“Burning hay’s not defense,” muttered one of the farmers, as if he’d said it before.
“It made you let go of him,” the Marshal said, as if he’d said that before, too.
“Is he truly mageborn?” asked Luap. The boy flicked him a malevolent glance that sent shivers down his back. Mageborn or not, the boy was wicked.
“I don’t know,” Bald Seli said. “He won’t say. Isn’t there some way to tell?”
Everyone looked at Luap. Would they realize that it was a use of magery to detect magery, and thus required a breaking of the law to detect a possible breaker of the law? No, irony was beyond them. He thought of sending for Arranha, but decided against it. He let a little of his power come forth, a mere trickle, and spread it as a net, imagining a silvery web before him. If the boy had mageborn blood, and such power, it should color that web. He leaned toward the boy.
“Are you mageborn?” he asked quietly. The boy stared past him, his skew eye to one side and his focused gaze to the other. Luap turned to Bald Seli. “Can he answer questions? Has he ever talked with people in your vill?”
“Oh, aye,” the Marshal said. “He never said much, but he made shift to ask for food, and answer yes or no. He didn’t have our accent, but we could understand him.”
“No, ye didn’t!” The boy’s voice was a peculiar skirl, rising and falling with no relation to the sense of the words. “Ye never understood me. Me. Never. Ye ask am I mageborn—I’m more’n mageborn. . . .” His words fell into a gabble Luap could not understand. The two farmers cringed against the wall.
“Careful, sir, he’s doin’ it again. He’ll be cursin’ the whole Fellowship next—”
To Luap it seemed that the boy’s gabble was that of one who could not control his voice, like the very old who sometimes lost words and strength all at once. It did not sound as he had imagined cursing to sound, but the boy’s cold gaze made him uneasy. He felt nothing in his net of magery to make him think the boy was mageborn—but he was not sure he wasn’t, either. The babble died away; the boy licked the spittle off his lips with an eagerness that frightened Luap again. He wondered what Gird could have made of this; it was beyond him.
Cob came up with their solution. “Take him into the High Lord’s Hall,” he said. “And get Arranha. If it’s a curse, that’ll be the place to take it off. We’ll know what we’re dealing with.”
Luap did not want to go, but he knew he must. He watched two Marshals carry the boy, whose tremors and twitches seemed less a struggle to escape than the way his body worked. Arranha met them at the Hall doors, and seemed no more upset by this than any of the problems people had brought him. He looked at Luap.
“He’s mageborn, in part, but he was also born flawed. Both in his magery and in himself.”
“Did he curse the sheep?” one of the farmers asked.
“I don’t know,” Arranha said. He asked the boy the same question, but got no reply. “Bring him up to the altar,” he said then, “and we’ll see if the god can shed light on our dilemma.”
But as they approached the altar, the boy exploded in wild squeals and convulsive movements so strong the Marshals could hardly hold him. “He’s frightened,” one of them said. “Maybe he thinks we sacrifice people.”
The farmers muttered, and Luap thought he heard one of them say “Only a mageborn would think of that.”
“Put him down, then,” Arranha said. They laid the boy down as gently as they could, for all his thrashing about, but he began beating his head on the stone floor. “We need Aris,” Arranha said. He laid his hands to either side of the boy’s head, but instead of quieting the boy screamed, a piercing noise that echoed in the high vaults of the Hall. Then he twisted around and caught Arranha’s thumb in his teeth. Luap leapt forward, as did others, and somewhere in the struggle to unlock the boy’s teeth from Arranha’s thumb, the boy quit breathing. No one quite knew when, or why.
After that, and its daylong aftermath of confusion, grief, and anger, Luap expected nothing but trouble when he introduced his idea the next day. He led up to it as carefully as he could, explaining how a distant land could let his people learn to use their skills to benefit others, but he was sure their minds were full of the boy’s malicious grin as he bit down on Arranha’s thumb. When he paused, he heard exactly the disapproving murmur he had expected.
To his surprise, Raheli stood. The murmur stilled. Everyone peered to see Gird’s daughter.
“I believe him,” she said. Then she looked at Luap, eye to eye, gaze to gaze. “I believe him,” she said more softly, and silence lay heavily on them. “My father—Gird—” As if they did not know, he thought. “Gird saw good in him; he was spared to serve Gird’s Fellowship.” In a long pause, no sound broke the stillness; he saw her take a long breath and wondered what would follow. “What is the reward of a faithful luap?” she asked. None answered. She looked around. “I will tell you, then,” she said. “A faithful luap, one who serves without enjoying power, one who stands beside, in the place of, the inheritor, shall be recognized at last by the one he serves. He shall stand before him, and be given his reward, the respect of the people. This is Gird’s luap: Gird will determine his reward.”
Luap blinked; that could be taken two ways, and one of them he felt as a blade at his throat. “In the meantime,” Raheli went on, “we can give our respect. I believe him, that he will take his folk to a far place and not breed up an army of invasion. You know I have not trusted him in the past. If his stronghold were nearer, I might be less willing to trust him now. But I believe he means what he says, and I believe the distance will enforce a truce between our peoples. My father wanted all to live in peace, but he himself could not find a way to let the mageborn learn to use their powers aright. That boy yesterday—if he had been brought up in a distant land, he would never have caused the trouble he did here. Arranha and Luap would have recognized something wrong in him. I believe Luap in this—that Gird agreed to let them go, and to this end.” She sat down, and in a moment the murmur began again, this time in a wholly different mood.
For that, and for some other reason he did not fully understand, when the Marshal-General called on him again, he found himself speaking with less forethought and grace than usual.
“Marshal Raheli has said more than I would claim—that boy frightened me. It’s true that I think our young people are best trained elsewhere—some place where we can be sure their power does no harm, that they have control of it, and know how to use it for good. But that boy—Marshals, I cannot claim to understand that.”
“But if you had such a child, in your distant place, you would not let him come back here to cause trouble, would you?”
“No.” He shuddered at the thought. “I don’t know what we’d do—but we would not let him loose on the world.”
“What about Arranha’s thumb?” asked another Marshal. Many of them. Luap knew, liked the old man even though they would not follow his god. Luap shook his head.
“We don’t know. If Aris were here, I’m sure he could heal it. But Garin is not as skilled, or as powerful. Arranha says if the Sunlord wants him healed, he will be healed, but he’s feverish this morning.”
Bald Seli had attended the Council, though his sheep-farmers had already headed home. Now he spoke up. “Maybe I should have let them kill him, ’stead of bringing such trouble on us.”
Glances flicked at Luap, each a minute but definite blow. “Maybe—but I think you did right,” Cob said. “You were trying to be fair; that’s what mattered. And I’ll agree with Raheli, Gird’s daughter, that if the mageborn had some safe place to teach their children, we might not have problems like this. At least not with the mageborn. It’s not Luap’s fault that the boy went wrong; for all we know he was cursed from birth.”