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.