Outside, the day had waned to a moist, cool evening. Luap built up the fire quickly, noticing that Gird still shivered from time to time.
“Are you all right?”
“Just cold.” He sounded tired as well as cold. Luap wondered if that way of travel, which he found exhilarating, felt different for the one who was taken, like a sack of meal in a wagon. “I don’t like caves,” Gird said, peevishly. “They all have something . . . this one that chamber, the gnomehalls their secret passages and centers, and gods only know what in that place you found, whatever it is.” He hitched himself around on the rock, and spread his hands to the fire Luap had built. “And I’m still not sure why you showed me that. Do you know yourself?”
“Not really.” Luap put the kettle on its hook, and added more wood to the fire. He should have brought a keg of ale. That would have kept Gird from asking awkward questions . . . but Gird being Gird might have thought that a suspicious thing to do. “I thought you should know about it; I thought it should not be a secret.”
“Umph. It was meant to be a secret, I’d wager. Meant to be, and kept a secret, all those years, until you stumbled into it. And that’s something I’ve always wondered about—” He coughed, a long racking cough, and Luap offered him water. Gird gulped a mouthful, and coughed again. “Blast it! You’d think I was an old man, hacking and spitting by the fire.” Luap said nothing, in the face of Gird’s shrewd gaze. “So . . . is that what you think?” Luap managed a shrug he hoped looked casual.
“You’re older than I am, but Arranha is older. To us you’re just Gird.” Not quite true; others had commented, this past winter, on that same enduring cough.
“That horse has slowed down,” Gird said, jerking a thumb at the white blur standing hipshot just outside the cave. “He hardly moves out of an amble, these days.” Luap looked at the horse, and met dark eyes that looked no more aged than a colt’s. Gird never admitted anything unusual in his horse, but everyone else realized that it had never been a stray carthorse. Where it had come from, no one knew, but Luap had heard more than one refer to it as “Torre’s mount’s foal.”
“Horses age faster than men,” Luap said, ignoring the snort from the cave entrance. “And you were willing to sit out in that snowstorm longer than I was.”
“That’s true.” Gird prodded the fire with a stick; sparks shot up, and shadows danced on the cave walls. He looked around. “It was homelier with an army in it.”
Noisier and smellier, Luap thought, remembering quarrels and hunger. Now they had plenty of food, warm dry clothes without holes, warm blankets to sleep in. “Sib’s ready,” he said, lifting the lid on that aromatic brew. “We’ll be back to a town tomorrow.” If he was lucky, Gird would not get back to his previous topic. He dipped a mugful for Gird, another for himself, and set the loaf by the fire to warm. They had an end of ham, the mushrooms they’d gathered on the way, a handful of berries, a few spring ramps. Gird drank his sib in three gulps, then held his mug for more. Luap served him, silent and hoping to remain so. He offered a slice of warm bread, with a slab of cold ham. Gird took it as silently, and bit off a chunk.
Silence lasted the meal, then Gird belched and sighed. “Strange place. A long way from here or anyplace I ever saw. They don’t look like the mountains near the gnome princedom. Elves . . . dwarves . . . they will not thank you for sharing their secret, when they find out.”
“I thought perhaps they’d lost it.” That sounded strange, even as he said it. “Forgotten it,” Luap amended. “There’s no sign anyone’s used it.”
Gird blinked. “But you haven’t been watching. How would you know?”
“I—don’t.” He had been sure, from the utter blankness of the chamber in this cave, the empty hall there. No smells of occupation, no stir of air, no sounds. He was sure the place had been waiting for him, would be empty any time he returned to it, until he took others there. If he took others there. His heart quickened, and he took a long breath. He would not think about that now.
“How much sign did we leave?” Gird went on. “In a day or so, whatever snow we tracked in will have dried. That’s large country, out there. You could take an army through this cave, a tensquad a time, and send them out into that, and a day later no one could tell.”
Luap hoped his face showed nothing; he felt the sweat spring out under his arms and on the back of his neck. He cleared his throat and forced a shrug. “But until we know where there is, what good is that?”
Gird nodded. “That’s sense. We’re not wandering folk, any more; we have no need of more lands. There’s plenty amiss here to clean up. You’re right, lad; my mind just wandered a bit. And I should thank you for showing me, not keeping it to yourself. You’re right; someone else should know it exists, someone human, I mean. But it’s lucky we didn’t know during the fighting. Some would’ve wanted to hide from trouble that way.”
He almost told Gird then. His mouth opened; he said the first words that came into his head . . . and they were not those words. “It would have complicated things,” he said, and ducked his head and pretended to yawn. Towers, walls, castles slid through his mind, peopled with mageborn men and women and children, living together in peace, far from the quarrels Gird never wanted to hear about, where he could learn the ways of his powers, and use them to prove they were not dangerous.
“Tires you, does it? Traveling that way?” Gird prodded the fire; Luap managed another yawn as the flames danced high for a moment, and nodded. He was tired but not from that. From being caught in the old trap of Gird’s mistrust, from being penned in too small a pen.
Chapter Nine
Gird came from court as grumpy as Luap had seen him. “Your folk I expected to be difficult; mine I thought had more sense.”
“What now?”
“A petition from over northeast somewhere, to have all the mageborn children tested for magical powers and then destroy them. The magery, not the children. I think. I don’t know how many times I have to tell them—!” He broke off, scrubbing his forehead with a fist as if to wipe out the memory. “It will work in the end; it has to work.”
“Maybe it won’t,” said the Rosemage quietly. “What then?”
“Not another war,” said Gird. “We’ve had enough of that.” That no war didn’t mean no killing they all recognized. “Look at Aris and Seri; they’re fast friends. They get along with both peoples.” The Rosemage opened her mouth, but closed it again. Gird knew, as well as she and Luap, that few mageborn had Aris’s talents, and few peasant-born had Seri’s experience of friendship. You can’t, Luap thought, make an alliance work because two children get along. More likely, Aris would trust too much in his own goodwill, and some superstitious peasant with no goodwill at all would bash his head in for him. That Seri would then gleefully avenge him wouldn’t help at all. He wondered what Gird would do if someone killed Aris as a mageborn—would that finally convince him that the two peoples would never mix? Or would he ignore that as stubbornly as he’d ignored all the other evidence?
“We could leave,” Luap said, as if continuing the conversation interrupted long before. No need to say how or where: Gird had not forgotten that.
“All of you?” Not quite disbelief, but a tone that made clear Gird’s opinion. Root and branch, child and lady and old and young?