“If I find out,” said the other, “I’ll knock his nob for ’im, that I will. My da told me it was more work than it sounded in songs, and he was right. We’ve climbed five hills a day, I’d wager, and haven’t walked down but one.”
“And that one muddy,” said the first yeoman. “Wi’ rocks at the bottom.” He crunched the bone of his chicken leg and sucked the marrow noisily, then belched with satisfaction.
“Rocks!” said the second. “I’ll tell you about rocks—” Then, as Aris raised an eyebrow, he fell silent. Their Marshal’s blue cloak swirled past, then the yeoman resumed, in a lower voice. “Like to broke my legs, I did, and the old man says ‘That’s what eyes is for, lad, to look where you put your feet.’ ”
Aris gave Seri a long took; she blushed and wiped her mouth and fingers with bread. He knew where the Marshals had found that idea, and who to blame. He knew she would have confessed, challenging the man to thump her if he could, had the Marshals not told them to keep quiet about whose idea it was. Once they’d decided the idea had merit, it hadn’t taken them long to put it into practice. Aris had been thinking of maneuvers in the spring, marching over soft green grass under warming skies. He had imagined himself setting up a clean tent to which the injured would come for treatment. Instead, the granges in Fin Panir, all four of them, were sent out in the cold after-harvest autumn storms, to practice moving engagements in the hills southwest of the city. Three days’ march to the hills had taught them all how little they knew of supply and camp organization (the veterans enjoyed pointing it out) and the hand of days in the hills proper had been a revelation even to them.
Aris took another hunk of bread. So far he hadn’t been scared, except of not keeping up, but he had been cold, wet, muddy, tired, stiff, and hungry. He hadn’t been needed to heal anything worse than blisters and bruises, for which most of the yeomen had their own pet remedies. Instead of a healer’s tent, he found himself carrying a staff just like everyone else, and doing the same camp chores he had done as a boy. Even though he and Seri had been with the peasant army, even though he had once lived a much harder life, the years he’d lived in Fin Panir had taken the edge off. And tomorrow they faced the three days’ march back, into the teeth of the winter wind. He wondered if they’d get to sleep tonight, or if the Marshals had some surprise planned for them, as they had on other nights. He hoped not. His eyes felt gluey.
Luap hardly believed what he saw, the Rosemage and Raheli eating elbow-to-elbow at the campfire, and both enjoying it. He was not sure what he felt. On the one hand, the two of them quarreling could knot his stomach. But on the other . . . he had always been able to move one by invoking the other’s opinion. What if they really agreed? What if they became (he shuddered) friends? The Rosemage had always gotten along with Gird better than he did himself; if she made friends with Rahi, his whole rationale for withdrawing the mageborn could fall through.
Everyone knew how those two had loathed each other; if they could become friends, so could any other mageborn/peasant pair.
Beside them were Aris and Seri, a pair he already found inconvenient. He wanted Aris to come with him; he did not want Seri. But he knew Aris wouldn’t leave her behind. He needed the Rosemage; he needed Aris’s healing talents. He did not need Gird’s troublesome daughter or that curly-headed young warleader who should have been born early enough to fight in the war.
He had come on this uncomfortable jaunt, he told himself, simply to chronicle the training exercise. Burdened with his sack of scrolls, his inksticks and pens, his folding table and a tent to keep them dry, he had not been tempted to take part in the training itself. Instead he instructed two of his more promising clerks in the art of field mapping, wrote up each day’s notes as reported by the Marshals, and tried without success to devise a better way to render rough country visible on a flat surface. It had been tiring, difficult work, carried out under difficult conditions, but it had not been the same as clambering up hill and down to hold mock battles with another group of tired, rain-soaked yeomen. He knew that, he had been there in the real war. So he had stayed away from the evening fires, to avoid making his comfortable job any more insulting than it was already.
Tonight, though, the maneuvers were over—supposedly—and they would all march toward home in the morning. So he had brought out a jug of the peach brandy his favorite cook made, in hopes of sweetening the Autumn Rose’s attitude. And there she sat, dirt and grease to the ears, joking with Raheli.
He walked toward them; young Aris saw him coming, and leaped up. “Sir—Luap—”
“Sit down, lad. You’ve worked a lot harder than I have.” Other yeomen moved aside to give him room beside Aris.
“I wanted to ask you,” Seri said, direct as always. “About those maps. Did you ever talk to the gnomes about mapping?”
How could the girl be that wide awake, that full of energy? Aris looked tired to the bone, but Seri—it must be the peasant endurance, Luap thought. He remembered Raheli brimming with energy when others had been too tired to move. And Gird, despite his age, had nearly always been the first up in the mornings. “Once, after the fall of Fin Panir,” he answered. “They’d come to talk to Gird, and he showed them my copy of the map they gave him.” He chuckled. “They weren’t impressed. I told them I had had to do it without the original; it was lost in the flood outside Grahlin that time—”
“Was that when the well exploded?”
He looked past Aris into that bright, wide-awake face, and past it to the two older women. Was that tone just a bit put on? Did Seri have some purpose besides what he heard in words? Rahi spoke up, as if he’d asked her to.
“Not exploded—but apparently the local magelord had magicked all the water in the river into it, underground, and sent it all out at once. It made an awful noise, and scared us silly.”
“The water shot up in the air,” Luap added. “Higher than any fountain, a column of water perhaps a man’s height across. It was, only a little mud-brick fort and when the water hit, it came apart around us. On top of us.”
“And the next day we had a pitched battle we never should have fought,” Rahi went on. “Gird was too shaken by the flood, I think—he felt we had to hold the bridge. Cob’s foot was hurt that night; he’s limped ever since. And we lost others who’d been with us from the start—” She stared at the fire, her face, grim. That fiasco and Gird’s sullen, drunken response in the next hands of days had almost ended the rebellion. Seri looked from Rahi to Luap.
“What I meant, sir, was that I wondered if the gnomes had solved the problems you were having with the new maps. Do they have some way of showing the land, even when it’s wrinkled up, so you can tell what part of a hill sticks out?”
“Not that I know of. By the time I had them to copy, of course, they’d been soaked and torn. We had to dig them out of the wet rabble, try to uncurl them without tearing them any worse, and then redraw them. Maybe there were marks that didn’t show after that.” Seri looked interested, alert, and—in another place and time—Luap would have been flattered by that alert interest. He had had few chances to teach her, but those few times he had enjoyed it. She came to everything with such enthusiasm, such eagerness to learn and do well, and those Marshals who had supervised her considered themselves lucky. But now he felt her intensity as a veiled threat—she and young Aris between them were up to something, and he could not decide what. Had they anything to do with the new friendship between Raheli and the Autumn Rose?
For those two were as amiable with each other as either with anyone else, now, and from the looks they cast at the youngsters, might have been their aunts if not their mothers.