He stood without assistance, and didn’t argue about the meal; Seri was right, as usual. By the time he’d eaten two bowls of soup, and three slices of bread, he felt solid to himself, firm on his feet. The Marshal-General, he saw, recognized the difference.
“So, lad—are you able to tell me your side of it, or would a night’s rest improve your tale?”
“I’m fine now, sir.” He felt Seri stir, beside him, but she said nothing.
“Good. You’ll need the jacks, I expect, and then come up to my office; Seri can guide you.” The Marshal-General pushed himself up and left the kitchen. Seri gathered the bowls and the end of bread.
“I’ll help,” said Aris, but she shook her head.
“You go clear your mind, Ari. The jacks are across the court, through the gate: there’s torches. And the washstand’s by the well. I’ll do this.” When he came back in, all traces of his late supper had vanished; the kitchen looked vast and bare in the candlelight, warmth radiating from the banked fire on the hearth. The cooks had put beans to soak; the faint earthy smell made him think of cellars and small-gardens. Seri took his hand, one quick clasp, then led him back upstairs. He thought he could find Gird’s office on his own, but he was glad of her company.
She left him in the passage outside the lighted room, with a single hug. Inside the room, the Marshal-General sat with another man, the luap, and when Aris tapped at the doorpost, they both looked up to stare at him. “Come on in, lad,” said the Marshal-General. “Come and tell me your story, and Luap here will write it down.”
Aris felt a mild reluctance to talk in front of the luap—Luap, he must be called—but with the Marshal-General’s eye on him, he could not argue. He took the stool the Marshal-General pointed out, and wondered where to start. What had Seri already said? He didn’t want to bore them. Luap, he noticed, had what looked like an old, rewritten scroll on the board in his lap. Luap smiled at him.
“Start by telling me your name, if you will, and what you know of your history.”
Perhaps Luap had not taken down what Seri said. Aris began with his name, his father’s name, the place of his birth. That was enough of family, he thought, and said, “When I found I could heal—”
“Wait.” Luap held up his hand. “Were you the only child?”
“No, sir. But the youngest, by several years; my next older brother had already begun arms training when I was born. That’s why I was so often alone with Seri and her family and the other servants; my parents were away at court, or visiting other domains, or—by the times I remember at all—at the war.”
“Do you read, then?”
Aris nodded. “Until near the war’s end, I had a tutor my father provided. He taught me to read and write and keep accounts, and I taught Seri—”
“A servant’s child?” Disbelief edged the Marshal-General’s voice at that.
“She’s my friend,” Aris said. “It was more fun, to have someone to read with, to write to, and as for accounts, she is faster than I. It was a game to us.”
“So,” Luap said, with a glance at the Marshal-General, “Seri was your companion in childhood, and much of that was during the war. Did your tutor instruct you in magery?”
“No, sir. He had none himself; he said my father would have me taught later, if I showed any ability. But then my father was killed, and my mother—” He stopped, feeling the heat on his face. His mother could not have known what he overheard; surely no child was supposed to hear things like that. He had tried to forget them.
“Seri said your mother married another lord after your father died in battle,” the Marshal-General said. “Seri said the other lord didn’t want to bother with you. Is that what you think?”
The last time his father had been home, his mother had said those things he wished he’d never heard. I didn’t want the last brat, she’d screamed. It’s not my fault he’s too young to help. There was more, that he carefully did not remember. Then his father had come for that last moment, scooping him into a tight hug, telling him to remember. Not what he’d just heard, he was sure: his father could not have known, any more than his mother, that he’d been awake with a headache. If only you had the magery, his father had whispered. But it’s too late, now. He had been frightened; he had started to cry, partly with pain of his headache and partly with fear, and his father had put him down gently and gone out the door.
Aris realized too much time had passed, and his hands had knotted in his lap as they did when he thought about his mother. “She—she grieved at my father’s death,” he said finally, in a low voice. “The lord Katlinha swore to protect her.”
His throat closed on another memory he had not quite buried. The lord Katlinha’s long black moustaches, which had fascinated him with their stiff curl. The lord’s hand stroking Seri’s cheek and neck, and the drawling voice in which he’d said, “Of course you can bring your sweetling, lad, though you’re really too young to appreciate her. . . .” Something wrong: he had realized suddenly that Seri was frightened, Seri who was never frightened—her eyes dilated, her breathing shallow. “But you’ll both have to mind me,” the lord had said, laughing at something Aris couldn’t understand, because Seri afraid was nothing to laugh about.
Then his favorite pup, the lame one, had chosen that moment to nip the lord’s other hand, and the lord’s hard bootheel had stamped. The pup squealed, Seri jerked free, Aris had flung himself at the injured pup, ignoring the lord’s command to let the beast die. In the end the lord had shrugged. “I’ll have you, lady, if it’s your will, but I won’t bother with that worthless scrap. There’s no mageblood in him; you said you weren’t willing, and no doubt you withheld yourself.”
They had gone, and left him. He and Seri had run off to join the blueshirts, with the surviving servants, and spent the last of the war fetching water and digging trenches for the peasant army. That he could say; he could not say the other.
“The lord didn’t want another son,” he said, half-gasping with the pain of remembering it.
“And your mother?” The Marshal-General’s voice held no anger, but also no space for refusal.
“Didn’t . . . didn’t want me,” said Aris, eyes down. It was his greatest shame, that he had been the kind of boy a mother would not want.
“Did she know you had magery?” asked Luap.
“No, sir. She was sure I had none; my brothers, she said, had shown it younger than I did.”
A silence followed. Aris looked up to see that the Marshal-General’s face had contracted in a black scowl. Luap stared at nothing, across the room. Finally the Marshal-General shook out his shoulders and looked at Aris. “Well—she was wrong, quite clearly. When did you find out what powers you had?”
“It was the puppy.” He hadn’t told them about the puppy; he tried to make it brief, and avoid that difficult moment with Seri. A favored pet, accidentally injured, and the pressure of his grief. “The cowman had already told me I was good with animals,” he said. “I liked the stables and byres; the beasts were quiet with me, and the men showed me how to work with them. But all I’d done was what they told me, until the puppy.” The huntsman had said it was hopeless; the cowman had said the same. Broken spine, soon death, and the sooner the better; the huntsman wanted to put the pup out of its misery. He had burst into tears again, and again an adult had been disgusted with him, though this time not cruel. Yer not cryin’ ’bout the pup, the huntsman had said. Yer cryn’ ’bout yer ma and da and that sun-lost count, may he die in the dark.
He had held the whimpering, shivering pup, that had made such a mess in his arms, and felt Seri behind him, also shivering. Then the familiar prickle he had felt so often before without doing anything—without guessing what it was. His hands itched, stung, moved almost without his knowing. He ran a finger down the pup’s back to the soft pulpiness where the count’s bootheel landed. He tried to imagine what should be there, what it should feel like. The pup rolled in his hands suddenly, squirming, and slapped his face with its wet pink tongue . . . and he’d fallen asleep where he sat, with Seri holding his head.