Oath and the Measure (4 page)

“It has come to this, young Brightblade. You have made your point and mine,” Vertumnus announced, and the stones at his feet grew over with thick moss.

“The rest is your own foolishness. You have entered my game. Which, alas, you must now play to its end, as your shoulder will tell you daily and nightly.”

Outside the window, the songbirds choired again. Wide-eyed, Sturm looked from the Green Man to his unwiped sword, from the sword back to Vertumnus. In great perplexity, with controlled focus, the young man touched his blade. It was dry and clean.

“Meet me on the first day of spring,” Vertumnus ordered, again with a strange smile. “In my stronghold amid the Southern Darkwoods. Come there alone, and we shall settle this—sword to sword, knight to knight, man to man. You have defended your father’s honor, and now I challenge yours. For now I owe you a stroke, as you owe me a life. For it is written in your cherished Measure that
any man who returns a blow must stay the course of battle
.”

Sturm looked about him in confusion. Gunthar and Alfred stood frozen on the dais, and Lord Stephan opened his mouth to speak, but no words came forth.

Hawk-eyed, expectant, Lord Boniface nodded. What Vertumnus said concerning returning blow was indeed enshrined in the Measure. Sturm was trapped in an ancient statute by his impulsive deed.

“I will lead you to that place when the time comes,” Vertumnus
announced. “And you might learn something of your father in that place and time. However, you must make your own way. If you fail to meet me at the appointed place, on the appointed night, your honor is forever forfeit.

“Nor is your honor alone in jeopardy,” Lord Wilderness continued with a mysterious smile. “For indeed, you owe me a life, Sturm Brightblade, and you will pay it whether or not you arrive at the appointed time.”

Dramatically he gestured at the lad’s shoulder.

“You can come like a child of the Order and meet my challenge,” he pronounced, “or you can cower in the halls of this fortress and await the greening of your wound. For the deeds of my sword bloom forth in the spring, and their blossoms are dreadful and fatal.”

The hall filled with more leaves and vines and tendrils, with briars and roots and branches enough to take a week to clear. The Green Man closed his eyes, bowed his head, and vanished amid the rustle as the torches on the walls burst suddenly into a cold white flame. Astonished, Sturm squinted through the shadowy thicket, but Vertumnus was truly gone, leaving behind mist and woodsmoke and the watery, metallic smell of the woods after lightning.

“Of all the trouble you might have uprooted, lad,” Lord Alfred proclaimed sorrowfully, “of all you might have done or left undone, this indeed was the worst of things.”

“The worst of things?” Sturm asked. “I … I don’t …”

Already, with their sober efficiency, the young knights were clearing the hall of foliage and brambles. Sturm stood in the midst of the razing and repair, looking up at the assembly of Knights who had gathered beside the empty throne of Huma. The young man shook his head, trying to banish the night as he would a confusing dream.

“Will you follow me, Sturm Brightblade?” Lord Alfred asked, this time in a softer voice. Gunthar and Stephan closed ranks behind him, their ceremonial armor glittering almost blindingly. From their places amid the wreckage of Vertumnus’s visit, Lord Adamant and Lord Boniface joined
the formidable triad.

Like suns, the lad thought. Like suns and meteors. I cannot approach them, and it is hard even to look at them.

“I thought …” Sturm began, but in the echoing hall, his voice was thin and weak. He couldn’t say what he had thought. He could no longer think of it.

Alfred nodded, and Lord Gunthar stepped forward as Alfred gracefully took the younger man’s place beside Stephan.

Behind him, the sawing and hacking died. Only the servants continued with their tasks—old Reza and the boy, Jack, sweeping up the last of the shattered crystal. The young men of the Order, reluctant to do a servant’s work in the first place, had stopped to listen to the drama unfolding beside Huma’s throne, delighting in the discomfort and possibly the punishment of one almost their age. For despite its devotion to the various honors of the Measure, the Clerist’s Tower was home to gossip and to rivalry that was not always friendly.

Lord Stephan was a veteran of these wars, too. He stepped toward Sturm and, clutching the lad’s arm in his gloved hand, led him past the craning necks and the sidelong glances, straight through the western door into the hush of the chapel. Lords Gunthar and Alfred followed closely behind, and behind them, the renowned Lord Boniface. Those left in the council hall returned to their business, no doubt imagining great mysteries and chastisements unfolding in the tinted light of the locked room.

There Lord Stephan seated the lad none too softly on an oaken bench by the window. Sturm clutched his shoulder and shivered as the wind crept through the old stone tracery behind him. But he shivered also at the ancient patterns in the stained glass: the rose, the horns of the bison, the yellow harp and the white sphere, the blue helix, all within the silver triangle of the great god Paladine, who contains all things and yet transcends them. All were symbols of the old pantheon, which the Order still honored, despite dark times
and the dangers of Ansalon.

The shelves sagged with thick, leather-bound volumes of mathematics, physics, architecture—studies the young man had shunned in the sparse days with his mother in Solace. “Sturm,” she had warned him then, “it is the books for you now. Sword and Order and father have failed you. A scholar may not be a wealthy man, but a scholar eats, his house safe from fire and his head from the axe.” Sturm frowned and shook his head: The Lady Ilys had called out these things from the centermost room of the cottage, a chamber away from the light and windows. He had pretended to listen, then set aside the books and scrambled to the thatched roof of the house. There, above his mothers admonishments, he fixed his eyes to the north, over the Plains of Abanasinia, where the horizon was nothing but light and plains, but a boy could imagine the turbulent Straits of Schallsea and north of that the southernmost coasts of Solamnia.

Now it seemed to Sturm that the chapel’s books mocked him and his wasted years among thatch and squirrels and birds. He had traveled far from Solace, only to be brought to another dark room and these same books, on what he now realized to be most somber business.

“The fault is not entirely yours, lad,” Lord Stephan began mildly, and yet Sturm heard a strange confusion in his voice as the old man paced before the altar, his eyes downcast. “Not entirely yours. This Vertumnus, it seemed, unsettled and surprised the lot of us.”

“How
did
that happen, Lord Gunthar?” Boniface asked mockingly. “I assumed that the guardianship of the hall was under your … capable command, as is always the case on a banquet night.”

Gunthar snorted angrily and leaned against the chapel door. There was no love lost between the two superlative swordsmen, the result of a generation’s fierce rivalry.

“ ’Tis being seen to, Boniface! No need for your damned gloating and delight!” he rumbled, his gray brows smoldering.

“Well …” Lord Stephan interrupted, his dry voice melodious and soothing. “Whatever the circumstance, we have no doubt finally met the fabled Lord Wilderness, and he’s every bit as curious as the stories say.”

“The stories!” Sturm exclaimed, half rising from his chair. “Do you mean to say you
knew
of this monstrosity, and … and …”

“We knew indeed,” Alfred replied. “Lord Wilderness is the companion to a hundred rumors, and deaf is the Solamnic Knight who hasn’t heard one of them. We knew of him but had never seen him. How could we have expected his visit? This chorus and burgeoning of vines?”

Gunthar glanced at Boniface angrily, and the four Knights settled into their private thoughts.

“The hour is late,” Alfred replied after a long pause, “and our thoughts border on fancy. Perhaps we should address this in the morning, when sunlight shines on what has come to pass, rather than the curious double light of the moon.”

“I agree with Lord Alfred,” chimed in Lord Boniface, and Lord Gunthar nodded also.

“But wait. Who
is
Vertumnus?” Sturm asked.

Nervously the Knights exchanged glances.

“I have heard,” Lord Alfred began, “that he is a renegade Knight whose path entangled with elves and all kinds of woodland foolishness. I have heard that he captains a band of Nerakan bandits down in his Southern Darkwoods.”

“I have heard Vertumnus is a druid,” Lord Gunthar declared. “A great pagan priest whose heart is as hard and knotted as oak. His sanctuary in the Darkwoods is a forbidden place, where birds whisper the last words of criminals and the dead hang like fruit from the limbs of trees.”

Sturm frowned.
That
seemed even more fanciful than the renegade Knight.

“And I have heard,” chimed in Lord Stephan, stirring up dust, “that the blood of the man is pure wizardry, that his dark eyes are fashioned from stone from the black moon Nuitari. I have heard that the Southern Darkwoods are all
an illusion, born of the black moon and the sorcerer’s dreams.”

“And yet he visits us in the Yuletide?” Sturm asked. “And wizard or druid or bandit Knight, he gains our most listening ears? How … how did this happen? And why?”

“I expect,” Lord Boniface observed dryly, “that Lord Gunthar will see to that answer shortly. How a single man could weave through vedettes of Solamnia’s finest young men, leading that great boar after him …

“Great boar?” the four others exclaimed, turning in unison to Lord Boniface. The famous Knight frowned, and Alfred laid an uneasy hand on his shoulder.

“We … we saw no boar, Lord Boniface,” the High Justice explained. “Perhaps the night’s confusion … or the wine …”

“I tell you, ’twas a boar I saw!” Boniface insisted angrily. “And if I saw it, ’twas there, by Paladine and Majere and whatever good god you could name!”

“Be that as it may, we saw no boar,” Alfred repeated patiently. “Only the flock of ravens in the rafters …”

He paused as the other Knights stared at him in puzzlement.

“You … you saw no ravens,” he concluded bleakly. “None of you did.”

“I did not look above me,” Stephan soothed. “Though by Paladine and all the assembled gods, I remember the shrill and insulting dryads the Green Man brought with him.”

It was his turn to be the curiosity. The Knights gazed at him in perplexity.

“Something also of corn and murmuring bees, it was,” Stephan muttered, “and a great
bear
, not a
boar
, danced in our midst.”

“No, no,” Gunthar corrected. “It was Vertumnus alone. I’m positive.”

“A hall of mirrors, this business,” Stephan muttered.

“But the shedding of blood?” Sturm asked. “The sap flowing from a wound?”

“Sap?” Lord Boniface asked incredulously. Four pairs of Solamnic eyes turned toward the lad, as though he had suddenly announced that the moons had fallen.

Stephan chuckled, and then suddenly grew somber, his eyes on the shivering lad who sat uncomfortably on the bench before him. “The problem is, Sturm, that whatever we saw, we agree that you were wounded, that in rage you dropped Lord Wilderness, and we all heard the challenge afterward.”

“The boy was wounded?” Gunthar asked in alarm. He stepped toward Sturm and extended his hand. “Where did he cut you, Sturm?”

“At my shoulder,” the lad replied, pointing to the wound …

… which had vanished entirely. The pure white fabric of his ceremonial tunic, unstained and untorn, covered the spot where the wound throbbed faintly. In silent bafflement, Gunthar and Alfred examined Sturm’s shoulder.

“Whatever you’re feeling,” Alfred pronounced quietly, “I see no wound. And yet a wound would make sense. Without it, the last threats of that green monstrosity would be ridiculous.”

He looked at the other Knights, who nodded gravely.

“Whether you be wounded or whole, Sturm Brightblade,” Lord Alfred continued, raising his index finger pontifically, like a scholar or lawyer, “there remains the problem at hand. Whatever we remember, this thing—this swordplay and killing and rising from death and … and
dripping sap
, for the gods’ sake!—’tis more important than dryad or boar, or your wound, for that matter. For Vertumnus addressed
you
, and it was to you that his challenge descended.”

“Indeed,” Lord Boniface said, firmly but not unkindly. “And now we must decide what this means.”

Sturm looked from face to face in the dimly lit library. Already the shadows in the room had shifted from the deepest blackness to a sort of foggy gray. Perhaps that, too,
was a power of Vertumnus’s music—to collapse a long night into a brief conversation. Or perhaps the time had passed so rapidly, like the years in Solace, merely because Sturm had not kept track of it.

Sturm was almost relieved when a soft rapping at the door signalled the entrance of the Tower sentries, or at least two of the company, whose honor or misfortune it was to speak for the threescore men assigned to guard the stronghold and the ceremonies therein. Shamefaced and shuffling, red to the ears and downcast of shoulder and eye, they stood in the doorway.

The sixty sentries were crack foot soldiers, gathered from all over Solamnia, schooled by the Order, and blooded in the Nerakan Wars. They were not the kind of men accustomed to nodding at their posts.

But out of their number, fifty had heard a soft, plaintive music rising out of the winter night. Some swore it was a folk song from northern Coastlund they heard on the brisk December wind; others thought it was something more refined and classical, the likes of which they had heard in the vaulted courts of Palanthas.

Some claimed it was a lullaby. But whatever the tune that reached the sentries who manned the walls from the Knight’s Spur to the Wings of Habbakuk, it acted as a lullaby indeed, for they awoke hours later, tied to their stations by entanglements of vine and root, their comrades tugging frantically at the undergrowth that imprisoned them.