Chapter 13
He could return to the Tower now.
Boniface watched Sturm's arrest from the topmost branches of a distant vallenwood. The spyglass he carried with him was cloudy but good. He saw the boy offer his hand, saw the captain take it, saw the gestures of friendship stiffen and sour, and saw the militia take them all-the horses, the elven mistress, and Brightblade-off toward the town of Dun Ringhill, where the old druidess sat at the head of an angry tribunal.
The finest swordsman in Solamnia wrapped his dark cloak about him tightly and shivered with pleasure. From a distance, framed in the menacing red moonlight, he looked like a huge raven or some unspeakable bat-winged creature, huddled in the height of the enormous tree. The spring wind died at the foot of the vallenwood, and in the upper branches, it was ultimate winter, dead and still, the steam of Boniface's breath rising like a specter into the midnight air.
Let the old witch have the boy, he thought. He shinnied down the tree like a spider.
Let them hang him, or boil him, or do whatever they do in the barbaric villages of Lemish. In its own way, it would be perfectly legal.
Why, it might even jog the council from their notorious sleep back in the Tower, where the Oath and Measure rust in the closets. The death of his ward might be enough to stir Gunthar Uth Wistan southward to invasions long overdue. Then the people of Dun Ringhill, of the Darkwoods, of all of Lemish and later Throt and Neraka, would know what it meant to transgress the Order and Measure.
But even if Lord Gunthar did not budge from the Tower, if the boy went unavenged and Lemish untouched, if this night marked the end of the matter, Boniface was still satisfied. For the long wars of a decade would be over at last.
Lord Boniface of Foghaven leapt into the saddle of his black stallion. Swiftly, with the grace born of fighting from horseback at close quarters, he wheeled the beast about and rode toward the Vingaard River at full gallop, his mind rehearsing the oldest of his pains.
They had grown up together, Angriff and Boniface. In sword and book, in horsemanship and cunning, in their first raids against the ogres of Blode through the border wars with the men of Neraka, there was scarcely a hairs-breadth of difference between one and the other. Only in their allegiance to the Oath and Measure did the two show differences.
For Boniface, the Order was life, and its rules and rituals the breath of that living. Book after book of the Measure, with its elaborate chapters and lists and qualifications and exceptions, he had memorized with reverence, so that his fellows had smiled at him, called him "the next High Justice."
They smiled because they had admired him. Of that, young Boniface had been sure, and through squirehood and the first lists of knighthood, his assurance had come from the letter, from the laws and restrictions the Order had established since the days that Vinas Solamnus first set pen to paper.
He didn't understand his friend Angriff, for whom both Code and Measure were more of a game. Sometimes Boniface ached and worried that the time would come when he would have to leave Angriff behind, when his own study and seriousness would blossom in the Rose of true knighthood, and Angriff would be a laughingstock, a cautionary tale for young aspirants that gifts and good looks and a generous spirit did not make you a Knight. He expected it to happen, but Angriff became a squire as well, and then a Knight of the Crown, serving with brilliance in the Fourth Nerakan Campaign.
It would have angered a lesser friend to see that brilliance, those talents, wasted on games and music and poetry, on anything but duty and honor. It would have angered that lesser friend, but Boniface bore with Angriff, hoping against the rising evidence that the heir to the noble Bright-blade line, the son of Emelin and grandson of Bayard Brightblade, would turn to discipline and find his joy in fulfilling every action in accordance to the unbending law of the Measure.
Against all evidence, Boniface hoped. That is, until his friend had come back from the east.
Newly wed, Angriff was missing for a month in the wastes of Estwilde, and all but his young bride Ilys gave him up for lost. Boniface himself had stood on the Knight's Spur with the lovely girl, her eyes red and swollen with a week's crying, and told her to hold back her tears and assume the green mantle of Solamnic widowhood.
He hadn't urged her hatefully, of course. It was, after all, a hard time for the Order, and hostile forces assembled far and near. He had simply figured the chances, which were not at all good.
She had nodded dutifully, had ordered the weaving of the mantle. The season had turned from winter to spring as the seamstress rendered the final embroidery, the ancestral sign of the phoenix. Two nights before Ilys donned the ceremonial mantle and became a widow by Code and by Measure, Angriff Brightblade came out of the Plains of Solamnia, riding slowly up the Wings of Habbakuk toward the gates of the High Clerist's Tower, so muddy and wet that horse and rider were indistinguishable and the first sentries almost drew bow against him, fancying him a centaur.
Ilys hid the mantle at the bottom of her bridal chest-shrouded in cedar, to be drawn forth and worn fifteen years later-and they all rushed to the foregates to greet her husband. The heart of Boniface had been as light as any, his joy as pure and surprising and unlimited…
Until he took the reins from his weary friend and saw the change in his eyes.
Something had happened in the wastes of Estwilde. Angriff never spoke of it, nor of his journey home, but the flippant way in which he treated Oath and Measure horrified Boniface. Law and life, it seemed, were toys to the frivolous Angriff, who from that day forward abided by only the most basic allegiances. He disobeyed superiors when he found their commands foolhardy or merciless, he forgave disobedience readily in his foot soldiers, discouraged trial by combat, and avoided all ceremony because it "no longer interested him."
Even more, it horrified Boniface that Angriff Brightblade answered neither to authority nor fate. The council turned their head to his misbehavior because his swordsmanship had blossomed. It was the only word for it. Angriff Bright-blade did things with a sword that no man had dreamt before him, or since, for that matter. Both he and Boniface had learned from the same master. The movements of their swords were essentially the same, but something happened to a weapon in the hands of Angriff Brightblade. It was as though the sword dictated its own path and Angriff followed it. Something reckless and free had entered his swordplay, and none of Boniface's time-honored rules and classical movements could answer for it.
Boniface watched, and envied, and looked for a time and place to match his skills with that of his old friend.
He found it in the Midsummer Tournament, in the three hundred and twenty-third year since the Cataclysm. Two hundred Knights had assembled at Thelgaard Keep, and for the first time, Angriff and Boniface found themselves in the Barriers of the Sword, the contest in swordsmanship that traditionally occurs on the tournament's second day.
Always before, only one of the three great Solamnic swordsmen would enter the Barriers of the Sword-Angriff one year, Boniface the next, and Gunthar Uth Wistan the third. It was an unspoken agreement, giving a sporting chance to the other Knights and avoiding the rancorous rivalry that can be found at the top level of many endeavors.
Three twenty-three was Angriff's year. Though many a Knight was surprised, and some outraged, to see Boniface's name placed in the Barriers, he was entitled by the Measure and as welcome as any man. So protest was silent, and though Gunthar Uth Wistan refused to speak to Boniface at the banquet the night before, Angriff was generous and friendly and joked about the possibility of their meeting in the Barriers on the morrow.