“I don’t know I’d—you know Arranha and I had talked about it?” She nodded. “I depended on his advice, but now—”
“Now you may have to make all the decisions yourself. I hope not, for your sake as well. What will you do first?”
“Take others to see it. Start thinking how to make it workable—we should grow our own food, for one thing, and not have to transport it from here. There’ll be plenty of work, hard work, to make it feasible.”
She nodded. “There’s something else: you need to think which mageborn to move first, and whether you want to gather them somewhere before you take them. Supplies for the first year or two, until your crops take hold. . . .”
“Supplies, yes.” Luap grimaced. “Well—I did it for Gird; I ought to be able to do it now. But I don’t even know how many mageborn there are, or how many will come.”
But the familiar rhythm of planning comforted him in the days following, as Arranha grew sicker, the swelling worse. He began making lists: seed grain, vegetable seeds, tools for farming and tools for making tools. He knew of no mageborn smiths . . . could he hire a smith to set up there? And if he could, with what could he pay a smith’s high fees? He found a master smith, and began asking the necessary questions; smiths were notoriously slow in giving answers. He went back to his lists. They would need a few looms—with skilled craftsmen and enough wood, they could easily copy the pattern looms. He paused, thinking. He had never worked wood himself . . . and that forest was very different . . . did that matter? Another question to ask a craftsmaster. He needed to know more about the skills of the people he would take—how many mageborn could weave, cook, plough, reap? So far as he knew, the work that needed doing—the work that would keep them alive—had never been done by magery.
Several times a day he checked on Arranha, who was unfailingly cheerful but visibly weaker each visit. To his surprise, others with no mageborn blood at all also visited. Rahi delayed her return to her grange and scoured the archives for anything on herbal treatments. Dorhaniya worked her way up the hill and arrived breathless and faint; Luap was afraid she would have a fatal attack as well. He insisted that she stay overnight in the palace; Elis agreed, and the next day Luap hired a cart to take her home. The men who had listened to Arranha’s many lectures on light and wisdom came to stand by his door, peering in shyly but unwilling to intrude on a sick man.
Luap felt a deep guilt he could not explain. He knew it had not been his fault: the boy would have bitten anyone; he had been mindlost if not possessed by some evil. He knew it was not his fault Aris was gone—Rahi had confessed that she and the Rosemage and Arranha himself had connived at that. He knew it was not his fault that he lacked the healing magery. But he felt guilty nonetheless . . . somehow it was his fault—his fault that Gird’s dream had not come true, and his fault that Arranha suffered for it. In reaction, he felt that his irritation was pardonable when one of the scribes made a mistake or spilled the ink. He got a morbid satisfaction out of scolding someone he would not ordinarily have scolded, and then lashing himself for being short-tempered.
He clung to his lists, and shared them with the Rosemage and Rahi. The Rosemage pointed out that he should require the mageborn to pay their own way, if they could: he was not a king, so he could not be expected to fund the expedition. Some of them were still wealthy; nearly all of them had something to contribute.
“They’d better,” Rahi said lazily, leaning back on the cushions of a bench in the scribe’s room. It was late night, and the scribes had long since ceased work. “If they don’t have something to contribute, they’ll starve.”
“More than skills: money,” the Rosemage said. “Clothes, tools, dishes, all that.”
Luap had a sudden panic. “How are we going to transport all that? Either we have to take it to the cave, and try to stuff it in the chamber; or we have to take it into the High Lord’s Hall—that doesn’t seem right.” He had a vision of the chamber choked with boxes, bags, sacks, bales of household gear . . . of the mess creeping across the floor of the great hall. Yet it had to be done: they couldn’t make everything out there.
“It will work,” the Rosemage said. “You don’t have to do it all yourself.”
“No, but—” But it had been his idea, his plan, and his place . . . his dream, in place of Gird’s. If it came true, it would be his responsibility; he could not deny that. Gird had known, Gird had not started a war and then gone home to twiddle his thumbs and watch how it went.
“Scary, isn’t it?” asked Rahi with surprising understanding. He looked at her, and she smiled. “Back before you joined, that very first battle, Norwalk Sheepfolds . . . remember it from the archives?”
“Of course,” Luap said. “Were you there? I thought—”
“No, I wasn’t there. But it scared Gird—what he’d started. He wanted it; he thought it was the only way. But when it came, when he saw what it meant, that he could never go back and things would never be as they were, that scared him. And I thought that was what you were feeling.”
“Yes,” said Luap. “I suppose I am. I believe we have to do it, that it’s the only way.” The undefined warning the elves had given rose from his memory; should he tell them about it? No, for he could not tell them what he did not know himself. “If I’m wrong—if I forget something—”
“You can always come back for it. You will be coming back quarterly at first anyway, to report to the Council and check on the new Archivist.”
“That reminds me.” Luap rummaged among the scrolls on his desk, glad to be distracted with something more pleasant. “I think we should keep a copy of the records out there, as well, and a copy of my records there should be transferred to Fin Panir each year. You know we found that mice and damp had damaged many of the old scrolls. This way, we would have complete records in two different places.”
Rahi snorted. “You would have all the world scribes, if you could. Think of the hours of work—”
“Yes, but good records are important. Without them, we wouldn’t have been able to clear up the land disputes of the past few years, for instance. And if we had better records of the early mageborn invasion, we might know more about what happened to the magery, and why the transfer pattern is graved in the floor of the High Lord’s hall.”
“Very well, but you’d best take more farmers than scribes or you’ll be hungry.”
“What are you going to do about Aris?” asked Rahi suddenly.
“Do? We can’t find him; we have no idea where he’s gone. We can only hope he comes back before Arranha dies.”
“I didn’t mean that: I meant about taking the mageborn away. Do you think Aris will go with you?”
“Of course he will,” Luap said. “He’s mageborn—more mageborn than I am. He has the most useful of mageries.”
“And Seri?” asked Rahi.
Luap shrugged. “She’s welcome, of course; I said that before. I don’t think it’s the best place for her; I doubt any without magery will find it comfortable. But we all know how attached she is to Aris.”
The Rosemage stretched and grinned at him. “Yes—though you did your best to separate them, didn’t you?”
Luap felt his ears getting hot. “I thought it would be easier later, yes. Evidently you two don’t agree, and I’m willing to admit I was wrong about them. So I suppose I’ll have a peasant-born Marshal as well as a mageborn healer—”