And even with those whose needs she understood, she felt she was the wrong person to help. She wasn’t the right age, the right status. To be one of the old grannies, you had to be a wife and mother first; you had to give the blood of birthing, the milk of suckling, proving your power to give life to the family, before you could share it abroad. She was no granny; she was barren, a widow, a scarred freak who would not fit in. The comfort she had felt at the dance vanished, and she blinked back the tears that stung her eyes, hoping the others did not notice, and finished her meal. Her past was gone, no use crying over it. That cottage would not rise from the rubble; those poisoned fields would not bear grain in her lifetime, and Parin would not rise from the dead to hold her in his arms, however she dreamed of it. And hers was not the only such loss; the only thing to do was go on. She struggled to regain the vision that had brought her to Fin Panir. She had said she would do what her people needed; if these women needed her, she must be what they asked.
“I don’t think Gird would change the Code that way,” she said slowly. “Not just for me, but because he really does believe in a fair rule for everyone. But I’ll keep my eye on it, how about that?”
“And on that luap of his,” said Arya, scowling. Rahi looked up, startled. He had seemed loyal to Gird, these last years—was he changing?
“What about him?”
Lia sniffed, and Arya’s scowl deepened. “He’s too thick wi’ that Autumn Rose, is what. And that old woman that brought fancy clothes for the altar in the Hall, she’s been telling him he’s a prince—”
Rahi shrugged. “Gird knew that, and told others. So?”
“But she treats him as one. What if he starts thinking he’d rather rule than be Gird’s luap? What if he has another child? What if the other mageborn are turning to him . . . eh?”
Rahi considered this. She had never liked Luap as well as some, or disliked him as much as others; in later years she’d come to think of him as important, even necessary, to the success of Gird’s purposes. A bit too confident in situations where an honest man wouldn’t be confident, but as Gird had said, if the gods could make a commander in war from a plain farmer, anyone could change. Yet—she doubted the gods had anything to do with Luap’s change, if it was a change. “I don’t know,” she said. “You know I don’t like the Rosemage, but Luap—he’s not the same as he was when I first saw him, and he’s not to blame for his father’s acts.”
“If you say so.” Both women had a sullen look Rahi could not interpret; she wondered what Luap had done or said.
“Rahi!” A man’s voice, from door to the courtyard. Marshal Sterin, she remembered after a moment. “When did you reach the city?”
She looked at the angle of sun through the tree in the courtyard. “Perhaps a hand ago.” Then it occurred to her that he had phrased his question curiously. Why? Why “reach the city” instead of “arrive?”
“Th’ old man’s had a bad morning,” Sterin said, coming in. The two women got up, silently, and went back to their work. Sterin sat where they had been. “He’d gone down to the lower market, on some errand, and met an old veteran from Burry.”
She had figured it out for herself; she didn’t want to hear it from Sterin. “He went drinking with him, did he?”
“Yes. We got him home all right, but—” Sterin leaned closer; Rahi noticed that he looked worried. “Did he ever talk to you about Greenfields? About before Greenfields?”
“No.” She had not seen him before Greenfields, except that one glance across the field; she had heard from others that he came down from the hill just before the battle started, and looked, they said, “strange.” By the time she saw him again, they had other things to talk of than the morning—and by the time she thought to ask, a season later, he would not speak of it. Everyone knew he would not speak of it.
“He said something,” Sterin said now. “He was drunk, yes, but his voice changed, and he said things. . . . I wonder if the gods gave him the words.”
Rahi doubted that. She waited; Sterin was silent a moment then told her the rest.
“He said he should have died, at Greenfields, and that all the troubles we have now come because he didn’t.”
“What!”
“Aye, that’s what he said. Plain as if he was in court, giving judgment. ‘I should have died,’ he said, ‘and that’s what’s wrong.’ The gods gave him a vision that day, he said, of a land at peace with him dead, and shattered with war if he wasn’t willing. Well, we were there, you and me, Rahi—we know how he fought. He didn’t save his skin by shirking danger; he and that horse were right in the middle of the battle. When he charged the magelords’ cavalry, I thought sure he’d be spitted.”
“Yes,” said Rahi, trying to remember anything but a confusion of noise and fear and stench. She could remember faces in her cohort, the thrust of pike and spear, the moment she slipped and fell, and someone yanked her up, but she could not remember anything of the shape of the battle. She had heard about Gird’s charge at the cavalry, but hadn’t seen it. All she knew was that it ended, at last, with the old king dead and victory for the peasants.
“So if the prophecy was that he’d have to be willing, I’d say he was—he proved that. Yet does that mean the prophecy was wrong, or he’s remembered it wrong, or is this something new?”
“I don’t know.” Rahi shook her head fiercely when Sterin kept looking at her. “I don’t, I tell you. He gets drunk sometimes, you know that, and drunken men spout nonsense. Why believe it’s prophecy? He may not remember anything of that morning but the end of it.”
“You could ask him,” Sterin suggested. “Maybe he’s willing to talk about it now, the morning after . . . maybe to you, especially. You are his daughter—”
She started to blurt “Not anymore!” as she had so often, insisting on her separation from all that daughter meant, insisting on her status as a yeoman and then a Marshal. But after all she had come here to regain that family name, and angry as she was at him for being drunk at such a time, she could not now deny that he was her father. “I’m a Marshal,” she said, after too long a pause. “Just like you: a Marshal.”
“If something’s gone wrong, something more, we need to know it,” Sterin said. “People heard, Rahi: people heard him say that, in the inn and on the street. They will talk; they will make stories about it. Luap is worried, too,” he finished, as if that would change her mind.
Rahi snorted. “Luap worries: that’s his duty. He thinks he’ll have to change the records, that’s what it is.” But Sterin still looked worried, his blunt honest face creased with it. “All right, I will ask. When he wakes, when I can see him.” Another task set her because she was Gird’s daughter, another burden she’d never asked for and did not want. The entire time she’d been insisting she was only a yeoman like any other, a Marshal like any other, people had expected her to have Gird’s ear: find out this, please make sure he does that, don’t let him do this other. Make him change the Code, don’t let him change the Code, tell him the Code will never work, explain that granges need more grange-set and that the farmer shouldn’t have to pay grange-set in a bad year. She wondered if anyone bothered Luap asking for Gird’s favor—it was his job, after all, to deal with such things.
Sterin left the kitchen, clearly relieved to have handed her the difficulty. The two cooks did not come back to chat, for which Rahi was glad. She wanted a few minutes of peace to think about all this, and decide which end of the tangled knot to grasp. Perhaps she should start with Luap, assuming he hadn’t been drunk, too. She wished she could stay in the kitchen, with its good smells of baking bread and stew and bean soup. She wished she could discuss it, parrion to parrion, with Arya, going back to the comfortable time when the way to chop onions, or season a soup, or preserve fruit, had been the most important topic of the day. She had not cooked, really cooked, for years; she eyed the great lump of dough Arya pummeled and wished she could sink her own hands into it.