Before he could say anything, she said, “I was a fool to wear armor on such a day, with no reason.” Her gloves were dark with sweat. “Although I suppose I could consider it proper training. That’s what I was taught: you don’t know the day you will need to fight, so you must be trained for cold and heat both.”
Luap smiled “I must say I’m glad I’m not wearing that.”
“So you should be.” She reined up beside him. “Gird’s right: all these pretensions of our ancestors were more trouble than they were worth. There you are, in soft pants and shirt, with a hat that shades your head instead of cooking it—and I wanted to feel grand, so I’m basted in my own juice.”
“Well, you’ll be back in the city soon, and into a cool bath—”
“No such luck. I’ve agreed to teach a class in longsword—that’s why I’m back so early—and while I can get out of this cooking kettle, I’ll be in a hot banda soon enough.”
They rode on to the city gate, and almost at once heard the unmistakable grumble of an unhappy crowd. Luap might have turned up an alley to avoid it, but the Rosemage pressed ahead, straight toward the noise. Luap shrugged and legged his horse up beside hers. Traffic thickened around them, slowed, became the back of a crowd. Luap stood in his stirrups, peering over the nearest to see the usual small opening in the middle. A man had hold of a boy; and several people were yelling. He could not make out the faces at that distance. Just another brawl, he thought, and would have backed his horse away. He looked at the Rosemage; she turned to him and nodded.
“We need to do something about this.”
“Us? Why not a Marshal?”
“Didn’t you recognize that boy? He’s one of ours.” She urged her horse on; around it, people backed away, scowling and muttering Luap followed, getting the same scowls and mutters, and handsigns that he knew all too well. These were the peasants who never forgot or forgave anything the mageborn had done; his skin prickled all over: Slowly, pace by pace, the horses forced their way into the crowd. One man, enormous of girth and shoulder, refused to give way.
“We don’t want you here,” the big man said. Luap thought he remembered the man as a troublemaker in the last assembly. At least he had the same build and resolute scowl as the one who had stood up in the back and told Gird he was an old fool to trust the surviving mageborn.
“Perhaps not, but I am here, and I’m staying. What is this?”
“None o’ yer business, magelover! Think we don’t know how ye put it in Gird’s ear, and you with that fancy magelady at yer side?” That was someone much shorter, who ducked quickly into the crowd; even from horseback, Luap could not see the man’s face.
“That’s right, Luap,” the big man said. “You always claimed to be no threat, a true luap, even a steer, but day after day we see you with that sorceress and that old mageborn priest. Think we don’t know you lust for magery like a boar for a sow? Think we don’t know you hoard every scrap of power Gird gives you, may his eyes clear? Seems every time he sits in a court, he’s come more to favor your people: we know who to blame for that. And every year he ages; he’s not half the man he was the day of Greenfields, but you haven’t a handful of gray hairs yet. What’re ye doin’, stealing his life from him bit by bit?”
An ugly sound, not quite a roar, from the crowd, showed their agreement. Luap’s horse flattened its ears and tail, and shifted nervously under him. He could not have spoken, for the rage and contempt that filled him—these dolts, these fools, to think this of him, to blame Gird for partiality to the mageborn, when anyone with sense could see that Gird trod a knife-edge between the resentments of his people.
Anger roared through him, a cleansing wind that swept away the memory of his own half-loyalties, his own errors.
“I would give him my years, if it would help,” he said, in such a tone that the crowd stilled. He meant it at that moment. “I am but a child, and he my wise elder. What is this, that you will not let Gird’s luap know?”
“A mageborn brat causing trouble, then,” said the man, in the tone of one who means And what will you do about it?
The crowd opened just a little, showing a scrawny lad, much-bruised, in the grip of a husky man with his other fist cocked. Parik, that was, a member of one of the three granges in the lower city. His scribe’s mind read the details off the last grange report: Marshal Donag, veteran of the war in its last year, and known for his dislike of the mageborn. Gird had commented on that when choosing another grange for Aris’s training; Donag had later complained that he spoiled the boy. Parik he did not know, though he remembered the man’s name on the grange rolls; he could not remember his craft or trade. He could not recognize the boy with all those bruises.
“Let him go.” The Rosemage, in her gleaming armor, shone in the sun almost as if she had called her light. The crowd shifted slightly away from her, enlarging the central space. Even the man barring her way moved aside. “Is it Gird’s way to batter children?”
“He’s no child. He’s a mageborn demon; he put fire on me.” The man shook the boy, who wobbled and nearly fell.
“Let him go,” Luap said, this time releasing enough of his own magery so that the man obeyed, as if his hands were not his own. The boy staggered across the open space to the Rosemage, bleeding from a broken nose and split lip, one eye rapidly swelling shut. She steadied him; Luap could feel her anger’s warmth, like a banked fire, and hoped the boy would realize she was not angry at him. He was wondering how to get the boy to safety, how to send word to Gird, when he saw a disturbance in the crowd across the way. He saw sidelong glances, heard the murmurs that ran faster than an old man could walk, Gird. He hoped fervently that it was.
The crowd parted for him, reluctantly it seemed, and Luap watched that heavy-shouldered figure stalk into the sunlit opening. He could think of nothing to say; he watched Gird eyeing Parik and his bruised knuckles, the Rosemage and bruised boy. It had gone far beyond I-told-you-so, and Luap felt no satisfaction in that. Gird’s glance had lost none of its edge; raked the crowd, and Luap saw many of them flinch from it.
“Well?” His voice cracked; Luap suddenly felt his own throat close in pity. Gird had not been well—really well—since Midwinter Feast, when he’d insisted on showing everyone how to do the Weaving dance in the snow, in and out of all the doors of the palace. It was monstrous that they would not let him rest and heal, that they kept pecking at him with one little problem after another.
Parik, insolent to the bone, tried to pass it off as the boy’s fault, a misuse of magery, and then insulted Gird into the bargain, mocking the old man’s sayings. Luap saw Gird turn pale, and hoped it was anger—it would have been anger, in the old days, but now it might be illness. Gird’s next words did not reassure him; Gird’s voice shook. The crowd stiffened; they did not quite growl. Parik pushed his luck, as such men always did, Luap thought, with a viciousness intended to break Gird’s authority completely. He felt so angry he could hardly keep from attacking Parik—but Gird would not want that. He must fulfill Gird’s trust, at least until Gird died. He was promising himself that he would kill Parik without pity the moment Gird died when Gird surprised him again.
Across that space, in the face of those who despised both of them, Gird met his eyes, nodded, and said, as casually as if they were relaxing after dinner; “You were right, and I was wrong. Are you still of the same mind?”