Bayard hid a smile politely and nodded. Father never noticed, his eyes on the floor in front of him.
“Let’s face it, he tends toward being oafish and petty and not altogether pleasant. He’s twenty-one, Sir Bayard, no boy, and not liable to grow out of such things.
“Had he any appeal or decency as a child, he would have been a Knight by now. Had he been a peasant, he might well have been responsible for a wife and several children.”
And had he been a dog or a horse, he would have been long dead, past causing trouble. My hiding place was too cramped. I shifted my position, but in doing so scraped my belt against stone, making a sound I could swear they had heard in Palanthas, in Pax Tharkas, at the ends of the world. I held my breath and waited.
Bayard leaned back in his chair, glanced smoothly and quickly my way. I was sure he had noticed me. But immediately he turned back to Father, who was droning on as if nothing had happened.
“All I am saying, Bayard,” the old man continued, “is that by twenty-one Alfric should have put away ‘boyish error.’ By his age I was a Knight of the Sword, held with a small band the Paths of Chaktamir, waded to my knees in the blood of the men of Neraka . . .”
“And those, Sir Andrew, were special times, in which special men were the actors,” Bayard responded smoothly, respectfully. “I’ve heard tales of your doings at Chaktamir. That is why I believe that, regardless of how little promise they have shown, there may be merit yet in a son of yours. After all, blood will tell in such things.”
Father reddened behind the graying red of his beard, never one to accept a compliment easily.
“Damn it, Sir Bayard, I wanted these boys to have their ticket out of Northern Coastlund, here at the swampy end of the world. Get ’em down into Solamnia, into adventure and swordplay and righting wrongs and all. My middle son’s some kind of . . . monk, and the youngest has all the markings of a miscreant . . .”
Bayard glanced quickly in my direction.
“You judge them harshly because of your high standards,” he suggested, but Father wasn’t buying.
“And the oldest. . . a surly lump in my larder. It’s enough to make an old man rampage.”
“My offer still stands, Sir Andrew,” Bayard replied, a bit impatiently. “A son of yours—I say now, any son—as my squire. He’ll find me a resourceful teacher.” He leaned back and steepled his fingers, turning ever so slightly to face the fireplace.
I shrank into the stonework of the chimney, back in the safe and ashy gloom. It was there that I suddenly had other problems. A rat, awakened or flushed from hiding by my adventures in the tunnel, scuttled across my foot and huddled, half-terrified, in the dark corner of the fireplace. I yelped, leaped, and hit my head against brick and blackened stone, showering myself in ash and cinders.
It was then, naturally, that the dog came barreling toward my hiding place, sure that he had cornered something wild and perhaps edible. I reached out with my foot, kicked the rat into the path of the oncoming dog, and scrambled up into the passageway, the sound of snarls, shouts, and last desperate squeals fading behind me as I slid into the closet of my room, changed my sooty, incriminating clothes for an innocent nightshirt, and slipped into bed, filling the late morning and the empty wing of the castle with the sound of false snoring.
The discussion continued in my absence, the two Knights reaching the worst possible decision. Father was convinced that the burglar had ambushed us from inside the room, let in by Alfric’s complete inattention. Despite Bayard’s assertion that Alfric required understanding. Father passed sentence rapidly and angrily.
Big Brother was to seethe about under house arrest, confined within the walls of the moat house. From there, unlike the end of a rope or the depths of a dungeon, he could quite possibly savage my person with one of any number of available weapons.
For it was Alfric’s opinion that I should have spoken out—should have taken the blame for the whole mishap.
Such is the ingratitude of brothers.
Needless to say, it unsettled me these days to hear my brother’s footsteps coming up the hall. Alfric was surly, blaming me cloudily for the theft of the armor, though the wine and the blow on the head had made him hazy as to what happened that fateful night.
Haziness, however, never stayed his fist or his well-aimed foot. So I would hide for hours in the secret tunnels and alcoves, cowering in ashes and occasionally booting rats to a curious dog, for I knew that of all creatures in the moat house, I was in the greatest danger. I wore disguises, once passing quite effectively for a chimney sweep. When I was not masked or hidden, I put on the face of innocence, doubled my efforts at my chores, and kept close to either Father or Brithelm.
I always kept my hands in my pockets, so that nobody would ask what had become of my naming ring. I was reduced to keeping company with Brithelm, and listening to his speculations on the gods. I tried not to fall asleep.
“Galen, what about the nature of prophecy?” he would ask, feeding the birds in the moat house courtyard, benign smile on his face and red hair askew over a patched red robe, looking for all the world like some outrageous scarlet fowl that had taken up with the pigeons and the ground doves.
“I don’t know, Brithelm. Watch out for that trough.”
At the last moment my brother stepped around certain immersion, still casting corn on the ground and whistling to himself.
“I mean, prophecy is a hall of mirrors, one reflecting on another and all reflecting back to the eye at the center of watching.”
“You know, you’re right, Brithelm. Don’t step on the dog.”
“These birds, Galen,” Brithelm mused, stepping over a terrier sleeping in the shadow of the trough. The dog paddled its feet, running in dreams.
“In the Age of Light the clerics foretold disaster by following the formations of birds on the wing. Sometimes in my sanctuary . . .”
“Back in Warden Swamp? I’ve heard that it’s overgrown and that a full cypress tree can grow there in a matter of weeks; the air is so humid that man-eating fish fly through it in search of their prey.”
Brithelm paused, looked straight at me while he kept on walking toward the cistern. I took him by the arm, steered him gently toward the stairway that mounted the south wall of our little run-down fortress.
“One man’s swamp . . . ,” he began, and laughed gently, tossing a final handful of corn toward a pursuing band of pigeons, “is another’s hermitage. Sometimes in the mornings there are a dozen quail you can see in the open, little brother. They’ll eat out of your hand. And there are dark things, too, but the legends magnify them.
“So birds are the most famous of auguries. Then there are leaves, the unruffled pool of water where you stare until you see beyond the reflections . . .”
Such was the time I spent in pure malarkey, while the eldest brother plotted and schemed, whined and pleaded, though he never could remember enough to fix me with the blame for anything. Still, he bent the old man’s ear with conjecture. After a morning in superstition with Brithelm, I often caught Father scowling at me suspiciously from the head of the table at lunch, while Alfric scowled at me over bottles and venison from his seat of disgrace at the far end of the hall. It was like being caught between mirrors.
So it went, with Father angry at Alfric’s negligence and growing suspicious of me, though the evidence never seemed to come in. Bayard, too, seemed to lose his good humor as the moat house hung for weeks in ominous suspension.
It was not until we heard of the killing that Father lost his temper completely. Another group of peasants came to the moat house, a crowd this time, bearing the worst news so far. It was shortly after dawn. Bayard had already left on his daily search for the rampaging armor thief, but the peasants caught Father throwing the dogs out of his chair in the great hall so that he might hold audience in dignity. The oldest of the peasants, a woman of eighty if she were a day, dressed in a homespun mantle against the unnatural cold, and grayed and warted like a storybook witch, was their appointed speaker. And she wasted no time, launching into her speech before the last mastiff hit the floor howling.