Aris shook his head. “No, why should it? The law’s the same for all, and the gods gift whom they will.”
The women looked at each other, the family resemblance clear in the angle of eye, the set of the mouth. “Well, then,” said Suriya briskly, “we’ll get along. Aris, your name is, so I’ve heard—has that a meaning, in mageborn speech?”
“I don’t know,” Aris said. “I think it may have been a child’s name, and I never learned the other.”
“Ah. Well. It’s the wrong time of year to gather most herbs, but we’ve still some collecting to do: barks, roots, that sort of thing. We’ll meet you here at sunrising tomorrow, shall we?”
Aris ran back up to the palace, excited and worried both. He found Seri in the same mood, but in her it came out in chatter. “I like our Marshal,” she said. “I only wish you could be there—but I know what Father Gird means, and he’s right. He’s made me his yeoman-marshal’s helper, already, and I had no idea how much work there is in a city grange. I missed you, but I like it.”
That set the pattern for the next two seasons. Before dawn, both were off to their granges, to learn from the best their Marshals could find. They drilled with the junior yeomen, and both assisted the yeoman-marshals and Marshals in any grange work to be done. Aris spent hours with Suriya and Pir, sorting herbs into packets and sacks, learning to identify by smell dozens of different dried leaves, roots, barks. They taught him to brew some into thick dark teas to drink, and mash others to a paste with lard, to be spread on the skin. He went with Suriya to the people who asked her help. Many times his own gift did not wake; he simply watched as she applied her herbs, and saw how her very presence soothed the worried families. At night, back in the old palace with Seri, they compared notes. Her days, spent almost entirely in grange work, were very different from his. Beyond the usual drill, her Marshal had begun giving her extra classes in weapon skills. The first time she was allowed to use a sword, she came back almost glowing with glee.
“But Seri—” Aris didn’t know how to disagree with her; in all their life he never had. But swords were for hurting people; he knew she could not really want that. Not Seri, whose warmth was almost a healing magic in itself. Besides, swordfighters—soldiers—died younger than most.
“I am not becoming a bloodthirsty warrior,” she said, almost angrily. “You’re as bad as my Marshal. Stopped in midswing, he did, to ask what I was grinning about and scold me for it.”
“I know you’re not bloodthirsty,” Aris said, rubbing her shoulder where a knot of pain resisted his fingers. “That’s why I worry. If you wear a sword, someday you’ll have to use it, and you’ll feel bad about it.”
“I’ll feel worse if I don’t know how, and get killed. Or if others get killed because I didn’t learn enough. The Marshal-General didn’t like killing people, but he did it. He did it as quick and clean as he could.” Seri, unlike Aris, had actually watched some of the final battles, despite being warned off more than once by the rear ranks. She had come back white-faced and shaky, but ready to help tend the wounded. Aris had stayed near the fires, tending the wounded as they came from the field as best he then knew, unaware that the pounding headache and itching of his palms came from something more than tending smoky fires and boiling whatever herbs someone gave him.
“I don’t want you to die,” Aris said softly.
“I won’t,” she said. “I will work hard, and be very good.” It should have sounded arrogant, but it didn’t.
By the time Suriya was ready to send Aris and Pir out to collect the early summer herbs in the fields far from the city, Gird had decided that the two should live away from the palace, in or near their granges. Aris moved his small pack down to Suriya’s house, and slept on a pallet in the kitchen. He had been called out at least once every hand of days for a healing; it would be simpler to live here. But he knew he would miss Seri. The first time he had healed in Suriya’s presence, she had gasped and turned pale. Now she knew what to do, what he needed of rest, quiet and food afterwards. But her hands, warm and strong as they were, were not Seri’s hands; he never felt the same afterwards until, in his rare free time, he could get up to the grange where she lived and worked, and tell her what had happened. She seemed cheerful enough, but her face always lighted up when he came, as if she, too, needed the familiar audience for her own tales.
The young man strode into the courtyard like someone who had never been thwarted. Marrakai. Luap struggled against a lance of envy that pierced him. He had known, as a boy, what the Marrakai were; he had been taught, in those early years, the high nobility of both realms. He fought the envy down, refused that easy resentment. Marrakai, according to Gird, had lost their magery early, and adapted. Gird no doubt thought he had much to learn from the Marrakai. Perhaps he did, though he was sure that learning to live with the loss of a talent was not the same as learning not to use one.
The young man went to one knee before Gird, surprising everyone, including Gird; Luap saw the flush of red that darkened his neck.
“Get up, young Marrakai: we don’t do that.”
“You have my respect, Marshal-General.” He stood straight now, almost quivering in eagerness for something . . . Luap could not imagine what. What could a man like that need from Gird?
“Aye, well . . .” Gird rubbed the back of his neck with one broad hand. “You have mine as well, and your father. How is he?”
The young man grinned. “He’s still in some trouble with the king, Marshal-General. For all the king needs his support, he wishes it need not be so.”
“That bad, eh?” Gird waved the others aside, called Luap with a look, and sat heavily on the bench beneath the plane tree. “Here—sit and talk.” He reached beneath the bench and pulled out a water jug. “Thirsty?”
“No, sir—Marshal-General.” The young man leaned back, and stripped off his dusty gloves. “My father thinks the king will settle. He’s not like the old one; he’s got sense and no wish to evil. But he finds it hard to forgive my father’s support of the peasants.”
“I thought your father was going to stay at home and pull his woods up around his ears.”
The young man shook his head. “That was not his nature, Marshal-General, as I think you know. He could no more ignore a war than a fine horse can ignore a race . . . it began with sanctuary given to fugitives from other domains.”
Luap watched the Kirgan closely. The boy had Gird’s confidence and no wonder: he hung on Gird’s every word, eyes wide with admiration. Luap eyed the thick, lustrous cloth of his tunic, the oiled leather, finely tooled, of his belt, the carved bone hilt of the dagger in his obviously new boot. He remembered cloth like that, boots like that; the boy was rich, and had enjoyed a lifetime of such riches . . . which was fine; Luap could understand that. What he could not understand, or accept, was the way Gird accepted this youth, and his equally rich and powerful father, as friends.
I have served you honestly, he said silently toward the back of Gird’s head, and pushing aside the memory of that time when he hadn’t. And I would have been this boy’s master . . . but you never trust me this way.
“But in spite of that your father is satisfied?” Gird asked. Luap had already told him that, as had the first messengers back from troubled Tsaia. “He is sure the new king has no such powers?”
“He swears it,” the Kirgan said. “He considers the Mahierian branch the best choice, for all it angers the Verrakaien.” Luap wished he knew more about the Verrakaien, who seemed, by the rumors, to be as powerful as the Marrakai but utterly inimical to them. Rumor also gave them the largest remaining store of magery, along with whispered tales of its source. He watched the young man’s face, wondering how Gird was so sure the Marrakaien were telling the truth.