“Here now! What’s going on here!” That interruption was Donag. Gird merely looked at him when Donag got to the center of the crowd, and Donag wilted. “I heard something—” he started to say.
“Awhile back, I heard something,” said Gird. He hardly knew what he was saying: a great space in his head rang off-key, like a cracked bell, and his vision was uncertain. “Awhile back I heard trouble—which you, Marshal Donag, should have heard. And then I heard that you did not care to hear such trouble. Or so Parik said.”
In the quick glance that passed between Parik and Donag, Gird saw as much trouble as he feared. Anger gave him the energy he needed to round on them all, but before he had two words out, Donag interrupted.
“Gods blast it, we’ve tried for years! You keep telling us they weren’t all bad. You keep telling us the children aren’t their fathers. And yet we still have mages working their magicks on us and our children. Look at Tsaia—they have a king again, of the same mageborn line—”
“He has no magicks,” said Gird heavily. “That was his great-uncle—”
“So he says,” Donag growled. “So they all say. ‘We have no magicks—we were born without—’ And then some mageborn spawn of Liart burns an honest yeoman—”
“An honest yeoman who was doing coward’s work, holding a lad for his lad to beat! And look at the damage: Parik has not even a blister, and just you look at the lad’s face. By the wheatear and corn, Donag, if the lad had bitten Parik—as any lad would, to get away—you’d no doubt claim that was magicks.”
“He could poison his bite,” muttered someone.
“Donag, think! If the lad could charm someone, why didn’t he charm Parik’s boy—or Parik—into letting him alone?” Donag’s face did not change; he was not thinking, or even listening. Nor were the others. Gird tried something new. “Suppose we exile them—send them all away. Will that satisfy you? Let the boy go, and any like him.”
Parik and Donag both opened their mouths, looked at each other, and then Donag spoke. “If we let them go, they’ll come back. Same as mice or rats or snakes—let ’em go, they’ll breed and come back worse’n ever.” Gird heard a murmur of agreement from the crowd. He wanted to tell them that what bred and multiplied here was their own fear, but he knew it would do no good. He struggled for words, and none came. He could feel the mood deepening, one frightened and angry person reinforcing another’s fear and anger, as one bell vibrates when one near it is struck.
Black murder hung over the crowd, a veil of hatred and fear. Some had wrapped themselves in it, as if it were a literal cloak of supple velvet, welcoming the darkness. Others stood hunched, frightened, unsure which was worse, the growing darkness or the spear-bright danger of the mageborn.
Luap gazed at him, calm, almost luminous. For the second time, Gird felt that crevice open in his mind, and Luap’s voice flowing through, cool silver water from a spring.
—We will not fight—he said.—We will not break your peace—
My peace! Gird would have snorted if he could. Some peace, with the city in wild turmoil; even Alyanya’s peace could not still this storm.
—My peace— echoed in his mind, in the great empty cavern still clangorous with the crowd’s noise.—Do you want my peace? Do you want justice?— As once before, he could not confuse that voice with any other.
Out of his emptiness, out of his pain, he cried—silently, as the crowd listened in momentary silence—for help. To the gods he had tried to serve, and feared, and refused to ask before, he cried for help.
Again, as at Greenfields, he was snatched up from the ground, whirled in a storm of fire and flowers and wind high above the city. But only for an instant. Then he found himself standing where he had stood, but no longer empty. Overflowing, rather, with utter certainty. Full of light, of wisdom, of mellow peace thick as old honey in the comb.
It was still hard. His head would burst, he was sure; his mouth was too small for the breath he drew; he could barely form the words that he must speak. They had strange shapes, awkward in his mouth, as if thought were sculpted into individual shapes not meant for human speech.
With the first words, the crowd stilled. He could not hear himself; he was balancing himself on those internal forces. Incredibly the thought sped by that this might be what women felt at birth—stretched beyond capacity, control relinquished to forces they could not name. Then he was drenched in a torrent of bright speech he must somehow say, its meaning racing past his mind faster than he could catch it. He felt the hair standing upright on his arms and legs, the prickle of awe becoming a wave of sheer terror and joy so mingled he could not tell one from the other. It was so beautiful—!
And as he spoke, and tried to hold himself upright, he saw the crowd change, as if someone had thrown clean water on a mud-caked paving. The hatred and fear lifted in irregular waves, leaving some faces free of that ugliness, others still stained but clearing.
After the first wrenching outwash of it, he was more aware of the crowd, of his own voice, of what he was saying. The words were strange to mouth and ear, but he knew what they meant, and so, somehow, did his hearers. Peace, joy, justice, love, each without loss of the others, engaged in some intricate and ceremonial dance. More and more the dark cloud lifted, as if his words were sunlight burning it away. Yet they were not his words, as he well knew. Out of his mouth, through his mind, had come Alyanya’s peace, the High Lord’s justice, Sertig’s power of Making, and Adyan’s naming: these powers loosed scoured the fear away.
That effect spread. Beyond the crowd gathered in the courtyard, beyond the city walls, across the countryside, the light ran clean as spring-water, lifting from fearful hearts their deepest fears, banishing hatred. Gird knew it happened, but dared not try to see, for the effort of speech took all his strength, even the strength he had been given. Sweat ran off his face, his arms, dripped down his ribs beneath his shirt, and still the great words came, and still he spoke them.
Now the darkness writhed, lifting free of his land, like morning fog lifting in sunlight. But it was not gone. He knew, without being told that when his words and the memory of them faded, it would settle again. And he could not stand here forever. Even as he thought this, the flood of power in his mind, faded, leaving him empty once more, but light, a rind dried by sunlight.
—It is not over—He had no doubt who that was. If he could have trembled, he would have. It had to be over: what else could he do? He could not live long as he was now. As he watched, seeing now with more than mortal eyes, the darkness contracted, flowed toward him. He closed his mind to it, as he had closed it to hatred so often before. It would not take him, even now, even weak as he was. But in his head the pressure grew again, forcing its way out, forcing an opening.
—Do not push that away: take it in. Take it all in, and transform it for them—
“I can’t—” But he could, and he could do nothing else. With a despairing look at the crowd, at Luap, at the buildings that stood high around the market, even the top of the High Lord’s Hall against the sky, he shrugged and relaxed his vigilance.
Now the great cloud of hatred and disgust pressed on him. He drew it in, doggedly, like a fisherman dragging a large net full of fish into a small, unsteady boat. It hurt. He had forgotten how painful it was to be that frightened, how hatred prickled the inside of the mind like a nestful of fiery ants, how disgust tensed every internal sinew. He had complained of his emptiness, to himself, but he had found those great clean rooms of his mind restful. There the spirit’s wind had had space to blow; there he could go for quiet, for renewal. Now those spaces were filling, packed tighter and tighter, with stinking, slimy, oozing, crawling nastiness.