“For my conduct it is easy to answer, sire. It is that of a Solamnic Knight when he and his squire are attacked without warning—and I might add, without reason—by seven folk who are supposed to be allies of the good and the just. That’s my answer, sire—quite simple and direct, I grant you, but when your men ambushed me, I assumed we had passed beyond formal introduction.”
I believe the old centaur smiled.
“So thou doest admit,” the old fellow asked, “thy allegiance to the Solamnic Orders?”
Despite my gestures, my throat-clearing, my elbow in his ribs. Bayard answered as he had before—in all honesty.
“‘Admit’? Nay, I proclaim it, sire! For despite what you have heard, the Order still’ stands for principles noble and true in a time unprincipled. Stop elbowing me, Galen!”
“And the armor?” the old centaur asked, staring me down with his wild green eyes, glittering like emeralds on leather.
“The armor is mine,” Bayard maintained, “though stolen from me briefly days ago, and worn by one for whose crimes I cannot answer.” He folded his arms across his chest and awaited the centaur’s response. Which was as I had feared.
“Sir Knight, if thy testimony stood against only what I have heard, by my troth I should be inclined to lenience. But there is the matter of the satyrs, and in that matter the testimony of mine eyes is witness against thee, and the eyes of my brothers have also looked upon thy misdeeds.”
“Satyrs?”
Bayard looked at me in puzzlement. I shrugged. What did I know from satyrs?
“The satyrs!” the old centaur continued. “The goat-men!”
Several of his traveling companions nodded roughly in agreement, shaking their manes in a most menacing fashion. Bayard paused, then spoke frankly.
“I promise you, sire, that I know nothing of what you call ‘satyrs.’ Indeed, the very word is new to me. And I promise you that I had never raised my hand against you or your people, until you rode out from hiding a brief while ago upon the road.”
The old centaur inclined his enormous, shaggy head, whispered to the bloody-nosed captain at his right, and the two of them galloped off to the far edge of the clearing. Two more joined them shortly—to my relief, neither was the one whose arm Bayard had disjoined in the recent struggle, for I was sure that whatever was to be done to us was soon to be put to a vote. A lively discussion began, but I could hear nothing from where I stood. I could do nothing from where I stood, either. So I reached into my pocket, sat down, and cast the Calantina. The grass was ankle high by now, and I had to brush it aside to read the dice. Six on twelve: Sign of the Goat. I consoled myself that the virtue of the goat was that he could survive just about anywhere under just about any circumstances. I hoped that applied to swamps and captivity, because I saw us staying here awhile.
“What do your tea leaves say, Galen?” Bayard whispered, seating himself painfully beside me.
“They say that sometimes the whole truth is a foolish thing to tell, sir,” I lied. “But then, you’ve told me you don’t believe the Calantina, anyway.”
The centaurs who were left to guard us seemed more informed than we were. Two of them inspected us from a distance, brandished their clubs, and grinned maliciously. Only Agion remained friendly, and it was fairly obvious nobody was listening to him.
“Don’t worry,” he encouraged me, as he picked several of the small, glittering nuts from the blue-needled branch of an overhanging aeterna tree and dropped them into his mouth. “Archala never delivers punishment unjustly.”
Of course, that did nothing to lighten my worries. Far better that this Archala not deliver punishment at all, for I did not care whether he disciplined justly or unjustly, as long as I escaped intact. I considered telling Bayard about the third party—the man the centaurs had seen following us a mile or so back down the road. But what would I tell Bayard about who I thought was following us? What would I tell him about the honey-voiced man who scaled the moat house on a mission of burglary?
To be quite honest, I had no real desire to clear my conscience before the centaurs turned me up by my ankles and drowned me for espionage. Sometimes the whole truth is a foolish thing to tell. So we sat there in silence, Bayard rubbing his bruises and I thinking frantically of ways to dodge judgement. Any judgement. But since nobody was moving or scuffling or breaking branches, the sounds of the swamp resumed—the weird songs of unfamiliar birds, now and again the bellow of a bullfrog or the whirring sound of an insect, for these animals had come from hiding when the rain had stopped and the sun had emerged. Around us the air was warmer, but still terribly heavy and humid. Though you could not see the plants growing—not really—you could look away from one and look back in a matter of minutes to find it larger . . . or what you thought was larger. It gave me the jumps.
I thought of what Gileandos had said about Warden Swamp: something that grows so rapidly grows like a boy; therefore it cannot be trusted, pointing to it on the map as it stretched for miles south of the moat house. Of course, stories had come to us through the peasants, stories of animals who had grown to unnatural size or changed unnaturally and roamed the recesses of the swamp. There was talk of legless crocodiles, and huge carnivorous birds, eyeless because they no longer needed eyes in the swamp’s green darkness, moving clumsily but swiftly among cedars and among cypress trees by leaps and lunges, their wings useless in a country covered by branches and leaves.
There was talk, of course, of the man-eating flying fish.
Now, there may not have been a great deal of truth to such stories, but other things were undoubtedly true. I knew them firsthand. For we had lost peasants, servants, and on occasion a visitor or two in the dark hollows of the swamp. Indeed, a band of visitors—a party of five dwarves from Garnet who came to visit Father the summer I was seven—had reached the far edge of the swamp when they decided to lie down and pass the evening in safety before continuing a journey they figured would be too dangerous in the dark. They awoke the next morning to find themselves surrounded by swamp, which had reached out to cover them in the night. Two of their party were missing, and though Father combed the outskirts of the swamp that afternoon and again the following morning, combed it with servants and torches and dogs and shouting, we never heard what befell those dwarves, nor anyone else who strayed into the swamp and lost his way. Such events brought about healthy respect, even a fear, for the green swath Gileandos had marked on the map in his study, the spot he enlarged every spring as the marsh swallowed the countryside. That night we slept fitfully. Several times I woke to see Bayard pacing at the edge of the clearing and at the edge of the light from our small fire, his hands clasped behind him as though they were tied together. There were no stars visible beneath this canopy of leaves and vines, so the night was dark without and within. After finally getting to sleep in the early morning, I awoke to see Bayard crouching over me, looking down upon me pensively.
“Sir?”
“Galen, if tomorrow brings some form of. . . severe punishment . . .”
For a second my spirit soared. I hoped devoutly that my companion’s innate nobility would compel him to bear the weight of that punishment, no matter how severe, and find a sly loophole by which he might send me unscathed back to Father. However, his nobility compelled him toward other things.
“If that severe punishment does come, I shall rest easily knowing you did not misunderstand something I said.”
“Yes, sir?”
“About the Lady Enid.” He slowly began to stand.
“About your betrothed, sir?”
“Yes. And that’s it. For you see, the Lady Enid isn’t really my betrothed.”
“No?”
“I mean, I’m not engaged to the Lady Enid or anything.”