Battle had now passed beyond him, for they had Seri backed to the rockface, her sword dancing in her own light, ringing a wild music off her attackers’ blades. Her face had a withdrawn expression, showing neither fear nor anger. Aris ran forward, noticing how his light threw the iynisin shadows back into themselves, caught between the two lights. He thrust clumsily at the first black-cloaked back he saw, wasting no time in challenge. Seri had told him often enough he should spend more time in grange and barton: he would admit she was right, if they lived. This close he could see the blood on her clothes, sense the heaviness in her legs. He did not wait for Gird’s admonition. To send his healing to Seri was the same as healing himself; he hardly slowed his attack on a second iynisin while closing her wounds.
They turned upon him again, but he fought through the ring to her side, taking another slashing blade across his shoulders. This, as he set his back to the rock, repaid his healing of it with a pain the double of its cause. One corner of his mind wanted to think about that: to wonder at the discovery that he could heal himself, to consider why it hurt, when none of those he healed had ever complained of pain. Between him and this curiosity stood the memory of Gird, who would not put up with nonsense in the middle of a fight. First things first, the old man would have said.
“I thought they’d killed you,” Seri said. Then, before he could answer, she said, “Shift sides.” She lunged forward, and he slithered sideways behind her. He had come up on her right, her strong side; she needed him at her left.
“I, too,” Aris said, trying to look sideways and to the front at the same time. He wished he’d practiced whatever it was she’d just done to make an iynisin lose its blade. Something slashed the back of his hand, and he dropped the sword again. His tendons and bones screeched their fury at his clumsiness as the magery pulled them back into place and knit them into strength; in the meantime, the dagger in his left hand had shattered. He snatched frantically at the fallen sword, and got it up just in time to save Seri from a killing thrust to the side.
The analytical corner of his mind decided that the pain was healthy after all; it was the compaction of all the pain normally felt during normal healing. As healer, he had used his magery to lift such pain from those he healed; part of his exhaustion came from absorbing that pain. But he could not do this for himself. Better, the analytical function went on, like a prosy lecturer who does not realize that outside the classroom a riot has started, better to mend the real damage than soothe the pain, if that is the choice.
“ARIS!” Ser’is shout brought him out of that, to see the black-cloaked iynisin fleeing through the twisted trees and over the rim of the hollow. From behind them, above the rock-face, a light stronger than their own held all starlight at its core. It was that, and not their fighting, that the iynisin had fled.
Chapter Seventeen
Although Luap had been startled to find Aris’s note, he realized that it might be wiser to bring up the idea of moving the mageborn when Seri and Aris were not in the city. They could only confuse the issue, and he had not yet formed a plan for convincing Aris to leave Seri behind. First convince the Council, and then talk to Aris. He rolled and unrolled a scroll as he thought about it. The details of the plan he had rehearsed so long flicked through his mind. How long, he wondered, would Aris be gone? Should he press for a meeting today? He thought not. Any appearance of hurry would plant some of those peasant hooves firmly in their muddled minds, ox-like. He remembered how it had been with his first version of Gird’s Life.
He waited until the next regular meeting, two days later. The younglings, as he thought of them, had not returned. Some had noticed a column of smoke from far away, but that could have been anything. It was the season for storm-lighted grass fires, he reminded the worriers. And he had the feeling that they were unhurt, no matter what the smoke meant . . . they would reappear when they were ready, cheerful and sturdy as always. And inconvenient, no doubt.
The meeting began on a sour note, because a complaint of witchcraft had been referred from a grange-court. A group of sheepfarmers insisted that a mageborn boy had cursed their flock, causing all the lambs to be born dead. They had beaten the boy, who had responded with an obvious burst of magery, setting a hayrick afire. The local Marshal had saved the boy, but wasn’t sure the first accusation was correct—and the boy, he said, would never completely recover from the beating. He had come, with the boy and two of the sheepfarmers, to Fin Panir to “settle this once and for all,” as he put it. Luap winced; this would make the Marshals edgy about anything to do with mageborn.
He watched the sheepfarmers, tall husky men in patched tunics, sit on the edge of the bench in the meeting room, as far from the mageborn boy as they could. He didn’t entirely blame them. It was hard to judge the boy’s age—Luap guessed about twelve—because of his strangeness. He had mismatched eyes, one that slewed wide, and a constant tremor that erupted in a nervous jerk to his head at intervals. The eye that looked ahead had an expression Luap had never seen before, cool and calculating it seemed, though his mouth dripped spittle when his head jerked. The Marshal, balding and scrawny (had he really been the one who saved Gird from being trampled that time?), explained that the boy had had a bad name in their vill from the beginning. And it was his limp—not the slewed eye or the tremor—that resulted from the beating.
The farmer’s testimony came in slow, difficult bursts of thick dialect; Luap knew they resented the questions he asked, but he had to know what they said to keep accurate notes. They knew their sheep, they kept repeating, and while it’s true that sheep come into the world looking for a way back to the high pastures, they’d had a fair crop of lambs every year until this lad took a dislike to ’em, and for nothing worse than being told to keep away from Sim’s daughter who was carrying her first and feared the evil eye. They knew he’d cursed the sheep because he said so—or at least he gabbled a string of nasty-sounding stuff that must have been a curse, and right then old Fersin’s best ewe bloated up and died. Within a day, anyway, and it wasn’t the season for death-lily, neither. Then the ewes started dropping lambs too soon, dead lambs, all of ’em, as if someone had fed them bad hay with birthbane in it, but no one had. Wasn’t any birthbane nearer than a day’s ride.
The Council looked at the Marshal—one of many named Sell, called for convenience Bald Seli—and he shrugged. “They called me in when the first ewe died, and accused this boy. I said don’t be calling down evil you don’t need—that ewe could’ve eaten something. None of ’em knew what the words meant, that he used. And they had no proof he was mageborn, only that he showed up years back with no family, and a scrap of good cloth for a cloak. Then the lambs started coming, all dead. They didn’t call me; I heard from you—well—one of ’em’s son, a junior yeoman. Thought I should know, he said. I went up there and found they’d pounded this boy so hard they’d broken bones, and then he’d set the hay on fire. The way I understand Gird’s law is if the boy did magery first, he’s wrong, but if he was hurt first, he could use magery to defend himself.”