“I had a thought,” said Arranha. Luap looked at him. From the tone it was one of those thoughts that caused them all to feel that their minds had been twisted into bread coils. He nodded, and Arranha, smiling as usual, went on. “At one time, our people had the power to make much of a small supply. As the Sunlord’s light brings increase to the fields, or one seed makes many after the growth of a crop—”
“Argavel’s Lore,” said the Rosemage.
“Yes. And it came with the usual warning: the gods’ gifts must not be used lightly. Some of our ancestors used this too greedily, and lost it. But I asked Gird one time—”
“You asked Gird?” Luap could not keep the surprise from his voice.
Arranha nodded. “Of course: he was a farmer, and a good one. The priesthood or Esea had preserved a verse at the end of Argave’s Lore which implied, I always thought, that the elements had been unaffected by the decree that mortals might not usurp the gods’ power of increase.”
“So?” For once, the Rosemage sounded abrupt with Arranha; Luap was glad his tediousness bothered someone else as well.
“So we could no longer make a pile of gold rings from the pattern of one, or a platter of bread from one slice . . . but we might, I thought, have the power to make two lumps of clay from one, or two gusts of wind from one . . . you see?”
“And what had Gird to do with that?” asked Luap.
“He let me try, with a lump of soil. And it worked.” Arranha looked pleased with himself. Luap felt he was supposed to get something more from this than he had yet figured out.
“So you—took a lump of soil, and you got two lumps of soil?”
“Five, altogether. It’s harder than it looks. One needs a matrix of some sort. I was using sawdust. Rockdust would be better.” Arranha smiled again, and then shook his head. “Gird was not impressed. He said you could get good soil by putting sawdust and cow droppings together, every farmer knew that much.”
At last it came together in Luap’s mind. “But you’re saying you could use some good dirt and the rockdust we have to make more? I would have to bring only one fifth what we need?”
“Better even than that. It didn’t occur to me while talking to Gird, but I should be able to use whatever you bring doubled, and then redoubled, and so forth.” Luap wondered if his face was as blank as the Rosemage’s; Arranha sighed at them. “It’s the same principle as my way of cutting stone.” How, Luap wanted to ask, but Arranha anticipated this and went on “Remember what I showed you about reflecting lines? Symmetry? This should work the same.”
“How many of us can do it, do you think?”
Arranha shrugged. “As with the stone, we don’t know. It may not be the same ones; young Aris may find multiplying earth more like healing than stonework, for instance. And it will not take many: doubling increases faster than you think.”
Luap had chosen to return to Fin Panir after Midwinter Feast, and in the Lord’s Hall before dawn. That should satisfy the new Marshal-General’s finicky notions about magery, he thought. Everyone knew by now he traveled by magery; it was ridiculous to insist that he hide the fact. Particularly since he could time his arrival to alarm no one.
That had been his intent, at least, and he depended on his lookouts’ report of the star positions to time his exit—but there was light enough in the Lord’s Hall for a very frightened junior yeoman to see his arrival, and for Luap to see the youth’s rapid flight, as well as hear it. Amused, Luap stepped from the incised platform below the altar and strode after him into the snow-streaked courtyard.
The yeomen on duty at the Council stairs were not amused. Roused from late-watch endurance by the boy’s startled cry and plunge from the Lord’s Hall door, they’d been prepared for something more dangerous than Luap: a demon, perhaps, or at least a ghost. Luap himself, familiar to them but not the boy, merely irritated them.
“You didn’t have to scare the lad,” said one, wiping his nose. “Comin’ in th’ dark like that—you could ha’ been anyone.”
Luap tried a smile, which made no difference in their expressions. “I’d thought coming before dawn would be the least trouble,” he said. “I didn’t expect anyone to be there—”
“It’s after dawn,” the guard pointed out.
“Here it is. Where I was, it will be dark another span. This is nearer the sun’s rising, and I forgot how much.” Actually he was not sure how much sooner dawn came to Fin Panir, but they need not know that.
“Huh. Don’t think of everything, do you? Well, if it’s the Marshals you want, they’ll not all be up yet?”
Luap thought of the years in which Gird was always up by dawn, at work by daylight. Some of the Marshals were like that still, but some, in Fin Panir, clearly relished the chance to lie abed warm on cold winter mornings. That had begun even while Gird lived, though the old man had not been above routing younger Marshals out himself.
“Something wrong, out there?” asked the other guard. He sounded hopeful. Luap laughed.
“No—all’s going well, but I am supposed to report at intervals.” The guards moved back into the windless angle of the building, and Luap moved through dim passages to the kitchen.
“You look fresh for someone who rode all night,” said Marshal Sterin, hunched over a mug of sib. Another Marshal sat silent beside him. “Or did you come in late, and find a room?”
Luap chose a mug from the stack, and dipped himself a hot drink. “I came the mageroad,” he said, not looking at them.
“But that still leaves you a long ride—unless you can come here—” By the change in tone, Sterin didn’t like that possibility. His voice sharpened even more. “Or can you just flit from place to place at your will, regardless? I thought it was some special place you’d found, that made it possible.”
“The Lord’s Hall,” said Luap, between sips. “The same pattern, or part of it, is incised in the floor near the altar. I thought you knew that.” He could not remember which Marshals had been in Fin Panir the last time he’d come.
“Ah. So when you take the old lady, she won’t have to ride a week to your hidden cave, eh?”
“No. That’s why I came this way—” That was a reason they could accept, and even admire.
“How did you learn it worked here as well?”
Luap shrugged, and reached past them to a cold loaf; he could smell the morning’s baking in the ovens. “Tried it once. I don’t know what might have happened; my thought was that if it didn’t work, I’d have come out in the cave anyway.”
“Huh. Like jumping a horse over a fence in the dark,” Sterin said, in a tone that suggested it took courage and stupidity in equal measure. Luap remembered now that he had been a stableboy before the war; he loved horses. “So—how do you like it out there? Is it good land?”
“It’s rough,” Luap said. “Mountains, narrow rocky valleys: it’s going to be hard to farm, but it’s ours.”
“There’s some won’t mind thinking of the mageborn breaking their fingernails on hard work,” said the other marshal in a carefully neutral voice.
“Work won’t hurt us,” said Luap. Let them think that, and gloat, while his people moved house-sized rocks with a finger’s touch and magery.
Both men chuckled. “You learned something, your years wi’ Gird,” said the quieter one.
“And my years as a farmer,” Luap pointed out. They looked as if they’d forgotten or never believed, but finally smiled at him. “When’s the Marshal-General available?” he asked.