After the meeting, Rahi was packing her things for the journey back to her grange when Sidis sought her out. “I wanted you to know it wasn’t you I objected to, or any of the women who were actually veterans,” he said “But most women up where I’m from didn’t fight—in fact, most of the men didn’t fight. They see the grange drill as something imposed from outside; it’s the women who’ve pestered me to send their daughters home.”
“So they don’t see the worth of it, eh?” Rahi sat down, and waved at him to do the same.
“Aye. It was on the edge of the magelords’ holdings, and even I remember that things weren’t too bad until after the war started. That’s when our Duke—the Duke that was—raised the fieldfees and imposed stiffer fines. We had less bad to fight about, and more to lose, and there’s feeling now that the grange system’s as bad as the magelords’ stewards ever were.”
Rahi whistled. “Perhaps they don’t think they need anyone at all, is that it?”
Sidis twisted a thong and untwisted it. “That’s what it seems, most times. They’re good folk, but they don’t look ahead much, and they think they can deal with their own lives better than anyone else.” He looked troubled, someone telling an unpleasant truth about people he cared for. “I’ve wondered myself, now the magelords are gone, what we need all this drill for. I come here, and you all seem to know things—it comes clearer, like. But how I’ll explain it to them—”
“Maybe they should do without a grange for awhile.” Rahi leaned back against the wall, watching his face. He didn’t say anything at first. “If they don’t want it, if they aren’t supporting it—maybe they have to feel the need first. Da always said you can’t convince an ox it will need water in the middle of the work when you show it a bucket at dawn. You could find another place . . . even here.”
“But—” His hands worked the thong back and forth, back and forth. “It’s losing, that is. Giving up. If there’s a grange somewhere, it should stay—”
“Not if it’s not wanted.” Rahi felt her way into this argument, hoping she was right. “We’re not here to make things worse, after all. The granges started because people wanted them. It’s true there has to be some kind of law—if those folk come to market in a town with a grange, they’ll have to abide by the Code. But if it sticks in their throats, why not let be?”
“The other Marshals,” Sidis muttered. “They talk of their granges growing, of founding new bartons. They’ll think I did something wrong.”
Rahi opened her mouth to deny that, and then stopped. To be honest, she thought he’d done something wrong. He’d come into the war, and then his position as Marshal, without any real conviction. And if she thought so, others might as well. She could not reassure him with her dishonesty. “If you made a mistake,” she said, picking her words as carefully as she would have picked through a bundle of mixed herbs, sorting them, “—if you did something wrong, it sounds to me that your folk have made mistakes as well. You couldn’t have done all the wrong. Our whole system began with the people, the peasants. If they aren’t with us, we have nothing. Pretending we do leads right back into what the mageborn did, all that pretense about the lords protecting the people, and the people serving the lords. If the folk in your grange don’t want a grange, it won’t be a real grange no matter what you do.”
His brows had drawn together, but his hands were still. “Some do—at least—”
“If they want it, they will make it work. Think about it.”
“What would you think, Raheli, Gird’s daughter, if I let the grange go—closed it, or however it’s done?”
Rahi looked past him, seeing against the far wall of the room a stream of images from the war, and the years after. What might it have been like, to live in a village with a better lord than Kelaive? Or with no lord at all? Could there be farmers, village folk, who did not understand in their bones what the grange was for, and how it worked? Apparently so. “I would think you had tried,” she said. “I hear the truth in your voice. But it’s not my decision.” She could not tell what Sidis thought of what she said; he merely nodded and went away, leaving her to ride out of Fin Panir later that day still wondering.
She took that uncertainty with her back to her own grange, and looked more carefully at the people who did not choose to come. She had heard no grumbling for some time, but did that mean satisfaction? Or that people grumbled where she could not hear them? She was not surprised when a letter from Fin Panir reported that Sidis’s grange had dissolved, and he himself had given up his Marshalship. She hoped they would fare well, and hoped that her words had not formed his decision.
It was half a year before she came to Fin Panir again. Luap had finished his Life of Gird, and the Council wanted her approval. From the tone of the letter, she wondered what the other Marshals thought of it. They might have sent a copy, instead of a letter, surely it would have been easier to send the scrolls here, instead of dragging her to Fin Panir in the busiest time of the year.
A copy of the original awaited her in Fin Panir; the young yeoman who led her to a small room opening on an interior court pointed to it. “Luap said that was for you, as soon as you arrived.”
Rahi stretched out on the room’s narrow bed, and unwrapped the scroll. Luap’s fine, graceful handwriting moved in even lines; she found it easier to read than her own crabbed script. “In the days of the magelords, in the holdings of one Count Kelaive, was born a child who would grow into Gird Strongarm, the savior of his people.” Rahi wrinkled her nose at that. A bit flowery, not much like Gird himself.
She read on, her thumb moving down the scroll and holding it open. It couldn’t be exactly like Gird, she reminded herself, because Luap hadn’t known the young Gird. Even she had only village tales to rely on. But she felt uneasy, as if a hollow bubble were opening in her chest. She could not say, at first, just what it was, but something . . . something was definitely wrong. She put the scroll down and lay back for a moment. Would anyone else notice it? Did it matter, when so far as she knew, no one else had survived from their village?
She picked up another scroll, and began reading. This was set during the war; Gird was enjoying a mug of ale in a tavern—she stopped again, trying to remember. Tavern? When had they been in a tavern? The drinking she remembered had been in various camps in the woods; by the time the army was taking towns, he had not been drinking that much. She looked at the scroll more closely. It was, she decided after a bit, intended to be funny: the great war-leader relaxing with ale, becoming excited, almost starting a fight. Her shoulders felt tight; she remembered how dangerous Gird could seem, in those rare drunken rages from her childhood. It had not been funny at all. And worse than that . . . this was not real; she could think of no time when it really happened. She scanned along the scroll, looking for some reference, and found it. This was supposed to have happened after the capture of Brightwater, and before Shetley, but she remembered that time as clearly as the past half-year . . . Gird had not been in any tavern; he had been off trying to persuade brigands to join the army.
Luap had made it up. He had made up a good story, as men often did, but then he had put it in this work, which was supposed to tell Gird’s story for all time. Rahi felt cold, then hot. How much had he made up? Was that what bothered her about the first scroll? She snatched it up, and read it carefully, with growing anger.
“You’re not telling the truth!” Rahi’s voice went up. Luap managed not to wince visibly. He had been afraid she would not appreciate what he had done, how he had turned the story of an ordinary farmer-turned-soldier into the shape of legend.