Darin sighed. “Well, if I cannot send you back or keep you from following me,” Darin said, “I suppose the next best course is for you to march with us. You can keep up, I trust?”
“You may indeed trust me in that, and wisely,” Sirbones said. He sounded maddeningly complacent.
Darin looked after the priest as he strode off toward the assembling line of men. He rubbed his arm and realized that the pain had vanished as swiftly as it had come. In fact, all the aches from yesterday’s exertions had also vanished, not only from his arm but from the rest of his body. Even the mild case of the flux from a bout with bad water two days ago was gone.
Darin began gathering his own gear. He still was not sure that bringing Sirbones home would not be bringing an owlbear into the sheepfold. But it seemed hard to believe that the Minotaur and his heir could not between them deal with anything short of Mishakal herself!
Chapter 2
“All seems in order,” Sir Niebar said. “I regret that it took so long to be sure.”
Sir Pirvan of Tiradot frowned. “Do you imply a fault in our accounting?” He hoped his tone could convey a sense of injury rather than his taking refuge in the Measure’s dictum that no knight will ever wittingly insult another.
Although if all knights had always lived up to every part of the Measure, the Solamnic chivalry would long since have either brought perfection to themselves and the world or gone mad trying to obey too many different rules at once.
The thieves of Istar had prided themselves on a complex and comprehensive set of customs to regulate the conduct of “night workers.” They had, however, never committed the ultimate folly of the Knights of Solamnia, which was to write everything down in a multitude of stout volumes.
“It does not,” Niebar replied. “Indeed, it reflects your success and prudent management. Your manor is doing well.”
“That is Haimya’s doing more than mine,” Pirvan said. “Fate had it that she leave off journeying for some years, when Gerik and Eskaia were young. In that time she discovered a gift, even a taste, for running a manor.”
And if you even think too loudly that we should be able to spend more of our own money to support the knights’ work, so that they have to spend less, I will knock you down and Haimya will geld you with a dull pruning hook.
Niebar rose to his full height, then bit back an oath. He had not been at Tiradot Manor long enough to remember which rooms were too low for his considerable height. He rubbed his scalp with one hand and thrust out the other to Pirvan.
The former thief turned Solamnic Knight took the proffered hand. He even managed a sincere smile, though the sincerity came more from the imminence of Niebar’s departure than from a genuine regard for the man.
Well, somewhat. There is no pleasure in his company, but he is honest, brave, and courteous without making a show of any of these virtues. Worse men have taken the Knights’ Oath.
The two knights walked down the spiral stair from the solar room atop the tower at the west end of the great hall. The outer door led to the courtyard of the fortified manor, where Pirvan’s groom and stableboy had already led out Niebar’s horse, and where Niebar’s squire and serving boy had already mounted.
“Farewell, Pirvan,” Niebar said. “I will not wish you a quiet year, because neither you nor your lady wife have much taste for that. But I will pray that what you wish for most will come to you, and soon.”
Niebar had to be past forty, older than Pirvan, but he leaped into the saddle with the agility of a youth, without disturbing his horse, except for what might have been a sour look and a faint whicker. Then the gate swung open, three pairs of boot heels pressed into three sets of equine flanks, and the year’s visitation party trotted off.
* * * * *
Pirvan waited until the last scrawl of yellow dust vanished from across the green horizon, then went in search of Haimya. Learning that she and the women were down by the millstream doing their best to wash winter out of the woolens, he went the other way, toward the ruined keep that was the oldest surviving human habitation on the Tiradot lands.
Built in the Age of Might, it had housed local lords of varying degrees of honor or rapacity until the Third Dragon War, in which it fell variously to both human and draconic foes. By the end of the war, it was uninhabitable.
When prosperity returned to the land, the then lords of Tiradot decided that the times of living in a fortress were past. They built a stout-walled, peak-roofed house with three floors and two wings, and all the appurtenances of a large farm as well, then surrounded the whole affair with a wall designed to keep out cattle thieves and cutpurses rather than armies.
Some generations later, another lord of Tiradot died without heirs, leaving the manor to the Knights of Solamnia. As the terms of the Swordsheath Scroll further generations afterward left the knights all property they had previously possessed, the Great Meld had made no difference in the status of Tiradot.
What eventually did make a difference was the need of the knights for the services of one Pirvan the Spell-Thief of Istar. When he prevented a renegade mage from unleashing Frostreaver axes on the world and helped bring down a black dragon revived untimely from dragonsleep, these feats were held to make him worthy of acceptance as a Knight of the Crown.
The price of his admission was to be as one of the eyes and ears set about the world, and particularly about Istar (in whose territory the manor lay), charged to him by Sir Marod. To do this properly he needed lands and other property suited to his station, and thus Tiradot Manor fell to his lot.
Pirvan was not sure to this day, some ten years later, who had fallen to whom. He had once heard a crown called “a splendid misery”; owning a manor often seemed much the same, on a more modest level.
At least one could say that the name “Pirvan of Tiradot” sounded better on the ear and in the heart than the name that he might otherwise have borne, one whispered behind his back but well known for all that:
“Pirvan the Wayward.”
* * * * *
As always, when bleak thoughts paraded through his mind like a band of drunken ogres, Pirvan found relief in vigorous exercise. A swift side journey to the armory gave him climbing irons, leather trousers and sleeveless tunic, rope, tool belt and pouches, and spike-soled boots. All the metal hanging about him clinked and jingled like tinkers hard at work as he walked out of the gate, toward the old keep.
The walls still rose some ten times Pirvan’s height on three sides, though they seemed even more cracked and crumbling than before. In places, the rubble core now dripped stones where before solid blocks had kept all tight and orderly.
Time to sell the rights to the villagers to quarry this old pile, Pirvan thought. There’s a good plenty of new houses and new rooms to old houses, not to mention stones for walks and walls, living up here. When I feel sour in mind or body, there will always be trees to climb.
The keep was a quarter of an hour’s walk, and the road to it was also the main road from the village that went with the manor. Pirvan passed a goatherd with her flock, a carter with a load of barrels (new, empty ones from the local coopers, judging from their polish, rattling staves and the speed the cart was making), several small boys doing nothing in particular, and an older lad carrying home two scythes freshly sharpened at the smith’s.
One and all, they greeted Pirvan with courteous respect rather than servility. This was very much to his taste, and would have been more so if he’d been sure why they did it. Was it their natural custom, their knowledge of what an exceedingly odd sort of lord and knight he was, or the growing suspicion of the Knights of Solamnia spreading across Istar?