’d asked. “Gars thinks some of them had handles— wooden handles—but I don’t 
know how they’d fasten. But you can cut with them.” Some were obviously blades, 
thin shards of stone like broken pottery. Others were rough lumps with a sharp 
edge, like handax heads, or chisels. Kerin poked at them.
“I could use these… it would be easier to make a bowl with this than a knife…” 
Gird nodded; that got him off the hook.
“Fine—try them, and if you can teach someone else—” He turned to thank Ivis, but 
Ivis was still grinning.
“That’s not all. Look here—” Wrapped in a wet cloth, he had brought seedlings of 
the common greenleaves: cabbage, lettuce…
The villagers had liked the idea of the outlaws growing some of their own food, 
and he’d been given as much as he could carry without crushing it. One of the 
men carried a small round cheese, and another had a large lump of tallow. He had 
also thought to ask for things Gird hadn’t mentioned: beeswax, soap, thread. 
“Best of all—” Ivis nodded at the last member of his team, who pulled a bundle 
from under his shirt. It was cloth, something rolled into a lump—but the 
deepest, most intense blue Gird had ever seen.
“What is that?” he asked.
Ivis grinned. “You know the lords won’t let us have blue clothes—”
“Yes. I never saw any.”
“This is old, from my granda’s time. He used to say that the blue was 
expensive—it came from some kind of blue stone, from far away north—but before 
the lords came it was a favorite color. Good luck color. Anyway, my brother says 
if you’re serious about overturning the lords, best we’d have some blue shirts.”
Gird unfolded the bundle carefully. Two blue shirts, each decorated with 
intricate embroidery around the neck, flowers and grain in brilliant colors. The 
old woolen cloth was as sound as ever. “Where had they kept this? Not even a 
moth hole…”
“I don’t know. My brother’s the eldest; he knew about it and I didn’t. But I do 
remember my granda’s stories. What do you think?”
“I think it’s good luck,” said Gird, refolding the shirts carefully.



Chapter Twelve
« ^ » 
On a bright, blustery day in early summer, Gird led his troop eastward through 
the wood. There were twenty-four of them now, and every one of them carried his 
own spoon and bowl as well as his own belt knife. Each had a hat, plaited of 
grass and oiled against rain, and a staff about his own height. Each had three 
flat hard loaves of bread tucked into his shirt. And they marched quietly 
through the wood, with Diamod scouting ahead, and Triga bringing up the rear.
They were on their way to meet another of the Stone Circle groups two days away; 
Diamod (as usual) made contact. Behind them, the forester’s campsite was clean 
and bare; they had moved all their gear some days back to another site Gird had 
found. Gird found himself about to whistle, and didn’t. They were all doing 
well, including the new ones. He’d been surprised when three more came from his 
old village; a friend of Fori’s, Teris’s son Orta, and Siga, a single man about 
ten years Gird’s junior.
They had told him all the latest news: how the steward had come to Gird’s 
cottage only to find it stripped to the bare walls. He had taken that for Gird’s 
impudence, but the villagers had done it, hiding every pot, tool, and bit of 
cloth. Gird had felt tears burning his eyes when the boys showed what they 
brought—his people, his neighbors, had cared that much, to risk themselves to 
save his things, and then to send their sons with it. Irreplaceable treasure 
indeed: two hammers, three chisels, his awl and his axe, a shovel blade, a 
spokeshave, a plane, a kettle, a longhandled metal spoon, firetongs, the 
cowhides that had been stretched across the bed-frames, a furl of cloth that 
still showed rusty bloodstains… “We couldn’t carry it all,” Orta had explained. 
“But if you go back, or send someone, there’s more.”
His eyes still burned, thinking of it. He blinked the tears away, and told 
himself to keep his mind on the journey.
Part of that involved watching out for forage along the way. They had all 
learned, since he came, to make use of whatever food came along. Gird had even 
eaten one of Triga’s frogs; he was sure it wriggled in his throat, but he had to 
admit it tasted like food. More or less. Some of the others refused, but most 
followed his lead. He still didn’t like frogs for dinner, but better that than 
hunger. Now he scanned the undergrowth on either side for edible berries and 
fruits, herbs and mushrooms. Fori, still the best slinger in the troop, would be 
watching the trees for squirrels or levets.
Gird wished it had been possible to leave Pidi with someone. The boy was too 
young for this, he told himself again—but then again, the boy was not as young 
as he might be. The black eye had faded, leaving only a faint dark stain 
beneath, but the little child he had been, thoughtless and carefree, had not 
come back. Pidi seemed happy enough—he laughed sometimes, and scampered through 
the woods like a young goat—but he would never be carefree. It would have 
happened in time, Gird knew, but—he shook that thought away. There was no safe 
place for Pidi. Home had not been safe. That led him to Rahi, and the black 
sorrow pierced him again. She had lost the child, in fever, and when he’d last 
heard, a few days ago, she was still too weak to get up.
A gust of wind roared by overhead, whipping the forest canopy and letting a 
flash of sunlight through. The Windsteed in spring seeks the far-ranging Mare … 
he thought, clicking his tongue in the rhythm of the chant. This was late for 
the Windsteed’s forays, but what else could it be? He accepted the omen, and let 
the wind blow away his dark thoughts. It never paid to argue with the gods, any 
of them.
That night he insisted that their temporary campsite be set up as neatly as the 
old one. No one argued. Fori lopped a sapling to make a handle for the shovel 
blade, tied it snugly, and began digging the jacks trench. They would have no 
fire, but they ate their beans (cooked the night before) from bowls, with 
spoons. Even plain beans tasted better that way, not scooped up with fingers. 
Almost before he said anything, the correct tally group had gathered up bowls 
and spoons to wash them in the creek by the camp; when they were done, everyone 
stripped down and bathed.
The full measure of what he had accomplished became obvious when they met the 
other Stone Circle group the next afternoon. They had come out of the wood, and 
angled between some brush-covered hills, and down a crooked stream bed. The 
other group had a guard out to meet them—that much Gird could approve— but they 
could smell the camp long before it came in sight. He noticed that his men 
wrinkled their noses as well. He had not intended to bring them in as a formal 
drill, but they began to fall in step, rearranging themselves into a column.
They came into a space set off by a rocky bluff on one side, and house-high 
thickets of pickoak on the others, to find unkempt men lounging around a smoking 
fire. Someone had stretched a line between two trees, from which flapped 
something intended as laundry, but Gird could not recognize one whole garment. 
His own troop fairly strutted into the clearing, and came to a smart halt 
without the command he forgot to give. The others stared at them, wide-eyed as 
cattle staring over a gate. The one who seemed to be the leader, a redhaired man 
whose sunburnt nose was peeling, stared as hard as any. Then he got up from his 
log.
“I don’t believe it. Diamod, you said these were farmers?”
Diamod smirked. “I said these were farmers who had learned soldiering. Was I 
right?”
“You—and you must be Gird.” The man came forward, looking Gird over with 
interest.
“I’m Gird, yes.”
“And you were a soldier?”
“Years ago I was a recruit. Then a farmer. Now—what you see.”
The man looked along the column, and swallowed. “What I see is hard to believe. 
How long have you been training them?”
Gird squinted, thinking. “Since late-plowing time. I was finishing plowing the 
day it happened.”
“I didn’t tell him everything,” Diamond interrupted.
“And you did that much that fast. Can you teach us?”
“I might, aye. But there’s more than just marching in step.”
“Swordfighting, of course. Or do you use spears?”
Gird laughed. “We don’t use swords or spears—where would we get them?”
The man’s face fell. “But—what do you fight with? Not just sticks, surely.”
He had not intended this kind of entrance, or a display of the other things he’d 
been teaching his men, but this was a chance he could not overlook.
“Aruk!” he said. Behind him, twenty-four sticks came up, to be held stiffly in 
front of each man. Gird took a step forward, clearing the necessary space, and 
said, “Form—troop.” This was tricky; they’d only been doing it right a few days, 
and it looked anything but soldierly if someone forgot. Properly, it took them 
from a column to the parade formation in smart steps and turns, each pair coming 
forward and spreading to the sides. It might have been wiser to simply face the 
column right or left and pretend that was the same maneuver—but if this worked, 
it was far more impressive. He did not look around; he wanted to see how these 
others reacted. From the even tramp behind him, and the heavy breathing, they 
were doing it right. From the faces in front of him, it looked professional.
Now he turned, as neatly as he could, and looked at his troop. They had all made 
it into place, still with sticks held vertically before them. Now came the 
interesting part. He gave the commands crisply, and the sticks rotated: left, 
right, horizontal, vertical, all moving together in an intricate dance of wood. 
No one was off-count today; he was proud of them.
“But—” the redhaired man said. Gird spun around to him.
“You fight with a sword?”
“Not very well yet, but—”
“These sticks are longer than swords. You can’t fence against a sword, no, but 
you can poke with it—just as you’d poke cattle through a gap. D’you think 
soldiers are harder to move than cattle, if you hit them right?”
“Well—no. But I thought—”
“If you want to learn from me—what’s your name, anyway?”
“Felis.”
“Felis, if you want to learn from me, the first thing is to clean up this 
stinking camp!” He had not quite meant to be that rude, but a gust of wind 
brought the foulness thick into his lungs.
“But what’s that got to do with—”
“Yes or no.”
“Well, yes, but—”
Gird glared around at the men in the camp, most of whom were sitting up more 
alertly now, sensing a fight coming. Two were not; they lay against the rock 
face, with another crouched beside them.
“What’s wrong with them?” Gird asked, pointing.
Felis glanced that way, then shrugged. “Sim has some kind of fever, and Pirin 
has the flux—”
“And you ask why the stink matters! Didn’t you have jacks where you came from? 
Didn’t the grannies teach you about any of that?”
Felis flushed dark red. “We don’t have any tools, hardly, and it’s not so easy 
out here away from the towns—”
Gird snorted. He felt good, the righteous anger running in his veins like stout 
ale at harvest. “You thought soldiering was easy? You thought fighting a war was 
going to be easy?” His sergeant had said something like that more than once—he 
had the rhythm right, anyway. Felis glared at him, but said nothing. Gird went 
on. “You ask any of these men—Ivis, or Diamod—if we had more than this when I 
started. You ask them if someone can smell our camp from as far away.”
Some of the men were standing now, coming forward slowly. Gird could not tell if 
they came in support of their leader, or from curiosity. Felis looked around, 
seeking support.
“There’s no way—we don’t have good ground here, for digging jacks and such. It’s 
hard enough to find enough to eat, and—”
A taller man intervened. “So what would you do, stranger, if you had command 
here? Or is it all talk?”
Gird raised his brows ostentatiously. “Do you want us to show you? Or had you 
rather live like this?”
“Show us!” Felis spat. “Go ahead—let’s see what you can do.”
“Your people must help,” Gird said. Felis shrugged.
“I won’t make them. You can try.”
“You’re giving me command?” There was a moment’s absolute silence, on everyone’s 
indrawn breath. Felis paled; his jaw clenched. Then he spread his hands.
“For one day, for what you can do. I’ll be interested. Of course, we’ve nothing 
to share for supper.” Gird was sure that was a lie, but he smiled.
“We brought our own, and enough for return,” he said. Then he turned his back on 
Felis, taking that chance, and dismissed his own men “—to your tally groups.”
Raising his voice to reach all the men in the camp, he said, “You have two bad 
problems. The first is your jacks, which is making you sick with its filth. No 
need to ask where it isn’t—but you need a good deep trench far away from the 
creek.”
“The ground’s all rocky hereabout,” said the tall man. “We can’t dig it with our 
fingernails.”
“Fori.” Gird put out his hand, and Fori handed him the shovel blade. “Here’s a 
shovel, if you can put a handle to it. Anyone here can cut a pole, or—”
“I’ll cut a pole,” said the tall man. He turned on his heel and stalked off. 
Gird watched him for a moment, then went on.
“What do you have to carry things in?” he asked the group at large. After a 
moment’s silence, someone pointed to the kettle on the fire, and a large wooden 
bowl. Gird smiled at them. “That’s more than we had,” he said. “We had no 
kettle. But we don’t dirty a kettle with filth. Triga, I’ll want some baskets. 
Any of you men know how to make a basket?”
“A man make baskets?” asked one with a low whistle. Gird put out his hand to 
stop Triga (and Triga’s arm was there—predictable as always) and said “Don’t 
laugh; Triga’s a good enough soldier to know that supplies help win wars. Learn 
from him; we need baskets to haul that stinking waste into the hole you—” He 
nodded at the tall man who had cut his pole and was bringing it back, “—are 
going to dig for it.”
“I’m not moving any of that filth!” snarled someone across the firepit. Gird 
heard mutters of agreement, and the amused chuckles of his own men.
“Move the filth, or move yourselves,” Gird said. “It’s killing you—and you know 
it.”
“That’s not all,” came Ivis’s voice from behind him, “he’ll have you bathing, 
and if you get a cut, he makes you scrub it out with soaproot. Besides, nobody 
wants to eat in this stench. Just get rid of it.”
Gird grinned at his people, and walked over to the firepit. The kettle on it 
gave off a thin steam, but he could not tell what was in it. The overall stink 
was too strong. “What is it?” he asked the man tending the fire.
“Grain mush. It’s been grain mush for months, ’cept when someone snares a 
rabbit, or finds a berry patch.”
“No bread?”
The man squinted up at him. “You a housewife? I never learned to make bread. 
Besides, it takes things we don’t have.”
“You’ll get them.” Gird patted the man’s shoulder, and left him peering 
backwards, stirring ashes instead of the fire.
Now for the sick men. He knew he’d been lucky that none of his own troop had 
sickened yet. Although he’d tried to nurse his mother and Mali, he knew very 
little of the healing arts. Cleanliness, of course—everyone knew that the fever 
spirits thrived on foul smells and dirt. They grew fat and multiplied on what 
made healthy men ill. It was nearly impossible to be clean enough to keep them 
all away (his mother had insisted that even a speck of old milk left in the 
bucket could feed enough spirits to ruin the next batch) but the cleaner the 
better.
The stench worsened as he neared the sick men.‘ One of them had red fever 
patches on his cheeks; his breath was labored, almost wheezing. His eyes were 
shut, and he didn’t pay any attention to Gird. The other, pale and sweating, had 
vomited; the man with him was wiping his face clean. Gird felt a tug at his 
sleeve, and turned. Pidi, almost as pale, had come up beside him.
“I picked some breakbone weed on the way—it might help for the fever. But I 
didn’t bring any flannelweed.”
“Boiling water,” said Gird. “See if they have another pot, and be sure you get 
the water well upstream.” Pidi went off, and Gird forced himself to squat down 
beside the sick men. The caretaker glared at him.
“Ya canna’ do aught for ’em. This’n’ll die by morning; feel his head.” Gird 
reached out to the fevered man, whose forehead felt like a hot stone—dry. “And 
this’n, bar he stops heaving, he’ll go in a day or two. He’s lost all he can, 
below, and I can’t get ’im to the jacks we got, let alone the jacks you say 
you’ll dig.”
“You know flannelweed?” Gird asked. The man shrugged.
“I’m no granny, with a parrion of herbs. What be you, man or woman?”
Gird took hold of his wrist and squeezed until the bones grated; the man paled. 
“Man enough, if strength makes men. But I’d be glad of a woman’s parrion of 
healing, if ’twould save lives. Have you sought a healer?”
“Aye. Felis brought one from the vill, a hand or more of days ago, when it was 
just Jamis here. But she was like you, all twinchy about the smell. Said we’d 
have to clean it up afore she could do aught. So’s Felis told her what he told 
you, and she huffed off, about holding her nose.”
Gird let go of the man’s wrist, and picked up the rag sodden with vomit. 
“This’ll do him no good here, but to make him heave again.” He tossed it away, 
and turned back to the sick man, who was staring at him with the frantic look of 
a trapped animal. “If we can find flannelweed, and get you to a clean place—I’ll 
try, at least.” He made himself touch the man’s hands, filthy as they were, and 
managed not to flinch when the man clutched at him.
“Please, sir—please—”
“I’ll try.” Gird looked at the sulky caretaker. “You can go clean up; I’ll get 
my people to carry them.”
“You’re welcome to it.” The man stalked away, clearly furious, rubbing the wrist 
Gird had bruised.
Gird looked around. Herf, in the tally group for camp chores, had picked up the 
stinking rag on a stick, and was carrying it toward the stream. He could hear 
the solid chunks of the shovel at work somewhere among the pickoaks. Ivis came 
up.
“Are you going to want to move them? I can have someone cut poles—”
“Yes, and I’ll need a bucket of clean water, if you can find one. Does anyone 
but Pidi know flannelweed?”
“I’ll ask. Those rags on the line aren’t really clean, but they’re cleaner than 
that—” Ivis pointed to the sodden rags under the two men.
“We’ll need them, but not here. No sense in dirtying them now.” Gird unhooked 
the sick man’s fingers from his hand, one by one, and stood up. Pidi was coming 
back down the slope with a bucket of water—had he had to go all the way up to 
find clean? Triga, Gird saw, had a cluster of men around him—presumably he was 
making a basket and showing them how. Artha—who, Gird wondered, had told 
him?—was carefully scooping ash from the cool side of the firepit into a sack of 
some kind. The cook looked furious, but wasn’t interfering.
Gird went to look at the stream, and shuddered. It looked as if hogs had 
wallowed in it, and it smelled worse. All along the banks, except at a crossing, 
were the uncovered remnants of a long encampment. Flies swarmed over them, 
rising in a cloud when he came near. Some of the filth had fallen into the 
stream and was far too wet to shift easily. It had been foul so long that rocks 
in the stream were slimed with luxuriant green weed, its brilliant color clear 
evidence of the steady supply of filth. It would be best to move the camp 
entirely, but he could not do that by himself.
“Gahhh.” Diamod had come up behind him. “This is worse than I recall. But 
perhaps you’ve changed my nose for me.”
“It’s a damned shame,” said Gird. He was angry again, but this time with a slow, 
steady anger that would burn for days. “It’s hard enough to think of fighting 
the lords, with their soldiers and their weapons. We can’t be fighting 
ourselves, too. There’s no village this bad; these men came from better. They 
should know.”
“So did we, but we didn’t do it until you made us. Be fair, Gird, when you were 
a boy, did you do more than your father demanded? Or your sergeant?”
“I grew to a man,” Gird said, growling, and forcing away the memory of his 
boyhood sulks. Had his mother really had to threaten beatings to get him to 
clean the milk pails? Had his father clouted him more than once for leaving muck 
on the tools? He sighed gustily. “True, I was the same way. But now—they’re men, 
they should know better.”
“Teach them, like you taught us.”
“I wish I could move the camp. Now. This moment.” Diamod grinned. “Tomorrow, 
maybe: the way you’re going, you could do that.”
Gird stared moodily at the mess near his feet. “We can’t move all this tonight. 
Ashes, I suppose for the rest.” He turned and called Artha. “There may not be 
enough—but try to spread ashes on all of this. Up-stream and down. Don’t step in 
it.”
“No, Gird.”
On his way to see how the trench was coming, Gird passed Triga, who held up one 
of his “fast” baskets, a flat, scoop-shaped affair. “Gird, it might go faster if 
we had something like a hoe, to scrape the stuff right into the basket.” A 
solution creating another problem, Gird thought, but one of the local men looked 
surprised and said “We have a hoe—course, it’s just wood—”
“Fine,” said Gird. “Triga, I don’t think we can move it all tonight, but see 
what you can do with that.” Triga nodded, not sulky at the moment. It had to be 
eating frogs, Gird thought, that made a man so touchy on some things so 
reasonable when given a problem to solve.
The steady thunk of the shovel led him to the trench diggers. The tall man who 
had cut the pole for the shovel handle was jabbing the dirt with another, 
pointed pole to loosen it for the man with the shovel. Four others—two of 
Gird’s, and two locals—were picking out rocks ahead of the shovel. The trench 
was deep enough, and reasonably straight, but it would never hold the 
accumulation on the banks of the stream. This would do for current and future 
use.
“Fori—” Fori was on the shovel at that moment; he looked up. “We’re going to 
need another hole for the old stuff. Not a trench; just a pit. Let’s put it 
farther back in the wood, away from this.” Fori nodded, and shouldered the 
shovel. The other men looked from Gird to Fori, and back to Gird. “Artha’s got 
the ashes; I told him to go ahead and use them where they are, but he can get 
more.”
“Does Triga have carriers yet?” asked Fori.
“Yes, and a hoe for scraping up.” Gird glanced up at the sky; it wasn’t long 
until sundown. “We can’t finish tonight, but we can get a start on it.”
The tall man leaned on his pole and looked at Gird. “You remind me of my da. He 
was always one for starting a job now.”
Gird smiled. “I was just thinking of my own da.” He turned away, sure that Fori 
could handle that little group by himself. By now, Pidi should have hot 
water—and he’d forgotten that he’d sent Ivis to find someone to find 
flannelweed. And where were the food tally groups?
Back in the clearing, he noticed a controlled activity. Pidi crouched over a 
bucket of steaming water, chatting with the local cook, who looked much less 
sulky. Felis, of all people, was gathering the dry rags off the line. Ivis, Cob, 
and Herf were crouched near the sick men; a stack of sticks had appeared by the 
firepit; and much of the clutter of the campsite was gone, replaced by clumps of 
gear that he suspected were not really organized. But it looked better, and he 
could walk across the open space without tripping over bits of wood and 
someone’s rotted boot. His own men and the locals were moving about as if they 
had something to do and were doing it. The cook waved to him, and Gird veered 
toward the firepit.
“This boy says he’s yours—right?”
“Right.” Gird tousled Pidi’s hair. “My youngest.”
“You got nerve, dragging your boy along to a war.”
Gird gave him a hard look. “I had no choice. They threw me out of my holding, 
because my daughter’s husband tried to defend her—and I hit one of them—so did 
Pidi, for that matter, boy that he is.”
“Oh. Your daughter—she died?”
Gird could feel his head beginning to pound; Pidi laid a hand on his arm, and he 
realized he’d made a fist. “No. She’s alive, last I heard, but she lost the 
baby. And she may die. I don’t know.”
The man gulped, and looked away. “I’m sorry.” After a pause, in which Gird tried 
to get his temper locked down again, he said, “The lad brought me herbs, for 
flavoring. Wild onions, too. Most lads don’t know that.”
“His mother and sister both had a parrion of herbcraft. Pidi learned quickly.”
“This’s not ready, Da, but it might help.” Pidi pointed to the steaming bucket, 
in which Gird could now see leaves steeping. He sniffed the sharp-smelling 
steam.
“At least it smells good.” He dipped some in his own bowl, and took it over to 
the sick men. Now he’d have to remember not to eat from his bowl until he could 
wash it. But Ivis had found a wooden cup the fevered man had used. Gird poured 
the hot liquid into it carefully. Ivis and Cob had stripped off his clothes, and 
washed him with the clean water they’d brought. Gird had no idea what the fever 
was; the man had the sour smell of sickness, but nothing he could recognize.
“Will he rouse at all?”
Ivis shrugged. “He opened his eyes when we first touched him with the wet cloth, 
but said nothing.”
Gird held the steaming cup under the man’s nostrils; they twitched. “Let’s lift 
him, and see if he’ll drink.”
Cob looked worried. “The healer in our village said if they’re not awake, don’t 
make them drink.”
“Just a sip.” Gird was sure the man was really dying, but felt he had to try. 
Ivis lifted him, and Gird held the cup to his lips. When he tried to pour a 
little in, it dribbled back out. Gird sighed. “Well. If he wakes, we can try 
again.”
“Do you think he’ll wake?”
“No. But I’m no healer; I could be wrong.”
They turned to the other man. Gird helped Herf bathe him with clean water, and 
wrap him in the cleanest clothes they could find. Gird hated touching the man’s 
clammy skin; it reminded him of tending Issa, who had been sick so often. They 
gave him a drink of clean water; he did not heave it up at once, so Gird felt 
more hopeful. He looked across the campsite, and saw Triga and someone else 
dragging loaded baskets away toward the pickoaks. Artha was back at the firepit, 
gathering more ashes.
“Do you think they would share our food?” asked Cob. That was what Gird had been 
thinking; he simply did not know.
“If they would, we’d have them in our troop before midnight,” said Ivis, 
grinning. “I still think it was that first hearthcake, Gird, that settled your 
place in our camp.”
Gird grinned back. “You were tougher than that. I thought it was Fori’s 
squirrels. But you know the customs: if they eat our food, and we don’t eat 
theirs, that’s their obligation and our protection. And they’ve already said 
they won’t share.”
“Felis said it. Felis may be wishing he hadn’t been so clever.”
“We can offer.” Gird stood up and headed for the firepit again. At this 
auspicious moment, one of his food tally groups returned, gleefully carrying the 
carcass of a young pig.
“If they won’t share now,” breathed Herf, “they’re so crazy we don’t want them.”
“How did they get that?” muttered Gird. “They haven’t been down robbing some 
farmer’s pigsty, have they?” When the commotion died down, he learned that 
they’d come across a sounder of wild swine, feasting on mushrooms and old acorns 
under the pick-oaks. One fell to a lucky shot by one of the slingers Fori had 
been trying to teach.
“I guess there were enough of us, so the most of them ran, and that one—it just 
knocked him flat, and then we landed on him, and slit his throat.”
“And the others didn’t come back. We were lucky.” Gird looked at his smug 
foragers, spattered with blood and dirt, and then around at the locals, who 
looked as hungry as wolves.
“We caught him, but he lived in your wood,” Gird said loud enough for all to 
hear. “We would share the feast.”
The local men in the clearing looked at Felis, who spread his hands. “All right. 
But all we have is grain mush.”
Gird breathed a sigh of relief. They should share food both ways; that made the 
obligations equal. “We would be glad to share freely, all we have with all you 
have.” He would like to have insisted that all of them, locals and his men 
alike, clean up before eating, but with the stream so foul that was impossible. 
He called his troop together, while the cook and Diamod fashioned a spit for 
roasting the pig, and supervised the washing of hands in clean water. No one 
argued; they seemed almost proud to demonstrate their superior habits to the 
locals. That led to a flurry of handwashing by the locals as well, and Gird was 
content.
Soon the smell of roasting pig overcame the worst of the camp’s stench. The cook 
caught the dripping juices off the pig, and stirred them into the mush, along 
with salt from Gird’s pouch. By the time the pig was done, Gird’s appetite had 
returned full force. With roast pig, mush, and the bread they’d brought, 
everyone had plenty to eat, and the conversations around the firepit were 
friendly. Then one of the locals got up and sauntered toward the creek.
“Use the new trench,” said Gird. The man stopped.
“But it’s dark. I couldn’t find it.”
“Cob, help him.”
The man opened his mouth to complain and shut it again. Cob was up, with a brand 
from the fire. “This way,” he said.
“But we always—” the man said, looking at Felis.
“Do it,” Felis said. “They fed us our own pig; they can tell us where to put our 
own jacks.”
Gird was up before dawn; the rank smell had gotten into his dreams, and he’d 
been pursued through dark tunnels by something with poison fangs and bad breath. 
His own men were curled up neatly enough under the edge of the pickoaks, where 
the smell was least. The locals were sprawled anyhow around the firepit. Gird 
went to the jacks, then picked his way to the firepit and poked up the fire. It 
was going to be a clear day, but dew had soaked the stones; he dared not sit 
down until they dried. He went to look at the sick men, and found that the 
fevered one had died in the night. The other was asleep, breathing easily. He 
put more wood on the fire, until it crackled, and then took a bucket and started 
upstream. On his way back, he met Fori with the other bucket.
“I thought this must be where you were,” said Fori. “And I knew you’d want more 
good water.”
“Another fifty paces up, there’s a clean creek coming in from one side. I went 
up that to a pool—I think there’s a spring under it.”
“That’s what Pidi said, when I asked him. Felis is asking for you.”
“Is he?” Gird went back down, stepping carefully as the water tried to slosh out 
of the bucket. Felis would have waked with one of two plans, and Gird hoped the 
man had sense. He doubted it; anyone who couldn’t stay out of his own mess could 
hardly be called sensible. Besides, it was never easy for a man to give up 
leadership.
Felis, however, had taken a third route Gird hadn’t thought of. “I talked to 
everyone,” he said, as soon as Gird came into the clearing. “They want to follow 
you. They think you know how to run an army.” Gird set the bucket down by the 
firepit, and blinked. He hadn’t expected Felis to ask the others himself, 
privately. “What about you?” he asked.
Felis darkened with the easy blush of the redhead. “I wish I had done what you 
did,” he said. “I wish I’d thought of all that. All I thought of was fighting 
itself—I kept trying to learn swordfighting— Gird met his gaze. “Do you want to 
learn my way, or go your own?”
“I’ll stay, if you’ll let me.”
“You fooled me,” Gird said. “I thought you’d be angry, and go away.”
“I am angry,” said Felis. “But you did it fairly, and not to make me angry. Did 
you?”
“No. At least—” remembering his own anger of the day before, “—at least, I 
didn’t start that way. It seemed such a waste.”
Felis’s followers had been watching their conversation from a distance, 
furtively; when Gird and Felis smiled at each other and clasped hands, everyone 
relaxed.
That day was spent cleaning up the camp as best they could, while the new 
members learned how Gird’s system worked. Supper was less a feast, for no lucky 
catch rewarded that day’s hunters. But the camp stank less, and Pidi had given 
two draughts of flannelweed to the man with flux. He had not died, at least, and 
had not heaved all day.
“What now?” asked Felis, as they sat around the dying fire. “Are you going to 
drill us for a few hands of days, and then go take over another group?”
Gird yawned and stretched. He was very tired. “No,” he said. “No, I have another 
plan. The Stone Circle must learn drill, and all the soldiering possible, but 
we’ll never have enough outlaws to fight a war. We’ve got to have a way to train 
everyone. At home. While they farm, or make pots, or whatever it is they do.”
“How?” asked Cob, beside him.
“Tomorrow,” said Gird. “I’ll explain it all tomorrow.”



Chapter Thirteen
« ^ » 
The newcomers, Gird discovered, had already grasped the idea of traveling 
quietly, with scouts ahead and behind. He led them back up the stream they had 
camped beside. The sick man looked as if he would definitely recover; they 
carried him in a pole-slung litter. All of them carried some piece of equipment, 
for Gird did not intend to return to that camp until it had had time to clean 
itself.
“I suppose you want us to dig a jacks trench every time we stop?” asked Felis.
“Yes.” Gird was ready to glare, but Felis merely shook his head, and grinned. 
They were halted for a noon rest on the shady side of a hill, where the scrub 
grew barely more than head-high.
Summer heat shimmered on the slopes around them, and baked pungent scents from 
the scrub.
“So will you tell us your plan now?”
Gird looked around at the others. They were all listening; he wondered how they 
would react. Was there a better time? He thought not. But instead of answering 
Felis directly, he asked, “How many men did you have when you started?”
Felis frowned thoughtfully. “I didn’t start it—but there were three hands when I 
came. Then Irin died, and then two more came, and then six, but one of them died 
soon; he’d been hurt. Three hands, four—it went up and down.”
“And how many other groups are there, and how large do you think they are?”
Felis began tapping the ground, as if a map, to remind himself. “I heard of one 
away westward—beyond your village—Diamod went there once and said they had less 
than two hands of men. North and west, another, but I heard that one was 
captured and killed, all of them. Two hands, maybe three. South and east, 
someone told me of a large group: five or six hands of men, maybe more. But I 
heard they have fields, and can feed themselves.”
Gird nodded. “That’s what I thought. There may be more groups, but nowhere more 
than the farmers can support. We can’t feed ourselves. So a day or two of travel 
between groups—each one drawing food from two or three villages—and the villages 
are so poor. Four hands is a large group; five is too large for most. And 
without proper care for the food they do get, some of it is wasted. Diamod told 
me several years ago there were enough in the Stone Circle to fight a war, but 
ten soldiers here and fifteen there and twenty over here don’t make an army. 
They have to be together. Organized. Training together.”
“But I don’t see—”
“We need the Stone Circle: we need a place for men to go when they’ve been 
outlawed or have lost their holdings. But we need an army more. And we need an 
army that can feed itself during training, house itself during training, clothe 
itself—”
“It’s impossible!”
“No, I don’t think so.” Gird let his eyes wander from face to face. “We were all 
farmers, craftsmen—we fed ourselves, housed ourselves—and in the evenings, 
off-season, we sat around our bartons or our homes and talked.”
“Yes, and you yourself would have nothing to do with fighting when you still had 
your holding,” said Diamod boldly.
“That’s true, because you wanted me to sneak away and teach you drill—go away 
from my home, and my work, and risk discovery both ways, to teach strangers. I 
say now I was wrong. But what I told you then still has force. Suppose you had 
said, ‘Let us teach you how to fight and defend yourselves—here in your own 
village, you and the men you know best fighting shoulder to shoulder to protect 
your own against the lords.’ Do you think I might have answered differently?”
A long silence. Diamod opened his mouth and shut it. Felis pulled a grass stem, 
chewed it, and spat it out. The others said nothing, but all the faces conveyed 
shifting thoughts and emotions. Finally Triga said, “You mean for us to go into 
villages and teach farmers what you’ve taught us—by ourselves?”
“It won’t work,” said Herf suddenly. “It can’t—the lords would see it, their 
guards would. Right under their noses, peasants drilling? They’d be hung on the 
spikes by nightfall.”
“There aren’t guards stationed in every village,” said Ivis. “If they would have 
their own scouts out, to see anyone coming—”
“Better than that,” said Gird. “Think how our villages are built. Every cottage, 
nearly, has its own—”
“Barton!” said Fori, eyes suddenly alight. “Walled in—no one can see, but over 
the back gate—
“That’s right,” said Gird. “Bartons. Big enough to teach a few men to march 
together, use sticks. No one notices when the men go into a barton of an 
evening, or the noise that comes out of it— men telling jokes, drinking ale—” He 
could suddenly feel it, the mellow flow of liquid down his throat that would 
ease his joints and make the old stories new again.
Felis pursed his lips. “Not everyone in the village will do it— what about those 
who don’t? What if they report it?”
“Start small. One or two, let the locals decide who else to ask. Nobody in my 
village would’ve reported it to the steward, though some wouldn’t come. Let ’em 
stay home. And if the guards do come, what’s to see? A group of men talking and 
singing, same as any evening.”
On face after face, Gird could see the idea take root and grow. He watched its 
progress through the group. It would work; he knew it would work. It had come to 
him in a flash of insight so intense that it waked him out of a sound sleep. He 
had been planning to try it, but the attack on Rahi had come first.
“So: you train us, and we train them. Just those of us here could reach five, 
six hands of villages, and if every village trained four hands of men—”
“But would we try to move in with them? Someone would surely notice that—”
Gird nodded. “I know. I’m not sure what the best way is, but I’m sure that 
training the farmers at home is part of it.” He stretched, relieved that they 
seemed to understand his point and agree. “But right now, each one of you must 
know everything I know—and be able to teach it. And if you know something I 
don’t, you must teach me.”
“You don’t know everything?” asked Felis slyly.
“No. I didn’t know how to plait baskets or cook frogs; Triga taught me that.” 
Triga grinned and raised a fist. “We all share some knowledge—the farmers among 
us, at least. But many of us have special skills, something extra, which we can 
share with others.”
  
By Midsummer Eve, Gird had both groups drilling with sticks. They camped apart, 
for he still could not feed both at once. One campsite lay just within the east 
side of the wood, and the other was near (but carefully not in) Triga’s bog. But 
the flow of information, skills, and supplies went back and forth almost daily. 
They drilled apart three days, and came together on the fourth, to practice 
larger group movement outside the forest, on a grassy hillside.
Both camps had the clean, tidy look of a good master’s workshop—and it was a 
workshop, as Gird explained often. If they had an army someday, of farmers who 
had trained in their bartons, they would have to have camps in the field, and 
those camps would have to have jacks, kitchens, shelters for wounded, space to 
store supplies. Here, in small groups, they could learn what worked, and later 
they could show others.
As summer days lengthened, the food-gathering groups were able to bring back 
more and more supplies. Gird insisted that some of these be stored for 
emergencies. They dried fruit on lattices of plaited grass, cut the wild grain 
and threshed it, dug edible tubers, honed their skill at slinging and throwing. 
Archery was harder. Of the four bows between the two groups, one had broken 
early, and it seemed no one could make good arrows. Still, the best of them 
occasionally hit a bird or rabbit. Each camp had its own handmill, and when 
there was grain to grind, they had bread. Gird toyed with the idea of trying to 
brew some ale, but they really couldn’t afford the grain. Maybe after 
harvesttime, he thought—next winter would be cold and dismal enough, without 
giving up ale entirely.
Gird rotated all the men through all the tally groups, but noticed which had 
special abilities. The whittlers, sure of an appreciative audience, worked even 
when not on actual tool duty, fashioning spoons and bowls, dippers and pothooks. 
Some of the men took to the old stone tools, and one liked to spend his spare 
time chipping new blades from flint cobbles. No one sneered, now, at those who 
could make useful baskets, or sew neat patches.
On Midsummer Eve, lacking ale, they drank the fresh juice of wild grapes and sat 
out under the stars, singing the old traditional songs. Like Midwinter, 
Midsummer was a fireless night, but this one was not dark and cold. In the 
freshness before Midsummer dawn, when every sweet scent of the earth redoubled 
its strength, Gird lay in the long grass and wished they could have women with 
them. The other men, too, were restless, remembering the traditional end to all 
those traditional songs, when the brief hours of darkness were spent first 
hunting the elusive flowers said to bloom only that night, and then celebrating 
them. Gird thought of his first night with Mali, of all the Midsummers he’d 
spent with her. A breath of air moved, wafting still more scent past him, and he 
rolled up on one elbow. She had been dead, and he had not gone back out, but now 
he was out, and he could not stop thinking about it.
Of course it would not do. He made himself get up and walk around the others, 
who pretended to be asleep. The two or three who were really asleep risked 
dangerous dreams, on Midsummer night. They snored, or muttered, and tossed 
uneasily. He did not wake them, walking farther away into the stillness. Dew lay 
heavy on the grass, gray-silver in the starlight, in the slow light of dawn that 
rose from the east in faintly colored waves.
Two days later, he had just come from the eastern camp, and was nearing the 
other, when Diamod met him on the trail.
“I have to tell you something,” he said. Gird stopped. He had made a rule that 
they not talk on the trail, even when chance-met like this. But Diamod’s 
expression declared this an emergency.
“What, then?”
“Your daughter Raheli—”
Gird’s heart contracted; his vision hazed. “She’s dead.” Despite the two reports 
he had had, he had continued to worry, sure that she might yet die of her 
injuries or her sorrow. He had worked harder, to keep himself from thinking 
about it, but her face haunted him.
“No—she’s come.”
Relief and shock contended; he felt that the ground beneath him swayed “Come? 
You mean—come here? They wouldn’t keep her?”
“They would have been glad to keep her; she would not stay. She has come here, 
and she insists she is joining us.”
“No!” That was loud enough to send birds squawking away in the forest canopy 
overhead, and loud enough for any forester to hear. Gird bit back another bellow 
and lowered his voice. “It’s impossible. She can’t—”
“You come tell her that. She followed me here from Fireoak— I didn’t even know 
she was following until I reached the wood, and then I couldn’t—I didn’t think I 
should—send her back. Or that she’d go.”
Rahi alive, and well enough to walk so far—that was as much as he’d hoped. More. 
He wanted to see her, hold her, know she was whole and strong again. He 
remembered the blood on her face, on her body. When he looked at Diamod, the man 
seemed to have understood his very thought, because he nodded slowly.
“Yes, she has a terrible scar, and no, she seems not to mind. She wore no 
headscarf. Something else, she’s dressed like a man.”
Gird shook his head, shrugged, could not think of anything to say. Most 
headstrong of his children—how was he going to convince her to leave? If she had 
come this far, it would not be easy, and if she refused to obey him, it would 
cause him trouble with the men.
“What has she said to the men?” he asked Diamod.
“She said she was your daughter, and must see you. She had told me she meant to 
stay, but when I left she had said nothing else to the others.”
“Thank Alyanya’s grace for that,” said Gird. He shivered, flicked his fingers to 
avert the trouble, whatever it had been (and he could guess well enough) and 
started on toward the camp.
The other men were all busy, carefully busy and carefully avoiding the tall, 
strongly built person in trousers and man’s shirt who sat motionless on a log, 
back toward him. Gird paused to look at her. From that distance, in that garb, 
she looked like a boy, her short dark hair (she had cut her hair!) rumpled, her 
big hands busy with a knife on a stick of wood. What was she whittling? When had 
she learned to whittle—or had she known, and he not known it?
He came toward her; the other men’s glances at him alerted her, and she turned, 
then stood. She stood very straight, as she had when expecting punishment in 
childhood—she had been the one of his children most likely to defy him. Now he 
could see the ruin that blow had made of her beauty, a scar worse than her 
mother’s, puckering the corner of her mouth. Her jaw had been broken, by the 
unevenness of it now. Her eyes held nothing he had seen before, in her years as 
child and maid and young wife. They might have been stones, for all the softness 
in them.
He could not bear it. He could not bear it that his daughter, his (he could 
admit it to himself) favorite, could look at him “Rahi—” he began. Then he found 
himself reaching for her, sweeping her into his hug despite her tension when she 
felt his hands. She stiffened, pushed him back, then stood passively. That was 
worse. He held her off, searching her face for some part of the girl who had 
been. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think—”
“I came to stay,” she said, as if it were a ritual she had memorized. “I came to 
fight. I am strong. I have no—no family ties.”
“Rahi—!” He was appalled. But she went on.
“No child, no husband, nothing—but the strength of my body, the skill of my 
hands. I can be useful, and I can fight.”
The other men had vanished, into the trees. Gird did not blame them; he was 
grateful for their tact. He was also sure they were listening avidly from behind 
every clump of leaves.
“I can’t marry again,” Rahi went on. “I’m—too noticeable. Imagine going before a 
steward or bailiff. And the healers say that fever may have made me barren, as 
well as killing my—the—child. And I don’t want to marry again. I want to do 
something—” She snapped the stick she’d been whittling, and flung the pieces 
away. “Something to end this, so no other young wife will see her husband die as 
I did, and then have it be his wrongdoing—” She looked up at Gird, eyes suddenly 
full of tears. “I have to do this, Gird, here or somewhere else.”
She had not called him Da, or the more formal father: she had called him Gird, 
like any of his men. That was another pain, even closer to the deep center of 
his heart where father and child were bound in ancient ties. He blinked back his 
own tears, and brushed away those that had run down his cheeks. His beard was 
wetter than he expected.
He tried to stay calm. “Rahi, love, we can’t have women here, in the camps. Not 
to fight—and it’s not fair otherwise. It’s not safe.”
“Was I safe tending my own hearth at home?” she asked bitterly. “Is any woman 
safe? Are we safer when the strongest men are off in the woods playing soldier?” 
Gird grasped at the weak end of that.
“That’s going to change; I thought of a way for men to learn soldiering in the 
villages.” He explained quickly, before she could argue, and when he finished 
she was nodding. “So you see—” he said, easing into it.
“I see,” she interrupted. “I see that the men will get some training, and then 
you’ll take them away to a battle, leaving the women unprotected.”
“That’s not what I meant!”
“That’s what it will be. You know that. Remember, years ago, when you told me I 
was as good as another son? After Calis died? I know many girls aren’t that 
strong—but not all men are as strong as you, yet you’ve got Pidi here—little 
Pidi that I can sling over my shoulder—and you think I can’t—”
“It’s not just strength. You know that.” Gird was sweating; he could feel it 
trickling down his ribs, and his hands were slick with it. “What about—you 
know—all those women things—”
Rahi stared at him a moment, and then snorted. A chuckle fought its way up, and 
she was suddenly convulsed with laughter. “Oh, Da—oh, Lady’s grace, it still 
hurts when I laugh, but—You mean you never knew?”
“Knew what?” He could not imagine what she thought was funny about the problems 
having women in camp could bring.
Her hand waved, vaguely, as she tried to stop laughing, and hiccuped instead. 
“Mother never told you? All those years and you thought—” she shook her head, 
laughing again. Finally, eyes streaming tears, she regained control. Now, 
flushed from laughter, she looked like his daughter again, like her mother—all 
the warmth and laughter that Mali had brought into his life regained. Gird 
stared at her, halfway between anger and delight. She took a long breath, with 
her hand to her side, and explained “Da, women have ways—herbs, brews—we’re not 
like cows, you know. We’re people; we understand our bodies. If it’s a bad 
time—and I agree, fighting a war would be a bad time—we take care of it and 
don’t make a mess. I can’t tell you; it’s our knowledge.”
“But Issa—”
“Oh, Issa!” Rahi shook her cropped hair. “It doesn’t work for some women, or 
they won’t bother—that kind wouldn’t want to learn soldiering anyway.” She 
chuckled softly, a gentler sound. “I thought I would never laugh again, and here 
the first time I see you, I disgrace myself—”
“It’s no disgrace to laugh,” Gird said. He wanted to reach for her again, hug 
her, stroke her hair as he had when she was a small child. But she was a woman, 
and a woman who had suffered too much to be treated as a child. “Even after 
sorrow—it comes, sometimes, when no one expects it.”
Rahi nodded. “Mother used to say it was the Lady’s way of making it bearable. 
Tears in joy, laughter in sorrow, she said, were a sign of the Lady’s presence.” 
She reached out to him, her hand almost as large as his own, and patted his 
shoulder. “There—now I’ve grieved, and laughed, and called you Da again, which I 
said would not do, were I your soldier. But I’m staying.”
And from that decision he could not budge her, not then nor that night nor the 
next day. Their argument was conducted in the spurious privacy of the camp, with 
everyone not listening. Between bouts, Rahi demonstrated her usual competence, 
fitting her contributions of work and skill in effortlessly. Gird began to 
notice covert grins, sidelong sly looks at her, at him. The skin on the back of 
his neck itched constantly from being looked at. His ears felt sunburnt. Rahi 
did not take part in the drill sessions, but she was clearly watching and 
learning the commands.
After the afternoon’s stick drill, Ivis lingered when the others dispersed to 
their assigned groups. “Your daughter—” he said, his eyes down.
“Yes.” Gird bit it off. He was going to have to talk about it, without having 
solved it, and it could do nothing but harm.
“You told us.”
“Yes.” He’d forgotten that, by this time. He looked at Ivis, who was staring 
past his shoulder. Gird resisted the temptation to look around—was Ivis looking 
at Rahi?
“She’s a lot like you,” Ivis said.
“She’s—what?”
“Like you. Gets things done. Strong—more than one way.” Gird grunted. He could 
see where this was leading, and he didn’t like it. Had Rahi been talking to them 
behind his back?
“She hasn’t said anything, but we couldn’t help hearing a little…”
Gird squinted up at the bright sky showing between the leaves, and asked himself 
why Mali hadn’t had all boys. Life would have been a lot simpler. “She wants to 
stay; you all know that. She can’t. She’s stubborn, like her mother.” And me, 
his mind insisted silently.
“Stubborn on both sides,” he admitted aloud. “But it’s impossible.”
Ivis dug a toe into the dirt and made a line. “She’s not like most women.”
Gird snorted. “She’s like all women. Wants her way, and expects to get it. But 
with Rahi, it’s even more so. Her next older brothers died, in a plague. That 
may have been it, though Mali—my wife— she was a strongminded woman too.” As if 
she were alive again, he heard her voice in his ear, as she had warned him that 
first night at the gathering. I will not guard my tongue for any man, she’d 
said, and she’d kept that vow. Along with all the others. And had taught Rahi 
the same, if teaching had anything to do with what was born in the blood. He 
could feel his own blood contending. If only Rahi had been his son—but then it 
might have been Rahi dead, and his (her?) wife left. Gird shook his head. That 
was too complicated; what he had was complicated enough. How could the men 
respect a leader who couldn’t make his daughter obey?
“We think she’s earned it—if she can, if she’s strong enough—”
“Strong enough! Of course she’s strong enough; that’s not the point.”
Ivis cleared his throat noisily. “Gird—it is the point. To us, anyway. You’ve 
worried about some of the men here having the strength to lead, or the courage 
when it comes to a real fight. She’s—she’s your daughter, and we know what 
happened. She should be here.”
Gird stared at him. “You think that? But if I let her—what about others?”
Ivis cleared his throat again. “The—the one thing I did hear her say, to Pidi, 
was that women could train at home too. In the bartons.”
In the bartons I don’t have yet, Gird thought furiously. In the bartons that are 
safe—if they are safe—only because the men always gather in the bartons. Again a 
memory of Mali forced itself into his consciousness, the day of their wedding 
when she had faced the ridiculous ceremonies with no embarrassment whatever. 
Were women really just humoring men with all that squealing and shyness? Could 
they—he had no doubts about Rahi, who could probably ride wild horses if the 
chance occurred—could other women really learn to fight, use weapons, 
kill—alongside men?
Ivis was watching his face with a wary expression. “She said I shouldn’t say 
anything to you,” he said.
Gird glared at him. “I thought you said you hadn’t talked to her!”
“I haven’t. I would have, but she wouldn’t. Said it was up to you and her to 
work out, and I should stay out of it.”
“Giving you orders, eh?” For some reason that amused him; he could feel Rahi’s 
resentment of someone’s interference, her fierce determination to convince Gird 
by herself.
Ivis grinned, catching the change in Gird’s mood. “You notice I didn’t obey.”
“So how many of them agree with you?”
Ivis relaxed still more. “I didn’t talk to all, but all I asked agreed that they 
would let her stay.”
Gird muttered one of the old guards’ curses he hadn’t used in years; Ivis 
clearly had never heard it and didn’t understand. “Go away, then. I want to talk 
to her.” Ivis vanished, as if whisked away by magic. Gird looked around for 
Rahi. There she was, grinding grain as placidly as any housewife by her hearth. 
He had a sudden sinking feeling, as if a hole had opened in his chest, and let 
his heart fall out on the ground. Could he possibly be about to do what he was 
going to do? He swallowed against the feeling, and called her. She looked up, 
smiled, and came to him. He noticed that she had, even in that moment, scooped 
the ground meal into a bowl, and laid another atop it to keep out dirt.
This time he looked her over as if she were a real recruit. Within a finger of 
his height, broad shouldered, as Mali had been. Thin, from the fever, but with 
strength in her arms. The scar down her face made her too distinctive to send 
into a village or town—but she could still see out of both eyes, and had two 
good arms and legs. He had men with less. She stood there calmly, not arguing. 
Not intending to change her mind, either; he could feel the force of that 
determination as if it were heat from a fire.
“I don’t think you understand,” he said without preamble, “how hard it is for 
me. I’ve already seen you lying at my feet in a pool of blood. I don’t think I 
can stand seeing that again.”
Her face paled. “You don’t understand how hard it is for me,” she said. “I lost 
that blood, lost my husband, lost my child, and could not strike even one good 
blow to stop it. I know I cannot stand that—I will not be that helpless again. 
Not ever. Either you teach me, or—I don’t know, but I’ll learn somehow.”
“And die somewhere I never know,” Gird sighed, near tears again. “And that will 
be my fault, as it was my fault for not protecting you before. You give me a 
hard choice, Rahi.” She opened her mouth, but he shook his head. “You would say, 
as your mother said often enough, that it is a world of hard choices. All right. 
I give in, on this one thing. But if this kills you, Rahi, make sure it is not 
because you failed to learn what I could teach.”
If she felt triumph, she did not show it. Only in the corner of her eye, the 
little wrinkle twitched, whether from surprise or delight, he could not tell, 
and would not ask.
“And you were right,” he went on, “to call me ‘Gird’ when you first came. If you 
would be a soldier, then it is for that you are here, and not as my daughter.”
She nodded, gravely. “Yes, Gird.”
“And if you—if you need—” Now her eyes crinkled in what could only be laughter. 
Gird glared at her. “Dammit—!”
“Gird, if I cannot stay as a soldier, for some reason, I will tell you at once, 
and go. But it is not likely, even without what I know of herbs: the healer said 
so.”
His arms ached to hold her, comfort her, restore to her the promises of her 
childhood—the promises all children should have. But it was too late for that. 
She looked content with what life had left her; he had no choice now himself. 
Her future was no more doubtful than his—and, he thought sourly, the only doubt 
was when they’d be strung on the spikes, not if.
But when she returned to grinding, and he saw by the glances passed around the 
campsite that everyone understood, and accepted his decision (he could not 
believe many of them actually approved) he was able to return to planning with a 
lighter heart. If he could establish training in the villages, bartons full of 
trained men—his mind put other women in that picture, and he hastily blanked 
them out—in time they would outnumber the lords and their guards. Would any of 
the guards come over? They had come from peasant ranks. If they saw their 
friends and family actually fighting, would that make a difference? He let 
himself imagine a series of battles in which the peasants stood their ground, in 
drill array, using their sticks and shovels, pushing back the guard and then the 
lords themselves. Of course, he still didn’t know whether the sticks would work 
as he saw them in his head.
He sighed. Time to start the next level of training. He had in mind 
straw-stuffed dummies tied onto logs, to simulate horsemen. It would help if 
he’d ever actually ridden a horse, and knew in his own body how firmly a 
horseman could sit. He’d seen men bucked off—he remembered trying to ride 
calves—but that was not like a soldier on horseback firmly in the saddle. Still, 
it ought to work. If they could unseat horsemen, they could ambush mounted 
patrols. Even more important, if they could unseat horsemen—even one 
horseman—even a straw dummy tied to a log—it might convince the farmers in their 
villages that it was worthwhile spending all those hours learning to drill and 
use a stick.
Making the straw dummy was quick work, in the hot days of tall grass and long 
afternoons. Cob suggested weighting the body with rocks; Triga had the even 
better suggestion of seating a real person on the log, and pulling him off 
slowly—to see how a person felt— and then making the dummy feel the same. That 
turned into several days of experiment, with one after another trying to keep 
his seat on the log with friends pushing and pulling from one or both sides. 
Gird took a turn, wondering if it felt anything like riding a real horse, or if 
it could be a way to learn. It was easy to wrap his long legs around the log and 
hang on, but hard to keep his balance when someone yanked his arm. After his 
second fall, he watched Ivis on the log.
“We don’t need the straw dummy,” he said, “As long as we pad the ends of our 
sticks, and remember that this one is a friend. Whoever’s up can tell us which 
moves are hardest to counter.”
The rider—Ivis, then others—was equipped with a reed “sword” and laid about 
vigorously to simulate resistance. Slowly at first, then with increasing 
confidence and speed, they all learned where to strike a rider to throw him off 
balance. The game became so popular that Gird had to remind them that there were 
other ways—and enemies—to fight, or they would have spent all their time 
knocking one another off logs.
Rahi, in the meantime, had merged almost invisibly into the troop. Gird was 
acutely aware of her presence for the first few days; then he went off to the 
other camp, and when he returned it was as if she had always been there—but as a 
soldier, not his daughter. She did not avoid him, exactly, but she did not spend 
her free time with Pidi, or with Gird, and even seemed to steer clear of Fori. 
She had her place in drill, and made no more than the usual beginner’s mistakes. 
As he would have expected, she learned fast. Gird waited for something to go 
wrong, but nothing did.
It was now nearing harvest. After harvest the fieldfee collectors would be out; 
Gird wanted to introduce his barton idea to at least a few villages before then. 
For that he needed seasoned older men, men the farmers might trust as similar to 
themselves. They had to be proficient in the drill (although he didn’t expect 
them to teach the farmers much in the short time until harvest—but they had to 
impress them.) And—perhaps most important—they had to be reliably close-mouthed. 
He himself would go, of course. Ivis had developed into a trusted lieutenant, as 
had Cob. Diamod was known in five or six villages as a Stone Circle organizer. 
Felis, who might have been another possibility, had broken his wrist on his last 
“ride” as a target, and would not be fit until after harvest.
After long discussions, Gird chose four villages to test his idea: Fireoak, 
Harrow (where Felis’s group had supporters), Whitetree, where Ivis’s brother 
lived, and Hardshallows. Cob and a man from Felis’s group went to Harrow, Ivis 
to his brother, Gird to Fireoak, and Diamod to Hardshallows. They were to spend 
no more than two nights in the village, and talk to no more than five men.



Chapter Fourteen
« ^ » 
Coming into Fireoak on a late summer day, as an active rebel organizer, was very 
different from leaving it as a fugitive who had only the ghost of an idea for 
rebellion. The two of them joined a stream of workers coming in from the fields: 
harvest markers, who went into the fields before harvest to make sure the 
boundary stones didn’t roll an armspan one way or the other—herders prodding 
slow-moving cows toward home and milking time. Gird flared his nostrils, 
enjoying the scent of cow. He had never understood those who thought cows stank. 
Pigs stank; dogs stank; even people—but cows had a rich, joyful scent, as 
befitted animals who lived on fresh grass and herbs. Their droppings had never 
disgusted him. Someone—he could not right then remember who—had told him once 
that a man should keep only those animals whose smells were pleasant to him.
The Fireoak farmers and herdsmen knew perfectly well the two were outlanders, 
but they knew Diamod and had heard of Gird. They sauntered down the lane, dusty 
and brown as the farmers with them, and no one spoke to them. Slow, traditional 
talk rolled by: harvest chances, taxes, a remedy for stiff ankles followed by a 
joke about the cause, comments on cows and weather and the uncommon number of 
rabbits that summer—a joke directed at Gird, which he well understood and knew 
better than to answer.
“Pop up and down everywhere, they do,” someone said a second time, to see if he 
would rise to the bait. “Got so common, we might think they’s people.”
Then the village, with its familiar cottages, the wattle fences between 
smallgardens, the walls of bartons rising behind. It was at once strange and the 
same: so like his own village, and yet not his village—and his village was not 
his village. Gird sniffed: bread, cheese, the vegetables they had not yet 
planted for the camps, ale somewhere—his mouth watered. Children wandered about, 
too thin but not yet starving, noticing the strangers but warned away from 
saying anything by quick gestures from their elders.
He would have passed Mali’s brother’s cottage, if Diamod had not jabbed him in 
the ribs. It looked different by daylight, from the front. He remembered Rahi’s 
harsh feverish breathing in the barton out back, the gray light of dawn when 
he’d eased out the gate into the field beyond. Now he saw a low fence enclosing 
a ragged smallgarden, the beaten path to the front door. And in the door, a thin 
girl, yellowhaired, who held one crooked arm as if it pained her. Her face 
whitened, and she ducked inside. Gird turned to see Diamod wink before he walked 
on.
Gird came to the door, stepped out of his boots, and said “Girnis?”
Mali’s brother’s wife, a face he barely remembered from that one night, said 
“You’re Gird? Gods above, what do you mean— come in, don’t stand there!” Gird 
picked up his boots and ducked beneath the low lintel. It was dark inside, and 
would have been cool if not for the fire on the hearth. By that flickering 
light, Gird could see Girnis standing flat against the wall between a loom and a 
wheel.
“Is—is Rahi—?”
“She’s alive, and well, and stubborn as ever.” Gird looked at the wife, whose 
lips were folded together. What had he walked into? He had not asked Rahi all 
that had happened here, but perhaps he should have.
“I thought—” the woman began, then closed her mouth, and twisted her hands, and 
finally said again “I thought you were leaving Girnis with us. To be ours.”
“I did,” said Gird, surprised. “I said so; I was grateful.”
She looked at him hard, then her mouth relaxed a little. “You didn’t come to 
take her?”
“Of course not! Why would you think—”
“Raheli left. When she didn’t come back, we thought she was with you, or dead—we 
didn’t hear of anyone being killed. And then we thought, if you wanted her, you 
might want Girnis, but she’s—”
“She’s not Rahi.” She was the child of Mali’s illness, the twin that lived, but 
never as vigorous as a singleton. “I wouldn’t take her. Girnis, let me see you.”
Girnis came to him, shyly but now unalarmed. Her arm had healed a little 
crooked—not so bad, when she held it out. But she stood with it up, as if it 
were still in its bindings, and it was thinner than the other.
“Does it still hurt you?” he asked. She nodded.
“Mother Fera—” she glanced toward the woman, “—says I should move it more, but 
the joint hurts, Da, when I try.”
“Let me feel.” Gird took her arm, conscious of its thinness, and the faint 
tremor—nervousness? pain?—that met his touch. He bent and straightened it 
slowly, stopping when he met resistance and heard her indrawn breath. He could 
feel nothing wrong but stiffness, but he was not a healer. “I’m sure your aunt 
has tried heat,” he said, “and herb poultices. I think myself it would be good 
to move it more. Sometimes things hurt when they’re healing. A few times a day, 
anyway—I think you could do that.” She nodded, solemnly. She was quiet; she had 
always been quiet, the quietest of his children, but not slow. Just quiet, in a 
house full of noisy ones.
The woman had moved nearer; she looked less alarmed. “We’ve had an offer for 
her,” she said. “She has a mixed parrion, she says?”
Gird nodded. “Yes. She has Mali’s parrion of herbcraft, and Issa’s—my brother’s 
wife’s—parrion of embroidery. Issa was a weaver, as well, but died before Girnis 
learned enough.”
“I am a weaver,” the woman said. “I can teach her, if her arm strengthens. 
But—will you let us arrange the marriage?”
“Of course. I told you—if you in your kindness will have her, she is your 
daughter, and yours is the right to speak for or against.”
He heard boots in the barton, and stiffened, but the woman called through the 
house: “Gird’s here. It’s all right.”
After that awkwardness, he was surprised to find that Mali’s brother was 
enthusiastic about the possibility of training within the village.
“Of course, the bartons,” he said. “You’re right, Gird, and I don’t know why we 
hadn’t thought of it before. Had no one to teach us, I suppose. I know—let me 
think—I know two hands of men who would join here, at once. What about weapons?”
“Drill first, then weapons,” said Gird. He and Barin were sitting on the cool 
stones of the barton, drinking ale to celebrate. He could feel a delicate haze 
leaching the tiredness from his bones.
“What about women?” asked Barin.
“Mmm?”
“You’ve got Rahi now. I’m Mali’s brother, after all; I remember what she was 
like and how relieved the family was when you offered for her. Will you take 
women like that in?”
Gird shrugged. “I would myself, but I can’t force another group to do it. What 
about you?”
“I don’t like the thought of seeing my wife—but after all, she could be cut down 
for no reason, as Rahi was. Most of them won’t want to anyway, but for a few—why 
not?”
The following night, five other men visited Barin’s, presumably to finish an 
open barrel of ale before the beginning of harvest, when it was bad luck to have 
one. They talked village gossip until the stars were thick and white, then Gird 
spoke his piece. Less open than Barin, they still agreed it was a good idea. The 
longer they talked it over, the more they liked it—except that only two of them 
thought women should be allowed to join.
“They talk too much,” said one of the men. “Let them find out, and it’d be all 
over the village by dawn.”
Barin laughed. “And who was it let out the secret of Kinvit’s lover, last 
winter?”
The others burst into laughs; the man who had complained of women talking too 
much said “But it wasn’t my fault!” Gird chuckled. It was always the same; the 
loosest mouths complained that others gossiped. Their tales were always true, 
and if the wrong story got out, it was never their fault. Finally the man came 
around, laughing at himself. “All right,” he said. “I got drunk; I opened my 
mouth, and out fell Kinvit and Lia, doing what Kinvit and Lia had been doing 
since harvest. No nosy old granny could have done worse.” But he was still 
opposed to having women training in the village. Gird did not push him, letting 
Barin do most of the talking. They would all know, by now, about Raheli; they 
would all assume that Gird had a special reason for allowing women to fight. And 
that was perfectly true.
In the end, the men voted to organize a barton meeting, and gradually recruit 
new members. Gird promised to send someone— “It may not be me,” he pointed 
out—to train them. “Consider him a sergeant,” he said at first, but even in 
starlight he could see the dislike they had for that name, associated as it was 
with the lords’ tyranny. “What would you call him, then?”
They talked back and forth, suggesting and arguing, until one of them said 
“We’re like a bunch of cattle milling in a pen, waiting for the herdsmarshal to 
set us on our way.”
“Marshal!” said Barin, smacking his leg with his fist. “That’s good—and it’s not 
a word we would fear to have overheard. Marshal. And the rest of us are—”
“Yeomen,” said Gird. “That covers all of us, farmers and craftsmen alike. Any 
but lords. And no one will ever know, from talk of it, what it is.”
“I do like that,” Barin said. “The yeomen and the marshal meet in the barton 
tonight. As long as we need only those two ranks—”
“But we’ve got another!” It had come to Gird in another of those flashes of 
insight. “Marshal—that’s one of us traveling, coming to train you. But even in 
the village, you’ll need a leader—that’s the yeoman-marshal. And then yeoman for 
everyone else.”
“And someday—” Barin said. He didn’t have to finish. They all drained the last 
of their ale, and stamped their feet in agreement. Gird could see it—the flow of 
men out to the Stone Circle, to learn. The flow back in, to train those in the 
bartons… and back out, to the fight they all knew must come, and then back, to 
take up their peaceful lives. As natural as breathing, or the cycle of seasons. 
He knew from experience that ale could make things seem simpler than they were 
in morning’s light, but this was going to work.
Work began in earnest when he returned to the camp and conferred with the others 
who had gone out. All the villages had shown an interest—not surprising, since 
they had talked to men already known to be Stone Circle sympathizers. Two of the 
others had noticed that the villagers shied from the usual military rank terms 
of sergeant and captain, but they had not come up with alternatives. They nodded 
when Gird told them about marshal, yeoman-marshal, and yeoman.
“That’ll do,” said Ivis. “They won’t mind that—it’s nothing like the guards. 
Best of all, we can talk about it in front of anyone— even a guard sergeant—and 
he won’t know what it is.” Gird nodded.
“They thought of that, too.”
“Will we all be marshals?” asked Cob. “I mean, when we’re drilling here, that’s 
going be to confusing.”
“None of us are marshals yet,” Gird said. “And some of us may be better than 
others at teaching. Besides, we still don’t know enough.” In his mind, the wheel 
of the year turned, grinding the moments away. How long before the first 
snowfall? Before full winter? Four bartons to train, this winter—maybe more. 
“After harvest,” he said, “we need to bring one man from each village here, to 
drill with us, and see how the larger units work. When the taxes are paid, no 
one takes much notice if someone travels to visit relatives. In the meantime, 
our own harvest: I hear the field-fees are up again, and we cannot starve our 
allies.”
For the next few hands of days, they drilled only briefly, spending most of 
their time gathering food and preparing it for storage. No casual nutting and 
berrying, this time, but a planned harvest of the woods and fields, that must be 
done before the lords came to hunt, in the days after the fieldfees were paid. 
Gird had planned food storage sites both in and away from the camps, so that if 
one were found and destroyed, others would be safe. They could not hunt, and 
risk foresters preparing for the lords’ visits seeing their smoke or smelling 
the blood, but they could gather fruit, tubers, berries, and stow them away. 
Into storage pits lined with rock went redroots and onions: their own harvest 
had been abundant. Other roots and tubers, bulbs and nuts, were stored with 
them, along with apples and plums and dried berries, bundles of herbs, strips of 
necessary barks. Their own baskets stored grain as well, harvested from the 
edges of common pastures, along streambanks, and in Triga’s bog. Gird moved from 
place to place, checking the growing stores, and trying to foresee what hazards 
they must survive.
After harvest, the lords would come to hunt the large wood; Gird moved everyone 
to the tangle of hills where Felis’s group had lived, and the only game worth 
hunting was wild boar. If they stayed out of the pickoak scrub, living 
uncomfortably in the lower brush, they should avoid the occasional hunting party 
with a taste for pig. The men grumbled, but only slightly. Gird found work for 
them even in the chest-high thickets of brush.
“We might need to come this way and hide, and it would be good to have paths 
they can’t see from the opposite hill.” So his troop crawled and twisted through 
the thick growth, hacking out paths wider than the rabbit-trails they found. 
Rahi sniffed the hacked ends of the scrub, and said she thought some of these 
were medicinal, stunted by soil or dryness. She began making a collection of 
twigs, bark, roots, and brewed a variety of pungent bitter concoctions which she 
insisted he taste. They all made his tongue rough up in furrows; they tasted as 
if they ought to do something good. One made him sweat profusely.
At last Ivis’s forester friends sent word that their duke and his friends had 
returned to the city; the forest was theirs for the winter. By this time the 
autumn rains were beginning, turning their trails to cold gray mud. Gird wished 
he had a stone cottage, with a great roaring hearth; his knees ached constantly. 
Instead, he had the three main campsites he’d found for winter, two backed into 
the south face of a hill, and one deep in a grove of cedars and pines. His 
favorite had a clean-running creek, small but adequate to their needs, and the 
surrounding trees had all dropped their leaves, letting in the low winter 
sunlight. The other south-facing camp had a larger stream, but he was somewhat 
worried about floods, come spring. Even in the slower autumn rains, they had to 
cross the stream on fallen logs. The men called that one Big Creek, and the 
other Sunbright; the most secluded campsite they called Cedars.
No one grumbled when he insisted they go right on working, rather than huddle in 
the first shelter they could contrive. He did not know if they were learning to 
think ahead, or if they simply accepted his orders. But wet and cold as it was 
now, winter could only be worse. The shelters he had planned went up quickly: 
wattle frames for side and roof, thatched with whatever they could find, mostly 
wild grass. Gird realized, as they wrestled with the grass between rains, that 
he should have had them out scything it earlier. Next year, he thought. And by 
then he would need another scythe or two. And some sickles. They smeared mud on 
the insides of the walls. Triga suggested another plan: poles braced against a 
tree, lashed together, and then wattle woven to make a circular peaked shelter. 
After building a couple like this, he admitted that it took more work, and gave 
less interior room, but the two they had made a welcome change, like extra 
rooms, during that winter.
The newly designated yeomen marshals arrived for their training while this was 
still going on; Gird had to stop for a couple of days to give them intensive 
training. But they were almost as impressed with the troop’s camp organization 
as with the drill. This, in turn, helped convince the last doubters among his 
soldiers that such organization was important. If it could impress strangers, 
then it was not just a matter of comfort.
The yeomen marshals stayed a hand of days; on the last day, Gird discussed with 
them the way they’d organize and train during the winter.
“By spring,” he said, “I’d like to have your yeomen ready to drill with another 
barton. Someday we’ll have to have bartons able to come together quickly.”
“What about recruiting new bartons?” asked the yeoman-marshal from Hardshallows. 
“I know you wouldn’t want to risk it in your old village—the steward, I hear, is 
still furious about you, and the men who left after you—but we’re less than a 
day’s walk from Hawkridge to the west, and not much more from Millburh, down our 
own stream.”
Gird had hoped no one would suggest that yet; he had wanted to be sure the 
barton idea would work before starting more. But he could not actually stop 
them—these were not his men yet—all he could do was make them sneaky, if they’d 
already decided. In the pause, while he tried to think how to answer, Barin from 
Fireoak spoke up.
“I think we should wait until we have at least two—maybe three—hands of yeomen, 
all drilling well. How else could we show them what we mean? And if—I don’t mean 
to be illwishing, but if this doesn’t work—if we find that our neighbors do tell 
the lords’ men, then better only a few bartons die, than many.”
Gird nodded, glad he hadn’t had to say it himself. “Barin’s right, I think. If 
your barton grows and prospers, and you’re sure it’s safe, then I will not tell 
you not to tell the next village. But we’re like a man starting a journey with a 
heavy load: it’s better to take a few slow steps, and be sure it’s balanced and 
will hold, than to set off at a run and have the whole thing fall apart.” His 
hands mimed the falling load, and they all laughed. “One village at a time. I 
think myself it would be better if only one in each barton knew the name of the 
yeoman marshal in other bartons.”
“But if he dies?”
“Each of you tell one of your yeomen—not someone you usually work in the field 
with—how to contact us, here. And let us know the name of that person. Later, 
everyone will know everyone, but for now, as Barin said, if someone tells, it’s 
better that only a few die.”
  
When the yeoman marshals had left, Gird and his troop used the hand of days 
between the last of the autumn rains and the first of the snows to transport and 
stow the food and supplies the villages had given them, cut and haul wood for 
their fires, and add such refinements to their shelters as time and ingenuity 
allowed. When that first bank of blue cloud rolled across, cutting off the 
slanting autumn sun, and dropping the temperature, Gird felt that they were as 
well prepared for winter as possible.
This did not mean he had thought of everything. His own well, in the foreyard of 
his cottage, froze only in the bitterest winters, and only after midwinter. The 
clear-running creek that was one of the reasons for choosing Sunbright froze 
solid before Midwinter, and they must either melt snow and ice for water, or 
carry it (a cold, heavy load that sometimes froze before they got it home) from 
a spring some distance away. He had thought to dig the jacks trenches ahead, 
before the ground froze, but had not realized that the “loose” dirt from them 
would freeze, and have to be chopped into chunks to fill the trench.
Problems had the advantage of helping Gird keep everyone busy. In the villages, 
winter boredom led to quarrels and occasional fights. Here, such dissension 
could be fatal. So his four tally groups had assigned chores, and whenever the 
weather allowed, Gird chivvied everyone out for a march or drill practice. He 
divided the groups slightly differently. One brought food from storage, and 
another cooked it, while the camp chores group had to maintain the fire, the 
jacks, and the supply of water. The tool groups were set to repairing tools 
broken or chipped, and to making useful items for the camps. One of the things 
the villages had sent (at Gird’s request) was yarn; Rahi taught several of the 
men to knit, using smooth-polished twigs as needles. Knitting was an unusual 
parrion; she had had it from Mali’s brother’s wife, in the time she lived there, 
and liked it much better than weaving.
Midwinter was a different kind of problem. Gird had always known when Midwinter 
was coming because the village headman said so. Here, he realized, everyone 
thought of him as headman, and he should know when to celebrate Midwinter. He 
looked up, at a heavy gray sky. The days were still getting shorter, so it 
wasn’t Midwinter yet. He felt that it would come in a hand or two of days, but 
he did not know when it would be, or how to find out. But missing the Midwinter 
celebration was unthinkable.
He asked the others. Most thought it would be “soon” but no one had an exact 
date. Would it matter? At that thought, a colder chill ran down his neck. Of 
course it mattered; Midwinter and Midsummer were the ends of the axle on which 
the year turned. He had to know. He had to find out. Now that the men knew he 
did not know, they were looking at him nervously.
“How did you find out last year?” he finally thought of asking Ivis.
Ivis flushed. “Last year—well—we all went into one village or another, near 
Midwinter, and celebrated there.” And before Gird could decide to do the same, 
he said, “I don’t think we can, this year—we’re too many.”
“True, but we can ask.” Ivis’ village was too far away, across the wood, but one 
of them could make it to Fireoak and back. To Gird’s surprise, Fori asked to go.
“I can stay with Barin, and ask about Girnis. And the barton.”
Gird nodded. “Good—but be sure you’re back before Midwinter.”
Fori set off the next morning with a sack of food and everyone’s prayers. Gird 
watched all the faces staring after him, and said, “Since you’re all so glad to 
be outside, get your sticks.” A general groan, but not so dismal as he’d 
expected.
Stick drill had progressed a little farther. Felis, once his arm healed, was 
able to demonstrate what he had learned of swordsmanship. Gird suspected it 
wasn’t much, but he himself had never gotten that far. One thing he did know was 
the length of swords Kelaive’s guards had used. He asked the others; the duke, 
Ivis said, carried a longer sword, but no longer than from waist to ground. He 
had seen him standing with its tip resting on the ground. So, Gird thought, a 
sword could have a blade that long, or shorter. He asked his one-armed smith, 
who mentioned curved blades and broad-bladed swords, but agreed on length. That 
meant that a longer stick could fend off a sword—not fence with it, to lose 
chips as the sword chopped—but if the stick could hold the swordsman back, the 
sword could not harm the person with the stick.
It seemed reasonable, but they had to test it. Slowly, Gird insisted. Carefully. 
No more broken bones, if possible. Felis took those of his original group who 
had learned the most about swords, and these faced Gird, Cob, and a few others 
Gird thought he could trust to stay calm.
The sticks were nowhere near spear length, but about the length a man would 
choose as a walking staff, or for guiding cattle. So far they were not all the 
same length, although a broad hand would cover the difference. Gird had watched 
them in use over the past season, noticing carefully what went wrong most often, 
when the sticks clashed in ranks, which grips did not hold. Now, with Felis well 
again, they would see. He felt a little silly, standing there with a real stick 
facing an imaginary sword, but what else could they do?
Felis waggled his wooden “sword” and swiped at Gird. Gird lowered his stick, and 
pointed it at Felis, who sliced at it. Before the “sword” struck, Gird jabbed 
the stick at Felis’s face. Felis jerked back, and his sword stroke went wild.
“Wait,” said Felis. “Try that again, slower.” It would not be slow in battle, 
but they were only learning. Gird nodded, let Felis begin his sideways swipe 
with the sword, and then jabbed again. Again Felis jerked his head back, and 
this time, while he was still off balance, Gird jabbed again, and got him in the 
chest, gently. Felis grunted, then straightened. “I can’t—I think I’m just not 
good enough—but if you keep poking that at my eyes—I have to back up.”
“Let Cob and Arvan try it,” said Gird, stepping back, Arvan advanced with his 
“sword” and very little enthusiasm, to meet Cob. Here Cob was the shorter by a 
head, yet with the length of his stick he could force Arvan off balance.
“It’s too easy,” said Felis, scratching his thick red beard. “These sticks we’re 
using for swords don’t have the weight of a real weapon. If someone got a blow 
in, it would jar your stick aside—”
“But could they?” Arvan was frowning. “Cob, just hold it still— let me try.” He 
swung hard at the stick, and managed to bat it aside, but it swung back on 
rebound, and Cob needed little force to control it.
“But suppose there were more than one swordsman,” Felis said. “If you have more 
than one coming in, you can’t just poke one. The other one will poke you.”
“That’s what the formation is for,” Gird said. “If it works.” This time he and 
Cob lined up facing Felis and Arvan. When they lowered their sticks, and jabbed, 
the two “swordsmen” found themselves giving ground, flailing uselessly with 
their shorter weapons.
“Just remember,” Felis said, “that even an accidental blow with a sword is going 
to take chips off that stick. It won’t last forever. Can you do real damage with 
it?”
“I don’t know.” Gird tapped him in the chest again. “If I did that much harder, 
you might fall down; I might even break your breastbone, or a rib.”
“You’ll have to swing it to knock someone flat, most times.” Triga, watching, 
entered the discussion. “And if you swing it, that gives time for a fast 
swordsman to slip in and kill you.”
“And if you swing it,” Felis pointed out, “it can foul on someone else’s stick 
who’s fighting another opponent.”
“Mmmph. I thought we could try this—hold still, now, I won’t really hit you 
hard.” Gird jabbed at Felis’s face, then tapped his chest, and then slid his 
hands down to swing the stick like a flail. But Arvan chose that moment to dart 
in and put his “sword” to Gird’s neck.
“Like that,” Felis said, grinning at Arvan and Gird both. Gird glowered at Cob.
“And where were you, partner?”
Cob looked rueful. “Standing watching you, when I should have been watching 
Arvan. We have more to learn, yeomen.”
“We could whittle a point on these sticks, and fire-harden it,” said Triga.
“It’s still not going to go through any kind of armor. Even if it did, it would 
catch there, and I’d be standing there with a dead soldier on the end of my 
weapon, looking foolish.” Gird scratched his beard vigorously, as if that could 
clear his head. “I thought if we hit them in the chest hard enough—or in the 
belly—that would knock them down, maybe even out.”
“Hit them in the face—that makes ’em back up, and they’ll worry about losing an 
eye—”
“True, but—” Gird thought about that. “We need a way to kill them, or we’d be 
standing all day poking poles at them. I did think of some farm tools—the 
shovel, the mattock, the scythe—but they all have to be swung. And you’re 
saying, aren’t you, that anything we swing will be clumsier than a sword?”
Felis half-closed his eyes, and began swiping the air. Gird stared, then 
realized he was imagining himself swinging various farm implements. Gird tried 
to guess which, from Felis’s movements, but except for the sickle (a short 
swing, with a snap to the wrist) he could not be sure which was which. Felis 
opened his eyes, made a few passes with his “sword,” and grinned. “I think 
there’s a chance with a mattock—and even a scythe, though the grips would have 
to be moved around. But it wouldn’t be easy.”
Gird heaved a dramatic sigh. “None of this is easy. If it was easy, someone 
would’ve done it long ago.”
Rahi spoke, for the first time in a drill session. “What if two or three worked 
together? One with the stick, to force the swordsman’s attention, and one or two 
with weapons more likely to kill, but slower.”
“That’s fine, if we outnumber the enemy,” said Felis. “But in battle—”
“Wait,” said Gird. “That might work—and we had better outnumber them, Felis, 
facing steel with wood. Let’s try it.”
Felis shrugged, but stepped forward again. This time Rahi stood beside Gird with 
one of the sickles. She was on his left, but then looked at her sickle and 
quickly changed sides as Gird lunged at Felis. Felis backed, his attention 
necessarily on the stick in his face. When Rahi came forward, he tried to swing 
at her, but the pole caught him in the angle of neck and shoulder. Arvan swung 
at Rahi, but missed as Cob’s pole got him in the chest, and then poked again at 
his face. Rahi could easily dodge Felis’s wild strokes, and she swung, stopping 
just as the sickle tip hooked into his side. Then, slow for the exercise, but 
smoothly, she swung back, pivoting, to come forward again and take Arvan in the 
belly. They all stopped and stood up.
“It works in slow motion,” said Felis doubtfully. “And I don’t know how we’ll 
practice it fast, not without killing each other.”
“We still need someone with a stick for every swordsman.” Gird scratched again, 
and stared at the stick. “And some behind with the other weapons, the killing 
weapons. Not that the sticks can’t kill. But there’s something I’m not seeing. 
Anyone else?”
“Well—you ever see that old-style stickfighting, on fair days?” asked Cob.
“No—the only fair-day I ever went to had one wrestler not as good as you, and a 
man who could throw knives.”
“They started it like a dance,” Cob said. “One man tapping a drum, and them 
tapping the sticks together. It was pretty, like watching horses in a field, 
tappity-tap. Then they started going faster, and faster, and about then I 
realized it was a kind of fighting. I’d have learned more, only I was there to 
make a few crabs wrestling, and my friends had bet on me. I asked one of them 
later, and he said it was old, something our great-great-grand-das would have 
known about.”
“Do you remember any of it?”
“Only the first bits, the slow part. But it’d be good practice, anyway. Get us 
used to the feel of something hitting the sticks.”
It took longer than Gird would have expected before he could match Cob’s 
pattern; his knuckles felt as if he’d hit them with hammers. And that was with 
both of them being careful. Triga, who’d been to the same fair, and thought he 
remembered the stickfighting very well, tried to start fast and ended up sucking 
his split knuckles ruefully. At least he wasn’t angry—but there had been no 
frogs to eat for days. Arvan picked up the movements quickly, as did Felis, but 
Padug, who had been Felis’s other star pupil at swordsmanship, was slower than 
Gird. By the time Fori came back, to announce that Midwinter Feast should be 
celebrated in eight days, most of them were still fumbling their way through 
this new drill.
Midwinter itself was the coldest and darkest Gird had ever known. No one was 
sick—Alyanya’s grace—but that meant no excuse for any fire whatever. And the 
rituals of Midwinter had always involved the whole family: each member had his 
or her assigned role. He had asked the men, and located an eldest son, youngest 
son, the oldest and youngest overall. Rahi had to take all the women’s roles; 
Gird hoped the gods would understand and accept their intent, and not demand the 
precision only a whole family could provide.
At dusk on the first night, all their fires were quenched, and the hearths 
brushed clean. Water, fire, ritual earth (though they had no garden or 
ploughland), each handled with due reverence—the icy air breathed with respect 
and affection both. Rahi, not surprisingly, remembered all the women’s verses: 
she had been, once, the youngest daughter, then the eldest, and with Mali’s 
death and her marriage, Alyanya’s representative in Gird’s home. Together, 
finally, hands cupped around symbolic light, they sang the Darksong. That was in 
the middle of the night, when Torre’s Necklace stood high overhead. From then 
until dawn, they huddled together, telling old tales of their childhoods, their 
fathers’ tales as far back as any could remember. Their breath steamed silver in 
the starlight, each speaker like a tiny chimney. Then—best of omens—a clear dawn 
to Midwinter Day, and Rahi set the circle pattern of twigs for the new fire. In 
a great circle, hand to hand, they watched her light it, on the lucky third 
spark.
They had their feast, as well, for Gird had hidden a comb of honey, and dripped 
it liberally over hearthcakes and grain mush. Besides that, they had deer, 
hunted safely long after the lords had gone back to their city. They feasted in 
comfort, around the roaring fires, and spent the second long night singing more 
songs than Gird had ever heard. All it lacked was ale; he missed the warmth in 
his throat and belly, though not the aching head when he woke.
  
The rest of that winter was hard, but not as hard as he’d feared. When the 
snowmelt began, with the myriad tinkling music of dripping icicles, they were 
all still healthy. No one had lost fingers or toes to the cold; no one had had 
lung fever.
Twice he’d been able to send men to the four original bartons, to check on their 
training. All had a full three hands or more in training; Hardshallows had five. 
And they were still recruiting, though cautiously. Fireoak had discovered a man 
who thought Kelaive would pay him for rebel names. He had changed his mind, 
Barin reported, when they explained it to him personally. Fori’s report of that 
explanation was fuller than Barin’s; the barton had expressed their opinion of 
him with force—the man would limp for awhile. Gird winced, but accepted it. 
Better one man beaten than many killed—or even one. He felt slightly better when 
he found, still later, that the one who had hit the man in the head with a pot 
was his wife, now an accepted barton member.
Hardshallows reported that it had indeed started a daughter barton, down in 
Millburh. Growing slowly, but Millburh had a resident guard post, almost a fort. 
They had to be careful. As the weather lifted, the barton in Ashy, Felis’s old 
village, sent word that it, too, had contacted another village: Three Springs, 
which had passed the word to two other vills in the same hearthing. As soon as 
the spring plowing was over, those bartons would be sending elected yeomen 
marshals to train with the main force.
It was all moving faster than Gird had expected. He still could not quite 
believe that he’d been away from his own home almost a year—and was alive, 
leading a growing number of disaffected peasants in what was clearly going to be 
an army. And yet they’d had no clashes with the lords, no trouble with any of 
the guard forces. It would be easy to be careless, moving through the green and 
fragrant woods of spring, with flowers starring the pastures beyond, with the 
birds carolling overhead.
We don’t have an army yet, he reminded himself firmly.



Chapter Fifteen
« ^ » 
All that spring and summer, the movement spread, like ripples from a dropped 
stone. The Stone Circle began to become what it had always claimed to be, the 
center of a wider movement of rebellion. The first bartons ventured out of their 
villages to drill with Gird in the fields. Their yeomen marshals contacted Stone 
Circle supporters in other villages. Distant Stone Circle outlaws, living wild 
in the woods and hills, sent messengers to find out what was happening. Gird 
would not let any more stay with him; he knew they could not support more where 
they were. But he sent those he thought would make good teachers and leaders, 
both to new bartons and to outlaw groups. Gradually—sometimes painfully—he 
discovered which of his people could do that work, and which of the outlaw 
groups were honest rebels, and which were brigands.
He insisted that the groups he led provide as much of their own food as they 
could. That summer was even busier than the one before, as strangers came and 
went, learning and taking back what they’d learned, while the work of supporting 
his own troops still had to be done. He saw no end to it, the things he had to 
do, remember, foresee. But he noticed that some of his people were learning to 
think ahead for themselves, learning to think how something used one way for a 
lifetime could be useful for doing something else.
He heard, late that summer, that a distant barton had ambushed a lord’s taxman, 
and shook his head. “That’ll start us trouble,” he muttered.
Triga cocked an eyebrow at him. “You were hoping to have a war without trouble?”
“I was hoping to have a war when we were ready for it. Not in bits and pieces, 
here and there, where they have the advantage.”
“What I heard was the barton got the money, all of it, and killed the taxman and 
his two guards. Sounds to me like the barton had the advantage.”
“As long as they didn’t take anything that can be traced. Where can they spend 
those coins? And on what? I hope they’ve sense enough not to go to a smith. They 
start trying to buy weapons, and we’ll see trouble we haven’t thought of yet.” 
Gird doubled his own outposts and guards, expecting the worst. Sure enough, 
mounted patrols swept through the country, both in the wood and beyond in the 
hills. Gird’s men were very glad of their low paths through the scrub. They came 
back to find that one of their winter camps, Sunbright—deserted now for several 
hands of days—had been found. The patrol had destroyed the little they’d left 
behind, and they would certainly know where it was the next winter.
But the patrols, after that double raid, stayed away. From their contacts in the 
villages, they heard of more trouble—searches of cottages and barns for illegal 
weapons, men taken on suspicion of rebel activity and beaten or—in two 
cases—killed outright. Only one of these was actually a Stone Circle supporter, 
and he had not been a member of the local barton (being, as the yeoman marshal 
put it, too hotheaded to wear a hat without its catching fire.) These searches 
and arrests actually increased support for the rebels: after all, if you could 
be arrested for nothing, why not join?
Gird split his group into threes, and sent each one to a different area for the 
rest of the summer. They drilled together only a few times, and cautiously, with 
watchers on all the nearby heights. During harvest, and the lords’ favorite 
hunting time after it, more patrols came. But they’d been expected, and they 
found nothing but the same deserted camp they had found before. Once the winter 
storms began, Gird knew no more patrols would come. That winter was like the 
previous one, except that he began to try to keep accounts of his troop. He had 
begun with simple tallies, marked with wheatear, sickle, and flower, but he 
needed lists of all his people, and their villages, and the bartons and their 
yeoman marshals. Rahi brewed a brownish ink, but he had nothing like the smooth 
parchment the sergeant had had to write on. He struggled for awhile with the 
pale inner bark of a poplar, but finally gave up in disgust. He hated writing 
anyway.
That spring, the spirit of unrest made the whole countryside uneasy. Gird was 
not quite sure now how many bartons there were. The long winter months were 
ideal for conspiracy; each barton wanted to claim a daughter barton or two. That 
meant more than doubling, over the winter. Requests came in for Gird himself, or 
one of his senior instructors, to come inspect and drill not just one barton, 
but several. Gird and the others agreed on basic rules for drilling bartons 
together—how far the drillground must be from any village, what kinds of 
lookouts to set, what the signals would be, and what common commands all bartons 
should know. But he knew it was futile; in time, they would be discovered.
On those days of drill, Gird noticed first one blue shirt, then another. They 
had three at the camp now. Those who wore the blue held themselves proudly, 
aware of defiance. Gird insisted they have another shirt or cloak to throw over 
it, should an enemy show up. It would be hard enough to switch from drill to 
some innocuous activity, without having to explain away a forbidden blue shirt.
They could not, in these short sessions, teach all the new people all they 
themselves had learned. Gird felt the push and pull of time, the sense of things 
moving fast and slow at once: the lords could not long remain unaware of all 
that went on around them, but his people were not ready yet. They needed more 
time, more drill, and he needed to know more himself. When he thought of 
gathering all the bartons, in a full army, and meeting the lords with theirs, he 
was terrified.
Time ran out before he was satisfied with himself or the bartons, after 
Midsummer and well before harvest. He had gone to the gathering place for the 
sheep of five villages, so much like the pens where he had met Mali, but far to 
the north and east. Norwalk Sheepfold, they called it locally, the usual 
stone-walled shelter, back to the winter winds, with a fenced yard before it. It 
lay in the hollow of grassy hills, a half-morning’s walk from the nearest 
village, where no troops were stationed anyway.
As usual, Gird came to the meeting site before anyone else, met the shepherds 
who would be their lookouts, and gave his instructions. Then he squatted in the 
lee of the sheepfold, eating a chunk of hard cheese, to wait for the first 
barton to arrive.
When it came straggling along, hardly any two yeomen in step, and weapons every 
which way, Gird winced. He knew it had formed recently, but that did not excuse 
the shambling, uncertain line, the complete lack of organization. He began, as 
always with a new barton, with an attempt at an inspection. As always, he found 
more than one thing wrong.
“You got to take care of yer own scythe, Tam!” Gird yanked the blade loose and 
just stopped himself from throwing it on the ground. They couldn’t afford to 
lose a single scrap of edged steel. But every single time he had to check the 
bindings himself—it was enough to infuriate the Lady of Peace herself. Tam’s jaw 
set stubbornly; the others stared, half-afraid and half-fascinated. Gird took a 
long breath and let it out. “This time get it tight,” he said, handing Tam the 
blade. He could feel the tension drain away as he went down the line, looking at 
the other scythes. Most were in reasonable shape, though he wondered if they 
really would hold against horses or armor.
Fifteen men and three women. Eleven scythes, one pruning hook, two sickles, 
three shepherds’ crooks, two simple staves. Everyone had a knife, and all but 
one of them were sharp. Before they began the actual drill, he looked around the 
skyline. Nothing but a flock of sheep to the north, whose shepherd waved from 
the rise. Safe.
“All right. Line up.” They had done this before, taught by Per who had learned 
from Aris, who had learned from Gird the year before in Burry. They moved too 
slowly, but they did end up in straight lines, three rows of six. Tam was still 
trying to jam the end of his blade into the notch of the pole, tamping it 
against the ground. Maybe he’d learn, before he died.
“Carry.” They stared at him, then half the group remembered that that was a 
command, and wobbled their weapons, clearly unsure where the “carry” position 
was. Don’t rush it, Gird reminded himself, remembering the defections after his 
last temper tantrum. They have to learn from where they are, not from where they 
should be. “Carry,” he reminded them. “On your left shoulder—this one—because 
you have to be able to carry your weapon a long way, and without hitting anyone 
behind or beside you, or catching on theirs.” He reached out and took a scythe 
from someone—Battin, the name was—in the front rank, and showed them. “Like 
this.”
By the time they were all able to follow the basic commands at a halt, the sun 
was nearly overhead. Gird looked around again. The northern flock was out of 
sight over the rise, but another moved now across the slope to the west, and its 
shepherd waved elaborately. Good. Two more bartons coming to drill. Even so, 
even with the shepherd’s signals, he would take the usual precautions.
“Weapons into the sheepfold,” he said. “Another barton’s coming in.” Much more 
quickly than before, they obeyed, laying the scythes out of sight behind the low 
walls of the pens. Two of the women began to cut thistles with their sickles, 
gathering them into their aprons. The men with shepherds’ crooks leaned on the 
low-roofed lambing hut and began talking sheepbreeding. The others hid in the 
lambing hut itself. Gird sat on one of the walls, and caught his breath.
“Sir? Gird?” That was Per, the nominal yeoman marshal of this barton.
“Just Gird, Per. You’ve got a good group here.” It would be a good group after a 
year of enough to eat and heavy training, but it would do no good to say that.
“I’m sorry about Tam’s scythe. I—there’s so much I don’t know—”
“Don’t worry. You can’t do it all; that’s why I tell them they have to maintain 
their own weapons. You’ve done a lot: eighteen, and fifteen scythes.”
“Three women,” muttered Per. Gird shot him a glance.
“You believe the lords’ sayings about women, Per?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Our women have suffered with us all these years. We never kept them safe; 
they’ve borne the lords’ children, and lost them if they had one touch of magic: 
you know that. Now they ask to learn fighting with us: if our pain has earned 
that right for us, theirs has earned it for them.”
“But they’re not as strong—”
Gird bit back another sharp remark, and said instead, “Per, we don’t ask anyone 
to be strongest, or stronger. Just strong enough.”
“Whatever you say.”
“No. Whatever you finally see is right—dammit, Per, that’s what this is about. 
Not just my way—not just Gird instead of your lord or the king, but a fair way 
for everyone. You, me, our women, our children. Fair for everyone.”
“Fair for the lords?”
Gird snorted, caught off guard. “Well—maybe not for them. They had their 
chance.” He pushed himself off the wall. The incoming bartons had joined 
somewhere along the way, and were marching some thirty strong, all in step and 
clearly proud of themselves. He could not tell, at this distance, exactly what 
weapons they carried, but at least some of them were scythes. Per’s foot began 
to tap the beat as the formation came nearer. Gird let himself think what they 
could do with some decent armor, some real weapons. They were marching like 
soldiers, at least, and impressing the less experienced group he’d been working 
with. He called those in the lambing shed out to watch as the yeoman marshal of 
Hightop brought the formation to a halt.
They had a short rest, then all three bartons began drilling together. Almost 
fifty, Gird reckoned them up, a half-cohort as the lords would call it, most 
with staves. For the first time, Gird could see them facing real troops, the 
lords’ militia, with a chance to win. He marched them westward, away from the 
sheepfolds, got them reversed, reversed again, and then tried to convince them 
that when the column turned, it turned in only one place. Those behind were not 
to cut the corner, but march to the corner, and turn. Again, and another tangle. 
He sorted it out, and got them moving again.
It was then that a shepherd’s piercing whistle broke through the noise of their 
marching. Gird looked around, already knowing what it had to be. There, to the 
east, a mounted patrol out of Lord Kerrisan’s holding; already they’d been 
spotted. He saw the flash of sunlight on a raised blade. His mind froze, 
refusing to work for a moment. Someone else saw them, and moaned. He turned to 
see his proud half-cohort collapsing, some already turning to run, others with 
weapons loose in their hands. The sun seemed brighter; he could see every 
detail, from the sweat on their faces to the dust on their eyelashes.
“We have to get away,” said Per in a shaky voice. He heard the murmur of 
agreement, a grumble of dissent.
“We’ll never make it,” breathed someone else, and a heavy voice demanded “Who 
told them we were out here?”
“It’s a random patrol,” Gird answered, without really thinking about it. “A 
tensquad, no spears—if they’d known we were here they’d have sent more, and more 
weapons. Archers, lancers.” He glanced at the horsemen, now forming a line 
abreast. One of them had a horn, and blew a signal. Two of the horsemen peeled 
off, rode at an easy canter to either side. “They’re circling, to pen us—”
“But what can we do?” asked someone at the back of the clump that had once been 
a fighting formation.
I ask for a sign, and I get this, Gird sent silently to the blazing sun. Lord of 
justice, where are you now? A gust of wind sent a swirl of dust up his nose, and 
he sneezed. “I’ll tell you what we can do,” he said, turning on his ragged 
troops the ferocity that had no other outlet. “We can quit standing here like 
firewood waiting the axe, and line up! Now!” A few had never shifted; a few 
moved back, others forward. Two at the back bolted. “No!” To his surprise, his 
voice halted them; they looked back. “Run and you’re dead. We’re all dead. By 
the gods, this is what we’ve been training for. Now get in your places, and pick 
up your weapons, and listen to me.”
The others moved, after nervous glances at the slowly moving horsemen, back into 
their places. Gird grinned at them. “And get those weapons ready!” Far too 
slowly, the scythes and sickles and crooks and sticks came forward. At once Gird 
could see what was wrong, besides not having anything but a knife and short 
cudgel of his own. They could face only one way, and he knew, knew without even 
trying it, that they’d never reverse in formation, with weapons ready. There had 
to be a way—what could work? In his mind, he saw his mother’s pincushion, pins 
sticking out all ways—but then how could they move? There was no time; the 
horsemen were closing, still at a walk, but he knew they would break to a trot 
or canter any moment. They must be a little puzzled by a mass of peasants who 
weren’t trying to run, weren’t screaming in fear.
“We have to kill them all,” Gird said, as calmly as if he knew they could do it. 
“When they’re close enough to fight, they can recognize you. The only way you 
can be safe back on your farms, is if you kill them all. That’s what all this 
drill is for, and now you’re going to use it.” All those eyes stared right at 
his, blue and gray and brown. He felt as if someone were draining all the 
strength from his body; they were pulling it out of him, demanding it. “You can 
do it,” he said, not pleading but firmly, reminding them. Never mind that this 
wasn’t the best place for a small group of half-trained peasants to fight a 
mounted troop. Make do, make it work anyway. Miss this chance and you’ll not 
have another. I’ll be safely dead, he thought wryly.
Almost automatically, the formation had chosen the side facing the horsemen as 
the front. Gird walked quickly along it, nodding, and then, talking as he 
worked, shifted those on the flank and rear to face out. “If they come from two 
directions, we have to be ready. You turn like this—yes—facing out, and you 
behind him— yes, you—you put your crook here. You, with the stick—poke at their 
eyes.”
“But do we hit the horse or the man?” asked someone behind him. This group had 
never drilled against even imaginary horses.
“The horse,” said Gird. “If you hurt the horse, either it’ll run or the man will 
fall off. Now think—you want to open a big hole—”
He heard the hoofbeats louder now, and faster. Sure enough, they were trotting 
towards him, eight horsemen with their swords out and shining in the sun. The 
horses looked huge, and their hooves pounded the dry ground. The two sent around 
the peasant formation had stopped: clearly they were intended to prevent 
runaways. The horsemen yelled, a shrill wavering cry, and Gird yelled back, 
instinctively. His motley troop yelled, too, a sound half-bellow and half-scream 
of fear. Two of the horses shied, to be yanked back into line by their riders. 
The peasants yelled again, louder; the riders spurred to a full charge. 
Belatedly, the other two riders charged the back side of the formation.
He was still thinking I hope this works when the riders crashed into the block 
of peasants. The horses’ weight and speed drove them into the formation, but 
five of them died before they cleared the other side. Gird himself slammed his 
cudgel into one horse’s head, leaping aside to let it stagger past into the 
sickle of the woman behind him. The rider missed his swing at Gird, but got the 
woman’s arm; someone buried a scythe in his back before he could swing again. 
Two riders were dragged from their mounts and stabbed; another took a scythe in 
the belly before sliding sideways off his horse, screaming. Gird saw one of the 
women with a simple pole poke one rider off-balance; someone else caught his 
sword-arm and stabbed him as he fell.
It was over in minutes. Ten horsemen lay dead or dying on the ground; seven 
horses were dead, two crippled, and one, spooked, galloped away to the west. 
Gird looked around, amazed. The woman who had lost an arm sat propped against a 
dead horse, holding the stump and trying not to cry. Eight were dead; two others 
badly hurt. But—but peasants on foot, with no weapons but the tools of their 
work, had defeated armed men on horseback. Not an equal fight, but a real one.
He knew he should say something to them, but he couldn’t think of anything 
fitting. He looked around the horizon, and saw only the sentinel shepherd, 
waving that no danger neared. Per came up to him, bleeding from a gash on his 
scalp, bruised, amazed to be alive. They all were. Per nodded at the woman who’d 
lost an arm, and said “Gird—I see now.”
“Do you?” He felt a thousand years older as his fury drained away. It had to be 
better to die this way, fighting in the open, than rotting in dungeons or worked 
to hunger and sickness, but those silent bodies had been people a few minutes 
before. That woman had had two hands. He nodded at Per, and walked over to 
crouch beside her. Someone else had already torn a strip of cloth from her skirt 
to tie around the stump. “You—?”
She had gone pale, now, the gray-green pallor before fainting or death, but she 
managed a shaky smile, and moved her other hand, still gripping the sickle. 
“I—killed the horse.”
“You did.”
“I—fought—they—died—”
“Yes.”
“All?”
“All.”
“Good.” With that she crumpled, and before they had finished sorting out the 
dead and wounded, she had died.
“Noooo!” That scream came from one of the other women, who fell sobbing on the 
dead one’s body. Then she whirled to face Gird, her face distorted. “You let her 
die! You—you killed her—and this is what happens—” She waved her arms to 
encompass the whole bloody scene. “You said fight to live, but she’s dead, and 
Jori and Tam and Pilan—” Her voice broke into wild sobbing. Gird could think of 
nothing to say: she was right, after all. The woman had died, and seven others, 
and the two worst wounded would probably die, even if their lord didn’t notice 
their wounds and kill them for that. The ten horsemen had probably had lovers or 
wives, maybe children—the weight of that guilt lay on his shoulders. But another 
voice, thick with pain, spoke out.
“Nay, Mirag! Rahi’s dead, but she died happy, knowing she’d fought well. Not in 
a cage in the castle, like young Siela, when she tried to refuse that visiting 
duke, and not hanging from a hook on the wall, screaming for hours, like Varin. 
Gird promised us a chance, not safety.”
“You say that, with that hole in you, with your heart’s blood hot on your side? 
What will Eris say, tonight, when she has no one beside her: what will your 
children say?”
The man coughed, and wiped blood from his mouth. “Eris knows I’m here, and she 
knows why. If she weren’t heavy for bearing, she’d be here herself, and the 
little ones too. This is best, Mirag. Rahi’s satisfied, and I’m satisfied, and 
if you keep whining along like that, I’ll say out what I think should happen to 
you!”
The woman paled, and her mouth shut with a snap. The man looked at Gird.
“She’s not bad, Marig—Rahi’s her sister.”
“I’m sorry,” It was all he could say. Marig shrugged, an abrupt jerk of her 
shoulder; the man beckoned with a finger and Gird went to him.
“D’you know much of healer’s arts?” Gird shook his head “Might should learn, 
then. If I’d been able, I’d’ve put a tighter band on Rahi’s arm. You’ll need 
that craft, Gird.”
“You’ll get well, and be our healer,” said Gird, but the man shook his head.
“Nay—this is a killing wound, but slower than some. Blood’ll choke me, inside. 
But you’d best get all away, before more trouble comes.”
A flick of memory, of his old sergeant’s words long ago, came to Gird. “We won’t 
leave wounded here, to be taken and questioned.”
The man grinned tightly. “I hoped you’d think so. Make it quick, then.”
“Is there anyone you’d—?”
“You’ll do. You made it work.” Gird grimaced; he had to have someone else agree, 
or it would feel like simple murder. He called Per over, and Aris, the yeoman 
marshal of Hightop. The wounded man was still conscious enough to give his 
assent again, and Aris, slightly more experienced than Per, saw at once why it 
must be done.
But neither would do it. So Gird took his well-worn dagger, and knelt by the 
man’s side, and wondered how he’d feel if he were lying there, bleeding inside 
and choking, and how he could be quickest. Worst would be weakness, another pain 
that did not kill. So he put the whole strength of his arm into it, slicing 
almost through the man’s neck.
The other badly injured man was unconscious, having been hit in the head, and 
then trampled under a horse. He quit breathing, with a last gasping snort, just 
as Gird reached him. Then it was only the hard, bloody work of dragging the 
corpses together onto a pile of brushwood and thistles, stacking what weapons 
they could use to one side. The group from Per’s barton left first, to enter 
their village as best they might without attracting attention. They dared not 
carry any of the spare weapons, and Gird cautioned them not to take personal 
belongings from their friends’ bodies.
“They’ll know someone was here,” he said, “to start the fire. But if you’re 
carrying a tool or trinket someone recognizes, they’ll know you, too, were part 
of it. This way it can seem that everyone from this village died, and it might 
spare you trouble.” Not really, he knew: there was going to be trouble for 
everyone—but there had always been.
They seemed calm enough, even Marig. She had quit sobbing, at least, and she 
laid the locket she’d taken from her sister’s neck back on her without being 
told twice. “Can’t we even take Tam’s scythe?” one man asked. “We don’t have 
that many.” His own crook had shattered. Gird shook his head again.
“With so few scythes, everyone will know that Tam’s is with you. It’ll be taken, 
but not to your village.” He nodded to Per, who started them off, in trickles of 
two or three, moving indirectly.
Aris had the other two bartons ready to move out; each one carried his or her 
own weapon, and some them carried a second, taken from the fallen. Gird dithered 
over the swords. For one of them to be found carrying a soldier’s sword meant 
instant death— but to lose all those blades—In the end he let them decide, and 
ten volunteers belted swords they could not use around their peasant jerkins.
“Are you sure you need to burn the bodies?” Aris asked. Gird said nothing; he’d 
never imagined doing anything else. It was in all the tales. “We’ll need a good 
start of them,” Aris went on, when Gird didn’t answer. “They’ll have horses near 
enough—we don’t know but what the smoke could be seen a long way, and the horses 
might come anyhow, and find us on the way. I don’t know—I don’t know if I could 
lead another fight today.”
“You could if you had to,” said Gird, plunged once more into how different it 
was in stories and reality. But Aris made sense, and he looked at the stacked 
bodies. The smoke would draw attention; someone would come, and that someone 
would likely be mounted, and ready for trouble. No smoke, and another patrol 
would go looking for the first—might not find them right away—but to let the 
dead lie out unprotected? He squinted up, and saw the first dark wings sailing 
far up. That alone would draw attention.
“All right,” he said, finally. “No fire.” Lady, bless these dead— these brave 
and helpless— Aris nodded, clearly relieved, and set off with his bartons. Gird 
angled away from them, his own new sword heavy at his side. Did I do the right 
thing? he asked himself. Am I doing the right thing now?
He looked back from a farther ridge, some hours later, and saw a column of dark 
wings. The woman’s face came to him, that face so composed, even as she died, 
and the thought of dark beaks tearing her face, gouging out her eyes—he stopped 
abruptly, and threw up on the short grass, retching again and again, and 
scrubbing the dried blood on his hands. Nor could that be the end of it: he had 
started something, back there, that no crow could pick clean, and no fox bury 
the bones of—he had started something, like a boy rolling a rock down a 
hillside, and the end would be terrible.
  
Word of the Norwalk battle spread as fast among the lords as among the bartons. 
Gird, sifting reports from his runners and spies, spared a moment for amazement 
at the varying interpretations. By the end of the first day, that column of 
carrion crows had attracted another patrol. By the end of the second, the little 
village of Berryhedge had been put to the torch, and the villagers—those who had 
not fled the first night—were dead or penned in the nearest fort’s yard, to be 
dealt with at the next court. The other two bartons had made it home safely, and 
so far their stolen blades had not been discovered. Bruises and cuts alone were 
not suspicious; too many of the farmfolk suffered injuries in their work 
year-round for that to be a sign of collaboration. But all the lords’ guards 
were alert, watching for smoke from illicit fires, searching for weapons, 
stopping travelers on the roads. It was, some said, a huge army— an invasion 
from the neighboring kingdom of Tsaia—the private war of one lord on another—the 
peasant uprising that had been feared so long. On the strength of one escaped 
horse, and its tracks, someone even decided that it had been an attack by 
cavalry, using peasants as infantry. No, argued another: it was an alliance of 
horse nomads and peasants.
To Gird’s surprise, some bartons now wanted to march out looking for patrols to 
fight. He reminded them of the dead and wounded, the village destroyed. But this 
was the first time that his people had fought, in military formation, against 
their old enemies, and they were elated.
“I can’t see why you aren’t happier about it,” Felis said. “It worked, just as 
you said it would. Losses, yes: you had warned us, no war without deaths, 
without wounded. We understand that. But it worked. If we keep drilling, keep 
working, we can stand against them. And there are more of us; the numbers are on 
our side.”
“I am happy.” Even to himself, Gird did not sound happy, and he knew it. “I am—I 
just see the other side. Felis, we have only one real chance: we have to do it 
all, and do it right, because if we don’t, then everyone who dies has died for 
nothing.”
“It’s not for nothing; it’s for freedom.” Felis scratched his sunburnt nose, and 
stalked around a moment before coming back to plant himself in front of Gird. 
“Look—you found a way for us to stand against their weapons and their training. 
It worked. Not even with the best of us, who’ve been training years now, but 
with one barton so new they hardly knew their left feet from their right. If you 
can do it with that, you can do it with anyone. Lady’s grace, Gird, the day you 
walked into our camp I wouldn’t believe you could get my men to pick up their 
own filth. But you did. What’s wrong now?”
Gird could not answer. He knew, as he knew the ache in his bones, that it was 
not that easy. It could not be that easy. But they needed him to say it was, to 
cheer them on, to give the simple answer he knew was not enough. He felt himself 
resisting, as he had once or twice when the steward put pressure on him, as if 
he were a tree, rooting himself deep in the ground. The one thing he knew, the 
one thing he had to give, was his own certainty when he was right—and if he did 
not know he was right, he could not say it.
Felis, he could see, did not like his expression or that refusal to rejoice in 
their victory. Nor did others, who visibly damped their own glee when he was 
around. He should do it—but when he opened his mouth, stretched it in a smile, 
nothing came out. We won, he told himself, and the depths of his mind, cautious 
as any farmer to the last, said We won that time.
He was not even sure what it would take to win, in the way he meant win, in the 
way that would bring lasting peace. He threw himself into more planning, trying 
to calculate how many yeomen they had by now, and where, and trying to picture 
the larger country in which his war would now take place. A few soldiers had 
defected, men ordered to burn their own villages, or seize their own relatives, 
men who faced in adulthood what Gird had faced as a boy. They knew more of 
tactics than he did, and insisted that he had to have support in the towns, as 
well as the farms.
Meanwhile, the conflicts continued. Another ambush, and another. A guard 
encampment attacked at night; another village burned, and its fields torched. 
Like it or not, ready or not, it was on him; he must fly on that wind, or be 
left behind. Gird drove himself and those he knew best, traveling far to meet 
the yeoman-marshals of other bartons, to speak to those who were not sure, who 
were afraid. By autumn, he was moving far beyond the villages and fields he knew 
best, trusting those he had trained to keep his own group working, to find a 
safe wintering. This next year would see whole villages rise—even before 
planting time—and he had to be ready to lead his army in the field.



Chapter Sixteen
« ^ » 
Something rasped, in the dry winter bushes, a sound too small for a cry, too 
great for a wild thing slipping away. Gird crouched, stock still, wondering 
whether to run now or investigate. It could be—it was probably—a trap. Someone 
had talked, and the town guard were out here to catch him. The sound came again, 
and with it another, like a sob choked down. Trickery, it would be. They were 
trying to lure him that way. But even as he thought this, he was moving, 
carefully as he might, threading his way through the prickly stiff brush.
In the gloom, he nearly stepped on the naked, bruised body that lay curled on 
its side. He stooped, after a hard look around that showed nothing but more 
brush. A man, an old man with thin gray hair and beard. One eye had been gouged 
out; the other showed only bloodshot white behind an enormous bruise. The man’s 
pale skin bore many bruises, scratches where the bushes had torn at him, whip 
marks on his back, burns on his hands and feet. Yet he was alive, his breathing 
unsteady and loud, but strong enough, and he had a steady pulse at his neck.
Gird squatted on his heels, considering. It was already cold, and would be 
colder with full night. An old man, beaten and burned, missing an eye—he’d 
likely die by morning, left here with no covering and no care. But inside the 
town, the barton waited. Even now they’d be gathering, waiting for him, waiting 
for the hope that only he could bring. And the old man might die anyway. Gird 
touched the old man’s shoulder, then wished he hadn’t, for the bloodshot eye 
opened.
“No…” breathed a tremulous voice.
“You’re safe,” said Gird, knowing he lied, but not what else to say.
“Cold…” came a murmur.
“It’s all right.” His mind went back to his own home, the times he’d teased one 
of the women for that soothing “It’s all right,” when it wasn’t. He could 
understand that now. It didn’t make things all right. With a gusty sigh—too loud 
a sigh, he thought instantly: it would carry in the quiet twilight—Gird stripped 
to the waist and laid his shirt, sweaty as it was, on the old man’s body. He had 
to have his dark jerkin for later… but he could spare the shirt.
“I’ll help you,” he said, and put his arm under the old man’s shoulder. 
Groaning, and obviously trying to smother it, the old man managed to get his 
arms into Gird’s shirt.
“You—should not—”
“I can’t leave you here to die,” said Gird. He couldn’t help it that the words 
came out harsh, not comforting. He was late, and he was going to be later yet, 
and if he had to climb in over the wall, he was very likely to be seen.
“Who?” Now wrapped in the shirt, the old man had recovered scraps of his 
dignity; he asked with little volume but much authority. Gird chose to 
misunderstand the question.
“Who beat you? I don’t know; I just found you. You don’t remember?”
The old man held up his hands—longfingered, graceful hands, for all the ugly 
burns—and said softly, “Esea’s light be with you, the High Lord’s justice come 
to you, the Lady of Peace lay her hand on your brow—” He paused, as Gird 
scrambled back, careless of noise. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t curse me!” It was hardly louder than the old man’s murmur, but the anger 
in it carried.
“Curse you?” The old man chuckled, a breathy sound much like the whuffling of a 
horse. “Lad, it’s a blessing—I’m giving you my blessing. Don’t you know that 
much?”
Gird shifted uneasily. “What I know is, the longer we stay here, the likelier 
we’ll be seen. Whoever beat you—”
“The senior priest at Esea’s hall,” said the old man. He was sitting up on his 
own, now, looking with apparently idle curiosity at the burns on his feet. “He 
called me a heretic, and held what he would call a trial by fire. I call that 
torture, but the law permits it. And as I lived still when he was done, they 
stripped and beat me and threw me off the wall.”
“You should be dead!” said Gird, and then reddened, realizing how it sounded.
The old man chuckled again. “That’s what the high priest said, in other 
words—that I should be dead, for the harm I’d done and might do, and he did his 
best. The gods, however, sent you—” He reached around, in the gathering 
darkness, as if groping for a staff, then stretched his hand to Gird. “Here, 
then. Help me up.”
“But you can’t—
“I can’t lie here in the cold in your shirt. Come now—give me your hand. It’s 
not so bad as you think.” Gird reached out, and felt the man’s hand slide into 
his. It was bony, as old hands are, with loose skin over the knuckles, but 
stronger than he expected. And he could not feel, against his own horny palm, 
the crusted burns he expected. The old man staggered once, then stood, peering 
about. “Ah—” he said finally. “There they are.” Gird looked, and saw nothing but 
the chest-high bushes disappearing into evening gloom. “If you will wait,” the 
old man said, more command than request, and he plunged into the tangle without 
making a sound. Gird waited, although he was definitely going to have to climb 
the wall. The barton would be wondering if he’d been caught.
When the old man came back, he had a very dirty ragged garment slung around his 
shoulders, over Gird’s shirt, and some kind of covering on his feet. It looked, 
in that light, much like the rags peasants wore wrapped around their feet in 
winter, when they had nothing better.
“Now, lad,” he said, far more briskly than Gird would have thought possible. 
“Now we can go into town without fear.”
Gird opened his mouth to argue, but instead found himself retracing his path 
through the bushes, the old man’s hand clenched firmly on his elbow. The old 
man’s other hand held Gird’s staff. Without fear? Did the old man plan to ask 
the gate guards to let them in, when he’d been beaten and left for dead? What 
was he?
When they came to the gates, the postern was still open, and the last few 
townspeople were hurrying in. A row of torches burned brightly, lighting their 
faces for the guards to see. Gird tried to shy aside, into the shadows, but the 
old man’s hand forced him to walk right up the middle of the trade road, into 
that golden light. He thought frantically how he could get out of this without 
alerting the guards, and glanced sideways at the old man.
In torchlight, the old man looked altogether different. Smaller, crook-backed, 
with a dry seamed scar where his eye had been, not the red dripping socket Gird 
had seen. Almost bald on top, and a wisp of pure white at his chin, a patched 
leather cape over a rough wool shirt (and it doesn’t even look like my shirt, 
thought Gird), patched leather breeches on bowed legs, feet indeed wrapped in 
dirty rags. He leaned on Gird’s arm, and the staff, as if his legs could hardly 
bear his weight.
“Ho, there!” One of the guards stepped forward, lifting a torch to peer at their 
faces. “And who be you, coming in so late—don’t know your face!”
Gird opened his mouth, and found a name in it. “Amis of Barle’s village, m’lord, 
and m’father’s father Geris, come to pilgrimage at th’shrine.”
“Should’ve come earlier; the gate’s closed to outsiders.”
At this the old man mewled, an infantile wail of misery and disappointment. The 
guard grinned, insolent but not unkind. “Never seen anyone needed a miracle 
more, and that’s a fact. Got any honey to sweeten the sib, Amis of Barle’s?”
“Honey, m’lord?” Gird let his jaw hang down stupidly, and patted his 
“grandfather’s” hand. “We’s no bees, m’lord, that’s for them’s got orchard 
trees. But we’s barley-cake—” He fished in his jerkin for the stale end of 
barley cake he’d saved from breakfast, and offered it. Whatever was going on, he 
was supposed to pretend stupidity and meekness. The guardsman looked at him, 
long and steady, then pushed it back. “If that’s all you’ve had, coming in from 
so far, keep it. Now, gransire, we’ve had an upset today, and I’ll have to see 
your hands before you enter.”
“Hands?” asked Gird before he thought. The one on his arm squeezed hard, hard as 
a strong young man, and released him. The guard nodded.
“In case a thief tries to sneak back in,” he said. “He’s hand-branded, that one, 
and we’re to look at all strangers, especially those with one eye gone. I’m sure 
your gransire isn’t the thief, but I must look.” And he took each of the old 
man’s knotted hands, and looked at the palm. So did Gird—and saw nothing but old 
pink skin, marked by heavy work. The guard jerked his chin up. “Get on in, 
fellow, you and your gransire, and be sure you’re not up to any mischief this 
night. Beggars’ steps on the winter side of Hall, and no laying up in someone’s 
doorway.”
“Thanks, m’lord.” Gird found himself pulling his forelock before he thought of 
it, and edged by the guard with care for his companion.
Once through the town’s wall, the old man used his grip of Gird’s elbow to guide 
him toward the main square. The streets were busy yet, full of people who knew 
exactly where to go. Gird had his own directions from the gate, but he went 
where the old man wanted him to—he had no choice.
In the square, a few stalls still had shutters open. A bakery, its main doors 
closed, sold the remnants of the day’s baking out a broad window. From one stall 
came the sour smell of bad ale, from another the stomach-churning scent of hot 
oil and frying meat. Gird swallowed his hunger, and found that his tongue now 
responded to his own will.
“I’ve somewhere to go,” he said gruffly. “Can you find a safe place?”
“Better than you,” said the old man. “Could you have come through the gates 
alone?”
Gird grunted. Of course he couldn’t, not that late, but if it hadn’t been for 
the old man, he wouldn’t have been that late. “I don’t understand you,” he said. 
“You were hurt, you could hardly move—”
“We can’t stand here in the open talking,” said the old man. “I want my supper.” 
This last became a weak whine, suitable to the aged cripple he seemed to be, and 
Gird was not surprised to see a couple of guards walk by, scanning the faces as 
they went.
“I don’t have anything but that barley cake,” said Gird, and added unwillingly, 
as the guards paused, “Granther, you know that. It took all coppers we’s got to 
make this trip for your eye. Here—” He fished out the barley cake, and broke it, 
as the guards watched. The old man took his share in a shaky hand, almost 
whimpering in his eagerness. A drop of spittle ran down his chin into his beard, 
glittering in the guards’ torchlight.
“Beggars’ steps over there,” said one of the guards gruffly, gesturing across 
the square. Gird bobbed his head, hoping he looked stupid and harmless. The 
guards moved on, stopping to joke with the baker’s lass, as she reached to close 
the shutters at the window. The old man touched Gird’s arm, pushing him gently 
towards the beggars’ steps.
When they sank down on the lowest of the five steps, Gird stuffed his piece of 
barley cake back into his jerkin, and said again
“I have somewhere I must go. Can you stay here? Will they find you?”
In the dimness, the old man’s face was suddenly more visible, as if a candle had 
been lit inside it. “Lad, I can stay here, or go, or stay with you, and they 
will not find me—have you seen nothing this evening?”
“Riddles,” said Gird. “You give me tricks and riddles—”
“I give you light in darkness.” The old man’s face shone brighter, then dimmed. 
“But the blind cannot see light, and think darkness is reality.”
Gird stirred on the cold step, not sure what he could say. The old man was mad, 
and no wonder, with what he’d been through. He must have been one of 
them—perhaps one of their elder mages—and he’d angered someone. They’d taken 
their revenge, and wrecked his mind as well as his body. Probably as bad as the 
rest of them, when he was whole, but now—“I need to go now,” he said, as gently 
as he could. “I’ll come back you.”
“Yes,” said the old man. “You will.” He bit off a chunk of the barley cake, and 
started chewing it. Gird watched a moment, feeling a strange confusion in his 
mind, then shook his head and got up.
The meeting place, when he finally found it, was a merchant’s storeroom crowded 
with nervous men, at least a dozen of them, and lit by two candles. He’d 
expected only the elders of the barton, but apparently others had insisted on 
coming. Was this a trap? He tried to see the corners of the storeroom as he gave 
the password again, but darkness lurked behind bales and boxes as if it were 
alive and twitching. His neck itched; he wanted to whirl and look behind 
himself, but he controlled that urge.
Calis, the only man he’d met before, limped forward to shake his arm and then 
grinned broadly at the rest. “I told you he’d come. Whatever happens, he’d 
come.”
“He’s late.” That was a square-built, black-bearded man, with a look of 
authority and the weathered face of someone out in the open most of his life.
“He’s here. That’s what counts.” Calis shook his arm again. “Lady bless you, 
Gird, for coming. You’ll lead us, eh? Make us free?”
Calis had not sounded that simple back in Harrow, when he visited that barton’s 
drill. Then he had seemed a possible leader, someone who could organize a 
barton, start its training. Gird looked around as calmly as he might, trying to 
figure out what had gone wrong here. Fifteen men, no women—that was still common 
enough, despite his urging. None very young: quite right, at such a secret 
meeting; young men talked too much. None very old. Four held themselves with a 
kind of furious rigidity: men used to command, perhaps, pretending a passivity 
they could not feel? Gird smiled at the black-bearded man. “Hurry makes the 
fleet fall, and the aim wide: I came as I might, to come safely.”
“You would preach safety in war?” That was another of the four he’d noted, a 
tall brown bear of a man leaning against the stacked boxes across from him.
“I preach nothing, being no priest. As Calis will have told you, I expect—” He 
glanced at Calis, whose gaze slid past him. So. Trouble indeed. “I teach what 
seems obvious to me, that wild rebellion against the king but causes death and 
torment.”
“And this is what we came for?” The brown man pushed away from the boxes to 
confront him. “We came to hear the same song the priests sing: obey, submit, 
seek peace from the Lady in your hour of death?”
“Gird, tell them. Tell them what you told us at Harrow.”
The worst trouble: treachery. Their first rule was never to mention one barton 
in another, to say only “there” or “that other place” or “his barton.” Gird 
shook Calis’s hand from his arm, but without violence, and tried to decide where 
the worst danger lay. He could not fight fifteen, were they all of the same 
mind, but it was just as likely that Calis had tried to entrap honest rebels as 
well as one rebel leader. If he could but find them out, and lead them. A dense 
silence packed the room thicker than the men. Someone behind the black-bearded 
man coughed. Was it a signal?
Gird glanced around the group, meeting all eyes but Calis’s. In the candlelight, 
all glittered; he could not tell false from true. He lifted his hand for 
silence, though all were quiet, and began.
“You know the times are bad. You know they’re getting worse. Bad enough when 
peasants are murdered at their work, when wives and mothers are raped and 
beaten, left for dead with their babies crawling in their blood. Worse, when the 
craftsman’s skill is bought with pain and threats, when a smith must make 
shackles and chains for prisoners, not plows and harrows for farming. Bad enough 
when merchants’ goods are stolen for the rich, and they must cheat the poor to 
survive.” He looked from face to face. There was one closed, tight with 
anger—for old wrongs, or for his words? Another sat slack-jawed, as if he could 
drink Gird’s words in, taste them on his tongue. There in the dim shadows at the 
back, two heads leaned together, mouth to ear.
“You know there’s been fighting—everyone knows that. Men and women have died, 
for trying to save their own lives. You know that all the times farmers and 
craftsmen and merchants have tried to fight against trained soldiers, they’ve 
been killed, and their families with them. What I’m telling you is about another 
way.”
“A way for peasants to fight soldiers?” asked the black-bearded man.
“A way for peasants to be soldiers.” Gird paused. That was the nub of it, and 
enough to have him hanged. He sensed a stirring back in the shadows. Well, he 
need not mince words now, having already convicted himself, and maybe boldness 
would gather a few to his side. “The difference between soldiers and hopeless 
fools willing to die is training. Not fine swords, nor magic, but training— the 
training soldiers have.”
“And you can give us that training?” That voice came from wealth and privilege, 
with its arrogant sonorities. Gird smiled straight at it.
“I? I’m a farmer: I give nothing. But I know how you can earn that training, and 
that’s my reason here.” Out of the gloom sea-green eyes stared into his. He 
could just make out a foxy brush of hair, a slender figure no longer lounging in 
the shadows but upright, alert. Odds it was some noble’s son, come to spit 
rebels with his guards around him to keep him safe.
“Gods know, farmers give nothing.” That voice again, this time clearly belonging 
to green eyes and an arrogant set of head and shoulders. “That sounds like 
kapristi talking, if a farmer knows what kapristi are.” He didn’t, but he caught 
the muttered “Gnomes!” of another.
“Farmers earn their bread,” Gird said, working his toes in his boots to ready 
himself. It had to come soon. “As craftsmen do, and merchants too, most times. 
What’s earned feeds; what’s given rots the belly. What’s taken—” He stopped as 
light dazzled his eyes, light that polished the blades drawn against him. He saw 
no source, but it centered on the brown man.
“What’s taken belongs to the taker,” said he, amusement ruffling the edge of his 
voice. “Traitors taken, in this town, belong to me.” He stood easily, 
weaponless, but from behind the stacked boxes had come two guards, with pikes, 
and four of the other men had drawn swords. To Gird’s surprise, the green-eyed 
man wasn’t one of them: his face drew back, shocked into loss of its earlier 
dignity. Calis stood dithering, clearly wondering whether to seize Gird or 
retreat to the safety of shadows.
“What’s taken,” Gird said, meeting the brown man’s eyes, “chokes the taker.” His 
fingers clenched and loosened, and he realized then that he’d left his stout 
staff with the old man on the beggars’ steps. Idiot he told himself. You’re 
asking the gods for a miracle. The brown man gave a smile that might have been 
genuine admiration.
“You’re brave, at least—no whining craven like most of your type. Too bad you 
didn’t choose honest soldiery, fellow—”
“I tried,” said Gird, keeping his voice level with an effort. He was not sure 
why he bothered to answer, save that he had no plan, and saw little help in the 
faces of others. “As a lad, I joined my count’s guard right willingly. But 
then—”
“What?” asked the brown man, lifting a hand to halt the guards who had moved a 
step nearer. Gird looked at him, seeing nothing like the vindictive arrogance of 
his own count. Those eyes might have been honest; that mouth had laughed 
honestly, at things worth amusement, not at others’ pain. Well, it would serve 
nothing, but he would tell this man the truth, and if one of them lived after 
his night, that one would know it had been told.
“The lord of our village came from the king’s court with his friends, to 
celebrate his coming of age. One of the village lads chose that confusion to 
steal plums from the lord’s orchard—” Gird paused, and the man nodded for him to 
go on. Despite himself, his voice trembled over the next phrases, and he forced 
more breath into it, almost growling at the end. “So our lord had him taken, 
which was just enough, and had him tormented and finally maimed, which was not 
just, not for a few plums. And he enjoyed the sight, gloating over the boy’s 
pain, and I—” He stopped again, drew in a great breath. “I was hardly older; I’d 
known Meris all my life.” His accent thickened, he could tell the brown man had 
trouble following it now. “I knew—I knew someday they’d tell me the same, to 
hurt or kill some poor lad as only wanted a handful of plums or a truss of 
grapes. Kill m’own folk, maybe, if in a bad year th’cows wandered. I couldna do 
that—could not—and so I ran, and it fell hard on my own folk even when I came 
back.”
“You’re from Kelaive’s domain,” the brown man said, softly. “That insolent pup, 
worst of a bad litter. I’d heard that tale differently.”
“Certain so, if he told it,” said Gird, caught up as always in that old pain, 
but also, suddenly curious to know how Kelaive told it.
“Not from him: his sergeant told one of my guards, and it passed to me on one 
long march—a good soldier ruined, he said, by a bad lord’s whim, and the blame 
fell on him, too, for not knowing how to keep you.” The man shook his head. 
“Well. You know the law, that’s clear, and your place in it. You had a bad 
master; that’s no excuse—”
“And what would be?” asked Gird, his voice tight with unshed tears and old anger 
still caged. “Would my mother’s death, when that count refused the simples of 
the wood to us? Would our hunger, in a bad winter when Kelaive danced in the 
king’s hall and laid double taxes on, to buy himself more gowns? Would my 
daughter’s pain, her own babe by her lover dead, and her raped to bear a 
stranger’s child? Cows stolen to make his feasts, sheep taken to give him 
wool—by all the gods, we farmers may not give, but we take better care of our 
least creatures than you lords do of us. Prod an ox and it kicks, and even a 
beaten cur will turn and bite your heel—”
“Peace, fellow!” The brown man stared at him. “Esea’s dawn, but you’ve a long 
tongue in your head, and wit in that thick skull. A hard use dulls most tools, 
but those of high temper—” He stopped, gestured, and the four drawn swords 
rasped back into their sheaths, though the guards stayed as they were, poised 
just behind him. “See here: would you take service with me, you and your family 
safe from Kelaive, and quit this nonsense? You’ll be killed, elsewise, and your 
family take the brunt of Kelaive’s bad will: by law I must report those rebels I 
seize.”
He might have done it, had not Calis seized his hand and rushed into speech. 
“Yes, Gird, yes! He’s a good lord, he is, and fair and just—he’ll keep his word 
to you—” But under the rush of words was fear, and in the other eyes he saw the 
same fear trembling. He shook off Calis’s hand, and met the brown man’s eyes.
“You will protect me, you say.” The brown man nodded, gravely. “But what of 
these others? You may be trying to be a good lord, sir—” The sir came out 
slowly, but inexorably, “—but here are those who thought you bad enough to join 
a plot against you.” He waved his hand around at those who clearly wished they 
could be invisible. “You may be better than Kelaive—I dare say you are, and it 
should be easy enough. But you can’t protect all those that need it, and it 
looks like you haven’t protected all your own, even.”
The brown man looked around; Gird watched the men flinch as he looked at each 
one slowly. “Cobbler. Wheelwright. Cloth merchant. Baker’s helper. You think to 
make a government out of such as these, farmer? Who’ll make your laws? Who’ll 
judge in your courts?”
“Honest men, sir.” He didn’t want to say “sir,” to someone who would either kill 
him, or be killed, this night, but he found himself doing it anyway. And he 
could not hate this man, who was so much more reasonable than Kelaive.
“Honest merchants?” Scorn edged the brown main’s voice. Gird noticed one of the 
men stiffen: that had gone home. “You think to find honest judges from a tangle 
of merchants who pour water in the milk, or chalk in flour they sell you. Or 
among farmers who put the bruised fruit in the basket first, or craftsmen who 
put as much base metal in gold or silver as they can?”
“As near there as among nobles, sir,” Gird said, and braced himself for the blow 
that would surely come. The brown man glared at him, showing anger for the first 
time. “At least among common men, of different trades, there’s a chance they’d 
stick to a measure, not make different weights and measures for each case.”
“Damn!” The brown man clenched his fist then opened it. “You are a man, after 
all. I hate—it’s too bad you cannot bring yourself to take service here.” He 
glanced aside, at the black-bearded man who had been one of the swordsmen. 
“Remember what I said, Caer? Squeeze the mud, and it turns to stone; beat the 
ore and get gold: from the pressure we put on them, such comes out. I would be 
proud if son of mine had courage to speak so before a deadly peril, had wit to 
think in bondage.” He turned back to Gird. “Death it must be, but a man like you 
does not fear death. I swear no torment; come quietly and I’ll ensure the 
headsman’s single blow. If you must fight, then I cannot interfere, and not all 
wounds kill cleanly.”
For some reason he could not define, Gird felt a change in the room’s 
atmosphere, as if a shutter had opened, letting in fresher air and truer light. 
He smiled at the brown man. “Sir, it’s not my way to give in so easily. But I 
will admit that had my lord been like you, I might not be here.”
“Were my subjects like you, Gird, I might not be here either.” He looked around 
again. “Out of these weaklings, these trimmers, you’d make an army? Were you to 
have the chance to try, I’d wish you luck of it, but worry none.”
Some bright image stung Gird’s mind, and he said “Well—if you have no worry, you 
could let me train them, as a wager, and see if they can withstand trained 
arms.”
The man laughed openly. “Well, indeed, fellow! Wit and tenacity combined! Let 
you train a score or so of malcontents to harrass my guards, and for a 
wager—that passes wit, Gird of Kelaive’s domain, and near approaches madness. 
And I should be mad to take such wager.”
“But why are you here, if you fear nothing from them?”
The brown man scowled, and a quick flicking glance to the green-eyed youth in 
the shadows conveyed some urgent menace. “You ask much, fellow. But if you think 
only subjects have troubled families, and because you will soon be dead, I’ll 
tell you. That—” He flicked a hand at the green-eyed youth. “That’s my son, one 
of them, a true-son, of my lady’s breeding. I came because he came, and knew he 
came because that bold tailor, there, came to me and warned me. My son’s of an 
age to seek adventures, to throw off fatherly wisdom, and stir up excitement—to 
seek, in a word, such midnight meetings, secret societies, all that.”
“I tried to tell you—” began the youth, but his father’s gesture stopped him.
“He would say that he’s done this for me: the lad lies, and all my beatings 
never stopped him. He feels deprived, that his brothers’ share of my wealth is 
larger. They’ve increased it; he’s squandered his. So he joins conspiracies 
against me, but with no real conviction. He’d most likely have confessed this 
one in another season.”
“Your son. You love him?”
“Love! He’s my son; he’s my blood and bone—but he’s as craven as any of these 
fools about to spend their last breath in prison.”
“You’ll put him there too?”
“Him? No; he’s my son. I may send him off to serve with the king’s army against 
the nomads, though. Let him freeze his rump in an icy saddle for a winter, and 
see if he learns wisdom.”
“And so a rich young man, who’s had all the chances to do better, gets off with 
a half-year’s exile from home, while the poor wretches with him must die—”
“It’s necessary,” said the brown man roughly.
“Oh, it’s necessary,” said Gird slowly, drawling it out in caricature of his own 
peasant accent. “And it’s that makes it necessary for us to fight. When it comes 
down to it, your justice is to save your own blood, and kill what stands in the 
way.”
“So does anyone!” snapped the man, his patience clearly fraying.
“No, sir. I’ve seen it myself, villagers sharing their few bits of food so the 
fewest died. We was all hungry, sir, each one of us, but we didn’t grab for self 
alone. You don’t have to believe it, but I’ve seen, and I know, and so does most 
of these others.”
Suddenly, as if he were suspended in the air at the very top of the room, Gird 
saw himself from outside, his own heavy-boned weatherbeaten face, his shaggy 
thinning hair, his heavy arms gleaming with sweat, his old leather jerkin a 
little loose where the past months of travel had thinned his belly. Baggy-kneed 
breeches, patched and stained, worn boots badly in need of resoling, no weapons 
but fists like knotted lumps of hardwood.
And he saw the brown man, and even into the brown man’s mind—saw the slight awe 
the brown man felt, and the fainter tinge of disgust that such a lout should 
speak sense, when his own son had none. He saw the candlelight quiver on a 
guard’s helmet as the man shifted slightly; he saw the sides and backs of the 
other heads watching him. And he saw the green-eyed man, that had looked older 
but was only a youth, sliding a throwing knife from his sleeve, as he looked at 
his father.
He was back in himself, yelling “No!” in a bellow that raised dust from the 
boxes, and throwing himself at the brown man so fast that the guards could not 
react. He hit the brown man square, and knocked him sprawling, just as the blade 
came spinning out of the dark, catching light and flickering. It missed them 
both, and stuck in the floor, quivering. The guard on that side had seen the 
blade whirl past; he turned to face the thrower. The other guard moved forward 
to swing at Gird, but met instead the black-bearded man, who had yanked his 
sword out to take Gird from behind. Their weapons rang together, and Gird 
managed to roll off the brown man and get out from under them.
Then a second blade flashed through the light and caught Calis in the throat, 
even as he pointed a finger to the green-eyed man.
“Traitor,” he said. “Call my father in, will you? Try to warn him?” And as Calis 
choked in his blood and died, the green-eyed man had his own sword out, and came 
into the fight on his own. He caught the black-bearded man under the ribs from 
behind, then parried the guard’s pike stroke and danced away. “Brother in law, 
are thy ribs sore enough?” The black-bearded man had fallen, hardly an arm’s 
length from Gird, and blood rolled out from beneath his hand. The brown man 
scrambled back, grabbing the fallen swordsman’s weapon.
Gird saw this in a strange inside-out way which left him dazed for the moment. 
He had wedged himself between two boxes, and tore at one with his hands, hoping 
to loosen a slat he could use to fight with. Now the other three swordsmen had 
their weapons out—but not all on one side. Two struck at the brown man, one 
defended; one of the pikemen, by this time had fallen to another thrown knife, 
from whom Gird could not see.
Of all the outcomes to such a meeting, he’d never imagined this, a fight between 
nobles—and not only nobles, but father and son. Across the room, he saw one of 
those he thought true rebels slip toward the door. Another caught his eye, 
lifted spread hands. What could they do? Clearly nothing, but escape—this was no 
brawl for unarmed men to meddle in. He could not help watching, though, as the 
father stood ground over the black-bearded man, fencing cautiously against his 
son’s supporter. It was madness to stay—the son must have arranged his 
invitation, planning to blame the father’s death on a stranger, a troublemaker 
from another land. Yet—as he saw from the edge of his vision another of the 
onlookers slip out the door—yet he had to know who would win, who would be 
pursuing him.
The fight went on, the clash of blades surely loud enough to draw notice. None 
of the combatants bothered with Gird; he might have been a spectator at a 
wagered match. He wondered if any of those who left were going to alert the city 
guard. He wondered more at what he saw. The green-eyed son, for all the faults 
his father claimed, a most skillful swordsman, pressed his father’s ally back. 
The second guard, after a few cautious chopping strokes with the pike, tried to 
pin his opponent in a corner, but he was taken from the side, by the third man, 
who opened his belly. The guard groaned and sagged to the floor.
Now the brown man and one friend faced three: his son and his two allies. Gird 
eyed the fallen pike: he could use that if he got hold of it, but how? And to 
what use should he put it, besides escape—and he could escape now, if he would. 
Instead, he watched, fascinated, the struggle before him. The brown man, when 
his guard fell, gave no sign of fear or alarm, but fought the more hardily, his 
blows coming swift and strong against two, while his remaining friend fought his 
son. Yet he had to yield ground, backing away from his wounded son-in-law. The 
green-eyed man opened a gash in his opponent’s arm, just as the father managed 
to slice deeply into one of the two he faced. That one dropped his sword tip to 
grab at the wound, and the father’s sword slid into his neck. But not 
unscathed—his other opponent stabbed deeply into his thigh, and he staggered. In 
an instant, he recovered, so that his eager opponent, careless, found himself 
transfixed on a blade that pierced him to the backbone. His legs failed, and he 
sagged from the blade, dragging the brown man’s arm downward.
Then the son turned, from a deathstroke to his father’s friend, and raised his 
sword. And then Gird moved, scooped up the guard’s fallen pike, and swung it 
like a quarterstaff to knock the son’s sword aside. Leaping over the welter of 
blood and bodies, he tackled the son as he might have tackled a runaway calf, 
bearing him to the floor with his own great size.
Silence, curiously loud in his ears. Someone groaned; several someones breathed 
harshly. Under him, the green-eyed man heaved up without success; Gird put a 
knee in his back and dared look back at the carnage.
He met the level gaze of the brown man, the father, now tightening a belt around 
his bleeding thigh. When he had it knotted to his satisfaction, the brown man 
pushed himself to his feet, and moved unsteadily to Gird’s side, looking down 
with an expression Gird could not read.
“Well, Jernoth, you’ve given me quite a problem this time. What can I do with 
you now?”
“I never meant this—” The voice was husky and strained, with what besides Gird’s 
weight on his back Gird could not tell.
“Maybe not: but you meant mischief enough. What can I do?”
“Kill him,” said Gird, without thinking. The brown man’s intense gaze shifted to 
him.
“Kill my son? Who, if others die, might be my heir?”
Gird felt the tremor beneath him, the shiver of hope. “You’d have killed me, 
sir, as hasn’t done you any harm, but saved your life twice this night. Why not 
him, that did the harm with intent? Do you think such a one should rule—do you 
think he’ll be better than Kelaive?”
“Quiet, you stinking serf!” said the captive. “It doesn’t matter what you want. 
I’m a noble; he won’t kill me.”
Gird ignored this, and looked straight at the brown man’s drawn face. “Sir, a 
farmer has to cull as well as foster: it’s part of good husbandry. Isn’t a ruler 
like a farmer, seeking to improve the quality of his domain?”
“My son—blood of my blood—”
“Your son tried to kill you, and not even openly, in challenge. He’s the cause 
of all these deaths. He was plotting you say, and not for the first time. Any 
farmer culls stock; foresters cull trees. You’d cull us peasants. Try the 
knife’s edge on your own cheek, before you shave another. Sir.”
The brown man picked up the pike Gird had used, and placed the point against his 
son’s neck.
“Get off him.”
“Are you—?”
“Get off him, fellow.” Gird slid back, catching the son’s elbows as he tried to 
get his arms under him.
“He’s lost less blood than you, sir.”
“Indeed. And I’m supposed to think you care which of us lives? Such as you hate 
all nobles; you’d be glad to see us all dead.”
“No.” Gird sat on the son’s hips, one hand clamping the other’s elbows behind 
his back, and fished in his jerkin for the roll of thongs he kept handy. He got 
it out, plucked one from the tangle, and quickly lashed the younger man’s elbows 
together. “No, sir, I don’t hate you, personally. I think you don’t see clearly, 
but you may be trying the best you know how. At least you aren’t like Kelaive. 
And I’m not going to let your son up to kill you, with you so weak.”
“And you weren’t thinking of taking this pike to me if I fell?”
“No. That’s not what I’m here for.” He pushed himself up, wondering if the brown 
man would now swing at him with the pike. He was unhurt; he ought to be able to 
dodge it easily enough.
“No. I suppose you weren’t.” The brown man regarded him thoughtfully. “You were 
here to teach my subjects how to fight my army, but you weren’t here to play my 
son’s game and kill me.” His eyes closed briefly, and he sighed. “Damn. What a 
tangle this is—and I wonder why the city guard hasn’t been beating the door in? 
We’ve made noise enough. Perhaps Jernoth bought them off, too.”
“There’s no one you can trust,” said Jernoth savagely. His father let the pike 
rest heavier on his neck, and he was silent.
“He could be right,” the brown man said. “And I’m not sure I could fight my way 
home, like this.” He looked at Gird. “And what about you?”
“I’ve no wish to die, when your traitor son lives, and no wish to spend time in 
your dungeons, either.”
“No—damn you, fellow, you keep making calm sense when any normal serf would be 
shivering in a heap. The others all ran away, and I doubt they’re sleeping sound 
now. What are you, anyway? Have the gods laid a call on you?”
“No.” Gird shook his head firmly. “My folk followed the Lady of Peace; she 
teaches submission. And your gods support you.”
A clatter of boots on the street outside stopped him; something crashed into the 
shop beyond the door.
“You should have run when you could,” said the brown man.
“You could acknowledge my help,” said Gird. Then the guards were in the room, 
their torches sending wild flickers of bright orange across the calmer 
candlelight. They skidded to a halt, their pikes at Gird’s back.
“M’lord Sier,” said the one with a knot of bright yellow at his shoulder. 
“Someone reported noise—” His voice trailed away as he looked around him.
“Treachery, sergeant,” said the brown man.
“This lout?” asked the sergeant.
“No.” The brown man smiled at Gird. “That fellow came to my aid; the traitors 
lie dead, all but one.” He looked down at his son, and the sergeant’s breath 
hissed in.
“Lord—Jernoth, m’lord?”
“Lord Jernoth. And two of these others.” He pointed, and the sergeant’s breath 
hissed again. Clearly he recognized them all. The brown man’s orders brought him 
to quick attention. “Sergeant, send word—I will need a cart; I’ve been wounded. 
This—fellow—” He waved a hand at Gird. “If he had not saved me, you would have a 
new sier this night; he is a stranger, but welcome in the city for three days, 
for his service. See he gets a tally from the guardhouse, meals and beer; I 
brought nothing with me, not so much as a copper crab.”
“Yes, m’lord Sier.” The sergeant eyed Gird with dubious respect.
“And then Lord Jernoth must be straitly confined until I pass judgment; it is 
ill done to hurry such a decision.” This he said facing Gird directly; but 
somewhere in the tone of his voice, Gird sensed that he would come to follow 
Gird’s advice.
From there, things went smoothly; the guards bound the young man more securely, 
then hauled him to his feet and away. Another tended the brown man’s wounds, and 
yet another had already sped away with messages. The sergeant opened his 
belt-pouch with deliberate slowness, and pulled out a flat wooden tally, one end 
stamped with the Sier’s mark.
“This here’s a meal tally, good at any inn but the Goldmark or the White 
Wing—them’s only for nobles.” He took his dagger and made three scores across 
the tally. “That’s for a day’s food and beer; they’ll break off the end each 
time, to the next line. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Gird wondered if he was really going to get free this easily.
The sergeant lowered his voice and went on. “What I heard was there was a 
meeting of conspirators, to hear a stranger, an outsider who came in to start 
trouble. Have any idea who that was?”
“Me, sir?” Stupidity was always a safe mask for a peasant.
“And then here you are, without a mark on you, but the Sier says you saved his 
life. Me, I wonder if you meant to do that—but his orders is my life, as they 
say, and he says let you bide here three days on free meals and beer. All I say 
is, you’d best be gone by sundown that third day, or the sier might have 
remembered something he wants to ask you. I would.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I don’t suppose you’ll be having any quiet little meetings with rebels 
while you’re here, either.”
“No, sir.”
“All right. Go fill your belly, and stay out of my sight.”
Gird went out into the dark street, only to be stopped by an arriving troop of 
guards, who let him go when he showed his tally. He tried to walk like someone 
with honest business, but the events of the past hour or so were beginning to 
touch his feelings, as well as his mind. When he got to the main square, he 
edged his way around it, touching the walls of one building after another, until 
he found the beggars’ steps.



Chapter Seventeen
« ^ » 
“You had an interesting evening?” The old man’s voice was soft, but clearly 
audible. Gird jumped, then crouched quickly beside him. “Here’s your staff,” the 
old man said, brushing his knuckles with it, as if he could see in the dark. 
Gird clutched at it, consoling himself with its smooth oiled strength. If only 
he’d had it with him…
“You’d have gotten yourself killed,” the old man said, even more softly.
“You—what do you know about it?”
“Shh.” Gird felt a strong, bony hand on his forearm, and the faint warmth of the 
old man’s body leaning against his. In the brief silence, he was aware of other 
movement on the beggars’ steps, movement that might have been the restlessness 
of disturbed sleepers.
The old man’s body was warmer than he’d thought at first; along his right side 
he began to feel as if he sat before a fire. He had not thought he could sleep, 
but now he felt himself sinking into that warmth, as the exhaustion of the day 
and the night’s exertions landed on him. It was so comfortable—and he could not, 
at the moment, feel threatened.
He woke at dawn, when the great bells of Esea’s Hall rang out to declare the 
sun’s daily triumph. The sound crashed through him, shaking him out of peaceful 
dreams, and for an instant he thought he was being attacked. The old man’s hand 
on his arm quieted him. Gird looked around wildly. The others who had spent the 
night on the beggars’ steps were stirring, sitting up, stretching. The man 
beside him—was someone else. He jerked his arm back.
“Easy,” the old man’s voice said, out of a different face. “It’s just a face.” 
It wasn’t a very different face, after all: still old, still with the same basic 
shape. He looked less feeble, this morning, and was certainly not blind—“A 
miracle, remember? We came for that.”
“But—”
“We should find something to eat.” The old man stood, and Gird unfolded himself, 
less stiff than he’d expected to be. “What is that?” the old man asked.
It was the tally the guard sergeant had given him. “It’s—I can get food, at an 
inn. A tally from the sier.”
The old man’s wispy white brows raised. “So—the sier himself. I knew it was 
important, but—”
Gird had had enough of the old man, who was certainly not the helpless, tortured 
creature who had aroused his pity the evening before. “I will share my breakfast 
with you, but then—”
“You wish I would go away. I worry you, don’t I?” That face was not guileless at 
all; Gird was more than worried. Whatever this was—and he was no longer sure it 
was a man and not some kind of demon—it kept forcing him into impossible 
situations.
“I have business,” Gird said, through clenched teeth. “I only wanted to help 
you, and—”
The thin hand, so very strong, slid under his elbow and gripped his arm as if to 
steady a fragile, tottering oldster. “And you think I’ve brought more danger on 
you, more trouble. And you think I was blind, as I know you are. Come along, 
Gird Strongarm—I know you, and you will know me better before this day is done.”
As before, he could not shake that grip, and found himself walking where the old 
man willed. To the public fountain, to wash his face and hands. To a cheap inn, 
where he bought hot, meat-stuffed rolls from the serving window, getting double 
the amount because he refused the ale that the servant offered. To a crooked 
alley, where they leaned against the bulging wall of a baker’s oven, and ate the 
rolls, while cats wound around their ankles, begging. The food steadied him, and 
restored the town walls and streets to their normal colors, no longer bright and 
scintillating as if he had a fever, but ordinary, subdued, under a gray wintry 
sky.
“You are better now,” the old man said, still clutching his elbow. Gird looked 
down at him.
“In body, yes. But you—what are you?”
“What I told you. A priest of Esea, presently in difficulty with his fellow 
priests. You have my gratitude for your service—”
“You didn’t need me!” Fed, awake, alert, Gird had been remembering that whole 
sequence of events. “You only seemed hurt— you tricked me.”
“No.” The man’s voice was low. “No—I could have died. I almost did. You do not 
understand—you could not—all that happened to me, or what my powers are. But I 
was near death, when you found me: that is true. You saved my life.”
“But you healed—” Gird could not quite say it; his fingers wanted to make 
warding signs.
The man sighed. “Gird, we need to talk, you and I. You have done me a great 
service; so far I have done you only a small one, which you don’t yet realize. 
You do not trust me—and no, that’s not reading your mind; you smell of fear. But 
we should both leave this town, before we find more trouble than your strength 
or my powers can handle. Will you trust me for that?”
“I know I have to leave,” Gird muttered. “He said so, and—and I don’t know 
towns, that well. But I have tallies for two days more.”
“Which no one will be surprised if you use to get food for travel, and then 
leave. That’s what the sier would expect you to do. If you stay in Grahlin, 
they’ll begin to wonder if you have more people to meet.”
“Can I use the tallies again so soon?” asked Gird, staring at the ragged break 
on the end as if he thought it would speak to him. The old man chuckled, but it 
was a friendly chuckle.
“We don’t have to go to the same inn. Besides, the sier gives these tallies to 
many men—to anyone on his service that day. Didn’t you notice that the inn 
servant scarcely looked at you?” Gird had not noticed; he had been trying to see 
if anyone were following them, “You can use both tallies at one inn; tell them 
you want food to travel. They’ll be used to that.”
So it proved. His request brought no comment, and the servant handed over a 
cloth sack bulging with bread and cheese, and a jug of ale. On the old man’s 
suggestion, Gird had retained the bit of wood with the sier’s mark on it, left 
when the last of the tally was broken. That got him past the gate guards with 
hardly a glance. The old man had left ahead of him; Gird was tempted to go out 
the other gate, but felt it would not be fair.
The old man waited just out of sight of the gate, squatting in the windshadow of 
a tree beside the road. As Gird came alongside, he stood up and began walking 
with him, steadying himself with Gird’s staff.
“Let me start with what is strangest to you,” he said without preamble. “My 
powers and my knowledge.”
Gird grunted. He was trying to think how he was going to explain to the others 
that his foray into the town had been not only useless, but disastrous. They had 
lost their one contact; the sier knew his face. Worse, the sier knew he had 
active enemies. Yet they needed someone in this town; it was sitting right there 
where the trade road met the river road, and soldiers based here could ruin any 
plan he might make for the whole area. That might be more than a year away—he 
knew that—but still the town could not be ignored.
He jumped as the old man’s hand bit into his elbow. “Listen,” the old man said. 
“You need to know this.”
He did not need to know anything except how to get the old man to leave him 
alone, he thought sourly. They did not need a renegade priest of their enemy’s 
god who might revert to orthodoxy at any moment and turn them in. But the twinge 
of pain got his attention, and he listened unwillingly.
“I am a priest of Esea,” the old man repeated. Gird managed not to say that he 
knew that much. “You clearly think of Esea as a power of evil—from the way you 
reacted to my blessing. But Esea, in old Aare, where your lords came from, is 
the name we give the god of light. The sun is his visible form, but it is not 
the god.”
“Sunlord, Sealord, Lord of Sands and Chance …” muttered Gird, unwillingly.
“You learned that verse in childhood, no doubt. So far as it goes, it’s accurate 
enough. Our people worshipped Esea, the Sunlord— though only peasants called him 
Sunlord. Sealord, that’s Barrandowea. Ibbirun, the Sandlord—more feared than 
worshipped. And Simyits, god of chance and luck. We had other gods, many of 
them, including your Lady, Alyanya the fruitful.” The old man looked at Gird 
calmly, as a man might look at an ox he was thinking of buying. “Tell me, what 
do you have against Esea?”
“Esea’s the lords’ god. He brings droughts, dries springs, overlooks wells. The 
merin hate him, and he withers the flowers we bring to please them.”
“I see. Because you think of Esea as the Sunlord, and in dry weather you see 
more sun?”
Gird shrugged. “I’m no priest. But so the grannies said, in our village. If 
there’s a drought, never let a priest of Esea near the wells: they’ll call the 
sun’s curse on them, and the water will fail.”
The old man snorted. “Do they think priests need no water? That we need no food, 
so a failing harvest means nothing?” Then he shook his head. “No, I’m sorry. 
It’s natural enough, that you’d blame outlander gods for your troubles, and even 
more natural, when your rulers are as bad as they are.”
“Yes, but you—”
“I’m human. As human as you are: not a demon, not a god. I am of the old blood, 
of Aare—kin to your lords, if you look at it like that.” He walked on a few 
paces, glanced sideways at Gird, and said, “I see you do look at it like that. 
And no wonder. But there is much you do not know. The old Aareans had powers, 
all of them, which none of your people had. Now this cold land has thinned our 
blood, some say, or the gods of your people have sought vengeance. I think all 
that is ridiculous.”
Gird fastened to the little he had understood. “You are the same blood as the 
lords—as that sier, or my old count?”
“Not close kin, but of the same origin—from Aare across the sea.”
“But—I have seen no powers, in the lords.” Even as he said it, he remembered the 
uncanny light that had come to a dusty, dark storeroom when the sier willed it. 
“Except—”
“Except last night. First with me, and then with the sier.” He caught Gird’s 
hand as he was about to make another warding sign, and said, “Stop doing that. 
It won’t work, because I’m not what you think, but it is annoying. You’ll 
convince anyone on the road I’m an illwisher.” There was no one on the road, 
before or behind. Gird scowled. The old man sighed. “Gird, our people had power, 
and now most of them don’t, or they have little. I have, and the sier has, and 
of course I know about the sier—I have known him for years. We have talked 
together, dined together—I’ve been his guest—”
Gird struggled to break the grip on his wrist; the old man was feeble—had to be 
weaker than he was—but he could not get free. He yanked back again and again, 
panting, without success. The old man merely smiled at him, a sunny, friendly 
smile of perfect calm and joy. “Let—me—go!” Gird said finally, when force had 
not worked.
“When I’m sure you have understood what I’m saying. Not until.” The same quiet 
smile, but Gird felt the threat behind the words.
“Understood, or accepted?” he asked, still angry.
“Understood. Esea’s Light, Gird, if I had wanted to charm the wits from you, I 
could have done it any time.”
“Could you?” He glared at the old man, wondering if that had been the answer all 
along. Had he been charmed into thinking the man hurt, charmed into taking him 
into the city, charmed into going unarmed into that trap? That peaceful smile 
seemed to fill his eyes, as if the old man were suddenly larger; warmth and 
peace seeped into his mind, washing the anger away. But he clung to the core of 
it, stubborn as a stone in the earth: he might be shifted, but he would not be 
changed. The old man sighed, at last, and that imposed warmth and peace left him 
abruptly. He was shivering in a cold wind, aware of sleet beginning to sting the 
left side of his face.
“Well. Maybe I couldn’t, at that. Not now, anyway. The gods must know what 
they’re doing.” The old man shivered now, too. But he was still smiling, if 
ruefully.
Gird looked around. They were on a rise, where the wind could get at them from 
any angle, and the sleet bit into him. The road ran on eastward, past an outcrop 
of rock that offered no shelter. Downslope to the right, downwind, scrubby grass 
thickened to knee-high scrub, and he thought he could see trees in the distance. 
“I’m cold,” he said. “I’m going to find shelter, and if you won’t let go of me, 
you’ll have to come too.” He was sure he could drag the old man, if he couldn’t 
get rid of him.
“Good idea,” the old man said, and nothing more until they had tramped through 
the scrub into the meager shelter of a leafless wood. Gird hunkered down behind 
a fallen log, and dug into the dry leaves. Deep enough. He pointed, and the old 
man crouched there, releasing Gird’s wrist. Gird found fallen branches to stack 
on the windward side, then piled leaves to cut the wind under the log. He kept 
working, as the sleet came down harder, to cut poles and make a low roof over 
them. The first flakes of snow floated between the chips of falling sleet as he 
finished, and crawled under it.
The old man had dug out the leaves to form a nest, and huddled in it. Gird put 
the sack of food and the jug where he could reach them, and squeezed close to 
the old man. He was not as cold as Gird had expected—but then he had never been 
as feeble as Gird expected. Beyond the edge of the shelter roof, more flakes 
danced. The hiss and rattle of sleet lessened, and that magical silence that 
heralds falling snow spread around them. Snow clung to the edges of fallen 
leaves, forming a fantastic tracery until more snow covered the ground in 
unbroken white.
Gird stared at it. He had slept fireless in winter before, and he had food and 
ale, but how was he going to get back to his troop? He had expected to spend 
some days in the town—to leave with enough food to reach the next town—and then 
to return, with a guide, through three different bartons. He had come to the 
town from the south; now he was east of it, in a country he had never seen, 
which was rapidly disappearing under snow. Snow in which his tracks would be all 
too obvious, in which he could not hope to travel unnoticed. In which he could 
starve, or die of cold. Beside him, the old man snored, the easy sleep of the 
old. He was warm enough, and unafraid—and what did he have to be afraid of, if 
he could heal himself of such wounds as Gird had seen? If they had been real.
Gird reached out and pulled the sack of food to him. Don’t look too far ahead, 
his Da had said. There are times to plan for planting and harvest, and times to 
eat the food at hand, and be grateful. Inside were bread, cheese, a slab of 
bacon, an onion. He looked at the sleeping man, and sighed, and put the sack 
aside again. They could share it when the old man woke.
As it happened, the old man woke before he did; Gird had not meant to fall 
asleep, but the silence and monotony had done it. Outside the shelter was dark, 
cold, and the silence. Within, the old man had made light, and radiated warmth 
like a hot stone. He was holding his finger—his glowing finger—to a ragged chunk 
of bacon, which sizzled and dripped onto bread beneath it. It had been the smell 
of cooking bacon which roused Gird, and it was the sight of it cooking at the 
old man’s touch which sent him out into the dark and cold in one panic-stricken 
rush.
“Come back!” the old man cried. “I was cooking it for you!”
Gird crouched in the snow, uncertain, shivering… half with fear, and half with 
the cold. Snow caressed his head, his cheeks, his arms and hands, icy kisses 
like those of the snow maidens that lived in the far north. The old man’s head 
poked out of the shelter.
“It’s all right. It won’t hurt you. I promise.” What good was the promise of 
someone who could cook bacon with his finger, and make light out of nothing? 
What good was the promise of someone who could change faces? But the smell of 
the bacon went right to the pit of his belly; his mouth watered. A lump of snow 
fell on his head, and he shuddered. Fear and warmth and food, or cold and hunger 
and—more fear. He was moving before he knew it, back to the shelter, praying 
fervently to whatever gods might be out this dark night to protect him from one 
old man.
Once face to face with him again, Gird could find nothing specific to fear. His 
hands were the gnarled and bony hands of any old man, holding out now a chunk of 
bread with a chunk of hot bacon on top. Gird looked at the food, but did not 
take it. “We must share,” he said hoarsely.
“I don’t like bacon,” the old man said, almost wistfully. “A slice of a lamb 
roast now, or even beef—but I never could eat bacon without trouble. Go on, you 
take it.”
Gird looked him in the eye. Could he not know the customs of Gird’s people? Were 
their people so different? “We must share,” he said again. “I cannot take food 
from you, if you do not take it from me.” Or rather, he thought to himself, I 
will not take it and put myself in that kind of relationship.
The man shrugged. “It was yours to start with, I merely cooked it. You don’t 
prefer it raw, do you?”
Gird sighed. Either he was ignorant, or he was being difficult. His head ached, 
and he didn’t want to explain it, but he was going to have to. “It’s important,” 
he said. “You cooked it; that means you have the hearth-right, the fire-right. I 
cannot take—no, I will not take your food unless you take some from my hand, 
because that would mean you were my—you had the right to give or withhold food, 
and I needed your protection.”
“Oh.” The old man looked surprised, but drew his hand back. “Is that why your 
people first brought food to ours when they came?”
“Did they?” Gird had no idea what had happened when the lords first came. “What 
did your people do?”
“Made a very large mistake, I think,” said the old man, as if to himself. “What 
should they have done?”
“Were they seeking aid in hunting, or against an enemy? Or were they starving?”
“No—at least not as the chronicles tell it.”
“Then if they wanted an alliance of hearthings, they should have offered food of 
their own, and all shared.”
The old man pursed his lips. “And what would it mean to you, if they ate the 
food offered, but offered none.”
“That is the way of accepting the giving hearth as the leader— as the 
protector.”
“Could they offer something else, in exchange? Arms, protection?”
Gird shook his head. “No—what protection could someone without food offer? The 
strong hearth has food to offer; the weak accepts it, and gives service for 
protection. If they wish friendship, it is as I said: food shared, both ways. Or 
more, if more than one are meeting. Famine rule, that can change things, but not 
always.”
“Famine rule?”
“In famine, all share equally, without obligation, even if only one provides. 
But it must be declared, and accepted.”
“This is worse than I thought,” said the old man, grimacing. “We were so 
stupid!” He put the bread and bacon down, and said, “Will you take something 
from the sack and share it with me?”
“I can’t cook it,” Gird said, frowning. It didn’t have to be cooked food, of 
course: bread was already cooked, and cheese was cured. But he had not actually 
provided this food—it belonged to the sier, who was an ally of the old man. Some 
people might argue about that. “Do you accept it as my food?”
“Yes.”
“Then I offer this cheese and bread, my hearth to yours.” Gird set the bread and 
cheese between them, then broke a piece from each and held out his hand. The old 
man took the pieces gravely, and offered Gird the bread and bacon again. This 
time Gird took it, hoping the bacon was still hot. But he waited until the old 
man had taken a bite before taking one of his own. The old man had not said the 
ritual words, but he was sure of the intent, and between only two, that was 
enough.
The bacon was still warm, and succulent; the grease-soaked bread made a 
comfortable fullness in his belly. Gird ate quickly, wasting no time, but his 
mind was full of questions. As soon as he had gulped down the last bite of 
bread, he turned to the old man. “What did you mean, your people had made a 
mistake?” The old man, eating more slowly, had not finished; he swallowed the 
cheese in his mouth before answering. “Gird, among my people the customs differ. 
Offering food is the sign of subservience: servants offer food to masters. I’m 
afraid when your people came bringing food, my people thought they were 
acknowledging their lower rank.”
Gird sat quietly a moment, thinking this over. The food-bringers, food-givers, 
ranked lower? When everyone knew that those who can afford to give without 
taking in return are the wealthy and strong? It was backwards, upside down, 
inside out: no one could live with a people who believed that. They would kill 
each other. They would believe—that the strong and wealthy are those who can 
take without giving—He found he was saying this aloud, softly, and the old man 
was nodding. “But that’s wrong,” he said loudly. His vehemence was swallowed in 
the snow, lost in that white quiet. “It can’t work. They would always be 
stealing from each other, from everyone, to gain their place in the family.”
“Not quite,” said the old man. He sighed heavily. “Then again, maybe that’s part 
of the reason why things have gone so badly up here. Back in Aare, there were 
reasons for that, and safeguards. At least, I think so. It had to do with our 
magic, our powers.”
“Like the light. And cooking with your finger?”
“Among other things, yes. Among our people, rank came with magic—the more magic, 
the higher rank. One proof of magic was the ability to take, either by direct 
magic, or by compelling—charming—someone to offer whatever it was as a gift.”
Gird thought carefully around that before he let himself answer, but it was the 
same answer that sprang first to mind. “But how is that different from the 
bullying of a strong child, who steals a weaker’s food, or threatens him into 
giving it up? It is stealing, to take like that.” And it was precisely what the 
lords had been doing, he thought. What they had always done, if this man was 
telling the truth.
The old man also waited before answering, and when he spoke his voice was 
slower, almost hesitant. “Gird, our people see it as the natural way—as calves 
in a herd push and shove, seeking dominance, as kittens wrestle, claw and bite. 
Yet this doesn’t mean constant warfare in a herd, only a mild pushing and 
shoving: the weaker ones know their place, and walk behind—”
“But men are not cows!” Gird could not contain his anger any longer; he felt as 
if it were something physical, bright as the light he still did not understand. 
“We are not kittens, or sheep, or birds squabbling in a nest—”
“I know.” The old man’s voice, still quiet, cut through his objection as a knife 
cuts a ripe fruit. “I know, and I know something has gone very wrong. But in our 
own home, in Aare, that sparring for dominance among our folk had its limits, 
and those limits were safe enough to let our people grow and prosper for many 
ages. We were taught—I was taught—that with such power comes great 
responsibility—that we were to care for those we governed as a herdsman cares 
for his herd—No, don’t tell me, I understand. Men are not cattle. But even you 
might use that analogy—”
And he had, the night before, talking to the sier. Gird shivered, not from cold, 
when he thought of it. No wonder it had gone home, if the man thought of his 
common folk as cattle already.
“I still think it’s wrong,” Gird said.
“It may be. But right or wrong, it’s the other way ’round from your people, and 
that means my people didn’t understand them from the beginning. We assumed your 
people intended to submit, agreed to it without conflict: that’s what our 
chronicles say. So whenever your people resisted, our people thought of that as 
a broken contract—as if you had gone back on your word.”
Gird tried to remember what he had heard of the lords’ coming. Very little, 
though he had heard new things from the men he had been training. Most of the 
stories began after that, with the settlements growing near the new forts and 
towns, with the “clearing” of old steadings, the forced resettlement of 
families, the change in steading custom to conform to the new village laws. 
Everyone had thought the lords knew they were unfair, knew they were 
stealing—but had they not known? Had they thought that all they did was right, 
justified by some agreement that had never been made?
“Not all,” the old man said. “Some things were forbidden in old Aare, which our 
people do here. The worship of the Master of Torments, for example: that they 
know is evil, and those who do it are doing it knowingly against the old laws. A 
contest of strength or magery is one thing, but once it is over, the winner has 
obligations to the loser, as well. But the basic misunderstanding, Gird, I 
believe I discovered tonight, from you. Your way seems as strange to me, I 
confess, as mine must seem to you—but strangeness is not evil. What we do with 
it may be evil.”
“When you offered me that food,” Gird said, “were you then declaring yourself 
lower in rank? Or were you trying to fool me into thinking that’s what you were 
doing?”
The old man started to answer, then stopped, then finally said, “I thought—I 
think I only meant to calm you, to make you think well of me. In one sense, that 
is claiming a lower rank, because it means I care that you think well of me—in 
another—I don’t know. I didn’t think, I just did it.”
“I felt,” Gird said carefully—carefully, because he did not want to hurt this 
old man, even now, “I felt like a stubborn animal, being offered a bait of grain 
if it will only go through the gap.”
A grin, across that close space. “You are stubborn; you would not deny that. I 
did not mean you to feel that, but given what your people think about offering 
food, wouldn’t anyone feel so in such a circumstance? Have you ever—”
“Yes.” Had the men he had fed felt that way? Demeaned, degraded? But it was not 
always so; he had taken food himself, gladly, acknowledging temporary weakness. 
Sick men had to be fed by healthy men, children by adults, infants by mothers. 
Was milk from the breast demeaning to a baby? Of course not. Yet—he worried the 
problem in his mind, coming at it from one side then another. The old man sat 
quietly and let him alone. “There are times,” he said, “when it is right to be 
the one fed. Times no one minds. If someone’s sick or hurt—or children—but grown 
folk, healthy grown folk—they feed themselves. In a way, living on another’s 
bounty is like being a child again. Maybe that’s why it means giving obedience.”
“Probably.” The old man nodded. “It’s interesting that you have the importance 
of having food to give, but absolute prohibition against taking it by force from 
each other. The force is used against the land, I suppose, in hunting or 
farming.”
“Not against,” Gird corrected. “With. To help the land bear more. Alyanya is our 
Lady, not our subject.”
“So you see even the gods as those who can give, not those who take?”
“Of course. If they have nothing to give, they are not gods, but demons.” Gird 
nodded at the cold dark beyond their shelter. “As the cold demons steal warmth, 
and the spirits of night steal light from the sun.”
The old man smiled. “This day is stealing my strength, Gird, and I cannot hold 
this light much longer. Not if I’m to have warmth enough until dawn. But before 
the light goes. I have an apology. I have withheld the courtesy of my name, 
although I knew yours. I am Arranha, and I am glad to have you as companion in 
this adventure.”
Gird turned the name over in his mind; it was like nothing he had heard. “I 
thought the lords had many names—four or five.”
“So they do, but priests have only one, and mine is Arranha.” With a last smile, 
Arranha let the light fail—the light Gird had yet to understand, and the cold, 
snow-clean air gusted for a moment under the shelter. Gird felt Arranha curling 
up in his leafy nest, and thought of walking away. But he could not blunder 
through a wood in the dark and snow, not and hope to live until morning. With a 
silent but very definite curse, he lay down, wriggling his way into the leaves 
until he was curled around Arranha. His back was cold, but Arranha, protected on 
the inside, was warm as a hearth. Gird was sure he could not sleep—then began to 
worry that they might sleep their way into death in the cold—and then slid 
effortlessly into peace and darkness.



Chapter Eighteen
« ^ » 
The next morning was cold and raw but Arranha was awake, and a milder warmth 
filled their shelter. Gird rubbed his eyes, and looked out to see snow covering 
all, under a gray sky: the light was silvery. The old man sat hunched, staring 
at his hands. Gird watched him warily. Was he about to do something? Was he 
doing something now, something Gird could not see? Then a cramp in his back 
jabbed him, and he had to stretch. Arranha turned to him, and Gird continued 
with a yawn that cracked his jaws.
“Sorry,” he said afterwards, but even to himself he did not sound sorry. Arranha 
merely smiled. Silently, he divided the rest of the bread and cheese, and 
Arranha shared it. The jug, when he shook it, was full. He looked at the old 
man, who smiled again.
“I filled it with snow, and melted it. It’s not ale, but it will do.” Gird 
sipped, found it water with only the faintest taste of the ale that had been in 
the jug, and drank thirstily. Arranha went on. “It is not snowing now, and I 
think it will not for some hours. If you wanted to travel, now is a good time.”
Gird scratched his jaw beneath his beard. “What about you? I would help you to 
someplace safe.”
Arranha laughed aloud. “Safe? For me? Gird, I am safer with you than anywhere 
else I can think of, in the world of men.”
“But surely you have friends—”
“None so rash as to harbor me now, when Esea’s Hall of priests has declared me 
heretic and traitor. They intended to kill me, Gird—you saw that.”
“But—sir—” Gird tried to think how to put it. The man was a priest, and had 
great powers, but he would hardly be accepted by Gird’s troop of peasant rebels. 
He began as delicately as he could. “I have my work—you seem to know that, and 
what it is—and the people I work with, my people, they—they won’t take to you.”
Arranha showed neither anger nor surprise. “You do not want me with you?”
Gird found he was scratching his ear, this time. “Well—it’s nothing against you 
yourself, but—you’re one of them, sir. One of the lords, and that’s who we’re 
trying to fight. Sir.”
“Do you know what you’re fighting for, Gird, or is it all against?” Gird must 
have looked as puzzled as he felt, for Arranha explained. “Do you have a vision 
of something better, a way to live that you want, or are you fighting only 
against the lords’ injustice and cruelty?”
“Of course we have ideas,” Gird said. They were bright in his mind, those 
pictures of what the world should be like. He was sitting at the old scarred 
table in his own cottage, with Mali and the children around it, all of them with 
food in their bowls, laughing and talking. In the cowbyre were his three 
favorite cows, all healthy and sleek; his sheep were heavy-fleeced and strong. 
He could look around the room and see his mother’s loom with a furl of cloth 
half-woven, tools on their hooks, Mali’s herbs in bunches, the sweet smell of a 
spring evening blowing in the window. Outside would be the fields, with the 
grain springing green from the furrows, the smallgarden already showing the 
crisp rosettes of vegetables, the beans reaching for their poles with waving 
tendrils. From other cottages as well he could hear the happy voices, even 
someone singing. He felt safe; he knew the others felt safe. That was what he 
wanted, what they all wanted.
“Can you tell me?” asked Arranha gently.
Gird tried, but the memories were too strong, too mixed: sweet and bitter, 
joyful and sorrowful, all at once. His voice broke; his eyes filled with tears 
that were hot on his cheeks, and cold on his jaw. “It’s just—just peace,” he 
said.
Arranha sighed. “Coming to peace by starting a war is tricky, Gird. You’ve never 
known war; I have.”
Gird set his jaw, and blinked back the tears. “It’s war enough, when my family 
and my friends die for nothing.”
“No. It’s bad, but it’s not the same. You’re starting something bigger than you 
can see. Much bigger. You need a better idea of where you’re going, what you 
will need. Do you know anything at all about law?”
Gird sniffed, rubbed his nose on his arm, and thought about it. Law. There were 
the customs of his village, and the customs all his people shared, from the days 
when they lived in steadings within a hearthing. Then there were rules the lords 
made, and that law he had had to memorize when he was a recruit. “A little,” he 
said cautiously. Arranha looked at him, as if wondering what that meant, and 
sighed again.
“This is going to take longer, and it would go better in a warmer place. Where 
would you go from here?”
The abrupt change of topic jarred; Gird wondered what the old man was up to. 
Something, surely. But he was tired of arguing, of his own emotions. Let the old 
man come along, at least for now. “We left the city by the east gate,” Gird 
said. “And then we walked east, and then south but only a little. So back south, 
and a little west—I don’t know this country well, up here.”
“The way you’re speaking of, there’s a village called Burry—is that what you 
meant?”
“Aye.” In Burry, the barton was already five hands strong, and the yeoman 
marshal had relatives in three other villages.
“Can we reach Burry today?”
“No. But there’s a place—” Gird did not want to talk about it, and Arranha did 
not press him. He ducked out of the shelter, into the distanceless light of a 
cloudy day over snow. They were going to leave tracks, clear ones, and the place 
they had slept would be obvious even if he tried to take down the shelter. But 
he could not see the road from here, or hear any travelers. Perhaps no one would 
happen by until another snowfall.
He led Arranha further into the wood, away from the road. The silence scared 
him; it felt unnatural. He reminded himself that he was not used to being away 
from a village in winter. Even near camp, he could hear the noises of other 
people. It might be nothing but this unfamiliarity that had his neck hair 
standing up, a tension in his shoulders. Arranha picked his way through the snow 
with little apparent effort, though he left tracks. Gird made sure to look, 
every so often.
When they came to the trail Gird had taken toward the city two days before, he 
almost walked across it without recognition. Its white surface lay smooth in 
both directions, trackless. He turned and led Arranha along it, as he looked for 
the place they could shelter overnight.
It was getting darker, and he was afraid he might not recognize it in snow, when 
he spotted the three tall cedars above a lower clump, and turned off the trail. 
Arranha had said nothing for hours. Now he said, “Is this a village?”
“No—it’s an old steading. Cleared by your folk, to settle a village.” He wasn’t 
sure that was why it had been abandoned; it might have been much older than the 
lords’ coming. “It’s empty,” Gird added. “No one lives here, or nearby.” He 
pushed through the bushy cedar boughs, shivering as they dumped their load of 
snow on him, and entered the old steading. He bowed, courteously, to the old 
doorstep, still centered between the upright pillars that had held the door. On 
either side, broken walls straggled away, outlining the shape of the original 
buildings in brushstrokes of stone against the white snow.
When he looked back, Arranha had pushed through the cedars as well, and was 
bowing as Gird had, though he looked uncertain of his welcome. So he ought, Gird 
thought. This was old; this had belonged to no one but his own people, and 
Arranha was a stranger. “Do you know how many lived here?” Arranha asked. Gird 
shook his head. “It was a steading; my Da said a steading was three or so 
families. Less than a village—four hands, five? A large steading might have 
more, but I think this one was small.” He led the way again, past the empty 
useless doorway, along what had been the outside of the main building, to an 
angle of low wall in what had been an animal shed or pen. Here two corners had 
survived the original assault and subsequent weather, to nearly enclose a space 
just over an armspan wide, and two armspans long. Gird thrust his hand into the 
cold snow in the larger space outside, feeling about, and grunted. “Here—help me 
lift this.” This was a lattice, woven of green withes and vines, and lightly 
covered with leaves; it would have been unnoticeable lying flat among the ruins. 
Now, it fitted across the space between the walls, an instant roof.
“You knew this was here—you had it ready!” Arranha sounded excited for the first 
time.
Gird let himself grin. “Aye. Thought it up. Looks like nothing but old walls, 
but it’s as good as a house. Almost.” He had lifted his end carefully, so that 
the snow did not slide off; it was heavier that way, but it would look less 
obvious. He hoped. When they had it braced in place, he looked at it again. 
Those two side walls had been intended to support a slanted roof, he was sure—he 
hoped his roof would slant enough to drip on the wall, not inside. The end wall 
should be lying within the enclosed space; he reached into the snow again, and 
found the end. He pulled it out, careful to bring its load of snow with it. This 
piece was light enough for one to move; he shifted it until it almost closed the 
gap. Now they had a small house, its walls chest-high, topped with a slanted 
roof with its back to the north wind. Its floor was almost snow-free, because 
that snow had come out with the end wall.
“You thought this up?” asked Arranha.
“Not all of it. I thought of wattle for temporary roofs, in our camps, but 
others thought of leaving sections where we might need them. And a man in Burry 
thought of putting the piece down where you might want no snow when the shelter 
was built.” As he talked, Gird braced the foot of the wattle enclosing the end 
with rocks. His hands began to go numb; he blew on them. Then he reached into 
his jerkin, and brought out one of his thongs. “We have to tie the roof on, or 
any little puff will blow it away.” Arranha took the hint, and began lacing the 
roof to the end hurdle.
Inside the shelter, it was quite dark. Gird felt around in the protected corner, 
and found the dry sticks he’d bundled, and the little sack of meal. He thought 
of the time it was going to take to start a fire with a firebow, and sighed. It 
would be sensible to ask Arranha to start the fire with his finger—if that 
worked, and if it cooked bacon it should—but he hated to ask a favor of a lord.
“If you would let me, I will start the fire,” Arranha said quietly. Gird backed 
out of the shelter and looked at him. No visible haughtiness, just an old man 
pinched with cold after a long day’s walk in the snow.
“In that far corner, then. There’s wood; I’ll find more.”
Arranha nodded and ducked inside the shelter. Gird did not stay to watch; he 
gathered an armload of wood, and came back to a shelter that let chips of light 
out between the chinks of the wattle.
Inside was warmth and firelight—none of Arranha’s magicks. Was Arranha tired, or 
simply being tactful? Gird did not know, or care; he was glad enough to see a 
warm fire. The jug was nestled near the fire, and Arranha had found the niche in 
the wall with the cooking bowl. He had poured the meal into the bowl, but looked 
as if he did not know what to do next.
“Let me.” Gird reached for the bowl, and felt the side of the pot. Warm, but not 
hot enough. He scrabbled around the floor of the shelter for small pebbles and 
pushed them into the fire. “For cooking,” said Gird, to Arranha’s surprised 
look. “I’ll drop them in the jug, to make the water hot quicker. That way it 
won’t crack the pot.”
By the time the mush was done, Gird was ready to eat the bowl as well. He 
swallowed hard, handed the bowl to Arranha first, and forced himself to match 
spoonful for spoonful the pace Arranha set. They scraped the bowl clean; with a 
sigh, Gird took it outside to scrub it clean with snow. After a final visit to 
the outside—Gird insisted on showing Arranha the proper place to use as 
jacks—they came back to the fire, ready enough for a night’s sleep.
Or so Gird expected. Instead, Arranha did whatever he did to brighten the light 
until Gird could see as clearly as in daylight. From the recesses of his 
clothes, he pulled a scroll. Gird blinked. The man had been naked; Gird had 
given him a shirt. Then he had had clothes of some kind—but Gird still didn’t 
have his shirt back—and now he was taking things he had not had out of clothes 
he had not had. He did not like this. But the alternative was, again, a cold 
night alone in the woods—and here was warmth and light and someone alive. He 
gave Arranha the look he would have given one of his men who pulled a stupid 
trick, but Arranha did not react to it.
Arranha pointed to the scroll. “Can you read that?” Gird peered at it, his 
long-forgotten struggles with reading sending cold sweat to his brow. The list 
looked familiar, the lengths of line and numbers made it certain.
“No—but I know what it is. It’s the Rule of Aare. I’ve seen it before; we had to 
learn it in the Kelaive’s Guard.”
“And what does it mean?” Gird stared at him, and Arranha nodded encouragingly. 
“The first one, for instance. What does it mean—how does it tell you to live?”
“Surrender none,” said Gird. “That’s obvious enough. Grab and hold what you’ve 
got. Don’t quit. Don’t give anything up.”
“And what is ‘anything’?”
“Anything—oh, lands, I suppose. Money. Power. Whatever they’ve got that they 
value—”
“Value,” said the priest, in that tone that made Gird think he meant more than 
he said. “Things of value—think, Gird.” He was thinking, and it made him 
restless. He wanted the ale he had had the night before, to ease the ache in his 
joints. He wanted to get out of this cold cramped shelter and take a walk across 
open, sunlit fields. He scowled, hoping that it would pass for thought, and 
ready to be angry if the priest laughed. The priest did not laugh. “Value,” he 
said again. “Gird, what do you value most?”
“Me?” All the usual answers raced through his mind: money, food, ale, the 
pleasures of the body, possessions, a better bull for his cows. Then slower, 
deeper, the people he knew, the way of life he wanted to live. But for that he 
had no words, no way to say it. “Not just money,” he said slowly. “Not things to 
buy or use, exactly. Friends—a good master, fair dealing in the market and at 
tax time—family—” Children, he would have said, but it was ill-luck to name 
them.
“Peace,” said the priest, casting that name over ordinary life without turmoil 
or undue trouble, as Gird himself had said that morning. “Justice.” And that 
stood for all the fair dealing, market or court or steward’s assessment, for a 
lord who would not trample young grain on a hunt, or refuse the use of medicinal 
herbs in his wood. “Love,” the priest said last, and it covered family and 
friends well enough, all the complicated relationships that made a life more 
than existence.
“But the law—” began Gird. The priest held up his hand, and Gird stopped short.
“The old law,” said the priest, “said nothing of peace or justice or love, 
because everyone agreed on their importance. And the first Rule, ‘Surrender 
none’ meant precisely that none of these should be given up: not peace, not 
justice, not love.”
“But—” began Gird again, and again the priest stopped him.
“Surrender none,” the priest repeated, this time in a tone of command that 
would, Gird was sure, have held an army spellbound. “None—none of the Rules 
themselves, and none of the great goods the Rules were intended to preserve. Our 
people have forgotten that. Our priests have forgotten that. We have taught them 
the wrong meanings of those simple commands, and it is these, acted out, which 
brought them to such actions as trouble you. They think they are meant to grasp 
more and more, and hold it tightly, sharing it with none, when they were meant 
to surrender no opportunity of doing right, of spreading Esea’s light, the High 
Lord’s justice, Alyanya’s peace.”
Gird thought of the other Rules, so painfully learned when he was a recruit. If 
indeed the first meant that, then how could the second, the third, be 
interpreted? “One, for me, and one, for you” had looked, to a peasant boy, like 
a clear description of the present situation: one rule for the masters, and one 
for the serfs.
“No,” said the priest, with a sigh. “It’s easily read that way, and that is in 
fact the way they read it now, paying tribute to Simyits the Two-faced, the 
Trickster, the lightfingered lord of luck and gambling. But it reminds us to 
share, as children do, as we did tonight—one spoonful for you, and one for me. 
Your people do the same.”
“But the others?”
“Define the vigilance necessary to protect the code: touch not, nor ask, nor 
interfere, where it is not necessary, where it is not your business; but if it 
is, then go far, swift, silently—never let justice lack because of distance or 
time or idle chatter. Face the door, yes: evil overwhelms the careless. Learn 
all the arts, to judge fairly, but staying alive is imperative, or the good 
judge cannot exist to judge.”
“It’s—it’s like a grape-leaf,” said Gird, his mind awhirl. “On one side dark 
green, shiny, and on the other silvery fuzz—can it be the same Rules? And even 
if it is, what matter to us? We were never of them.”
“Gird, if a man use a stick to beat a cow, instead of guide it, does that make 
the stick evil? Would you burn the stick, for being a bad stick, or clout the 
man?”
“The man, of course, but—”
“The Rules of Aare were a tool of law, a stick, if you will—once men used them 
well, to guide themselves to better actions, and now they use them badly, to 
beat other men. You’re going to need a stick like that; before you throw this 
one on the fire, take another look at it.”
“It still sounds like trickery,” said Gird. He looked closely at the priest, 
watching for anything he could interpret. Nothing but interest. “If the Rules 
can be read both ways, then there’s something wrong with them. Why not write 
laws that can’t be read wrong?”
“Try it,” said the priest. A smile twitched his lips. Gird felt the back of his 
neck getting hot. Somehow the man had made a trap, and he’d walked in. Even 
though he didn’t feel the teeth yet, it was still a trap.
“I could,” he muttered sourly, thinking hard. What was the trap?
“It’s not that hard to say a man shouldn’t steal his neighbor’s sheep, or put 
offal down his neighbor’s well.”
“And if the sheep got into his garden, or the neighbor had stolen something from 
him?”
“If we had fair courts, to settle the first problem—”
“Very good. And how will you make fair courts?”
The priest was taking him seriously. The trap must have very fine teeth, because 
he couldn’t feel them yet, and the man was asking what he’d thought about 
before.
“Fair courts should have someone who knows something about the argument—the kind 
of argument—”
“Another serf?” asked the priest. This was extraordinary, and Gird paused to 
look again for any signs of ridicule. None.
“I’ve wondered about that,” he said cautiously. “A farmer to judge disputes 
between farmers, a tanner to judge between tanners. But then if a farmer and a 
tanner have an argument, who? If it’s someone who started as a peasant, say, 
then he’d need some training, same as if he wanted to be a soldier.”
“Let’s suppose you have your judge,” said the priest. “A fair man, who knows 
enough of both sides to understand it, then what?”
“Plain laws that anyone can understand,” said Gird. “Fair dealing between master 
and man, between crafter and crofter. If the law says ‘no stealing’ that’s plain 
enough—”
“And what is stealing?” asked the priest.
“Taking what’s not yours,” said Gird. “That’s obvious.”
“But think, Gird. We all take some things that aren’t ours: air, water, sunlight 
and starlight—”
“The water in my well was mine.” Gird clung to that. Air? Sunlight? He’d never 
thought of himself as “taking” them. There was plenty left for everyone else.
“The water in your well came from somewhere else, and someone else put it there. 
Have you done one thing to make it grow, as you work to make your cabbages 
grow?”
“No.” He’d never thought of it that way. It was his well, as it had been his 
father’s well, and he had felt lucky to have a well of his own. His well, his 
water. But he had worked, himself, to get each year’s crop of barley and oats 
and cabbages and onions, to take the cows to be bred, to birth the calves. He 
himself had fed and brushed his animals, pruned and manured his trees, plowed 
and harrowed and planted and harvested his fields. The water was just there, 
more in a wet year and less in a dry year, but always there, without his 
thought. Given, like the air and the light. And he had taken.
“Would you call that stealing from the gods?” asked Gird. Or, he wondered to 
himself, were the gifts of flowers and herbs to the merin spirits really a form 
of payment, and not praise?
“No, I think not. They gave us to this world, and gave to it also those things 
we need and cannot make for ourselves, by any labor. To take a gift is not 
stealing. But I wanted you to think about your law. If you want more than riots, 
if you want more than killing the magelords and then each other, you must have 
law.”
Before he could stop himself, Gird blurted “But I don’t know anything about it.”
Arranha smiled. “You were just saying you knew what kind of laws you wanted. And 
once you knew nothing about fighting, but you learned. You can learn this, if 
you care enough about it.”
“From you?”
“From me you can learn some, but not all. You don’t trust me, even now—” He 
looked closely at Gird, as if to see into his mind. Gird hoped the uneasy 
feeling inside wasn’t the priest’s inner sight. “So we must find you teachers 
better suited to your nature and experience. What do you know of the kapristi, 
the gnomes?”
“The gray rockfolk? Dire fighters, fair dealers, is what I’ve heard. Not much 
friends with humans—”
“Not with our folk,” the priest agreed. “Before we came your people had no 
problem with them. Some of ours… well, you’ve heard me admit that our folk have 
gone widely astray from Esea’s path, and not alone in their treatment of you. 
Some of the wildest thought the kapristi were easy prey, being small and seeming 
meek. Tried to hunt them, ahorse and afoot. Ignored their boundary markers, 
tried to move you peasants onto their land to farm or mine.”
“And?”
“And were deservedly killed by the kapristi. That’s not what my former 
colleagues would say, of course, but it’s true. They never tried to invade human 
lands, or attacked humans where they had not been attacked. But once roused, 
those small gray folk are as dangerous fighters as any you could hope to train. 
As well, they live by a code of law that they boast is the fairest and most 
settled in all the worlds and peoples.”
Gird could not keep back a grin. “There is such a law?”
“They claim so. I have met them myself, Gird, as a student of law. They like my 
people little, but they were fair and just with me. But it is a strict law, so 
strict that I doubt you’ll find humans agree to follow it. They take no excuses, 
the kapristi, as they make none; they value fair exchange so highly that they 
believe free gifts are dangerous, fostering slackness. Would you go so far?”
“No, among our people, gifts are a sacred duty. Alyanya’s blessings are gifts—”
“Yet the gnomes would say you return fair exchange, duties of worship, for such 
apparent gifts, or the gods take vengeance. That’s their explanation for what’s 
gone wrong with our people. Impiety, failure to return proper service, and the 
gods punish by withholding the gifts.”
“And what do you say?”
Arranha sighed, “I say that my people have erred, by being ungenerous. We value 
free gifts, even if we misinterpreted your people’s offer of food. Perhaps free 
gifts are dangerous for gnomes; for humans I think they are necessary. But with 
the loss of powers came fear, so our people grasp more, and give less, than they 
did. This hurts you, and you, in turn, will hurt them. That cycle has no end, 
unless you wish it—unless you declare an end, someday, and forgive the rest of 
the injury.”
Gird felt his forehead knot. “What has that to do with justice?”
Arranha smiled at him, serene once more. “You will find out, Gird, when it is 
time.”
Gird felt unaccountably grumpy at that, as if he were a child being told to 
ignore adult concerns for now. He was, after all, a grown man—widowed—the father 
of grown children. Arranha seemed to read this on his face. “I’m sorry,” he 
said. “I didn’t mean to confuse you. You are no child; I know that. But I do not 
know myself exactly why the god sent me to you, or you to me. I was as surprised 
as you, when you stumbled onto me in that ditch. The god wants something from 
both of us—”
“Not your god!” Gird said.
“Then yours. Believe me or not, as you will, but I have been a priest, a true 
priest, and I know: your god has shaped your life to some purpose, and I am now 
part of that purpose. I think—I believe—that some part of that is helping you 
learn how to shape the future beyond the coming war. Whoever leads your people 
needs to know more than soldiering.”
Gird ducked his head. Of course he had thought about it, wondered if the gods 
had drawn him toward the leadership that now seemed certain. But it did not do 
to question them too closely, to bring yourself to their notice. The old man was 
strange, too strange; he wished he’d never found him. And yet—something about 
him attracted, as the warmth of a fire in cold attracted. Certainly he knew that 
they must plan for something beyond war; it was what had bothered him since 
Norwalk.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
“But you will,” Arranha said softly. “You will know because you must know, and 
you will teach others.”
Suddenly this solemnity in a tattered shelter in snowy woods, this serious 
discussion of legalities and philosophies, struck Gird as ridiculous. He 
snorted. “Aye—I can see now: the great gods who could choose you or anyone else 
will choose a peasant who can hardly read—a serf and son of a serf, who is 
better with cows than people—to teach a whole people about law. That’s wisdom.”
Arranha leaned forward. “Do not mock them, Gird. If they have chosen you—and I 
think they have, and you suspect it, beneath that banter—they will make you what 
they need. Better clay that can be shaped to their will, and then fired, than 
broken shards of earlier firings.”
The laughter had gone, fleeing down the hollow corridors of his mind a nameless 
fear. “I am not mocking,” Gird said. “I was wishing for miracles.”
“Those, too, you may have. For now, you have me: no miracle, but an Aarean with 
some small magicks.”
“Which once I would have called miracles,” said Gird, sighing. “Well, Arranha, 
you may be right. But at the moment I cannot stay awake.” The old man chuckled, 
released his light, and Gird fell asleep in the glow of the banked coals of 
their fire.
The next morning was colder, but brighter, as the clouds began to break and a 
thin sunlight poked through them. Gird and Arranha dismantled the shelter; Gird 
gathered more wood to replace what they’d used, and tucked it into the corners 
of the walls. Arranha watched as Gird tried to scatter snow over the wattle 
sections, now laid flat again. Gird wondered if the face he wore now was truly 
his own, healed of the injuries, or a face maintained by magic (how?) to fool 
him. And how was the barton at Burry going to react to this man? He could not 
lie to them, and pretend Arranha was other than he was.
“Do you ever wonder how our magicks work?” asked Arranha when they had started 
along the trail.
Gird, who was ahead, swinging his arms to warm up, shook his head. “I never saw 
any, until I met you. Not save the healer’s hands that some have, to take away 
the pain and lay it aside.”
“Your people have that?” Arranha’s voice had sharpened. “Some of them. Not 
many.” The cold air speared into his lungs; he had to talk in short gasps, and 
wished Arranha would ask no more. But he could feel the pressure of Arranha’s 
curiosity at his back, as if it were a stinging fly between his shoulders. 
“You’ve seen it yourself?”
“Felt it m’self. Take the pain of a headache, or a blow. Lay it aside, on 
something doesn’t feel pain, like a rock.” He blew out a great cloud of steam, 
trying for rings. It was good luck to blow rings, the holy circle. “Most of ’em 
use herbs, for fevers. Singing charms, for demons, if they have the parrion— ” 
He stopped, aware of the intensity of Arranha’s interest. Had he said more than 
he should?
“Singing charms—” murmured Arranha. “Esea’s light, what we’ve missed! What’s a 
parrion, Gird?”
“Parrion’s a girl’s— ” Well, how could he explain? “It’s—what a mother gives—or 
an aunt—family things. My mother, she had a parrion of weaving. Certain patterns 
were hers, and the loom—but it’s not like giving someone a cow. The steading—the 
family— knows a girl’s ability. Her parrion is that, plus what the women give 
her. I don’t know all of it; men don’t have parrions, exactly.”
“So that’s it! Gird, in the old chronicles, my people record that yours used to 
have a group of elders in each—steading, is it?—and mentioned parrion. But it’s 
not recorded what that was.”
Gird nodded, on surer ground now. “Three elders, there were. One was of the 
hunters, one of the growers, and one of the crafters. The hunter was a man, the 
crafter a woman, and the grower might be either.”
“And the crafters were weavers? Potters?”
“Toolmakers, builders, anything we made. Of course all know something of 
it—anyone can build a wall.” Even as he said it, Gird wondered. Anyone could 
build a wall if someone good at building walls gave directions. Some walls were 
better than others.
“Hmm. Did women make weapons?”
“Of course. Why shouldn’t they?”
Arranha crunched along several strides before answering. “Among our people, it’s 
thought bad luck to let women make weapons. Their blood shed during the making 
could weaken the weapon’s hunger for blood, make it weak.”
Gird stopped short and turned; Arranha nearly crashed into him. “Blood weaken? 
You mean you don’t blood your hearths, or your foundations?” From the shocked 
expression on Arranha’s face, they did not. Gird’s mind whirled. These lords 
were even stranger than he’d thought. To take food without giving meant 
strength, but blood shed meant weakness: another refusal to give, he thought 
that was. Yet they had magical power to heal themselves—why should they be 
afraid to give blood where it was needed? And what would this mean in a war? He 
was not about to explain the power of giving blood to this alien priest. But 
Arranha was quick, he had seen it for himself. His eyes widened even more, and 
his mouth fell open. “It’s—the giving again. Esea! I would never have thought of 
that. The food giver is stronger—the blood giver is stronger—and that’s why our 
people found women ruling your steadings. And that’s why your people follow 
Alyanya: the Lady gives harvest—food— and blood. I—am—amazed.” He shook his 
head, like someone recovering from a hard blow. Then, softly. “And I see that 
you can never accept our laws. If you are to have your own, you will have to 
forge them from your own beliefs.”
Gird, although he heard this, felt a fierce exultation warming his whole body. 
He had been afraid of the lords so long, afraid of their cruelty, their wealth, 
their power. It had never occurred to him that they might be afraid, that they 
might be weak where his own people were strong.
But Arranha was still talking. “Gird, remember: if this is the strength of your 
people, and you are their proper leader, then it will be demanded from you—you 
will be their symbol—‘
Gird shrugged. “Do you think I’m afraid to give?”
Arranha looked at him a long moment. “No—you’ve shown that you can. But I think 
you do not understand how much you may have to give—”
Gird shrugged again, this time irritably. “I may die; I know that. It’s likely. 
We all may. More than that, no man can give.” Arranha started to say something, 
closed his mouth, and shook his head. Gird cocked an eyebrow at him, but the old 
man merely waved for him to lead the way.
So what had that been about, Gird wondered, as he continued toward Burry. He had 
already lost his wife, most of his children, his home, his beloved cows (he 
wondered who was milking the dun cow, and if she had settled again). The 
children he had left might die, and that would hurt—that would worse than hurt; 
he knew he could hardly live through it, if more happened to Rahi or Pidi or 
Girnis. He himself could be captured, tortured, killed—but he could not imagine 
anything else. And by being where he was, he had consented to those losses, if 
they were demanded of him.
“I still think you should talk to the gnomes,” Arranha said suddenly, after a 
long silence.
“I don’t know any gnomes,” Gird said. That should settle that. Besides, he had a 
winter’s work to do with the bartons, keeping the training going. He would send 
someone else to recruit in another town, someone who had been in a town before, 
maybe.
“I do,” Arranha said. “They have much you need to know. For example, leaving law 
aside, have you ever drilled two or three cohorts together? Do you know how to 
place them on a battlefield when cavalry threatens? Do you know what to do about 
archers? Or the kinds of magical weapons my people have?”
“We won at Norwalk against cavalry. We practice pushing men off horses,” said 
Gird, feeling stubborn. Of course it wasn’t really pushing men off horses; it 
was pushing men off logs, and he had to hope it was much the same thing. Arranha 
had said that the gnomes had fought the Aarean lords—and won. He would like to 
know how they’d done it. What he could remember of the sergeant’s lectures on 
tactics had most to do with controlling unruly crowds, clearing the village 
square, hunting wolves. He had a sudden terrible vision of what his ignorance 
could mean if he led all his bartons out to battle and did something stupid—so 
stupid that the lords won easily, and his own people were dying, captured. He 
shook his head, banishing that ill-luck.
“Besides,” he said, “you say the gnomes give nothing away. Why should they teach 
me soldiering for nothing? Or law?”
“You might have something valuable to trade,” Arranha said. Gird waited for him 
to explain, but he didn’t. So what did he have? Nothing but his own strength, 
the allegiance (for now) of some hands of half-trained peasants, his own burning 
desire for peace and justice. Arranha had said the lords violated the gnomish 
borders. But would they trade for that, when they could defend themselves as 
well as Arranha said? Would they trade bad neighbors for good?
“Would you talk to the gnomes if they would talk to you?” asked Arranha, 
breaking into this line of thought.
Soldiering beyond what his sergeant had taught, ways to make laws fair for 
everyone. Would it work? He had nearly got himself killed in that town, for 
knowing so little; he did not want to be the one to get all his men killed. And 
he did want peace, and justice, on the other side of battle. What would the 
others think, if he went to the gnomes? He thought about that. He had good 
marshals, now, who could keep the camps going, keep the bartons going, until he 
came back. It would be a season or more, he knew. But was he trusting Arranha 
because of some wicked magic?
“I will think about it,” he said, looking back to see Arranha’s expression. “I 
would need to tell my—my friends.”
“Of course. If you would take my advice, go to them without me—so you can be 
sure there is no power of mine involved—discuss it. If they agree, and you 
agree, then I will take you.”



PART III



Chapter Nineteen
« ^ » 
Winter wind had scoured the sky clean of clouds, autumn rains were past. The 
next clouds would bring serious snow, but that was likely days away. Gird 
followed Arranha across the frostbitten grass, his farmer’s mind noticing every 
sheep dropping, every wisp of wool caught on a thornbush.
“I feel uneasy, out in the daylight like this,” he said finally, when a fold of 
ground hid them from the wood in which they’d spent the night.
Arranha gave a brief smile back over his shoulder. For an old man, he was 
remarkably quick across country. “We are beyond Gadilon’s domain, remember?”
“They wander beyond, often enough.”
“Not this way. Kapristi taught Gadilon’s sires caution, Gird. It was his 
great-great-grandfather who tried to start a war with them.”
“I still can’t believe—”
“—that those little folk could defeat the magelords? Nor could my people, at 
first. But you, you want to defeat them with peasants—is that so different?”
“Well—we’re bigger—”
“And not so disciplined. Even with the bit of drill you learnt from your count’s 
sergeant. You need more; your people need more: law and drill both, which to the 
kapristi are but branches of the same tree. Or, as they would say, two ends of 
one rod.”
“Rod?”
“Measuring rod, or staff of justice. One measure suits all lengths: that’s one 
of their sayings. One law serves justice; many laws serve misrule.”
“I think I will like that,” said Gird slowly. “That’s a problem I know, well 
enough—right there in the Rule of Aare, it is, though you say it wasn’t meant to 
be like that.”
Arranha smiled peacefully at him. “Truth is greater than either of us, Gird. I 
might mean to speak truly and be mistaken: I’m no god. And you might find it 
where you didn’t expect it.”
A little higher on the slope, something marked the rough grass… a straight line, 
he realized, that went on across the slope, and around the edge of the hill, to 
reappear on the next elbow west. He could not tell if it went beyond that. 
Neither fence nor wall nor plowed furrow—but a line in the grass, as if it had 
been closely mown perhaps two handspans wide. He nudged Arranha. “Is that the 
track of some demon?”
“You saw it! Good. That’s the kapristi boundary line. Many humans don’t notice—”
“Any farmer would,” said Gird. “How do they mow it so evenly? How do they keep 
the line? I don’t see any endstones.”
“They don’t need endstones: it’s their domain, and they set the line where they 
will. Our people no longer dispute it, and yours never did, being wiser.”
“And now?”
“Now we call, and then wait. Remember what I’ve told you: they’re absolutely 
honest and fair, but they demand the same of others. They give nothing; fair 
exchange is their rule. They will not take simple courtesies amiss, but they 
will not return them. Expect no thanks, if a bargain is struck, and don’t expect 
to get any more for asking please.” Arranha led the way up to the boundary, and 
called upslope in words Gird did not know. “Kapristi speech, of course,” he 
answered Gird’s question.
“But no one’s around,” said Gird.
“No humans, no. But a dozen kapristi could be a stone’s throw from here, and 
you’d not know it unless they wanted you to. This is their land, Gird; make no 
assumptions about what you do not know.”
I’m not, Gird thought silently. He watched the slope above them, as it roughened 
into rocky outcrops of some gray stone streaked with black. Rockfolk. Elder 
folk, like the blackcloak, the kuaknom, he had seen. Like the treesinging elves 
he had not seen. Even more like the dwarves of legend, who sang gold out of the 
deep mountain rocks, and made jewels by squeezing rock in their hard fists. Folk 
created before humankind, who might see humans as he saw the Aarean magelords: 
intruders, dangerous, enemies.
Rocks moved, coming down the slope. He blinked warily, and they were not rocks, 
but small gray men. Kapristi, not men, he reminded himself. Gnomes out of 
fireside stories, all cautionary: what happened to the man who tried to cheat a 
gnome, the woman who hired a gnome to clean the chimney, the child whose goats 
strayed over the gnome’s boundary. As a child, he’d thought that last story 
silly, but back then he’d assumed that the gnome lands had a tall wall around 
them, that the boy must have pretended his goats got in as an excuse to climb 
the walls and see for himself what treasures the gnomes had.
The gnomes (he felt slightly more comfortable with his peoples’ name for them in 
his mind) moved with steady precision, nothing at all like men slipping and 
clomping down a slope. Six of them, all looking (to his eye) much alike. They 
loosed no shower of stones, no bits of turf, to roll before them. They had 
narrow clean-shaven faces (or did they not grow beards?) under close-cropped 
dark hair. Although they barely came up to his chest, he could not have confused 
them with boys—no boy moved with such economy, or had such hardness of face. 
They all wore gray: belted jerkins over long-sleeved shirts, narrow gray trews 
tucked neatly into gray boots. Jerkins and trews might have been leather; the 
shirts were wool.
Meanwhile, Arranha had bowed and spoken again in their angular tongue. Gird 
heard his own name mentioned, and glanced at Arranha, then looked back at the 
gnomes. The apparent leader was looking at him, a speculative look that made 
Gird feel like a carthorse up for sale. He could feel his ears and neck getting 
hot. Finally, Arranha turned to him again.
“Gird, this is Lawmaster Karik—that’s not all of his name, but that’s the polite 
way for a human to speak to him. I have told him about you, and he has agreed to 
speak with you. He has not, however, agreed to let you enter kapristi lands: he 
will speak with you here, across the line.”
If it had not been for Arranha’s gaze, Gird would have turned on his heel and 
stomped away. They didn’t trust him, that’s what it was, and he had done nothing 
to earn their distrust. Yet, said a voice in his mind. Arranha had told him of 
the Aarean nobles’ attempt to take gnomish lands; they had reason to distrust 
humans.
Gird choked back all he wanted to say, and bowed awkwardly at the gnomish 
leader.
“Lawmaster Karik—”
“Gird? You have no clan-name?”
“Dorthan Selis’s son was my father; but our clan name was lost. Our lord was 
Kelaive, whose subject-name I refuse.”
“Ah.” A gabble of gnomish between the leader and another of his group. Then the 
leader turned back to Gird. “It is that you have no master? No clan? No 
allegiance? You are without law?”
Gird stared. What were they driving at? He looked at Arranha, who said nothing, 
and wanted to smack that smug smile off the priest’s face… except that it 
wouldn’t work. He cleared his throat, and then realized that a wad of spit could 
be misunderstood. He swallowed it. The gnomes waited, motionless but not 
unattending.
“Lawmaster Karik, our lord destroyed our law.” That got attention; he could 
almost feel the intensity of their interest. “I came seeking law—a way to make 
things fair.”
“Things are fair, human farmer: it is living beings who may choose unfairness. 
Are you a god, to know justice and give judgment?”
Gird shook his head, hoping the gnomes had the same gesture. “No god at all, 
Lawmaster, but a man seeking knowledge. I know unfairness when I see it: short 
weight, shoddy work, carelessness that causes injury, stealing and lying—but 
Arranha has taught me that knowing wrong is not all I need to do right.”
“And he brought you here? Or did you seek us on your own?”
“I—he would have taught me his rules, Lawmaster. He showed me that the magelords 
have broken the Rules of Aare, changed their meanings… but I want nothing of 
those old rules. I want new rules, better rules, that cannot be so 
misunderstood.”
The Lawmaster turned to Arranha. “Here is a strange being. You told us once that 
the serfs had no wit for law.”
“I was wrong.” Arranha bowed, first at the Lawmaster, then at Gird. “When Gird 
and I first met, I thought he was a common outlaw—a rabble-rouser who wanted 
only vengeance for injuries done. And indeed, he had suffered injuries enough. 
But he has more—”
“Indeed.” The Lawmaster’s dark, enigmatic gaze returned to Gird. “And you, Gird 
son of Dorthan son of Selis, you must know we give nothing: that is fairness, 
good for good and evil for evil. What can you give, for the knowledge you seek?”
“My pledge. Arranha said you had no law between your people and ours except by 
steel. If our side wins, I pledge a rule of law that protects all boundaries, 
yours and ours, and my own strength to enforce it.”
“You could be killed in a season, and your debt to us would not be paid. Or your 
cause could fail, easily enough… though I hear you are trying to teach 
discipline to idle human rabble…”
“Not idle, Lawmaster, but by the magelords’ illwill.”
“Hmph.” The Lawmaster looked hard at Gird, then said, “Will you give the pledge 
of your hand and heart, to do all in your power to restore justice to these 
disputed lands?”
“Yes.”
“Then come over the boundary, and I will teach.”
  
For all that he had thought he was nervous under an open sky, Gird found that 
winter season mured in the gnome’s halls almost intolerable. Rock beneath his 
feet, rock overhead, rock walls never far away on either hand. Nothing to see 
but rock, however finely dressed. He saw no beauty in the austere fluting of 
columns, the majestic proportion of the ceremonial halls. His hosts soon knew 
this, and his most constant guide once sniffed, “If you want splendor, Gird, if 
you want stone wrought into the likeness of beasts and birds and trees, studded 
with shining jewels and clad in gold and silver, if you want harp music and 
singing, you should have chosen our cousins. Dwarves chose splendor; they are 
all gold and blood, generous or deadly as the passion takes them. But you wanted 
law, you said, and that is what we live.”
“You do trade jewels,” Gird said. He had seen them once, laid in a precise 
pattern on black cloth for an apprentice to value.
“We do. We are rockfolk, after all; the rock speaks to us as trees speak to the 
sinyi.” The gnome sighed heavily at Gird’s blank look. “Elves, that is: the 
first born singers, those of silver blood. The rock is ours, and the rock 
returns to us in its treasures what we give of wisdom and loyalty.”
“Like cows,” Gird murmured; the gnome glared him.
“It is nothing like cows. You eat cows.”
Gird did not argue—he could not win arguments with the gnomes—but he thought it 
was the same. He had loved his cows, cared for them, and out of that love and 
care had come the bounty of milk and meat and hide.
Most of his time, especially at first, he spent with Lawmaster Karik in a quiet, 
brightly-lit room lined with shelves full of books— the first he’d ever seen—and 
scrolls.
Lawmaster Karik insisted that Gird must learn to read and write—to gnomish 
standards—and calculate with their figures.
“Law is too important to be left to your memory,” he said. Gird could tell that 
this, like most that he said, was not negotiable. “You must write it down, and 
in courts of law it must be there for reference. Likewise contracts: you 
understand the importance of honest exchange, but how can that be adjudicated if 
the terms of the contract are in question? It must all be written down.”
“But my people don’t usually read and write,” Gird said.
“They must learn.” Lawmaster Karik tapped the heavy slates on which he had 
marked the gnomish runes. “If it happens that some cannot learn, then someone 
who reads and writes must stand for that person before the law. We have few so 
lacking in wit; we must hope that among your people it is also rare. Is it true 
you know nothing of written speech?”
Gird felt himself flushing again; in a moment he would start sweating. “They—I 
tried to learn, when my lord’s guard recruited me.”
“Well? Can you read, or not?”
He was sweating; he felt huge and clumsy and stupid next to the precise gray 
figure of the gnome, whose face never showed emotion. “Very little,” he said 
unwillingly.
“You will learn. As it is a necessary precondition to your learning how to 
devise a workable system of law for your imperfect people, and as we did not 
ascertain before we contracted with you to teach you law, it is to our loss that 
this is assigned, and you will not incur any greater obligation because of it.” 
The gnomish clerk who accompanied Lawmaster Karik to the lessons noted this 
down; Gird suddenly realized that what he had done originally had also been put 
down as a written contract. “You must learn rapidly, Gird, if you are to be in 
time to begin your war in the correct season.”
To Gird’s surprise, the gnomish script came easier than the Aarean had—or 
perhaps it was the absolute lack of distractions, and his fear that he might 
have to stay there forever if he did not learn. More quickly than he dared hope, 
he was able to sound his way through a passage of law that the gnomes had 
translated for him. They had turned aside his attempts to learn their language: 
“There is not time,” all of them said.
“If it is when a contract made that one party agrees to hold the other not 
liable in case of death, then it is lawful for the death of that second party to 
clear the obligation from his own heirs, but if that second party has partners 
in work, then it is not lawful, even if it is so when the contract is made.” 
Gird came to the end of that proud of his ability to read, but unsure of the 
implications for a farmer whose cow dies before it is delivered to the buyer.
Lawmaster Karik said, “A cow cannot be a party to contract: the death of the cow 
has nothing to do with it. It is the death of the farmer that might apply, if 
the buyer agreed that the farmer’s death meant the farmer’s heirs need not 
deliver the cow.”
“But if he has not paid for the cow, why should he expect it if the farmer has 
died?”
“Suppose he has paid for it, expecting it to come.”
“That’s not how we sell cows,” Gird said. He knew about that; no farmer in his 
right mind would pay for a cow that did not stand foursquare and in milk before 
his eyes. The Lawmaster looked at him, and he felt that he must have said 
something stupid.
“Let it not be cows,” the Lawmaster said, “Even among men, it is common that one 
buys something for delivery later. One may provide cloth to a tailor, who will 
make clothes of it. One may send fruit or cheese or grain to a fair, and expect 
goods or coin to come back.” Gird had to admit that some people did things that 
way; he thought it was unnecessarily risky. “You, yourself,” the Lawmaster 
insisted. “You send men out to bring back supplies, do you not?” He did, but 
most of those were gifts, not paid for, and he knew very well what the gnomes 
thought of that. To prevent more argument, he nodded.
“So if someone buys something not present, and the person selling it should die 
before delivering it… then, if it was agreed beforehand, his death cancels the 
debt?”
“That is what that passage says.”
“But does the seller’s heir keep the price?”
A flicker of interest on the Lawmaster’s face. “An excellent question! That is 
in the following passage, which you may now read.”
Gird cursed himself silently, and put his thick finger on the first symbols of 
the next line. Another miserable passage of legalese. The matter turned, he 
learned as he read, on whether the goods exchanged for the undelivered goods 
were perishable, consumable, or durable. If someone traded soft fruits for 
grain, the grain to be delivered, the soft fruits might have spoiled, or been 
eaten, before the nondelivery occurred (counting, the gnomish law specified, the 
days between making the contract and expected delivery, before nondelivery could 
be charged.) Perishable goods fell under one section of law, and consumable 
goods under another.
“For example,” the Lawmaster said, “if someone trades cloth to a tailor for 
clothing made… if the tailor cuts the cloth, but then dies before the garment is 
made… you see that cloth is consumable, and properly so. That is a different 
situation from a tailor who sold that cloth to someone else, and then died. In 
the first case, supposing the original contract to have had a death clause, the 
tailor’s heirs would not have to return the cut cloth. But in the second, they 
would owe the price they received for it.”
The more he studied, the more Gird saw that the gnomish law did make plain 
sense. Absolute honesty, absolute fairness in exchange: all the laws came down 
to this, and nothing intruded. They had a rigid rank structure, but rank had 
nothing to do with law… at least, the law of exchange, which made all equal… 
that “one measure for all” that Arranha had mentioned. He could see how it would 
work among humans—at least, among humans who wanted it to work. It was what he 
wanted for his people, fair laws; surely they all wanted the same.
Lawmaster Karik began to give him simple cases to examine. Gird found judging 
harder than he had expected, particularly when Karik insisted that intent and 
circumstance made no difference to the law.
“If someone means well, but does ill, the ill is still done—and the consequences 
still exist. Besides, if intent forgives wrong, then any wrongdoer can claim 
good intent.”
“But it’s obvious,” said Gird. “I could tell if someone meant to do wrong, or 
just erred.”
“Could you? Suppose someone stole a measure of grain, claiming it was to save a 
family member from starving…”
“Find out if the person is starving,” said Gird promptly. Karik shook his head. 
“Suppose the thief had plenty of grain of his own, but chose to steal someone 
else’s rather than fulfill his own family obligation. Suppose the thief had 
money, with which to buy grain, but again chose to steal it. Suppose—”
“All right.” Gird held up his hand. “I understand. But surely there are times 
when circumstances make a difference.”
Karik nodded slowly. “There are. No code of law can speak to all circumstances, 
even among gnomes, and among your undisciplined people I foresee great 
confusion. But for every exception you make to a rule, Gird, more will try to 
force their circumstances into that exception. As plants growing between set 
stones force them apart, the roots of the plants seek every weakness in the 
stone.” Gird suddenly realized that Karik identified with the stone—that all the 
rockfolk would—where his sympathies had always been with the plants that broke 
stones apart. Even when it meant mending a wall, he had admired the delicate 
mosses and ferns that had persevered in their attack on it. He pushed this 
thought away, and came back to the subject. He had always assumed that the 
gnomes would feel as he did about Kelaive’s treatment of Meris, that the 
punishment was far more than a boy’s prank deserved. Now he asked.
Karik listened to all the details before saying anything. Then he had questions 
Gird had never thought of, and only after offered his opinion.
“The right relation of punishment to wrongdoing is a subject in itself,” he 
began. “In our law, the obligation is to restore, so far as possible, the right 
relation between the parties. Thus if you should steal a measure of grain, you 
would have to replace it—or its value—and also pay a fine to the court, to cover 
the cost of trying the case. We use punishment only for younglings, but some 
human systems extend punishment to adult humans, and in our view fail to 
distinguish properly between punishment and restoration. Some things, of course, 
admit of no restoration: injury that results in permanent loss of function, 
death, the breakage or loss of some singular, irreplaceable object. This is 
difficult to judge, although we have standards.
“In the case you speak of, you are not arguing that the wrongdoer was not 
guilty, but that the punishment was too great. On that basis alone, I would 
agree. But if the fine for a theft of so much fruit were a certain amount, the 
thief’s age would make no difference. Circumstance should not change the 
judgment, assuming the law to be just in the first place. Kelaive seems to have 
had no law beyond his own pleasure: this does not make the boy’s thieving less 
wrong, but adds another wrong—the lord’s wrong—to it.”
“I still think there are times—” Gird began. Karik waved him to silence.
“You have never lived under a just code of law; you cannot be expected to 
understand how it would be. We shall do our best to teach you, and hope you can 
teach others, and in time your people may approach justice.” With that Gird had 
to be content.
In the course of learning law, Gird answered the gnomes’ questions about the way 
he organized his troops. He had not forgotten what Arranha said about the 
gnomes’ fighting ability. Perhaps he could find something to trade for their 
knowledge—but nothing occurred to him. The offer came, to his surprise, from the 
other side, many hands of days after he had made good progress with Karik.
He and Arranha met with a group of gnomes in one of the formal halls; Arranha 
had explained that he’d been asked to translate. After a few exchanges of formal 
greetings, one of the gnomes spoke steadily for several minutes. Finally Arranha 
turned to Gird.
“They would like to contract with you to provide military knowledge in return 
for your help in a specific battle. They think you need this knowledge, and may 
not win your war without it; they have been impressed by your diligence in your 
study of law, and your lawful nature. But, they point out, you seem to have no 
knowledge of strategy, and little of tactics. This they can provide. Are you 
interested?”
Of course he was interested, but for what kind of battle did they need his help, 
if they could defeat the magelords on their own? He framed that question as 
tactfully as he might, for Arranha to translate, but the gnomes could follow his 
speech well enough and began to answer at once. They could give him no details 
until they knew more of his abilities, but they wanted the Aareans lured into a 
trap… the Aareans were too wary, now, to come after gnomes if nothing else was 
involved.
Gird stared at the blank grayish faces, all too aware of his own limited 
experience. He wanted—no, needed—the expertise they had; he had been allowed to 
see a unit of gnomish guards drilling once, and he lusted after that knowledge. 
But what would it cost? By their own law, they had to deal fairly with him… 
though his notion of fairness went far astray from theirs. Was this a place in 
which they overlapped?
They did not rush him. He sat a long time, or so it seemed, in silence, and when 
he finally nodded, and then slowly read the contract and signed his 
name—shakily, but legibly—they bowed stiffly and left him alone with Arranha.
The next day, Lawmaster Karik introduced him to Warmaster Ketik, who turned him 
over to Armsmaster Setik. Not for the first time, he wondered if the gnomes 
chose their names to sound like beetle-clicks. It was not a question he could 
ask. Armsmaster Setik had the first scar he had seen on a gnomish face, two of 
them, in fact. Gird had expected a larger, brawnier gnome, but Setik was built 
like all the rest. He walked around Gird like a child around a trade-fair 
wrestler, looking him up and down, then snapped a question at the interpreter 
who had come along. “Are all humans your size, he asks?”
Gird shook his head. “No—they come from this high—” he gestured, “to this high—a 
hand taller than I am. Some are built thin, and some heavy, at every height.”
“And what are your weapons?”
Gird listed them—the ones they’d used so far, and the ones he’d thought 
possibilities. The Armsmaster listened in the usual expressionless silence, and 
then uttered a brief comment which the interpreter did not immediately explain. 
“What?” asked Gird finally. The interpreter’s mouth twitched. “He said 
‘Ridiculous!’”
Gird felt the back of his neck getting hot. It was not ridiculous; he had won a 
battle with just those weapons. The Armsmaster watched him out of black, shiny 
eyes like seeds. Gird struggled with his anger, all too visibly he was sure, and 
said, “It worked well enough.” This time the Armsmaster’s question was obvious 
enough that he began answering before the translator finished, squatting to draw 
on the floor with his finger the little battle of Norwalk Sheepfolds. The 
Armsmaster sat on his heels, watching, absorbed in the recital. But ultimately 
unconvinced; when Gird finished, he began a rapid commentary in gnomish, and 
Gird knew, before the translator began, that it was critical.
“He says you were lucky. He says you made fundamental errors in placement of 
scouts, signalling methods, and in choice of ground. He says if you do that very 
often, you will kill all your people and lose your war.“
Gird had long suspected that his apparent success at Norwalk Sheepfolds had been 
more luck than skill, but he did not like hearing that hasty analysis by someone 
who hadn’t even been there. Someone who was used to drilling with experienced 
(and disciplined) gnomes, who would not have to stop a panicky rout just before 
a fight, who had time to pick the right ground, and dependable people to work 
with. He wanted to say all that, until the gnomes understood, but the 
Armsmaster’s shiny dark eyes offered no sympathy. He wanted to say they’d won 
anyway, despite his mistakes (if the problem had really been his mistakes) but 
he met a closed, expressionless face that was not about to change its mind.
“So what should I have done?” he asked, not quite successful at keeping the 
sarcasm out of his voice.
“He says you will know when he has finished training you.”
Gnomish military training was to the training his old guard sergeant had given 
as Mali’s cooking had been to his mother’s. He had been proud of his troop’s 
drill—now, for the first time in his life, he saw absolute precision, and 
realized how sloppy even his old sergeant had been.
“It did not require much to impress peasants who had nothing,” the Armsmaster 
said. The three units of gnomes who had just shown off would have impressed 
anyone, Gird was sure. They had moved forward, backward, sideways, opening and 
closing ranks, had marched one unit through another, and had come out the other 
end of a long string of commands in the same close, crisp formation they’d 
begun. “You will not get this, from your humans who are not all the same size 
and shape. But you can come closer than you have.”
Gird felt like a clumsy, not-too-bright recruit again, trapped in the middle of 
a formation of gnomes not quite shoulder high on him. But he learned—learned not 
only how to move, but why. That notion of a pincushion that he had had, when he 
ran around turning his people in place at Norwalk: that had a name, and the 
right commands to achieve it whenever he wanted, from any other formation. He 
had always assumed that he needed a large uncumbered space for drill, the gnomes 
taught him to move a unit quickly and precisely in a room cluttered with 
supplies, to judge the space available and come up with the commands needed.
He discovered that the wrestling ability which had dumped both Cob and Triga was 
the very first level the gnomish younglings learned. Armsmaster Setik dumped him 
repeatedly, no matter what approach he took. “You’re too short,” he complained 
once, bruised and winded from several hard falls. “I can’t get a grip on you— 
and besides, you rockfolk are stronger.” Setik grabbed his wrist and pulled him 
up.
“We are not stronger. We know how to use our strength. Can you lift that?” That 
was a barrel of meal. Gird shrugged, and tried. It was heavy, but he had lifted 
heavier. Setik put his arms around it and heaved, but it did not lift. “You see? 
You are stronger, in plain strength. It can be very useful. But you do not know 
how to use that strength. You want to jump at me and do the work yourself. Make 
me do the work.”
They drilled with sticks very similar to those Gird’s people used. Setik 
insisted they must all be the same, no matter the size of the fighter. Gird 
thought that was another expression of the gnomish need for order, but Setik 
disagreed. “First: they must all be the same so that your fighting formation can 
have the same intervals without chancing an accidental blow. Second: they must 
all be the same so that when one breaks, or someone drops one, that fighter will 
be comfortable with any replacement. Each weapon has its own best blows; some 
are similar, but in battle a single mistake chances death. Chance is your enemy, 
Gird—do not depend on luck. Depend on skill, drill, strength, endurance, 
tactics: what you know, what you can do. If that is not enough, chance will not 
save you.”
“But what about our tools? I thought we could use farm tools— we did use them.”
Setik snapped a command at one of the others, who went jogging off to the 
gnomish armory, and returned festooned with agricultural implements. Setik 
picked up a scythe. “Show me how your people used this at Norwalk.”
Gird hefted it, enjoying as always the very balance and swing of it, then 
shifted the handgrips for a better overhand stroke, and lifted it. It made an 
awkward chopping weapon, harder to control than a mattock, but it could reach 
over others and deliver a solid blow to a head or back. He had seen only two of 
the successful strokes, both oblique downward swings that ended in a soldier’s 
back. He demonstrated on the straw-filled leather dummy set up in the middle of 
the chamber.
“I thought at first of swinging it as usual,” he explained. “It could take off a 
leg. But the backswing’s too dangerous—there’s no way to control it in 
formation.”
“That’s what I thought.” Setik scratched his head. “We had a weapon more like a 
mattock, used with a similar stroke but easier to handle because it balances 
better. That great long blade out there, and the curving handle, make this one 
very unbalanced. And even you, with your strength, could not swing it sideways 
at head level.”
“Even if I could, the greatest danger is to the person on my left and behind. 
I’ve seen someone killed like that in harvest, a scythe-tip buried in his 
belly.”
“Good individual defense,” Setik muttered. “One man against several armed—that 
might work. Sharpen the outer edge of the blade as well. But not a good 
formation weapon. I suppose you use the shovel like the pole?”
“Yes, but it has that edge.”
“Hmmm. What we call a broadpike. It would also work with a sharp downward 
stroke, but that would not fend off the enemy’s. These little things you 
mentioned, sickles and firetongs and such— good for brawls, maybe, or defense 
when surprised by an enemy while working—but not for your army.” Setik went down 
the list, explaining and demonstrating why each tool was not worth using as a 
weapon, “unless you have nothing else. But I would not waste my time drilling 
with them. If you are fighting with trained units against real soldiers, you 
need a formation weapon. We use polearms, to give us reach, a hauk in close 
fighting, and archers… do your people know archery at all?”
A hauk, when Gird asked, was a short stick, a club, which could be used for 
training, or for cracking heads—it reminded him of the guards’ billets and 
maces. The gnomes in formation had hauks thrust into their belts behind their 
backs, ready to grab when needed. Gird learned how to handle all the gnomish 
polearms correctly; Setik recommended that he settle on one, fairly easily made, 
for his own army. “A simple spike on the end of your pole will do,” Setik said, 
“and any smith can make that from scrap metal— those scythe blades, for 
instance. A real pikehead is better, and you could use broadpikes, but that 
takes more metal, and more skill in smithing. Sharpening the pole itself is 
better than nothing, but wood alone is not likely to penetrate metal armor—if 
that’s what they’re wearing.”
Setik knew exactly how footsoldiers with pikes should maneuver against cavalry; 
Gird’s rude guesses, based on practice with men on logs, came close but would, 
Setik said, cost him too many soldiers. Archers were the worst threat; the 
gnomes dealt with enemy bowmen by having better bowmen of their own. Gird was 
not sure his people could learn that fast. He himself had never been better than 
average with a bow. And the art of making good bows and good arrows—strong 
enough to be useful in war—had passed from his people to the Aarean lords. 
Peasants had not been allowed to have bows, or make bows; what they had now 
could take small birds and animals, but no more. Setik shook his head, and 
explained to Gird again just how much damage an unopposed group of archers could 
do. The implication was clear: learn this, somehow, or die for its lack. Gird 
began to consider who among his people might know a clandestine archery 
expert—someone far to the north, who might have friends or family among the 
horse nomads, whose bows the Finaareans respected, perhaps.
Days passed; Gird was no longer sure how many. The gnomes did not celebrate 
Midwinter, and refused to interrupt his lessons for it. He hoped the gods would 
forgive him, this once—perhaps, since he was underground, among gnomes, they 
would not know. That didn’t seem likely; the gnomes certainly thought that the 
High Lord, the great Judge, knew everything above ground or below.
He felt stuffed with new knowledge, things that made perfect sense during the 
lessons but came apart in his mind afterward like windblown puffballs. The 
Warmaster had been appalled to discover that Gird had no idea how many of the 
lords there were, or how many soldiers they had. That Gird could not draw an 
accurate map of Finaarenis and the surrounding lands. That he did not know who 
the king was, or how the king was related to the various nobles, or how the land 
was governed. They poured all this into him, day after day, every minute of his 
waking hours filled and overfilled with new knowledge. He had never known there 
was that much knowledge in the whole world, and he wished he hadn’t found it 
out. Even with the gnomes’ organizing skills, he found himself remembering the 
name of a town when he wanted the number of stones of grain needed to feed a 
hundred men on march for two hands of days, or coming up with the right way to 
place scouts to watch a tradeway when he wanted the command that split a column 
marching forward into two columns, one of which was veering off to the right. He 
could imagine himself in the midst of battle calling out the exceptions to 
liability for delivery of spoiled perishables instead of the right commands, and 
he sweated all the worse for it. This struggle was no easier that he did not 
know how long it would last: how long he had to learn what—he now agreed—he 
needed to learn. Years would not have been enough; he had started with a bare 
half-year, if he was going to lead the war in the next season. He would have 
fretted about that, if he had had time. Instead, the worry seeped into his other 
thoughts like a drop of dye into water, coloring every moment with fear he had 
not named.
He would have discussed it with Arranha, but the priest was often away when Gird 
returned to his assigned quarters and fell into bed.
At last, with no warning (at least nothing he had noticed) he and Arranha were 
summoned to the largest of the ceremonial halls, where a crowd of gnomes had 
assembled. Silently, Gird noticed; there was none of the whispering or 
chattering of a human crowd. Lawmaster Karik (one of the four or five he had 
finally learned to recognize at sight) led Gird to the front of the chamber, and 
spoke lengthily in gnomish. Then he turned to Gird.
“It is time to send you out, if you would be at your encampment before your 
people are sure we have killed you. Remember your contracts with us; we have 
delivered to you that which we promised. You have your obligation.”
At least he knew the correct response. “I acknowledge receipt of your knowledge 
and training; I admit my obligation, and swear to fulfill it to the length of my 
life.”
“Witnessed.” That brought a stir, and the chorus from all. “Witnessed.”
A chill went down his back. He fully intended to carry out all he had promised, 
but that “witnessed” meant uncounted gnome pikes at his back if he failed.



Chapter Twenty
« ^ » 
He had known he missed the sun—even the thin, cold sunlight of winter—but not 
until he came out into that remembered beauty, and rested his gaze on a horizon 
impossibly distant, did he know how much. Tears stung his eyes. It had hurt, in 
ways he could not define, to have his vision trapped between walls so long. It 
had hurt to have sounds reverberating in those walls, quiet as the gnomes had 
been. It had hurt to smell no live wind, with its infinitely varying smells, its 
constantly changing pressures on his skin. They had led him out into a morning 
of softly falling rain, a cold spring rain that still held a threat of late 
snow. Between the showers that fell curtainlike here and there he could see long 
tawny slopes, dark patches of woodland, the soft lavender and muted burgandy of 
sap-swollen buds coloring what had been gray. He heard the soft whisper of the 
rain on sodden grass, the distant gurgle of water running away downhill, a vast 
silence between the sounds where nothing would echo. Cold and damp as it was, it 
soothed the inside of his nose, easing with smells of wet earth and rock the dry 
itch from a season underground with only rockdust and gnomes. His own human 
smell, that he had been aware of as unlike the others, disappeared into that 
freshness.
“We will see you at Blackbone Hill,” said Armsmaster Setik, who had come out 
with Gird. Arranha was staying behind awhile, but had told Gird he would follow 
him later. Gird wondered if Arranha knew about Blackbone Hill; the gnomes 
mentioned the name only when Arranha was not around.
“Yes,” said Gird, drinking in another breath of that air, wondering why the 
ragged, uneven landscape of duns and grays seemed so much more beautiful than 
the careful sculpting of the gnomes’ halls.
“You have the maps.”
“Yes.” As he looked at the land, now, the maps he had been taught to use seemed 
to overlay it. He would go that way, and find a tiny watercourse to lead him 
north and west, then leave that one by a steep-browed hill, and find another 
beyond the hill, and then the wood he almost thought of as his wood…
“And—” Setik looked up at him with an expression Gird could not interpret. “I 
found it most satisfying; for a human, you are— are not unlike a kapristi in 
some ways.”
Gird turned, surprised. The Armsmaster had been even less outgoing than his 
other instructors, if possible. Gird had assumed he would be glad to rid himself 
of a clumsy human oaf. Setik’s brow was furrowed slightly, his scars pulled 
awry.
“You are by nature hasty, as all the lateborn are: hasty to laughter, to anger, 
to hunger—but you forced foresight on yourself, and withheld haste. You have a 
gift for order, for discipline, for what we mean by responsibility.”
“You are a good teacher,” Gird said.
The gnome nodded. “I am, that is true. But the best teacher cannot turn a living 
thing from its nature: I could not make stone grow and bear fruit like a tree. I 
could not teach a tree to fly. Even among us, who are much alike, some have less 
talent for war than others. You have it, and you have what is rare with us—what 
war requires that the rest of our life does not need, and that is a willingness 
to go beyond what is required, into the realm of gift.”
Gird was both puzzled and fascinated. All he had heard, from Lawmaster Karik, 
showed the gnomes’ distrust of gifts, and until now he had not suspected the 
gnomish soldiers thought differently.
Setik smiled suddenly, a change as startling as if rock split in a manic grin.
“War calls for more than fair exchange; we soldiers know what the lawgivers 
cannot understand. Even among us, I say, are some who freely give—and in war 
that giving wins battles. You have that; from what you say, it is a human 
trait.” Abruptly, he stopped, and his face changed back to its former dourness. 
“Go with the High Lord’s judgment,” he said. Gird glanced back at the entrance 
to the gnomes’ caves, so nearly invisible; there stood several others, watching 
and listening.
“You will not take thanks,” he said to Setik, “but among my people it is rude to 
withhold them. I will thank the gods, then, for sending me to such a good 
teacher of war, and ask their grace to keep my mind from scrambling together 
what you so carefully set apart.”
If he had believed the gnomes had any humor whatever, he would have said Setik’s 
black eyes twinkled. “Soldiers of one training are as brothers of one father,” 
the gnome murmured. “Go now, before someone asks awkward questions.”
Gird nodded, saying nothing past the lump in his throat, and headed downslope. 
He stepped carefully across the boundary, and did not look back until he had 
traveled well out of sight of that unambiguous line.
The gnomes had shown him a small, exquisitely carved model of the lands they 
called gnishina, all drained by the great river Gird had never yet seen, from 
the western plains to the sea. All his life Gird had lived among low hills and 
creeks whose windings made no sense to him. He had thought the world was made 
lumpy, like redroots in a pan, until he saw the gnomes’ country, with great 
mountains rising behind a line of hills.
The model made sense of what had seemed random hummocks. He had not understood 
the gnomes’ explanation, but the great concentric arcs of rock were obvious 
enough, with the river dividing them like the cleft of a cow’s hoof. Rows of 
hills, variously shaped by the different kinds of rock in them (he understood 
that much; everyone knew that red rock made rounded slopes, and white rock made 
stepwise ones) bowed sharply away from the river, to run almost parallel to the 
southern mountains as they neared them. Between the hills ran the creeks and 
rivers, all tributaries of the Honnorgat. These stream valleys had formed 
natural routes of travel. Moving a large force north or south was easiest near 
the Honnorgat; moving it east or west was easiest away from the great river.
Once more under the open sky, he could interpret the hills before him for what 
they were: the flanks of a great arch. Going north, he would cross white rock to 
yellow, and yellow to brown, then travel west to come back to yellow and white. 
Just so a man might run his finger from the side of a cow’s hoof to the cleft, 
then forward to the point—and find hoof wall again. More importantly, with his 
understanding of the whole region, and the maps the gnomes had provided, he 
would know where he was—where his army was—and how to get where he wanted to go. 
He hoped.
  
Human lands were scarcely less perilous than the gnome princedoms, though their 
perils were less uncanny. Gadilon might not trouble his gnomish neighbors, for 
fear of their retribution, but he had no intention of letting a peasant uprising 
unseat him. Gird was hardly into that domain when he saw the first patrols, 
seasoned soldiers whose alertness indicated respect for their new enemy. 
Whatever had happened while Gird was underground with the gnomes, it had ended 
all complacency in the outlying holdings. Gird spent an uncomfortable half-day 
lying flat among dripping bushes as the patrols crossed and recrossed the route 
he had planned to take. When dark fell, he extricated himself, muttering curses, 
and edged carefully around the hill and down a noisy watercourse. Here the water 
noises would cover any he made.
Even with his caution, he was nearly caught. If the sentry had not coughed, and 
then spat into the water, Gird would never have known that the dark shadow of a 
boulder was actually a person. He stopped where he was, wondering if he’d been 
seen. Another cough, a muttered curse. Gird crept away from the stream’s edge, 
feeling the ground under his feet carefully. He could not stay here, and he 
could not go back—not without knowing where the other soldiers were. He made his 
way into the tangle of rocks on that side of the stream, and eased his way up 
onto one of the huge boulders. From that height, he could just see a twinkle of 
firelight downstream and below. The sentry had probably been told to climb where 
Gird now was, but up here the night breeze was cold and raw; the man had slid 
down to get out of the wind. Gird flattened himself on the cold hard stone and 
thought about it.
With his gnomish training in mind, if he’d been the person responsible for that 
camp, he’d have had sentries upstream and down, and scattered through the woods. 
Scattered where? His un-gnomish experience told him that men, like the sentry 
whose cough had revealed him, cared for their own comfort. No matter how wisely 
a commander had sent them out, they would each choose a place that combined the 
maximum of personal safety and comfort with sufficient—to that 
individual—performance of the assignment. If he could figure out what that was, 
he could get around the camp in safety. If he made a mistake, they would all be 
after him.
One simple answer was to backtrack upstream and swing wide around the camp. That 
would work if he didn’t then run into another patrol. He could think of no 
reason why Gadilon would have another patrol out to the south, but who could 
read the lords’ intent? Or he could try to angle away from the stream, through 
the brush and woods, and hope to avoid any other sentries without losing so much 
ground. If the streamside sentry represented the distance from the camp that all 
of them were posted, that should be possible. He was still debating this with 
himself when he heard horses’ hooves in the distance, a cry of alarm from the 
camp, and a trumpet call. The sentry below him gasped, and started back for the 
camp at a run, falling over rocks and bellowing as he went.
Gird stayed where he was, trying to understand what was going on. More lights 
appeared: flickering torches moving between the trees. Loud cries, shouted 
commands, responses from distant sentries. He felt a little smug that they were 
coming from the radius he’d guessed. He wished he could get closer, and had 
started down from the rock when he heard the unmistakeable clash of steel on 
steel. More yelling, more screams, more noise of hoofs, weapons, another trumpet 
blast cut off in mid-cry. He could hear noise coming his way, as several men 
thrashed through the undergrowth, stumbled over obstructions. They came near 
enough that he could hear their gasping breath, the jingle of their buckles and 
mail, the creak of leather. Behind them were more; someone shouted “There they 
go!”
With a crunch of boots on gravel, they were beneath him. He could just make out 
two or three dark forms against the starlit water, the gleam of starlight along 
a weapon’s blade. One there was wounded, groaning a little with every gasping 
breath. Gird lay motionless, hoping no one would notice the large shadow flat on 
the top of the boulder.
“Don’t let ’em get away!” he heard from downstream. “Follow that blood trail.” 
One of the men below him cursed viciously.
“We got to move,” he said. “They’ll find us, and—”
“Per can’t go farther,” said another. “We’ll have to fight ’em off.”
“We can’t.” A pause, then, “We’ll have to leave ’im. He’s the blood trail, 
anyway. They find him, dead, they’ll think that’s it.”
“No! They’ll know he couldn’t have got this far alone. ’Sides, he’s my sister’s 
husband; I’m not leaving him.”
“Suit yourself.” One of the shadows splashed into the stream, and started 
across. The other threw a low-voiced curse after him, and backed against the 
rock on which Gird lay.
Now the pursuers were in sight, the light of their torches swinging wildly 
through the trees. Gird saw rough, bearded faces, men wearing no livery, or even 
normal clothes, but the skins of wild animals roughly tanned and crudely 
fashioned. They carried swords and pikes, stained already with blood. Gird dared 
not lean out from his perch to see the men at the foot of his rock—but he 
suspected that they were Gadilon’s soldiers, in his livery, and these others 
were—what? Not any he had trained, he was sure, but who? Gadilon’s peasants?
He slid back carefully over the crest of the boulder, hoping that their 
attention was fixed on the men below. What happened then was clear enough by the 
sound of it: a low growl of anticipation from the pursuers, a challenge by the 
one man still able to fight, and bloody butchery thereafter. It did not last 
long. One of the attackers said, “There was another—look here, he took to the 
water.”
“No matter. We’ll find ’im by day, or let ’im carry word to his lord—he’ll get 
no comfort of it. One back from each patrol will do us no harm.” Then the 
speaker raised his voice to carry over the stream’s chuckle. “Hey—you coward! 
You count’s man! Go tell yer count what happened, and tell ’im ’twas Gird and 
his yeomen! Tell ’im to shake in ’is boots, while he has ’em to shake in.”
Gird felt the blood rush to his skin at that; he nearly jumped up where he stood 
to deny it. How dare they use his name! His ears roared with the pressure of his 
anger; as his hearing cleared, he heard one of the men laugh.
“Diss, what’re you playing at? D’you really think the count’ll believe this 
night’s work was Gird’s?”
“What do I care? If he thinks it’s peasants, he’ll ride his peasants harder, and 
spend less time looking for brigands. If he blames every robbery and ambush in 
his domain on peasants, isn’t that good for us? And if he doesn’t believe it—if 
he thinks to himself it’s a trick of brigands—he’ll wonder why brigands would 
lay that crime on peasants. If maybe we’re allies. And the peasants… if they’ll 
skimp to send grain to Gird’s yeomen, why not to us—if we convince them we’re 
with them.”
Gird dug his fingers into the rock to keep himself from plunging right into 
that—which was the same, he knew, as plunging a knife in his neck. The brigands 
all laughed; he heard them stripping the bodies of the count’s soldiers, before 
they left them naked and unprotected in the night, to return to the fire and 
carousing with the guard-sergeant’s ration of ale. Gird heard them ride away, in 
the hours before dawn. He waited until he could see clearly before slithering 
down from his perch, stiff and miserable, to see for himself what they’d done.
The dead soldiers looked no different from any other dead; he had not forgotten, 
in his half-year with the gnomes, how the dead looked and smelled. He squatted 
beside them and closed their eyes with pebbles. They were enemies, but not now 
his; he had not killed them, and he felt he owed them that basic courtesy. They 
had stiffened; he could not straighten their limbs. But he found mint already 
green beside the creek, and laid a sprig on each of them. Then he plucked a 
handful of it, and went toward the deserted camp. There he put mint on each of 
the dead, soldier and brigand alike, unsure why he was doing it except that it 
felt right. This was not his fight; he disliked both sides with equal intensity.
The brigands had stripped the soldiers of weapons, armor, clothes, and money (or 
so Gird judged, finding a couple of copper crabs trampled into the ground), but 
had left behind what food they had not eaten themselves. Gird saw no reason not 
to take it. He stuffed the flat loaves and half a cheese into his shirt. At the 
soldiers’ picket lines, he found the cut ends of ropes where the brigands had 
stolen the horses; continuing downstream, he found another dead soldier, the 
downstream sentry.
He went as warily as he could, aware that he now had two sets of enemies: when 
Gadilon found out about his patrol, these hills would hum with soldiery, but at 
the same time the brigands would not be happy to find a real Gird in their 
midst. By midday, he had put a good distance between himself and the site of the 
brigand attack, but he felt no safer. The gnomish maps told him that he needed 
to cross all Gadilon’s domain, south to north, then open sheep pastures shared 
between several lords and peasant villages, before he would be back in territory 
he knew by sight. The nearest barton—as of the previous fall, he reminded 
himself—was a group of shepherds who called their settlement Farmeet.
His most direct route took him across a trade road that connected Gadilon’s 
towns with those in Tsaia to the east and lerin, the most southwesterly town in 
Finaarenis. The gnomes had pointed out that he must, eventually, control traffic 
on this road in order to secure either southern quadrant of the realm. Like the 
River Road, along the southern bank of the Honnorgat in the north, the southern 
trade road allowed the lords to move soldiers and supplies easily from one 
fortified town to another. Gird himself found moving across country easier, but 
the gnomes had insisted that no organized army could travel like a single man or 
a small group.
Gird made it to the road with only one more close brush with a patrol (he had 
hidden in a dense cedar as the men rode by underneath, discussing the deaths of 
their friends in the ambush Gird had seen. He was dismayed to find that they 
assumed peasants had done it—and that the peasants and brigands were in league.) 
Now he peered from a thick growth of plums, all white with bloom, at a rutted 
track that seemed deserted. A horseman had ridden by sometime before; he’d heard 
the hoofbeats, and he could see fresh tracks overlying older ones. He leaned 
forward a little, shivering the plums, and the bees in the blossoms lifted with 
a whine to their buzz. Bees didn’t bother him (he wondered where their hive 
was), but he still could not tell if anyone was on the other side, watching. The 
soldiers had said something about closing the trade road, keeping the peasants 
from using it or crossing it. That would take sentries all along the way—surely 
they weren’t doing that— but he would hate to take an arrow in the neck finding 
out.
Something chuffed, across the track. Gird held very still. A deer burst through 
the plums there, paused in the track, ears wide and tail high, and chuffed 
again. Even as Gird heard the snap of a bowstring, an arrow thunked into the 
deer and it staggered, limped a stride, and fell awkwardly. Three men dressed 
alike crashed through the undergrowth, lashed the deer’s carcass to a pole, and 
disappeared back into the wood on the far side of the road, without a glance 
toward Gird. Their silent cooperation convinced Gird that they worked together 
constantly, but he had no idea whether they were foresters, soldiers, or 
brigands. Or, for that matter, poaching peasants. He could hear their progress 
through the wood; taking a chance that anyone else watching would be attracted 
by that noise, he darted across the road and into the trees, then swung wide of 
their path.
He wished he dared speak to them. That archer had been powerful and accurate; 
that’s what the gnomes said he needed. If those were peasants, poaching deer, 
then he might find a useful follower. More likely an arrow, he reminded himself. 
Too risky.
He made it safely to Farmeet, only to find the shepherds far less outgoing than 
he remembered from the summer before.
“I heard you was taking on Gadilon’s patrols,” said one of the shepherds, not 
quite looking at Gird. “Heard as you come on ’em sleeping, and killed ’em lying 
there, and took their clothes and all…”
“No,” said Gird. “That was brigands.”
“How’d you know?” They were all very still, sitting hunched as shepherds do, 
their long crooks angling up over their shoulders.
“I was there, hiding from the soldiers, when the brigands came.” They said 
nothing, but he could feel their disbelief. It was unlikely, he had to admit; to 
such as these, unlikely was nearly the same as impossible. Only a complete story 
would do; they would suspect anything less. Keeping his voice low and 
matter-of-fact, he told it all, from first sighting the sentry to laying mint on 
the bodies.
“Good you did that,” said the oldest shepherd, nodding. “Shows respect to the 
Lady, that do. Proper to do it for both sides, too.”
“They said they was you?” asked another.
Gird nodded. “They did, and they meant it to confuse both Gadilon’s men and our 
people.”
“We heard things this past winter.” The oldest shepherd poked the fire. “You’d 
gone down to the underworld, we heard. Talked to that one—has the horned circle, 
you know what I mean?”
“Liart—” breathed Gird.
“Aye. No good, that one. Them’s follows him likes hurting. Our lord’s got some 
like that in his service. Heard you made bargain with ’im, anyhow. That’s where 
you were, eh? Is it?”
“No.” Gird wondered where that story had come from, the lords or the brigands or 
simple imagination. “No, I was with the kapristi—the gnomes, the little 
rockfolk.”
“Ah. They’re not his followers, what I hear.”
“No. They follow the High Lord; I went to them to learn about law—what’s wrong 
with the lords’ law, and what might replace it.”
A younger shepherd spat. “Anyone can see what’s wrong with the lords’ law—it 
don’t take muckin‘ about underground to see that.”
“Hush, Dikka. This’ll be more, what Gird’s talkin’ about.”
“When this war’s over,” Gird began, hoping they could think that far ahead, 
“we’ll have to have fair laws, if we’re to have peace. Most of our people don’t 
remember how it was before the lords came. What we do now’s a mix of our old 
customs and their laws— it makes no sense, as anyone can see—you’re right there. 
But what to do about it—that’s something else.”
“And you saw beyond the war, to the peace? Ah, that’s good.” The oldest shepherd 
finally turned to look directly at Gird. “You want the peace, do you? And not 
just the fighting?”
“That’s right.”
“And you know a fair law for all of us then, when it’s over?”
Gird shook his head. “I know a way to devise such a law—but it will mean many of 
us working on it. You, too, perhaps.”
“Not me—but I’ll be glad to think on it, that someone is. So you’ve naught to do 
with the horned chain?”
“No.” He let it stand baldly, like that; they looked at him a long moment, then 
all nodded.
The oldest shepherd said, “You have an honest look, and nothing that fits one of 
the horned chain worshippers. So I say—” gathering the others with his eyes. “I 
say he is Gird, and not that fellow as stopped by a hand of days ago, claiming 
Gird’s name and asking our help.”
“What!” They had said nothing of this before. The old man grinned, showing the 
gaps in his teeth.
“Aye—another Gird was here, if we believed him, which we didn’t. Big fellow, 
like you in that. Grinned a lot with plenty of teeth. Said that great powers was 
with him—and us if we joined him—and the lords would be cast down and trampled 
in the dust. Our sheep’d grow fat and have golden fleece, the way he told it— 
you’d think he’d been talking to the Master Shepherd and not the Master of 
Torments.”
“So what did you do?” asked Gird, fascinated. The shepherds all chuckled.
“Do? We’s no more’n stupid old shepherds, lad. Us can’t think o’ none but sheep 
and wool—can’t make an onion from a barleycorn, nor sheep of mice, no more’n 
make soldiers of th’ likes o’ us, can you now?” The exaggeration of their 
accents was so pronounced that Gird found himself grinning; they grinned back, 
well pleased with his reaction. “He wanted a barton here; we said we’s no 
barton—we’s shepherds, not farmfolk. He says what’s Farmeet, then, as he’s been 
told it’s a barton—and we says it’s a bitty sheepfold, no more’n that, just a 
lambing shed and pen. He was not happy wi’ us when he left.”
Gird sniffed elaborately, reference to the old saying about onions and 
barleycorn, and said, “I smell an onion in this seedsack, so I do—” They laughed 
uproariously.
“It works both ways,” the old shepherd admitted. “No onions from barleycorns, 
but no hiding an onion from anyone with a nose. But them’s certain as they 
smelled stupid, afore ever they got here; we’s no reason to argue with ’em.”
“How many?” asked Gird. The old shepherd held up his hands and spread them 
twice: four hands of men, about the size he’d expected.
The little Farmeet barton had only two hands of yeomen: six men and four women. 
It would probably spend the entire war herding its sheep, shearing, spinning 
wool, but it had already served him well.
From Farmeet, he made it safely to Holn, where the rumors the brigands had 
spread had not yet come. Other rumors had. Already conflict had started, and the 
lords were raising all their troops, planning to crush the peasants before the 
summer came. They would move, Gird was told, on Kelaive’s domain first, sweeping 
east across the lands where he had been known to dwell. Gird’s own people had 
runners in all the southern villages, waiting word from him; Holn’s runner had 
already gone to tell Ivis and Felis he was back, and another runner waited any 
message he wanted to send.
What he wanted, desperately, was a pause in time—a few days when nothing 
happened, so that he could get back with his own troop and make plans. But it 
could not be, and he understood it. He listened late to the yeomen of Holn, 
spreading the maps the gnomes had provided and running his finger along the 
lines. Then he slept, for a few hours, and had a last conference with the 
barton, warning them about the brigands who claimed his name. He had no time to 
stop and teach them the new drills the gnomes had taught him; they would have to 
learn later, when they rose. For now, he must get to his own troops as quickly 
as possible.
Although he knew the country near Holn, he was glad to have a local guide, who 
knew just where the patrols had been going. The first bits of green were showing 
in hedge and wood; wild plum frothed white, and tiny pink flowers starred the 
rumpled grass that had green at its roots. Cold wet air gusted past him, 
carrying occasional snowflakes, spurts of rain, and gleams of unsteady sunlight. 
He could smell the growth in it, the spring smell that made new lambs throw 
their tails over their backs and frisk as he and his guide went past. There was 
a pasture with cows, the herder in his leather cape standing hunched against a 
flurry of hard raindrops, and here was a ditch brimful of racing water, clear as 
deep winter ice in a bucket. Gird would have frisked if he could, and he 
chuckled to himself at the thought of a middle-aged farmer-turned-rebel, 
throwing his tail over his back to dance in a spring rain.
They saw no patrols that day, but between showers Gird thought he saw a smudge 
of dark smoke blowing away somewhere to the east. He asked his guide, who 
shrugged.
“There’s been burnings, this winter past. A whole grange, we heard of: every bit 
of grain and hay lost, and the stones cracked, some of ’em. The lords were 
making everyone burn the stubble in the fields, last harvest, so’s no one could 
hide in it. Hayricks, too, some places.”
From Holn to Sawey, where Felis waited in the barton of a farmer called Ciri. It 
was dark, quiet but for dripping off the roofs—too quiet for a village on an 
early spring evening. His guide led him to the back gate, clicked the pebbles in 
his pocket together. Someone answered the clicks from within, then pushed the 
gate open for them. Inside was the good smell of food, cows, leather, oiled 
wood, and the sight of friends’ faces. They hugged, smacking each others’ 
shoulders. The gnomes’ impassive dourness faded from Gird’s mind—these were men, 
humans that he knew, faces alive with passion for one thing after another.
“At last,” Felis said. Others echoed him. Gird took a deep breath. There was no 
going back now; there had been no going back from Norwalk, but now he could not 
hesitate. It was truly “at last” and he must do what he had come to do. They 
were watching him, relieved to see him but still a little uncertain. Hoping he 
was over whatever had bothered him after Norwalk Sheepfolds—needing him to be 
over it—but unsure that he was. They reminded him of boys watching a father 
whose uncertain temper determines the quality of their life. I am sure, he told 
himself. When he smiled at them, their faces relaxed.
“At last which?” he asked Felis, intentionally lightening the moment. “At last I 
am here to settle an argument, or so that you can tell me you don’t want me, 
or—”
“You know,” said Felis, rubbing his nose. How, Gird wondered, had it gotten 
sunburnt so early in the year?
“I do, but I’m not sure you do. Yes, this is the year, and yes, I have learned 
things we can use, and yes, we start now. Tonight.” He felt the change in the 
tiny enclosure: relief, eagerness, and— as always—fear.
“I told you,” said one of the local men, in the corner. Gird smiled at him, 
raising an eyebrow; he flushed. “Some said you’d say wait, like you did last 
year, but I knew. I knew you had not lost your courage.”
Felis jumped into that. “Only a few, Gird, and no one—”
“It’s all right.” He felt calm and light, certain now where he was going with 
this group, and for the next few days. After that—“I could not say what I 
thought was wrong; you know that saying things is not my skill. I’m a plain 
farmer, same as any of you. I was as glad as any, we’d won at Norwalk, but I 
knew something was wrong, and now I know what.”
“And that is?” asked Felis, a challenge in his tone. Gird stretched, and let 
himself hunker down in a corner comfortably.
“You’ve heard of the gnomes’ soldiering, haven’t you?” Felis scowled, but 
nodded. “Well, they’ve taught me a lot. Norwalk was lucky. I had to learn 
better—and I have—and with what I know now and you can learn quick enough, even 
the gnomes think we can win.”
“What did you trade them?” asked Ciris, whose barton it was.
“Our—my—pledge that we would respect their borders, deal fairly with them—” That 
got nods, and muttered agreement. “— And our help in one battle: they want to 
trap the magelords in a place called Blackbone Hill.”
This caused less comment than he’d expected; if the gnomes wanted their help, 
they must think Gird’s was good, and that meant good fortune. Gird had his 
doubts, but wasn’t about to share them. Not yet.
“We’re not in the same camps,” Felis told Gird, when the other men had left and 
he and Gird were sharing a heap of straw. “The patrols began to come too close. 
Ivis thought we’d do better spread through several bartons. He said his forester 
friends told him the duke was planning a raid around Midwinter. So we left, and 
let out word to one of the brigand gangs that the camps had supplies in them. 
They moved in; the duke’s men caught them—and recognized them, too; the leader’s 
someone the duke’s wanted for years. We hope that’s convinced the duke that his 
peasant uprising was really a brigand gang in his wood. Ivis’s brother agreed to 
say in the duke’s court that the leader had been coming to him, threatening 
him.”
Gird shook his head, half in admiration of their ingenuity, and half in concern. 
“Not all brigands are that gullible,” he said, and told Felis about that other 
band he’d run into.
“So what will you do?”
“Fight my war, and let them fight theirs. People will recognize the difference 
soon enough.” He told Felis about the shepherds of Farmeet. Felis chuckled.
“Everyone thinks farmers are stupid, and shepherds are the stupidest: lords and 
thieves alike. But tell me, what is ‘your war’—how will we fight, and when, and 
where?”
“And have I seen the gods themselves, and is the overworld paved with gold and 
walled in crystal? You want all the answers at once? In the dark?” Beside him, 
Felis made a sound between a snort and a sniff; Gird relented. “All right. What 
I heard is that the lords have raised their army, and plan to start by clearing 
from Kelaive’s domain east. We will take all the bartons from Hardshallows 
eastward, and move north—away from them, for now—and strike for the River Road.”
“Why?”
“Even if we won here, we’d still be caught between the south trade road, the 
River Road, and the trade road between Finyatha and Ierin. Their supplies would 
flow freely; ours would not. If we cut the River Road, we’ve cut Finyatha from 
Verella, in Tsaia—”
“Tsaia! You’re not thinking of fighting there—”
“Tsaia’s king is kinbound to this one. The gnomes say things are as bad there. 
Our bartons on the east reported interest in neighboring vills inside Tsaia.”
“But I don’t know where Tsaia is, except eastward.”
Gird grinned, in the darkness; Felis sounded as much affronted as frightened. 
That was good. “You will know, when we get there. Now: this is what we must do 
to win in Finaarenis alone. We must be able to feed ourselves, control the food 
supply—and that means the trade roads, as well as protection for the farmers, 
and certain towns—”
“You sound—different—” Felis sounded uncertain again.
“I am, in a way. It’s all very different than we thought. It’s more than raising 
three or four bartons at a time to attack a small force. Right now the lords 
have trained soldiers with good weapons; they have stores of supplies; they have 
control of towns and roads—and, if we’re honest, of much of the countryside. We 
should have more yeomen overall, but you know how it is—if we seem to be losing, 
some of those will go home and forget they ever heard of us. Our people have 
almost no experience, our weapons— Oh. That reminds me. Changes there, too.”
Felis rolled over; the straw rustled. “All right. I’m convinced. You’ve come 
back ready to lead us to glory, full of as many new ideas as when you came into 
my camp that first day. But unless the gods put their touch on you, you still 
need sleep, and so do I.”



Chapter Twenty-one
« ^ » 
In less than a hand of days, Gird stood facing his first army: the bartons from 
Hardshallows, his own village, Fireoak, Whitetree, Harrow, Holn, and the 
original two Stone Circle groups. After his experience with the gnomes, their 
“straight” lines looked crooked, and their marching seemed as ragged as goats 
dancing along a path, but he said nothing of that for the moment. They were 
there, bold, timid, nervous, confident, in every possible mood he might have 
expected. With them had come the food he had told them to put by for this 
purpose; each had brought his or her sack of grain and beans, onions and 
redroots, even strips of dried meat.
What he had not expected so soon was the ragtag clutter of refugees that had 
come with them. His own village had come all in a lump, convinced that anyone 
left behind would die. After all, everyone knew where Gird had come from, and 
Kelaive had never been slow to make reprisals. Most of Hardshallows followed its 
yeomen, for the same reason, and Fireoak, in the same hearthing, feared the same 
trouble.
So besides the yeomen, Gird had all the others to worry about: small children, 
pregnant women, old men and women who could scarcely totter. They knew nothing 
of camp discipline. He had to double, then triple, the size of the jacks; smoke 
from the cookfires marked the sky with unmistakeable evidence of their presence. 
When nothing happened for a few days, the oldest and youngest began to treat it 
as a holiday—spring, and no work to be done. Grandparents sat and chattered, 
children screeched, mothers festooned every bush with laundry.
Most of those who were young and strong wanted to join the bartons—better late 
than never—but Gird took only a third of them. The others he assigned to his 
traditional tally groups, with Pidi (now beginning to show his growth) to teach 
them the necessary foodgathering and camp skills. This group he knew could not 
keep up when the army began to move, but he had no safe place to send them; they 
would have to do as best they could.
As for the bartons, he had all of them change from varied farm tools to the long 
stick and the hauk for weapons. The farm tools went to the nonfighters, with a 
few hours of instruction. Once all his units had the long sticks, drilling them 
began to look more like drilling a real army. Gird imagined good, hard, steel 
points on the ends of those sticks, but what they had were sharpened wood: not 
good enough, but cheap and available. He imagined a lot more drill, but they had 
no more time than they did steel.
What he did have was willing spies. When the enemy army set out from Finyatha, 
runners passed the word from barton to barton. Gird knew within a few days, 
while the army was still days north of Hardshallows.
“Why don’t we move now?” asked Ivis and Felis. Gird tapped the map the gnomes 
had made him.
“We can’t be sure they aren’t getting information the same way we are.”
“But no one would tell the lords about us—not farmers—”
“Felis, think. They burned Berryhedge, didn’t they? Took the survivors, beat 
them—do you think there’s anything about the Berryhedge barton they don’t know? 
They burned three other villages we know of last winter, taking prisoners each 
time. Some yeomen got away; some didn’t. Some of those they caught will have 
told all they know—from pain, from fear, from hope of saving a child… whatever. 
Most of our people want to be free, but many of them are scared—and so they 
should be. Some of those scared ones will help the lords, simply out of fear.”
“But I still don’t see why—”
“Look again. If they know we’re moving north, they’ll most likely turn and come 
after us. They could catch us on the move, before we get to the River Road. I 
don’t know all that country; I need to see it, so that when we come to fight 
there, I can choose good ground.”
“The gnomes taught you that, too?”
“Yes.” He looked up, and saw a sulky expression in Felis’s eyes. Ivis was merely 
puzzled. “Felis, I’ll be glad to teach you all the gnomes taught me—to teach all 
of you—but right now I don’t have time. Now. When the army has passed the lower 
ford, there, they’ll be unlikely to turn back until Hardshallows. In spring, 
that stream runs deep and rough. That gives us time to get well north of them 
before they turn—and if we’re lucky they’ll go on to my old village, to get word 
from the steward there.”
Cob said “What about the lords’ magic—did you learn anything about that? Is it 
real, and what can they do?”
“It’s real.” Gird rumpled his hair with both hands. He could have done without 
that question. The next would be what could he do about the lords’ magic, and 
the answer was, nothing. “Some of them have lost it—that may be why they’ve 
changed for the worst. They’re afraid they’ll lose all their power without their 
magic to fight for them. But some have enough left—they can make light, call 
storms, compel men to obedience, change their faces—”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Lucky for us that most of them don’t have it any more; we’ll be fighting 
soldiers who have no more magic than we do.”
“Better weapons,” said Cob gloomily.
“Better for fighting unarmed peasants. Remember that most of ’em have been 
sitting around guarding some noble’s home; the ones that have experience got it 
with horse nomads—not with foot troops who use polearms. They belong to 
different lords; they’ll have a divided command; they aren’t used to drilling 
together. We are.”
The lords’ army did exactly what Gird had expected. They moved at a leisurely 
pace down the trade road from Finyatha toward Ierin, waited for a contingent of 
troops from Ierin, then swung southeastward, following the west bank of the Blue 
all the way to Hardshallows. His spies told him they burned that deserted 
village after fording the stream, then stopped to celebrate a victory. 
Supposedly, the enemy forces now numbered about 300 soldiers, and that many 
again of servants, guides, packers, and other noncombatants. This was by no 
means all the force the lords had at their disposal. Ivis’s duke was rumored to 
be on his way with his personal guard—a hundred strong, some of them fresh from 
the northern frontier.
By this time, Gird and his army were on the move. His original Stone Circle 
troops now numbered just over fifty; these he considered his best trained and 
hardiest. The bartons already risen contributed over a hundred, and the newest 
yeomen—the hardiest of the refugees—added another sixty or so. Then there were 
the refugees themselves, some of whom might be able to fight, at least a single 
blow: over two hundred of them.
Moving this motley group turned out to be harder than Gird had expected. 
Although he and his Stone Circle troops were used to traveling, many of the 
others had never been out of their villages until now. They did not understand 
maps, and the farther Gird led them from familiar country, the more unhappy and 
nervous they became. Some of the older people simply stopped, refusing to go on. 
For the first few days, it seemed that Gird was constantly being asked to 
persuade someone’s father or mother to keep going. “Not another step!” burned 
itself into his memory, along with “How many times have I told you—!” addressed 
to a wailing child.
It was not what he’d planned. It was not anything like what the gnomes had 
advised. But what could he do? They were his people; he had to take care of 
them. He led them by the safest ways he could find, avoiding villages where 
soldiers were quartered. He could not hide the movement of so many from 
everyone, but most of the peasants would not report them. What worried him were 
the few who might.
  
Gird paced back and forth nervously. It was much harder to hide a camp for three 
hundred than a camp for fifty; the jacks stank almost as far as the road when 
the wind blew right, and he could not convince his yeoman marshals that any 
guard sergeant would know what that smell meant. They would not make the 
trenches deep enough, and insist that the users cover it all. As for the 
cookfires—he looked back over his shoulder at the wisps of smoke rising into the 
forest canopy. At least they had trees here, and something to cook. He had to 
remember that, and the times when they’d had nothing. Farmers around here had 
been generous, though it was hard to persuade them to stay on their farms and 
grow food when their barton training gave them confidence. They wanted to fight, 
now, not plow and plant and reap. He himself would have changed places gladly, 
in peace, but they wouldn’t believe it. For a moment he felt a scythe in his 
hands, the lovely long swing back and forth, the bite of the blade into ripe 
wheat. But that was past, and now he had a camp to care for.
“Gird?” Raheli had come up to him, more quiet-footed than he would ever be. In 
the dimming evening light, the scar on her face stood out whiter than ever.
“What, lass?” His lass she would always be, the child he had held in the moments 
after birth, the laughing girl who had put flowers on the endstones and danced 
in the starlight with her lover… the girl he had not been able to protect. He 
could not get away from that.
“There’s trouble nearby; a runner came in.”
“How much trouble?”
“Farmer’s place burning, soldiers all around.”
“One of ours?”
“They say not. He came to a meeting awhile back, over to Whitford, and he’d been 
giving food to the local barton, but not drilling there. Tis said he’s a lord’s 
bastard, and got his cottage-right that way.”
Gird grunted. Peasant jealousy again. “Not his fault, if it’s true. Family?”
“Young wife, two children. Quiet man, they said. Hard worker, but kept to 
himself.”
Gird interpreted that his own way. If his village had resented his getting the 
cottage, they’d have made life hard on him; such a man might keep to his own 
hearth with good reason. Had the soldiers interpreted his solitude as rebellion? 
“What of him and the family?”
Raheli shook her head. “Don’t know yet. Soldiers took two off along the road, 
but it looked like a woman and girl.” Her voice shook; Gird’s would if he spoke, 
and he knew it.
“They killed him, then,” Gird said huskily. “Otherwise, they’d take him along.” 
To watch, to feel his own shame. The same shame and rage he felt still, when he 
thought of it. He turned away, blinking back the tears. “Well—we’ll have to keep 
a good watch; there’s naught more we can do.”
It was near dawn when a sentry found someone crawling through the wood on elbows 
and knees, sobbing. Instead of killing the intruder at once, he dragged him 
along to the main campsite. Gird, coming from the jacks to the cookfire in hopes 
of a quiet mug of sib, heard the commotion as the sentry reported to the night 
marshal.
“What’s this?” he asked, strolling over. The sentry’s catch was a lean, 
dark-haired man who stank of smoke and burnt wood. He stood hunched and 
shivering, his hands cradled to his chest.
“Says he’s a farmer, got burnt out,” said the sentry. “Says they beat ’im, 
burned his hands.”
“Come to the fire,” Gird said. The sentry and the night marshal both helped the 
man, who staggered as if he was near collapse. They got him seated by one of the 
firepits, where the flickering light of the morning cookfire showed a 
strongboned face smudged with ash and soot. A welt stood out along one side of 
his face; one eye was swollen, and his hands, when he held them out, were 
blistered on the palms, as if someone had forced them onto a hot kettle. His 
shirt was scorched up one arm, with the red line of a burn beneath.
“You need to drink,” Gird said. The morning cook had shifted to the other side 
of the firepit; he reached for the dipper in the sib kettle and paused. “Is your 
mouth burnt? Would cool water be better?”
“Water,” the man said faintly. Before Gird could get up, the cook had turned 
away, and came back quickly with a bucket of cold springwater. Gird held a 
dipperful to the man’s lips. He sucked it in noisily, swallowing so fast he 
nearly choked.
“Easy. There’s plenty.” Gird filled another dipper, and glanced at the cook. 
“Where’s Rahi? We’re going to need a good poultice for his burns.” The cook 
nodded, gave another stir to the porridge, and went off. When the man had 
finished the second dipper of water, he shook his head at the offer of another.
“Thanks…” he said. Tears made a clean track through the dirt on his face, 
glittering in the firelight. “I—I thought—”
“You’re safe,” Gird said. It was not strictly true, but he was safer here than 
where he had been. “What’s your name?”
“Selamis.” An unusual name for a peasant, Gird thought, but Rahi had said he 
might be a lord’s bastard. Some of them had unusual names. The man’s mouth 
worked a moment, then he said, “It’s—not a village name. I’m not from there.”
“It’s not a man’s name that matters,” said Gird. “Selamis is as good as any 
other. I’m Gird—that’s Jenis, and that’s Arvi.” He craned around to look. “And 
the cook’s Pirik. How did you get away?”
Selamis grimaced. “Tunnel—you—your men said, at Whitford that time, we should 
all have a way out, tunnel or hole in the wall, something like that. I had one 
in the woodshed, just under my barton wall. Not big. They threw me in there, 
after—after they were done—and said they’d take me off to the duke’s court come 
morning. So—I managed to move th’ wood, get the trap up—”
“With your hands burned like that? Brave man.” Gird flexed his own hands, 
imagining how it must have hurt to move anything.
Rahi came then, with her bags of herbs and a chunk of tallow. “Get him clean,” 
she said to Gird without preamble. He nodded, and dipped a bowl of water from 
the bucket the cook had left there. While Rahi worked the tallow and herbs 
together in a bowl to make a poultice, Gird washed Selamis’s hands gently, then 
his arms and face. The man winced, but did not cry out. Rahi smeared the burns 
and the welt on his face with her poultice, and bound his hands in clean rags. 
“It will hurt,” she warned. “Anything touching burns hurts, even air. But it 
will keep them clean, and under the blisters they should heal without much 
damage.”
Once he was bandaged to Raheli’s satisfaction, Gird and the night marshal, Arvi, 
helped Selamis to the jacks and then settled him on a blanket. By then it was 
dawn, light enough to see the paler line around his mouth from pain and shock. 
Gird told one of the others to keep an eye on him; he himself had more than a 
day’s work to do. He half expected the soldiers who had burnt the man’s farm to 
come looking for him, but his scouts reported that all the soldiers from that 
farm had headed back to the nearest town. It was afternoon before he came back 
to see Selamis in daylight.
The man was drowsing uneasily, twitching and shifting in the blanket. He 
muttered indistinct words that sounded almost like an argument, then cried out 
and woke completely. Tears stood in his eyes. Gird squatted beside him, and laid 
a hand on his arm.
“Pain, or worry?”
“It—hurts a lot.”
“Aye. I’m sorry we’ve nothing better. Are you hungry yet? Can I bring you 
water?” The man nodded for water, and Gird fetched it, then lifted him to drink. 
When he was through, Gird let him down gently.
“How many people do you have here?” the man asked, looking around. Gird blinked, 
thinking.
“Oh—two or three hundred, maybe more. It varies. Does that surprise you?”
“I thought—bartons—a few men each—”
“Some bartons are small, no more’n two or three hands of men. Others are larger. 
But you weren’t in a barton.”
“No. I—they didn’t like me much.” The expression on his face was curious; Gird 
would almost have said spoiled, but the man was too old, and had worked too 
hard, to be a spoiled child.
“Rumor says you’re a lord’s bastard.” He watched for a reaction, and got it. 
Selamis’s face closed, hardening; his eyes seemed to chill from warm brown to 
the color of icy mud. “You won’t let me stay?”
“Why wouldn’t I? I care more for honesty and courage than blood; that’s what all 
this is about.” That had surprised the man; Gird wondered again just what he’d 
been through.
“My—my sponsor assigned me that cottage,” the man said quickly. “I didn’t have 
anything to do with old Kerith being evicted; I’d have taken her in myself, but 
she wouldn’t come—”
“I’m not blaming you,” Gird said. Clearly someone had, and Selamis still felt he 
had to explain himself. He could believe that the local barton might have 
shunned the man, unfair as it was. But unfairness at the top made everyone 
unfair. “Here you will have the trust you deserve: if you are honest and brave, 
you will find loyal friends who care not at all who your father was—or your 
mother, for that matter. If you’ve suffered from both lord and peasant, you may 
find that hard to believe, but it’s true.”
“You’re peasant-born?”
Gird laughed. “All the way back, near’s I can find out. Farmer after farmer, 
born to plow and plant and harvest, to tend my stock.”
“But they say you’re a great general,” Selamis said. Something in the tone rang 
false; Gird looked at him a moment, but couldn’t place what bothered him. He 
laughed again.
“I’m no great general, lad; I know how to do a few things well, and keep doing 
them. As long as they work, we’ll survive. The gods have been with us, so far.”
“You believe they care who wins a war down here?”
“You don’t?” Gird looked him up and down. “You don’t think the gods gave you a 
bit of extra strength, to open your trap door with burned hands? You don’t think 
they hid you from the soldiers as you came through the night—that they led you 
to our camp? I’d say you’ve had some bounty of the gods already—”
“But my family—”
Gird laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. The last thing you need now is a 
scolding, and you still weak from what happened. I’ve cursed the gods myself, 
more than once, in such trouble.” He patted the man’s shoulder, and levered 
himself up; his knees seemed stiffer every day. “I’ll talk to you again, but for 
now you rest.”
He had gone only a few steps, when Selamis called “Gird—” Gird turned. The man’s 
face had gone white again, and he was shaking.
“What’s wrong?” Gird asked, coming back to his side.
“I—I can’t—” Selamis shook his head violently.
“Can’t what?”
“I can’t lie to you!” That came out loud enough to attract attention; Gird 
glared at the faces turned his way until they turned back. He knew they would be 
listening anyway. He sat heavily beside Selamis, facing him.
“What’s this now?” he asked, in the tone that had always gotten the truth from 
his children. Selamis had started crying, the rough, painful sobs of someone who 
cried rarely. “Easy, now, and tell me what it is you’ve lied about.”
“They sent me,” Selamis said, so softly that Gird could hardly hear him between 
sobs. “They sent me.”
“Who? The soldiers?” Selamis nodded; Gird chewed his lip, fighting back the rage 
that spurted up in his mind. He looked away; he was afraid of what Selamis would 
see in his face. “Sent you to spy on the camp? To betray us?”
“Yes.” That was as soft as the other; he heard fright as well as misery in 
Selamis’s voice. Gird waited it out, staring at his fingernails, until Selamis 
went on. “They—they killed my son. Said they’d—they’d keep my wife and 
daughter—in prison—so if I didn’t come back they could—could—”
“I can imagine,” Gird said. He could hear the iron in his own voice. When he 
closed his eyes it was as if he could see all of them together, all the men and 
women and children taken hostage in the past years—beaten and raped and 
tormented and killed—he opened his eyes, and stared hard at the leaves on the 
ground in front of his knees. “Why you?”
“Because I’m a lord’s son,” Selamis said bitterly. “He—he put me there, where 
everyone hated me; he knew I would have no friends, no one to turn to. They said 
I owed it to my father, that my only hope was with him. I would—if he had asked, 
as from a son, I would have done anything for him, but they forced me—”
“And your hands? Was that to make us believe?” Selamis shook his head. “No. That 
was the guard captain; he knew me before, as a boy. Just to remind me what he 
could do, he said. He’s one of them—the horned circle—” His head rolled again. 
“I can’t—I can’t stand it—what they’ll do to her—to my daughter—and I can’t lie 
to you—what can I do?” Gird pulled him up and cradled him in his arms. There was 
nothing to do but endure, and Selamis surely knew that. Yet the pain the man was 
feeling would be like the pain he felt when he found Rahi—when Amis was 
killed—when Metis was tortured. He held Selamis with all the love he felt for 
all of them, all the ones who suffered in person or through those they loved.
“It’s all right,” he said, knowing as always that it was not all right, not yet. 
It was as much promise as reassurance. It would be all right someday; he would 
make it that way, make a world in which such things did not happen—or if they 
did, someone who cared would work to change them.
“But my daughter, my little girl! I have to go, I can’t—”
“You can’t go. You’re hurt. And you can’t betray us now; you don’t really want 
to. You want to save your child, as any father would—as I did, and failed. I 
won’t lie to you, Selamis. Your child may die, and die horribly. I can’t promise 
anything better for her. But you can help me, help me make a better land than 
this.” Selamis was still sobbing, but less wildly. When he was finally silent, 
Gird laid him down gently. “You are a brave man, Selamis. Brave to come here, 
brave to tell me—and brave enough for whatever comes of it.” He left him then, 
and told one of the healers to watch Selamis closely. She peered at Gird, as if 
she could see his churning belly and the rage in his heart, but said nothing. He 
was grateful for that.
He was not grateful for the wariness of his marshals, who accosted him before he 
made it to the cookfires for his supper.
“Are you sure he can be trusted?” asked Felis, “I heard he was sent—”
“He told me that himself,” said Gird. “If he tells me himself, that stands for 
something.”
“He might have thought we’d heard something from the villagers.”
“Have we?”
Felis scowled. “No. But we might. He wasn’t liked.”
“He wasn’t liked because he was some lord’s bastard, and the lord arranged a 
cottage for him. One of theirs was evicted. Not his fault. He wasn’t in their 
barton because they didn’t want him, but he gave food. They’ve got his wife and 
daughter, threatened him with what you’d expect if he didn’t betray us—and he 
told me that. Himself. That’s not like a spy.”
“Not if he’s told you everything,” Felis said. Behind him, Ivis and Cob said 
nothing, but their eyes agreed.
Gird’s own doubts vanished in a perverse determination to have Felis be wrong. 
“We’ll watch him, but I say he’s honest, and we can trust him. Are we to make 
the same mistakes they do? It’s a man’s own heart says what he is, not his 
father’s bloodline. Men aren’t cows.”
“No, some of them are foxes.” Felis stomped off, his own fox-red hair bristling 
wildly. Ivis and Cob laughed.
“He could be right, all the same,” said Ivis, dipping out a measure of beans. 
“No better way to convince us he’s honest than to confess something. I’ve done 
it m’self as a boy.”
“And what if he is honest? How would you have an honest man act?” Ivis shrugged 
and did not pursue the subject. The next day, when Gird insisted they move on, 
Selamis was able to walk. Rahi said it would be many days before he could use 
his hands.
They had been threading their way between the domain of Ivis’s duke and that of 
a count, to his east. North of that, they would come into the domain of the sier 
Gird had saved. Although the main lines of the hills ran across their way, gaps 
existed: ways known to herders, hunters, foresters. Gird had his scouts out all 
around; for several days they found nothing but their own people.
Then about midmorning on the fourth day, the forward scouts reported that 
soldiers were blocking the next gap to the north. Gird halted the ragged column 
and thought about it. They could swing west, here, between two lines of hills, 
and take the next gap… but that would mean stringing his whole line out, down on 
the streamside. Here that meant open land, arable. They would be trampling young 
grain they might want to eat, come winter… and they would be visible from hills 
on both sides. Downstream, westward, was a largish village with a permanent 
guard detachment. Could the blocked gap be intended to push him into a trap?
“How many in the gap?” he asked his scouts.
Fingers flashed. “Two hands. Four in sight, and the others in the trees on 
either side.”
“Did they see you?”
“No—I don’t think so.” The scouts exchanged looks, agreed on that, and went on. 
“One of ’em said as how it was boring. They’d been told to guard the gaps—all of 
’em—but they didn’t think anyone’d come this way, not with the good bridge 
downstream.”
Two hands of guards, but well placed in a narrow gap. The noise of battle would 
bring more—that had to be the intent, that or some similar trap. Overbridge, the 
village, had a barton but Gird had not called on it yet. His scouts reported 
that the Overbridge farmers seemed to be at normal work in their fields. Gird 
looked around. All his people were watching him, waiting for him to make a 
decision. The longer he waited, the more nervous they would be—and the more 
likely that some child would get loose and go off noisily, to reveal where they 
were.
“Six hands,” Gird said. He pointed to Felis and Cob. “Three each from yours. 
Ivis, have four hands ready for support, if we need it. The rest close up and be 
ready to get everyone across and through the gap quickly. If there’s a real 
fight—if they have more hidden that the scouts missed—they’ll have 
reinforcements coming, from both upstream and down. That won’t hurt us as long 
as we know it’s coming, and have reached higher ground before they do.” He 
placed pebbles on the ground to show them what he meant. “If they do come after 
us, let ’em get right up in the gap, and then turn on ’em. Be sure you don’t 
cross the water until all of us are across and out of sight. If they see us, I 
want them to think we’re all the trouble they have.”
Six hands of men—three from the original Stone Circle outlaws and three from 
Fireoak barton—followed Gird and the original forward scouts. They crossed the 
rushing little river upstream of the gap, at a narrows where the forest almost 
met across the water, going single-file as quietly as they could. Then they 
worked their way upslope, hoping to flank the ambush. Gird was not at all sure 
this would work; he would have expected his own maneuver. But if the guards were 
still expecting ignorant peasants, they might have no one on the hilltop to 
watch for it.
His idea almost worked. Gird spotted one of the guards at the moment the guard 
spotted him, and yelled. More yells, and the noise of movement. Gird held his 
group still. It was possible that the guard had not seen them all, and in a 
moment he would know where all the guards were.
“Come out here, you!” the guard said. “Who are you, skulking about in the 
woods?” He sounded as much nervous as angry.
Gird did his best to look frightened; he could hear the others clearly now, and 
then they came in sight. Seven… eight… nine… in yellow and green uniforms. They 
carried short swords; two had bows slung over their shoulders. That was a 
mistake; he hoped they would not realize it in time to cause him any trouble.
“Answer me, serf!” said the guard, bolder with his friends around him. “You know 
the rules: no one’s allowed on the hills now.”
Gird would like to have said something clever, but he couldn’t think of 
anything. The man was three long strides away—farther than that for the men 
behind him—and Gird would have to be fast or the bowmen might get their bows 
into action. Someone behind him, trying to move closer, rustled the leaves; the 
guard’s eyes widened. “Are there more… ?” His voice rose, as Gird charged 
straight ahead.
They had swords in hand, but swords could not reach him. Not if the others came 
in time. Gird thrust the point of his stick at a face that had blurred to a 
white blob; the man staggered back. Someone’s sword hacked at his stick; he felt 
the jolt, swung the tip away, and jabbed forward again. The guards were yelling, 
surprise and fear mixed together. Gird paid no attention to them; he could see 
his own men on either side of him, jabbing again and again at the soldiers who 
flailed wildly with their swords, stumbling into trees. The two bowmen backed 
quickly, reaching for their bows.
“Bowmen first!” yelled Gird—the first thing he’d actually said, in words, and 
lunged at one of them. His stick caught the man hard in the chest; it didn’t 
penetrate, but the man staggered and fell. He gave Gird a look of such utter 
surprise that it almost made Gird back a step—but instead he thrust again. This 
time the point caught the man in the neck, slid off to one side, and pinned his 
shoulder to the ground. Gird leaned on the pole. It was surprisingly hard to 
force the point in… but the man was clawing at his throat, his face purplish. 
Gird pulled the stick back and clouted him hard on the head. The soldier fell 
limp; when Gird checked, he was not breathing.
Around him, the fight was ending in a wild flurry of blows, counterblows, and 
bellows. The sharpened sticks worked, but clumsily: driving a sharp point of 
wood through clothing and flesh took strength and weight; once spitted, the 
enemy was even harder to free. Most of Gird’s people had done what he did: use 
the point to fend off attack and throw the swordsmen off balance, then finish 
them with a blow to the head. It worked because they outnumbered their 
opponents, but Gird knew that would not always be true.
“Get their weapons,” Gird reminded his people, as they finished off the last of 
the soldiers. “Knives as well: we can use everything. All their food, any 
tools.” The dead soldiers had not worn armor. Gird shook his head over that; 
they must have assumed that the peasants had no weapons worth wearing armor for.
“Boots?” asked one of his still barefoot yeomen.
Gird nodded. “Clothes, if you want ’em. Felis, take two hands and go downslope; 
watch for their reinforcements. We made enough noise to rouse a drunk on the 
morning after. Cob, you take a hand back to hurry our people along.” Gird helped 
drag the bodies into a pile out of the way. He did not bother to look for herbs 
of remembrance: these were his enemies; he had helped kill them, and it would be 
an insult to lay the herbs on them. Only one of his people had been hurt, a 
young yeoman who had a knife wound on the arm to remind him that fallen enemies 
were not necessarily dead.



Chapter Twenty-two
« ^ » 
Soon he could hear the rest of his people coming. They were hardly past, moving 
much slower than he would have liked, when he heard hoofbeats from the stream 
valley. No one had said anything about a mounted contingent nearby, but it made 
no real difference. Felis sent a runner back up: twenty horsemen, five bowmen 
and the rest with swords. Dust back down the trail, as if more were coming, 
though he couldn’t say if those were horsemen or afoot.
“Good,” said Gird, surprising those around him. He hoped it was good; it would 
be good if they won. “Fori, take eight hands—go that way—” Downstream that was, 
“—through the woods two hundred paces, then go downslope and wait for my call. 
You’ll be coming in on their flank or rear. The rest of you, come with me.”
The entrance to the gap trail offered the horsemen a gently rising slope from 
the narrow fields near the river, a slope gradually steepening as the trees 
closed in. Gird placed his troops across the point of this triangle, inside the 
trees, with the center set back a horselength. He watched the horsemen as they 
rode back and forth near the river, clearly looking for signs of a crossing. One 
of them went upstream, and came back at a gallop, yelling. The group milled 
about, then formed into a double column and headed for the gap trail.
Gird was surprised at that. Could they really be so stupid? Sunlight glinted off 
their breastplates and helmets—these would be harder to kill, but they were 
trusting too much to their horses and weapons. At the last moment, as the 
leaders came under the edge of the forest, some caution came to the leader, for 
he held up his hand and the troop reined in. The bowmen had their bows strung; 
they reached for arrows. Gird gave the signal anyway. On either side, his men 
ran out, carefully keeping their formation, poles firm in their hands.
The rearmost horses squealed and tried to back away: their riders spurred ahead. 
Two bucked, and one unseated its rider, who fell heavily. The first two riders 
had also fallen, shoved from their saddles by skillfully applied poles. One lay 
stunned; the other had rolled up quickly, and was doing his best to defend 
himself with his sword. Behind him, the other riders had tried to charge 
forward, but their horses shied from the sharp points of the sticks, swerving 
and rearing. The riders cursed, spurring hard; they could not reach Gird’s men 
with their swords, and any who were separated were quickly surrounded, and 
pushed out of the saddle. Three of the bowmen, however, had managed to set arrow 
to string. Two of the arrows flew wide, but one—by luck or skill—went home in 
the throat of the man about to unseat the bowman. He managed to fit another 
arrow to his string, and this one narrowly missed Gird. Now his companions 
realized what he was doing; the remaining horsemen clumped together, protecting 
the bowmen in their midst, so that they had time to shoot again and again.
Gird smacked the man nearest him with the flat of his hand. “We’ve got to get 
them now!” he bellowed. His people surrounded the horsemen several men deep, but 
were showing no more eagerness to face the frightened horses’ hooves than the 
horses were to face their poles. “Stand there and they’ll get you all!” he said, 
flinging himself past those in front to snatch at one horse’s bridle. Its rider 
aimed a vicious slash at him; Gird ducked, and thrust his belt-knife into the 
underside of the horse’s jaw. The horse reared, screaming and flailing; Gird 
caught a hard blow from one hoof, but lunged again. His men yelled; he saw 
another dart forward, and another. The bowmen could not hit them now without 
shooting through their own companions. Horses and men screamed; it smelled like 
a butchering. Gird grabbed for another bridle, and nearly fell; he had slipped 
in a gush of horse blood. Too bad, his mind said as if from a distance, that we 
have to kill the beasts for their riders’ sake. And where, his mind went on, are 
those others that made the dust cloud?
As if in answer to that question, an even louder uproar erupted somewhere behind 
him. Gird whirled, slipped to one knee in the carnage, and staggered back up. 
There—downstream a little—it sounded as if Fori’s group had engaged the enemy 
support without waiting for Gird’s call. Or had he called? He couldn’t remember. 
He was out of breath, and his leg hurt. When he looked down, he could see a rent 
in his trousers. The horse’s hoof, probably. He took a deep breath, and 
bellowed. Those who looked around, he waved toward the new noise. “Fori’s men,” 
he yelled. “Get in line, idiots, before—” his breath and voice failed together. 
Someone put a shoulder under his arm; he would have shoved help away, but for 
the moment he could not. He let himself be helped to the edge of the trampled 
ground.
Someone handed him a waterskin; he drank, wincing as someone else prodded the 
gash on his leg. Now he could breathe, and see: all the horsemen down, and half 
the horses, in a welter of blood. Some of his own dead this time, more wounded. 
Tending them were women he distinctly remembered from the refugee group… what 
were they doing down here? He had to get back to the fighting, he reminded 
himself. When he tried to get up (when had he slid to the ground against this 
tree?) his leg refused to take his weight.
“Your arm—” said someone behind him.
“It’s my leg,” he growled, but glanced at his arm anyway. A bloody gash had 
opened it from near his shoulder to his elbow; he stared at it, surprised. He 
didn’t remember that. A broad-faced woman with tangled reddish hair sluiced the 
blood off with water from a bucket, laid a compress of leaves on the gash, and 
wrapped it tightly with a strip of cloth. She touched his head; he winced and 
pulled back.
“Quite a lump,” she said cheerfully. “We might’s well call you Gird Hardhead as 
Gird Strongarm.”
“But Fori—” he said.
“Quiet. It’s all right.”
He wanted to say it was not all right, not until the fighting was done and they 
were safely away. But something with teeth had hold of his leg, and was trying 
to pull it off. He blinked, grunted, and resolved the monster into two people, 
one of them holding his leg still while the other cleaned out the ragged wound. 
It seemed to hurt a lot more than it had; he didn’t know if that was good or 
bad.
“Gird?” That was Fori’s voice; Gird fought his way through the haze of pain and 
exhaustion to focus on Fori’s face. Pale, but unmarked; he looked more worried 
than anything else.
“I’m fine,” said Gird. He would be fine; it was not all a lie.
Fori grinned. “It worked,” he said. “Just like you wanted: we took their 
reserves in the flank before they knew we were there. And then the others from 
here—from the first fight—came and got them between us. We lost a few—
“How many, each side?” Thinking about the fight might clear his head.
Fori’s hands flicked, counting it up. “Eight hands of reserves, afoot—our match. 
Then four hands of horsemen, and two hands in the gap itself: fourteen hands, 
seventy altogether. All dead. Of ours, eight dead, and four hands wounded, some 
bad.”
Cob’s head appeared beside Fori’s. “Gird—we’re going to move you now.”
“Move me! I can move myself!” He lunged up, but firm hands pushed him down.
“No. We aren’t going to lose you because you walked all your blood out.” Gird 
would have fought harder, but his body did not cooperate. He let himself relax 
onto the rough litter, and endured a miserable bouncy trip to whatever 
ridiculous site Cob or Felis had picked for a camp.
He woke to firelight, and listened to the voices around him before opening his 
eyes. He knew at once he was indoors, in some large, mostly bare room. It did 
not smell like he imagined a prison would smell, and the voices around him 
sounded tired, but satisfied, happy, quietly confident. Then, in a lower tone, 
someone said, “What about Gird—do you think—?”
“He’ll be fine,” said the voice of the red-headed woman who had tied up his arm. 
“If he hadn’t tried to fight the whole battle himself—”
“Did you ever see anything like it!” That was no question; the speaker’s voice 
carried raw emotion. “Throwing that horse down like a shepherd throws a lamb—”
Did I? wondered Gird. He could remember nothing but the first horse rearing over 
him, and the hoof raking his leg. Now he came to think of it, that had been the 
other leg, not the one with the bad gash.
“—Like something out of a tale,” the young voice was going on. Others chimed in, 
a confusion of details almost as chaotic as the battle itself. Gird felt himself 
flushing. They made it sound as if he’d waded single-handed into the entire 
Finaarean army.
“If he dies—” began someone else in a hushed voice.
Gird opened his eyes. “I am not going to die,” he said firmly, glad that his 
voice carried his intent.
Several men laughed. “I told you,” said Cob. “He’s too stubborn to die.” Under 
that confidence Gird could hear relief in his voice. He tried to hitch himself 
up and pain lanced through his head.
“Don’t move,” said the red-headed woman beside him.
“You could have said that before I did.” Gird cleared his throat. With the 
headache, his other pains awoke again, and he wished he’d stayed asleep.
The woman grinned down at him. “Cranky patients get well faster,” she said. 
“Soup?”
“Water.” She and another supported his shoulders as he drank, then propped him 
up. The various pains settled down to a steady but bearable level, and he 
realized he was hungry after all. And curious: what exactly had happened, and 
where were they, and who had taken over when he fell on his face? Someone handed 
the woman a bowl of soup, and she lifted Gird’s head so he could drink it.
He saw movement in the group around the fire. Then his most experienced fighters 
were around him. “You’re wondering what happened,” said Felis, almost smugly. 
Gird glared as best he could. Felis had become a good leader, but he could be 
unbearably smug.
“We were all standing around the riders, having poked and prodded them into a 
huddle, wondering what to do next, when you jumped out and—”
“I remember that,” Gird said. “It’s what comes after—”
Cob shrugged. “You grew about four hands taller, sprouted wings and horns, and 
started throwing horses around like sheep. No: you didn’t really get bigger, but 
you looked bigger. Yelling your head off and covered with blood, and you did 
throw at least one horse right on its side—I saw that, and so did everyone else. 
The rider that sliced your arm—you threw him, too, across one horse and into 
another. The riders panicked, even the bowmen. I think we could have stood there 
watching you finish them all off, but that was boring after awhile, so we tried 
it for ourselves.”
“What hit my head?”
“I didn’t see that. We heard the others coming, and Fori’s attack yell, and you 
told us to go help him. I ran off with my group; when I got back, you were 
sitting against a tree, not saying much of anything, while Elis here cleaned you 
up. It was hard to tell which blood was yours.”
Felis broke in. “The new formations work perfectly, Gird. Even in the trees—I 
admit I’d wondered if that practice going between trees was good for anything, 
but now I know it is.”
“Of course, we outnumbered them,” said Ivis. “Two to one.”
“More than that.” Gird shifted, testing the limits of his pain. “They were 
stupid enough to come to us in pieces. We had three to one on the first group, 
more like five to one against the horsemen.”
“But—oh.” Gird could see by their faces that they were working this out for 
themselves.
“Remember what I told you. What counts is how many against how many at the point 
of contact. If they’re not in the fight, they don’t count.”
Fori spoke up. “But we were even against their reinforcements, at first. And we 
were moving them—I think we could have won.”
“Probably. I hope so. But you’d have had more losses, and a harder fight. We’re 
good, lads, and better than before, but it never hurts to let them make it easy 
for us. If we can take them at good odds, why not? Now—where are we?”
They chuckled, slightly sheepish chuckles. Cob said. “You aren’t going to like 
this.”
“What?” He tried to roar, but it didn’t come out as a roar, more as a peevish 
growl.
“We’re in Overbridge. In the soldiers’ barracks.”
“You idiots!” That time it did come out as a roar, and faces turned to him. He 
struggled to sit all the way up, and nearly made it.
“Listen to me.” Cob had a hand on his chest, with weight behind it if he didn’t 
lie back. He lay back, simmering. “There are no more soldiers in Overbridge. The 
ones we killed were stationed here; the barton is sure none got away. The 
nearest beyond are past Burry, at a road crossing. We sent word to Burry—and you 
know the Burry yeomen.” He did know the Burry yeomen, as determined as any; if 
they swore no one would get through from Overbridge, no one would. “This village 
is delighted with us—those guards camped here all winter drinking up the ale and 
rolling the local girls, even a few with babies coming. We killed them without 
trampling the fields, or involving the local yeomen. They begged us to come in, 
offered us food, even the little ale the guards hadn’t found—”
“Ale—” said Gird meditatively. That should dull his headache. “But we can’t stay 
here,” he said, looking around to see if he could spot a likely jug.
“Of course not.” Cob reached back, and someone handed him a jug. He dangled it 
in front of Gird’s nose. “But for one night, while certain persons take their 
well-earned rest—”
“You do have sentries out?”
“Of course. Don’t we always do what you tell us?”
Gird heaved himself up on his uninjured elbow; someone behind him helped him up 
until he was braced against the wall. He got his hands around the jug, and 
sniffed it. Yes, just what he needed. He took a long swallow that warmed his 
throat on its way down. He offered the jug to Cob, who shook his head.
“I’ve had some. Now, about our wounded: three of them won’t be able to travel 
for days, maybe weeks—” Gird took another swallow, and felt the edge come off 
his aches and pains. Behind the throb in his head, his mind was beginning to 
work again. Wounded who could walk tomorrow—in two days—not for a long time. 
Members of the Overbridge barton who wanted to come along rather than stay home 
and farm. Villagers who wanted to meet the man who had thrown down a horse. 
Felis wanted to tell him about the weapons they’d taken from the dead soldiers 
and those found in the armory. Ivis had questions about food supplies for the 
next march, and Rahi—when had she appeared at his side?—Rahi had one of her 
herbal brews that puckered his mouth after the ale.
He woke next in the cool colorless light of dawn, his head pillowed on Rahi’s 
lap; he looked up to see her slumped gracelessly against the wall, snoring. His 
head throbbed; he could not tell if it was the ale or the lump. He tried to 
reach up to scratch his itching hair, but chose the wrong arm; his wince woke 
her, and she smiled at him with a look that turned his heart. He could not stand 
for her to be here, for her to be leaning over him as he had so often leaned 
over her.
“You put me to sleep,” he said quietly, holding her gaze. “You told them to give 
me ale, and then you had that brew—”
Rahi grinned. “You needed the rest, and you’d have stayed up all night, arguing 
and keeping everyone awake. Besides, we wanted to clean your wounds again. That 
hurts.”
“Not so badly now,” he said, moving arm and leg gingerly.
“You told us, clean makes fast healing. And we have two healers, now. From 
Overbridge.”
“We still need to move, leave here before someone comes.” Some large army they 
could not handle, a commander smarter than the one that had let Gird pit his 
entire force against three separate smaller ones.
But that day was spent reorganizing after the battles. Gird fretted less as he 
realized it was not entirely faked for his benefit, and less still when one of 
the healers had time to draw the pain from his head and lay it on the soldiers’ 
hearth. Where, she insisted cheerfully, it really belonged. He thought to ask 
about Selamis, who had been traveling with the noncombatants, since he could not 
hold a weapon.
“He looks bad,” said Ivis. “Sad, miserable—I suppose part of it’s the pain. But 
his wife and daughter—he can’t help thinking about them.” Ivis’s losses were far 
in his past, a young wife dead of fever, children never born alive. Gird thought 
he knew the anguish Selamis was feeling now (where was Girnis, his other 
daughter? She had married a lad from Fireoak, but neither of them had come to 
the wood when Fireoak village broke up. He had not asked Barin about her, not 
wanting to know.) He looked around but did not see him. Ivis interpreted the 
look correctly, and said “He’s explaining the accounts to Triga.”
Gird felt as if someone had poked him with a pin. “Accounts? He can read?”
“So he says.” Ivis could not, and was glad of it. “Says he can calculate, too. 
And write.”
“I’ll keep him busy,” Gird said. “We need someone who can keep track of what we 
have.”
Meanwhile, his army had gathered all the clothing and equipment the soldiers had 
had—those with no shoes or boots tried on the soldiers’ until they found some 
that fit or were comfortably large and could be stuffed with rags or tags of 
fleece. The soldiers’ clothes, washed in the stream and dried on bushes, became 
shirts and tunics for those with no clothes, and patch material for those whose 
clothes needed patching. In the soldiers’ kitchen were the huge cookpots he 
remembered, and longhandled utensils. The heavy storage jars would be impossible 
to carry along (and now, he thought, I know why their army needs wagons), but 
the food stored in the pantry would fit into sacks. They had fifty-nine swords 
now (some had broken during the fights), four bows gathered after the battle and 
another forty found in the armory. Gird spared a moment’s thanks that the 
soldiers had chosen to go after them with swords instead of carrying those bows 
along. Best of all, the armory had racks of pikes, eighty of them.
Gird limped over to the racks and touched one gleaming tip. He lifted it from 
the rack and felt the balance. Not that different from the sticks—the gnomes 
were right about that, too. And if they carried them for a few days, the new 
weapons would feel normal.
“That should go through a little easier,” Felis said behind him. Gird noted that 
Felis did not specify what it would go through easily. He knew that some of them 
were still shaken by their own violence, by the knowledge that they, too, were 
men who could kill.
“We have the gods to thank for this,” Gird said. He turned and looked at those 
who had followed him into the armory. They all nodded; eyes down. “We earned the 
victory this time. But it will not come so easily again.” They did not like 
hearing that, but it was the truth, and he could not lie to them. He had won at 
Norwalk Sheepfolds in spite of his own mistakes, because the enemy had not 
expected anything. He had won here, as easily as he had, because of the enemy’s 
mistakes. Some day he would face a commander who made no mistakes, and then—He 
shook his head. Time enough for that later. Now they must thank the gods who had 
been with them, who had helped them.
His people had no rituals for celebrating victory in war, because they had not 
fought a war—at least not in living memory. Gird conferred with the oldest men 
and women he could find; none of them knew the right ritual. In the end, Gird 
combined the thanksgiving ceremonies for Alyanya’s permission to open the 
ground— which should hallow their use of the steel they carried—with the harvest 
prayers for those who had died in the past year. Sweating with both nervousness 
and pain, he limped from the soldiers’ barracks to the bridge over the stream, 
and threw in a ritual handful of grain, of flowers (gathered that day by village 
children), of mint leaves. The oldest granny laid a fire in the center of the 
village square; he led everyone in a slow dance around it. The fire burned 
bright, upright and clean: did that mean the gods were satisfied? He did not 
know. He felt both sadness and contentment, grief worn out with time, as the 
harvest lament always left him. The fire spurted up, suddenly, burning blue as 
the summer sky; Gird felt a wash of heat across him, as if he’d been dipped in 
it—but he was not burned, and the fire had fallen back to its wooden roots in an 
instant. All the hair stood up on his neck. They said something, he told 
himself. And I’d better figure out what it was…
  
It had looked simpler on the model in the gnomes hall. Gird wiped sweat off his 
forehead and scowled at the stragglers moving along the trail past him. Go north 
like this, they’d said, and capture this stronghold, they’d said, and then send 
part of your force over here to capture this other stronghold which controls… it 
had made perfect sense. There, with gnome soldiers. He could almost understand 
the gnomish disapproval of undisciplined humans.
He had not planned the capture of the Overbridge guardpost, and it had fallen 
into his lap, eighty good pikes and all. He had neither planned nor expected the 
other results of that victory: the bartons that had suddenly decided to leave 
home and join his army, the lords who decided to punish him by burning 
farmsteads where no one yet had even thought of joining him, the utter confusion 
and chaos which had erupted in a few hands of days all over the central part of 
the kingdom. He had planned a march north to the River Road, to isolate (if not 
capture) Grahlin, the city in which the Sier of Sorgrahl ruled, and he was 
instead spending days he could not afford in skirmishes with the sier’s very 
capable mounted patrols. Remembering that brown man and his courage, he was not 
surprised to find that the sier made none of the mistakes other commanders had 
made.
He would have been glad to avoid Grahlin, but it was important for several 
reasons. It controlled access to the Honnorgat along one of its major 
tributaries, the Hoor. It sat athwart the River Road, which here bowed away from 
the Honnorgat to avoid seasonal flooding at the confluence with the Hoor. And 
the sier’s large garrison would be as much trouble behind him as it was in front 
or on either flank.
It would have been easier—much easier—without all his unexpected allies, 
especially the noncombatant followers. They had no place to go; he understood 
that. But he wished fervently that they would find another no-place besides his 
army. They could not move quickly, and would not move silently. Even now, when 
his face should have warned them away, some of the children were calling out to 
him. The adults shushed them, only after the fact.
At the moment, he was trying to work his way to the west of Grahlin. They had 
tried it before, but this time Gird hoped that the sier would be busy with eight 
hands of men who had gone east, with forty of his precious pikes. They were 
supposed to convince the sier that they were leading the whole army that way, 
but if these stragglers didn’t move faster (and more quietly) a stupider man 
than the sier would realize what was happening. Even as he thought that, the 
last of the noncombatants trudged by, and his rear guard grinned at him. He knew 
only about half of them. The rest were new, from the incoming bartons.
Gird fingered the tally sticks tucked into his shirt. Eight hands of pikes was 
less than a quarter of his army now; he found it hard to keep the rapidly 
changing numbers in mind. New people came in daily, supplies flowed in and out 
like water in a basket dipped in and out of a river. The gnomes had insisted 
that no one could manage a war without knowing his own and the enemy resources, 
but he could not do that if they kept changing. At least he would soon have 
someone who could really write and cast accounts. Selamis had been able to read 
everything Gird showed him, including the maps, and he said he could write. When 
his hands healed, they’d know.
The rear guard had passed; its marshal nodded at Gird, who fell in beside him. 
This was—Adgar, he remembered. Once of Felis’s troop, then his own—the kind of 
man he liked as marshal, a solid farmer.
“I got the word by runner,” Adgar said. “The sier’s men took the bait, and are 
chasing our eight hands eastward.”
“Lady’s grace be with them,” said Gird. His scouts had not reported any nearby 
enemy troops eastward, but things changed fast. “Our front’s crossed the Hoor, 
and made it over that first ridge.”
“Be nice if they could get right up to that guardpost without being spotted.” 
Adgar hawked and spat. “We could use more pikes.”
Gird said nothing. The sier’s men, he was sure, had their weapons with them, not 
hanging on an armory wall. They would have to earn any pikes they got from 
Grahlin. Something stung his sunburnt ear, and he swatted it. In another hand of 
days they’d either stop to find flybane or be eaten alive.
By midday, the end of the rear guard was across the Hoor; the noncombatants were 
supposed to be sitting quietly in the woods, while the front waited for the 
rearguard to close up. Gird moved up to lead the rearguard, and noticed that his 
ragtag followers were following orders, for once. Heat and exertion had given 
them the will to stretch out in the shade and wait. Even the children were 
silent as he led the rearguard past them. He wished he could rest; he had gulped 
swallow after swallow of cold Hoor water and his belly gurgled. The ridge beyond 
was steep; he stumped up it, using his stick, until he saw the blue rag tied to 
a low limb. He halted, and clicked the pebbles in his left hand.
More clicks answered. Cob stepped out of the thick undergrowth, and waved him 
on. “It’s working,” he said. “They left the guardpost as soon as they saw our 
patrol go across the road.” It had been a small group—purposely small, to draw 
out the guard detachment without giving them any reason to call for help. 
“Horses?”asked Gird. Cob nodded.
“But they’re fast, the fastest we have, and the land’s broken down there. Good 
cover.” He did not add, as he might have days earlier, that if all went well 
those guards would soon have better to do than chase fugitives. He knew from 
experience now that all did not always go well.
He led Gird up to the front now, where his other forty pikes would lead the rest 
across the open ground between the hill and the guardpost. If Gird was right, 
few if any were left inside. If Gird was wrong, they were going to be full of 
arrows, but he would not think of that. Instead, he took a last look at the sun, 
hoped the “fugitives” had had enough start to lead the guards a good distance 
away. Then he nodded at Cob, and set off at a quick walk across the short grass.
It felt very open, out here under the sky, away from hedges and trees. In the 
shadow of a distant clump, cows stopped chewing to watch them walk by. Gird 
forced his eyes away from the cows and their calves and back to the guardpost. 
It was designed like a fort in miniature, but its walls were no higher than 
barton walls. Most of the time it functioned as a toll station, collecting a fee 
from travelers using Grahlin’s bridge over the Hoor. It did boast a tower, all 
of three men high, from which a sentry could survey the bridge and the road into 
Grahlin. Or, as Gird thought, the road away.
So far no alarm had come from the guardpost. Gird squinted at its tower; he 
could see no one up there. But a thin column of smoke climbed into the sky from 
somewhere in the guardpost. He muttered a curse. At the least they had left a 
cook behind—a cook who might chance to look out a window idly. He looked along 
the road as they neared it. Nothing westward—so he should hope, having sent a 
small group to block the road well out of sight of the guardpost. Eastward, this 
late in the day, no traffic moved between Grahlin and the bridge, as he’d 
expected.
Now they were on the road itself. Gird sent units around both sides of the 
guardpost, which continued to look as innocuous as a cottage, including the 
smoking chimney. The little tollbooth on the road was empty. The guardpost’s 
main entrance, a heavy wood gate, was closed, but the postern stood open. Gird 
had planned to break down the gate, which a drunken guard in a tavern had 
reported to one of Gird’s fascinated agents was “only there to impress serfs; it 
wouldn’t keep out a hungry ox, let alone a determined soldier.” But given an 
open postern—it was either a trap or great good fortune.
Great good fortune turned in an instant when the cook—a tall woman with two 
buckets of garbage in her meaty hands—backed out the door into the men Gird was 
sending in. She let out a scream that would have shaken slates from a roof, and 
flailed about with the buckets. In the narrow space of the postern, they 
couldn’t get at her without killing her, and no one wanted to do that. Then her 
screams roused the hand of guards left at the station, and Gird heard them 
blundering around inside as they tried to figure out what was going on.
“Quiet!” Gird bellowed. To his surprise, the woman was instantly silent, her 
mouth hanging open. Her eyes bulged out in almost comical panic, and she dropped 
the buckets with a loud clatter. Gird took her by the shoulders, moved her 
aside, and said “Be still.” She nodded, still with her mouth open. “Follow me,” 
he said to Cob, and plunged through the door.
Already one of the guards had arrived at the narrow passage that led to the 
postern; Gird lunged with his stick, wishing he’d had sense enough to take a 
pike instead. His weight and speed forced the man back, but the wooden point 
would not go through the breastplate. He jabbed again and again; the man 
retreated, but slowly. Now he was out of the passage. Another guard came up 
beside him. Cob leaned on Gird, giving him more weight to use. That was fine, 
but he couldn’t use the point on more than one at a time, and the passage was 
too narrow for two to stand abreast. He would have to push his way out, and take 
his chances until Cob and the others got through.
He took a deep breath, and bellowed a wordless cry as he lunged. The guard 
backed two steps; Gird hit his chest hard, and the man staggered and went to one 
knee. Faster, Gird told himself, shortening his grip and running out the end of 
the passage. Cob and the others were at his heels; he struck at the second man’s 
face. Then Cob was beside him, then another. Cob had a pike, and the man who had 
fallen died on it. Gird saw a stairway up the outside of the tower, and a man 
halfway up. He had a horn, and was lifting it to his lips.
Gird threw his long stick, end over end. It spun in the air like a wheel; the 
man saw it coming, dropped his horn, and screamed. He ducked; the stick hit the 
stone above him and shattered. Gird had no time to watch this. One of the others 
had jumped at him as he threw. Gird threw himself to one side, and pulled his 
hauk from his belt. The sword knocked a chip from it, and the guard grinned 
triumphantly just as someone else’s pike took him in the back. Gird grabbed the 
sword out of his hand, and looked around.
Four guards lay dead or dying; the small courtyard was full of Gird’s men, and 
the guard on the tower stairs was slumped against the wall.
“Sling,” said one of Gird’s men smugly. Fori was not the only one, now, who 
could hit something with a slung stone.
“We’re not through,” Gird reminded them. “Get this place secure, and get 
four—no, six—hands to the bridge.” He went for the tower, and panted his way up 
the steps. The guard there was unconscious; Gird dumped him off the steps for 
someone else to kill, and continued to the top of the squatty tower.
From there he could see dust rising from the distant horsemen who were chasing 
his fast patrol. A score of them, at least, by the dust. Below, he heard the 
noise settle into the busy murmur of purposeful activity. He looked the other 
way. There were six hands—most of his remaining pikes—almost to the bridge. 
Almost a third of them were wearing blue shirts. Gird grinned. His yeomen had 
begun wearing them when they expected a good fight. Gird himself still had the 
one Ivis had brought to their first camp, but he was saving that for the day 
they really needed luck.
Today they needed only the time the fugitives were buying. Gird had all his 
yeomen in place well before sundown, when the pursuers might be expected to 
return. A carefully selected group of followers straggled across the fields, 
although they did not straggle nearly so well when they tried. They kept closing 
up into neat lines, until Gird yelled at them again. The returning horsemen, 
trotting briskly in formation toward their own guardhouse, could not help but 
notice the milling mass of people in the field; they turned aside to 
investigate. As soon as their backs were to the road and the guardhouse, Gird’s 
signal sprung the trap, and up from roadside ditch and out from the enclosure 
came the yeomen with their long sticks and their new-won expertise in unhorsing 
cavalry. One, indeed, wheeled instantly and rode for the bridge to alarm the 
city beyond, but found himself cut off by the pikemen.
Gird hurried his people into position for the reaction that was sure to come. He 
wanted both ends of the bridge secure, breastworks on the rocky west bank of the 
river, a defined perimeter that included the guardpost and the bridge. Late that 
night, he was sitting over a table in the guardpost with Selamis, interpreting 
the records that they’d found.
“This is tolls,” Selamis said. “Last year by this time they’d had— let me 
see—almost twice as much road traffic. Numbers and weight are both down. So his 
income will be down—”
“But he’s rich; he’ll have treasure in a storehouse—”
“He has to pay his troops, feed his troops, pay his suppliers. Where do you 
think his money comes from?”
“Fieldfees,” said Gird, almost bitterly. Selamis shook his head. “Fieldfee’s the 
least of it. Road tax, bridge toll, market tax, building tax, death fees, 
marriage fees—not just on farmers, on everyone. Smiths won’t make his weapons 
for nothing. He has to find them the raw metal, pay someone to bring it here.” 
Selamis’s hands were still tender, but he could turn the pages himself now. 
“Look at this. Cloth merchants’ stonage last year—”
“Stonage?”
“Stones’ weight—didn’t your village use that?”
“But cloth is furls.”
“Not in bulk. The rough measure of stonage is what team it takes to start the 
wagon on the level. If you’ve ever been in a big market town, in the square, 
you’ll have seen the tracks, where they test it. The town’s market judge has a 
hitch—can’t use the traders’ horses, they could be trained wrong. 
Double-double-hand-stone, a thousand stones, that is, if a pair starts it. If it 
takes another pair, it’s counted as two, and so on. It’s only rough; I was told 
once that a thousand-stone load will break down to more than that, unloaded, but 
it takes too long to do that. Most lords just raise the load-fee.” Selamis liked 
to talk, and explained things clearly. Gird was fascinated at the variety of 
knowledge a lord’s bastard had collected. When he asked, Selamis shrugged and 
seemed to answer frankly. “I was in his household until I was shoulder high to a 
grown man— they taught me reading, writing, figures, something of law and more 
of custom. Their custom.”
“And then fostered you to farmers? Why?”
“I don’t know.” That was a door slammed in his face. “I suppose my father 
decided he had enough bastards around.”
Gird thought of asking which lord had been his father, but thought better of it. 
The man was upset enough already. He yawned, honestly if tactfully, and 
suggested a few hours sleep before the inevitable attack from Grahlin. As it 
happened, the attack did not come at dawn, when Gird had expected it, and he got 
almost a full night’s sleep before someone woke him up to ask his advice in an 
argument between two families whose children had started a fight.
Once he’d dealt with that (giving each child involved an unpleasant camp chore 
which took him far away from the others: the mothers might have thought of this, 
and let him sleep), he went out to look at the bridge by morning light.



Chapter Twenty-three
« ^ » 
Full daylight, and nothing moved on the road between the city and the bridge. 
Gird stalked along the lines, glowering into the distance. He could not attack 
the city; he knew nothing about attacking cities. They had to come out here, 
where he could fight them. So far the sier had been willing to do that, and Gird 
had assumed he would come to get his guardpost and his bridge back.
“I don’t like this,” said Felis, when the sun was a hand higher. Gird didn’t 
like it either. He wondered what the sier was doing instead of sending his 
troops out. That brown man would not give up his power easily. Even as he 
thought this, a shout from the bridge brought his head around. He could see 
nothing but one of his own yeomen waving an arm; he waved his in reply and 
jogged on.
Under the bridge in the early morning, the Hoor had flowed steadily northward, 
toward the Honnorgat. Now, even as Gird watched, that flow diminished, the 
water’s color changing from clear green to murky brown. Then it was gone, and 
the wet rocks and mud gleamed in the sun before they dried. Fish flopped 
frantically in the puddles, splashing the water out. Sinuous gleams flashed up 
the bank and into weeds: watersnakes.
“Esea’s curse,” someone said softly. Gird felt trapped with everyone looking to 
him for answers he did not have. He had never seen a river disappear like that, 
and neither had anyone else he’d known.
“Fish,” said someone else, and he saw several of his yeomen slithering down the 
bank to grab for fish in the puddles.
“Get back!” he yelled. Whatever it was had power to spare; where a river 
disappeared it could return. His people stared at him, and turned to climb back 
out. He wondered how much water they’d drawn, how many buckets and skins and 
jugs they had for their need. Expecting the worst, he sent someone to check on 
the kitchen well at the guardhouse; it was empty, which did not surprise him.
What surprised him was that nothing happened. Around midday, a runner came in 
from the eastern contingent reporting that they had fought two stiff 
engagements, come off intact, but had to retreat up the River Road eastward. 
That meant they could not help if he needed them, but he had expected that. The 
fish trapped in their puddles died, and stank by mid afternoon. The nearest 
creeks to the west were barely trickling; beyond them, the flow seemed normal. 
Gird sent a small party north to the Honnorgat; they reported that the big river 
seemed completely normal. Although it was not particularly hot for the time of 
year, everyone felt thirsty—which was partly the knowledge that they had no 
source of water, Gird knew.
He sent those who could not fight away westward, with a score of yeomen, to make 
camp by the nearest good water source. He hoped it would stay good. He had a 
feeling that the sier had decided to move to a new battlefield, one on which 
Gird had no strengths at all.
Afternoon wore on to evening, cloudless and still. As the sun set, the sky took 
on a strange bronze-green color; everything seemed to glow from within in that 
uncanny light. No one had actually suggested that they might abandon their 
position, but Gird noticed too many sidelong looks, too many whispers. He wished 
he had even the ghost of an explanation to give them. Instead, he had an itch 
between his shoulder blades and the feeling that something very bad was going to 
happen when he least expected it.
Early in the night, he decided to pull back his people on the far side of the 
bridge, except for the scouts dispersed in the fields. He felt a little better 
then, but not much. He was bone-tired; he’d walked the lines all day, trying to 
see something that would explain what was going on. But he could not settle to 
sleep. Most of the others had, worn out with tension, but Gird stalked back and 
forth, in and out the gate, grumbling to himself.
He had just been to the jacks when he heard a resonant pooot that sounded like a 
novice hornplayer, followed by a shattering crash that resolved into a 
splash-edged roar. The ground trembled beneath him. Gird spun to see water 
erupting from the kitchen well, glittering in the starlight, higher and higher, 
a trembling column far higher than the tower. Cold mist washed over him, then a 
splatter of drops, then a flick of solid water falling. The ground bucked and 
groaned; he fell heavily. He saw the well split, as a cracked waterskin splits 
if squeezed. Water roared out of a cleft in the ground, waves of it now rolling 
toward him.
No one could have heard him, but no one needed to. That noise, and the shaking 
ground, had everyone awake and moving. But the guardpost’s enclosed space was 
already knee-deep in water, water that surged and heaved, seeking a way out. At 
least the main gate’s open, Gird thought, struggling to keep his feet in the 
racing water. He was soaked already, and the water was rising. Other struggling 
shapes in the darkness clung together; screams rose over the deep-bodied roar.
“The gates!” Gird yelled. “Get out the gates!” He didn’t know if anyone could 
hear him, but it felt better to yell. He fought his way through the water, now 
thigh-deep, and lost his footing just as he came to the gates. The water threw 
him, tumbled him, dragged him toward the dry riverbed, but before he reached it 
was shallow enough for him to get back to his feet. He angled away from the 
river, shouting for his marshals. In the starlit, windless night, he could see 
only the vague shapes of guardpost, toll station, and bridge, dark moving blurs 
that might be his men, and the glittering surface of racing water.
Then the ground heaved again, and the guardpost disintegrated into individual 
blocks of stone and pieces of wood, as a final gout of water spurted even 
higher, and fell with an indescribable noise on the mess below. Gird’s ears 
ached with the silence that followed; his yeomen’s cries seemed thin, more like 
buzzing flies than human sounds. He was cold, cold all the way through, wet and 
shaking. He looked toward the distant city, and saw a faint glow move through 
the air toward it, to vanish behind its walls.
Anger followed fear so closely that he was still feeling the chill when he found 
himself bellowing at his people to be quiet and pay attention.
“What was that?” came a plaintive wail.
“Magic,” Gird said firmly. “Now—who’s where? Felis? Cob?”
Answers came, shakily at first, and then more firmly. Not everyone. Cob had been 
inside, sleeping in the guards’ barracks; he hadn’t answered. Gird shivered, 
remembering the way the guardpost walls had wavered. Anyone who hadn’t made it 
out before they fell could be crushed—or drowned. Gird splashed through the 
water, only ankle-deep now, to the near end of the bridge. He looked down, 
unsurprised to see water in the river, rising water. Too late for the fish, but 
the frogs croaked happily. If I were the sier, Gird thought, I would attack 
while the enemy was still disorganized. How long did the sier expect him to be 
disorganized?
He got most of his wet, shivering, miserable yeomen back into some kind of 
order, weapons in hand. One watchfire, on the west side, had survived; he sent a 
hand of men across the River Road to search for dry fuel. With a makeshift torch 
in hand, he clambered into the jumbled mess of fallen stones and mud that had 
been a tidy guardpost. Orange light glistened on wet rock, gleamed on stretches 
of rippled mud, and turned the slow but steady flow over the lip of the kitchen 
well to a fiery glaze. Some of the odd shapes were bodies: a naked foot stuck 
out from under a stone, a dead face, mouth clogged with mud, screamed silently 
from its pool of water. Gird shuddered. Someone in the darkness coughed, then 
retched. Someone else groaned.
All through the rest of the night, they searched the wreckage for anyone alive. 
Most of those in the ruins of the guardhouse were dead or dying, crushed by 
fallen stones or drowned—or both, it was hard to tell. Daylight made visible to 
all what those with torches had seen in the night: an uneven pile of rubble, 
mud, and the smashed remains of whatever had been inside it. One by one they 
dragged the bodies out. Too many bodies. Gird raged inwardly at the unfairness 
of it. Felis, red hair thick with mud, crushed when the tower fell: he had been 
a burr in Gird’s boot, from the first day, but he had also done his best. Cob 
was alive, but lame; a falling stone had smashed his foot. Gird looked at all 
the bodies, all the injured. Twenty-three dead, eleven injured who could not 
walk. Worse than any battle he’d fought so far. They would have to dig a 
grave—and for that matter, new jacks. They would need litters for the injured. 
Food—all the food stored in the guardhouse was gone. He was not sure whether to 
trust the water that still came from the shattered well, trickling away through 
the mess. It came to him suddenly that no one had blessed this well for a long 
time. Its merin might have deserted it, or been angry with the men who took its 
water and gave no thanks. Perhaps that had made it vulnerable to the magelord’s 
magic.
He sent someone to find herbs for the dead, and flowers for the well. If any 
good spirit still lived in that water, he wanted it to be happy, to know that 
the men there now respected it. He laid the proper herbs on each of the dead, 
muttered prayers for their traveling souls, and scattered the flowers on the 
water. They swirled in an unseen current. Gird took that as a sign that the 
merin accepted his offering, and dared to taste the water. It was sweet.
“Do you know what it was?” asked Cob, when Gird paused beside him.
“Magic,” Gird said. “The sier’s magic, I’d guess.”
“What can we do against it?”
Gird shrugged. He had no weapons against magic, nothing but Arranha’s word, and 
the gnomes’ word, that the magelords were losing these powers, that he could 
defeat them with ordinary soldiers.
“If that’s what they used to be like,” Cob said, “I’ll quit cursing my 
grandfather’s grandfather for giving in. No one could stand against that.”
Gird cracked his knuckles. “I don’t know. Most of us are alive, and he’s not 
come out to fight us yet. Maybe it takes something out of ’em.”
Cob spat. “He hasn’t come out to fight because he doesn’t need to. He can do 
this again and again—”
“If he could do it so easily, he would have before.” Gird spoke slowly, feeling 
his way into the truth. “He sent his soldiers, his patrols, because that was 
easier, until we blocked the road that he needs. Besides, he hasn’t followed it 
up. If he could, I think he would; he’s not a stupid man.”
“You know him so well.” Cob rarely indulged in sarcasm; Gird thought it was the 
pain of his foot.
“I met him, last year,” Gird said. Cob stared at him. “When I came to visit the 
barton—what I thought was their barton. It was a trap, but not for me alone.”
“And you met the sier?”
Gird nodded. “Met him and—” He did not want to tell Cob all the details of that 
meeting. “He’s—an interesting man,” he finished lamely. Cob gave him a long 
look.
“It should make a good story sometime. If we live to hear it.” He tried to shift 
his legs, and bit back a groan. “Last thing I needed—damn that rock!”
  
What bothered Gird most was not knowing what else the sier could do. If he could 
dry up a river and then send water out a well, breaking the ground around it, 
what could he do with fire? Could any one of Gird’s cookfires turn into a huge 
inferno? Could the sier move hillsides the way he had moved water? Or call a 
whirlwind? If he could move water at such a distance, could he influence men 
directly, even kill? Twenty-three dead now—in minutes—at no risk to the sier or 
his army. He shook his head as if flies were after him; this would not do. He 
needed to know more.
Selamis, called back from the nonfighters, stared at the sodden ring of 
destruction in apparent shock.
“You’re a lord’s son,” Gird began, Selamis’s eyes came back to him, wary now. “I 
met one of their priests, who said they’d had great powers before, but now these 
were waning. He said one reason the magelords bred with our people was in hopes 
of getting more mages. Do you know anything about that?”
Selamis didn’t answer for a long moment, his eyes roving across the mud and 
rubble. “I never saw anything like this,” he said finally.
Gird grunted. “Did you ever see the lords use any magic?”
“Yes. My fa—they could make light. Some of them did, anyway. I saw one call 
someone once, I suppose you’d say. A quarrel among servants, almost a brawl, and 
when he came they all quieted, even smiled. Not like they were hiding the anger, 
like they didn’t feel it.”
“What did he do?” Gird had not missed the change in Selamis’s tone when he spoke 
of servants.
“He gave his judgment, scolded one—but they didn’t mind. They couldn’t, with 
that feeling.”
“You felt it too?”
“Partly. It was—” Selamis seemed to struggle for the right words, his hands 
waving a little. “It felt good,” said finally. “Peaceful, like a hot afternoon. 
Safe.”
“Mmm.” Gird thought what that could mean for a commander. To have his soldiers 
feel safe, confident—he remembered that the brown man, the sier, had given him a 
feeling of confidence. He had thought he didn’t want to kill the sier because of 
his own attitudes; had the sier been influencing him? And if he could do that, 
could he make others feel fear and confusion? He asked Selamis.
“I never saw anything like that,” he said. Gird eyed him thoughtfully. Something 
about the man seemed odd. He was only ten years younger than Gird, but seemed 
younger than the other men his age; Gird kept wanting to call him “lad.” Was 
that his magelord blood? Arranha had said the lords discarded their halfbreeds 
who had no magical talent: was that why Selamis had been fostered away?
“Did you ever do any magic?” he asked bluntly. Selamis’s eyes widened, then 
narrowed.
“No.” It was a flat no, inviting no more questions. Gird ignored that.
“That priest I met, he said bastards with magic were adopted in, and those 
without fostered away as small children. You talk as if you stayed with the 
lords longer—did they think you might have it?”
Selamis reddened, and turned away. “I have no magic. I am only a bastard, and my 
father sent me away—he never said why. I hadn’t done anything wrong—” But to be 
a bastard, Gird thought, without the talent they hoped to breed in you. He 
didn’t like the whine under Selamis’s words. A few years of luxury too many; 
perhaps he thought he should have had it forever.
“What about fire? Could they make something burn, something far away?”
“Like this?” Selamis looked around. “I don’t know. Light a fire, yes, by 
touching the wood, but I never saw anyone do it from a distance. Except—” His 
brow furrowed. “—the priests of Esea, in Esea’s Hall, once. They said it was the 
god lighting the fire on the high altar, but I always thought it was the 
priests; they had that look, that concentration.”
So Selamis had been to Esea’s Hall—with his father? Gird did not ask; he had 
more immediate worries.
“Is there any effort to it? Does it tire them?”
Again a curious expression crossed Selamis’s face, caution mixed with something 
else Gird could not interpret. “I think so. I remember hearing that.”
“So if one man, say, did that with the water, then he might be too tired to do 
more today?”
“He might.” Selamis pursed his lips. “They said it was like any other strength—a 
weak man would be exhausted from lifting what a strong man could carry easily. 
The man who did this might have been able to do more, or this might have been 
the work of more than one using all their strength.”
Gird scrubbed at his face; he felt he had been awake forever. “And you could not 
say which, could you?”
“No.” Selamis looked around again. “Did you lose the maps, in that?”
Gird had forgotten his maps and the records he had found in the guardpost. 
“I—must have.” They would be crushed under the rocks, soaked and blurred, even 
if he could find them. He glared at the rubble. “Now what will I do—I can’t draw 
maps!”
“I can,” Selamis said. “My hands are almost healed—and I remember the maps well 
enough. Let me look; I might find something.” He stepped carefully onto one of 
the tumbled stones.
“Go ahead,” Gird said. He didn’t think Selamis would find anything useful, but 
there was always a chance. Others had picked through the rubble salvaging what 
they could; though most of what they found was smashed beyond repair, some 
weapons survived intact.
Around midmorning, two of his scouts returned to say that at least sixty foot 
soldiers were on their way, carrying pikes. With them were a score of bowmen. 
Gird could just see the dustcloud. He had only a few bowmen worth the name, 
although his yeomen had been practicing with the bows taken at Overbridge. He 
had plenty of time to withdraw, but he did not want to withdraw. He still had 
almost twice as many yeomen as the reported force, and thirty of the good pikes. 
Unless the sier could make the river itself flood, they should be able to hold 
the bridge, at the least. He sent all his wounded west, to stay with the other 
noncombatants.
“You’re sure about this?” Cob asked. Gird could feel the attention of others; he 
wished Cob had not asked.
“Sure enough,” he said. “He wants it, or he wouldn’t have done all that. We 
thought it was important before; now we know it is.”
“But if he has more magicks—”
“We’ll pull back. Ordered retreat—” He had never actually done that, but the 
gnomes had told him how it should work. “They can’t take us with sixty, even 
with good pikes—”
“Alyanya’s grace,” said Cob, wincing as someone bumped his foot. He had tried to 
insist that he could stay. Gird insisted that he go. He wished he could do the 
same with Rahi, who was perfectly healthy, but he knew better than to try. She 
had taken all his ideas about women, and her individual situation, and recast 
them into something that he did not yet understand. It was hard to think of her 
as his daughter, although the memory of her as a child and young woman still 
lived in his heart. He knew she had killed, now—he had been told, after 
Overbridge, about Rahi—but he still thought of her with her bag of herbs, her 
poultices.
He realized that he was standing there thinking about Rahi because he needed 
someone to replace Cob, and she was the logical choice—would have been, if it 
weren’t that she was his daughter, and a woman. He had said it was the same rule 
for everyone—had he meant it? His mind flicked over the other possibilities. His 
senior people already had their responsibilities. There was Selamis, but he was 
new; he had never even drilled with them. He wondered if he could blame it on 
gnomes. They had been worse than surprised when he told them that women were in 
the bartons. But Arranha had said that the magelord women were trained to war— 
or had been.
He looked around. Cob had never said anything, but Gird knew Rahi had been his 
chosen second. She was busy now, supervising Cob’s unit in raising the 
breastworks on the downstream side of the bridge. They had no shields that would 
hold against arrows; they would have to crouch behind their scanty walls and 
hope. Maybe he wouldn’t need to say anything at all. But as if she felt his gaze 
on her, she looked around, and waved.
The enemy force came in sight now, marching along at a good pace. Gird felt his 
belly tighten. They looked ordinary enough, and if he’d had real pikes for all 
his yeomen, he’d have been confident.
It was going to be hard, bloody work with wood alone against their armor and 
steel, but it could be done. Had been done. Gird placed his few bowmen on either 
side of the bridge, where they would have the broadest target.
They came closer. Behind the soldiers with pikes he could just see the bowmen. 
He heard a shout, and they halted as neatly as even the gnomes could have 
wished. Their bowmen drew and released; the arrows flew up and burst into 
flames. Gird stared, as surprised as if a cow had suddenly grown fleece. Someone 
in his own lines screamed, then chopped it off.
The flaming arrows landed close behind his lines, but no one was hit. By that 
time, another flight was in the air; belatedly, Gird told his own bowmen to let 
fly. The second enemy flight fell closer. One missed Gird by a fingersbreadth; 
he felt the heat of the frames. His own bowmen saw their arrows angle away from 
the formation, as if they had struck something.
“What is that?” someone asked. Gird had no answer. He was beginning to wonder if 
his two-to-one advantage was an advantage at all. The enemy bowmen released 
another flight, the yeomen were looking anxiously up to watch the arrows fall. 
Two of them were struck full in the face. Another four were struck as well, and 
all six burst into flames, as if they’d been soaked in grease. The other yeomen 
backed away from them, and at that moment the enemy pikemen charged across the 
bridge.
Gird’s bowmen tried again, and this time hit some of the enemy, but most of them 
made it to the breastwork. Even as he rallied his yeomen, Gird realized that he 
had made more than one serious mistake. They had never fought across a 
breastwork before, for one thing. Raising it for protection from arrows—which 
hadn’t worked anyway—had meant raising it higher than his people usually thrust 
with their sticks. They were awkward now, handicapped by the breastwork, unable 
to coordinate their moves as usual. And although they had practiced against each 
other, they had never faced a trained polearm unit before. The sier’s soldiers 
knew exactly how to handle their pikes over a wall—Gird’s yeomen had no 
advantage of reach, and the disadvantage of poorer weapons and training.
Worse was to come. Rahi’s yell brought his head around, and he saw her pointing 
downstream, to the north. He could just see the cloud of dust, and the dark dots 
within it that were men on horseback. One of the gnome warmaster’s favorite 
sayings raced through his head: “War rewards the prudent and farseeing, and 
punishes the unwary. It is what you do not know about your enemy that destroys 
you.” He had not known horses could ford the Hoor downstream from the bridge; he 
had not known about that kind of fire arrow; he had not known that he did not 
know. He was not sure he knew what would get them out of this alive.
Already some of the sier’s pikes were atop the breastwork, forcing a wedge into 
his line. If they divided his force, all was lost. Gird raised his voice over 
the din, calling them back to rally around him. Rahi looked over her shoulder, 
nodded, and got her unit rearranged into a tight mass, backing away from the 
breastwork one careful step at a time. Keris, on the upstream side, did the 
same, not quite as neatly. The sier’s pikes overran the breastwork and pressed 
them hard, but the yeomen managed to come together and sort themselves into rows 
and columns again.
Gird could just see the approaching cavalry over the heads of the fighters. 
Would they surround his force, or attack one side? And how would the sier’s 
commander order the pikes? He felt no fear, only disgust with himself for 
leading his people into this trap— a mistake from start to finish—and the 
stubborn determination to get them out if possible.
The sier’s commander (Gird had finally picked out the dapper little man in a 
helmet decorated with streamers) had no doubts at all. He disengaged abruptly 
what had been the front, shifted his pikes sideways, and left Gird’s flank open 
to his bowmen. Gird’s own archers, gifted for once with both initiative and 
skill, let fly before Gird even realized what had happened, and skewered the 
front rank of enemy bowmen. But the second rank sent fiery arrows into Gird’s 
closely-packed troop—and anyone hit was instantly engulfed in flame. Gird 
himself tripped one victim and tried to roll him, but the man was 
dead—consumed—after the second scream. Gird hardly felt the blisters rising on 
his arms for the cold chills that raced down his back. It had to be more 
magicks—no fire burned like that. His formation rolled; he could feel their 
terror. Frantic, his bowmen tried again, downed four more of the enemy.
And the enemy pikes slammed into what had been their right flank.
Gird struggled with his own fear and confusion, shouted orders he only hoped 
were right. Their poles were as long as the enemy pikes—just longer—they could 
hold them off if they made no mistakes. He threw himself into that line, giving 
his yeomen his own energy, his own strength. His line stiffened, straightened… 
and behind him, he heard the cavalry coming, a thundering roar.
War is full of mistakes; it forgives none. The gnomes had said that, too. 
Sometimes the winner was the commander who made the fewest mistakes, or managed 
to correct them. Gird spun, with a final slap on the shoulder to one of the line 
facing pikes, and bellowed encouragement to those facing horses.
This, so apparently dangerous, they had done before. The yeomen braced their 
sticks and pikes, ready to prod the riders off balance. The horses, as usual 
when faced with an obstacle too large to jump, slowed, shied, ducked away from 
the line. Their riders spurred them on, whacked them with the flats of their 
blades, but the horses refused. Gird would have called his line to attack, but 
he could not do that with the pikes opposite. He heard a yell from the remaining 
enemy archers, and several horsemen turned aside, to return with archers riding 
double.
“Look out!” someone yelled, as if there were anything they could do. The archers 
grinned—six of them, Gird counted. The riders backed off slightly; those with 
archers mounted turned their horses’ heads away, so that the archers had the 
best possible angle. Gird sent up a wordless prayer to any god who might be 
paying attention—though he suspected he had been stupid enough to make them all 
turn their backs—and received no miracle. The archers made a slow and elaborate 
dance of taking arrows, nocking them— “Front two, now—second two, reverse!” It 
was outrageous, hopeless, and impossible, but better than standing like sheep in 
a pen. The front two ranks on that side of Gird’s formation followed him in a 
ragged charge at the horsemen; the second two—who had been supporting the two on 
the pike side—spun and faced outward to replace them. Gird did not stop to see 
if it worked, or how neatly they turned. He was running straight for the mounted 
archers, screaming as loud as he could; when he saw one archer draw, the arrow 
aimed at him, he threw his stick, end over end, and dove for the ground.
He felt the heat of the flames, but the arrow missed him. The horse, alarmed at 
an attack from the rear, crowhopped and whirled, fighting its rider; the archer 
grabbed too late for the rider’s belt and slid off, landing hard on his back. He 
heard screams: one of his men had been hit by a fire arrow. But more had 
followed Gird’s lead; horses squealed and bucked, spun and reared, and all but 
one archer fell off.
The other riders tried to cut Gird and his yeomen off from the fallen archers. 
Gird ducked under one horse’s neck, got his arm under the rider’s leg and 
heaved; the man fell off the opposite side, cursing, and cut his own horse 
trying to strike at Gird. The horse squealed, shied, and collided with another 
in time to spoil that rider’s stroke. Gird had his hauk out, and popped the next 
rider hard on the knee. He heard it crunch. Then he saw one of the archers, 
standing, with his strung bow over his shoulder, reaching up for a lift onto 
horseback. The rider was leaning out and the archer took his wrist. Gird’s hauk 
got the archer in the angle of neck and shoulder just as he left the ground. The 
man sagged, pulling the rider down and sideways; before the rider realized his 
danger, Gird had yanked back on the archer, and dragged both off the horse. He 
put a deliberate heel on the bow as he smashed the archer’s head, and then the 
rider’s.
“Gird! Here!” He followed that yell and found a tight cluster of his men, 
protected by their sticks, holding off a milling crowd of horsemen. Gird dived 
into that protection just as a sword opened a gash across his shoulders.
“We got the archers,” said one of the men proudly.
Without archers, the horsemen could not quite reach and kill the yeomen; Gird 
was able to maneuver the survivors of his raid back into the main group. These 
had recovered enough control to withstand the pressure from the sier’s pikemen, 
though Gird realized he no longer outnumbered the enemy by anything like two to 
one.
Time passed, with sweating, grunting, miserable fly-bitten flurries of effort 
and equally sweating, miserable, and fly-bitten stretches of exhaustion, when 
both forces had run out of breath and will. The sun moved on towards evening, 
and Gird had not been able to move his yeomen anywhere. But no reinforcements 
had come for the sier’s troops, either. They were locked together like two 
stubborn bulls that have shoved head against head without yet establishing 
dominance.
What broke the stalemate was Gird’s twenty other yeomen, coming back from the 
distant campsite to find out why they had had no orders. They came marching 
along, singing “The Thiefs Revenge” as loudly and unmelodiously as twenty men 
could do, while behind them came such of the noncombatants as wanted to flourish 
a shovel or pick and learn to march in step. In actual numbers, they were too 
few to matter, but as fresh troops coming onto a field where all are exhausted, 
they had an effect beyond their numbers. The sier’s men withdrew a step, and 
then another. Gird did not order a charge; he was near falling down himself, and 
knew his yeomen did not have strength left for a charge. The sier’s pikes 
withdrew an armslength, a pike’s length—the horsemen rode between, and the 
sier’s pikes turned to march away. Gird let them. He was glad enough to see them 
go.
There was no question of holding his position. Too many had died, demonstrating 
that he did not have what he needed to hold it. Gird watched the low evening 
sunlight gild the backs of the sier’s men as they withdrew to the far side of 
the bridge, and formed again. His own yeomen gathered the bodies of their dead, 
ignoring the sier’s fallen. It would be foolish to strip the bodies in sight of 
their companions. Too many, too many: Gird cursed his foolishness, his 
stupidity, and even the time he wasted cursing them.
“At least you got us out of it,” Rahi murmured, as he gathered them again to 
march away.
“No thanks to me,” Gird said. “I got us into it.”
“You always said a lesson that leaves bruises is never forgotten.”
He looked at her, but her steady eyes did not reproach him. “I said that?”
She grinned, a white flash out of her dusty face. “Often and often. When that 
witch of a dun cow kicked me. When Gori hacked his ankle with the scythe—” Gori, 
her older brother, his first son, who had died of a plague. Rahi went on. “One 
of your favorites, that was, along with Think first, and you won’t bleed after.”
Gird snorted. “I didn’t remember that one, did I? Gods above: I thought about 
what I would do, not what they would do.”
But if Rahi did not reproach him, others would. He would reproach himself for 
this day’s stupidity. He would learn from it— he had to, to make the deaths 
worthwhile—but he would not forget that he could have chosen differently, and 
those men and women would still be alive.



Chapter Twenty-four
« ^ » 
In this chastened mood, Gird spent the next hand of days ensuring that his camp 
was as safe as it could be. He examined those who wanted to train as yeomen, and 
assigned them to units to replace those who had died. He visited the wounded, 
steeling himself to endure criticisms which no one actually voiced. He was sure 
they said more behind his back.
To his surprise, his recent defeat brought in as many recruits as his earlier 
victories. Hardly a day passed without one or three or six men or women 
straggling into camp, asking a chance to train and fight for “the new day.” Some 
had traveled hands of days from distant farmsteads; others came from villages 
and towns only a few hours away. Some were enthusiastic youths, children—as Gird 
saw them—hardly off their mothers breasts. They stared wide-eyed at his veteran 
yeomen; he could practically see “glory” written on their foreheads. When he 
tried to explain how hard a soldier’s life could be, they hardly listened, their 
eyes wandering to the alluring strangeness of campfires, women in trousers 
carrying pikes, men practicing archery. Gird sighed, turned them over to one of 
the more dour yeoman-marshals, and tried to ignore their eager glances when next 
he passed them as they scrubbed pots or dug jacks trenches.
Older recruits posed other problems. Some had a grievance against a particular 
lord, and wanted Gird to ensure vengeance. These could turn sour when they found 
that everyone had a grievance, and Gird thought no one’s private reasons more 
important than another’s. Some were obviously the misfits of their villages, 
quarrelsome bullies who thought Gird would supply weapons and food and an excuse 
for their violent behavior. Some were spies, as Selamis had been originally, 
some were crochety old men who were sure they knew how Gird should run his army, 
and some were soldiers changing sides, born peasants and now returning to their 
people—who also knew how Gird should run his army. Few of them shared Gird’s 
concern for the time after the war, for the kind of land they would have. And 
they all knew less than they thought they did.
Gird dealt with these as well as he could. What bluff honesty and forthright 
explanation could do, he did, but when that failed he resorted to his strong 
right arm and a voice that could, as one of his marshals said, take the bark off 
a tree at twenty paces. He had the least patience with whiners and those who 
could find, as the saying went, one grain of sand in a sack of meal.
The army grew, nonetheless, and Gird found that Selamis’s ability to read, 
write, and keep accounts was invaluable. He no longer had to keep in his head 
the members of each unit, with its marshal and yeoman marshal. Selamis 
suggested—tactfully—changes in nomenclature, preserving the name “barton” for 
the original use, and calling tactical units “cohorts” no matter how many 
bartons went to make them up. Gird agreed, after scowling at Selamis’s neat 
script for a long moment. The gnomes had had names for the units, based on size, 
from the five-gnome pigan to the hundred-gnome gerist, but the language of his 
own people had nothing but “horde” and “skirra.” The former meant everyone in 
the steading or hearthing who could fight, and the latter meant a small raiding 
party sent to steal livestock. He did not like using one of the mage-lords’ 
words, but cohort was better than the others.
With Selamis and his most experienced yeomen, Gird worked out a new, more 
uniform, organization. His cohorts were upwards of 120 hands—though the term 
“hand” began to fall out of use with the larger unit. Each cohort would have a 
marshal, and at least four yeoman-marshals. Where bartons had joined to form 
cohorts, their yeoman-marshals would serve, otherwise the most experienced 
yeomen could be chosen. Each cohort would divide into tally-groups for camp 
work, and each tally-group would be supervised by the yeoman-marshal for that 
section. When the army divided for some reason, Gird would appoint one of the 
marshals to command whatever group he himself was not with—which led to the 
title of “high marshal” for such a situation, and—over Gird’s initial 
protests—“Marshal General” for himself.
“They don’t have to call you that,” Selamis pointed out.
“Thank the gods! Why should they? A general is one of those fancy officers in 
gold-washed armor with a plume to his helmet; I’m not—”
“But you are, in one way. Commander of the whole army. It’s for the records, 
Gird, and if you send orders—”
“Flattery.” Gird eyed Selamis dubiously. The man had good ideas, but he had too 
many of them, too fast, and was too tactful by half in presenting them. Gird 
could not doubt his bravery—he had asked to start training while his hands were 
still sore—but he could not overcome the feeling that Selamis was just a little 
too smooth.
Somewhat to Gird’s surprise, the sier had caused no more trouble—no patrols had 
come in pursuit, and the guardpost near the bridge was left a pile of rubble. 
Gird’s eastern troop—half-cohort, he reminded himself—returned after several 
hands of days, full of their own stories of battle. They had “almost” held the 
sier’s cavalry; they had seen no sign of magicks.
Ivis made no comment on Gird’s mishaps, but did get him aside to discuss 
Selamis. “Are you making a yeoman-marshal out of him?”
Gird raised his eyebrows. “I hadn’t thought. Why?”
“He wasn’t in the barton in his village.”
Gird sighed. “We went over that. He was an outsider; he’d been given someone’s 
cottage—”
“I don’t entirely trust him.” Perversely, Ivis’s distrust made Gird feel 
obligated to defend Selamis.
“He’s not like us, I’ll admit, but he’s good enough.”
“He was telling Kef what you thought about the lords’ powers,” said Ivis. “As if 
you’d told him to. Did you?”
“Well—no. But I don’t see that it matters, unless he lied about it. What did he 
say?”
“Just what you’ve told me, mostly, and you thought the others should tell you if 
they’d heard anything more.”
“That makes sense. If I’d thought of it, I’d have done the same.”
“Yes, but—” Ivis shook his head. “I can’t explain it, but he’s— he’s not solid.”
“His wife and daughter died. We heard three days ago, from someone who saw it. 
He knows—that would unsettle anyone.” Gird did not say how Selamis had taken the 
news; he was not sure himself what that white-lipped silence meant, that was 
followed so soon by apparent calm. He looked off across the camp, where Selamis 
at that moment was chatting with someone while scrubbing a kettle. Harmless 
enough; what was it that unsettled Ivis? Gird remembered that Diamod had 
unsettled him, with the difference between farmer and craftsman, an indefinable 
shift in attitude.
By this time they had moved the main camp, shifting west away from Grahlin, and 
south along one of the arcuate band of hills. Only one of the gnomish maps had 
been recovered; Gird was trusting Selamis’s memory for the rest. The maps looked 
much the same to him, barring the use of a brush instead of a pen.
The larger camps, and richer resources of summer, allowed refinements he had 
missed before. One of their number claimed to have made his own brews before, 
and combined the seeds of early-ripening wild grasses with gods only knew what 
to produce a potent brew. The taste varied widely from batch to batch, but no 
one was asking for flavor. Gird found it relaxing to sip a mug in the evening 
after dark, when the weight of the day’s worries seemed to bow his shoulders and 
put an ache in every joint. It had been a long time—many years—since he could 
end most days in a pleasant if hazy mood. He had, he told himself, earned it.
It was on one such evening, after a day spent settling the petty disputes which 
so often infuriated him, that he found himself faced with six newcomers, all 
women, and all with a grievance. His head had ached since before dawn with the 
coming storm that drenched the camp in afternoon, and brought a foul stench from 
the jacks. No one else admitted to smelling it; he’d had to bellow at the 
marshals before they reassigned their tally groups to digging a new one. Even 
after the storm, it was hot and sticky, with hardly a breath of breeze and 
clouds of stinging flies; nothing would dry, and his boots were sodden. For 
supper they had only cold porridge left from the morning; the storm had caught 
them by surprise, and all the fires had gone out. So Gird had retired to his 
favorite stump with a pot of Selis’s brew, and let the stuff work the day’s 
irritations out of his consciousness.
He was not happy to be interrupted by the newcomers, and the woman who talked 
the most had a sharp, whining tone that set his teeth on edge. She had a 
complaint about the duke’s steward in their village, and a complaint about the 
barton’s yeoman-marshal, who did not welcome women. She wanted to tell him in 
detail about a legal dispute involving one woman’s husband’s mother and a 
promised parrion which had then been withheld, as proof of the unreasonable 
attitude of the steward. His eyes glazed after awhile. He was acutely aware of 
her disapproval, and that made him even less willing to be sympathetic. The 
other five women stood shifting from foot to foot as they listened, clumping 
behind Binis, the speaker, as if she were some sort of hero able to protect 
them. She didn’t look much like a hero, a tall scrawny dark-haired woman with a 
big nose and very large teeth, hands too large for her wrists… He never did 
remember when the vague annoyance sharpened into active dislike, and the dislike 
into anger. Along the edge of his memory was the sight of Binis’s face, the 
expression changing from surprise to dismay to anger and contempt, the faces 
behind hers mirroring hers as if she were in fact the only real person there— 
his memory blurred, after that. The next thing he knew, Kef had waked him with 
the news that Binis was gone, and with her the five newest yeomen. That was the 
next morning, broad daylight, far later than he usually woke.
“She’s gone to tell the sier where we are,” warned Kef. “You really made her 
furious—”
“I said what I had to.” Gird rubbed his face, hoping the headache would go away, 
and wondering what, in fact, he had said. He hadn’t drunk that much, and the 
stupid woman shouldn’t have kept nagging at him.
“I know, but—” Kef peered at him. “You should be careful, Gird; that stuff Selis 
makes would take the hair off a horsehide.”
“I’m fine.” He wasn’t, but he would be with a can of cold water over his head 
and something to eat. If they had anything left. He clambered up, stifling a 
groan as stiffness caught him in every joint, and looked around.
Something was wrong. He couldn’t tell exactly what, but instead of the busy, 
determined life of the camp he sensed uneasiness, an almost furtive bustle in 
the distance, and ominous stillness around him. None of his cohort marshals were 
nearby, and yet he saw no drill in progress, and heard no tramp of feet out of 
sight. He smiled at Kef, and started toward the hearth. It was bare; the fire 
burnt out and the stones barely warm. One cookpot sat to the side, and in it was 
one cold sodden lump of porridge.
“That’s yours, then,” said a woman walking by—Adar, he remembered after a 
moment. Widowed, mother of two surviving.
“You’ve eaten?” he said to Kef, who was still hovering near him.
“Oh yes. Hours ago. I mean—”
“You mean I overslept because I was drunk,” said Gird, and prodded the porridge 
to see how firm it was. He broke off a smaller lump and ate it with difficulty, 
watching Kefs eyes. They wavered, not meeting his gaze.
“Well—you had a lot to do last night—”
“Is that what they all think?” He took another small lump, and gulped it down 
without trying to chew it. The stuff would hold slates on a roof in a gale, he 
thought.
“Oh no. I’m sure they don’t—although some—I mean someone said, but I don’t know 
who—”
Gird finished the porridge, cold and gluey as it was, and thought about it. 
Rahi’d told him to be careful about drinking too much, but she’d always said 
that. Tam and Amis, too—but that was years ago. And some people always 
complained that others drank too much. Far as he was concerned, it was those who 
had neither head nor heart, trying to deny others what they themselves couldn’t 
enjoy. Yet he remembered old Sekki well enough, who always smelled of sour ale 
and staggered when he walked, day or night— who died in a stinking puddle of his 
own vomit, one night. The sergeant had pointed him out to Gird and the other 
recruits—and he knew the sergeant’s warnings against drunkeness didn’t come from 
lack of taste for it.
So—had he been drunk last night, and had he thrown away five good yeomen (he 
wouldn’t count Binis) by losing his temper in a drunken rage? Evidently some of 
the others thought so. Could they all be wrong? They’d all been wrong before, 
but so had he.
His head throbbed, and the porridge sat uneasily in his belly. He hadn’t been 
really drunk, but then again he had to consider how the others felt, what they 
thought. He picked up the cooking pot and started for the creek.
“Where are you going with that?” came a sharp voice from behind him. He turned, 
and grinned at Adar. She reddened.
“Going to clean it,” he said. “Don’t we have a rule, that laggards to table 
clean the pot?”
Her mouth fell open, then shut with a snap. “But you—but you’re—”
“I can dip water and scour, Adar,” he said mildly. “And one thing about rules, 
they’re for all of us. I’m no different.” He turned away before she could offer, 
and stumped down the bank. The first splash of cold water went on his face, then 
he dipped the pot, scooped up a handful of sand and small gravel, and swirled it 
around. When he felt with his fingers, the gluey coating of dried-on porridge 
was still there. Blast. He’d have to really work at it. He looked around for 
rushes or reeds. Adar was standing on the bank, watching him.
“Here,” she said. “This makes it easier.” She handed him a lump of porous gray 
rock, very light for its size. Scrapestone, or scourstone: he remembered seeing 
similar lumps for sale in city markets, priced far above a village peasant’s 
ability to pay. Mali had always used rushes. But the scourstone took the 
porridge off the pot quickly, and his knuckles hardly hurt at all. He gave the 
stone and the rinsed pot back to her.
“Does it pass your inspection?” he asked.
A smile tugged at her mouth. “Better than my breadshovel did yours. I never 
would have expected you to know how to clean pots.” He thought of saying it was 
simple enough, like most women’s work—which had been his father’s comment when 
his mother was sick—but he thought better of it. Simple work could be hard, and 
since it had to be done, better those who did it should take pride in it.
“When my mother had fever,” he said, “my father bade me do kitchen work—my 
brother’s wife was sick, too.”
“Ah. And can you cook?”
He grinned, remembering burnt porridge and bread that baked stone hard outside 
but soggy within. “No, not well. I’ve tried, and we didn’t starve, but no one 
would choose my porridge or bread. The Lady gave me wit to plow and raise the 
grain, not prepare it.” He did not mention his hearthcakes, which had helped him 
win over a campful of hungry men. They were poor fare compared to real food, and 
he knew it.
“You have a brewer’s taste for ale,” she said, then colored again. “I’m sorry—I 
didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did. And I gather you all agree. How much did I drink last night?”
“Too much,” she said. “A pot or so, that I know of.”
He wanted to explain about the pain in his knees and hips and shoulders, the 
steady ache that sapped his strength some days, the tension and fear, that ale 
relieved. But he remembered—and knew she remembered—the tonguelashing he’d given 
young Black Seli for getting drunk in a tavern and blabbing about the nearest 
barton. Black Seli’s excuse had been a fever, and he hadn’t put up with it. 
Rules are for all of us. I’m no different. Why had he said that, right out loud. 
It was true, but still. No one knew how hard it was, dragging a mob of ignorant 
peasants through one battle after another. He looked at Adar, and realized that 
she was not going to accept that argument. Neither would he, if someone else 
gave it.
Gird sighed, heavily, and said, “Well, you may be right. Times before, I drank 
too much, and I thought I had my reasons.”
“Most men have,” said Adar, “At least they say so.”
“Yes. Well, I can’t stop last night now—”
She cocked her head at him. “No—and you can’t stop the results of it, either.”
He had not thought Adar was so forthcoming. She’d been a quiet one, hardly 
speaking in drill, always busy at some task but never chattering with the other 
women. You said women had brains too, he reminded himself. You said men should 
listen to them. But it was different, Rahi or Pir and this stranger. He wasn’t 
going to justify himself to her, and he wasn’t going to make promises, either. 
He climbed the bank, regaining the advantage of height, and looked down at her.
“I’ll have to try,” he said. Then he went on, to hunt for at least one of his 
cohort marshals.
Kef caught him halfway across the camp, by which time Gird was sure that the 
problem was much bigger than he’d thought. All the firepits were cold, when 
someone should have been brewing sib and baking for the noon meal. Those few he 
could see all looked to be tying up bundles.
“Gird! Red Seli wants to see you.” Kef was breathless; he must have run some 
way. “Back there,” he said, waving an arm to answer Gird’s unasked question. “In 
the woods near the spring.”
“Where are the other marshals?” asked Gird. Already he knew they might have 
deserted.
“Ivis took his cohort up the river, to gather fuel; Sim’s looking for a better 
campsite—”
“Better than this?” Gird looked at the clean-running creek, and the heavy woods 
around that hid them from almost all directions. And they had watchers on the 
high rocks, the only point that overlooked the camp.
Kef looked down. “They’re afraid Binis will tell,” he said. “Or those new ones.”
“So they all decided to move while I slept.”
“They tried to wake you, but—” Kefs voice trailed off. Gird’s headache was no 
worse than the pain in his heart. He had told them the importance of a leader’s 
ability to stay alert, to wake quickly and able to deal with emergencies. He had 
shown them— and would they distrust him now, because only once he drank too much 
ale? Could he not have any relaxation?
He remembered the gnomes suddenly, their stern faces and inflexible rules. Their 
warmaster would have had something to say about “relaxation,” and not what he 
would like to hear.
“What did I say to Binis?” he asked Kef.
“You don’t remember?”
“If I remembered, I wouldn’t need to ask you, now would I? Tell me.”
Kef looked down, scuffed his toes in the leafmold, and then stared past Gird’s 
shoulder. “You said—you said you didn’t care what the steward had done, that the 
yeoman-marshal had a right to run his barton any way he pleased, and if he 
didn’t want a gaggle of whining women treating war like a village brawl over 
oven-rights that was fine with you, and if she didn’t have a better reason than 
that for joining up, she’d never last a day of camp discipline— that you had 
enough half-witted, lovesick wenches hanging around already, bothering your 
soldiers with nonsensical notions—that for all you cared she could take her ugly 
face to the duke and see what good it did her—”
“I said that?”
Kef nodded. “More than that—and livelier than that, if you take my meaning. You 
brought up every god I heard of, and a few I haven’t, and threatened to unbreech 
her in front of the whole camp and tan her backside.”
“Oh gods.” His heart sank. He had never suspected himself of that kind of thing. 
He thought Binis was ugly, and just the sort of woman he disliked, but that was 
no excuse for what he’d said.
“That’s when Rahi tried to get you to be quiet—”
“Rahi—!”
“And you told her to shut her damnfool mouth or you’d show her you were still 
her father—?”
“Mmph.” Humor pricked his misery. “I daresay she didn’t take that well.”
“No—she said ale was no one’s father, and stormed off—that’s when Binis left. 
And the others.”
Gird scrubbed his head with both hands. Worse than he’d thought. Worse then he’d 
ever imagined—how could he have done such a thing? He could see, with the clear 
vision of the morning after, just how that would affect all the women. He had 
had no problems with them before; they had done all he asked of any soldier, and 
now—he shivered. “Where’s Rahi?”
Kef was staring at the ground again. “Gone. She went off with Sim. I—I think 
she’ll be back.”
At least his son had been far away, off scouting with a small group in the west. 
Maybe he could get this straightened out before Pidi came back. He had the 
feeling it was going to take a long time, and a good bit of unpleasantness.
“Well. Thank you for telling me.” That surprised Kef; he had expected anger, 
Gird could see. “I needed to know what had set everyone off. Now I do, and I’m 
not surprised.”
“You’re not?”
Gird shook his head. “No—why would I be? I didn’t know what I was saying, 
Kef—you don’t have to believe that, but I didn’t. That’s not an excuse; I’ve 
told you all that, and it has to apply to me, too. I was wrong to get drunk, 
wrong to say all that to Binis—”
Kef scuffed the ground again. “That yeoman-marshal, he did say as how she’s hard 
to live with—always picking quarrels, complaining—that’s why he didn’t welcome 
her—”
“That’s as may be.” Gird took a deep breath, and it out in a long sigh. His head 
still hurt, but he could see, between the waves of pain, what he should have 
done, and would have to do now. “I was still wrong, and I can’t afford to be 
wrong like that. Red Selis first, and then I’ll find the other marshals: we need 
to have a conference.”
Red Selis, who had taken over Felis’s unit after the guardhouse defeat, was so 
relieved to find Gird sober, cooperative, and reasonable that he looked almost 
foolish. Gird did his best to project calm confidence. They discussed the 
transport of water to an alternate campsite, if one were found, and the possible 
storage of some equipment near the spring in case they came back to this site 
later. When all this was settled, Gird looked Red Seli straight in the face.
“I played the fool last night, and you have cause to mistrust me—what about it?”
Red Selis’ face turned redder than his hair. “Well, I—I was going to say, 
sir—since you mentioned it first—it’s not that we don’t trust you—”
Gird resisted the temptation to shake him. “Of course you don’t, right now: what 
I’m asking is, do you want to quit? Go home?”
“Quit!” Startled, Red Selis stared slack-jawed a moment, then shook his head. 
“No, ’course not. Just for one bit of temper? It’s just that—I dunno, exactly, 
but—”
“If I’d done that in the midst of battle, it could’ve killed us all,” Gird said 
harshly. “If someone else had, I’d be ready to break his neck for him—might even 
try. It’s worse for me—I’m supposed to be showing you how. Tell you what, I 
never knew it to take me like that before—not that I recall. It won’t do: you 
know it, and I know it. That’s well and good: no more of it for me. But to mend 
last night’s bad work—I have to know if you’ll trust me on this, long enough to 
see that I mean it.”
“Well—yes.” Red Selis looked thoughtful. “I never—I mean I thought you’d be 
angry, like, that we’d seen you—”
“I am angry, but with myself. It’s not your fault.”
“’Twas my cousin made the brew—” muttered Red Selis. Gird had forgotten that.
“It’s not his fault either. You’ve heard me say it to others: the rule’s the 
same for all. I was flat stupid, that’s what it is, and it won’t happen again.” 
As he said that, he wondered—how was he going to tell when he’d had too much? 
Surely it wouldn’t mean giving up ale altogether? He could see sidelong looks 
from those of Red Selis’s cohort who were close enough to hear. At least they 
were there, and not on their way home.
By nightfall, Gird had visited each of his marshals. Sim had not found a really 
good campsite; the army was dispersed among several temporary sites, and, to 
Gird’s eye, had lost perhaps one in seven. He didn’t do a formal count, and no 
one told him. Gird had not seen Rahi all day; he had not wanted to ask Sim about 
her. He had asked the marshals to gather everyone briefly, and in the dusky 
forest light of early evening he faced his army in a clearing not big enough for 
them all. He could feel hostility, fear, and even more dangerous, detachment—too 
many of them had decided they didn’t care what he did.
“How many of you,” he began, “saw what happened last night?” Arms waved, and a 
general growl of assent. “And how many of you saw it coming? How many noticed I 
was drunk before that?” Fewer arms, and a subdued mutter. Finally one clear 
voice from behind a screen of trees.
“I seen it days ago, the way you started goin’ to the ale-pot every night. Said 
to my brother, you just watch, and he’ll go the way of our uncle Berro, see if 
he don’t, and you did.” That brought a scatter of chuckles, but some nodding 
heads.
“Well,” Gird said, “you were right. I just hope your uncle Berro never made such 
a fool of himself, and never said so much he wished he hadn’t said.”
“I always heard as how drunks say what they really mean,” said someone else, 
challenging. A woman’s voice. Gird had expected that.
“My Da said, the first time he found me drunk, that a drunk’s mind was two years 
behind him, at least.” He paused, looked around, and felt a flicker of interest 
from them. “If you’d asked me, back when I had a home and a wife and children, 
if I thought women could make soldiers, I’d have said no. I’d never seen one, 
and neither had any of the rest of you. When Rahi came, my own daughter, I 
doubted her at first. But she had nowhere to go, and I knew my own blood was in 
her.”
“And you told her—”
“Aye. Drunk, which I shouldn’t have been, I told her a bunch of nonsense. Maybe 
I do think that, down in the old part of me, in my past. But here and now, I 
mean what I’ve said afore about women. You know what that is, and how I’ve made 
the rules here. And kept them, until now. I let my own daughter—and you that 
have daughters know what that costs—choose to put her body in front of pikes and 
swords. I meant all I said, and my pledge is still that what laws we make 
afterwards will be fair to women as to men.”
“Fine, then, when you’re sober—but what if you’re pickled in ale when you write 
the laws?”
“I won’t be.” He waited a moment, to see how they’d take that, and was surprised 
at the change in the atmosphere. Most of them were listening, were believing 
him. The others were uncertain now, no longer detached or hostile.
“I may be pigheaded, but I’m not that stupid: I made a mistake, a big one, and 
it’s cost all of us, not just me. I’m not going to do it again.”
“Going to let someone tell you to quit?” asked the same woman’s voice. Gird had 
not thought farther than keeping away from ale altogether.
“Good idea,” he said, surprising her. “Who would you trust?” A long pause was 
followed by several muttered suggestions, mostly marshals. The woman spoke up 
again.
“Rahi?”
“Tell you what,” Gird said. “I’ll talk to Rahi, Cob, those others you 
mentioned—and as far as the ale goes, they can tell me what they think. Is that 
fair?”
This time almost all of them agreed. “But what about Binis?” asked another 
woman. Gird nodded, and waved quiet those who tried to hush her.
“She’s right. What I do from now on is one thing, but what I did to Binis and 
those others is another—something I have to deal with. What I thought is I’d go 
after her, find her. Apologize—
“No! She’ll turn you in.”
Gird shrugged. “If she does, it’s better than her setting the sier on all of 
you.”
But this provoked more discussion and argument. Gird waited it out. Finally, Red 
Selis seemed to speak for most when he said, “It’s already happened; if she’s 
gone to the sier, then she’s gone— we don’t want to lose you as well. If she 
comes back, you can apologize then.”
“She won’t be back,” said someone else. “But the redhead has the right of it. 
You’re no good to us dead or captured.”
“I should tell her—” Gird began, when a voice behind him spoke out.
“Tell her what?” It was Rahi; he turned to see her standing there as if she’d 
never been anywhere else.
“I’ll tell you I’m sorry,” he said. “About last night—I didn’t know how drunk I 
was.”
“Very,” she said. Her mouth quirked. “More than I ever remember. I hope you 
learned something from it.”
“I did. And I was going to find Binis, and tell her—
Rahi shook her head before he finished. “Best not. I’ve got her settled for now, 
best I could do.”
“What?”
“Where did you think I’d gone off to? Someone had to be sure she didn’t put the 
sier’s men on us right away. I let her have her say—and she’s got a tongue on 
her almost as bad as yours, when she’s roused—and finally convinced her she 
wouldn’t get any profit out of the steward, besides it not being everyone’s 
fault. But she hates you still, and she’d be glad to do you an injury if she 
could. You can’t mend it; best end it.”
The meeting broke up into clumps of people talking, a few arguing, some coming 
to Gird to thank him for speaking, some edging around him. He spoke to all who 
approached him, feeling Rahi’s attention at his back like a warm fire. Finally 
everyone wandered off into the gloom, and she came up beside him.
“You were stupid,” she said quietly. He heard the steel underneath.
“I was. I don’t know—”
“Mother said when you were young you drank like that sometimes. Came home ready 
to fight anyone.”
“I don’t remember—before I met her, yes, but after—”
“Only a few times, she said, but when she was dying she bade me watch for it. 
Help you if I could.”
“You helped me here. I’m sorry, Rahi.” He would have hugged her, but she stood 
just too far away, his daughter no longer, making sure he knew it. That, too, 
pierced his heart with a pain as great as all the rest.
She heaved a sigh much like his, and her hands turned, gesturing futility. “I 
don’t think you can understand what your ways have meant to women—beyond what 
you saw in it.” He raised his brows, inviting her to speak, but she shook her 
head. “You can’t understand; you’ve never been where we were. But don’t take it 
back, whatever you do. Not for me or for any of us. You’ll lose—lose more than 
soldiers from your army, if you do.”
“I don’t mean to, Rahi. You keep me straight, eh?”
She grinned, a little uneasily. “I’ll tell you you’re drinking too much, and 
you’ll curse at me.”
“To no effect; the gods know what curses to take seriously. I tell you now, when 
I’m sober—do it, and I’ll listen, or you can lay a hauk across my skull and let 
sense in. Did you hear me tell the others? Well then—it goes for you, too.”



Chapter Twenty-five
« ^ » 
In the next few days, there was no sign that Binis had carried out her threat to 
expose the army to her sier. Gradually, by ones and twos, those who had fled 
returned. Gird, having apologized publicly, would have liked to forget it had 
ever happened, but knew that it had. In fact, the longer he thought about it, 
the worse it seemed: first a defeat, and then a drunken temper tantrum. He would 
have to do something to redeem himself.
His first choice of action was the disruption of a taxday at a market town west 
of them. Most towns had a garrison of troops, either belonging to the local lord 
or to the king. This made enforcement of special fees and taxes much easier. As 
well, the townsfolk felt even more at risk than poor farmers, and were less 
willing to lend their skills to Gird’s supporters. Although most farming 
villages now supported a barton, few towns did, and those bartons were small and 
timid.
This time, Gird made sure, through his spies, that none of the lords were 
actually in Brightwater before he planned his attack. He would face fewer than a 
hundred soldiers—well trained and equipped, but unsupported by magicks—and he 
had the support of bartons in all the surrounding farm villages, as well as 
shaky support from a faction of artisans in Brightwater itself.
Brightwater lay in a valley between two ridges, just where a stream had cut the 
western ridge to join the one that ran northward toward the Honnorgat. Most of 
Gird’s army had been east of it; he moved two cohorts onto the ridge west of the 
town, and waited. The town was too small to infiltrate beforehand; even with the 
summer fair approaching, the local troops were being cautious. He could not 
count on help from the two hands of yeomen in the barton there, either; they had 
formed only that winter, and had no regular place to drill. But as he’d 
expected, the approaching fair, and the incoming traders, distracted the local 
soldiers; they kept close to the town, scrutinizing traders, and did not bother 
to scout the woods. Once the fair began, the soldiers gave up even a pretense of 
patrol. They had enough to do in the town and the meadows around it. Traders who 
had not made it through to Grahlin on the River Road had turned aside and come 
here; the fields south of the town were thick with their camps.
On the day before the tax would be collected, a second contingent of soldiers 
arrived from Finyatha, wearing the king’s colors and carrying pikes. Selamis, 
watching this with Gird, announced that the enemy now had 150 soldiers in the 
town. Gird scowled, and sent scouts to check back along all the roads to make 
sure there were no more surprises. Then he called Rahi over.
“We’ll want every yeoman who can carry a weapon, and they need to be there—” He 
pointed across the valley to a wood below an outcrop of streaked yellow rock. 
“When we come down here, the fight’ll slide that way, and they’ll be placed 
right to land on ’em—”
“You’re sure?”
“Naught’s sure but death, but it should be so. They can’t go the other way, 
without getting into the rapids where the streams come together. Handy of the 
Brightwater folk to build their town on this side of the river. If things go 
well for us, I’ll want our reserves right down there by the bridge when they 
retreat that way.”
In the event, it happened as Gird had planned. His two cohorts made it to the 
edge of the fields just south of the town unobserved; the traders who might have 
seen him were in the market square, complaining bitterly about the tax being 
exacted. The soldiers stood around the market square, menacing the traders. The 
few traders’ servants took one look at Gird’s ragged but determined army and 
dove under the wagons, too scared to give an alarm. By the time they reached the 
town’s inadequate wall, with its gates standing wide for the fair, a few 
soldiers did see the peasants coming, and tried to sound an alarm, but in the 
confusion of a fair that alarm went unanswered until Gird and his men were well 
inside the town.
It was less a battle than a bloody slaughter, as his first cohort took a section 
of guardsmen in the rear. They had been stationed around the market, to keep 
merchants in until the tax had been collected; they could not turn and combine 
fast enough to defend themselves. Many of the people in the market had their own 
grievances, and joined in the fight with savage glee. Gird saw one woman lobbing 
cheeses at a line of soldiers just before they fell; a shepherd yanked back one 
man’s head in time for a yeoman’s knife to slice his throat. Gird’s battle plan 
dissolved as everyone entered into the fray on one side or the other. When the 
tax officer fell, a swarm of peasants and merchants tore at the sacks holding 
the fees, and dove after the shower of coins that spilled out.
On the other side of the market, the soldiers had chance to regroup and settle 
themselves to fight. Their trumpets blared signals; they locked shields and 
started forward. Gird managed to get his cohorts back together, not without 
difficulty, and forced a way through the surging crowd, even as the crowd fell 
away from the soldiers’ swords.
The two groups met in the market square; Gird’s had the advantage of numbers, 
and forced the soldiers back into one of the narrow lanes opening onto the 
square. At this point, the citizenry re-entered the fray by throwing things out 
of windows—mostly at the soldiers, but some of the missiles landed on Gird’s 
group. When a ripe plum splattered on his head and dripped sweet sticky juice 
down his face, Gird was instantly reminded of that first row in his own village. 
He kept his cohorts moving, and the soldiers, increasingly unsure, retreated 
faster.
The town gates on the east opened onto a narrow strip of land between the walls 
and the river; as with most towns, the bridge was not in the town proper. Here 
the soldiers tried to rally, but they had no real hope against Gird’s larger 
number and longer weapons. They backed raggedly south, along the town walls, 
toward the fields where the traders had camped, and the bridge that would let 
them across the river to a road leading safely north. But Gird’s reserves were 
just where he had expected, and the soldiers were caught between.
Gird was just ordering the bodies stripped of weapons, when a stream of 
bellowing men ran out of Brightwater’s east gates. His cohorts reformed 
instantly. The men slowed, and a small group approached cautiously.
“Who’s in command?” asked a tall, heavyset man in a trader’s gown. He was used 
to command himself, by his voice. Gird stepped forward. “I am Gird.” The man’s 
worried expression eased. “Gird—I’ve heard of you. You have to do something! 
They’re rioting in there; they’ve killed the council, and they’re looting in the 
market—”
Gird shrugged. “What did you expect? I daresay they’re hungry.”
“But you—but I heard you were different—that you had studied law or something of 
that sort, that you had some notion of order.”
Gird gave him a long, level look. “Are you asking me to bring order to the 
city?” He heard a stirring in the ranks behind him, but ignored it.
The man’s eyes shifted, and he turned to glance at the other equally worried men 
behind him. Gird noted that they all looked prosperous; their clothes had no 
patches and their faces had good flesh.
“Well, I—I can’t. I don’t know anyone else—they said you could control the 
peasants.”
“Is that what you want?” asked Gird of the others. A few nodded; the rest looked 
confused. Gird felt a sudden surge of excitement. Was this the start of the new 
society he had dreamed of? A chance to set one town on the right path? It was a 
chance, whether or not it was the right one. He nodded, abruptly, and saw on 
their faces that they were more glad than frightened. He hoped his cohorts would 
agree. He turned to them, scanning their faces quickly. Some looked as confused 
as the traders; some looked eager, and a few angry or unwilling. Those he called 
out, and sent as scouts to patrol the roads.
“We’ve been asked to help Brightwater regain its order,” he said. One of the 
merchants mumbled something; Gird ignored it. “I want no looting, no idle 
mischief: you know what I mean. These are our people, same as farmers; we need 
them and they need us. We’ll let them see if they like our rule, if they think 
it’s fair.”
He took in only one cohort, replacing wounded with sound yeomen from the others, 
and marched them in as if for drill practice.
The crowd in the market dispersed, to stand flattened against the walls. He 
could hear some dispute at a distance, angry voices and clangs and clatters; 
that would have to be dealt with, whatever it was, but for the moment he had to 
control the center of town.
It looked far worse than the count’s courtyard: dead bodies, some that stirred, 
broken pottery and foodstuffs scattered and trampled, market stalls torn down, 
broken, their awnings ripped and flapping in the breeze. Once he had his troops 
in the market square, it occurred to him that he had never explained how to 
organize a city. He wasn’t sure himself.
The traders and merchants who had come after him now sidled up, looking even 
more alarmed. “You have to say something!” hissed the leader. Gird nodded, but 
let his silent gaze pass across the square, catching the eyes of those who 
watched, noting their expressions. Then he nodded, sharply, and raised his hand 
for silence.
They stared back at him, much like the first men he had met in the wood. Perhaps 
the same common-sense would work with them.
“You’ve heard of me,” he began, not sure they had. “I’m Gird; we’re peasants 
seeking a better way to live. We fight the lords who tax and tax—” A ragged, 
halfhearted cheer interrupted him; he held up his hand again and it ended. 
“You’ve seen peasants fight before, out of desperation, but we are not 
desperate. We know a better way, a fairer way, and we want to see that for 
everyone. These men—” he pointed at the traders, “—came out and asked me to 
bring order to Brightwater. I would rather bring justice—is that what you want?”
A sulky-looking man slouched against a wall yelled out, “What matters what we 
want? You got the weapons; you’ll do what you want.”
Gird shook his head. “No: if Brightwater prefers chaos to order, you may have 
it. Do you?”
“Me? I want my rights, that’s what I want.”
“That’s what we want for all.” Other heads nodded. Gird noticed unfriendly looks 
aimed at the sulky man. He raised his voice to carry beyond the square and said, 
“Where is Jens, the harnessmaker’s assistant?”
“Here!” Gird had never met Jens, yeoman-marshal of the Brightwater barton, but 
he liked the compact young man with bright blue eyes under a mop of chestnut 
hair. Jens had his entire barton together, and they were standing in what could 
pass for a double row.
Gird turned back to the others. “This is the yeoman-marshal of Brightwater 
barton. He will help me restore order, and bring justice to your town. He knows 
you, and you know him; what he says is said in my name.” He looked at Jens. “Do 
you know what fighting is still going on? Are there more lords’ men here?”
Jens shook his head. “No, sir. I think that noise is at the council chambers, 
people taking things, but no more soldiers.”
“All right then. We need this square cleaned up—” Gird looked around. “Wounded 
by the well, so the healers don’t have far to go for water. Dead outside the 
walls—we’ll need men to dig graves. Those whose stalls are broken, you can start 
repairing them.” He pointed to the woman he remembered throwing the cheeses. 
“You—what about your stall?”
She pointed at a jumble of broken wood and ripped cloth. “That was it, sir, and 
how I’m to get another I don’t know—”
Gird pointed to two of his yeomen. “Help her fix what she can. Selamis—” Selamis 
was at his shoulder, staring bright-eyed around. Gird glared at him. “You can 
take accounts—who had what space, who needs help to repair stalls or houses. 
Anything else you find out.” He looked at Kef, one of the marshals he’d brought 
along. “You take a half-cohort and settle that riot, or whatever it is. Rahi, 
you take the rest and make sure everything else is quiet.”
Gird stayed in the square with Selamis, trying to get a sense of the town’s 
organization. It was far more complex than his village, or the army. The 
artisans were not simply “craftsmen” as he had supposed: each craft had its own 
standing in the town, and rivalry between crafts became apparent as he listened. 
Within each, too, were hierarchies and rivalries. So a tanner’s apprentice might 
jostle a dyer’s apprentice with no more than a curse in response, but a potter’s 
apprentice ranked a tanner’s. The finesmith had nothing to do with the 
blacksmith, and Brightwater boasted both a weaponsmith and a toolsmith. In 
Gird’s village, anyone might peg a bench together or frame a cowbyre; here 
carpenters and joiners were separated by custom and caste. He wondered what 
Diamod would say about that, then remembered that Diamod was off scouting. Then 
there were merchants, some as specialized as the salt seller, and some as 
general as the importer who handled any and all goods transported across the 
mountains, from needles to silks to carved buttons in the shape of sea monsters. 
The houses towered two and three stories tall; those of the wealthiest were 
clustered in the southwest corner.
An uneasy stillness gripped the town soon after Gird’s yeomen occupied the 
soldiers’ guardhouse. Gird did his best to keep everyone busy, insisting that 
streets must be cleaned of dead bodies (“Yes, the rats too!” he had yelled at 
someone who asked) and debris. When it was possible, he restored goods to the 
merchants who had owned them—although he could not clean and mend what the fight 
had soiled and broken.
He settled such minor disputes as were brought to him the first day with what 
wit he could muster, although some of them seemed frivolous. Why would someone 
in the aftermath of a battle want a judgment against a neighbor for using the 
neighbor’s balcony as one end of a laundry line? Why pick this moment to 
complain that someone’s son was courting a daughter without the father’s 
permission? He realized that the Brightwater yeoman-marshal, though well-known 
and considered to be honest, had the low status of a “mere” harness-marker’s 
assistant; whatever he said on an issue was immediately appealed to Gird. Gird 
might have found this funny (after all, they were preferring the judgment of a 
discottaged serf), but he had no leisure to savor the joke.
That night, Gird found himself invited to dine with the principal traders, who 
had, he was sure, their own ideas about his notions of justice. They offered 
beef and ale, raising their eyebrows when he refused the ale, and insisted that 
they each take a bite of the bread he brought before he would eat of their meat.
“We had heard you liked ale,” one of them said, too smoothly. “If you prefer 
wine—”
“I prefer water,” Gird said, smiling. “In war, I’ve discovered, the drunkard has 
half the men of a sober man, and less than half the wit.”
They laughed politely, and came to the point rather sooner than he expected. 
What did he mean by justice, and how would he insure that traders would be 
respected and treated fairly? Gird answered as the gnomes had taught him: one 
law, the same for all, of fair weights and measures. A market judicar, backed by 
a court to which all parties could appoint representatives. He sensed that some 
of the traders were satisfied by this (he had never believed that all traders 
were inherently dishonest), but that one or two were appalled. One of these last 
walked with him back to the guards’ barracks, complimenting him on the 
discipline of his troops. Gird felt as he had when the steward complimented him 
on the sleekness of a calf.
“And you yourself,” the man went on, his voice mellow as the ale Gird had not 
drunk. “So different from what I’d expected— truly a prince of peasants.” Gird 
controlled his reaction with an effort. Did the fellow think peasants had never 
heard lying flattery before? The calf the steward had praised so highly had been 
taken as a “free gift” to his count’s marriage celebration. “I’m sure you will 
not misunderstand—” The voice had a slight edge in it now; Gird braced himself 
for the thorn all that rosy sweetness had been intended to conceal. “Some of my 
colleagues are—alas—less than frank with you. They have their own standards, not 
perhaps what you would understand, being so honest yourself.”
Gird was tempted to say “Get on with it, man! Is it gold you want, or someone’s 
life?” He merely grunted, and walked on a little faster. The man’s hand touched 
his sleeve, slowing him. Gird glanced ahead, to the torchlight where his men 
were on guard at the corners of the market square.
“There’s fair, and there’s fair,” the man was murmuring, his hand still on 
Gird’s arm. “A man like you, peasant-born—good solid stock, I always say, 
Alyanya’s good earth—” That came out of him as harshly as a cough; Gird would 
have wagered that the man had never given Alyanya a thought in his life. “I just 
want you to know I’m your friend; you can trust me. And as a token, I have a 
little gift—” The little gift came heavily into Gird’s hand, round and smooth, 
with a slightly oily feel. He knew without looking that it was gold, the first 
gold he had ever touched. With anger and revulsion came curiosity: he wanted to 
peer at the coins, to see if it was one of the fabled gold seadragons, or the 
more common (by repute) crowns. He opened his hands and let the coins ring on 
the cobbles of Brightwater’s main street.
“You dropped something, trader!” he said loudly. Heads had turned at the sound 
of gold hitting stone; he himself would not forget the almost musical chime, or 
the edges of the five coins against his fingers.
“You stupid fool!” The trader’s voice was low and venomous. “You might have been 
rich, powerful—”
“I might have been your tool, or dead,” said Gird softly. Then, louder, “Best 
pick them up, sir; there’s been enough coin scattered today.”
“If you dare tell anyone—” began the trader, crouching and scrabbling over the 
cobbles for his coins. “I’ll—”
“You’re threatening me?” Gird’s voice rose, the day’s frustrations and his anger 
getting the better of him. “You snivelling little liar!” The trader’s hand slid 
into his gown, and the torchlight glinted on a thin blade; Gird batted it aside, 
hardly aware of the shallow gash it gave him. He could heard his men coming to 
see what was going on. His second swing felled the trader as if the man had been 
a shovel leaning on a wall. Gird stood over him, sucking his knuckles.
He wished the man would stand up, so he could knock him down again.
“What happened?” Jens, the Brightwater yeoman-marshal had come with the others. 
Gird didn’t answer until they had all arrived, perhaps two hands of his own 
yeomen and those citizens of Brightwater who had been on the street and brave 
enough to hang around when trouble began. He looked around the circle of faces.
“This one came with me into the city, tried to bribe me, and pulled a knife when 
I refused his bribe. Tried to tell me the others were dishonest.”
Jens snorted. “That doesn’t surprise me. Short weight, scant measure, stone-dust 
in the meal, and it’s been said for three years that it’s his bribes to the 
council chair that preserved his license to trade here. They’re not all bad.”
“I didn’t think so. But it’s this sort of thing I’m going to get rid of.” Gird 
looked around the faces again, seeing varied expressions from glee to worry. “An 
honest man doing honest work should be able to survive that way—one reason he 
can’t is cheats like this. If you want my help, that’s what the cost is to each 
of you—I won’t tolerate bribes, cheats, lies. One rule, the same for all, and 
fair enough to let a man live if he’s willing to work honestly.”
“And women?” asked one of the two women there. He nodded.
“And women. Same rule—no more being cheated because only a man can hold a 
cottage or craftcot. Earn the pay, get the pay.”
“I’m for that,” she said. Gird wondered who she was, she looked smaller than any 
of his women, but her face had the same resolute expression.
“What about him?” asked Jens. “Are you going to kill him?”
Gird was startled; it had never occurred to him, but from Jens’ voice and the 
reactions of the townsfolk, no one would think it odd if he sliced the man’s 
throat on the moment. “No,” he said. “We’ve proclaimed no laws—he could claim he 
didn’t know—”
“Not if he was dead,” someone muttered. Gird ignored that.
“It’s got to be fair,” he insisted. “The lords kill for whim; we don’t.” That we 
included those around; he saw by their faces that they realized it, and were 
surprised. “No, this’n goes back to his own wagon, out there, with his money, 
all of it, and the other traders must know.” As he said it, he realized that he 
would have to do part of it himself. They were still not accepting Jens or even 
one of his own marshals. He wished he could have a mug of ale; his belly needed 
it. He pushed that thought away, and pointed to two of his men. “Simi and 
Bakri—you carry him. I’ll come along and explain. Jens, you come too: I can’t 
stay here forever, and they’re going to have to learn to respect you. The rest 
of you— back to your posts, and call out replacements if you need them.”
Fires were still flickering in the traders’ field; Gird could see a cluster of 
dark forms around the one where he had eaten. He hailed them, as his yeomen 
carried the trader toward the fire. By the time they laid him down, he was 
beginning to stir and groan.
“This man,” Gird said, “told me some of you were dishonest, and then he tried to 
bribe me. I dropped his gold on the street—he got it back, threatened me, and 
then drew a knife.” He pulled up his sleeve, and showed the fresh gash still 
dripping blood. “So I knocked him down, and here’s his purse. Anyone here know 
much he had, so they can verify it?”
The other man who had seemed upset at Gird’s original comments on fair trading 
scuttled forward. “I’m his partner—I know—” and then his voice trailed away. 
Gird could imagine what he was thinking. Supposing he did know how much his 
partner had had, should he give that amount, or something higher—and claim Gird 
had stolen it—or something lower, and let Gird keep the bribe he would be sure 
Gird had taken. Gird looked past him to the trader he had already picked as the 
most trustworthy. He had asked Jens about him, on the way out, and Jens said he 
had a reputation for fair dealing.
Gird carried the purse to the trader. “He gave me five coins, gold I think, but 
he picked them up when I dropped them. Would you hold his purse?”
Reluctantly, it seemed, the trader reached for it, and then upended it into one 
of the wooden bowls they’d eaten from. “Five gold crowns,” he said. “Three 
silver crowns, and two copper crabs.” He stirred the coins, picked up one of the 
golds, and bit it, then examined it closely. “And this one is false—poor Rini, 
he couldn’t even bribe honestly.” Several of the others chuckled. The trader 
looked hard at Gird. “I presume you have a reason for bringing him back here 
rather than slitting his throat for him?”
“I don’t do that,” Gird said. The gash on his arm was beginning to sting, and he 
felt suddenly foolish and countrified, standing there with his sleeve torn and 
blood dripping down his hand. He did not like the feeling, or those who made him 
feel so. It should have been obvious why he came; it had been obvious to him.
“Well.” The trader cleared his throat. “He won’t trouble you again, I daresay, 
and if you intended to be sure none of the rest of us offered you bribes, I may 
say that some of us would not, anyway.”
He sounded almost angry; Gird realized that from the trader’s point of view they 
might resent being lumped with the dishonest one. “I didn’t think all of you 
would,” he said. “But it seemed fair to return him here, where he was known, and 
make sure you knew his purse was with him.”
“Oh.” The trader’s voice had changed. “You were not accusing us of being his 
accomplices? Of sharing the bribe?”
That had not even occurred to Gird; it opened new insights into the ways 
merchants thought—not reassuring. “No,” he said firmly. “I thought before that 
most of you were honest, but one or two—” he carefully did not look at the 
unconscious man’s partner, “—were less happy about what rules I might make. I 
spoke to you, sir, because you seemed honest before, and Jens said you were.”
“Jens? Oh—that—uh—
“The yeoman-marshal of Brightwater barton,” Gird said.
“I thought he was a harness-maker’s—”
“I was a farmer,” Gird interrupted. “And now I’m the marshal-general.” It was 
the first time he had used the title Selamis had come up with; it felt strange 
in his mouth, and sounded strange on his ear. He went on before the traders 
could comment on it. “We consider all yeomen equal, whatever their skill. 
Yeoman-marshals guide each barton; marshals train yeoman-marshals and command 
cohorts.”
The traders looked a little dazed; the one who had been speaking before said, 
“Is it like a guild, then? More like that than an army, it seems—”
Gird knew nothing of guilds, and did not want to admit it right then. “It’s 
enough of an army to fight a war with,” he said. “But we think beyond war, to 
the way people should live in peace.” Their faces were still blank, carefully 
hiding what they thought. Gird felt the day’s work heavy on his shoulders, and 
wanted a quiet place to sleep before anything else. “You take charge of him,” he 
said to the traders, waving at the one who had opened his eyes, but still lay 
flat. Then he turned and headed back for the town.
He would have fallen into bed without even cleaning the knife-gash if one of his 
men hadn’t insisted on washing it out. They had saved him a bed—a real bed—in 
the barracks. He was asleep as soon as his head went down. He woke in full day, 
with sunlight spearing through the high, narrow windows and all the other beds 
empty. Someone had pulled his boots off, and laid a blanket over him. He felt 
stiff and dirty; somehow it was worse to sleep clothed in a bed, inside.
Outside he could hear what sounded like normal town noises. No screams, no clash 
of weapons. He stretched, shoved his feet into his boots, folded the blanket, 
and looked around. Weaponracks on the walls, but no weapons: the soldiers had 
used them the day before, and his men had them now. He could smell cooked food. 
He followed the smell and came to a wide-hearthed kitchen. Someone at the hearth 
looked up and saw him.
“There he is. Bread? Cheese?”
“Both.” Gird looked around. “Where’s the jacks? And a well?” He followed 
gestures and found the jacks, then a long stone trough fed by a pipe in the wall 
of the barracks court. A thin trickle leaked under the wooden plug; when he 
pulled it out, a stream of cold clean water raced along and out the open drain 
at the far end of the trough.
“Clean shirts inside,” called someone from within. Gird pulled off his filthy 
one and used it to mop himself with water. Someone had left a chunk of soap—real 
soap—on the rim of the trough. He scrubbed, feeling more human by the moment. 
For that matter, he might as well be clean all over; he shucked his boots and 
trousers, and scrubbed himself all over. Yesterday’s gash on his arm reopened, 
stinging, but it looked clean, a healthy pink. When he was done, he replugged 
the pipe, and looked for somewhere to lay his wet clothes. Rahi was standing in 
the kitchen doorway, chuckling and holding out a blue shirt.
“You!” He could not have said why it bothered him then, but somehow being found 
wet and naked, alone in a walled yard after his bath, was not the same as 
bathing with others in a creek or pond. He dropped the wet clothes, snatched the 
shirt, and then held it away. “Blue? But I don’t have a blue shirt—
“You do now. Go on, put it on; they’re asking for you, a whole gaggle of them.” 
She had brought trousers as well, somewhat too large but clean and whole. As he 
dressed, she picked up his wet clothes, sniffed them, shook her head and dumped 
them back in the trough. “These’ll need more than rinsing.”
That day Gird found himself having to explain in more detail than he had yet 
devised just how he thought the law should work. He discovered men of law, who 
explained at great length why his simple measures would not do, and why the law 
had nothing to do with justice, and a great deal to do with precedent, custom, 
and the maintenance of commercial stability. Gird listened until he could not 
stand it, and then roared at them; they turned pale and disappeared, and he 
thought no more of them. He let each craft, each kind of merchant, present an 
appeal: Selamis sat beside him and wrote them all down. Brightwater had plenty 
of clerks who could read and write, but Gird trusted Selamis more than the 
strangers. He was not surprised to notice that Selamis talked easily to the 
merchants, even the richest, or that they seemed to prefer him to Gird.
Then he gave them all his plan, which combined (he thought) absolute common 
sense with absolute fairness and honesty. When everyone complained, he was sure 
he’d gotten it right: it pleased no one completely, but everyone slightly. 
Somewhat to his surprise, the grumbling died off, and the townsfolk and traders 
went back to their work. He had expected more trouble, not shrugs and winks and 
return to business as usual.
Many of his yeomen had never been in a town as large as Brightwater. Gird spent 
the next several days straightening them out, and insisting (until his voice 
nearly failed) that his rules applied to them, too. It was always possible that 
a townsman’s gift of a pear or meat pasty to the man patrolling the street was 
not intended—or taken— as a bribe, but Gird could see clearly where it might 
lead. If someone wanted to give supplies to the army as a whole, as the farm 
villages had done with their gifts of food and tools, then Gird insisted it had 
to be done openly. Selamis had to record the gift, and then Gird would 
distribute it among all the cohorts as needed. Only a few yeomen were obviously 
looking for bribes, or extorting gifts, whichever way it could be described. 
Gird shocked his followers and the townsfolk by discharging those few, publicly, 
and explaining why. After that, the problem seemed to disappear.
He himself had a chance to see inside a rich man’s home for the first time, when 
the surviving master merchants and craftsmen invited him to dine. He had never 
really thought about what would go into all those rooms, had envisioned even a 
king’s palace as a glorified peasant cottage, but with everything whole and in 
abundance. The guard barracks had reinforced that notion: it was larger than his 
cottage, but the furnishings were much the same. Now, when he stepped onto 
glazed tiles of blue and white, when he saw the tapestries hung from walls, the 
carved and inlaid chairs and tables, the shelves crowded with things whose 
purpose he could not even guess, he realized how wrong he had been. The dining 
hall lay at the back of the house, facing a walled garden—but a garden made more 
for viewing than using. No cabbages, no red-roots, no onions or ramps—but bright 
ruffles of color he did not even know. Two fruit trees were trained against 
opposite walls; their fruit gleamed like jewels among the leaves.
The meal itself surprised him as much as the house. He had assumed rich men ate 
more of the same food that he ate—what else was there? He peered suspiciously at 
a translucent yellow-green liquid in a glossy blue bowl, and waited until the 
others had dipped their spoons (their silver spoons) into it before trying it. 
It tasted like nothing he had ever imagined; he could have drunk a kettleful of 
it. That was followed by a stew of vegetables and fish, then a roast of lamb, 
rolled around a grain stuffing flavored with herbs. He had not known lamb could 
taste like that. Then came a dish of fruit with a honeyed sauce, then an array 
of cheeses, white, yellow and orange.
By this time, he had had more food than his belly would hold with comfort. The 
merchants nibbled on, watching him covertly. He wondered if they knew he was 
calculating how many of his yeomen just one such meal would feed. They might—and 
they might be worrying about it, too. He looked around the room, noticing the 
soft-footed servants who had brought and removed all those dishes. One of them 
met his gaze with an angry challenge; Gird gave him a slight nod. He refused the 
last three courses, explaining that he never ate so heavily in the midst of the 
day, and when he left he felt as if he should take a bath and wash it all off.
“And that’s an honest one, they say,” Gird reported to Selamis and several of 
the marshals that evening. “Not so rich as the one the mob killed, not cruel or 
unfair to his laborers and servants. I saw just that one part of the house, from 
the entrance to the dining hall—but if the rest is anything like it—”
“It would be,” said Selamis, the corners of his mouth twitching. Gird glared at 
him.
“You know all about it, I suppose; you may even know what that green stuff was 
that looked like ditch-water and tasted—oh, gods know how it tasted, but it was 
good. But men like that, they have a lot to lose. They’ve done well under the 
lords; they won’t stick with us if they don’t do well under us. But if we bend 
the rules for them, we’re betraying our own people.”
The marshals nodded seriously, but Selamis lounged in his seat, almost smirking. 
Gird wanted to clout him. It was hard enough making the marshals accept him when 
he was invisibly efficient; when he put on airs, it rubbed everyone’s hair 
backwards. Gird glowered at him.
“I suppose you think you should have gone to that dinner? You, who would know 
all the names for that kind of food, and which of those pesky things on the 
table were for what use? I see the way they talk to you first—maybe they 
should’ve asked you.” Gird paused for breath, puffed out his cheeks, and made a 
rude noise. “But they didn’t ask you, Selamis: they asked me. They know where 
they stand with me, even if they don’t like sharing table-space with a big 
stupid peasant who doesn’t know what to do with a silver spoon. You’re in 
between: not one nor’t’other, not true peasant nor true lord. We don’t care if 
you’re a bastard or not, but they do. Yet you push it in our face that you’re 
more like them.”
Selamis had gone first red, then white, then red again. “It’s not my fault,” he 
said, glaring at Gird. “I can’t help it that I know figan soup when I hear of 
it, or what the things are. Or that the better— the merchants and such are 
comfortable with me.”
“No, I suppose not.” Gird was half-ashamed that he’d let his temper loose, but 
the silent support of the marshals, who had never liked Selamis that much 
anyway, stiffened him. “What is your fault is the way you use it. If you’re one 
of us, be one of us; don’t be smirking in your ale when you know something we 
don’t.”
  
From the traders he found out where the king’s army had been all this time. It 
seemed that after reaching Gird’s village, they had had word from Gadilon about 
an army harrassing his domain—an army headed by a terrible, cruel commander 
named Gird. Gird thought back to his near encounter with the brigands in 
Gadilon’s forest, and managed not to laugh. The king’s army was busy, the 
traders said, in the south and east, convinced that that was the main peasant 
force. And the traders had heard only vague rumors of trouble in the north until 
they were near Brightwater—and then the rumor had said the trouble was up on the 
River Road, near Grahlin.
“We were near Grahlin,” said Gird, not specifying when, or why they’d left.
“I don’t expect the king has heard that yet,” the trader said. “Sier Sehgrahlin 
has much of the old magicks, but not the way of calling mind to mind. Even if he 
could, the king could not hear, nor any with him. There’s no one much left with 
that, but the king’s great-aunt, and she’s too old to matter.”
“Where is she?” asked Gird.
“In Finyatha, of course, in the palace. Amazing lady; she came to the market 
there once, when I was a boy, and my grandfather sold her a roll of silk from 
the south. She looked at me and said ‘Yes, you may pet my horse,’ and my 
grandfather clouted me for presuming. I never asked; she saw it in my mind. She 
told my grandfather so, and he said I shouldn’t even have been thinking it, and 
clouted me again.”
“What was the horse like?” asked Gird, suddenly curious.
“A color I’d never seen; I heard later it was favored in Old Aare: blue-gray 
like a stormy sky, with a white mane and black tail, and what they called the 
Stormlord’s mark on the face, a jagged blaze that forked. But it was the 
fittings that fascinated me: that white mane was plaited in many strands, each 
bound with bright ribbons that looped together. The saddlecloth was embroidered 
silk—I was a silk merchant’s child, I could not mistake that. Then when she 
mounted, she sprang into the saddle like a man—and rode astride, which the horse 
nomad women do, but no merchant woman I had known. My grandfather told me later 
all the magelords do, men and women alike, but they think it is presumptuous in 
lower ranks.”
Gird returned to the topic that seemed to him more important. “But if she is the 
only one—and the sier Grahlin has no such powers—then his messengers must find 
the king’s army before the king will know and come north?”
“Yes. If he even calls for him: did you not know that Sehgrahlin is the king’s 
least favorite cousin? They have been rivals for years; Sehgrahlin refused to 
send his troops on this expedition, although he has some up north, guarding 
against the horsefolk. He will not like to ask the king for help, that one; he 
will do his best to drive you out of his domain with his own powers.”
He had done that, Gird thought, but what more would he do? He asked the 
merchant, who shrugged. “He might help Duke Pharaon—they’ve hunted together a 
lot, and he once loved Pharaon’s sister—but he married into the Borkai family. 
Those he would help, but they lie away north of you, north and west, right on 
the nomad borders.” The trader knew what the gnomes had not—or what they had not 
bothered to teach Gird—which lords lived where, and how they were related. Gird 
had Selamis write it all down, although he suspected Selamis might know some of 
it already. Then he asked about the one magelord family the gnomes had 
mentioned, and the trader’s expression changed. “Marrakai! Where would you have 
heard about them? They’re not even in Finaarenis; Marrakai’s a duke in Tsaia. No 
magicks, that I know of, but probably the best rulers in both kingdoms: honest, 
just, and put up with no nonsense. If that brigand you say is using your name 
wanders into Marrakai lands, he’ll find himself strung high before he knows it.”
The trouble with towns, Gird realized when he had been there a hand of days, was 
that they were harder to leave than villages. He would like to have had a town 
allied to him—but he could not hope to protect Brightwater against a full army. 
No army had come, but one might. Their barton had grown, swelled with sudden 
converts, but he didn’t trust that. The newly elected council of merchants and 
craftsmen wanted him to stay (one told him frankly that it was cheaper to feed 
his army than pay the bribes and taxes of the earlier rulers) but he had not won 
his war. When the gnomes sent word that it was now time to redeem his pledge to 
help them at Blackbone Hill, he was glad of the excuse—but he left most of his 
army near Brightwater, under the command of Cob, whose broken foot was nearly 
healed.



Chapter Twenty-six
« ^ » 
Under a milky sky, the crest of Blackbone Hill loomed dark and inhospitable. 
Gird had expected the darkness, but not the shape, which made him think uneasily 
of a vast carcass, half-eaten. Sunburnt grass, like ragged dead fur, seemed 
stretched between the gaunt ribs.
“There’s them says it’s a dragon,” Wila, his guide, said nervously. Clearly he 
thought it was something. Gird forced a grin.
“If ’tis, ’tis dead, long since.”
Wila shook his head. “There’s bones, up there. All black, black inside and out. 
Seen ’em myself.”
“Dragonbones?” Despite himself, Gird shivered. No one had seen a dragon, but the 
tales of Camwyn Dragonmaster proved that dragons had lived, and might still. 
Even the lords believed in dragons; one of the outposts up on the western rim 
was called Dragonwatch.
“Dunno.” Wila paused, and hooked one foot behind his knee, leaning on his staff. 
“All the bones I seen was too little, unless a dragon has almighty more bones 
than other creatures. If they’d been normal bone, I’d have said fish or 
bird—something light, slender. But black like that—and no one could think that 
hill’s just a hill, like any other.”
Gird glanced upslope again: true. Something about the shape of it, malign and 
decrepit, made the hairs on his neck crawl. “Why’s anyone live here, then?” he 
asked.
“Well, now.” Wila switched feet, and leaned heavily into his staff. Clearly this 
was a question he’d hoped to answer. “In the old days,” he said, “before the 
lords came out of the south on their tall horses, this was uncanny ground. The 
Threespring clans claimed the east side for spring sheep grazing—it’s not so bad 
then, with new grass and spring flowers. The Lady tames all, you know,” he 
added, and dipped his head. Gird nodded, and swept his arm wide, acknowledging 
her bounty. “Then the Darkwater bog folk, they claimed herb right to the western 
slope, and the land between rock and bog.”
“Herb-right to that?”
“Aye. In the old days, that is, when the Darkwater bog folk gave half the 
herbalists in this region, they gathered the Five Fingers from that very rock, 
the Lady’s promise to redeem it, they said.” He peered closely at Gird. “You do 
know the Five Fingers—?”
Gird nodded. “But where I come from, only the wise may say the names—I have 
heard, but cannot—”
“Ah—yes. I forgot. You’re from the overheard, aren’t you?”
“Overheard?” Gird hadn’t heard that term. “Where the kuaknomi overhear the 
blessings and overturn them. That’s what I was taught, at least. Where the 
kuaknomi overhear, only the wise may say the name of any sacred thing, lest a 
prayer be changed to curse.”
“They don’t come here?”
“Well—there’s them as says Blackbone Hill has felt their touch, but aside from 
that, no. We have the truesingers here, the treelords.”
“Elves?”
Wila snorted, then coughed. “That’s coarse talk of them, lad. What they call 
themselves is truesingers. Sinyi, in their tongue.”
“You speak it?” Gird could almost forget the coming battles for that.
“A bit.” Wila put both feet on the ground, and picked the staff up. “Best be 
going, if we’re to be past the Tongue by dark.” And despite Gird’s questions, he 
would say no more about elves, but led the way at a brisker pace than Gird 
expected from someone his age. What he did say, briefly and over his shoulder, 
had to do with the human settlement now nestled at the hill’s steeper end. 
“Lords forced it,” he said. “Broke apart the Threesprings clans, and settled a 
half of ’em here, and put in two brothers from the bog folk, and set them all to 
digging in the hill. Came out as you’d think: fever and death, broken bones and 
quarrels, but the lords want what comes out the mine shaft, and never mind the 
cost. Send more in, when too many die. It’s a hard place, Blackbone, and no hope 
for better.”
“But the barton—”
“Oh, well. The barton’s together, and they’ll fight—they’re good at that. Come 
the day—”
Come the day, Gird thought, and no one will have to live in a place like this, 
ever again. The black, disquieting hill loomed higher as they plunged into one 
of its gullies, angled downslope, then up and across to another. He had been 
days coming here, after the gnomes’ message arrived, passed from one guide to 
another.
Blackbone was as bleak as its hill, a cramped village of dark stone huts locked 
in by steep slopes. It stank, not with the healthy smells of a farming village, 
but with rot that would never become fertility, human waste and garbage piled on 
barren stone. A thin dark stream writhed behind the row of dwellings, too quiet 
for its rate of flow. Wisps of sulphurous steam came off it. As a mining 
village, it had no farmsteads; the barton, Gird found, had adapted to 
circumstances, and met in the mine itself.
“They dunna come ’ere,” said the yeoman-marshal, Felis. “They come to the 
outside, we got to haul it that far, and load their wagons. Inside they dunna 
come.”
Gird found it hard to endure even the outer tunnel, as daylight faded in the 
distance. Now he was out of sight of the entrance, sweating with fear, and 
hoping the barton would think it was the heat. Around the gallery where they 
drilled, torches burned, smoking. In that dim and shaking light, the men and 
women looked like nightmare creatures, monsters hardly human. He had already 
noticed that they were all grimed with the black rock. Now their eyes glittered 
in the light, the whites unnatural against dark-smeared faces. He glanced up, 
seeing the dark rock overhead far too close.
One of the women grinned, teeth white against the darkness. “You’re no miner, 
eh? The rockfear gripes you?”
No use to pretend. “It does. I’m a farmer, used to no more than a bit of roof 
between me and the sky.”
She laughed, but not unkindly. “At least you don’t lie. Lead us out to fight, 
then, and you’ll be free of this rock.” The emphasis on “you” caught his 
attention.
“And you? Do you want to stay here?”
“Nay—but what do I know of farming? I’d go to other mines, could I.” Some of the 
faces nodded agreement, others were still, with a stillness Gird had never seen.
He had no time to wonder at that, for the detailed plan of battle had to be made 
that night. Now that he’d seen for himself the shape of the land, the way the 
dark rock loomed over the wagon road into Blackbone, he could mentally place his 
few archers where they could do the most good. The barton members nodded when he 
spoke, but he wondered if they understood at all. None of them were archers. 
Most of them had never been out of Blackbone in all their lives. They knew 
digging and hauling, enough carpentry to build ladders and simple boxes, and not 
much more. They’d been drilled with picks and shovels. Gird felt the edges filed 
onto the shovels and wished he could have such metal for better weapons.
One of the men nodded. “They ’ad to give us good steel, see, or it wouldn’t be 
no use against this rock.”
“But no smith,” said the woman who had asked him about rock-fear. “They brings 
us the tools, but takes no chances we’ll make swords.”
Deep in the ground, away from natural light, Gird lost track of time and would 
have gone on all night, but they had candlemarks for measure, and brought him 
back out to sleep under the sky. He almost wished he’d stayed within, for the 
air stank worse than in the mine itself, and he felt smothered.
The next day, his troops arrived. None of them liked Blackbone Hill. He saw the 
looks sent his way, noticed how they angled away from the line of march, as if 
they didn’t want to set foot on that dark stone. He hated it himself, felt a 
subtle antagonism through his bootsoles. What if he was wrong? What if the power 
of Blackbone turned against them, preferred the lords? The gnomes had said it 
would not, but they were, after all, rockfolk. Their goals were not his goals.
Threesprings barton, kinbound to Blackbone, had sent twenty-seven yeomen, the 
largest contingent. They were all darkhaired, dour, barely glancing at Gird when 
he spoke to their yeoman marshal. A third of them were women, all as tall and 
thickset as the men. Longhill, barely a day’s march away, had sent fourteen: its 
best, the yeoman marshal assured Gird. Deepmeadow, Whiterock Ridge, Whiteoak, 
Hazelly, and Clearspring had been on the march two days each. Some of them had 
never been so far from home; they clutched their weapons and foodsacks as if 
they expected the rocks to sprout demons. Westhill, the most veteran of this 
lot, had marched four days across the rolling hills. Their sturdy cheerfulness 
heartened the novices more than Gird could; he did not explain that Westhill had 
no village to return to, for the lords had burnt and salted it over the winter.
Blackbone barton greeted these allies with restraint—or, as Gird saw it, with 
total lack of enthusiasm. A few words passed between the Threesprings yeoman 
marshal and a Blackbone man, a mutter of family news, as near as Gird could make 
out, but nothing more. Longhill clearly expected no better; the yeomen smirked 
and sat quietly without attempting conversation. The others, barring Westhill, 
clumped up nervously and stared roundeyed from the taciturn Blackbone yeomen to 
the higher slopes of Blackbone Hill. Gird made his way from one barton to 
another, doing his best to reassure and cheer them.
Blackbone barton itself actually broke the ice with a contribution to the 
evening meal. Short of supplies as it was—as any remote mining village without 
farmstead support would be—the village nonetheless made a very potent brew and 
had saved it, as their spokesman said “For the day.” Now the chunky little jugs 
passed from hand to hand, raising spirits or at least numbing fears. Gird, 
mindful of watchful eyes, took but one pull at a jug before passing it on. The 
story of his drunken rage had traveled farther than he had; he knew he dared not 
risk another, and certainly not before a battle.
By dawn, he had them all in position. They looked fewer in the morning light, 
when he knew an enemy was coming, and the land itself looked larger. Could they 
possibly hold the narrow throat, choke the lords’ soldiers from the village?
Eight bartons. Near two cohorts, by his new reckoning, though he had none of his 
marshals along. And there, coming along the stone-paved trade road, were the 
mounted infantry, the archers he feared so much, the light cavalry, and—he 
squinted—and a small troop of the lords themselves, mounted. So—so the gnomes 
had been right. Whatever they got from the Blackbone mines was important enough 
to bring them out themselves. He could not read their devices, or recognize them 
by the colors they wore; the traders had told him all that, and Selamis had 
written it down, but Selamis was not here to remind him. Lords were lords, he 
thought to himself, and what difference did it make if he faced sier or duke or 
count—any and all would be glad of his blood, and he of theirs.
Because he was looking for it, he noticed that the lords’ troops also disliked 
the touch of Blackbone Hill, and veered slightly until sharp commands brought 
them back. He told himself that the horsemen would have trouble on the slopes. 
Would horses, too, flinch from Blackbone? He hoped so; they were ruinously 
outnumbered otherwise. Perhaps he should have brought some of his regular 
troops—but there would have been no way to move that many that far without 
opposition, and he had had no time for additional battles. He looked over at 
Wila, who could see down into the cleft where his few archers waited, and held 
up his hands three times. Wila passed the signal on. If they could take the 
archers out, then his people could stand against a charge. Horsemen couldn’t 
spread wide on that uneven slope. He hoped.
The clatter of hooves and boots rang loudly from the stones on either side of 
the track. Gird kept his head down, trusting his carefully placed archers to 
choose their targets wisely. He heard the twang of one bowstring, then another, 
then shouts from below. So it began, again, and he squeezed his own hands hard 
an instant, fighting down that last-moment fear that caught him every time. He 
stood, and waved his arm.
In that first scrambling rush downslope, Gird could see that his archers had 
done their work well; many of the lords’ archers were down. Arrows flicked by, 
close overhead. A few of those below had found cover, and returned a ragged 
flight. Someone beside him staggered and went down, hands clutched to chest. 
Ahead of him, the front line of yeomen, with the best weapons, had engaged the 
mounted soldiers, unseating many of them and killing horses. The slope and 
sunrise gave them advantage, and Gird’s archers continued to pick their targets 
wisely.
“Get the lords!” he bellowed, reminding them.
But the attack lost momentum, foundered. No arrows found the lords on their tall 
horses; Gird could have sworn he saw arrows slide aside, as if refusing to 
menace the magelords. The lords themselves drew no weapons he could see—not 
then—but their soldiers regrouped with amazing speed. They paid no attention to 
the wounded and fallen among them, striding over bodies as if they were merely 
more rocks. Gird had called for all his bartons to attack when he thought he saw 
the enemy crumbling, but now he had no unseen reserves, and the ground no longer 
favored him. Either his people were spread out along the road, outnumbered at 
each point, or he could call them to clump on the road itself, and try a frontal 
attack—exactly what he had not wanted to do with the weapons he had available.
Furious with himself, and with the gnomes who had advised this battle plan, Gird 
watched his ambush degenerate into a lengthy slaughter. Now that they were sure 
the rocky slopes held no more surprises, the lords and their soldiers pushed 
forward strongly on the road itself. Already they were beyond the range of 
Gird’s archers, who would have to come out of cover to find targets. The yeoman 
marshals were looking over their shoulders now, expecting Gird to come up with 
something—some plan—and he could not think of anything. Could he hold them 
together? Would a rout be worse than this? Why had he ever thought the gnomes 
could design a battle plan for humans? He had to try something. He called them 
all in, trying to slow the enemy advance along the road. That might give someone 
a chance to escape.
It had been a mistake. It had been a disaster, and now the end would come. Gird 
held the retreat together, as foot by foot they were forced back through the 
village into the maw of the mine. He had been so sure that taking out their 
archers would be enough. It might have been, without the lords themselves there, 
with their wicked magicks. Their troops, who might have broken and fled— would 
have, Gird was sure—still moved forward, as if they had no thought at all, as if 
they could suffer no wound or fall to no death. Yet they fell, and died, and 
were trampled by their own. The faces he could see did not change expression 
even in death. Too far behind for any of Gird’s weapons to reach, the lords sat 
veiled on their tall horses, watching, performing whatever magicks they could.
Here was still more evidence that some of the lords still had potent powers to 
call on. Rocks split, air hummed and thickened in his throat, unnatural light 
rippled over the battle, making it hard to see. And so he was going to die under 
a mountain of rock, because he had believed the wrong story. There wasn’t any 
way out of this, but if he did live, he was going to have a few choice words for 
Arranha, if ever he caught up with him again.
He shifted to one side as the mine closed around them.
“Go on!” bawled the Blackbone yeoman marshal in his ear. “Let us take this.”
“It was my bad idea.” Gird smashed his club into a shoulder, and ducked aside 
from a pike. “I should be last—”
They fought side by side for a few moments, as the soldiers charged again. Then 
the momentum of that charge dissipated, and they could retreat further into the 
dark shaft without immediate risk. The soldiers were cursing the darkness, 
stumbling over loose rocks and the fallen.
“Hurry up,” the yeoman marshal said. “Afore the lords get in, and make they 
magical lights—”
“But we should make a stand,” Gird said. “I’ll do it—a few others—”
“Never mind!” The yeoman marshal yanked Gird’s arm hard. “Leave them to it; 
they’ll find out—”
“What?” He couldn’t see, in the dimness, anything but a flash of teeth.
“It’s in the charm,” said the man, almost gleefully. “Come with me.” What charm 
was that, Gird wondered. It was that or be left in darkness, and Gird came. 
Dying inside a cursed mountain wasn’t his idea of the way to die, but what 
choices did he have? None, like the rest of them. All around, in the darkness, 
he heard the rasp of feet on stone, the groans of the wounded, the heavy 
breathing. Deeper into the blackness, and deeper, twisting and turning through 
passages that were sometimes tight for a single man, and other times so wide 
that three or four abreast must reach out with hands to feel the walls. Gird 
clamped his fear within him, and tried to think, without success.
When the dim bluish light of a gnomish lamp blossomed nearby, he could not 
believe it. All around were faces equally surprised, mouths open. A firm, cool 
hand gripped Gird’s, and he looked down to see the warmaster who had set this 
battle’s plan.
“It is for you to command,” the warmaster said. “No human noise!”
“Silence!” Gird bellowed and no one spoke. He bent to the warmaster, full of his 
own questions and complaints, but the warmaster’s expression stopped him.
“It is that they are within, the outland lords?”
“Yes.”
“You marshal your humans, follow my orders.”
“Yes.” There was nothing more to say. Whatever the gnomes demanded, he would 
have to perform, both by his contract and by the logic of the situation.
“Then go. Follow that one—” the warmaster pointed. “Go far and swift.”
“You don’t need our help?”
The warmaster’s face conveyed secret amusement. “Human help for rockwar? Go.”
Gird waved, and the others formed up to follow him, as he followed his guide. It 
occurred to him, as they plunged once more into a narrow dark passage, that the 
gnomes might have planned all this just to lure a few lords underground—though 
he hated to think that.
All he could hear behind, though he strained his ears, was the noise of his own 
people shuffling along. His guide carried a lantern, so he himself could see 
where to put his feet, but the others stumbled in darkness. At last, a dim shape 
of light ahead, that widened and brightened to daylight. He squinted against the 
light, and then as he came out, stopped short. They faced a gloomy sunset, a few 
rays of somber light escaping beneath heavy clouds. And that meant—he shook his 
head, to clear it. They had walked through Blackbone Hill? He peered up and over 
his shoulder. There it was, that gaunt, misshapen spine arched slightly away 
from them.
Ahead the gnome set off downhill, in that measured but tireless tread, and Gird 
waved the foremost of his people on. He would stay to see the last of them out, 
and silence questions.
By dark they were far below the hill, coming into marshy ground.
The blackwater bogs, Gird thought. The gnome stopped suddenly, and Gird nearly 
ran into him.
“Here is good water.” The lantern light glittered from a pool that looked as 
black as the rock of the hill. But when Gird dipped a handful, it was clear, 
trembling in the light, and tasted sweet. Others knelt, dipped for themselves, 
and drank thirstily. He could hear the splashes, and the moans of the wounded 
behind him in the darkness. The gnome touched his arm to get his attention. 
“This is water that runs clean, and the bog clans know safe ways from here. Do 
you acknowledge debt?”
There was no alternative. “You have brought us from danger to safe water: I 
acknowledge owing.”
“That is fair. This is the exchange: no humans to go beneath that hill. To 
gather the herbs of the field, to pasture flocks, it is permitted. It is not 
permitted to delve in the rock, or build aught of the loose rock of the surface. 
Granted?”
“Granted.” Gird sighed, nonetheless, thinking how he would have to argue the 
miners into it. He wanted to ask why, but knew he would get no answer. And he 
was tired, desperately tired. He wanted to know how many they’d lost, and if the 
wounded would recover, and he wanted to fall in his tracks and sleep.
“What of the magelords?” he asked, determined to get something out of this 
exchange.
The gnome smiled. Gird remembered that smile from his months in their princedom. 
“It is not a place for humankind, within that hill. The magelords took what was 
not theirs; knowing, they took it. We return justice.”
The ground heaved, thudding against Gird’s feet, and a shout went up from his 
people. Trees groaned; their limbs thrashed briefly as if in a gust of wind. In 
the lantern light, the water in the pool rocked and splashed like water in a 
kicked bucket. Gird looked at the gnome, whose smile broadened.
“Justice,” it said again. “No pursuit.”
When dawn brightened behind Blackbone Hill, the marshy forest looked much less 
threatening. Delicate flowers brightened the hummocks of moss; butterflies 
flicked wings of brilliant yellows and oranges in and out of the sunbeams. They 
had halted beside an upwelling spring of clear water, that flowed into an amber 
stream between thick-trunked dark trees. A clearly-marked trail led away 
downstream from their campsite, and the gnome—who had stayed with them until 
daylight—said that it led safely to an old settlement of the bog folk, now 
abandoned, but on another safe trail to Longhill.
Gird counted up his survivors. Only five of Blackbone itself had survived. Their 
kin from Threesprings had lost but three, and still remained the largest barton. 
Longhill had lost seven of fourteen; Deepmeadow had lost eight of twelve. 
Whiterock Ridge had lost all its archers, but no one else, and Hazelly lost only 
one. Clearspring and Westhill had lost two each. But of those living, a quarter 
were wounded, unfit for work or fighting for many days.
And the survivors were anything but satisfied with the way the battle had gone.
“You didn’t tell us they rockfolk’d be involved,” said the yeoman marshal of 
Hazelly. For someone who had never fought at all before, he was surprisingly 
pert, Gird thought.
“Us wouldn’t’ve let ’un fight in th’mine unless they’d been there,” said one of 
the Blackbone survivors. “They told us away last winter they’d no more patience 
with the magelord’s thievery.” He peered at Gird through the morning mist. “But 
they didn’t say what’t’would cost us. They said you was the best leader—”
Before Gird could answer that, someone from Threesprings broke in. “Ah, them 
rockfolk! Suppose it was their plan, too, warn’t it? And you their hired human 
warleader?”
“They didn’t hire me,” Gird began, wondering how he was going to settle this 
lot. They had good reason to grumble, but so did he; it was not his fault the 
gnomes had kept the main part of their plan from him. So had the Blackbone Hill 
folk, for the matter of that.
Westhill, more experienced in living in the country, had done most of the work 
to make the camp liveable. The others learned quickly, if unwillingly: the 
Westhill yeoman-marshal had a tongue sharpened on both sides. Gird began 
thinking what to do with this ill-assorted lot. Some of them, from the villages 
that no longer existed, could come directly into the main army. Others might go 
home for a time, though the areas of peace shrank day by day.
In a few days, the mood had settled; those who had been most badly wounded were 
either mending or dead, and everyone else had decided to stay with Gird or go 
home in a huff. There were only a few of the latter. The rest had begun to 
recast the tale as they would tell it to friends at home. Gird noticed that the 
lords’ troop grew, and the lords’ magicks became ever more spectacular, as they 
retold it to each other. The survivors from Blackbone Hill itself—including some 
who had hidden in the houses until the fight passed by, and then escaped around 
the hill—seemed glad to go to Threesprings, where they had kin.
Gird himself climbed back up the trail to take a last look at the west side of 
Blackbone Hill in broad daylight. It had not changed, that he could see, and he 
felt no desire to walk on it again.
He made his way back across country toward Brightwater, with the Westhill 
yeomen. On their way, they found ample evidence that the war was spreading. 
Twice they fought off attacks by mounted patrols; once they blundered into the 
path of a large infantry force, and got away only because they were fitter than 
their pursuers. Gird wondered where that force had been going; as far as he 
knew, he had no one active in that direction. They passed more than one 
burned-out village, inhabited by peasants who fled into the woods when they 
approached, and slunk out behind them to work the fields.
Gird led them in a careful circle around Grahlin; they were near Burry when they 
met someone recently from Brightwater, a yeoman Gird remembered only vaguely. 
His news was mixed. The king’s army claimed to have killed Gird, between 
Gadilon’s domain and the gnome lands to the south; it had then marched north, 
celebrating that victory by burning any village whose lord reported it as 
rebellious. For some reason, it had gone east, rather than returning in its 
tracks, and was now at the eastern border of Finaarenis, preparing to march home 
on the River Road.
“So,” Gird said, putting a blunt finger on the map. “That group we saw was 
probably going to join the king’s army. Well. When they get to Grahlin, the sier 
will have much to tell them, and we can expect them in Brightwater sometime 
after harvest, no doubt.”
According to later reports, the king’s army had met with scattered but brisk 
resistance on its march north; bartons Gird had never heard of had fought 
individual and combined engagements. In the meantime, Gird’s main force had 
control of the valley in which Brightwater lay, from just south of the River 
Road all the way to the southern trade road. They had taken two lords’ 
residences, although only servants were there: the lords were off with the 
king’s army, and their families were safe (for the moment) in Finyatha.
Putting all this information together with Selamis and the senior marshals, Gird 
thought he still had numerical superiority, but most of his troops were 
ill-armed and had no defensive armor at all. They were short of supplies, in 
part because Gird did not want to squeeze the remaining farmers. Some smiths had 
come over to the rebels, it was true, but they had little metal for them to 
work.
As the summer waned, Gird remembered the gnomes’ warning that he must win in one 
season, or find an ally with money or troops—or both. They had suggested one, 
which he had been reluctant to approach.



Chapter Twenty-seven
« ^ » 
Not for the first time, Gird felt well out of his depth. These wooded hills had 
taller trees than any he’d known; following a gurgling creek between two of 
them, he felt he was sinking deeper and deeper into unknown lands. Far overhead, 
the leaves just changing turned honest sunlight to a flickering green, as 
unsteady as the water beside him. Most of the undergrowth still showed the heavy 
green of summer, but one climbing vine had gone scarlet, as if the tree itself 
were bleeding. Gird shivered when he saw that.
If he had not spent that winter with the gnomes, he would never have come here, 
so far east, to meet a lord reputedly not so bad as the rest. But if he had not 
gone to the gnomes, he would never have survived his second season of war. If 
they had been right about other things, perhaps they were right about the 
Marrakai.
“Ho!” Gird jumped as if struck, and then stood still, peering about him into the 
confusion of leaves. Then a man in green stepped out on the trail he’d been 
following. His guide? Or was it a trap? The man had a staff like his own, and a 
bow slung over his shoulder. “Are you from the Aldonfulk hall?” the man asked.
“Yes,” said Gird. The man moved like someone well-fed and well-rested, full of 
confidence. The lord himself? Then he remembered what he was supposed to say. 
“Aldonfulk Lawmaster Karik ak Padig Sekert sends greetings to the lord duke 
Marrakai.”
“Ah. And Kevre Mikel Dobrin Marrakai returns those greetings, through his 
kirgan.”
Gird struggled his way through the names he had heard only in the gnomish 
accent, and the references, to remember that the kirgan meant heir of law and 
blood. He stared as the young man came forward. Black hair, green eyes as the 
lords had sometimes, a face young but already showing character. That sier in 
Grahlin would have been glad to have such a son. The young man smiled.
“And you must be Gird, the scourge of the west, that we have heard so much 
about. I’m Meshavre, called Mesha.”
“But you’re a—” He didn’t want to say it, but the young man said it for him.
“A lord’s son? The enemy? I hope not that, at least. Yes, Kirgan Marrakai, in 
formal usage, but this meeting you is hardly formal. Do not your people use one 
name only, at least in this war? Call me Mesha, then, and I will call you Gird.”
He was used to command; his voice carried the certainty that Gird would do what 
he wanted because he asked it, and he (that voice conveyed) would ask nothing 
unreasonable. Gird could imagine him dealing with dogs and horses, with wounded 
men, with crying women, all of them calming under that voice and obeying it. Yet 
it was reasonable, what he said, and Gird could see no good reason to disobey, 
nothing that would not make him feel foolish.
“Well,” he said, to gain time. “Mesha. Whatever you think of rebellious 
peasants, that’s the first time I’ve called a nobleborn by a pet name in all my 
life.” He met the young man’s eyes squarely, to find surprised respect. Mesha 
nodded.
“My father was right, then, as were the kapristi. They said you were different, 
and told long tales of you; my father had heard some of those same tales from 
Finaarean lords.”
“Who told them differently, I would guess,” said Gird. He liked the young man; 
he couldn’t help it. Was that the charming he’d been warned about? But the 
gnomes had said the Marrakai magic had gone long ago, that these lords were no 
longer magelords except by inheritance.
“I heard only one of them, from the sier whose life you saved. He was divided in 
his mind; if all the rebels were like you, he might be your ally. But come: let 
me bring you to a safe place to rest and eat. There’s a forester’s shelter, down 
this way.” And without another word, Mesha turned and started down the trail. 
Gird followed, still half-afraid of a trap. But why then would the young lord 
meet him alone in the first place? Why not simply put an arrow through him from 
behind a tree?
The forester’s shelter had three sides of stone, the front open to a firepit 
ringed with stones. Tethered beside it were two horses, a brown and a gray; a 
small fire crackled in the firepit, and something was cooking that sent a wave 
of hunger through Gird’s belly.
Duke Marrakai was an older version of his son: heavy black hair and beard, green 
eyes, and a powerful body. Gird was aware that the two of them, father and son, 
could easily kill him if that was what they had in mind. But so far neither made 
a move against him. The duke was himself stirring a pot of some dark liquid, and 
Mesha moved quickly to unpack saddlebags: bread, cheese, onion, apples, slabs of 
meat. Gird unslung his own thin pack, and put his remaining loaf of bread with 
the other. Mesha looked startled, but his father nodded approval.
“We thank you, Gird, for sharing.” His voice was deep, and Gird had no doubt its 
bellow would carry across a battle. “Mesha, show Gird the spring.”
The spring came up beside a flat rock. Gird knelt and held his hand over it; the 
surface rippled a little with the flow. He muttered the greeting for its 
guardian spirit, and looked up to find the kirgan watching him curiously. “You 
don’t speak to it?” he asked. Mesha shook his head. Gird looked back at the 
spring; surely it was glad to be recognized. He bent and scooped up a handful of 
icy, clean-tasting water. It made Gird’s teeth ache. He filled his waterskin 
after Mesha drank.
“Do all your people talk to springs?” asked Mesha. Gird retied the thong that 
held the skin closed for travel.
“Whenever we take water from the earth, we thank the Lady, and the guardians. 
It’s only courteous.”
“Even from a well?”
“Of course.” Gird looked at him. “If you give something to someone, don’t you 
expect thanks? We cannot live without water, without the rain falling and the 
springs rising.”
“Yes, but—is that why peasants—why your people—tie flowers and wool to the 
wellposts?”
“Yes, and if this were a spring on my land, I would bring gifts at Midwinter and 
Midsummer. Perhaps someone else does that here.” Mesha looked as if he would ask 
more, but didn’t. Instead he waved at the clearing behind the shelter. “Over 
there, behind that cedar, is the jacks for this shelter. Tis far enough from the 
water, my father says.” Gird had no need then, but wondered how long they 
thought he would stay.
They came back to find Duke Marrakai pouring the dark liquid into thick-walled 
mugs. “Do you have sib, in your country?” he asked Gird. Gird nodded. “Good. I 
like it with more tikaroot than most, though that makes it more bitter; this has 
honey in it.”
It might be poison, but why? Gird took a mug and sipped cautiously. A strong 
flavor, thicker and darker than his people made it. After another sip or so, he 
decided he liked it well enough. The duke had his knife out, and cut the bread 
and cheese into slabs. Now it was Gird’s turn to be surprised, for he held his 
hands over the food and used a form of blessing Gird had never heard: “Thank the 
Lady,” had been enough for him.
Marrakai and his son took Gird’s bread first, which forced him to share theirs. 
He wondered if they knew the significance of that among his people. Arranha had 
not, but these were supposed to be different. One bite stood for all; he might 
as well have cheese and apples. They ate in silence, as hungry men do; Gird, 
being hungriest, was most aware of his own eating. There was enough to fill his 
belly, and he took it. Mesha and his father ate slowly, so that they finished 
all together.
Then Duke Marrakai turned to Gird. “You are not oathbound to me, or to any with 
whom I share oaths: we are as strangers, among whom is no rank. Call me Kevre, 
if you will.” Gird stared at him: a peasant call a great lord, a duke, by one 
name? He nodded, trying to cover his confusion. Marrakai went on. “We have 
shared food; among our people, that used to mean peace, and sometimes alliance. 
If it is not so among your people, I will not hold you to those obligations—but 
if you want first truce, and then perhaps alliance, let us speak of that.”
Gird wondered if there had been ale in the sib; he could hardly believe what he 
was hearing. Alliance? With a duke of Tsaia? That the gnomes had had some reason 
for sending him here, he’d been sure, but this went beyond all hopes.
“Sir—Kevre—” That would take getting used to; the “sir” still came easily to 
him. “Among our people, shared food declares peace, at least for that meeting. 
And sometimes more—if something is being decided, then food shared means 
agreement.” He did not mention obligation, intentionally: let the Marrakai duke 
show what he knew.
“Yet you were trailhungry when you came; it would be unfair of me to bind you by 
that—”
“Are you bound?” asked Gird boldly. Marrakai nodded. “I am. Both by custom and 
by my own honor. I knew what I did when I ate of your bread, and gave you mine; 
therefore am I bound. While you are here, in my domain, you are my guest; 
neither I nor mine will harm you, nor let harm come to you.”
Gird nodded. “And I thought of what it meant, Kevre, when I put my food with 
yours, and when I saw you take it, leaving me only yours to eat. I said nothing 
and ate: that binds me, by the law the gnomes taught me, and by the custom of my 
people.” He grinned at Marrakai. “Of honor I cannot speak, since I was taught 
that we peasants had none, but I can see right and do it.”
“Which is honor enough for anyone,” said Mesha quickly. His father gave him a 
sharp glance, but nodded.
“Mesha’s right. So here we are, you my guest and I your host, both of us brought 
here by an interest in gnomish law. What law have the gnomes taught you? Is that 
your message?”
Gird tried to put his scattered thoughts in order. “Sir—Kevre— the gnomes taught 
me their law, and something of past times, and how the old customs of our people 
were like and unlike the High Lord’s law.”
Marrakai frowned. “Do they call Esea and the High Lord one thing and the same?”
“I’m—not sure. What they said was that the High Lord had been for the Aareans in 
the form of Esea. But they themselves consider the High Lord the source of 
justice. The judge.”
“Yes. That I knew. The High Lord’s Law, as they say. You know of the Rule of 
Aare?”
Gird nodded. “A priest of Esea taught me, but he was outcast, for claiming that 
the Rule of Aare meant differently than the king’s law said.”
“You met Arranha?” Marrakai shook his head. “Gird, I am well rebuked: I had not 
thought any peasant leader, no matter how worthy, would be familiar with 
Arranha’s heresies and gnomish law. Are you sure you are not a scholar, rather 
than a fighter?”
Gird felt himself redden. “I did not choose fighting; I would farm if I could. 
But—”
“But you could not. My pardon, Gird; it is no time for jesting. But Arranha! I 
have not met him myself, although I have heard from his horrified colleagues all 
about his views. I think myself he’s right. The oldest documents in my archives 
are from Old Aare, and from these it is clear that the interpretation of the 
Rule has changed, over the generations. I have tried to convince our king to 
return to the intent of the Rule.”
“Would he?”
“Felis? No. None of them see it as I do, although some agree that great wrongs 
are being done in its name. Some would abandon the Rule entirely, seeing no hope 
of reform, and some are, unfortunately, profiting so well that they see no 
reason to change.”
“Some like wrong itself,” muttered Mesha. “The Verrakai—
“I name no man’s motives,” said Marrakai firmly. “You know what I think, but 
that’s not at issue here. There are bad men in any realm, and in every family.”
“Not like that,” said Mesha. Gird looked at him and wondered if he spoke as 
freely to his father in his own hall. “Taris is merely foolish.”
“Judge all by the same rule,” said Marrakai. “If you would name Verrakai wicked, 
for gambling with lives, then consider Taris’s loss of those steadings—were 
there not men and women farming them, who came under another’s power? How is 
that different? We have been fortunate to have so few, but we are not gods, to 
be perfect.”
“You punished Taris; Duke Verrakai gave his son jewels when he—”
“Enough!” Gird noticed that Mesha was instantly silent, but clearly unconvinced. 
Marrakai turned to Gird. “My nephew, whose father was killed years ago, gambled 
away some of his father’s lands—which to me is dishonor, for the care he owed 
those who lived there. Lands are not like ring or sword. As for the Verrakai— 
have you heard of them?”
Gird shook his head. “Only that Verrakai is one of the dukes of Tsaia, a great 
lord of the east.”
“A great lord, if wealth counts for all. I would not speak of him, Gird, without 
need. Our families share no great love, and I cannot be fair.”
Gird looked from one face to the other, and said nothing. After a moment, 
Marrakai sighed, and went on.
“That’s beside our purpose. The kapristi may have told you that long ago my 
father’s father’s father resisted our king’s attempt to invade their princedom 
across Marrakai lands. When they routed that invasion, and made a pact of peace 
with the Tsaian throne—as they did with the king of Finaarenis for the same 
reason—the kapristi noted our action on their behalf. They counted themselves in 
debt to Marrakai. My great-grandsire argued that what he had done was right—that 
he had laid upon them no debt—but they argued in return that by our law he had 
not been obligated, and so it went, until they agreed on a settlement. From that 
day on, we have dealt evenly with kapristi. As you know, they accept no gifts 
and give none, but with those they consider upright, they deal willingly and 
fairly.”
“That is so,” said Gird.
“Of course I knew of the unrest in Finaarenis; there is unrest in Tsaia, for the 
same reasons. And I had heard of you: after Norwalk Sheepfolds, everyone heard 
of you.” Marrakai paused to drink more sib, and offered Gird another mugful. 
Gird took it, nodded, and Marrakai went on. “A peasant turned off his land turns 
outlaw: that’s nothing new. That peasant joins a rebellious mob, burns hayricks, 
ambushes traders: that’s nothing new. But a peasant training other peasants to 
march, to use their daily tools as weapons, to fight trained soldiers—not only 
training them so, but leading them: that was new. And not at all to most men’s 
liking. Most lords, at least. And then you disappeared entirely, after saving 
Sier Segrahlin’s life. Dead, most thought, or frightened into flight.
He had to ask, though he was sure he knew the answer, and the question itself 
could anger Marrakai. “Is it because you fear this for yourself? You would give 
me help, and for what—to let your domain abide?”
Marrakai was not angry, but his son was. He shook his head, at both Gird and his 
son. “What I fear is long war, with all the lands laid waste and no justice 
gained. They have not begun to fight back, Gird, not with the worst magic. You 
will see far worse than you’ve seen: poisoned wells, fields ruined for long 
years, unless you find someone with magic to restore them. You did not win 
quickly; they know, now, what they face. Yet you must fight. I understand 
that—it had gone too far, and your lords have no intent to mend matters. Am I 
afraid? Of course. I have children too; I have lands I love, people that depend 
on me. Worse, I have an oath I swore to our king, when he took the crown. I 
cannot take my own soldiers into this, except to defend my own lands, without 
his permission, which he will not give.”
“Why obey a wicked king?”
Marrakai sighed. “Felis is not wicked, merely weak. He has wicked advisors, some 
of them—if he had only had the sense to marry his rose, as he called her, 
instead of that sister of Verrakai’s— but that’s not wickedness. Gird, I pledged 
my loyalty to him, to the king of Tsaia both as king, and as the man Felis 
Hornath Mikel Dovre Mahieran Mahierai. If I go to war against his will, then I 
have broken my word, and if my word was ill-given, foolishly given, it is still 
binding on me. It would not be on everyone; some can free themselves with less 
trouble. I cannot. I cannot do it and be who and what I am, the self I respect. 
I have argued with him, pled with him, stormed at him, and finally left 
court—with his entire consent, because he was tired of hearing me. But that one 
thing I cannot do.”
Gird felt the unshakeable substance of the man, as unyielding in his way as the 
gnomes. He had never found anyone to give such an oath to; the oaths he had had 
to give the steward he had never felt as binding. A peasant did what he must to 
survive; honor was something the lords sang of, in ballads.
“You disapprove?” asked Marrakai. Gird shrugged and shook his head.
“I have no right to approve or disapprove. It is right to keep a promise, that 
I’ll agree, and if that is how you see your duty to your king, it may—must—be 
right for you.”
“I wonder sometimes,” said Marrakai. His lips quirked in a rueful smile. “What I 
propose to do is, in the eyes of many, just as bad as marching my own men out to 
face his. Fine wit, one of my tutors said, splits hairs, but split hairs make 
weak ropes to hang a life on.” Gird said nothing; he could not follow that. 
Marrakai seemed to understand, for he shrugged in his turn. “Let me be clear, 
then: the gnomes sent word that you were the best of possible leaders to the 
revolt surely coming in Finaarenis. Last summer I thought you might come, and 
heard instead of your campaigns—”
“Not all of them mine,” said Gird, rubbing his nose. “That fellow in the south—”
“I expected confusion of tales,” Marrakai said. “But some were surely yours. The 
gnomes said you might—with the High Lord’s judgment—win in one season, but they 
expected not. You would need gold for good weapons, they said, and possibly 
troops, and they were unwilling to provide either. They thought I might, for my 
own reasons.” He looked at his son. “There is one of my reasons: Mesha will not 
succeed to my lands as long as Felis is king. He was too forthright at court, 
worse even than I am.” A chuckle escaped him; Gird noticed that the young man’s 
ears were bright red. Marrakai shook his head. “We are not good at hiding our 
opinions, we Marrakai; it has been so for generations. My grandfather said 
someone dropped yeast in the mix when the gods shaped the first of us; it 
bubbles out at inconvenient moments.”
Gird looked from one to the other. He knew nothing of the lords’ way of living, 
but he would expect no great tact from either of them. Curiosity pricked him. 
“What did you do?” he asked Mesha. The young man turned even more red than 
before, but his eyes twinkled. He started to answer, but his father waved him to 
silence.
“What does not matter, save that he spoke the truth as he saw it, and that was 
too stony a mouthful for the king’s dignity to chew and swallow. I’ll not have 
it a common jest, Mesha, I told you that: I’m proud of your honesty and courage, 
but it is wrong to make tavern gossip of your liege lord.”
“He’s not my liege lord,” Mesha said, eyeing his father warily. “He will not 
take my oath—he said it—and thus—”
“I named you heir, and my oath binds you. Gods above, lad, this is no time for 
your antics! We are near enough the traitor’s blade as it is.” The younger man 
sat back, averting his face, and Marrakai turned to Gird. “I’m sorry, Gird: it 
is discourteous to withhold the tale, and yet I cannot let him tell it. Forgive 
me that discourtesy, if you will, and accept in its stead my support.”
“Support?” Gird was still confused by the rapid exchange between father and son.
“Yes. You need weapons; I can supply some, and gold to buy others. You may need 
sanctuary; my woodlands are open to you, and my troops will not permit others to 
cross the boundary, if you should be pursued. If my peasants wish to 
organize—bartons, do you call them?—then I will make no objection. Your war will 
spread into Tsaia—it must, because our king is allied to yours—and you must win 
in both kingdoms if you are to win at all.” He paused long enough that Gird 
wondered if he had finished speaking. “What I want is much like the gnomes asked 
of you: I want your assurance that you will do your best to organize a society 
after the war, in which order and law prevail—and that you do not urge your 
followers to massacres and destruction beyond the necessities of war.”
“I’m doing that already,” Gird said.
“So I had heard, but the stories were confused enough I was not sure which 
stories were of you, and which of your more fanciful selves. I can see for 
myself that you are not a man who hates easily, who would kill or rape for the 
pleasure of it; I know, from my own life, that war is a fire that cannot be 
caged in a hearth. This has already been bloody; it will be worse. I want to 
know I am supporting someone with a vision of peace beyond the war.”
“Yes.” Gird saw the futility of more words; how could he explain his vision? But 
his calm certainty seemed to convince Marrakai, who nodded shortly, and then 
stood.
“Gold I brought with me; you may take it as you go. Mesha will guide you to our 
borders, and introduce you to trusted men of my personal guard. Weapons—you will 
have to provide transport beyond my borders, but I can supply 250 pikes, 
whenever you can take them, and heads for the same number, if you have the 
poles.”
Once again Gird found himself handling gold coins, this time in daylight, 
openly. Coins of both kingdoms were minted with the same values: Tsaian crowns 
were traded in Finaarenis often enough to cause no comment. He let his fingers 
rummage among them, enjoying the feel, and looked up to see a wary expression on 
Marrakai’s face.
“They’re so—heavy,” Gird said. “And they feel—they feel so different against my 
skin. It’s no wonder some men become misers, and want to touch gold all the 
time.”
“Had you never felt gold before?” asked Mesha.
“Once. Someone tried to bribe me.” Gird poured the coins from his hand back into 
the leather bag Marrakai had handed him.
“You cannot be bribed?” Mesha asked.
Gird met his eyes. “Between this gold and my heart is the memory of my daughter, 
raped and bleeding, her dead husband, my closest friend, struck down for 
nothing. I could be bribed, I daresay, but not with gold.” The young man looked 
alarmed, but Marrakai smiled.
“I have trusted the right man, then. Fare well with that gold, and your 
memories.”
Mesha, on the way to the Marrakai border, shared knowledge as precious as the 
gold he carried. “My father says I cannot tell you what I did to be banished 
from court and my inheritance, but he said nothing about what I saw.” He 
explained the kinds of magicks the lords might use, and the tools needed for 
each, and the cost. He knew nonmagical counters for some of them, because the 
Marrakai, having lost their magicks early, had had to defend themselves from 
rival mages.
“It’s said the best defense is a pure heart, but none of us has one pure enough, 
if we even knew what the gods meant by it. Men were not made perfect, I say, and 
come nearest perfection as fools when they deny their mistakes.”
Gird nodded. “I’ve made plenty. It’s a rare young man sees that, but you have a 
rare father.”
“He’s—different.” Mesha walked on some strides before explaining that. “I knew 
that before I knew why; I could see it in the way others treated him. They’re 
afraid of him, although they have greater powers.”
“I hope for your peoples’ sake that you are different the same way,” said Gird.
Mesha looked at him, started to speak, and then, after several minutes of 
silence, tried again, his face turning red even as he spoke. “What is it like, 
being a peasant?” When Gird did not answer at once, he turned away, ears 
flaming, and hurried on. “The harpers sing of simple country joys, of the 
delights of the farm. My father’s people seem happy enough, but they would not 
tell me, would they? I asked my father, and he said go and try it—but my tutor 
brought me back.”
Gird thought at least part of Mesha’s curiosity was genuine interest, something 
he had had no chance to pursue in a place he was so well known. He looked, to 
see the young man staring at the ground as he strode along.
“I liked farming,” Gird said. “It’s hard work, but I grew up with it; I was good 
at it. Have you ever milked a cow? Swung a scythe? No? Well, it came natural to 
me. Digging’s no fun, but it has to be—plowing, planting, harvesting, all that’s 
the good part. Seeing Alyanya’s grace fill the baskets and barrels. Weather’s 
weather, the same for all. What’s bad comes from other men—from the lord taking 
more and more in field-fee every year, from death-fee and marriage-fee, from 
losing the right to gather herbs and firewood in the forest, all that. Having to 
take grain to his mill, instead of using our handmills, and having to buy ale 
from his brewery, instead of brewing our own. Going hungry, when there’s no need 
but to pay the taxes, seeing our children thin and sick, while his plump 
younglings ride by on fat ponies, trampling our fields.”
Gird looked over to see how Mesha was taking this; the young man’s face was 
sober, neither angry nor disapproving.
“Never think the troubles of peasants are little ones, Mesha. Hunger gnaws at 
you; the hunger of your family, of your children, hurts worse than your own. To 
feel the winter wind strike through ragged clothes, to have no fire in the 
house, and then the steward comes, smelling of meat and new-baked bread, to 
demand a special tax because the lord’s courting a lady, or his lady has had a 
child, that’s the bad part of it. Our lord, Kelaive, said peasants were lazy 
cowards: said it with his plump belly full of food we raised, with his well-fed 
soldiers around him, and we listened, shivering in a cold wind, or baked by 
summer sun. The steward said we should understand his greater problems. Greater 
than hunger? Greater than cold, than sickness, with healing herbs denied? Can 
there be worse than choosing which child shall have a crust of bread?” He could 
say no more; he felt the blood beating in his ears, the breath storming through 
his lungs.
“I’m sorry,” Mesha said.
“It’s all right,” said Gird, blindly walking on.
“It is not, and it is not right that I did not know.” Mesha sounded angry now, 
and not with Gird. “My father is a better man than that. I know it.” But Gird 
heard the uncertainty in his voice.
“I hope so,” he said, carefully making his voice light and easy. “As you will 
be.”
“I would tell you of things my father has done, but I see now that it is not 
enough, not for me. I must know how our people live. He has asked me before to 
take over a village, but I wouldn’t—”
Gird was surprised to find himself relaxed again, “You are young, Mesha. When I 
was young, I did not look for pain. I trained as a guard under that very 
steward—not looking, not seeing. My family—I thought they were fools, and I 
would show them all. After all, as a guard I ate their food, wore their clothes, 
brought money home—real coppers—to my father. And boasted of it. That’s what 
hurt worst, later—that I had boasted, while my sisters and brothers went hungry 
and I was full.”
“You—you do not hate me?” That was a boy’s voice, a boy’s naked desire to have 
an older man’s respect.
“No. I do not hate you, or even—by this time—Kelaive. I hate what made Kelaive 
greedy and cruel, what made my father cringe before even his steward, what has 
kept you—who would, I daresay, be just and generous if you could—from knowing 
what you need to know.” Gird smiled at the young man’s worried face. “Be at 
peace, Mesha, while you can; long life brings enough battles to every man’s 
door.”
  
Once he crossed the border into Finaarenis, Gird began arranging transportation 
for the promised pikes. It would have been easier to sneak them across country 
before the summer’s war erupted; the gnomes had advised him to go to Marrakai 
first. But he wasted little energy on regret. Before the leaves fell, all his 
pikes were over the border.



Chapter Twenty-eight
« ^ » 
Meanwhile, his people told him, the war had hardly slowed for harvest. The 
king’s army had split, one column going to Blackbone Hill, where they found only 
ruin. The other had started west along the River Road, but when it reached the 
lands controlled by Sier Segrahlin, the sier had refused the king’s army 
passage. Rumor had it that the king and the sier would not mend their quarrel, 
whatever it had been, until an enemy army lay at the gates of Finyatha.
“We could arrange that,” said Gird, laughing.
“Could you?” Arranha, to Gird’s surprise, had come to Brightwater. He wore the 
same face Gird remembered, and seemed content to live with Gird’s army and to 
endure the nervous glances of the other yeomen who distrusted anyone who had 
been a lord.
“We must someday,” Gird said. “But having fought the sier, I would prefer not to 
do it again, if we can avoid it.”
Arranha smiled at him. “You are acquiring prudence, then? I thought he might 
give you trouble. If his powers last, if he is not killed by a rock falling on 
his head, or lung-fever—”
“Can he be killed so? When my bowmen aimed at lords, the arrows flew astray.”
“As I understand that form of magic—and it is not my own— one must know of the 
attack to defend against it, like a man holding up a shield over his head. If 
someone surprises him, he has only the strength of his bone.”
Arranha had brought additional reminders and suggestions from the gnomes. “Not 
free gifts of information, you understand. I was told that they consider this to 
fall under the original contract; they’re pleased with what you accomplished at 
Blackbone Hill.”
Gird snorted. “They damn nearly got us killed at Blackbone Hill; they didn’t 
tell me what they were doing, or that they’d been talking to the miners—”
Arranha laughed gently. “But you survived.”
Another surprise of that homecoming was Selamis. After Gird had scolded him for 
not letting go his aristocratic background, he had seemed to fit in better. Once 
more, he was almost unnoticeable. Gird had begun to make use of his special 
knowledge, taking it for granted that Selamis would know which lord was related 
to whom, and what the news the traders brought meant. But until he left for 
Marrakai’s domain, the other marshals had still been wary of Selamis. Several 
had come to him privately, and asked him not to make Selamis a marshal, or give 
him command. Gird had had no intention of doing that anyway. Now, however, they 
all seemed at ease with him. The marshals had discovered how handy it was to 
have someone able and willing to write and keep accounts—and someone whose face 
everyone knew, but who had no actual command. Selamis, Gird heard with some 
surprise, had stopped a street brawl—and he had patched up a quarrel between two 
of the newer marshals—and he had convinced the ranking merchants that the 
Brightwater yeoman-marshal was worth hearing.
“I thought you were crazy,” Ivis said, on Gird’s first night back. “A lord’s 
son, troublemaker in his village—I know, you said he wasn’t, but we had one in 
our village and you never did. Now— he’s not that bad. You know what Cob’s been 
calling him?”
Cob leaned over and punched Ivis. “Hush. Gird won’t approve.”
“What, then?”
“Luap,” said Ivis, snorting with glee. “You know—the lords’ own term for a 
bastard who can’t inherit. Rank but no power. Cob’s been calling him our luap.”
Gird looked hard at Cob, who had the grace to blush. “It’s not as bad as it 
sounds,” he said defensively. “He’s the one taught me the word, and made a joke 
about it. Spends all his time with us high-ranking folk, marshals and you, and 
has no command of his own. So I took it up, and he just grinned.”
“Joke or not, I don’t like it.”
“Why not?” That came from the subject of discussion himself, who flung a leg 
over the bench, clapped Gird hard on the shoulder, and faced him squarely. “No 
one’s ever liked the name my father gave me: you said yourself Selamis was a 
strange name. I am a luap: my father’s bastard, and your trusted assistant in 
all but command. They’ll tell you I’ve practiced, and learned fighting, but I’m 
still best at keeping accounts.”
“Yes, but—” Gird shook his head, uneasy about something in the guileless, open 
face in front of him. If it didn’t bother the man, it should. But this was one 
argument he lost; he found that many of the yeomen had fallen into the habit of 
speaking of “the luap” or “that marshal’s luap.” With Gird’s return, and 
Selamis’s return to Gird’s side, it quickly became “Gird’s luap.” Gird still 
called him Selamis, though he sometimes slipped.
Later that fall, the lords changed their strategy. They had not been able to 
trap Gird’s army all summer, and he had inflicted sharp losses on them. So they 
turned their attention ever more strongly to the land which supplied him with 
soldiers and supplies, forcing the evacuation of farming villages, burning them 
out if they resisted, stripping the countryside of resources. They had armed 
soldiers supervise the harvest, after which the fields were burnt; for hands of 
days the sky was streaked with smoke, and ash dusted travelers. Livestock they 
drove to the lords’ fortified towns or dwellings, and any they could not confine 
under guard were slaughtered to feed the soldiers.
This work proceeded at different rates in various parts of the kingdom. Some 
lords were loathe to lose the produce of villages they had established, and 
counted instead on quartering more of their own soldiers among them. Some did 
not have the resources to reduce or move more than one or two villages that 
autumn. Those that survived could choose to try escape, or wait and hope that 
the coming spring would change things. But Gird found more and more refugees 
wandering, some seeking him and some looking for any safe place to spend the 
winter.
His own force controlled the valley lying south and east of Brightwater. This 
provided a large grain harvest—large, that is, until he measured it against his 
increasing needs. The town of Brightwater, all the little villages, his army—the 
grain would feed so many only if it were carefully managed, and by his own laws 
(he felt the teeth of a joke in this) he could not seize it. Some, of course, 
would not trust him, and yield it willingly. His own followers had sometimes 
less patience than he did; he found himself scolding his own as often as the 
others about the need for fairness, the evils inherent in bullying.
“It’s not the same thing,” Ivis argued, one dank late-autumn day, when a cold 
rain had blackened the falling leaves to a silent dark carpet. “If we’re fair in 
distribution—in famine law—and all share equally, then it’s not bullying. 
Bullying benefits the taker—
“So it does—and so it does here.” Gird blew his nose noisily on a bit of dirty 
fleece and rubbed it on his sleeve. His head was pounding, his ears felt full of 
water, and he was sure this was more than a fall chill. He could not feel this 
sick with a mere chill. “It benefits us—the takers—because then we have more to 
distribute fairly, and our own share—as well as others—is larger.”
“But it benefits everyone.”
“No. Not the ones who lose—who have larger shares now. Our way is right, Ivis, 
and better than theirs—I know that. But part of our way is how we do what we do, 
not just what we do.”
“If we all starve it won’t do them any good—”
“We aren’t starving yet. Besides, while I won’t bully our people, I don’t have 
anything against taking from our enemies.”
“I thought you said we weren’t ready to assault their fortified places.”
“A grain caravan isn’t fortified.” Gird did not bother to explain, the way his 
throat was hurting, that he’d suggested to outlying bartons that they attack 
grain caravans. Some of them were successful—successful, too, at running off 
herds being moved from the deserted villages. More and more bartons began even 
bolder actions: ambushing any guard unit unwary enough to camp outside walls, or 
travel carelessly along the roads and trails. Clashes between small groups of 
rebels and small units of guards soon convinced the guards to move only in 
larger numbers.
Winter snows had always meant the end of military actions, but this winter 
brought no peace, only the slowing of movement. Gird, struggling to codify his 
laws with the help of Selamis and Arranha in Brightwater, sifted the reports 
from distant villages. Here a barton had ambushed a lord and two hands of 
guards, killing all of them and leaving that domain open; there two bartons had 
fought off a brigand attack, only to fall to the soldiers who came onto the 
scene when the battle was almost over. The merchants and craftsmen of Tarrho, a 
town about the size of Brightwater near the eastern border, had decided to 
overthrow their lord and declare their freedom—then the servants and laborers 
had rioted, overthrowing the merchants in their turn. Tarrho’s small barton had 
tried to bring order, but had the trust of no faction; after bitter fighting 
that left many dead and the city without supplies of food, brigands rode in, 
looted everything, and set it afire. The king’s messengers declared it was the 
fault of Gird and his rebels; the barton’s survivors, who arrived in Brightwater 
before Midwinter, explained what had really happened.
“A good many of them brigand bands claims to be your yeoman, Gird,” the 
yeoman-marshal said. “Nobody knows, for sure—I mean, if they aren’t one of yours 
already, they don’t. So they’re afraid of your name, and the bartons.”
“That’s why we need to have our rules known,” Gird said. “If they know we have 
rules, and what they are, and they see that we stick to them, then perhaps 
they’d trust us.”
“Maybe.” The yeoman-marshal did not look convinced. Gird peered at him.
“What do you think it would take?”
“Well—sir—I think they need something to see. We can say we have rules, but 
that’s not enough, not for city folk used to looking up law in a book.”
“Which is why I’m writing it down,” said Gird, slapping the table and jostling 
Selamis’s tools. He pointed at the younger man. “This is Selamis.” He still 
would not say my luap. “He writes a better hand than I do, one anyone can read.”
“That should help,” the yeoman-marshal said, craning his head to see what was on 
the top sheet.
“It’s very simple,” Gird said. “I told him, we have to get it all into no more 
than four hands of rules—if people can count their fingers and toes, they’ll be 
able to remember them.”
And gradually, copy by copy, the first simple laws that later became the Code of 
Gird spread from barton to barton, even into the towns. Of necessity, these 
rules were suitable for a time of war; Gird could not possibly work out all the 
laws needed for trade and commerce in peacetime. But he was sure of his intent: 
cruelty was always wrong, and always harmed the community. Honesty and fair 
dealing were good, and helped it.
In the bitter cold and deep snows of winter, no army could march far. Stragglers 
came to Brightwater and the villages where Gird had some of his army 
encamped—starving, ragged, sometimes dying of cold even as they staggered to a 
fire. Gird himself traveled from one camp to another as best he could, trying to 
make sure that food and warmth were shared fairly among them. He knew, without 
needing the gnomes’ advice, that he would have to win in this coming year—at 
least he would have to control most of the farmland, so that his people could 
grow food again. Otherwise his army would starve, and then the lords would win 
without a fight. Food stores dropped lower and lower. His yeomen did not grumble 
much, seeing Gird’s belt as tight as theirs. But the soft cries of hungry 
children pierced him as if they were all his own. He hardly saw Rahi or Pidi, 
these days; Girnis had disappeared into the dust of war and he knew nothing of 
her. But the children in the camps were always with him, a reminder of what he 
was fighting for, and what would be lost if he failed.
It was in the first days of coming spring, uncertain weather that could bring 
thaw or hard freeze from day to day, that he took one of his cohorts out to seek 
food from one of the villages that had promised it the year before. They marched 
four days, south and east down the valley, across a ridge, and down another 
valley. Gird had sent a runner ahead. But instead of a yeoman marshal, or the 
barton, come to meet them, he found the entire village standing grim and 
unwelcoming in a snow-swept meadow nearby. They would not, they said, give 
anything—not one stone’s weight of grain or handbasket of dried fruit. Begone, 
they said, before you bring the lords’ wrath down on us. Gird nodded, and looked 
them up and down individually.
“What it comes down to, you don’t trust me.”
The cluster of ragged men and women said nothing. He hadn’t expected them to 
admit it. No one met his eyes. Behind him, his cohort, even more ragged than the 
peasants from the village. He could hear their breathing, the rasp of pebbles 
under their feet when they shifted in place. He could feel, as if it were a hot 
iron, their rapt attention on the back of his neck. His own belly knotted with 
hunger; he knew theirs were empty too.
Gird tried again. “You agreed with us last year, you remember that?” He stared 
right at the headwoman, who stared at her feet. But she nodded, slowly. “Yes—you 
said you’d share your harvest with us, feed us, to help us win against the 
lords—”
“You didn’t win.” That voice was bitter, but low, from the back of the group. 
Gird could not tell which dark-wrapped head it had been, or whether man or 
woman.
“We haven’t won yet,” said Gird. “But we’re a lot closer—Lady’s tears, did you 
think it would be all one battle? We told you—”
“ ’Twas a bad winter,” said the headwoman, still avoiding his eye. “And them 
folokai got after flocks, near took the whole lamb crop.”
“Tell ’em all, Mara,” said the same bitter voice, louder this time.
“The lords come,” the woman said. Now she looked up, and Gird could see a fresh 
scar across her face, the mark of a barbed lash that had almost taken her eye. 
“They said we had to have more than we could show. They said we’d been giving it 
to rebels, and they said they’d have no more of it. They took a child from every 
hearth—they come here, and where was you? Away, is all we know. No help. Help 
for help, that’s what we say, and you’ve given no help.”
“I’m sorry,” said Gird. Now all the faces looked at him, all scarred one way or 
another, all bitter. All betrayed. He wanted to say It’s not my fault, but knew 
that wouldn’t help. They had protected many of the villages, in the past year: 
he thought of all those skirmishes and battles, the cost of it to his army. This 
year, given supplies enough, they’d control more territory, and fewer villages 
would suffer. But here they had not protected the people, and the people had 
changed their minds.
“They come oftener,” the woman went on. “Check the fields, check the stores. 
Leave us bare enough for life, they do, and destroy the rest. Threaten the 
fields, if we give aught to rebels.”
Could he promise they would not come again? Did he have the strength yet? Gird 
tried to think, but he wasn’t sure. And a false promise would be worse than no 
promise. And if he told them how close he was to moving his lines on another 
league or so to the hills, would these betray him to their lords? Were they lost 
to him entirely?
“Gird?” That was Selamis, as usual. He had, no doubt, come up with some clever 
idea for saving the situation. Gird wished he could be properly grateful. He 
waved the man forward. Selamis muttered “The Marrakai gold?” in his ear. Well, 
it was a clever idea. Probably not what the Marrakai agent had intended the gold 
to be used for, but it might work. Although—if they went buying food, to replace 
what he bought, their lords would surely notice that, too.
But he had to try. His mouth dried, thinking of all possible consequences. “We 
have a bit of gold we found—”
“Found!” That was not a promising tone. Someone spat juicily; it splatted on the 
rock a bare handspan from Gird’s boots. “They told us you brigands’d have 
gold—and what they’d do if we come to market with it. You’re no better than they 
are, that’s a fact. Take our food for your army—they do the same. Both raids us, 
neither protects—not them from you, nor you from them, and there’s not a hair of 
difference.”
He could not, even hungry as he was, drive these folk farther. Like it or not, 
they were the reason for his fighting, and he could not harm them—yet. Could 
they use the gold at some market? One of them might pass for a trader, 
perhaps—someone robbed on the road? That was common enough. Would that pesky 
priest wreathe his magicks for them, make someone safe in the towns? He might, 
but he would want something for it, and Gird did not yet trust him.
“We’re not the same, and I think you know it. But you’ve had more trouble than 
you could stand; I understand that. We won’t take it by force, but you think of 
this—one child from each hearth now—do you think that will satisfy them? I lost 
more than that, before I broke free. You need not be as stupid as I was.”
“You lost children?” Others shushed that voice, someone in a leather cloak, but 
Gird answered it, counting them on his fingers. “My first two sons died of 
fever; the lord refused us herb-right in the wood. My wife lost two babes young, 
one from hunger and one from fever. My eldest daughter they raped; killed her 
husband. The babe died unborn. My youngest son they struck down; he lives. 
Another daughter they struck down, breaking her arm; I know not if she lives or 
dies. And my brother’s children, that I’d taken in: two of them dead, by the 
lords’ greed. And that’s children. I lost friends, my parents, my brother. You 
ask yourselves: if they can take one child, will they stop there? Will all your 
submission, all your obedience, get you peace and enough food? Has it ever 
worked? You can sit here and let them take you one by one, or you can decide to 
fight back.”
And he turned, glared at his own unhappy men, and marched them away. No one 
called him back, but he was not surprised to find three of the villagers 
following his cohort when they had gone some distance—and ready to join him.
Still, such incidents made him touchy. He was trying to stretch a small bowl of 
gruel one day, when two of his marshals reported that the villages to which 
they’d applied had refused to give or sell supplies, on the grounds that they’d 
been raided by brigands. His patience snapped.
“I am so sick of this!” It came out louder than he meant, and he’d meant it loud 
enough. Everyone fell silent, watching him, which only made him angrier. He 
lowered his voice to a growl, all too aware that his growl was audible farther 
than some men’s shouts. “All this dickering, like a farmer trying to work down 
the price of a bull. All this haggling with thieves and bullies, craft guilds 
and village councils. Any idiot should be able to see what we’re doing, and the 
worth of it. You’d think they liked being yoked and driven by the magelords, the 
way they kick and snap when we free them. The Lady of Peace herself would be 
driven to fury, the way they are. By the gods, we’re trying to make them free, 
and make things fair, and they won’t see it!”
“We might as well be brigands,” said Herrak. It was not the first time he’d said 
something like that, and Gird disliked the whine in his voice. “The way they 
are, what difference does it make?”
“It makes a difference to us,” said Gird. “There were brigands before; they 
never helped the farmers. If we’re only robbers, all should be against us. What 
I can’t see is why they don’t see the difference.”
“We need to win,” said Selamis, smiling. He had the honeysweet lilt to his voice 
that Gird hated; it worked on the crowds, most times, but it was not 
plainspeaking.
“What do you think, I should go to the brigands and recruit them?” He meant it 
as a jest, but the quality of the silence told him the others had thought of 
that before. Seriously. Selamis was paring his nails with a knife; he gave Gird 
that sideways look that Gird disliked.
“Some of them might be more like us than you think. Leaderless farmers thrown 
out of their villages—isn’t that what you started with?”
Cob sat up straight and glared at Selamis. “We were not brigands. We may have 
been disorganized, lazy, filthy, and incompetent, but we were not brigands.”
Selamis smiled at him. “That’s what I meant. But your lord called you brigands, 
I’d wager.” Cob was not mollified; he glowered at Selamis. But Ivis nodded.
“He did. And maybe—you were good with us, Gird, and if you found even another 
cohort by full spring—”
Gird mastered his anger with an effort. Late winter had always been the worst 
time for quarrels, even in the villages: empty bowls and enforced idleness made 
everyone irritable. “I suppose you have a particularly saintly brigand in mind 
for me to recruit?”
“I can’t promise saintliness, but these last two villages both claim that the 
brigands near them muster a cohort or two. And there’s a man who can guide you 
to their camp.”
“I’ll think about it.” He would have thought about it between other things for a 
long time, but the next day a stranger came bearing an offer—written, Gird was 
surprised to see—from that very brigand captain. He had been a soldier, he said, 
and turned his coat when the war began. He had much to offer Gird, and would 
meet with him—in his camp. Gird talked to Arranha. The old priest shook his head 
and spread his hands.
“You put your life in the hands of Sier Segrahlin, Gird, and came out of that 
alive; if you want to chance this brigand I have no reason to think you’ll do 
worse. Will you take a cohort of your own?”
“No. We don’t have the food now to move them that far, and have them look like 
anything but starvelings. That won’t impress him or his men. I’ll go alone, and 
wear my best boots.”
  
“You might like to consider something.” The big man’s face was dark with more 
than weather; ancient dirt outlined every crease, and his heavy dark hair was 
greasy. But the dagger with which he was paring his filthy nails was spotless, 
its edge gleaming.
“I might,” said Gird, accepting the dirty clay pot one of the other men offered 
without enthusiasm. Gods only knew what kind of brew would be in it. He sniffed 
as unobtrusively as possible. The big man’s shrewd eyes missed nothing.
“If you want ale, we’ve got it. That’s just water—spring water, from over 
there.” His head jerked, and Gird’s eyes followed, to a glisten of water among 
rank weeds across the clearing. Gird sipped, cautiously. It tasted like spring 
water, untainted by any herbs he knew.
“You’re the peasant’s new general, I hear,” said the big man. He waved his hand, 
and a woman in a striped skirt, a pattern Gird had never seen, brought over a 
wooden tray. On it were a loaf and two wooden bowls half-full of stew. The stew 
had slopped onto the tray, making a gray puddle, but it smelled good. “Here,” 
the man said, breaking the loaf and offering both chunks to Gird. Gird took the 
smaller; the man frowned, but passed him one of the bowls.
“I’m not a general,” Gird said. He nibbled the bread: coarse and sour, but no 
worse than his own baking.
“General, captain, leader, whatever you want to call it. You’re commanding them 
now—”
Gird nodded. No use hiding it, and by rumor this one would never tell the 
nobles.
“You need troops.” The big man dipped his own chunk of bread in the stew, and 
stuffed his mouth full, then bit it off savagely. “I have troops.”
Gird looked around at the men huddled at the cookfires, being served by the two 
women. “These?”
“Among others. More than you have, peasant general.” The words were slurred with 
chewing.
“Then you want to join us?”
The man swallowed that mouthful, took another, and finished it before answering. 
“You need us. I think you want us.”
Gird dipped his own bread into the stew and took a large bite.
Better meat than he’d tasted since spring. “Good stew,” he said. The man frowned 
at him, but said nothing. Gird looked past his shoulder at the others, and found 
eyes staring back at him that quickly looked away. He put his bowl down, and 
leaned forward, fists on knees.
“I need people who want to make a better land.”
The man’s eyes widened, and then he laughed, an explosive gust that sprayed 
spittle an armspan. “Better land! What kind of talk is that? Is that what you 
peasants think you’re doing?”
“If it’s not, we’re nothing but outlaws.”
“And you think that’s so terrible? Simyits’ fingers, Gird, we’ve been outlaws so 
long most of us don’t know where we come from, and do we look so starveling to 
you?” The man pushed up his sleeve, and squeezed a meaty forearm. “See this? 
Show me the peasant with as much meat on his bones—not you, not anyone you know. 
Besides, you’re all outlaws: the lords have a bounty on you, same as us.”
Gird was aware of ears stretched long to hear their words. “We’re outlaws 
because we had no choice. Because the magelords’ law gave us no way to live 
within it. Given a fair chance, I don’t know many as ’ud live outside the law. 
All I ever heard of outlaws, they was mostly men driven off their lands by some 
greedy lord.”
The man hawked and spat, not too near Gird’s feet. “Aye, it’s unfairness drives 
most men to the woods. Some of us was stolen away young, or born to free 
fathers. But we’re all free now, that’s the thing. Free, and with no wish to put 
our necks under the yoke again.”
“The magelords’ yoke?”
“Any yoke.” The man spat again, this time a hairs-breadth nearer. Gird thought 
it was deliberate. “See here, Gird, I’ll be straight with you. We’re free, and 
we want to stay free. You talk of a better land: just what do you mean? A better 
king? A better tax gatherer?”
Some of the others had come nearer. Gird had noticed before that they were 
well-fed; now he could see the glint of weapons in their hands. “No king,” he 
said. “The magelords brought kings to our land; we had none before.”
“Who told you that?” It was a long, lanky redhead well behind his leader.
“The gnomes,” he answered. He would have gone on, but the collective intake of 
breath stopped him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“You deal with gnomes?” The big man sounded both angry and afraid.
He was not sure how to answer. Would they understand that bargain he’d made, or 
would they fear gnomish incursions? “I learned of old times from the gnomes,” he 
said finally. “And of law.”
The big man’s eyes slewed to left and right, meeting others and picking up 
control as visibly as a man picks up the reins of horses in harness. Gird felt a 
cold draft down his back. Something he’d said had changed their minds—and not 
for the better.
“I would not call it better for the rule of gnomes or gnomish men,” said the 
leader.
“They seek no rule in human lands,” said Gird. “They abide by their laws, which 
forbid that.”
“But you learned law of them—and from them learned what you would do to make the 
land better?”
“It’s obvious enough what would make it better. Honest dealing between one man 
and another, one craft and another. Fair judges. Taxes there must be, but fair, 
and no more than a man can pay and still live decently. From them I learned what 
is needed to make such things exist, what rules groups need.”
The big man’s teeth gleamed as he grinned. “Fair dealing, eh? And who’s to say 
what’s fair, with no king? The gnomes?”
Gird shook his head, pushing away his doubts. This was familiar ground, at 
least, and perhaps they would listen. “Not the gnomes; they have their law, for 
themselves. We need a law, a rule, for us— for all of us. We decide what’s fair, 
all of us, in council—as our forefathers did, in the old days of steading and 
hearthing.” Talking fast, he explained more of the plan he and his friends had 
worked out. But he knew soon enough that they listened with only idle interest. 
When he finished, the leader was shaking his head.
“That’s fine enough for farmers, and village bakers. Do you think the finesmiths 
will sit elbow-to-elbow with stinking tanners and pig farmers mired to the 
knees? And what about us? We have none of the crafts you mentioned. What do you 
think such as we will do, in your ‘better land’? Do you really think I’ll take 
up plowing and reaping, or Pirig will return to herding sheep?”
“Why not?” asked Gird, though he was sure he knew. “It’s honest work, and 
without the magelords’ interferences—”
“Because I’m not what you call an honest man,” said the big man, leaning toward 
him. “You want honest, you go to the gnomes, and much good it will do us! Should 
I push a plow or swing a scythe, when my skill is with sword and handaxe? Will 
your better land have a place for soldiers?”
Gird raised his eyebrows. “Soldiers? Is that what you are?”
“Close enough. Strong men with weapons: call us brigands or soldiers, it matters 
not. Soldiers are but brigands in uniform.”
Gird bit back the angry reply he wanted to give; this was no time to lose his 
temper, or his head might go with it. “Some are,” he said in as mild a tone as 
he could manage. The other man sank back onto his rock. “But if life’s to be 
better for all, our soldiers must be more.”
“Your soldiers! Your half-starved peasants who know less about swordplay than 
the worst fighter in my band.”
Gird smiled at him, with clear intent. “If your swordplay’s so skilled, then why 
haven’t you freed yourself of the militia’s scourge, these past years?”
“It’s not all swordplay!” yelled someone from the back of the crowd that had now 
gathered.
“Exactly,” said Gird to that unseen voice. “Fighting a war’s more than 
swordplay; my peasants may be clumsy with blades, but they know that much. 
You’ve tried your way, and it didn’t work—now you want my help—”
“No!” The big man had jumped up; something had pricked him there, something Gird 
might use if he could figure out what it was. “I don’t need anyone’s help! We 
could sit here, fattening on the spoils of your war, peasant, preying on both 
sides. I offered you help, help you need: men and weapons. I don’t need your 
pious words, your gnomish law.”
“And what did you want, in exchange for your help?”
“Only what you give others who bring in troops for you: that you name me 
marshal—even high marshal—along with those others.”
“I think not,” said Gird, and bent down to pick up his bowl. As he’d expected, 
the big man came at him, seeing a clear target. As he’d planned, the bowl of 
cooling stew went into the big man’s face, and he tucked and rolled away from 
the knife. His feet jammed into the big man’s belly, and then he was up, 
balanced, fist cocked, as the big man choked and gasped on the ground. He kicked 
the man’s knife away. The other men had started forward, but now ringed about 
him, uncertain.
“Soldiers must trust each other,” said Gird loudly. “I must trust my marshals, 
and my marshals must trust the yeoman marshals, and those trust their yeomen—or 
nothing works in battle.”
“I’ll kill you,” growled the man on the ground, between gasps.
“Get up and try,” said Gird. Someone snickered, in the crowd, and he felt that 
others felt the same way. But the ring surrounded him; he could not have escaped 
if he’d tried. He didn’t try, and they came no closer, more curious than angry.
The big man finally clambered up, his dirty face grim. “You— you should have 
killed me when you had the chance, fool!”
“It’s not my way to knife a helpless man who is not my enemy.”
“I am now.” said the big man. He glared around the ring. “You— why didn’t you 
hold him?”
“Why?” asked the same redhead who’d spoken before. “You started it. Take him 
yourself; he might hurt me.” More chuckles, this time more open. The big man 
flushed.
“So I will, then, and you’ll miss your fun after—I’ll let Fargi take his skin. 
As for you, Gird, I hear they call you Strongarm, not rocktoe: if you have 
strength in that arm, use it.”
“Aye,” said other voices. “No more wrestlers’ tricks: fight Arbol manlike, fist 
to fist.”
Stupid, Gird thought, remembering the gnomes’ acid commentary on human brawling. 
But stupid or not, his one chance of surviving this ill-chanced venture lay in 
the strength of his arms and the hardness of his fists. The big man crouched, 
then rushed him. Gird sidestepped, jabbed hard into the man’s ribs, and took a 
glancing blow on his own. So that worked—if he ever saw the gnomish warmaster 
again, he’d have to tell him. If you must use fists, Ketak had said, learn to 
use them well. The big man was throwing a flurry of blows at him now, blows Gird 
took on his own arms, keeping them away from his face. His own punches were 
landing on shoulders, arms, and body; the other man was quick enough to protect 
his own face, ducking behind his fists like a river-crab behind its claws. He 
heard the other men mutter, call encouragement to their chief; he tried not to 
hear any of that.
Then the other man kicked out, catching Gird on the shin. He dropped his guard 
for a moment, and took a hard blow to the side of his head. For some reason, 
that made him laugh: the memory of his father once telling him he’d be safe in a 
brawl, having a head made of solid stone. He saw on the other man’s face 
surprise and a touch of fear at his laugh—well, so he should be afraid. For all 
the big man’s extra weight, he was no stronger, his shoulders not quite as 
broad—and he had eaten all his supper, and taken a kick to the belly.
Gird let himself grin. The man himself had chosen fists, when he might have 
skewered Gird with a sword—did he not realize he had chosen Gird’s best weapon? 
The other man gave back, foot-length by footlength, as Gird hammered him. He 
hardly felt the return blows; he had not had such a wholly justified excuse for 
pounding someone in a long time. In battle he had to be thinking of the whole, 
had to be looking ahead—in training he had to be watchful that he did not 
cripple one of his own. But now, here, he could let out all the frustration and 
rage of the past year, and whether he lived or died, he would have the 
satisfaction of pulping that arrogant face that thought itself too good to be a 
peasant.
Now the other man had given up attack, and was trying to defend himself from 
Gird’s blows. Gird drove him back with two, three, four short jabs to the body, 
and then loosed his favorite swing, all his weight and shoulder behind it, to 
crack the other’s jaw and drop him like a loose stone. The big man went down, 
twitched, and lay still. Gird flexed his hands, and sucked a cut. Nothing 
broken, though they’d be stiff in the morning. As his temper cooled, he could 
feel the lumps on his ribs that would be bruises, and the throbbing of his 
kicked shin.
The mutters around him now were awed. He looked deliberately from face to face, 
wondering if they’d attack him, knife him. He would not have a chance against so 
many. But although two knelt beside their leader, and someone brought a bucket 
of water, the ring widened, giving him space. He heard a complaint, quickly 
squelched, about a wager, and realized that some of them had gambled on the 
fight—he should have expected it, but he hadn’t.
“Is that how you won your army, then?” asked one of the men. Gird shook his 
head.
“No. But I find it useful sometimes. My—Da used to say the only way to get an 
idea into some heads was to break them open and let the light in.” Open laughter 
now, a little uneasy but genuine amusement. He felt slightly guilty for the lie, 
his father having been Alyanya’s servant to the end, but his instinct said that 
letting these men know he’d ever been in the militia would be a mistake.
“An’ now?”
Gird looked at the speaker, licked his knuckles again, and said, “Now what? He 
tried to take me, and I flattened him—that’s between us. There’s nothing between 
you and me unless you make it so—are you challenging?”
“Nay, not I. What I meant—d’you claim command of us?”
“He can’t!” said someone behind him. Gird did not turn.
“No,” he said slowly. “That’s not what we fought about. You’ll choose your own 
leader—for all I know, you’ll choose him again.”
“But about joining your army—”
Gird shrugged. “You heard what I said. I’m looking for men as want a better land 
later, and those that’ll be honest yeomen now. Those that do can come with me; 
those that don’t had better not. We may be skinny and hungry, but we do know how 
to deal with those as try to stick a knife in our back or steal from us.“ He 
nudged the fallen leader with his toe.
“We could kill you now,” muttered one of the men just at the edge of his sight. 
Gird laughed, and saw the surprise on their faces.
“Killing’s easy—you could kill me, and the magelords likely will. So then what? 
Killing me won’t get you into my army. Make up your own minds; I’m going home.” 
He turned, and stared hard at the men who had crowded close behind him. Like 
dogs, they wilted under a direct stare, and shuffled, making a gap for him to 
walk through. His back itched; it would take only a single thrown knife, a 
single sword-thrust. But he could not have fought his way out anyway. Behind him 
he heard a sudden argument, curses, and more blows ending in yelps. Someone else 
was taking over, he guessed, wondering if they’d come after him. He walked on, 
into the trees, not looking back. Looking back would do no good.
He had gone some distance when he heard running behind him on the trail. Gird 
slipped aside, crouching in the undergrowth to crawl back down parallel to the 
trail, and saw four men and the woman in the striped skirt jogging along. All 
were armed; the first watched the trail keenly, and stopped them about where 
Gird had left the trail.
“He can’t be that far ahead of us,” said one.
“Wait—I don’t see—”
Gird stood up; they heard the rustling leaves and turned, clearly startled and 
alarmed.
“Why did you follow me?”
“We—I—wanted to join you,” said the first man.
“I heard you let women join,” said the woman.
Gird stepped out onto the trail, warily enough. “I do, if they’re willing to 
take orders like anyone else. But we have rules you might not like.”
“There’s better than him,” said the first man, jerking his chin in the direction 
of the brigands’ camp. “I’d rather fight than steal.”



Chapter Twenty-nine
« ^ » 
Spring rains that year delayed everyone’s movements. Gird drew and redrew his 
battle maps, revising his plans over and over again. His cohorts were most 
effective as he’d used them before, striking swiftly against small 
concentrations of the enemy, where they could outnumber them and control the 
surrounding country. But if the supply situation stayed as bad as it was, he 
could not do that another year; he would have to confront the lords’ armies 
directly, win and control larger areas, to ensure the safety of food-producing 
lands and those who farmed them. Should he do that early, or late, after wearing 
down the lords’ armies with raids? What would it cost him, in unsown grain, in 
next year’s harvest?
In some areas, the lords were not allowing their peasants to plow and plant; in 
others, the farmers were guarded by soldiers. Gird shook his head at that. Why 
would they think he’d raid during planting time? His own forces protected an 
area in the Brightwater valley; over the winter he had urged all the farmers to 
form bartons and learn drill. Most of them had. Now his army protected them 
during planting, and he hoped they could protect themselves during the fighting 
season.
He began moving his army eastward, one cohort at a time, cloaked in the rains 
and leaving less trail than if he moved everyone at once. Ivis had found a good 
shelter two days’ journey away, overhanging ledges that opened into a sonorous 
cavern. Gird himself went back and forth with the first two, then spent several 
days in Brightwater, settling accounts with Marrakai gold and hoping the town 
would be there when he got back. If he got back. Then he headed out with the 
last cohort, noticing that despite all his care, the tracks left by the others 
were as clear as any map ever drawn, one brown scrawl of mud after another 
across the new spring grass.
Roads, he thought to himself. We’ll need good roads, when it’s over. What they 
needed now was good luck, the gods’ gift of miracles; remembering the other 
times he’d wanted miracles, and what he’d actually received, he was not willing 
to ask. He felt unusually grumpy; he had banged his knee hard on the doorpost 
going out of the barracks, and it still throbbed. The damp raw air seemed to 
bite into the bruise, rather than soothe it. He hawked and spat, catching an 
early fly; that cheered him.
By nightfall, he felt he’d been marching for half a year. His feet were damp and 
cold; he pulled off his worn boots and pushed his feet near the fire, rubbing 
them. A fine drizzle hissed in the flames; smoke crawled along the ground, 
making them all choke and cough. Gird thought longingly of the barracks in 
Brightwater—even that merchant’s house, with the brazier in the center of the 
table, where several men could sit around it and talk. He would never think like 
a merchant, but he had gotten over some of his first astounded contempt. He told 
himself to be glad he had a good leather cloak; time was when the drips off the 
trees would have wet his bare head. But it didn’t work. He was cold, stiff, 
damp, and without reason homesick for his own small cottage, with his own fire 
on the hearth, and his own family around him. He said nothing; the others were 
quiet as well, on such a dismal evening.
The next day’s march brought them to the rock shelter and cavern, where most of 
his army was gathered. He plunged again into the familiar problems: how large to 
make the jacks, how many sacks of grain and dried fruit did they have and how 
long it would last, where the nearest sources of supply were. He was more than 
ready to pull off his boots and stretch out near one of the fires for a rest 
when Selamis insisted that he had to speak to Gird privately.
Gird followed his assistant deeper into the cave, annoyed once more at Selamis’s 
fidgits. They didn’t have time for such nonsense.
“Here.” The younger man’s voice, hardly above a whisper, halted him.
“I’m here,” growled Gird, trying for patience. “What is it now?”
Instead of answer, soundless light answered him. Between Selamis’s clutched 
fingers shone a rosy glow, steady as daylight. His eyes glittered in it, 
squinted almost shut. Gird, through his own shock, saw the taut lines of his 
face, the tears that trickled down those quivering cheeks. He looked down, 
terrified, at his own hands, but they were outlined only from without, by 
Selamis’s light.
“What—” His voice broke, and he swallowed, tried again. “What is that—what did 
you find? Where?”
“In me.” The man’s hands spread a little; the light glowed steadily between 
them, sourceless, rose-gold: the light of spring evenings hazed with pollen, of 
autumn dawns among the turning leaves. Or of friendly firelight, welcoming. Gird 
shuddered, and fought back a rising terror.
“You’re a—a mage?” And almost simultaneously, rage shook him.
You lied to me, he thought. But Selamis’s face showed more fear than even he 
felt, fear not of him, but of the light.
“I don’t know.” The man spread his hands farther apart, sighed, and the light 
vanished. Far back up the passage, Gird could hear Raheli arguing still about 
how many onions should go in tonight’s kettle—so it was still the same world, 
the same time. “I told you,” the voice went on in the darkness, “that I am a 
lord’s bastard. But I didn’t tell you—”
What this time, Gird wondered, remembering the many things his so-called luap 
had not told him until circumstances forced it. Would the man never find truth, 
and cease his lying?
“I was bred for magic.” It came out in one gulping rush. Gird said nothing, 
listened to Selamis’s breathing as it slowed again. “They do that now—”
“I asked you about that,” said Gird softly. It made sense, now. “Go on,” he 
said, more gently than he might have a moment before.
“I—I had none they could find,” his luap said. “That’s why they sent me away—the 
real reason.”
“You know,” Gird began as delicately as his nature allowed, “if you’d just tell 
me the whole damn truth to start with, we wouldn’t have these little problems.”
“I know. But if you’d known—”
“Damn it, I’m not a monster!” His voice echoed off the walls, most monster-like, 
and then he had to laugh, muffling it as best he could. “Oh lad, lad, you are 
too old for these tricks. I can believe your heritage of blood, true enough, the 
way you never trust outright—”
“Trust is dangerous,” muttered Selamis.
“And you trusted me with this.” As always, the rage and mirth had passed 
quickly; he felt a pressure to reassure this frightened man, a certainty that he 
must be saved for them.
“It has to be the magic,” Selamis said, his voice now steady but very soft. “But 
I don’t know—”
“When?” asked Gird, rather than let him entangle himself in his uncertainties.
“Two days ago, when we came. Raheli asked me to come back here and see if 
anything threatened. I fell over a ledge, just beyond here, and suddenly felt 
I’d fallen a long way. It was dark—darker than this—utterly dark inside and out, 
despair and grief. What I fear in death, only worse.”
Gird grunted. Darker than this end of the cave, after that uncanny light had 
left it, he could not imagine. Fear? They all feared, but Selamis was braver 
than he knew. He had a storyteller’s gift of tongue, that was all, that let him 
talk himself frightened.
“Then I called on Esea,” the luap went on. Darkness pressed on Gird’s shoulders, 
so hard he nearly gasped. Esea! Was he so much a lord’s son he still reached for 
their god in his trouble? “And the Lady—both of them. Light came to my mind—not 
as memory of light, but light itself, within.” Gird felt the hairs prickling on 
his arms and neck as the luap talked. “Silver as starlight, cool. Then under the 
silver light flowers grew in a wreath, but colored as in sunlight, 
sweet-smelling: the midsummer’s wreath, fresh-woven. But the light was silver 
yet.” Gird’s eyes filled with tears, and he felt them hot on his cheeks. Not 
magic, then, but the gods’ gift? It had to be. “Then the light came, in my 
clenched hands, just as I showed you, and in the light I could see the symbols 
on the rock.”
“The what?” Gird muted that roar even as it came out. Again the light bloomed in 
front of him, the same serene rosy glow, but this time the luap’s face was calm.
“Come on. I’m supposed to show you. They said tell Gird.”
“They?” He didn’t expect an answer, and got none, following the luap over that 
ledge of rock to a bell-shaped chamber in the cave. In its center was a smooth 
polished floor, inlaid with brilliant patterns. Something glittered there, as if 
faceted, but the light was too dim to make it clear. Selamis stepped around it, 
and Gird followed, eyeing it doubtfully. Selamis stopped before a recess in one 
side of the chamber. “There,” he said.
The light in his hands brightened. Gird looked uncertainly at the wall, as the 
designs became slowly visible, then glowed of their own light.
“It’s something about elves,” Selamis said, when Gird said nothing. “And 
something about the rockfolk, and something about the gods—”
“And men,” said Gird, tracing one line with a blunt thumb, for he did not put 
the pointing finger, the shame finger, on anything that might be sacred. 
Something rang in his head, a sound he later thought of as the ringing of a 
great bone bell, his skull rapped by the god’s tongue—but at that moment he was 
conscious only of the pressure, the vibration shaking wit and body alike.
When it ended, he was flat on his belly on the cold stone, eyes pressed shut, 
and he heard Selamis’s equally shaken breathing nearby. He opened his eyes 
deliberately, rubbed his palms on the stone, and then over his head.
“You might have told me you were the king’s bastard,” he said, mildly enough he 
thought. Selamis had already come to a stiff crouch, the light still glowing 
between his hands.
“I should have.” It was the first time he hadn’t made an excuse. Whatever had 
happened had affected him, too. “I—I should have.”
“You could be the heir. Bastardy’s no bar, not with magic.”
“I—don’t have that much—”
“They should never have let you live.” Gird heaved himself up, shook his head, 
and glanced cautiously at the graven designs. Now he could barely tell what they 
were, interlacing curves and patterns that meant more than any ordinary man 
could understand. Or should. He looked over at that mysterious pattern on the 
floor. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Huh. Bring your light, can you?” The light came, and Selamis with it, almost 
affronted to have Gird interested in something else. He could make nothing of 
it, even with more light and finally shrugged. “Well. Whatever that is, now we 
know what you are— do we?”
“King’s bastard. Outcast. Light-maker.” Selamis’s voice was bitter.
“Do you want that throne, king’s bastard?” The growl in Gird’s voice made the 
chamber resonate. “Is that what it is, you’d like a peasant army to put you on 
your father’s throne, let you rule instead?”
“No!” That howl, too, resonated, a reverberating shriek that seemed to pierce 
the stone itself. “No. I want—I just want—”
“Safety.” Now it was contempt that shook the air.
“There is none.” A mere whisper, but Gird heard it. He looked across the 
comfortable, cozy light into a face that had grown into its years. Almost.
“Right you are, lad. No safety, no certainty, and hell to pay if the others find 
out who you are. Is that what you see? Or do you also have the foreseeing 
magic?”
“Some, yes. Since the light came.”
He would not ask. Pray to the gods for favor, yes, and make the sacrifices his 
people had always made, but he would not ask the future. That was for the wild 
folk, the crazy horse-riders, and the cool arrogant lords who had no need to 
ask, because they knew.
“I will not be what he is,” Selamis said. “I renounce my own name, and name 
myself luap—I swear I will not inherit that throne, that way, that habit of 
being—” It sounded like a vow to more than Gird, and Gird did not interrupt. “I 
am no true heir; I renounce it.” But the light glowed on, even when he spread 
his hands wide.
Gird waited, then into the silence said, “Lad, you can no more renounce what the 
gods give—that magic—than I can the strength of my arm or the knowledge of drill 
that forced me into this in the first place. I’ve been that road; it turns back 
on you.”
“I will not be the king!” shouted the luap, eyes wide. “No. You will not be the 
king. But you cannot divide the king’s blood from your blood, or the king’s 
magic from your mind. You have only the choice of use, not the choice of 
substance.”
“What can I do?”
Gird’s belly rumbled, and he had a strong desire to hawk and spit. Clearly that 
would not do in this place; he didn’t want to find out what would happen if he 
did. Grow up, he thought to himself, but to the luap said, “For one thing, you 
can guide us back out. I’m hungry.” Then, at the indignant expression, he said 
“By the gods, you’re half-peasant: use sense. You can be who you are, and do 
what is right. What’s so hard about that?” Then he strode away, past the 
patterns on the floor that seemed to have tendrils reaching for his feet, and 
stumbled into the ledge. “Damn it,” he roared. “Come on.” His shin would hurt 
for days, he knew it, and there was too much to do and not enough time.
No one said anything when he came out of the shadows to the cookfire, the luap 
at his heels. The onions in the stew had everyone belching. They can smell us in 
the king’s hall, right across the land, Gird thought, going out to the jacks, 
but he wasn’t worried. He would have to think about the luap, but not now. Now 
he had to think about the army, and the king’s army, and where would be best to 
meet them.
His one advantage was the willingness of the people to help him; he knew where 
the king’s army moved, but the king’s army must search for him. The king had 
left Finyatha again, and this time Segrahlin rode with him (so the word came), 
and every lord who could make magicks of any kind. And their well-fed soldiers, 
rank on rank of them, and their horsemen, who now had learned to armor the 
horses as well.
Thus he was in no mood to be cooperative when Selamis cornered him again the 
next night, and wondered, in too casual a tone, if Gird were going to name him a 
marshal in the coming campaign. Gird stared at him, momentarily speechless.
“I can’t give you any command now,” said Gird. “You can see that, I hope—”
Selamis glowered silently. When he was sulky, he did look almost aristocratic.
“And it’s going to be damned hard to explain why I’m not. Blast you, you might 
have thought—”
“Would it have done any good to tell you sooner?” Gird did not like the 
self-righteous whine in that voice. Selamis had lied, and liars had no right to 
be self-righteous.
“Whether it would or not, you didn’t. You didn’t tell me, and didn’t tell me, 
and if you hadn’t had that—that experience—” He couldn’t say it aloud, that 
Selamis had used magic, that he was a mage. It terrified him still, though he 
hoped he was concealing his reaction. The saying was that liars weren’t much 
good at spotting others’ lies. He hoped it was true.
“If I’d had no magic, it wouldn’t have done any good to tell you.”
“You think it’s done good?”
“Well, I meant—if I didn’t have magic, then my birth didn’t matter—”
Gird rounded on him. “By the Lady’s skirts, you’re still thinking of the throne, 
aren’t you? You still think your blood and your gods’ cursed stinking magic give 
you some sort of right to power?”
“It wouldn’t be the same—”
“You’re right it wouldn’t—because you’re not getting within leagues of that 
throne, my lad. Forget that. You can make pretty lights, and your father is the 
Finaarenisian king. And that means nothing, not one damn thing, to me or any 
other peasant—”
“It means something to the nobles,” said Selamis stubbornly. “You said that 
yourself. If they knew—”
“They’d slit your stupid throat. How can you be so dense? I’ve seen smarter 
stones, that had at least the sense to roll downhill. No. You’re the king’s 
bastard, and not alone in that, I’ll wager. You’ve got a bit of magic, enough to 
scare girls with—”
Light blazed around them, and a cold fist seemed to squeeze Gird’s heart in his 
chest.
“It scares you,” said Selamis, furious, his handsome face distorted. “Quit 
pretending it doesn’t. Admit it.”
But there was rage and rage, and Gird’s grew out of deeper roots than pique. He 
forced one breath after another out of stiff lips, and felt his heart settle 
once more into a steady rhythm. Without his thought, his powerful arm came up 
and smashed Selamis in the face. The light vanished, as Selamis measured his 
length on the ground.
“You stupid, stupid fool,” said Gird, almost calmly. He squatted, made sure that 
Selamis was still breathing, then looked around. Could they be lucky enough that 
no one had seen the light Selamis made? No: there in the gathering dusk someone 
hurried toward them. Gird sighed, gustily. He ought to kill Selamis, quickly and 
painlessly, before he woke. He should have done it before, when he first 
realized the man had lied, and lied again. The fool had renounced his claim 
before the gods; that alone should have settled him. Now he, Gird, would have to 
explain everything, and it was the worst possible time to tell everyone that 
they had the king’s bastard in their camp.
  
He was frowning over the supply rolls when he realized that Selamis was awake 
and staring at him. He glanced over and met a furious look.
“You hit me,” said Selamis, in a hoarse whisper. His head probably hurt; the 
bruise on his face made it look lopsided.
“That I did. You showed me what you were.”
“Why do you assume I’ll be bad—?”
Gird put down the notched tally stick reporting the grain harvest in Plumhollow 
Barton and looked hard at Selamis until he wilted. “You know what you did: you 
lied, and lied, and lied again, and then lost your temper and used your magicks 
on me. Is that what any of us would want in a king, if we wanted a king at all? 
Should I believe that a crown will make you honest, teach you patience and 
mercy, give you wisdom? You seem to think you’ll be a good king, better than 
your father. You might argue that it would be hard to be worse. But I’m not 
helping a liar, a lackwit, or a hotheaded fool onto a throne, where he can put 
his foot on my neck again. No.”
Selamis’s eyes closed, briefly, and the hand Gird could see stirred. Was he up 
to magicks again? But the eyes opened again, and the hand relaxed. “I’m sorry,” 
he said. “I shouldn’t have done that—”
“No more you should. Where’d you be if you’d killed me, eh?”
“I—I didn’t think—”
“True enough. And does not thinking make a good king?”
“No.” It sounded sulky, but then Selamis’s face must have hurt a lot. A sigh, 
then, long and gusty. Gird didn’t look up. “What are you going to do now?”
“I ask myself that,” said Gird, picking up the single tally from the smithguild 
and running his thumbnail along the nicks. “I should have killed you, back when 
I first realized you were lying, and I definitely should have killed you last 
night. But I’ll tell you what, lad, I’m a bad keeper of accounts, and you’re 
good at it—and sometimes the best milker is the worst for kicking the pail.”
“You’ll let me live because I can read and cast accounts?”
“For now. But use those magicks just once more and you’re dead.”
“Did I hurt you?”
Gird’s hand went to his chest before he thought; he glanced at Selamis and met 
his eyes. “Yes, and you might have killed anyone less stubborn. What did you 
think you were doing, eh?”
“I didn’t really know—it just seemed as if I could press—”
“Don’t. Don’t even think about it. As soon hand a child of three Midwinters a 
pike to play with, and hope no crockery breaks.”
“I’ll be loyal,” said Selamis, but it carried little conviction.
Gird put the tally down, and faced him squarely. “You will be loyal, lad, 
because I will break your neck myself if you’re not. You have no more choices, 
no more room to maneuver. I’ve told the marshals what they must know; what you 
must know is that your life depends on my good word. And if they think you’ve 
charmed me, magicked my good word, they will kill you. And if you try charming 
one of them first, the same. If you find that too harsh, consider your father’s 
way of dealing with traitors. We will kill you quickly as we may—but we will not 
let you loose again to misuse your talents.”
  
Gird shifted east and south, taking two smaller holdings easily when the 
outnumbered garrisons fled, and winning another with a stiff fight: he needed 
the food enough to make the losses worthwhile. One of the fleeing lords had 
magic enough to poison the wells and blast a field to dry ash. Gird wondered if 
anything would ever grow in that gray grit. The others’ fields might make a 
harvest, if nothing went wrong through the summer. The one that fought gave 
them, unwillingly, their first magelord prisoners.
The lord was dead; whether he had had magicks or not, he had fallen to pikes. 
His wife, several servant women, and the children— wholebred and bastard—had 
barricaded themselves into a wholly inadequate tower. Gird’s yeomen battered the 
door down easily and dragged them out. Gird looked at the woman. But for her 
long robes, so unlike anything the peasant women wore, she looked like any other 
woman her age. She had borne children; she looked to be carrying another. The 
children were children: a stairstep gaggle, in all states from wild terror to 
infant placidity. The servant women were trying to gather them in their arms, 
soothe them.
Gird felt his head throbbing. He had never really thought about prisoners, and 
certainly not women and children. He had assumed that the lords would all be 
killed in battle, somehow, and he wouldn’t have to worry about it. Now he did. 
The woman—the lady, he found himself thinking—looked as if she expected death. 
Or worse. The servants were unsure, glancing from the lady to his yeomen.
“She was about to stab the children,” said one of the men holding her. Gird came 
closer. Brown hair, eyes with flecks of blue and green and gold. Her chin came 
up and she braced herself to face him.
“You didn’t want to kill the children,” said Gird.
“Better me than you,” she said. Her voice was calm, almost toneless, the voice 
of someone who had given up.
“I’m not going to kill the children.” What was he going to do with them? Where 
could he send them? But he was certainly not going to kill them; that was what 
lords did.
“What, then? Torture them for your amusement? I know what kind of games you 
peasants play.” She had gone white, sure of what he would do; in the rage that 
followed, he almost did it, but one of the children broke loose from the servant 
women, and ran straight to him, pummeling his legs and screaming. Gird leaned 
over, wrapped the child in his arms and lifted him. Her? The mite had braids; 
did the lords braid boys’ hair as well as girls‘? The woman struggled 
frantically when Gird picked the child up, but quieted when she saw Gird hold 
the child carefully.
“Quiet, child,” Gird said to the girl. He would assume it was a girl. She 
screamed all the harder, red-faced, tears bursting from under tight-shut lids. 
“No!” he yelled down at her. Silence followed; the child sniffed and opened her 
eyes. Remarkable eyes, blue flecked with gold, eyes he could drown in. He looked 
across at the lady. “You do not know the games peasants play, lady, if you think 
we torture children. It is the pain of our children that drove us to this war. 
Is this one yours?” White-lipped, she nodded. “A lovely child. I hope she has a 
long life.” He set the child down and pushed her toward her mother. “Go, little 
one.”
It was still no solution. He caught the sidelong looks, the low-voiced comments 
he was meant to overhear. As he toured the stronghold, learning more about 
fortifications than the gnomes had ever bothered to tell him, he wondered what 
he was going to do with them. The dungeon, when he found it, drove that thought 
out of his mind briefly, for there were the fates the lady had feared, knowing 
them too well. Gird swallowed nausea and rage, as his yeomen helped the pitiful 
prisoners up to daylight. He fingered the torturer’s mask of red and black, 
wondering which of the dead men above had worn it. There on the wall was a 
larger version of the same mask, leather stretched over wood and painted in 
garish stripes. Beneath was a circle of chain, with barbs worked into the links. 
Behind him, his yeomen murmured, angry. Gird yanked the mask and circle off the 
wall, careful not to let the barbs prick his hands, and nodded to the other 
equipment.
“Take this all up and burn it. We’ll leave nothing like this behind us.” The 
words rang in his mind as he went back to his prisoners. Nothing like this 
behind us meant intent as well as material objects. He wanted to crush 
something, hurt someone, but that was what had started the whole mess.
The lady was crouched, with her children, in a corner of the outer wall, with a 
jeering crowd around her. They fell silent when they saw Gird, and he waved them 
away, but for a few guards.
“I think you know what I found below,” said Gird. She would not meet his eyes, 
this time. She had known. Had she condoned, even encouraged? “I found the mask, 
the barbed chain—”
“I told him,” she said, looking at her clenched hands. “I told him we were never 
meant to follow Liart. That our only hope was Esea’s light, and if it failed, we 
should greet the long night peaceably. But he would not. He would not admit his 
powers failed, that his children might not have all he had been given. I told 
him nothing was forever, that men rose and fell like trees, like—like wheat, 
even, brief as that is. That we could not win safety this way.”
Gird reached out and took her hands in his. “Look at me. Yes, like that. Did 
you, yourself, kill anyone? Did you send anyone to the torturers?”
Her head shook once, side to side; she said nothing, staring into his eyes with 
those multi-colored eyes of hers. Was she trying to charm him? Could she?
“Did you truly try to stop him, your husband?”
“Yes. But he would not listen.”
Gird released her hands. “Well, then: you listen to me. If I find you’ve lied, 
that you helped with that filth, your life is forfeit. Otherwise, it depends on 
you. Will you redeem the evil your husband did?”
Her eyes widened; she had not expected that. “How could I do that?”
“Come with us, work to heal those who are hurt.”
“I have not the healing gift—and besides, I am—” she gestured at her belly, just 
swelling her robes.
“Where do you think peasant women go, when they’re thrown off their land and are 
pregnant? As for healing gift, if you can boil water and wash bandages, you will 
earn your keep—though I admit it’s little enough, until this war’s won.”
“And I will be the slave of slaves, for your delight?”
His mouth soured. “No, lady, I would be delighted to have everyone safe at home, 
no one a slave to anyone.”
“And if I don’t agree?”
Gird shrugged, and stood up. “I suppose we can turn you out, chase you away from 
our camps, and let you find your own keep, if you can. Can you?”
“Not as I am,” she said. “All right. I will take your offer.” The unspoken for 
now seemed to hang in the air around them. Gird had the uneasy certainty that 
this would not be the last such problem, and he was not at all sure he had found 
the best solution.
The next day, he watched the lady—now garbed in the more practical peasant 
clothes—and her children set off with those of his wounded he was sending back 
to the rock shelter. He had had to argue harder than he liked with his own 
yeomen, to extract their promise to treat her fairly. The children they would 
have taken happily; he sensed that they wanted him to kill the lady, but feared 
to say it. Selamis—the luap, he reminded himself—had not offered his opinion, 
and Gird had not asked it. He had returned to being the efficient keeper of 
accounts and carrier of messages.
One of the new problems of this year, with the larger army was his inability to 
see what was going on across the field of battle. Now he knew exactly why the 
soldiers’ officers rode horses: they were above much of the dust and all the 
bobbing heads and weapons. This count’s stables had held many horses. Some of 
them were dead, but the others could be useful. He could barely remember how it 
had felt to ride that mule, back in his youth, but it would have to do.
The stables yielded five live, unhurt horses. Two were tall and leggy, one was a 
pony (for the children? Gird wondered) and the other two were nondescript 
animals of middle size. He was not even sure how to saddle and bridle them, but 
some of his ex-soldiers were, and quickly had all but the pony tacked up. These 
experienced riders mounted and tried the animals out. One of the tall ones began 
to fret and prance; it was lathered on the neck almost before it was ridden at 
all. The other tall horse seemed quieter, but on the second circuit of the 
courtyard went into a fit of bucking and dumped its rider in a corner. Gird knew 
he didn’t want either of those. The other two horses were more obedient, but his 
experienced riders said neither was suitable for a novice. He could not afford a 
broken leg right now, Gird told himself, so he’d better keep using his legs for 
what they were meant for: walking. Maybe he could stand on a rock?
Two days later, as he was moving the army north again, he saw an old gray 
carthorse plodding through a narrow wood. One of the food scouts waved, 
hopefully. Meat? Gird waved back a negative. He really would like a horse; he 
had always wanted to ride a horse. Not someone’s trained warhorse, but a plain 
old horse that would plod along, and let him learn without breaking his legs for 
him. He had no way to catch a horse, but he wasn’t going to eat his desired 
ride, not yet. Besides, they still had meat from the horses back at the count’s 
stronghold.
At the midday break, an old gray horse grazed only a few pike-lengths from them, 
ripping up the grass with delight. Was it the same horse? Gird could not tell. 
He could tell one cow from another across a field in the fog, but horses were 
horses to him, with color and size their only distinction. This one had the 
usual big dark eye, a pink-freckled nostril fluttering with each breath, burrs 
in the long hairs of its fetlocks—he realized that the horse had come a lot 
closer. He had to look up to see its back, its slightly swayed back. Ought to 
make it easy to stay on, he thought. The horse blew a long slobbery breath over 
his leg, mumbled the edge of his boot in its lips, and sighed.
He could probably grab its mane and hang on long enough for someone to get a 
belt or something around its neck. The horse’s lips brushed his arm, gently as 
human fingers, and softer. Gird reached up to a tangle of yellow-gray mane that 
felt surprisingly silky. The horse yanked its head up, and Gird came to his 
feet. Everyone was watching him, silently. He looked at them, shrugged, and 
stroked the horse’s neck. It stretched its head out, shook it sideways, and gave 
an elaborate yawn, showing a mouthful of heavy, slightly yellow teeth. Gird 
stroked its shoulder and barrel. He loved the feel of a healthy animal, and 
although this one had looked dirty from a distance, the coat felt sleek and 
clean under his hands. It must be someone’s stray.
He found himself atop the horse bareback, holding the rope of an improvised 
halter, hardly aware of the sequence that put him there. The horse had sidled 
this way and backed that way until Gird had had to climb on a rock to keep 
stroking that sleek coat; he had wanted to keep stroking it. Then in some way 
the horse had indicated an itch, a flybite, on the opposite shoulder, and Gird 
had leaned across to scratch it, and there was a fly biting lower down, and he 
had leaned farther—and found himself lying belly-down across the horse’s back. 
It had stood motionless until he made the obvious move of throwing a leg over.
It was much easier to see, from up here. He could see all the cohort beside him, 
and the ones ahead and behind. He could imagine how much easier this would make 
guiding a battle. But he had never imagined the effect of horseback riding on 
the unaccustomed rider. At first he was tense, then he relaxed and enjoyed it, 
and then—all too soon—his muscles and tendons began to complain. About 
midafternoon, he couldn’t stand any more of it, and managed to slide off—which 
was harder than he’d supposed. His feet burned and tingled unpleasantly, until 
he walked the blood back out of them. The horse followed Gird as if he were 
tied, although Gird had forgotten to take hold of the rope.
He climbed on again the next morning. He was stiff in places he had never been 
stiff, but the horse had found another rock to stand beside. His legs loosened 
up quickly; he found the rocking motion pleasant. Something about the feel of 
the gray horse between his legs gave him confidence. He wondered if this was 
what the horse nomads felt, what made them raiders and not farmers. Of course, 
they rode real horses, war horses, and not gentle old carthorses. The back under 
him heaved a little, and Gird grabbed for the mane. Surely the horse had not 
heard his thought, and taken insult! He tried to think of something 
complimentary, just in case, and was rewarded with a relaxed back and springy 
walk. His original intent, in coming north again, was to intercept the king’s 
western movement at a site where the ground gave him advantage. The king, 
however, had recognized that same situation, and put his army to a forced march 
to intercept Gird’s. Unluckily for Gird, the runners who would have brought him 
this information were captured. If he had not chosen to ride, for the first 
time, out beyond his scouts, he would have led them into a trap. As it was, the 
gray horse stopped with a snort, planting its feet firmly in the road, and 
refused to budge. When Gird tried to swing off, it whirled, nearly unseating 
him, and then started smartly back down the trail at his first experience of a 
trot. He clung to the mane desperately, afraid to fall at that speed; when it 
slowed, where his forward scouts were, they had taken that return as an alarm.
“I don’t know,” Gird said, glad to slide down now that the horse was standing 
still. It looked past him back up the trail, and snorted. “It saw something it 
didn’t like; animals can smell and hear better than we can.”
His scouts slid forward, to reappear not long after with word of a large enemy 
force lying right across the route Gird had planned to take. Gird looked at his 
maps again. Any other route to the same ground would take them several more 
days, and the enemy might easily trace them and reposition themselves. Straight 
ahead he might get a slight advantage from a slope, but he’d have to engage in 
woods where the pikes were far less handy than swords. He frowned. Back down 
their trace a half-day or so was a passable field, a large natural meadow, 
backed by a steep forested ridge behind several lower hills. They had come the 
long way through it, to avoid the hills, but he could hide several cohorts back 
there.
It was the best he could do, and it would do only if the enemy decided to come 
after them; they could not sit for long without starving. He gave his orders, 
and then had someone give him a leg back up onto the horse. Old worn-out horse 
it might be, but it had saved him, and maybe the war. He stroked its neck, as he 
waited for the last cohort to reverse. Strange that an old carthorse should be 
so willing to carry an untrained rider, and so gently, but he would be foolish 
to question such good fortune. The horse heaved a huge sigh, and butted his foot 
with its soft nose. Gird scratched its withers, and his own head, contented for 
the moment.
His army reversed and marched back down its trace without attracting immediate 
mounted pursuit—the only kind Gird feared. They were on his new-chosen field a 
little after midday. It was not as good as he remembered: there were bramble 
patches near a small creek, and muddy areas under the fresh green grass. But 
such as it was, he had no choice. He moved his army back, under the edge of the 
trees, to encamp, sent his scouts well out, and set to work to improve the site 
as best he could. By nightfall, he had word that the enemy was coming, on more 
than one trail. The largest group followed his own trace, but another was moving 
in from the northeast, on one of the alternate trails. So, he thought. He had 
been right—no escape that way, even if he’d tried it.



Chapter Thirty
« ^ » 
In the predawn stillness, he could hear a single bird calling from far away, 
high on the hill’s slope. His army slept. As quietly as he could, Gird made his 
way past the banked firepits, past the line of sentries, to whom he nodded 
without speaking, and started up the hill. Here, beyond the camp, he walked 
through layers of fresh summer scents, the night smells of open country. A patch 
of pale tiroc flowers poured out heavy sweetness; in the hot daytime sun, they 
hardly had an odor. Down from the heights came a waft of cedar, a sharp bite of 
wild thyme. A goat had brushed against the bushes here; its sharp pungency 
banished the other smells for a moment, until he’d climbed past it.
Ahead, the hill was dark against the early dawn glow. Something rustled in the 
bushes, a frantic frightened scurry as some small animal fled. The bird called 
again, closer now. It was no bird he knew, with that exquisite rippling flow of 
music. Gird looked back. Light had seeped into the upper sky, and far to the 
west the land began to show its shape, the hilltops their color. He climbed on, 
very aware of the smells and sounds, the feel of the cool air on his bare arms, 
the texture of the leaves that brushed against him, the feel of the stone or 
soil beneath his feet.
He came to the hilltop sooner than he expected. Behind, below, the ragged and 
smelly army lay hidden in shadow. He heard a distant clatter of pots, and 
wondered what the cooks would find to put in them. More roots and herbs, no 
doubt, and they still had two sacks of meal. Not much for a whole army. But 
morning hunger had been part of his life from childhood; farmers were always out 
working at dawn. He had this brief, private moment before the day’s cares.
Far over the rim of the world, the sun rose up, the light by which truth could 
be seen, as Esea’s priest had named it. Against the low slanting light, Gird saw 
the myriad furred tufts of grass, rose-gold, forming a dancing curtain of rose, 
veiling the sun’s impossible brilliance, transmuting it to grace and delicacy. 
He stood bemused, as he had once long ago on his farm, on that silver starlit 
evening. All was gold now, gold and rose together, shifting veils softening 
piercing brilliance; the scent of it rose up around him, a column of rose-gold 
incense. He had just time to think This is a vision, when the hill slipped out 
from under him and he hung suspended in gold and rose draperies. Now he looked 
west again, over the land new-lit by the sun, where soft gold light filled the 
valleys like wine, and a harder radiance chiseled the hilltops into clean, 
unblurred beauty. Despite the haze of gold, he could see far, to the distant 
mountains on the edge of Finaarenis. He had dreamed of them as cold, gray, 
uncaring crags, but now they stood serene and gracious, great castles awaiting 
their lords. He seemed to see within them, to the arched and echoing halls where 
the rockfolk harped and sang and crafted jewels and gold into treasures worthy 
of such castles. Now he looked north, across the light, to the great river and 
beyond, seeing at a glance all its laughing little tributaries, and the great 
loom of the moors and the broad steppes.
There the horse nomads roamed, with bright embroidery on their boots, narrow 
streamers blowing from poles by their tents, herds of shining horses. Above them 
romped the Windsteed, flaunting a cloudy tail, and broad across the grassland 
the Mare of Plenty ranged on tireless hooves. Behind her, grass sprang tall and 
green, and her hoofprints filled with clear water.
He would have been frightened if it had been possible; he retained enough of his 
wit to know that. But it was not possible. He lay quiet in the gold and rosy 
veils, looking where he was bid, seeing the land as it was, as the gods saw it, 
as it could be: in the broad light of day, peaceful villages of farmers, 
orchards restored and fields once more fertile. Flocks of sheep on the 
hillsides, herds of cattle in river meadows. A market fair, in some town that 
might be built where a burnt village had been, with fair measures given, and 
fair weights enforced. Children splashing in a shallow ford, a woman riding a 
horse, a bright helm on her head, cottages with tight roofs and mended walls, 
rows of bright flowers. The vision pierced his heart, brought scalding tears to 
his eyes. This—he had almost forgotten—this was what he wanted, not an obedient 
army, helpful farmers, even victory in battle, but this peace, this plenty, this 
justice.
With the tears came his release from the dream. He felt himself falling, but 
slowly, like goosedown or a dandelion tuft; felt gentle arms around him; heard a 
murmuring voice he could not quite follow. Flower petals drummed feathersoft on 
his bare arms, against his face, drying his tears, and when he came to himself, 
he was standing in a drift as white as snow in the broad morning sun. He reached 
his arms into the cool petals, lifted them, buried his face in them. Alyanya’s 
sign, it had to be—but beneath the fragrance was a faint bitter tang of cold wet 
earth in autumn. Promise and warning, then, and he but a peasant. Laughter rang 
about him, so joyous that he smiled before he realized the sound had been within 
him.
“Dammit!” he burst out, unthinking. “You won’t ever make anything simple!”
And the voice that answered him then was cold, clean and precise as starlight.
—No. I did not make anything simple.—
Gird’s knees gave way, and he fell into the flowers. That was not Alyanya, by 
any reckoning, and he could not pretend to himself not to know who it was. Ask 
for a word from the gods, he thought crazily, and beware—
But the knowledge he had asked for without really wanting it was pouring into 
his head, overfilling it as if someone stuffed a sack with wool.
Promise: it was possible to win that peace for his people.
Warning: it was not his peace.
His fault? he wondered.
No answer, only certainty. All the symbols the priest had taught him, all the 
gnomes had shared of their lore, flickered through his mind as quickly as the 
counters on a trader’s account board, a rapid clicking that ended with the 
crashing finality of stone falling onto stone. As it was now, as reality lay, 
that peace was possible, but he was forfeit.
He had thought he did not care, until he knew it was certain. Now, in a silence 
he realized was more than normal, he lay face down in Alyanya’s flowers and had 
leisure to consider if he meant in truth what he had said so often. I would give 
my life, he’d said. I will risk, he’d said. I could be killed as easy as you, 
he’d said to frightened yeomen.
But that had been risk; the spear might thrust in his gut, or not. The sword 
might slice another’s neck. So far it always had been someone else, and he knew 
now he’d half-expected it always would be.
Now… certainly die? Never enjoy that peace? Never sit with his grandchildren 
around him, telling his tales of the old days?
He was suspended again, this time in the vast caverns of his own mind: cold, 
darkness, fear beneath him, and nothing at all above. If he fell now nothing 
would slow his fall; he would not land in Alyanya’s flowers. His own mind—he 
knew it was that, and no gods’ gift of vision—painted all too vividly a picture 
of the land after his fall. No peace, but the ravages of the magelords, the 
scavenging of brigands. More dead bodies bloated in the fields for crows to pick 
clean; babies and children and young and old: he saw all their faces. Innocent 
beasts, cows and horses and sheep, lame and wounded, wandering prey for folokai 
and wolves. And he saw his own death then, the death of an old man, bald and 
feeble, when he could no longer forage from his hideout in distant caves: he 
fell to folokai, and the crows followed.
Death either way, then. It should be easy, he told himself fiercely, to buy that 
peace with an early death. It was not easy. On his tongue he tasted the ale he 
would not drink, the roast he would not eat, and in his hands he felt the warm 
bodies of the children— o, most bitter!—he would never hold. It is not easy! he 
screamed silently into silence. His own mind replied tartly that nothing was 
easy, nor ever had been—and he opened his eyes and blinked against the snowy 
petals.
It was not easy, but he had done other things that were not easy. He had seen 
his mother die, and Mali that he loved, and his daughter near death at his feet. 
He had seen the best friend of his youth trampled under the lords’ horses; he 
had seen wells poisoned and fields burnt barren. He took a deep breath, holding 
all these things in his mind, all the pain he could remember, all the love he’d 
had for family and beasts and trees and land—love that no one else ever knew, 
because he could not speak it. He tossed it high, with his hope for life. And 
felt it taken, a vast weight he had not known he carried.
The petals vanished, though he could feel their softness yet, and their perfume 
eased his breathing. He was all alone on the hilltop, though he heard someone 
crashing through the bushes on the upward trail.
  
“Gird! Marshal-general!” One of the newer yeomen, to whom that title came 
naturally. Gird took a breath, and hoped his face did not show all that had 
happened.
“What?” he called back, hearing in his voice a curious combination of irritation 
and joy.
“They’re coming! They’re already out of the wood!”
Gird swung to look north, and they certainly were. Horsemen first, the low sun 
winking on polished armor and bit chains, gleaming on the horses themselves, 
gilding the colors of banners and streamers and bright clothing. Some of those 
were surely mage-lords. Behind them, shadowy in the dust already beginning to 
rise at the edge of the wood, were the foot soldiers, rank after rank. His mouth 
dried. How many hundreds did they have? He had thought he had more—one thousand, 
two thousands, three… The horsemen halted just far enough out on the meadow to 
let the infantry deploy behind them. Gird searched the wood on the far slope for 
the archers they would surely have sense enough to send out in a flanking 
movement. His own archers were supposed to be up on the end of the ridge, 
guarding against archers getting into his rear. He hoped they were alert. He had 
no fear of the horses or foot soldiers getting back there; the ridge behind him 
to the south was safe as a wall.
Below him, he heard his own army coming into order. He started down the hill, 
hoping the enemy had not spotted him atop the hill. He put his hand up to his 
hair, thankful that he hadn’t put on his salvaged helmet yet.
At the foot of the hill, the gray carthorse stood as if it were waiting for him. 
Someone had found a saddle for it, and a bridle. Even so, the horse had 
positioned itself beside a rock. Gird climbed on, wondering even as he did why 
he found it so natural that the horse was making itself useful. Cob came running 
up with his helmet, and offered a sword. Gird shook his head. He hadn’t learned 
to use a sword yet, and a battle was no time to try something new. The horse was 
new enough.
His cohorts had formed; he rode past them, checking with each marshal. The faces 
blurred in his eyes; his mouth found the right names by some instinct, but only 
Rahi’s stood out distinctly. She gave him her broad smile, and the gray horse 
bobbed its head. Rahi’s cohort laughed. He wanted to tell her, and no one else, 
what the god had told him, but he could not. That kind of knowledge had to be 
borne alone. He noticed, without really thinking about it, that over half of his 
yeomen had managed to find a blue shirt to wear; it was beginning to look like a 
uniform.
For a time it seemed that the enemy might simply stand on the far side of the 
field and stare at them, but after a time they moved forward. On the north, the 
broad-topped wooded ridge sloped directly into the meadow, but on the south, 
Gird’s side, three distinct low hills lay between the sharp southern ridge and 
the more level grass, with the sluggish creek running east to west along it.
Gird had done what he could in the limited time he had to make this ground as 
favorable as possible. He had archers on the north face of all three hills, as 
well as the blunt end of the southern ridge. He had had pits dug, in the mucky 
ground near the creek, lightly covered with wattle and strewn with grass. This 
would, he hoped, make both cavalry and foot charges harder, and prevent easy 
flanking of his troop. His main force was arrayed before and between the two 
more eastern hills; the western hill seemed undefended, but in addition to 
archers had several natural hazards. Against the lords’ reputed magicks, he had 
no defense but Arranha’s comment that a mage could not counter what he did not 
expect. He hoped they would not expect the small, doomed, but very eager group 
that he had left well hidden on the south face of that north slope, directly in 
the enemy’s rear, with orders to stay hidden until the lords were busy with 
their magic elsewhere.
Now the king’s army moved; for the first time, Gird saw the royal standard that 
he had heard about, a great banner that barely moved in the morning breeze, then 
suddenly floated out, showing its device. Gird had been told it was a seadragon; 
by himself he would have thought it was a snake with a fish’s tail. Each of the 
lords with the king had his own banner, his or her own colors repeated in the 
uniforms of the soldiers—and, if the gnomes were right, his or her own separate 
battle plan. That was supposed to be another advantage to his side. They looked 
pretty enough, like the models the gnomes had shown him: one hundred all in 
yellow and green, then two hundreds in blue and gold, then a block of orange, 
and a block of green and blue. Gird assumed that the lords were in the rear, 
those mounted figures in brilliant colors that seemed to glow with their own 
light. Even as he watched, he saw bright-striped tents go up, servants hanging 
on the lines. Smoke rose from cookfires newly lit. For some reason, that show of 
confidence infuriated Gird. Win it before you celebrate it, he told them 
silently.
The cavalry screen drew aside on either flank, and the foot soldiers advanced. 
Most of them still carried sword and shield; some units had pikes; a few had 
long spears. Gird frowned; those could cause him a lot of trouble. But watching 
them advance, he realized that they were not accustomed to that extra length. 
Evidently someone had decided to make a weapon that would outreach his pikes, 
but the men carrying them had not had enough drill. Behind the swordsmen and 
pikemen came the archers. Over the winter, Gird had tried many versions of a 
shield that would stop arrows but be light enough to carry, and easily dropped 
when both arms were needed for the pike. Nothing worked perfectly. His foremost 
cohorts had small wooden shields that might protect their faces from arrows near 
their utmost range, but most trusted to their stolen—no, salvaged—helmets and 
bits of body armor.
The first enemy flights of arrows went up; Gird’s marshals shouted their 
warnings, and all but the stupidest looked down. The enemy made a rush forward, 
discovering a moment too late the pits Gird’s army had dug. These were not deep 
enough or large enough to keep the enemy back, but they slowed the rush just as 
the archers, following it, came within range of Gird’s archers.
More angry than hurt, the enemy foot soldiers floundered through the mud, hauled 
themselves out of the pits and flung themselves on at Gird’s unmoving cohorts. 
The enemy lines were no longer lines, and behind them their own archers were 
falling to Gird’s. They did not care; they looked, to Gird on his old gray 
horse, like any young men who have made fools of themselves in public. Their 
officers, bellowing at them from the rear, didn’t seem to have much effect; a 
second and third line staggered into the pits, tried to jump across and failed, 
and fought their way out, to storm up the gentle slope toward Gird’s cohorts.
The marshals watched Gird; he watched the straggling but furious advance. Those 
few seconds seemed to stretch endlessly, as if he had time to notice the 
expression on every face, whether the oncoming eyes were blue or grey or brown. 
Then the first ones reached the mark he had placed, and he dropped his hand, 
with the long blue streamer that served as their banner.
His cohorts moved. One step, two: cautious, controlled, their formations 
precise, he thought smugly, as any gnome’s. Where the king’s soldiers had 
expected last year’s sharpened wood stakes, they met instead the steel pike 
heads that Marrakai gold had bought. The first died quickly, almost easily, a 
flick of the pike it seemed, from where Gird sat on the gray horse. He knew 
better, from having been there himself. Then the ragged lines caught up with 
each other, and the slaughter began.
Pikes outreach swords, but swordsmen and axemen can form a shield wall hard for 
pikes to breach, if all are brave. Whether it was courage, or the kind of 
magicks Gird had seen at work at Blackbone Hill, the soldiers of the king were 
brave. At first Gird’s cohorts advanced, step by step, down that gentle slope, 
pushing the king’s men back into the trampled mud and treacherous pits. Then the 
king’s cavalry swept east, toward Gird’s right flank, and back down the near 
side of the creek, avoiding the pits he’d dug at that end of the meadow.
This was not what he’d hoped they would do. He had hoped they’d be seduced by 
the apparent gap on his left flank, between that and the westmost hill. It 
should have looked like an easy way to get right round behind him. But 
apparently they’d been looking for something more quick than easy. And if he 
didn’t do something—quickly—they’d be on attacking his flank with only the 
archers uphill to hinder them.
The gray horse seemed to understand this almost as quickly as Gird; he was 
picking his way neatly but rapidly across the gap between the center and the 
eastmost hill without jolting his rider at all. Gird looked around him. 
There—that cluster of bright colors up under the trees must be the lords and the 
king. So far they’d done nothing magical, but he had no doubt they would. And 
there, across the creek and coming his way, were the enemy cavalry.
Gird bellowed loud enough that the gray horse flattened his ears; the nearest 
cohort marshals turned, and caught his signal, then saw the rushing horses. He 
would have wheeled the gray horse around, but the gray horse leaped onward, 
straight at the oncoming cavalry. Gird hauled on the reins, to no avail.
“I know I said it would be nice to slow them down, but we can’t—one horse—one 
rider— ” Was this to be his destined death, charging uselessly an entire wing of 
cavalry? But they were almost on them; Gird shrugged, and swung the pole his 
blue banner was tied to.
Pole and rag took one horse in the face; Gird nearly lost the pole, and his 
seat, but managed to keep both, and duck a swipe from a curved blade. The gray 
horse swerved under him; he grabbed for mane and hung on. All around were 
horses, most of them swerving aside and one frankly running backwards before it 
slipped and fell, rolling on its rider.
Then they were in the clear, Gird with his banner and the gray horse with a 
disgustingly smug cock to its ears.
“I want to go back,” Gird said between his teeth, as if the horse were a 
recalcitrant child. It shook its head, blew a long rattling snort, and picked up 
an easy lope back toward the battle. He saw a dozen or more horses down, some 
with arrows in them. He saw the back of the enemy cavalry, trying to charge 
again and again into two of his cohorts of pikes. The armor on the horses, heavy 
padded canvas, would have protected them from sword-strokes of other mounted 
fighters—not from pikemen on foot. Gird wondered if they realized that, or 
simply never thought of it. He felt the gray horse tense under him, and braced 
himself for whatever it might do.
What it did was outflank the enemy cavalry, working its way up and over the knee 
of the eastmost hill without putting a hoof wrong, and return Gird to his 
observation post on the central hill. From here he could see that that 
particular cavalry sortie would be thrown back without much danger. His own 
center was not advancing now, holding place to support the right flank under 
pressure, but that did not concern him. More worrying, some of that bright-clad 
group of nobles who had been back under the trees were moving forward. Several 
of them, clustered together, raised their arms.
He had not expected the well to spout water, the year before, and he did not 
expect the storm that gathered like a boil atop the ridge behind him, and spat 
lightning into the trees. Wind rushed irrationally down the slope, bringing fire 
and smoke with it. Shrill screams rose from both sides, louder from Gird’s camp 
followers, who found themselves caught between a forest fire and a battle. Then 
the wind stilled, as suddenly as it had started, and Gird saw that the little 
group of mages had fallen to the ground. Behind him, the fires still burned, but 
less fiercely, and the new wind direction took the smoke and flame upslope, away 
from him.
His eyes still stung and watered; he could barely see across the meadow to the 
king’s party. Had it been his hidden archers who killed those nobles, or someone 
else? The momentary lull caused by the onrushing fire had given way to renewed 
din of battle. His cohorts were inching forward again, by the half-step now, the 
wounded shifting back as they had practiced, the fallen trodden underfoot. He 
could do nothing about that, not yet.
The enemy spearmen had finally made it to the front of their lines; they proved 
as clumsy as Gird had hoped.
Even so, they made rents in the cohort they faced, and it could not advance. For 
hours, it seemed almost for days, the two armies were knotted in battle. Their 
lines staggered back and forth, gaining and losing an armlength, a footpace. The 
noise was beyond anything Gird had imagined, so loud that individual screams and 
blows merged into a hideous roar.
He concentrated his attention on the details of it, sending his own voice above 
the rest when necessary. The enemy’s reserve archers, mounted, tried a sweep 
past his left wing. This was the maneuver he’d been looking for: would they 
support it? At least half the remaining enemy cavalry, and—yes—behind the screen 
of battle, a cohort or two of infantry. They thought the west hill empty, 
available; Gird smiled to himself. He might be only a stupid peasant, but he had 
learned a few things. That trap would spring itself, but he had to set the main 
one now.
Once before, the arrival of his camp-followers bearing almost useless “weapons” 
had convinced an enemy that he had vast reserves. The lords had been telling 
themselves that the peasants were all rebels at heart; they had only to count to 
know how many peasants were on their own lands, and fear the worst. Gird had 
taken the chance that the king and his advisors would follow the trails they had 
followed through the ridges, trails where horses and pack animals could go, 
where armies could march without fighting their way through prickly undergrowth. 
Gird marched that way where he could, and he knew they had trailed him back to 
this meadow. So they would think that what they saw, and what might be behind 
the little hills, was the worst of what they faced. That was, in fact, the 
truth, but would they believe the truth when a pretense fit their deepest fears?
He rode the gray horse a little up the slope, above the dust of the battle, to 
where he had a clear view across the meadow to that forested ridge behind the 
king. The king would have scouts atop it, for a certainty —if his people had not 
found them yet. But that would do him no good. Gird waved the pole with its long 
blue streamer twice. An arrow whirred past his head as the horse neatly 
sidestepped. Evidently some archers had decided he was worth hitting—well, he’d 
told his own to take out archers first, and anyone on horseback next.
Shrill yips from the western hill told him that the first part of his plan was 
working. His archers were falling back, coming around the slope into the hollow 
between the two hills—not a deep hollow, but one with its own peculiarities. The 
enemy archers should be making for the hilltop; he thought the cavalry would 
swing around, trying to take him in the rear, and so came the signal he had been 
waiting for.
It was amazing how many pits five thousand yeomen could dig in less than a day. 
Gird thought they could have dug a trench all across the meadow, but trenches 
could be jumped, and pits cleverly placed where horses must go between rocks of 
a rockfall—pits just too wide to jump easily—are a most effective cavalry trap. 
Thanks to the land and the Lady, he thought piously, for that fortuitously 
placed rockfall between the hill and the ridge behind it, where many horsemen 
could get into trouble out of sight of the rest of their army. His archers, 
having slipped around the hill to the rock-fall, were busy; the enemy archers 
above them, on the hilltop, found themselves unable to see what was going on. 
Those that tried to come down the south face of the hill to support the cavalry 
found the scour of the rockfall dangerous in more than one way. The others 
could—and did—let fly into the backs of the cohorts Gird had between the west 
and the central hill. He had anticipated this; those cohorts gave way, bending 
back around the hill; the archers found themselves having to shoot downhill into 
a confused mass of their own and Gird’s troops.
One unwary captain in the king’s forces saw that withdrawal as weakening, and 
urged his own cohorts on to flank those retreating. Gird smiled grimly. His left 
flank was now anchored by a wall of rock three men high—out of sight of that 
rash captain, up the little creek that looked so innocent. His troops stood on 
rock ledges, while their opponents were in the creek, or the mud on its other 
side. When they reached what they thought was his flank, they would find 
themselves standing on the far side of a pool of deep water, with no way out but 
the way they had come in. His archers would find them easy targets.
Meanwhile, the knot of bright-clad nobles across the field was moving 
again—perhaps it been only exhaustion that felled them. Gird squinted; he was 
sure he saw someone still on the ground. Out of the trees across from him came 
yet more cohorts of infantry, more squadrons of cavalry, and some—he squinted, 
shook his head, and looked again—some did not look human. Magicks, he told 
himself firmly. It’s only magicks. Masks and costumes and fancy ways of 
frightening people into doing what you want. He wished he knew if the king’s 
whole reserve was committed now.
Below him, the main forces contended as they had all morning, in a heaving, 
sweating, bloody, snarling mass. If it comes to plain fighting, he had told his 
marshals, if it comes to simple pounding each other, we win: we’ll pound harder, 
and take more pounding. The king’s army now outnumbered his in the center, but 
his center had not given back at all. They leaned into their pikes with every 
thrust, grunting with the effort.
Then the king’s new reserves hit the back of his force, giving it that extra 
weight—man against man, those in front were forced forward by that pressure, 
onto the waiting pikes. They died, had to be shaken from the pikes, and others 
were already there, already being killed—and again, and again. Gird saw the 
shiver in his ranks, the realization that something new had entered. The 
marshals looked aside, trying to find Gird; he caught their eyes and waved with 
his free hand. Then he took the long pole and signalled his last reserve, across 
the meadow and up on the ridge behind the king’s camp.
It seemed to take forever for that reserve to appear; he had told them to hide 
neither on the ridgetop nor near the bottom. In the meantime, his center sagged 
backward, and the enemy, heartened, drove forward with renewed energy. Gird had 
hardly time to see the first of his reserves clear the trees, yelling their 
heads off and sprinting downhill toward the enemy rear, before he was down in 
the thick of his own battle, supporting the center.
Fighting on horseback was completely different, he found. He had dropped the 
banner-pole, no longer needed—from here they would fight to the death, win or 
lose; he had no more decisions to make—and pulled his hauk from his belt. It was 
good for bashing heads, and bashing heads from above worked as well as when he 
was afoot. For one moment he thought of Amisi, and shoved the thought aside.
Later, when he heard it in songs, the battle of Greenfields (as the meadow 
became known) sounded much tidier than it had been in reality. The songs didn’t 
mention the several times he was knocked off the horse, and remounted by some 
helpful soldier, or the blow to his knee that had him limping for a quarter 
year, or the near-rout when the enemy’s last cohort of reserves turned out to be 
masked magelords with their power in hand. The songs certainly did not mention 
that long and miserable night after the battle, with the forest fire still 
burning its way south, or the cries of the wounded that never ceased. And 
somehow in the songs, that gray horse turned white. Gird was sure he had not 
aged that much in one day.
He remembered stumping through what had been the enemy’s camp, swarming now with 
squads of his own yeomen gathering up supplies and weapons. The king’s tent had 
gone up first, larger than many houses Gird had seen, with interior rooms walled 
in fluttering embroidered panels. He had had musicians with him (two had been 
killed, almost accidentally, when Gird’s reserves tore through the camp; the 
others had been found crouched around their instruments), and a man who painted 
pictures on lengths of fabric. He had started a picture of the king, victorious, 
returning with Gird’s head, but offered to change the faces for only ten gold 
pieces. Gird shook his head, and wondered what kind of king would take musicians 
and painters to battle.
The king was dead. He did not look much like Selamis, but fathers and sons did 
not have to look alike. He had been a tall man, dark haired as many magelords 
were, and in death his eyes had only the dull color of a fish found dead on the 
shore. Gird had found Sier Segrahlin’s body, spiked with arrows from behind; he 
felt no guilt at that, but wished he could have talked to that brown man. They 
had almost understood each other, across a gulf no one else wanted to bridge. He 
still wondered, occasionally, if the sier had charmed him that night.
The songs listed the dead magelords, as if to remind the listener that these 
were all real. Gird did not even look at all of them; he had seen bodies enough. 
They had killed the wounded as quickly and painlessly as they could; they had 
killed all the magelords they captured; they dared not do less. At least there 
were no children with them.
He did not understand why he was still alive; his vision of the morning had been 
so clear, so certain. He felt curiously suspended, as he had after the Norwalk 
Sheepfolds, unable to rejoice in the same way as the others, though he felt a 
deep contentment. So many had died, and he had not, yet he had been sure he 
would— he had been almost promised he would. Nor had Rahi died, or Pidi; he 
found them both alive, marked but certainly not mortally wounded. But when he 
touched them he felt no more and no less than he felt for any of his yeomen: 
they were all his children, in some way he could not define.
He remembered coming back to his own encampment, holding the wounded and dying, 
speaking what comfort he could, until he fell asleep and woke to find that 
someone had covered him with a stolen piece of the king’s tent. All that day and 
the next, as the crows and flies fought with them, he tried to bring order and 
restore health to that trampled and discolored ground. “Bury them all,” he said, 
“Or burn them—even the magelords, yes: we had the gods’ gift of victory, we owe 
them respect.”
The songs began that first night, with the talk around the fires of those who 
could talk, and by the next night a few were trying to fit words to familiar 
tunes. The dead king’s surviving musicians were glad to help. Gird was more than 
a little amused that the first version he heard of what became “Gird at 
Greenfields” was set to “The Thiefs Lament”—the very song with which he had been 
taunted for cowardice.



PART IV



Chapter Thirty-one
« ^ » 
Greenfields broke the king’s power, and gave Gird control of the main 
grain-growing regions of Finaarenis. But it was not the end of the war. Those 
lords who had not joined the king’s army, for whatever reason, were now sure 
destruction loomed. Some walled themselves in Finyatha; others fled toward 
Tsaia. Heirs of lords killed at Greenfields squabbled over inheritances now in 
jeopardy; rich merchants, who assumed a peasant government would have no desire 
or need for fine goods, appealed to the remaining lords for help.
Gird knew all this, and much of it he had anticipated, but his first problem was 
securing the year’s limited harvest. Where there were no lords, there might be 
brigands. He split his army into sections, put each under a high marshal, and 
sent them to settle the countryside. He himself rode for the north, crossing the 
Honnorgat for the first time in his life on the gray horse, which seemed less 
like a broken-down carthorse every day. He could stay on at a trot now, although 
he preferred the swinging canter. Most of his marshals had caught a horse and 
learned to stay on it, as well. It made supervising a march or a movement much 
easier, and messages could pass far more quickly. Feeding the beasts was another 
worry, but men could not eat grass, and horses could. In summer, at least, they 
could afford a few horses.
Rumors of the king’s defeat spread even faster than Gird had expected. In the 
north, he and his column found mostly deserted, looted manor houses, and 
celebrating peasants. Few of his recruits had come from the north—in fact he had 
trouble understanding their speech—but they seemed genuinely pleased with his 
success. He wondered if the quickly-established bartons in each village would 
ever amount to anything, and prayed that war would not test them.
Finyatha offered a different problem. Largest and richest city of the north, the 
seat of the Finaarenisian kings, it hung just out of his reach like a tempting 
plum. Most of its people were common folk, as everywhere, but at the moment it 
swarmed with magelord refugees. He had no knowledge of siegecraft; common sense 
told him that assaulting those walls with pikemen would do no good— a much 
smaller force on the walls could defend it. He thought of trying to divert the 
river, but remembering Segrahlin’s tricks with water decided that some mage 
inside could simply call water into any well he wanted. In the end, he left it 
alone, and like an overripe plum, it fell on its own. One party of magelords 
tried to escape along the River Road to Tsaia; most of those fell to raiding 
parties, Gird’s or brigands. The rest were too weak to keep control of the city. 
When the disruption inside reached the gates, and the fighting erupted into the 
fields outside, Gird’s column—which had been waiting at a distance—marched in 
with little difficulty, to the apparent delight of all.
The gray horse brought Gird into those stone streets as if carrying a king; 
cheers racketed off the walls, and the flowers of summer fell on his shoulders, 
Alyanya’s blessing. Then the horse pranced into the courtyard before a towering 
stone structure that seemed to spring, like trees, from the roots of the world 
itself, and reach skyward with every stretched finger. Between its arches, great 
windows had stood; they were shattered now, glittering fragments crunched 
beneath the horse’s hoofs. A few pieces still clung to their frames, reflecting 
brightness against the cool darkness inside. The horse knelt; Gird stepped off 
and looked around. It was a hot day, blue-skied, and the courtyard had blue 
shadows under every ledge of gray stone. The very air shimmered; he blinked. Was 
it the air, or his eyes?
Arranha stood on the steps, between splintered doors. Gird would have been 
surprised, but could not quite feel it. “This was Esea’s High Hall,” Arranha 
said, as if he were a guide. “It became something else, something worse, and 
Esea’s blessing was withdrawn.” He shook his head. “I warned them, but they 
thought they could extract more power by bringing darkness and light so close 
together.”
Gird could not follow this, but he did follow Arranha into the partly ruined 
building. It soared overhead, high arches of stone, one after another rising 
from fluted pillars, making a space reminiscent of a great forest. At the far 
end, where a circular window had been, sunlight fired the lower arc to a silver 
crescent. Gird felt hairs rise on the back of his neck. He swallowed.
“You must see this,” Arranha was saying, “because you must decide if the gods 
demand this building be torn down. I myself would hate to see that; it’s the 
most beautiful in the north, to my eyes. But the people know what went on here; 
you must see for yourself.”
What he had to see was evidence enough that the magelords had lost all sense of 
right and wrong. Arranha tried to explain what they thought they were doing; to 
Gird, who had never sailed a ship, did not know a lodestone from any cobble in 
the river, who did not care about the theory behind it, it was simply disgusting 
and grotesque. An excuse, as he saw it, for some to bully others, to excuse 
their own cruelty on religious grounds. Here were the same symbols he had found 
in that count’s dungeon: the barbed chain, the masks with horns and spikes, 
painted to terrify, the instruments whose only purpose was pain. The place 
Arranha had led him to stank of old blood, death, and fear. He heard a nauseated 
gulp beside him, and turned to see Selamis at his side; he had followed Gird, as 
he often did, without speaking or asking permission.
“Don’t make it worse,” Gird said. “Go spew outside if you must. But this is your 
real inheritance from your father.” The younger man made it to the outside 
before he threw up. When he came back—to Gird’s surprise—he looked grim but in 
some way satisfied.
Gird came back out to find a crowd of those who had suffered under the old, and 
wanted his justice. His, he thought. The blue summer sky pressed down on him. 
Another than Alyanya had given him that victory; what did he want here? Justice, 
and all that came with it. The Hall?
The evil, he told them, is not in the stones, but in those who did wrong. 
Justice will rule here, the High Lord who judges all things rightly. He himself 
went to the crypt under Esea’s altar and scrubbed it until it stank no more of 
all that had happened in it. He brought in the holy herbs for the dead, and lay 
them reverently on the floor. He came up to find the crowd still standing, and 
scolded them as if they had been his yeomen for years. Cleaning before building, 
he said, waving his arms at the shattered glass in the courtyard.
  
With Finyatha fallen, the other lords in Finaarenis fled to Tsaia, where the 
Tsaian king gathered an army to retake that land and save his own. Gird ignored 
that for the present. They had not time before winter to mount a campaign; the 
Marrakai told him all he needed to know of preparations. He himself was back in 
Brightwater before snow fell, with Selamis and Arranha, to plan for the coming 
year.
Despite the destruction of farming villages and fields, they had more food than 
the year before. The lords’ granges had held a surprising amount; some had 
burned, but more had been saved. Many other goods were found in more abundance, 
though the distribution was not as even as Gird would have liked. But he did not 
interfere with anything but gross injustice. If these people were to help make 
their own fair laws, they would have to start by making some mistakes.
In spring, the fighting spread eastward into Tsaia. Gird had not realized how 
far the barton organizations spread—not only in Marrakai lands, but beyond. 
Barton after barton rose, combined with its neighbors, and elected a marshal: 
most were competent. The Tsaian royal army which had at first treated the very 
idea of a peasant army with contempt, even after the defeat in Finaarenis, fell 
back again and again. Gird did not want his Finaarenisian troops to invade 
Tsaia: they had fought for their own freedom, in defense of their own homes and 
families. That much he had felt confident— that Alyanya, Lady of Peace though 
she be, could understand and condone. Invading someone else’s land, even for the 
best reasons, did not seem the same.
But Ivis, his high marshal in the east, had no such worries. Bartons were 
bartons; yeomen were yeomen; in any fight between peasants and lords, he wanted 
to be one of the leaders. Several cohorts volunteered to go to Tsaia with him. 
Gird, working hard on the new and—he hoped—simple legal system that would enable 
men to live in peace and deal fairly with one another, let him go with only a 
warning.
The legal code was, in fact, turning out to be much harder than he had expected. 
If he made the laws simple, they were so general that someone would claim not to 
know how that general principle could be applied in a particular instance. If he 
made the laws precisely applicable to common situations, someone would come up 
with an uncommon situation and claim to have found no guiding general principle. 
Gird tried to ignore the twinkle in Arranha’s eyes, but finally admitted that he 
had been as naive in law as in war.
“Not that you won’t end up with better law than we’ve had,” said Selamis, quite 
seriously. “I think it’s coming quite well.”
“Some of it,” growled Gird. It had been so simple to say that no one should beat 
up someone else, but now he was faced with honest merchants who had pursued 
thieves, and husbands convinced that they must beat their wives. And how much 
beating was beating? If a thief, once caught, kept fighting and had to be 
clouted before he would come along to a magistrate, was that a lawful or 
unlawful beating? Gird had insisted that the right to beat, within marriage, was 
both limited and equal for both sexes, but enforcement proved beyond his means. 
He felt at times like the father of a roomful of quarrelsome children, each of 
whom insisted that the other one started it.
Mercantile law proved equally tricky. Gird himself had gone around to three 
markets, taken a sample weighing stone, and found that no two were the same. He 
had one of the Brightwater masons cut one that matched the middleweight stone, 
had several more made to balance it, and replaced all the Brightwater 
weightstones with the standard. As the mason turned out more standards, Gird 
sent them to nearby markets, and insisted on their use. Prices danced up and 
down with the new stones. Gird assumed they would settle to something equivalent 
to those before, but his mental analogy—a chip on a bucketful of water, after 
shaking—did not satisfy him.
At least this year most of the arable land was under cultivation, and his 
noncombatant camp followers had returned to their homes or settled in partially 
deserted villages nearer by. Some of the bartons had dispersed as well, those 
that had villages to return to. Food should not be a problem, if the war stayed 
in Tsaia.
As the war receded eastward, the land that had been Finaarenis settled back into 
farming and trade. Some lands were blighted, some wells ruined; peasants 
shrugged and moved on. Some fields grew rich green grass over bones the crows 
had picked; those they avoided for another year. Gird moved from Brightwater to 
Grahlin, amused now to see how small a town it really was, that had seemed a 
city to him. Esea’s Hall there had been burned, by the local inhabitants; they 
showed him the charred foundations proudly. He moved on east, to camp near the 
Tsaian border for a time.
Tsaia fell, at last, with blue-shirted farmers calling themselves “Gird’s 
Yeomen” holding the king captive in his own dungeon. By the time word came to 
Gird, the king had escaped—and been found dead, of a magelady’s anger. The two 
messages came on the same day, in Ivis’s difficult script. Gird had tried to 
insist that his marshals, at least, must learn to read and write, but some had 
struggled as hard as he himself. He looked up from puzzling his way through it, 
having read it aloud, to meet Selamis’s steady gaze.
“So,” he said. “You are the last surviving magelord of rank, if you look at it 
the way you once did.”
Selamis shook his head. “No, you know I don’t.”
“You feel no slightest flicker of desire for that throne? They say it is 
lovely.” The throne of Finaarenis had been hacked to bits before Gird saw it.
“None. That was not my throne anyway, even if they wanted a king.”
Gird drew a long breath. “I suspect they do; there’s a different feel over 
there. Marrakai said their king was foolish, not cruel, and Marrakai is anything 
but a fool. It’s a land that might take lords, if they were not mages.”
Selamis looked down, pensive. “And where is a land that will take mages, if they 
are neither lords nor evil?”
“You think of yourself? You are safe with me.”
“I think of others like myself. I cannot be the only bastard with magic in his 
blood, that will someday bring him death at the hands of those for whom all 
magic is evil. Even some of the pure blood— that lady you sent away, and her 
children.”
Gird cocked his head. “If I had magic in my hands—if I could bring light, as you 
and Arranha can, whenever I needed a light to find my way; if I could light a 
fire with it, and never be cold—I would find that tempting. I would want to use 
it, first for myself, and then for those I loved, and then—I don’t know, friend 
luap, as you would be called—”
“I wish you would just call me Luap, as the others are doing now—”
“And forget who you are? I wish I could. But I see no way to use magic well, to 
have that much power others cannot share, with no force to bar misuse.”
Selamis waved at the papers Gird had been working over, another revision of the 
first part of his Code. “Your law?”
“Law without force behind it is but courtesy: for love or greed, men do things 
they should not, and law must have a hard hand to knock those hot heads into 
sense. For ordinary men, the law can serve, but what force can bind a mage?”
Selamis laughed aloud. “You did it yourself, Gird—a good knock to the head, as 
you say, and there I lay.”
Gird laughed too. “Yes, an untrained mage. By the gods, d’you suppose if I’d 
felled that sier in the first place he would never have fought against us?” A 
ridiculous idea, but he was in the mood for it.
“Mages are children first, Gird—good parents can teach them law.”
That sounded reasonable but he still had his doubts.
Then the Tsaian king’s killer sought sanctuary in his camp. He wondered what she 
would say about his death. Magedead, the report had been, from someone who 
claimed to know what that meant. A royal ring on his chest, and briars grown 
over him, in bloom even in this season. The season was autumn. Late autumn.
“Bring her in, then,” he said to Selamis-now-Luap.
“She’s a mage,” said Selamis. He meant more by that; Gird looked at him sharply.
“So?”
“She’s one of them, but not one of them.”
“One trying to do good, like the Marrakai?”
Luap looked away. “Not precisely. She had lived for years as a sheepherder.”
“A mageborn lady?”
“So those who knew her say. In exile from the Tsaian court, for some wrangle 
there—”
“And she comes to us. Why? Did she say?”
“She says you must know how the king died, and hopes you will let her take 
service with us.”
Gird stared at Luap. “Is she a fool, this magelady? Take service with us? Why 
not join Marrakai, if she’s what you call a good mage?”
Luap shrugged. “I don’t know. Will you see her?”
Gird shifted in his seat. “Oh, I’ll see her.”
She was tall, and even in armor conveyed a lithe lightness, a supple strength. 
It set Gird’s teeth on edge. This one had never, he was sure, borne a child or 
suckled, had never so much as cared for a sister’s child. Dark hair, braided 
snugly to fit beneath the helm she carried under her arm. Skin pale as ivory, 
flushed with rose at the cheeks, eyes used to command, bright and piercing. 
Before he could speak, she had spoken.
“The king is dead, and by my hand,” she said. “If you do not allow murderers in 
your army, you will not want me. Otherwise—”
Gird felt that his head was full of apricot syrup: sweet, cloying, thick. He 
dragged his thoughts through it, just able to think So this is what that 
charming is about! Whatever had happened to the magicks of the other magelords, 
this one had full measure and running over. He struggled with his tongue, which 
wanted to say “Yes, lady,” and dug his fingernails into his palms. It helped a 
little.
“I wish you’d stop that,” he said, somewhat surprised at the even tone in which 
it came out.
Her mouth opened, and her cheeks paled. “You—are not afraid.”
Humor tickled the inside of his mind, thinning the rich syrup of her magicks. 
“No, but I am getting angry. I don’t like tricks.”
“It’s not a trick,” she said. The pressure of her sweetness increased; it was 
hard to breathe.
“Trick,” insisted Gird, through the honeyed mist over his eyes. “Same as luring 
a fly to honey, and swatting it. You might try honesty.”
All at once, the magicks were gone, his mind clear, and the woman’s face had 
gone all white around the mouth. That had gone home hard, though most of the 
magelords didn’t seem to regard honesty as much.
“I did,” she said between clenched teeth. Without the magicks, her face was 
older, not unlovely, but no longer a vision of beauty and terror. The dark hair 
had silver threads in it; the face had fine lines, a touch of weather. “I tried 
honesty, back then, and that brought me exile. And when I tried again, my duty 
to the king— ah, you would never understand!” She turned away from him, a 
gesture Gird read as consciously dramatic.
“You killed him,” Gird said, deliberately flat across that drama.
“I killed him.” She faced him again, and now he saw tears glittering in her 
eyes. Did she really care, or was it all an act? Women he knew cried noisily, 
red-faced, shoulders heaving, not one silver tear after another sliding down 
ivory cheeks. “I trusted him; he was my liege. And then—”
He was tired of her dramatics, and wholly out of sympathy with her kind of 
beauty. “Spit it out, then, lass, or we’ll be here all day—” It was the tone he 
used on his own folk, the young ones, the frightened ones. On her it acted like 
a hot needle: she jumped and glared at him.
“He sent me away because I would not give up my weaponcraft and magery to be his 
queen, or so he told me then. I loved him dearly, and thought he loved me; there 
was no Rule requiring me to give up the sword as queen. I thought it his whim, 
and tried to talk him out of it, but he would not. I went into exile heartsore, 
like any girl whose betrothed turns her away. When he was imprisoned I knew it; 
he called in the way of our folk, though he had no need to call me. I would have 
come. When I took him from the prison where your folk had him, when I’d fought 
our way past the walls to safety, he told me he’d sent me away because of 
foretelling. Because he’d been told he’d need me someday. So he set conditions 
he was sure I would not understand nor agree to, to force me to refuse him, and 
then to leave the court. I had been honest those years, true to him and his 
memory: he had lied to make use of me. No love, no children, no freedom for my 
own life—”
It was the sort of thing the women talked about, back home, stories and gossips 
about unfaithful lovers, men cheating women of a promised marriage, women’s 
vengeance on them. The men, Gird had to admit, had their own gossip, muttered 
into their mugs of ale, or half-whispered from man to man during shearing time, 
with guffaws and backslappings. Still, it sounded just as petty from this 
magelady as from any village girl; he was surprised she hadn’t come up with 
something better.
“And for that injury you killed him?”
“For that, and for the king he was not. By Esea’s Light, he had enough of the 
old Seeing to know what went on. Marrakai would have helped him stop it if he’d 
wanted to, but he could not be bothered.”
“And from that act of—honesty—” Gird let the word trail out, and watched the 
blood flood her face. “You came here, and used your magicks on me. Why?”
“I thought you would not give me hearing, but kill me first. It was only to buy 
that much time—”
“And you found that time worth the cost?”
“It did you no harm,” she said.
“You.” Gird leveled both index fingers at her. “It cost you, mageborn lady. It 
cost you my trust.”
“But—
“NO!” He hammered the table with both fists. “No. You listen, mageborn, and then 
see if you want to dare our mercy. This you did, this use of magicks to charm me 
into listening, this is exactly what we despise. To keep yourself safe and put 
others in peril, to use weapons we cannot bear: this is unfair, unjust, and we 
will not let you do it.”
“What do you know about justice?” she snapped.
“More than you. I would not use my strength against a child to take what was not 
mine—no, not if I hungered. I know what fair exchange is—”
“You’ve been talking to kapristi—”
“Aye, and listening, too. Weight for weight, work for work, honest labor for 
honest wages, no chalk in the flour and no water in the milk: that’s fair 
exchange.”
“And what did you exchange for this wisdom?” She was still scornful, ready to be 
very angry indeed.
“What they asked for it: when we gain the rule, to bind ourselves to respect 
their boundaries evermore. To allow gnomish merchants in our markets, at the 
same fair exchange humans use.”
“That is all they asked?”
“ ’Tis more than they got from you, all these years, so they said. They want a 
peaceful, ordered land nearby, one content with its borders; they want fair 
dealing.” Someone came in then, an excuse to dismiss her. But he could not quite 
dismiss her from his mind. Her image clung there, disturbing. He wished she 
would leave; it was going to take all his influence to keep the others from 
attacking her. They might even think she had charmed him.
Several nights later he heard music from the far side of camp. Strings, plucked 
by skillful hands, and sweet breathy notes of something not quite like a 
shepherd’s reed pipe. A voice, singing. He stiffened. He knew that voice, knew 
that honeygold sweetness. Damn the woman, he thought. Her with her arts, she’ll 
get us all killed.
He chose a roundabout way to her; he could not have said why. Perhaps the 
sentries would be less alert, listening to the singing? But no. They challenged 
him, every one, with a briskness he found irritating rather than reassuring.
She sat well back from the fire, cradling the roundbellied stringed instrument 
and listening to another woman play a wooden pipe three handspans long. Gird 
watched her from the shadows. That long bony face, the hollows of the eyes—she 
had grace, he had to admit. Her hands moved, her fingers began touching the 
strings again, bringing out mellow notes from her instrument. They wove around 
the pipe-player’s melody and tangled Gird’s attempt to follow either instrument 
alone. One of the men began to sing, a horse-nomad song. “Fleet foot the wind 
calls, run from the following storm—” The magelady joined in, again that golden 
tone he mistrusted. Her voice ran a little above the tune, patterning with it, 
but in no mode Gird knew. He scowled, ready to be angry. All at once her eyes 
met his. Her voice slipped, and found itself again.
No. He would not listen to her. He would not look at her. She was betrayal, 
treachery: she had killed her own king. Magelady, born to deceit and mastery. He 
was himself: peasant: Mali’s husband. Mali’s dead, whispered some dark corner of 
his mind. Raheli’s father, then. Broad and blunt, and liking it that way—he 
would not let himself be seduced by mere grace and golden voice.
She was surpassing beautiful. He tried to think of her body as no more than the 
body of an animal, a sleek cow he had seen and coveted, a graceful horse. He 
focused on her hands, now racing over the strings to finger some intricate 
descant to the piper. It was not the same song. For how many had he stood here, 
fascinated, watching her? Those long-fingered hands, strong and supple, that 
long body. He met her eyes again, dark eyes older than her years, full of 
sorrow.
She knew. She knew he watched, and how he watched. Rage roiled up in him: she 
was charming him again, even now. He glared at her; she looked back, sorrowful 
and unafraid. Calm. Kill me now, her look said. I did not do this. Yet, if it 
was not charm, why wasn’t she disgusted at his interest? A peasant, a coarse man 
old enough to be her father—
Not so, came her voice in his mind. You are not so old, nor I so young.
No disgust? He was disgusted, with himself. How could he think of such a woman, 
as a woman, after Mali’s loyalty and Raheli’s tragedy? What had he fought for, 
if not to remove such women from power?
Time had passed, the fire only warm ashes under a dark sky. The others had 
fallen asleep. Only she remained awake, watching him as he watched her. Magicks, 
he thought disgustedly.
“Not so, lord marshal,” she said. Aloud, in her own voice, but quietly.
“Reading minds is magicks.”
“That, yes. The other—if it be magic at all, it is older far than mine.”
“I—would like to hate you.”
“With reason.” She turned away, and folded around the melon-bellied instrument a 
trimmed fleece. “But you cannot, lord marshal, any more than I hate myself. I 
did not come here to unsettle you.”
“Wind unsettles water,” he said, surprising himself. Where had that come from?
She laughed softly; it had an edge to it. “Yes—wind. But you are not water, lord 
marshal—Gird. You are what you said—good peasant clay. Do you know what the 
rockfolk say of clay?”
“No.”
“Sertig squeezed clay to rock. And rock squeezed makes diamond, fairest of 
jewels that gives light in darkness.”
He grunted, surprise and superstitious fear together. He had consented to be 
rock; the other, half dreamed of, still wholly terrified him. And diamonds were 
jewels, and jewels belonged to the wealthy, to such as this lady: he would not 
so belong. But his mouth opened, and he spoke again.
“I have dreamed of you.” He had waked sweating and furious; he had not spoken to 
her since.
She looked away. “I thought you might. I’m sorry.”
“You—you are like no one—”
“I am myself. Once—a name I will not use again. Now, what he called me, an 
autumn rose, a last scentless blossom doomed by frost—”
“You like that word. Doom.”
“Gird, I know myself, and my future: it is the chanciest gift our people had, 
but in me it is, like the others, strong. I will have no children; my time is 
past.” She met his eyes squarely. “And you, who have children—you think you 
could give me some?”
He felt suddenly hot. Now she was smiling, but it had no warmth in it.
“I know your dreams, Gird; your eyes speak of them. A mage-lady’s body—a 
magelady unwed—what is she like? You see the foreign shape of my face, my hands, 
and you wonder about the rest.” From musing, her voice roughened to anger. “Ah, 
Esea! You will believe it my magicks no matter what I do! And I have tried, if 
you had the wit to see it, to be invisible to you, to draw no eyes, least of all 
yours.”
“It was your sorrow.” That, too, came without his thought. Yet it was true. She 
had tried no charms on him or anyone, after that first meeting, but the stress 
of her sorrow drew eyes to her.
“Look, Gird: I will show you, and then if you are wise, if the gods are truly 
with you, you will know that in this I am honest.”
He opened his mouth, but her gesture silenced him, for she had thrown off her 
cloak, and begun unlacing her shirt. If he said anything now, someone might 
wake, and the explanations would be, at best, difficult. Her fingers moved 
quickly, deftly, stripping off her clothes with no more apparent embarrassment 
than he would have had in his own cottage. It should have been too dark to see 
her, but she glowed slightly, a light he knew was magelight.
She had the body he had imagined. Long legs, long slender body untouched by 
childbearing; her hips were like a young girl’s and her breasts—he ached to 
touch them. Even Mali as a girl had not had such breasts, the very shape of his 
desire. But through the beauty he had expected he perceived the barrenness she 
had claimed. Like some graceful carving of stone, set up in a lord’s hall for 
amusement: he could engender nothing there. His hands opened, closed; instead of 
the imagined softness and warmth, there was hardness and cold.
She wrapped the cloak around herself again, dimming the glow until he could just 
make out her face. “You see?” A thread of sorrow darkened that golden voice. “It 
is not you, Gird; it is a choice I made, long years ago: obedience to my king. 
Service, not freedom. Death, not life.”
“It’s wrong.”
Her brows rose. “You are my judge?”
“No, but—” There had to be a way to say it, that meant what he meant. “Serving 
things rightly, that can’t be serving death. Loyalty’s good, I’ll agree there, 
but it’s not all—what you’re loyal to must be worthy.”
“Wise clay, lord marshal.” Her voice mocked him, but her face was uneasy. “Where 
did a peasant learn such wisdom?”
“It’s only sense,” Gird said stubbornly. “Peasant sense, maybe: we serve life in 
our work. Growing crops, tending beasts—that’s serving life.”
“I erred, as I’ve admitted. A mistake, believing the king was true, and worth my 
obedience. A mistake I remedied, you remember.” Her voice had chilled again; he 
thought she did not truly believe it was a mistake.
“So you said.” He was grumpy, annoyed with his body which had not admitted what 
his mind knew—no comfort there. A man his age, to be so put out—he was disgusted 
with himself, and with her for rousing that interest. On the way across camp, he 
stumbled into one thing after another, knowing perfectly well it was his own 
temper making his feet clumsy.
Arranha. The old priest was one of them; perhaps he could explain. Gird sought 
him out, not surprised to find that Arranha was awake, peaceably staring at the 
stars.
“And how is the lady?” asked Arranha. Gird felt himself swelling with rage, to 
be so easily read, and then it vanished in a wave of humor. He folded himself 
down gingerly, to sit beside the priest.
“She is herself,” he said.
“Too much so,” said Arranha. “A bud that never opened, eaten out within. She has 
the body of a girl, but no savor of womanhood.”
Gird opened his mouth to let out surprise; his ears were burning. “She is 
lovely,” he said, after a decent interval.
“Cold,” insisted Arranha.
“Well—yes. And yes, I looked; she showed me—”
“She wants you?”
“No. I had never seen anyone like her—not to speak to—and I suppose—it was my 
own curiosity.”
“Natural enough.” Arranha shrugged that off, as he did other things Gird could 
not anticipate. “Which curiosity, I gather from your words, has now vanished. I 
would pity her, myself, were she not capable of better.”
Gird chuckled. “I thought you said we all were capable of better.”
“True. But great talents draw envy, even from tired old priests sitting up all 
night. Gird, she might have prevented much evil, had she listened to good 
counsel. It was not all heedlessness of love: she has the foreseeing mind. She 
chose not to listen; she chose in spite of her knowledge. She could not have 
saved the king, I daresay—from all I ever heard of him, as foolish a young man 
as ever sat on a throne. Not wicked, in any active sense, but silly and shallow. 
But she might have saved more than she did, and I can’t forget that. Nor should 
you. If she ever quits making a singer’s tale out of her lost love, she’d make 
you a fine marshal, but you’ll have to change her course.”
“I have enough to do, without teaching mageladies.” Arranha shrugged. “If a 
weapon falls into your hand, you either learn to use it, or your enemy uses it 
against you.”
  
Luap looked up as a strong, slender hand slapped down on the account rolls. He 
started to complain, but the look on the mage-lady’s face stopped the words in 
his month. She was white around the lips—with fury, he was sure—and he 
half-recalled hearing Gird’s bellow only a few minutes before.
“You!” she said, in a voice that had some of Gird’s bellow in it, though not so 
loud.
“Me?” He could not help noticing the hilt of her sword, her fine and reputedly 
magical sword. The jewel set in the pommel glinted, as if with internal fires. 
And every bit of metal she wore glittered, bright even beneath the cloth that 
shaded him from midday sun. Her eyes, when he met them again, seemed to glitter 
as well, fire-bright and angry. What could he have done? She had always seemed 
remote, but calm, when speaking to him.
“You,” she said, very quietly now, “you have mageblood.”
Luap shrugged, and looked away. “Common enough, lady; if you look closely, 
there’s bastards aplenty in this army.”
Her hand flipped this half-truth away. “Bastards in plenty, yes, but those in 
whom the mageblood stirs and wakes are few enough.”
He stared at her, shocked almost into careless speech. But he caught the 
unspoken question back, and tried to school his face. He could see by her 
expression that she wasn’t fooled, or maybe she could see his thoughts. She 
nodded at him, mouth tight.
“Yes. I do know. You have the magic, the light, and you know it. You could be 
what I am, were you not obedient to that—that churl out there!” Her arm waved. 
Luap felt a bubble of laughter tickle his throat. “That churl” must be Gird, 
whatever he’d done this time to anger the lady.
“It may be so,” he said, trying to keep even the least of that laughter out of 
his voice. “There was a time I thought so, but truly, lady, I have no desire for 
it now.”
She rested both fists on the little table and leaned close to him; he could 
smell her sweat, and the onion on her breath from dinner. It did nothing to 
diminish her beauty, or her power. “It has nothing to do with your desires, 
whatever your name really is. It is given to you, like the color of your eyes, 
the length of your arm: you cannot deny it.” He said nothing, facing her with 
what calm he could muster. Her eyes looked away first, but she did not move. 
Then she straightened up, with a last bang of one fist that crumpled the supply 
roll. “No. You are more than just a bastard, and you must learn it.”
Suddenly she was alight, blinding him at first, and then the heat came, 
scorching heat that blackened the edges of his scrolls. Without thought, he 
grabbed for power, and threw a shield before him, swept the scrolls to safety 
behind him.
“Stop that!” he said, furious and frightened at once. She laughed, a scornful 
laugh he remembered from his earliest childhood, the laugh of one whose power 
has never been overcome. Above his head, the fabric caught fire, the flames 
hardly visible against her brightness and the noonday sun.
“You have the power; you stop me!”
It was challenge, challenge he had never expected to face, that Gird would never 
have had him face. And he felt within a surge of that uncanny power, whose ways 
he had never learnt, never dared to explore. But as he had startled Gird, 
perhaps he could startle her, and so he let it out, in whatever form it might 
choose to come.
It came as a fiery globe, that raced at her; she slapped it away, first with a 
laugh and then, when it surged again against her hand, with a startled 
expression. She drew her sword, now glowing as brightly as she, and swiped at 
the globe. Luap would have been fascinated, if he had not also been involved. He 
could feel a vague connection between himself and the globe, as if he had a ball 
of pitch at the end of a long and supple reed.
With a final pop like a spark from sappy wood, her brilliance vanished. Luap 
blinked. Her shadow stood behind her, lean and black; the sun was overhead—he 
realized then that he was alight as she had been. She was staring at him, her 
first expression changing to respect, and then awe.
“You,” she said, in a very different tone from her first approach.
“Yes?” Whatever was in his voice, it worked on her. Her mouth moved, but she 
said nothing. Finally she shook her head, and managed speech.
“Do you know whose bastard you are?” she asked. Luap kept his mouth shut tight; 
if this was where she was going, he was not going to help. But she nodded, 
slowly, as if this confirmed something she’d hardly dared imagine. “The king’s,” 
she said quietly.
Calmly. “You have the royal magery; it could not be anyone else— and I think you 
knew, Luap. I think you chose your name of war precisely.”
“And if I did?” he asked, relaxing slightly. The shadow behind her blurred, as 
if his light dimmed. He could not tell; his eyes still refused to answer all his 
questions.
“If you are the old king’s son, born with his magery—
“They said not,” said Luap. “Like all bastards with no magic, I was fostered 
away—”
She laughed, this time ruefully. “Luap, they erred, as you must have known long 
since. You are his heir—in blood, and in magic— and the evidence is right 
here—in what just happened. Show this to any of the old blood, and you would 
inherit—
“Inherit!” For an instant his old dream sprang up, bright as ever, but anger 
tore it away. “Inherit a kingdom torn by war? Inherit the fame my father had, 
that made men glad to see him dead? Inherit his ways?”
Her voice lowered, mellowed, soothed him as honey soothes a raw throat. “You 
have thought of it, Luap; you must have. He was a proud man, a foolish man… 
even, in some ways, a cruel man. He should have had more sense than to foster 
you away. None of our people have done all we should. But you—you know better. 
You could be—”
“I could be dead,” said Luap. He wanted to hit her; he could feel her attempt to 
enchant him like a heavy weight of spring sunlight. It had been bad enough to go 
through this once. He shook his head at her. “If you had asked me two years ago, 
lady, I might have been foolish enough—I would have been foolish enough to 
agree. What my father did to me—the vengeance I wanted, the power I had always 
envied—yes. I would have. Even a year ago, maybe. But I’ve learned a bit, in 
this war. Even from you.”
“Even from me? You mean, because of me, you would not—?”
“Not you alone. But, lady, I can see what Gird sees now; I can see the cost of 
your counsel, down to the last dead baby, the last poisoned well—”
“We are not all evil!”
“No. But—you tell me, lady, what it is that made you angry this time? What sent 
you here to work behind Gird’s back?”
She whirled away from him; he let his own power flow out to her, and she turned 
back, unwilling, but obedient—recognizing even as she fought it the source of 
her compulsion. He released her, and she staggered. “He—he’s an idiot! He knows 
no more of governing than any village bully!”
Luap chuckled. “He is an idiot, that I’ll grant. But he’s far more than a 
village bully, and if you can’t see that, you’re not seeing him yet for what he 
is.”
“He lets those fools of merchants blather on, bickering about the market rules—”
“What should he do, crack their heads for them?”‘Luap could see she had thought 
of that, with relish. He shook his head at her. “Lady, Gird’s as likely to lose 
his temper and bash heads as any man I’ve ever known. If he lets them bicker on, 
wasting time as you’d say, then he has his reasons.”
“He claimed they would obey rules they made better than rules he gave—and yet he 
won’t let them make the rules they want to make. Insists that they and the 
farmers must agree what is a ripe plum, nonsense like that.”
“Nonsense like that matters, to those who grow the plums, or pay good coin for 
them.”
“And that brings up coin. D’you know he’s planning to call in and melt down all 
the old coinage? No more copper crabs and gold crowns, but stamped with 
wheat-ear and poppy. I tried to tell him what that would cost: the finesmiths 
don’t work for nothing. He wouldn’t listen. And he asks of me what he does not 
understand—”
“He wants you to give up your grievance, as he made me give up mine.”
“Your heritage, he’s made you give up.”
“One and the same. My grievance: being born of royal blood, and thrown out to 
live in a peasant’s world. Having the royal power, and being denied its use. The 
world, in short, not to my liking.”
“It’s more than that!”
“Not really.” Luap grinned sideways at her. “Lady, I’ve known peasant lads 
enough, furious because their father favored another brother, because the 
steward was unfair, because the world was. Grumbling, sour, envious, resentful, 
quick to take offense and seek vengeance for every slight. So was I, though I 
hid it, thinking myself too good to admit such feelings, though they burned in 
my heart.” He paused, to see how she would take this. She listened, though he 
suspected it was only because she knew he was a king’s son. He took a deep 
breath, hoping no one would interrupt them, or come close enough to overhear 
what only Gird, so far, knew of his past.
“When I married, lady, I loved my wife as a prince might love a scullery-maid: 
just so much, for her beauty and her skill. Our children: I saw them in my mind, 
clothed in royal gowns, and hated the reality of their broad peasant faces, 
their rough hands. You are unwed: you cannot imagine what this means of love 
foregone, of wasted years, when I might have been rich in hearts-ease. Then as 
Gird’s power grew, my master—who should, I knew, have been but a courtier at my 
court—commanded me to join the army, gain Gird’s confidence, and betray him. I 
would have done so, for the reward he promised, but he did not trust. He took my 
wife, my children—killed my son, to make his point, and held them captive 
against my behavior. The wife I had never loved as I could have, the daughter I 
thought too plain: I saw in their eyes, as the soldiers took them away, a trust 
I had never earned. Then I began to love them, but it was too late.” The old 
pain struck to his heart again, and tears blurred his vision. He blinked them 
away, and saw on the magelady’s face a curious expression. He hoped it was not 
contempt: he could feel rage rising in him like a dangerous spring; contempt 
from her would set a fire under it. She said nothing.
“So I came to Gird, as one driven into rebellion by injustice, but I meant to 
betray him, only he was gentle, that night, with my injuries, and something—I 
could not do it. I told him, about my family, and he cried: great tears running 
down his face, his nose turned red—I could not believe it.” He waited until she 
asked. “And then?”
“And then they died, as my master had promised, and I could do nothing. In the 
market square at Darrow, before a frightened crowd—someone told me about it 
later, not knowing whose wife it had been. And I—I hated Gird, almost as much as 
my master, for having done nothing—though there was nothing he could have done. 
When I discovered my powers, I had thoughts of claiming my own place, somehow. 
Making things better, being the king that should have been, in a land where no 
one suffered. A boy’s dream, after a beating. Crowns and palaces for all, meat 
and ale and honey on the loaf—”
“You could have—”
“I could not. Gird knocked me flat, when I tried my powers on him, and rightly 
so. I didn’t see that at the time. But if you’ve wondered why I have no command, 
that’s why. He could not trust me. The marshals still look at me sideways, but 
Gird knows I’m different now. So could you be, if you’d give up that old wound 
you cherish,”
“I do not cherish it! The ruin of my life—!”
“Only if you choose so. Lady, listen to me. You have lost something: who has 
not? It is what we make of what’s left that counts. I lost my wife, my children, 
lost them even before they were taken, in the blindness of my pride in blood. I 
lost a crown, the way you see it. You stayed away from this war; you have not 
seen what I have seen, or learned the lessons it taught. My loss is as important 
as any other, and no more important than any other. King’s son, bastard, 
widower, childless by war, a luap in every way: I have lost or renounced all 
command, being unfit for it.“
“And this is what you and Gird want me to do?”
Luap stretched his arms high over his head, easing the knot in his back. By her 
tone, she was at least thinking about it, no longer quite so sure of herself. 
“Gird wants you to quit thinking you’re a special case. I would have you 
consider the fruits of freedom: freedom from your past. What good is that old 
anger doing you now? What good is it doing any of us, when you would lure me 
into a conspiracy to undo what all these men and women have died to do? You, 
lady, best know whether you are as unfit for command as I was.”
Her expression shifted, from half petulant to something approaching respect. 
“I—never doubted my ability to command, when it should be time. Not until now—”
“Yet you never took the field. And why come here, to your people’s enemies? And 
why stay?”
“I’m not sure.” She looked down, and away, and anywhere but his eyes. “I did not 
take the field… because the king did not call me, as he called other nobles. 
After I killed him, I thought… I knew that none of our people would accept me, 
the king’s murderer. Why should they? I’d broken my oath to him, why not join 
his enemies? My own act placed me there, it seemed.”
“And what did you think Gird would do, pat you on the head and tell you the king 
had treated you badly and deserved your vengeance?”
She flushed. “I didn’t know. I don’t suppose I was thinking clearly. As for why 
I stay… where would I go? Back to Tsaia to pick sides in that contention? Away 
from here, where some peasant terrified of magery is like to split my skull with 
an axe while I sleep?”
Now she met his eyes again, with an expression he had never seen on her face, 
honest bewilderment and the first glint of humor. “I set out to save the king, 
and killed him; after that, what could I dare intend, that would not go awry?”



Chapter Thirty-two
« ^ 
Gird had been right; Tsaia preferred lords to peasants, if peasants to mages. 
There the followers of cruel gods had all been magelords, or their close kin. 
When the bartons rose, some found their own lords with them, against those they 
most hated and feared. Duke Marrakai, though accused of treachery by Duke 
Verrakai, proved his loyalty in most men’s eyes by supporting a Mahieran for the 
throne. The Rosemage, as Gird called her, assured him that the candidate had no 
more magical ability than a river cobble. He was not sure he believed her, but 
he did believe Arranha, who said the same thing.
He was, as he had never expected to be, alive and a hero. Everyone knew the big 
blocky man in blue (it seemed simpler to keep wearing that color; when he 
didn’t, someone would give him a blue shirt “to remember by”) on the stocky 
gray—almost white now—horse. Children ran out to meet him on the way, calling to 
him, running beside the horse. If his route was known, there would be bits of 
blue tied to branches, blue yarn braided into women’s hair, blue flowers, in 
season, thrown before him. If he surprised a village, they would drop their 
tools and gather, beg for his blessing, bring all their problems for him to 
solve.
He found that they wanted him—his physical touch, his presence, his listening 
ear—far more than they wanted his ideas. They had each their local 
heroes—someone who had fought with him at Grahlin or Greenfields, Blackbone Hill 
or Brightwater. Every little ambush, each battle, had its heroes, and they had 
all gone home, if they lived, to tell the tale their own way. Gird heard with 
some astonishment that he had thrown a horse and rider “so far the crash was not 
heard when they landed” in one battle, and someone who had lost a leg and 
survived (Gird remembered the man clinging to his hand, begging for death) came 
hopping up without it to hug Gird and pound his back and show off his children.
But when he tried to speak to them of the future, only a few paid heed. The 
others were busy with their work, with lives deferred. They had won, and life 
was good; they feared nothing but the lords’ return, and needed nothing but 
Gird’s friendship.
Some were interested in the legal reforms he instituted. Merchants, craftsmen, 
and even a few former farmers—but their interest in abstract justice and perfect 
fairness gave way to factional argument far more often than Gird had hoped. 
Eventually, after hours and days and even seasons of wrangling, one group would 
agree on a particular rule, only to have those who had not attended the original 
conference refuse to follow it. Then everyone appealed to Gird, and he found 
himself making the very judgments he had called on others to make.
Most folk understood the need to have some armed force for protection, both 
locally, against brigands, and regionally, in case of invasion. But fewer wanted 
to support the barton and grange organization Gird envisioned, with adequate, 
uniform training for yeomen, yeoman-marshals, marshals, with regular drill for 
all yeomen even in times of peace.
He was troubled, as well, by the feeling that he had had since surviving the 
battle at Greenfields. He had been told that he could not see the peace he would 
bring, and here it was, all around him. Either the gods were wrong—and he could 
not believe that—or he had misunderstood. He didn’t believe that, either. Which 
meant that the peace he saw was somehow not real. Something was wrong with it, 
as something had been wrong after Norwalk Sheepfolds. He had asked then if it 
was his fault that he would not see true peace, and had had no answer. He asked 
himself the same question now: was the wrong here his fault? Had he failed in 
something he should have done, that would have brought true and lasting peace— 
had he withheld something he should have given?
His own memories reminded him of his mistakes; the victories others boasted of 
in his name seemed to him full of his miscalculations, deaths he’d caused by his 
stupidity or carelessness. That one fit of drunkenness, which left a legacy 
still; even now, even when everyone called him Father Gird, someone would take 
the mug from his hand with a kindly smile, when he’d had what they thought was 
enough. He had done what he set out to do—free the land of its bad rulers—but 
every time his gray horse ticked a hoof on a skull, or he saw the white end of a 
bone turned up as someone plowed a field, he shuddered.
He traveled widely, urged on by that vague but persistent uneasiness. Everywhere 
he went he seemed to see prosperity returning, as farms returned to burnt-over 
fields, as once-deserted villages hummed with life. His people had more flesh on 
their bones; foreign traders complained of their scant profits, but kept 
returning. So did wealthy craftsmen who had thought a peasant kingdom would have 
no need of their abilities. His new coinage, which the magelady had so 
complained about, circulated more freely than the old ever had. When Luap first 
mentioned what he saw as the problem, the continuing bitterness between former 
magelord landholders and tenants, Gird scoffed at him.
“They won’t hurt children,” he said. “The adults, maybe, but—”
“I’ve talked with Autumn Rose.” Luap said the name without embarrassment; Gird 
still thought it was silly. If she wanted to conceal her real name, she could 
have taken any simple one. She had changed, over the years, but she still had 
what he thought of as lordly arrogance. He let himself remember the first time 
she had laughed at herself, admitted that she could be as ridiculous as anyone. 
Was it then that she began to change, to give up her old grievance against the 
dead king. She had made, as Arranha had predicted, a good marshal when she 
finally quit dramatizing her lost love. He realized his mind had wandered, as it 
did more often now, and came back to find that Luap was watching him, patiently. 
Luap went on. “She thinks it will get worse. There are too many of the halfbred 
children, and sometimes the power sleeps a generation or so, cropping out 
unexpectedly. Besides, you said not all the adults were guilty, that if they 
wanted to live under your laws they would be safe.”
“So I did, and so they are.” He hated it when Luap was patient with him, as if 
he were a doddering old man; it made him grumpy. Luap shook his head. “If they 
come so far as your courts, they are. Many don’t. There was a man killed in the 
south, near Kelaive’s old domain—” The regions had not been renamed; Gird 
decided they needed to do that next. The very name Kelaive wakened old angers. 
“—a younger son, he could make light with his finger, enough to light a candle. 
Stoned, Gird, and no one will admit to having anything to do with it. You can 
lose your temper and stab someone in a rage, or bash his head with one rock, but 
stoning— that takes time, and many people.”
“What did they say he’d done?” He must have done something, to arouse that kind 
of anger.
“They don’t say, because no one admits to doing it. Cob’s your high marshal down 
there; you know he’s sensible.” He had always liked Cob, whose blunt, 
matter-of-fact approach to life had not changed through war or peace. He still 
limped, from the foot broken outside Grahlin, but never complained. “What does 
Cob say?”
Luap pulled out the message and read it aloud. “Tell Gird he must do something, 
perhaps send the mages away.”
“Away where? Where would people trust me to send them? Those here don’t want to 
live in Tsaia, won’t go back to Aarenis— and they say there’s nothing left in 
Old Aare. Besides, if I send them away, that kind of folk will worry that 
they’re plotting together. I hear enough of that on the east side now, worrying 
that Tsaia will invade. It’ll wear itself out, in time; what takes years to grow 
can’t wither in a moment.”
He went back to the maps, determined to eliminate Kelaive’s name before the day 
was out. The old names, the folk names, belonged: Burry and Berryhedge (four 
families lived there now, in the ruins) and Three Springs. Get rid of the lords’ 
newfangled names; he would agree that some of their family members were 
innocent, but no need to honor a bad name by putting it on a map. He was 
uneasily aware that some bartons had indulged in more looting and destruction 
than he would have approved if he’d been there, but he was sure—he hoped he was 
sure—that that had been a single overreaction to years of oppression.
Another year went by, and another. He put on weight; his old belt gave way one 
day in the middle of a court session, to everyone’s delight. Someone ran to 
bring him a strip of blue leather; he insisted on paying for it (he was, after 
all, sitting as judge) and wore it thereafter. He still rode out from the city 
that had been Finyatha and was now Fin Panir, visiting villages and towns, 
following that old restlessness. He had to admit that Luap was right in one 
thing; it was taking much longer than he’d expected to reconcile the common folk 
to the continued presence of surviving mage-lords and their children. It would 
come, he was sure of it: at some point they would recognize what they lost in 
this continual picking at the past. Mali had told him that, all those long years 
ago, when he had held a grudge against Teris: all life soured if you held anger.
  
He was working by an open window one hot afternoon when he saw the furtive 
movement of those who know they’re about to do wrong. One, then another, slipped 
past beneath him, heading around the corner toward whatever lured them on. He 
was not really curious; it was too hot, and his feet hurt even in slippers. Then 
he heard children’s shrill voices, and someone yelled “I’ll tell Gird!” in the 
very tone in which one wrongdoer informs on another. Sighing, he pushed himself 
away from his desk, put his feet into his largest pair of boots, and was 
downstairs when the threatened information arrived. “Something” was going on 
“down the market way” that he wouldn’t like. The marshal, the barefoot child 
informed him “made no good of it.” Then the child was gone, with a flick of a 
smile that could mean anything from “I started it” to “I know you’ll fix it.” 
Both could be true.
He followed the furtiveness he’d observed before, and saw more hurrying backs. 
Odd that someone’s back could reveal intent, he thought. As much as a face, 
perhaps more. Then he saw a crowd, in the lower market, where the livestock pens 
were. At the moment, their backs had the look of guilty curiosity.
He felt the crowd’s mood shift even before the growling mutter began. Not again, 
he thought. Couldn’t the fools understand? Why did they start this nonsense 
again, now, when all was won, and only ruin could follow such anger?
Those at the back of the crowd moved instinctively away from his determined 
stride, even before they recognized him. Their voices followed, then raced 
ahead: “Gird—it’s Gird—he’s coming—” A lane opened for him, leading him toward 
the trouble.
There was Luap, as he had expected, and the Autumn Rose. She held the shoulders 
of a whip-thin, dark-haired lad whose face was a mass of bruises and scrapes, 
eyes barely visible in the mess. Blood dribbled from his broken nose and split 
lip. Gird could see the lad shaking, and no wonder. Across from them was a 
yeoman of the local grange, Parik, sucking raw knuckles. When he saw Gird, he 
glowered, no whit repentant.
Luap, uncharacteristically, said nothing. The Autumn Rose looked past Gird’s 
ear, an insult he would have thought but for the warning that leapt into her 
eyes. So. He looked back at Parik, seeing in Parik’s eyes the confidence that 
came from knowing he was not alone in this.
“Well?” Gird’s voice cracked, as it had been doing since Midwinter Feast and 
that disastrous dance in the snow. He swallowed the lump and awaited an answer.
“That’n used magicks,” said Parik, in a tone well-calculated to sting without 
justifying rebuke. He merely looked at the lad, and then gave a final lick to 
his own knuckles.
“You’re accusing him of misusing magicks?” asked Gird mildly.
“Nah—they all seen it. He’s a magelord’s brat, should never have lived this 
long, and needs mannering, if he’s to live any longer.” Parik made a show of 
patting his tunic back into place.
“And you thought it your job—?”
“He put fire on me,” said Parik, as if explaining something difficult to a dull 
child. “He put fire on me, so I put m’fist on him. Like you says, Gird, or used 
to say, simple means for simple minds.” He laughed, a little too loudly, and 
Gird heard nervous sniggers elsewhere.
He closed his eyes, suddenly so tired he felt he must sink to the ground. He had 
told them, and told them, and explained, and argued, and shouted, and broken 
their stubborn heads from time to time, and even, when his breath ran out, 
spoken softly, and here they were, just as bad as ever. Just as bad as the 
magelords, barring they used fists instead of magic. Gods—! he thought, then 
stuffed the prayer back. Ask their help and get their interference, like as not. 
He opened his eyes to find everyone staring at him. Give them an answer, a 
judgment: he had to, and he could not.
“The Marshal?” he asked. His voice was unsteady; he could see their reaction to 
that, like a child’s to a parent weeping.
“Don’t need no Marshal to know right from wrong,” said Parik, bolder now that 
Gird had not unleashed his usual bellow. “S’what you taught us, after all: don’t 
need no priests, no crooked judges, no lords—and ’specially no magelords—”
Gird looked at Luap: Luap white-faced, gaze honed to a steel blade that sliced 
into Gird’s mind. Luap, who had warned of this, whose warning he had ignored, 
thinking it special pleading. It was to Luap he spoke, in a conversational tone 
that confused the others.
“You were right, and I was wrong. Are you still of the same mind?”
Luap’s face flooded with color: surprise. “I—yes, Gird.”
“They are not all Parik.” And that was special pleading, his special pleading. 
Luap nodded, taking it seriously. He had not hoped for so much compassion.
“Talk to me!” yelled Parik. Gird watched the Autumn Rose transfer her gaze to 
him, as deliberate as someone shifting a lance; Parik paled, but did not 
retreat. “Is that it, then? Are you hiding behind your pet magelords, using 
their power to charm us?”
“WHAT!” That time he had the old strength in it, and Parik backed up a step. 
Fury lifted Gird to his full height, pumped power into the fists clenched at his 
sides, as he stalked towards Parik, stiff-legged. “I never hide; I never did. 
There are no magelords, Parik, because I led you and the others to fight free of 
them. Mages, yes, and some mere children, like this lad here—but no magelords. 
No, Parik.”
Parik backed up another step, blustering. “But—but that lady there—she looked at 
me—”
“I’m looking at you, Parik, and seeing a bully who’d be a lord as bad as ever we 
fought, had he the power.”
“Me? But I just—”
“You just beat a lad half your size, for using magicks you said, but you brought 
no accusation to the Marshal—”
“Donag, he don’t want to be bothered with little stuff like that—”
“Then Donag must not want to be Marshal; that’s what Marshals do, is deal with 
‘little stuff like that’ and keep big hulks like you from bruising their 
knuckles breaking lads’ faces—”
Gird heard a growl from the crowd, concentrated over there— disapproval, backing 
for Parik. Maybe Donag as well? Could one of his Marshals be supporting this 
madness?
“He used magicks!” yelled Parik. “He put fire on me!”
“And what had you done, eh?” Gird glanced around at hostile faces, frightened 
faces, confused faces. “What started it all?”
“Parik’s boy complained,” said someone softly, just audible under the shifting 
crowd noise.
Gird swung toward that sound, and located a face that fit the voice. “Parik’s 
boy?” he asked.
Silence fell, in the center. Parik scowled at the young woman who edged her way 
to the front. Neither beautiful nor ugly; a quiet face, clear-eyed and 
determined. She looked straight at Gird, as if afraid to look 
elsewhere—certainly not at Parik.
“It was Parik’s boy, sir—Gird. He’n the others was playing, playing the stick 
game, y’know?”
He knew: a boy’s gambling game, easily disguised as something else if 
disapproving adults came by.
“Julya—” began Parik angrily, but the girl went on, ignoring him.
“That lad, he has quick fingers—he’s a tailor’s apprentice now, and I’ve watched 
him with a needle—and he won twice running. Then Parik’s boy said he was a 
cheat, and a magelord’s bastard, and the lad said he was no bastard, and Parik’s 
boy jumped him, and Parik grabbed him, held him for his boy to hit. That’s when 
the lad made fire on his fingers, to make Parik let go—” Her voice trailed away.
“You—you just want to lie with a magelord’s son, you Julya—” Parik’s voice had a 
nasty whine to it. The girl reddened but stood her ground.
“I don’t want to lie with you or any of your hardhanded sons, that’s the truth. 
And I won’t see you lying about what happened and not tell.”
“Here now! What’s going on here!” That interruption was Donag. Gird merely 
looked at him when Donag got to the center of the crowd, and Donag wilted. “I 
heard something—” he started to say.
“Awhile back, I heard something,” said Gird. He hardly knew what he was saying: 
a great space in his head rang off-key, like a cracked bell, and his vision was 
uncertain. “Awhile back I heard trouble—which you, Marshal Donag, should have 
heard. And then I heard that you did not care to hear such trouble. Or so Parik 
said.”
In the quick glance that passed between Parik and Donag, Gird saw as much 
trouble as he feared. Anger gave him the energy he needed to round on them all, 
but before he had two words out, Donag interrupted.
“Gods blast it, we’ve tried for years! You keep telling us they weren’t all bad. 
You keep telling us the children aren’t their fathers. And yet we still have 
mages working their magicks on us and our children. Look at Tsaia—they have a 
king again, of the same mageborn line—”
“He has no magicks,” said Gird heavily. “That was his great-uncle—”
“So he says,” Donag growled. “So they all say. ‘We have no magicks—we were born 
without—’ And then some mageborn spawn of Liart burns an honest yeoman—”
“An honest yeoman who was doing coward’s work, holding a lad for his lad to 
beat! And look at the damage: Parik has not even a blister, and just you look at 
the lad’s face. By the wheatear and corn, Donag, if the lad had bitten Parik—as 
any lad would, to get away—you’d no doubt claim that was magicks.”
“He could poison his bite,” muttered someone.
“Donag, think! If the lad could charm someone, why didn’t he charm Parik’s 
boy—or Parik—into letting him alone?” Donag’s face did not change; he was not 
thinking, or even listening. Nor were the others. Gird tried something new. 
“Suppose we exile them— send them all away. Will that satisfy you? Let the boy 
go, and any like him.”
Parik and Donag both opened their mouths, looked at each other, and then Donag 
spoke. “If we let them go, they’ll come back. Same as mice or rats or snakes—let 
’em go, they’ll breed and come back worse’n ever.” Gird heard a murmur of 
agreement from the crowd. He wanted to tell them that what bred and multiplied 
here was their own fear, but he knew it would do no good. He struggled for 
words, and none came. He could feel the mood deepening, one frightened and angry 
person reinforcing another’s fear and anger, as one bell vibrates when one near 
it is struck.
Black murder hung over the crowd, a veil of hatred and fear. Some had wrapped 
themselves in it, as if it were a literal cloak of supple velvet, welcoming the 
darkness. Others stood hunched, frightened, unsure which was worse, the growing 
darkness or the spear-bright danger of the mageborn.
Luap gazed at him, calm, almost luminous. For the second time, Gird felt that 
crevice open in his mind, and Luap’s voice flowing through, cool silver water 
from a spring.
—We will not fight—he said. —We will not break your peace—
My peace! Gird would have snorted if he could. Some peace, with the city in wild 
turmoil; even Alyanya’s peace could not still this storm.
—My peace— echoed in his mind, in the great empty cavern still clangorous with 
the crowd’s noise. —Do you want my peace? Do you want justice?— As once before, 
he could not confuse that voice with any other.
Out of his emptiness, out of his pain, he cried—silently, as the crowd listened 
in momentary silence—for help. To the gods he had tried to serve, and feared, 
and refused to ask before, he cried for help.
Again, as at Greenfields, he was snatched up from the ground, whirled in a storm 
of fire and flowers and wind high above the city. But only for an instant. Then 
he found himself standing where he had stood, but no longer empty. Overflowing, 
rather, with utter certainty. Full of light, of wisdom, of mellow peace thick as 
old honey in the comb.
It was still hard. His head would burst, he was sure; his mouth was too small 
for the breath he drew; he could barely form the words that he must speak. They 
had strange shapes, awkward in his mouth, as if thought were sculpted into 
individual shapes not meant for human speech.
With the first words, the crowd stilled. He could not hear himself; he was 
balancing himself on those internal forces. Incredibly the thought sped by that 
this might be what women felt at birth— stretched beyond capacity, control 
relinquished to forces they could not name. Then he was drenched in a torrent of 
bright speech he must somehow say, its meaning racing past his mind faster than 
he could catch it. He felt the hair standing upright on his arms and legs, the 
prickle of awe becoming a wave of sheer terror and joy so mingled he could not 
tell one from the other. It was so beautiful—! And as he spoke, and tried to 
hold himself upright, he saw the crowd change, as if someone had thrown clean 
water on a mud-caked paving. The hatred and fear lifted in irregular waves, 
leaving some faces free of that ugliness, others still stained but clearing.
After the first wrenching outwash of it, he was more aware of the crowd, of his 
own voice, of what he was saying. The words were strange to mouth and ear, but 
he knew what they meant, and so, somehow, did his hearers. Peace, joy, justice, 
love, each without loss of the others, engaged in some intricate and ceremonial 
dance.
More and more the dark cloud lifted, as if his words were sunlight burning it 
away. Yet they were not his words, as he well knew. Out of his mouth, through 
his mind, had come Alyanya’s peace, the High Lord’s justice, Sertig’s power of 
Making, and Adyan’s naming: these powers loosed scoured the fear away.
That effect spread. Beyond the crowd gathered in the courtyard, beyond the city 
walls, across the countryside, the light ran clean as spring-water, lifting from 
fearful hearts their deepest fears, banishing hatred. Gird knew it happened, but 
dared not try to see, for the effort of speech took all his strength, even the 
strength he had been given. Sweat ran off his face, his arms, dripped down his 
ribs beneath his shirt, and still the great words came, and still he spoke them.
Now the darkness writhed, lifting free of his land, like morning fog lifting in 
sunlight. But it was not gone. He knew, without being told that when his words 
and the memory of them faded, it would settle again. And he could not stand here 
forever. Even as he thought this, the flood of power in his mind, faded, leaving 
him empty once more, but light, a rind dried by sunlight.
—It is not over—He had no doubt who that was. If he could have trembled, he 
would have. It had to be over: what else could he do? He could not live long as 
he was now. As he watched, seeing now with more than mortal eyes, the darkness 
contracted, flowed toward him. He closed his mind to it, as he had closed it to 
hatred so often before. It would not take him, even now, even weak as he was. 
But in his head the pressure grew again, forcing its way out, forcing an 
opening.
—Do not push that away: take it in. Take it all in, and transform it for them—
“I can’t—” But he could, and he could do nothing else. With a despairing look at 
the crowd, at Luap, at the buildings that stood high around the market, even the 
top of the High Lord’s Hall against the sky, he shrugged and relaxed his 
vigilance.
Now the great cloud of hatred and disgust pressed on him. He drew it in, 
doggedly, like a fisherman dragging a large net full of fish into a small, 
unsteady boat. It hurt. He had forgotten how painful it was to be that 
frightened, how hatred prickled the inside of the mind like a nestful of fiery 
ants, how disgust tensed every internal sinew. He had complained of his 
emptiness, to himself, but he had found those great clean rooms of his mind 
restful. There the spirit’s wind had had space to blow; there he could go for 
quiet, for renewal. Now those spaces were filling, packed tighter and tighter, 
with stinking, slimy, oozing, crawling nastiness.
Envy, spite, malicious gossip like cockleburs, wads of gluttony like soft-bodied 
maggots, a sniggering delight in others’ pain, thoughts and fears more 
misshapen, harder to hold, than the bright words he had found so painful. He 
felt himself grow heavier, as if he were filling with literal stones and muck, 
felt himself cramping into ever more painful positions as he tried to hold it 
all, and bring the rest of it in. Like a tidy housewife whose home is invaded by 
raucous vandals, he tried to protect some small favorite crannies of his mind, 
long-furnished with joyful memories—and failed. The stink and murk of it found 
every last crack, and filled them all. He felt himself creak, the foundations of 
his mind almost shattering from the weight. What would happen then?
He had it all. He dared not open his mouth, lest something vile leak out. The 
faces around him were stunned, horrified—he could not imagine what his face 
looked like, but it must be worth their horror. Transform, the gods had said. 
And just how? That ungainly, rebellious mass struggled to get out, and he 
squeezed. He did not feel the stones beneath his knees, then his hands—he felt 
only the terrible crushing weight of fear, the compression of hatred.
  
Through scalding tears Luap saw that homely, aging face transformed. Like the 
High Lord’s windows, he thought. From outside, they looked dark—until at night a 
light woke them to brilliance. Now light illuminated Gird, almost too bright to 
watch, and from his mouth came rolling the words they all understood without 
quite hearing them. Beside him, the Autumn Rose murmured a counterpoint to Gird, 
her face radiant. Then she was silent. Luap felt his own heart lift, expand—and 
then his sight, as if Gird’s speech awakened all his magegifts at once. He saw 
clinging darkness rolling away, lifting, knew in his bones precisely what Gird 
was doing, and what would come of it.
He could not bear it. It should not be Gird, who had earned a peaceful age, a 
time of rest. He should be the one. But when he opened his mouth, it was 
stopped, and the breath in it.
—You have other tasks—
He would have argued, but he had scarce breath to stay on his feet, and when he 
recovered, Gird was silent. Above them the cloud visible only to a few shifted, 
as if it were living spirit meditating attack. Gird was staring at it, mouth 
clamped shut just as so often before. Then—then his eyes widened, and his jaw 
dropped in almost comic surprise. Again Luap tried to move to his side, to help 
however he could. But again he could not move. Gird shrugged, then, and eyed the 
cloud doubtfully.
Even as he watched, Luap was thinking how he could record this in the archives. 
What would be believed, what would be too fantastic even for the superstitious, 
what would cause controversy, and what bring peace? He had no doubt that this 
was Gird’s death. The man was too old, too battered by his life, to survive 
this.
—No one could—As he swayed under the pressure of that answer, he wondered if 
that was what Gird had heard.
And then the cloud settled on Gird, condensing, becoming, in the end, visible to 
everyone. That dark mass had no certain form, no definite edges. It weighed on 
him, pressed against him, until he sank first to one knee, and then the ground. 
They could not move to help, not until he lay flat, hands splayed on the stone, 
struggling to rise, to breathe—not until the darkness vanished, and Gird lay 
motionless.
Luap knew before he reached Gird’s side that he was dead. His flesh was still 
warm, his broad blunt hands with their reddened, swollen knuckles still 
flexible, almost responsive, in Luap’s. Luap blinked back his tears and looked 
at the crowd. Silent, awed, most of them had the blank and stupified look of 
someone waked from deep sleep. A few were already weeping.
But the air around them had the fresh, washed feel of a spring morning after 
rain. Inside, in the chambers of his heart where he had struggled to wall up 
ambition and envy, Luap knew that walls had fallen, and nothing was there but 
love.



Epigraph
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes 
not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties—but right 
through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
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[scanned anonymously]
[July 1, 2003—v1 html proofed and formatted by the EBook Design Group ]