“I’m sorry.” He actually sounded sorry. “I went too far, perhaps—I forgot your leg. We’ll talk again later—we must get you upstairs and let the surgeon see that.”
“See what?” A voice in the doorway interrupted. Paks tried to turn her head, but felt too dizzy. Her ears roared.
“She’s got a small wound, Arianya,” said the Training Master.
“Not that small,” said the voice. “It’s bled all over your floor, Chanis. Better take a look.”
Paks tried to focus on the Training Master as he came back around the desk to kneel beside her chair. Her eyes blurred. She heard the two Marshals talking, and then another excited voice, and then felt a wave of nausea that nearly emptied her stomach. She clamped her jaw against that, and roused enough to know that they were carrying her along the passage. Finally the motion stopped, and her stomach quieted. When she got her eyes working again, she was lying flat on a bed, staring at the ceiling. Her mouth was dry, and tasted bad. She rolled her head to one side. That was a mistake. Her stomach heaved, and she hardly noticed the pail someone pushed under her mouth until she was through.
From a distance, someone said, “If she had the sense to match her guts, she’d be fine—”
“I don’t call fainting from a simple cut like that guts, Chanis.”
“She didn’t, and you know it. We all pushed as hard as—”
“Well, however you say it. I still think—”
Closer, someone called her name. “Paksenarrion? Come on now, quit scaring us.” She felt a cup at her lips, and drank a swallow of cold water. Her stomach churned, but accepted it. She opened her eyes again to see the Marshal-General’s flint-gray eyes watching her. Before anyone else could speak, Paks managed to force out her own message.
“I want to join—the Fellowship—even if you send me away.”
Silence followed this. The Marshal-General stared at her. Finally she spoke.
“Why now?”
“Because I was wrong about him—Gird. And so—and so I want to join, and do better.”
“Even if I send you away? Even if you never go beyond yeoman?”
“Yes.” Paks felt as stubborn now on this ground as she had before on others.
“I hope you feel the same when you’ve remade a couple of skins of blood.” The Marshal-General sat back, and grinned. “Gird’s ten fingers! Did you have to lose half the blood in your body to learn sense?”
“I didn’t,” said Paks. She had the curious feeling that her body was floating just above the bed. She knew she understood more than the others, only it was hard to speak. “It isn’t lost—it’s not in the same place, is all.”
“And you’re wound-witless. All right. If you still want to make your vows when you’re strong enough, I daresay Gird will accept them. But that will be some time, Paksenarrion. For now you must rest, and obey the surgeons.”
Not until some days later did Paks hear the full story of that day. She had had no visitors at first but the surgeons, the Training Master, and the Marshal-General. Finally the surgeons agreed that she could move back to her own room. She was surprised at how shaky she felt after climbing the stairs—from one simple cut, she thought. She sat down hard on her bed, head whirling, and leaned back against the pillows. Rufen and Con woke her some time later when they discovered her door open and looked in to see why.
“Paks?”
She woke with a start; the last sunlight came through her window. “Oh—I forgot to shut the door.”
“Are you all right? You look pale as cheese,” said Con. Paks gave him a long stare.
“I’m fine. I just—dozed off.”
“The Training Master said you were back. He said not to bother you, but your door was open—”
“That’s all right.” Paks pushed herself up. She wondered what they were thinking about, and felt her ears going hot.
“I’ve never been so mad in my life,” said Con, moving into the room to sit at her desk. “I’d have taken Cieri apart if I could have—”
“Instead of which, he dumped you—how many times?” Rufen leaned against the doorframe, smiling.
“That doesn’t matter. Listen, Paks, if they’d thrown you out, I’d have—have—”
Paks shook her head. “Con—it’s all right.”
“No, it’s not. It wasn’t fair—we could all see that. I couldn’t believe it, the way he hounded you—and you the best of us. Gird’s flat feet, but I’d have blown up at him days before.”
Paks stared at him in surprise. “But I thought you’d be on their side—I thought you’d agree that it wasn’t fair for me to be here as an outsider.”
Con shrugged. “That! What difference does that make? I’ve been a Girdsman all my life, and I never will be as good a fighter as you are. It’s not as if you were bad: you don’t quarrel even as much as I do. No one’s ever found you doing something underhand or cowardly. They ought to be glad you’re willing to come here at all. And that’s what I told him.”
“And then what?” Paks could not imagine that scene at all.
“And then he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, and until I did I should kindly keep to my own business, and I told him my friends were my business. And he said I should choose my friends with care, and I said I’d learned more from you since you’d come than from him since I’d been here—” Con stopped, blushing scarlet.
“And then,” Rufen put in with a wide grin, “then Cieri said maybe he should have long yellow hair to catch Con’s attention, and Con swung on him, and ended up flat on his back. Cieri asked the others what they thought, and apparently everyone was on your side. I wish I’d been there—I knew I’d regret being in that lower class after you got here. I don’t know if I could have done any more, but—”
“But you shouldn’t have,” said Paks, looking at Con. “He’s—he’s the weaponsmaster, you shouldn’t argue with him.”
“But he was wrong,” said Con stubbornly, his eyes glinting. “Paks, if you’ve got a fault it’s that you’re too willing to be ruled. I know what you’ll say—you’ll say that’s how a good soldier is. Maybe so, for a mercenary company. But we’re Girdsmen; Gird himself said that every yeoman must think for himself. I don’t care if Cieri is the weaponsmaster, or the Training Master, or the Marshal-General, if he’s wrong, he’s wrong, and if I think he’s wrong I should say so.”
“Just because you think he is wrong doesn’t make him wrong,” argued Paks. “How do you know you’re right?”
“I can tell unfairness when I see it,” growled Con.
“How do you know?” Paks persisted. “Sometimes things seem unfair when they happen, but later you can tell they weren’t—so how do you know when something is truly unfair?”
“Well, when it’s—I mean—by Gird, Paks, it’s easier to know than to say. I know Cieri was unfair to you; he kept picking at you, trying to make you mad, and then when you got mad he blamed you for it. And you were hurt, dripping blood all over, and he didn’t even offer to heal it for you.”
Paks shrugged. “If he thought I was wrong, he wouldn’t.”
“But it was his fault. And so it wasn’t fair. Don’t you know anything? Didn’t you ever have brothers or someone in your Company that kept trying to put things on you—surely you know what I mean.”
Paks shrugged again. “Con, I know enough to know that looking for the final fault, who’s really to blame, just keeps trouble alive longer. I shouldn’t have lost my temper, no matter what. If he was wrong to push me that far, it was still my fault. And the Marshal-General told me when I came that they were reluctant to train someone who had given no vows of service.”
“But now you’re joining the Fellowship, is that right?” asked Rufen.
“Yes. The surgeon says I should be up to a bout at Midwinter Feast.”
“How bad is your leg?”
“Not bad. They stitched it up; it’s healing clean. It’s mostly blood loss; I should have tied it up tighter to begin with.” Then she thought of something else. “Con—did some dwarves show up at the field after I left?”