“Oh—time the sun hits the side court, he’ll be done eating,” said Sterin. “You don’t want to bother him afore then—but you’d remember.” Luap nodded; anyone who’d tangled with Marshal-General Koris before he had two mugs of sib and hot breakfast inside him remembered it. That he’d been just as unpleasant to the magelords during the war, especially that morning at Greenfields, had won him a Marshal’s shirt and later advancement. No one doubted his courage, or his willingness to work (once he was up and fed) but Gird himself had learned not to disturb Koris at dawn without urgent reason.
“You want what?” The Marshal-General stared as if his froggy eyes would burst. Luap still found it difficult to believe they had chosen Koris, even though he’d been at the election. If only Cob had not been so adamant about staying with his rural grange.
“Dirt,” said Luap again, being patient. “Soil. You know: what you grow crops in.”
“You’re going to take dirt back to your mountain fortress by magery?”
Luap bit back a sarcastic remark about the practicality of taking it any other way, and nodded instead. Still, through the ensuing argument, he had a vivid mental image of a caravan loaded with dirt headed for an unknown destination. “With your permission,” he said. The Marshal-General scowled at the courtesy, and Luap cursed himself. He had forgotten how rude—honest, they called it—the Girdsmen were, in their own land. Among his people, he found himself thinking, courtesy implied no weakness; he had acquired the habit of smooth speaking. Here it could only get him in trouble.
“Well . . . let me ask the others.” The Marshal-General had run out of reasons, but he was not about to give in.
Luap bit his tongue to keep from explaining again that they would not take much dirt; it could inconvenience no one to take a little dirt from some disused farmstead. He could have simply taken it, without asking, except that he had promised Gird, a promise he had so far kept. But Gird would not have had to ask anyone, he would have given his answer at once, and that would have been the end of it. In his mind, Luap asked Gird, and Gird—his imagined Gird—growled assent, irritable at being disturbed for such a trivial matter. Luap felt better. Gird would have let him take the dirt, and this paltry successor to Gird’s position would accomplish nothing with his indecision.
“You will excuse me,” he said smoothly to the Marshal-General, not minding now that it ruffled the man so. “I have friends waiting, whom I have not seen in more than a season. When the Council has considered, perhaps you would let me know?”
Astonishment. Resentment. Envy. Anger. This was someone who would always end in anger, for whom anger served every need. “And where will you be,” the Marshal-General asked querulously. “Here in Fin Panir, or off in that haunt of magery?”
Already such a reputation! Luap wondered what the man would have said if he’d seen them carving the very mountains to build their terraces, and smiled to himself. That smile came into his voice; he did not trouble himself to hide it. “I will be here, in Fin Panir, some length of days, Marshal-General. Working on the chronicles, and checking the copyists’ work, as the Council requested. Should your decision take longer, I may be there awhile.”
The Marshal-General sniffed. “We shall take what time we need, to consider carefully all that might result from such a choice.”
Luap struggled not to think It’s only dirt too loud. The man’s eyes dropped again to his desk, then flicked up as if hoping to catch Luap by surprise. Luap met that glance with blandness. “I would not try to hurry you, Marshal-General.”
Now the man flushed, and he rushed into explanation. “It’s not just my decision, you know. I’m not like a king—”
“It’s quite all right, Marshal-General,” said Luap. They had no real hierarchy, having fought a revolution to end hierarchies, and had discovered the function behind tradition with dismay. Gird, taking a king’s power, had never believed he held it, and in that belief had used it casually, as if born with the rod in hand. His successors, so far, had used it nervously, uncertain how much use was needful. Even Cob, who had seemed to understand the need for a single final leader, had not pursued his original plan. Luap smiled again at the Marshal-General, and left.
For all that he felt alienated from the peasants who crowded the streets, he enjoyed the city bustle. From the palace area, he went down to the main market, noting how healthy, if rude, the population seemed these days. Red-cheeked men and women, bundled warmly against the cold, hurried to and fro, meantime trampling the snow to a dirty mess. When he came to the wider streets near the market, he found more signs of improved trade and order. An oxcart of sand almost blocked the street, and two men shoveled sand over a thick lens of ice. The inn where Gird had gotten so disastrously drunk looked busy enough; he heard singing from behind its windows. Loud voices in the streets, cheerful but coarse; half the words were those his people never used.
He had remembered where Dorhaniya’s narrow house stood, past the market, and up one of the crooked streets on the lower hill. When he knocked, Eris answered the door, as stolid as ever, but she smiled briefly.
“She’s doing better,” she said. “I’ll tell her.”
“I didn’t know she’d been sick,” Luap said.
“Oh. I thought maybe that was why you came—”
“No, I’ve been out in the new place—surely she told you?”
Eris shrugged. “I don’t pay that much mind, to be sure. She’s getting on, you know. She did say something—about a new place, and we might go—but she’ll never shift out of her own room, again, let alone move the household.”
“But—” He said no more. He had counted on Dorhaniya, old as she was; something about her eased his mind in a way no one else did. To her, he was the prince, the legitimate heir to the throne, and while she agreed he must never take the throne, she still gave him the deference, the respect, she thought due his birth.
“I’ll tell her,” said Eris again. “Please—wait here—she’ll want to see you, but she’ll want to dress.”
He waited in a stuffy little room hardly warmer than outside. Perched on a carved chair that seemed designed to poke him in the spine if he relaxed, he looked around at a room lit by sunlight reflected from a snowy back yard, perhaps a garden in summer. Gradually, he recognized the contents, the tools and supplies of a lifetime’s occupation for a woman of Dorhaniya’s class. Baskets of fine-spun yarn in neat balls, two standing tapestry frames, another hand-frame with a half-finished design placed neatly on a table under the window. He stood, after another vicious poke from the chair, and went to the table. Outlined in a circle of blue, a white G and gold L intertwined, the stitches so tiny that, as with the altarcloth, he almost believed the design painted and not embroidered. He glanced at the frames. On one, another version of the G and L design, this one set in a blue rectangle bordered with red and white interlacing. To his eyes, it looked finished. The other, hardly begun, he could not interpret—something geometrical, he thought, in green and blue and red.
“She begs your pardon,” said Eris, behind him; Luap turned quickly. “She wants to see you, but wishes to have me put up her hair. Would you like something to drink?” She had brought a tray with a tall, narrow silver pot; the scent of the vapor rising took him straight back to childhood. What had it been called? Something he’d never tasted, but served to the adults in the afternoon. “Selon, perhaps?” said Eris, touching the pot. Luap nodded, more curious than thirsty. It looked as he remembered, darker than sib, with a hint of red, but clear. Eris poured into a cup thin as an apple petal, and shaped almost flowerlike, of five lobes. He took it, inhaled, and smiled at her. The impulse came to confide.