“You insufferable fool!” Luap’s anger roared past his knowledge that losing his temper would only cause trouble. This time it was not Gird; this time it was not someone he respected; this time—this one time, maybe—he was wholly justified, completely right, and he was not going to pretend a subservience and shame he did not feel. He would wipe that smugness off Binis’s face, that sly satisfaction in catching him off guard, that intolerable superiority. “The Marshal-General himself has mageborn blood—is that why he can’t get up until midmorning? Does that make him dishonest enough to steal from the grange-sets honest peasants have sent in to buy himself fancy foods rather than eat porridge and stew with the rest? Or didn’t you know any of that?” By her expression she had not known, and didn’t believe. “Look it up in the archives,” he said bitterly. “If you can read. His grandmother was raped by a magelord, just as my mother was. It’s in the records, the great accounting Gird held after the war. His own mother reported it.”
“You made that up,” Binis said. “It can’t be true. Besides, the Marshal-General’s speciaclass="underline" he has a right to sleep later and eat better food.”
“Really! Gird didn’t . . . but then you didn’t know Gird, more’s the pity.” That rush of anger over, Luap felt the first twinge of fear. Lazy, selfish, and misguided the present Marshal-General might be, but he still had to work with him. So far the Council had sided with Luap on the larger issues, but he must not strain their patience by angering the Marshal-General on minor matters. He looked at Binis with more loathing than she perhaps deserved. She was the Marshal-General’s tool, less culpable because she was both younger and subordinate. He hated her. If not for his oath to Gird, he would use his magery now, and compel her to agree. He toyed with that idea for another furlong or so, imagining sending her back to the Marshal-General as a spy, as a mageborn tool. If she had said anything more, he might have, but she had the prudence of the naturally sly, and said nothing.
So the rest of the day passed, in uncomfortable silence. She asked once, in late afternoon, what grange they would stay at that night, and he replied that they would camp. He managed not to add, with the sarcasm he felt, that she should have realized that from the supplies he’d bought in Cob’s village. He attacked the jacks trench as if it were a buried enemy, raising another blister on his hand, and she watched sullenly. They ate their supper in silence, and in silence passed the night and the morning’s rising. Binis filled in the trench without commenting.
Luap rode in morose silence all that morning, inquiring of all the gods he could think of—and Gird—what else he could have done. The explanations and excuses looked shabby, spread out in his mind; he knew that Gird would have swept them away. Yes, the woman was stupid, smug, and difficult: that was her problem. He had not made things better with his flare of temper. He found himself arguing that Gird, too, had lost his temper with a difficult woman named Binis, but it would not work, and he knew it. All at once he was plunged into internal darkness, a wave of despair. How could he think of leading his people to any good purpose? Everything he’d ever done wrong came back to him in vivid pictures; he hunched over the horse’s neck, wishing he could spew it all out and die, have it all over. The Rosemage would lead his people better. Or Aris and Seri, in partnership.
He had no thought of food, and Binis finally said, plaintively, “Aren’t we going to stop and eat?” Another stab of guilt—had he compounded anger and rudeness with cruelty?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I—lost track of time.” He reined in and looked around. At least he wasn’t lost; he still recognized the shapes of hill and field. Beneath him, his horse sighed and tugged the reins, wanting to graze the fresh spring grass. “Yes. We can stop here, or go on a bit to that creek.” He pointed.
“You look sick,” Binis said with her usual tact.
Luap shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He thought of apologizing for yesterday’s anger, but Binis was not one to inspire selflessness; she absorbed it as her due. He dismounted, and let his horse graze. Binis found a convenient rock and settled to her food; he had no appetite for his, but realized he should eat anyway. He choked down some mouthfuls of bread and cheese. This would not do; they had several more days of travel together, and he had to find some way to get along with this woman.
He tried asking questions about life in Fin Panir; Binis gave short answers, and made it clear that he should know the answers already. He tried telling her about the war, how it had been to march these very hills and river valleys with Gird’s army. She listened to that, but her questions revealed no grasp of tactics—he became very tired of her “Why didn’t Gird just—?” She seemed to think all battles were great set pieces, with armies lined up on either side; she was sure that any villagers who didn’t support Gird’s army must have been part mageborn.
“They were hungry and frightened,” Luap tried to explain. “Someone had to stay and plant the fields, but if the magelords caught them sharing food with us, they’d be killed—worse than killed.” He remembered the thin faces, the desperation, the bodies displayed on hillsides. “Look there,” he said, pointing to an ox-team busy with spring ploughing. The farmer had made a grisly decoration of skulls turned up by the plough. Binis shuddered; Luap thought he might have pierced her determination to simplify the past. He hoped so.
By the time they reached the cave, in a misting rain, Luap felt her presence as a great weight on his neck. He made a last try. “We had several cohorts in here,” he said. “Worse weather than this, but also early spring. Gird had a bad cold. Lots of us did.”
“Which spring?” she asked. This time she took the shovel to dig the trench; he thought that was a good sign.
“The spring before Greenfields,” he said. While she built a small fire in the familiar ring of stones, he dragged first one sack of soil, then another, back to the chamber. She did not offer to help. The feeling grew on him that this was the most significant of his visits to the cave: the season, the weather, and the sullen peasant were all the same. Binis could easily stand for some hundreds of her fellows.
He felt this even more when he discovered that she expected him to take the soil to his stronghold by the mageroad, then return and go back with her to Fin Panir to report to the Marshal-General. “That way I can be sure you don’t return and steal more,” she said. Luap wondered briefly if she had anything between her ears but malice and stubbornness.
“Binis, if I had wanted to disobey the Marshal-General and steal more earth, I could have come here in the first place and never travelled with you at all.”
“You wouldn’t have dared,” she said. “You can’t disobey the Marshal-General.” She said it in the way she would have said that stones fall or water is wet, someone stating a natural law.
“I could,” Luap said flippantly, and instantly wished he hadn’t. He already knew Binis had no sense of humor. She was scowling now, as if he had insulted her. “Listen to me: I did what your Marshal-General asked because I swore an oath to Gird. Not an oath to obey his successor, an oath to support him, and do no harm with my magery to his people. I saw no reason to quarrel with the Marshal-General; I have fulfilled his requirements, and I am going back to my land.” To stay, he almost said. But he would return, to continue his work with the archives, and he did not mean to cause more trouble than he had.