Oath of Fealty (13 page)

His own list, already prepared, lay before him. In a few minutes they had completed their task. “Now read them,” Kieri said. One by one, they read their lists. All but one started with “The king marries and begets an heir” and none contained what was at the head of his
own list, “Peace.” When they had finished, he read his own list, continuing to ten hands of years. They looked stunned.

“Sier Halveric, you are the only one who did not list my marriage and getting an heir at the top of your list. Why?”

“You promised to marry and give us an heir, Sir King. I trust you.” Halveric sounded smug.

“I can understand,” Kieri said, looking at the others, “after what you have been through, your intense interest in this. Indeed, providing you with an heir
is
my duty, and it is important to the realm. Yet remember, when the king left you no heir, the gods provided. I don’t intend to trouble them again, but you should not fear unduly. Your goals are worthy; what matters to you matters to me. But what matters to me must also matter to you … and assuring peace is more important even than assuring an heir.”

“We
are
peaceful,” Sier Belvarin said, looking puzzled. “I am glad you want to remain so, but—”

“It is the peace of a lamb who does not see the wolf crouched at the forest edge,” Kieri said. Belvarin stiffened. “It is not the peace I want for this land, and it is not the peace you should want.”

“Peace is peace,” Sier Carvarsin said, glowering. “We have not had a war here for generations; we are no threat to our neighbors, so they have no reason to attack us.”

“And no reason not to,” Kieri said. Now all of them looked shocked. “Think you: If the Pargunese will come to Tsaia to attack me, as they did on my way here, why will they not attack here?”

“They never have,” Sier Belvarin said. One of the elves stirred.

“Amrothlin?” Kieri said to him. “Is that your memory?”

“Long ago in human time,” the elf said, “when first the Seafolk came up the river in their pointed ships, they would have settled on this side. We did not permit it, for we had seen how they dealt with the trees, as if trees existed only to make more ships. They were easily frightened, and kept to the north side of the river after that.”

“How did you frighten them?” Kieri asked.

The other elf looked down his nose for a moment. “The taig, Sir King, has many powers of which you are as yet unaware, but as I am to be your tutor in such things—” Kieri stared; he had not expected that. “—I will show you when it is time. That is many lessons hence.”

“Does that mean elves will defend the land against the Pargunese, if they attack?” Kieri asked.

“We defend the Ladysforest,” Amrothlin said. “Since the Compact, that is all we are bound to do. It is up to the king to protect the people. Though, as you know, we may choose to aid the king.”

“Let us hope the Pargunese do not know that,” Kieri said.

I
n the days before the mourning ceremony, Kieri’s daily schedule acquired some stability. Waking at dawn or before, a session in the salle with his Squires and Armsmaster Carlion, breakfast, a meeting with the Council, and then a longer session with one Council member after another. In the afternoon he visited his cohort and took exercise, then met again with his advisers. His elven relatives insisted they needed at least two hours a day for his schooling in matters elven, but the first session with Orlith consisted of sitting in silence as he tried—with little success he was sure—to open himself fully to the taig.

On the day before the mourning ceremony, Sier Belvarin came to instruct him in the rites, bringing with him two other Siers and the Seneschal.

“The ceremony’s … different … than it is in Tsaia,” Belvarin said.

Kieri waited out the glances, the shifting of hands on the table.

“You see,” one of them said, with a quick glance at the others, “we bury them.”

“Yes …” That didn’t sound different.

“It’s—you do know the Lady of Peace?”

“Of course,” Kieri said. Did they think because he had been a soldier he would not know of Alyanya?

“It’s the land.” Another long pause, another set of looks exchanged. “Well, we’re old in the land here, you see. Before the magelords came,
there were people here. Humans. In Tsaia, too, but the magelords conquered them. Here, we have the old ways.”

The old ways. Kieri had read, with some scorn, the Girdish beliefs about their origins before the magelords came. All peaceful farmers and herders, but they had shed blood to thank Alyanya for the gift of fertility … was that what this was about?

“You blood the blade before setting iron to the soil?”

A look of relief from all of them. “Exactly. You know this?” Belvarin asked.

“Well, yes. I thought everyone knew that. I know some of my—my former—landholders did that before ploughing or digging. We blooded our blades at the Spring Evener.”

“So you see, then, that when someone dies, they go to the land, to return to Alyanya the gifts of flesh she gave them in life. They feed the land, so the land will feed others. That’s the first ceremony, returning to Alyanya what she gave, fruit for fruit. And then, when the time has passed, they rise again, clean bone—”

A distant memory pricked. Before Aliam raised him to squire, he had been sent up in the attics to look for holes in the roof after a windstorm—there’d been broken slates in the courtyard—and as he looked around in the dim light he’d seen a gruesome face leering at him. He’d managed not to scream, but he’d fled down the ladder, shaking, only to have Estil tell him it was only a skull. Only.

“You dig them up?”

“Yes. And that’s the greater ceremony, raising the bones and carrying them to the memory-hall.”

Kieri felt the small hairs rising on the back of his neck, as if they were tiny bones themselves. “Memory-hall?” he said, keeping his voice as level as he could.

“Every village had one, once,” Belvarin said. “It would be in the appropriate place, and the elders’ skulls were mounted to the center posts—but we don’t do that anymore. After the elves came north and made a pact with our people and those of our people who came from Tsaia when the magelords invaded—the old people, this is—the customs changed.”

“I had forgotten the skulls,” Kieri said. “In the attic at the Halverics’—”

“A fine family. Very traditional. So you see, my lord king, when the
time is come, your part in the ceremony of recovering King Sarnion’s bones and placing them in the palace hall of memory will be longer than this one. It is a celebration: the Lady has accepted the gift, the land has been renewed.”

“I see. And when will this be?” Kieri had no idea how long it took for flesh to peel from bone in the earth.

“Not this fall harvest or the next but the one after that: the Fall Evener.”

Since the old king’s body was already in the ground, the formal memorial in which Kieri took part consisted of a short procession in which Kieri carried boughs of the important trees, and laid them in a certain order on the grave. He did not recognize the boughs, leafless as they were, but trusted Belvarin would have made sure which was which. It did not seem enough, for a king’s recognition of his predecessor, but it was what tradition required.

Afterward, the Seneschal led Kieri to the palace ossuary. “It’s a bit different here, because it’s the royal residence, you see. In a private home, there’s just the skulls in the attic, and maybe a bone-house somewhere. But here, it’s a kingdom’s history. All except the skull of King Darien, the first king, of course, because that was mortared into the top tower.”

The ossuary lay underground. Kieri had no idea what to expect, but did not expect to be impressed by mere bones. He’d seen enough of them on battlefields, especially that last year in Aarenis, when every field sprouted bones instead of grain.

The Seneschal unlocked a brass-bound wooden door. Above it Kieri saw fresh green branches laid across wooden pegs. “This one’s the ancestors’ home and that other one—” He jerked his head toward another similar door. “—is the treasury.” The treasury door had no green branches over it. “Now, this line of green stone, my lord, this is for respect. We go barefoot here.” He kicked off his palace slippers, revealing knobbly old man’s feet, blue-veined, and looked at Kieri’s boots. The look conveyed a command, but he said nothing. Beside the door was a bench; the Seneschal waited until Kieri sat on it, and then knelt to help him pull off his boots and socks. Kieri’s bare feet looked incongruous to him, under the formal robes he wore, but the stone felt warm and smooth, almost comforting.

When the Seneschal pulled the door open, Kieri expected a musty smell, familiar from cellars and barrows, part earth and stone enclosed, part bone. Instead the air had the freshness of spring outside. He’d expected a dim chamber filled with dusty old bones, cream, white, yellow-brown, gray. Instead, the ossuary blazed with color against whitewashed walls. Kieri stared. Human bones didn’t come in those colors—colors as bright as fresh-dyed yarn, as flowers, scarlet, green, blue, yellow. Here and there light glinted from other things—from curves of metal, copper and bronze and gold and silver. And on every skeleton, fresh green leaves, one between the teeth, one across each eyehole, one on either side, where ears might have been. They looked as if they’d been picked that very morning.

“What—?” Kieri choked back all he was tempted to say and instead said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” the Seneschal said, obviously pleased at the surprise he’d arranged. “This is the old way, you see. Remembrance is a form of honor, so nothing should be forgotten that is honorable to a king or queen. In the old days, before the magelords came, it was mostly simple things—this one was good with sheep, that one was a good cook. Simple dyes and a little knife-work made that clear. But kings, my lord, as you know, have more complicated lives, and so their bones must hold more … the first few kings, indeed, were scarce honored more than their people; their bones hold simpler stories and the old-fashioned decoration. You’ll see that in a moment. It was two or three generations before a king thought to find a bone-artist while he still lived, and explain what he wanted. But here’s your father, you’ll want to see him.”

Kieri did, and did not. The father he barely remembered, the bearded man who had picked him up and swung him about … that was a live man, however brief his memory. Bones meant death, meant he would never see his father in the flesh again. But it was tradition, and he followed the Seneschal farther into the ossuary.

“Here he is,” the Seneschal said.

The bones were neither fresh nor ancient, each set neatly as near to its place in life as possible, and each painted in brilliant colors, scribbled with thin black lines that Kieri now realized were script.

His father. His father’s bones. Kieri stared at the skeleton, wondering
what he was supposed to feel. The colors made him uneasy: white bones, clean bones, were natural things, but these colors, this writing, seemed … alien.

“You may not be familiar with the script used,” the Seneschal said. “It is very old. I can translate for you.” Without waiting for Kieri’s word, he bent over the pelvis. “This, right here, tells of your birth. See, the background color is that used for sons, and it gives your birthdate, your mother’s name—”

Kieri shivered. He could read the script now, as he could not a few moments before; the words flowed through his mind in a voice he knew instantly was his father’s.

For on this day my son Falkieri was born, and we rejoice in his strength and pray all the gods for his long life, health, and joy
.

“I can read it,” Kieri said, fighting the lump in his throat. He could read all of it, the writing voicing itself, the colors and script together making pictures as well as words, telling the story of his father’s life. Not far from his own birth was the birth of his sister. Not far from that, the anguish his father felt when his wife—Kieri’s mother—and Kieri disappeared, when word came back of her certain death, and his presumed. His father had grieved for years, pouring all his affection onto the sister … had died of grief, in the end.

Tears rolled down Kieri’s cheeks, through his beard. He could feel them, but he could not stop them; he did not try. His father … what would his father have thought of the man he’d become? He could be glad his father did not know what had happened to him, those bitter years of captivity; he wished his father could have known how his son was saved by a family he loved—his friends. He felt now, bone to bone, that human kinship; he knew his father’s favorite flavors, colors, pursuits, as if they were his own.

More than the elven sword, more than the Council’s acclamation, bound him here now. This was the human half of him, bone and blood, not song and immortality and the uncertain bounds of the elvenhome kingdom where his grandmother ruled. This was truly home, not just a childhood memory, but the place his bones knew, and where his bones would lie.

At last he turned from his father’s skeleton. “My sister?”