“But why did you show us?” Aris asked. He was sure it had, that the horse had its own reasons for revealing to them what it concealed from others. Without a change in shape or color, this time, the eyes opened, and the horse looked deliberately from one to the other. Aris felt the hair rise all over his body, as if he’d been dipped in cold water. He felt even more alert, as if some great danger had passed near. Every sense came to him sharply. He could hear a horse five stalls down licking the last oats from its manger, and another slurping water. The voices of men in the yard outside, bantering about their work, were almost painfully loud. He could smell everything, from the pungency of the horses to the smoke to the last apples frost-pierced on the trees in the meadow. He could feel the clothes on his body, the slick hair of the horse’s neck, the pressure of the air in his nose that promised an autumn storm.
He glanced at Seri. She looked as if she felt the same. Her hair stood out from her braid as it did on cold clear winter days, more alive than some people’s faces. Now she looked the old horse full in the face. “We’re supposed to do something? We are? But we’re newcomers; we don’t know anyone. What—”
As if a large, warm hand had touched his shoulder, Aris felt calm rest on him. Not his calm: the horse’s. The horse shook its head sharply. “Not yours, then,” he said. “A god?” No answer, but it must be. A god wanted something from them, which meant they must give it, whatever it was. And they were to be ready—that much was clear—but whatever it was would come later, not now.
The gray horse yawned again, and when it was through stood looking even more aged and decrepit, if possible. “So,” said Gird from behind them. “You’ve found my old horse.” Aris managed not to look from the horse to Gird and back again. “He’s a good campaigner,” Gird said, rubbing the horse’s poll, “but getting long in the tooth.” The eye nearest Aris opened an instant; he felt the horse’s secret laughter. “You said you liked cows, boy,” Gird went on. “Come see ours. We’ve got two of the dun milkers and four of the spotted ones.” Aris glanced back as they left the horse stables and saw the gray horse watching them.
Gird lavished the attention on the cows that Aris and Seri had given the old horse. He and the cowman discussed them in detail, from their broad black nostrils to their carefully curried tails. Gird ran his hands over them, looking inside their ears, stroking their broad sides and velvety flanks, feeling the udders for any inflammation. Aris liked the smell of cows, and their complacent belief that grass counted for more than anything else, but he could see that Gird’s affection went beyond that. Finally Gird was done, and led them out into the meadow west of the palace complex. A few fruit trees, the remnants of a larger orchard, clung to their last leaves and some wizened apples.
“If you could live as you liked,” Gird said, “what would you do between healings?”
Aris thought. “Well—I could work in the stables—or I suppose with your—with Luap in the copying rooms.”
Gird looked at Seri. “I’d like to work with the horses,” she said. “If Aris is, that is.”
Gird nodded, as if that confirmed something he’d been thinking about. “That’s about it. You two have lived and worked together for years, but—but if one of you died, what would the other do? You, Aris, are willing to do whatever’s needful; you have the mageborn courtesy; you won’t say what you want most, and I’m not sure you know. Seri knows, and will say it, but then thinks she must stay with you. I would not split brother from sister or friend from friend, but the two of you need to learn that you can live out of each other’s pockets.”
Aris felt cold. Would Gird send Seri away?
“I’ve been talking to Luap and the Marshals,” Gird went on. “I don’t like to see younglings cramped inside with scribe’s work. Unless that’s what you wanted most, I wouldn’t have it so. You both need grange discipline, and you both need a chance to find your own balance. So here’s my thought.” He looked from one to the other, as if to be sure they were paying attention. Aris could hardly hear over the blood pounding in his ears.
“You, Aris, need to know herblore as well as your own magicks, and you need to be around others who heal in different ways. There’s a grange in the lower city that has three women with parrions of herblore in it; they have agreed to teach you what they know, and the Marshal can supervise your use of your own healing. You will be a junior yeoman, as you were in your own barton; you will spend your days in grange work and healing and study. And you, Seri, seem like to grow into a Marshal someday. For you I’ve found a grange with a healthy group of junior yeomen; if you have the abilities I suspect, you will be a yeoman-marshal soon enough. And yes, before you ask, these are separate granges. But both are in Fin Panir, and you will live here, near me, for the first year. You will still be together part of every day; but you will learn to trust others, and work with others, not just yourselves.”
This was so much better than what Aris had feared that he felt himself flushing with relief. “Thank you, sir,” he said. Gird smiled at him, obviously well-pleased.
“All right, then,” he said, “let’s go down to the city, and I’ll introduce you.”
Marshal Kevis of Northgate Grange welcomed Aris as warmly as any mageborn could expect. “A healer, the Marshal-General tells me. Gods, lad, if we’d known about you during the war! But you would have been too young, then, I suppose?”
“I didn’t know what I could do until later—at least, I thought it was only animals.”
“Gird said that, yes. Well. Suriya is our oldest herblore-healer; she wants to meet you at drill tonight. Her daughter Pir and her niece Arianya are the others. We have the same drill-nights as the other granges here, and I’ll expect you to attend unless you’re sick—or do you get sick?”
“Yes, Marshal,” Aris said. “I don’t think I can heal myself—if I could, I wouldn’t have gotten sick in the first place.”
“That’s sense. Well, then, be at drill, study healing with Suriya, and when someone needs your skill, come and tell me. If Suriya has nothing for you to do, there’s always work at the grange. Gird says you’ll be staying up the hill, with them—even so, you’re to come to me before you go healing someone.”
Aris nodded. He felt half-dressed, with Seri off somewhere else, but he understood what Gird was trying to do. Not split them apart, but teach them to grow on their own. When he asked, the Marshal had several chores he could do that day, until time for drill. The yeoman-marshal, a young man a few years older than Aris, put him to work chopping wood and carrying water.
Suriya was a gray-haired woman who looked old enough to be his grandmother. She laid a gnarled hand on either side of his head, and hummed, then nodded sharply and spoke to the Marshal. “He’ll do. The Marshal-General was right, Alyanya bless him: Here, lad, see what you think of this—” She handed him a small cloth bag of aromatic herbs. Aris sniffed.
“I don’t know much, but it smells like what my folk called allheal and itchleaf.”
“So it is, lad, with a pinch of dryhand, for them as gets the sweats without need. Scribes use that sometimes, that shouldn’t, for a natural sweat keeps the body pure, but they don’t like smudges on their scrolls.” She waved at two other women, who came nearer. “This is my daughter, Pir, and my niece who’s just come into her full parrion. You’ll learn from her first, if it doesn’t bother you to learn women’s things.”