“Four or five. If you left day after tomorrow, you would certainly not come to the border before she caught up with you.” He turned to Dorrin. “Do you agree with our arrangements?”
“Yes, Knight-Commander,” Dorrin said. Kieri thought she looked less tense than when she had arrived.
“Then I will go and make arrangements with the Captain to make use of the Field.”
“And I,” Paks said, “must needs get my pack. I’ll take yours, too.”
Kieri looked at Dorrin after they all left. “Well, Captain … Duke Dorrin. You’ve surprised me before but … the old magery? In one way it is a relief to know you have it, given what you will face, but it’s still a shock.”
“I’m sorry I never told you about the magery,” Dorrin said.
Kieri shook his head. “You weren’t using it; it wasn’t important then.”
“The Knight-Commander is most concerned that I not yield to a desire for vengeance—indeed he wishes me to use magery as little as I can, lest arrogance negate Falk’s support and open a gap into which the blood magery could penetrate.”
“This Knight-Commander has not seen war himself,” Kieri said. “You and I both know the dangers of uncontrolled anger, but we also know what war requires. And this is war you face, Dorrin: treason, rebellion, a civil war, at worst. My advice to you is to use whatever force you need at the beginning. You are not like to use it for your own glory.”
“I am of the same blood—I think he fears it will affect my judgment.”
“He has not seen you in battle. I have. Here—let’s talk of it as if it were a Company campaign. Tell me what you expect to find, what your plans are.”
Dorrin laid out the situation as she understood it, concise and crisp as all her briefings were. “And then there are the surprises—the things I can’t know ahead of time. I can’t know how many of the servants are complicit, for instance.”
Kieri nodded. “Of course, but you know to expect the unexpected. I agree with your assessment and your plan is sound. Dorrin, the prince is right—though this will take all your will and all your skill, as well as that magery you now have, no one else could do it. I believe you can. Trust yourself. I do.”
Kieri bade a final farewell to the cohort two days later, as Selfer led them out of Chaya, on the road to the river. No inspection this time—he was no longer their commander, and already their faces turned more naturally to Selfer than to him for orders. Selfer, his former squire, bowed instead of saluting.
“My lord king. It has been an honor to serve you these few years …”
“An honor you have well repaid,” Kieri said. “Go with Gird, Selfer, and Gird’s grace be with you.”
“Thank you, Sir King,” Selfer said, bowing again. Then he mounted and rode to the head of the column, and the familiar commands started them on their way. Away. Forever.
Kieri pushed that thought aside, and went back to work. The more he learned of the long breach between elves and humans, the more concerned he was that this might be a primary cause of Lyonya’s economic decline.
Within the human community, those of part-elven blood most often sided with elves and accepted elven values. Here were the strongest opponents to his proposals for an effective military, the strongest proponents of isolation. They were, in general, content to see Lyonya stay as it was, or return to an imagined ideal past: a forest land of peaceful folk who had no quarrels, no wars, no “foreign luxuries.” A land where, as one put it, “We used to sit around the fire and sing, and the trees sang with us.”
Those of pure-human blood—and especially those with magelord strains in their families—were most impatient with elven strictures, most annoyed by elven “arrogance,” and most interested in foreign trade. They wanted change, growth within and without. And yet, Kieri saw quickly, these had little experience outside Lyonya, and their notions of how other realms thought and acted were as naive as those of the part-elven.
His elven relatives themselves were little help. They were, as Kieri judged them, just as impenetrably arrogant as many humans thought them. Convinced they were right, without being willing to explain why, quick to take offense if they thought they were not sufficiently honored, and at root pleased with the division between human and elven.
“But you marry humans sometimes,” Kieri said to his uncle Amrothlin.
“Humans are … irresistible at some stages,” his uncle said. “Some of them. It’s the very insubstantiality, knowing that they will fade and die in a day or two—as it seems to us. To share that vibrant life for the short time of their spring—it is a great pleasure. But then they’re gone and we are still here. It is as you with flowers. You plant them, cherish them for the few days they bloom, and then remember them fondly.” He smiled as if remembering some liaison of his own, and then shook his head. “Though flowers are not as demanding. But you see—for us, bearing children is a rare and wonderful event. With a human, it is easier.”
“Except when it’s deadly,” Kieri said, thinking of his sister, who had died too young of early childbearing.
“That angered us all,” Amrothlin said. “Our Lady was so wroth the taig trembled and all the trees in the Ladysforest dropped their leaves in sorrow at the perfidy of humans.”
“And did you never consider that if you had told Aliam Halveric more plainly what you already knew about me, if she had known she had a brother—however unfit to rule at that time—she might not have felt the need to bear children so young.”
Amrothlin jerked back, as if Kieri had hit him. “It is not our fault!” he cried. “She would not listen to our Lady; she was warned. It was those humans—”
“Have you visited her bones, Uncle?”
Again Amrothlin flinched. “Bones—we do not do that, as you surely know. She should not be there, hidden in stone: she should be set free—”
“She was half-human, as I am,” Kieri said. “I have visited her bones, and I say it is not human fault alone that led her to her death. She grieved for her mother, who had left her to take me to see the Lady, and she grieved for me, the older brother who should have protected her. She was angry with you—with elves—because you cost her both mother and brother.”
“We did not!”
“No—but think. She was reft of more than half her family, for something that would have seemed—to a small child—no reason at all. All the work was left for her, all the care. She loved her father—he was all she had left—but you, I have no doubt, considered him as lightly as you do all humans.”
Amrothlin shifted uneasily in his seat. “No—not quite—he was the king, after all.”
“A king with no taig-sense, as you’ve said. For her, the only family she had left—”
“She had us—”
“Whom she did not know. Could not know, as she had known her mother and me.” Kieri felt the grief he had sensed in his sister’s bones. “She died of sorrow as much as childbirth, I believe. Determined to do her duty, but without much joy, if any. I blame myself, Uncle, for not escaping sooner, while you might still have considered me worthy—for not somehow finding a way to serve her, save her.”
“I—never thought any of this,” Amrothlin said. “Her husband … her Council …”
“They erred, and they suffered for it,” Kieri said. “So did the taig, and so did the kingdom. But I hold you, Uncle—you and all the elves, including my grandmother—partly responsible. Not that you asked my mother to bring me to the Ladysforest—that was innocently done, I am convinced. But that my sister felt abandoned and bereft—desperate enough to think risking her own death without need was her best way to prove herself—for that, we are all in part responsible.”
“Not you,” Amrothlin said. “Not after what you endured.”
“I was near enough healed by then, grown to manhood. I sensed secrets hovering around me, but did not press for answers—”