A Sword Named Truth

by Sherwood Smith

  But Senrid had learned from Keriam that ‘obvious’ was not inevitable, or even exactly the same thing to every commander. Senrid considered what he knew of Jarend Ndarga’s father. The jarl was tough, hardened from years of riding the southern border in the ongoing effort to curtail the constant horse-raiding going back and forth, but actual battle experience? Senrid was fairly certain that David Ndarga had been an academy scrub, consigned to the horse pickets, when Senrid’s grandfather last led the Marlovens against the neighboring countries. He could always ask Fenis Senelac, who seemed to know the history of every battle, as a result of having two older brothers in the academy.

  Senrid scowled at the map, then darted for the library, warded and locked, where what remained of the royal records were kept. Marloven rulers who took their thrones by violence had a habit of eradicating all their predecessors’ records. Senrid’s uncle had been no different, trying to remove Senrid’s father from everything but memory, but he’d not succeeded as well as he thought.

  Older records were harder to find. The year before, Senrid had made a foray into his ancestral home, deep in the tangled, dark-magic-distorted forest of Darchelde. His ancestors’ castle was a ruin, blasted by unimaginable magic, but careful exploration had disclosed an enormous archive filled with books. Most had been destroyed by four centuries of wind and weather. But not all.

  Senrid had set teams of young scribes to work sorting them and recopying the most fragile. The reward was the filling of some of the holes left by long-dead usurpers. Senrid sought some of those now, to read up on how his ancestors had commanded past battles, skirmishes, and routs, successful and not.

  He was still at it when Keriam found him lying on the floor in a welter of maps. Senrid looked up, startled to discover wintry light blue in the windows, and Keriam standing at the door, ready for their morning briefing.

  “Keriam, Methden is going to war. I have to stop it.” And before Keriam could respond, Senrid scrambled to his feet, sending papers flying. “Hibern is due soon. Have the runner tell her we had to leave. She’ll understand. I’ll meet you in your tower. There’s somebody I’ve got to talk to first.”

  He bolted out the door and raced down to the academy.

  He knew where he was likely to find Retren Forthan, one of his few friends among the academy boys. Forthan was that rarity, a boy from a laborer family. He’d been scooped up during one of the regent’s mass conscriptions for building a super army with which to reclaim the Marloven empire of old. Forthan had been assigned with the other laborers’ boys to the foot, but he’d proved to be so skillful that he’d been put forward by his infantry captain to be considered for command training at the academy.

  Senrid’s uncle had been ambivalent, knowing that his cronies among the jarls would not like this precedent, for places in the academy were much prized. Keriam had been insistent. And now Forthan was about to embark on his second year as a senior.

  The academy was mostly empty during the winter, but a few boys stayed on. Forthan was inevitably one. Senrid knew he’d find him up early, drilling contact fighting in the same seniors’ forecourt where Senrid had gotten his teeth loosened by Ndarga last year.

  He hopped up and down, cursing himself for running out without a jacket, then forgot the cold when Forthan appeared, wrestling his clothing straight before saluting, fist to chest.

  “I’ve got a situation,” Senrid said in a quick, low voice. “Come on. Let’s go where we won’t be overheard.”

  Forthan followed without question, matching Senrid’s quick step until they reached the archery yard, empty except for pools of icy slush here and there on the ground. Senrid whirled to face the older boy. “You’ve probably been reading the same histories I have, right? Of course you have. But you’ve been getting lectures in the military thinking behind all the glory, and that’s what I need, that knowledge. Keriam agrees we need to know our own history better than just singing the same old stupid songs.”

  Forthan muttered with uncharacteristic ambivalence, “That’s so.” And to get off the subject of reading, “My father said once that nobody seemed to know any songs but the ones that made their family look good.”

  Senrid laughed. “True!” He kicked at the slush with the toe of his boot. “But I’m talking about reading. I mean, you can read and read and read. I have. I know. Reading makes you able to quote the significant facts of every battle, but it doesn’t make you a commander. I know that. I knew that.”

  He looked sideways. Forthan could barely make out his expression in the weak light, but he could see the self-mockery in Senrid’s tight shoulders, his sharp gestures.

  Senrid went on. “Not many have heard this, but it was a near thing with Siamis, there at the end, up in Bereth Ferian. And it was all my fault. Mine was the decoy plan, because those mages up there didn’t take anyone our age seriously. Well, they were right not to take me seriously.”

  Forthan gestured with a flat hand, as though pushing something away.

  “It’s true,” Senrid said. “I should have known that Siamis would be ahead of me.” He kicked the slush again. “Nobody knows this, either. When I was a prisoner. In Norsunder. Detlev looked right at me, and said that I wasn’t worth his time yet. That’s why I’ve done the no-growth spell.”

  Forthan stared somewhat helplessly. Like most Marlovens, he knew nothing about magic other than the little spells people were raised with, and trusted it less. He did understand that Senrid had done some kind of spell that kept him from aging. He said slowly, “Some people think that you did that spell because you wanted a chance to play, now that the regent is gone. You want a boyhood you didn’t get.”

  “Let ’em,” Senrid said carelessly.

  “But others think you are running some kind of ruse, only not against us, but against outsiders.”

  “I suppose that’s going to happen. Especially if I . . .” Win, Senrid thought. But he couldn’t say it. Instead, “The rumor I want going to those outsiders is that first one, at least until Detlev is defeated. He and Siamis read minds like we read books. Forthan, Siamis was a step ahead of me all the time. One step? Ten steps. I fell right into his trap. If it hadn’t been for the lighter mages coming to Liere’s call, I’d probably be right back in that cell. So let any Norsunder spies hear that Senrid wants to play with the little brats.”

  Forthan remained silent, feeling very much out of his depth at this careless reference to personal encounters with Norsunder’s most sinister villains.

  Senrid kicked again at the slush. “I don’t want to look like I’m worth Detlev’s notice, but I still need to make the jarls see that my father’s rules are back. Where was I? History. Reading history.” He began to pace back and forth. “Look, Forthan, I’ve got no harskiald whom everyone will follow.” Senrid used the Marloven word for supreme army commander, who in wartime was second only to the king. “We both know that we’ve had no upper rank commanders when we need them often enough that we’ve got jokes about it: ‘the empty tower’, and ‘waiting for an elgar.’”

  “Elgar” was a centuries-old slang term for the heroic commander who won every duel as well as every battle.

  “All because of our Marloven would-be kings taking out the opposition’s strongest leaders before they strike at the king they want to replace. Or, in my uncle’s case, purging the academy of all its smartest seniors, because he’d watched as a scrub as a handful of the smart ones helped my oldest uncle when he tried to take the crown from my grandfather.”

  Forthan made a vague gesture of agreement. He’d grown up hearing bad or unpopular commanders joked about as ‘waiting for an elgar.’ It was the next thing to saying they were cowards. Or stupid. And he’d heard some of the jarls’ sons repeating gossip about the boy king and his empty tower.

  Senrid said, “If I did have a great harskiald, and handed my problems off to him, then I’d probably end up with another regent. Don’t wa
nt that! So I have to learn to command. I’ve read everything I can find, and I know the details of countless battles, but I can’t find why they did things, that is, their thinking before they gave the commands that led to wins.”

  Forthan was still silent. If the king asked directly, he wouldn’t lie. But he dreaded making the humiliating confession that he was illiterate, convinced it would end his academy days summarily.

  “Our greatest hero, Inda-Harskialdna, left the least direct evidence. All we have of him are the two versions of the Fox record, neither of which agree with the other, and a lot of hearsay and bombast about people who came after, you know, ‘hearkening back to the great days of.’”

  Senrid threw up his hands, fingers stiff. “In some of the oldest, moldiest stuff, I’ve found hints that there’s a third Fox record. One that has everything. Though I’m sure it’s not in this kingdom. Too many have searched for it. Horseshit! There goes the bell. But you don’t have to go, right?”

  Because the academy was not in session, Forthan wasn’t expected anywhere. He flicked his fingers in agreement, and Senrid went on, “Here’s why I need you. You know I’ve been watching the academy games ever since I was little. And I got so I could predict who would lead wins, who wouldn’t. What they’d do.”

  Forthan opened his hands in assent, relieved to find himself back on familiar ground. He and Senrid and Jan Senelac had sat on the seniors’ roof many a summer evening, little Senrid avidly listening as the two older boys dissected the games, before the regent put a stop to it. “Academy games are different from a war with Siamis, is that what you’re going to say?”

  Senrid whirled around, then stabbed the air with three fingers. “But it’s the same, really. Isn’t it? Siamis plays for keeps, but it’s all a game to him, he even said so. And I see that, I do, because what we’re talking about are patterns, predicted by the way somebody thinks. The choices they always make. Right? Right?”

  Forthan tried to follow the quick voice, and turned up his palm again in silent assent.

  “So how do you know how and when to give orders, when in the heat? Because you always win.”

  Forthan scowled into the middle distance, then said, “I don’t always win. Well, I guess it’s always if I know the ground. Or if I’m up against someone I’ve been up against before. If I know the ground, and I know them, I pretty much know what they’ll do next.”

  Senrid’s breath crowed. “So it’s true! What they say about picking your ground. Right?”

  Forthan shrugged, acutely uncomfortable at being pulled from familiar to dangerously unfamiliar territory. He wanted to help Senrid, whom he liked and admired, even though he found it difficult to follow Senrid’s quick changes of mood and subject. “I know the ground. Here. At the academy,” Forthan said stolidly.

  Senrid gazed at him, suspecting that Forthan’s meaning was metaphorical as well as specific. He grinned, socked Forthan companionably on the arm, and raced off.

  He pounded up the stairs to Keriam’s tower, and burst in as the man was just being served a cup of freshly ground coffee.

  As soon as the orderly was gone, Senrid kicked the door shut, and out it all came, from Ndarga’s sudden appearance to Senrid’s talk with Retren Forthan, in a headlong cascade. Keriam listened, knowing when Senrid was like this there was no halting him.

  “. . . and so it must have taken them the better part of two months to put this together. I think I need to confront them on their own ground. Waldevan is a rat, I know that much from my uncle’s day. No, rats fight. He’s a . . . a beetle. He’ll squeak and try to scuttle but if he’s penned, he’ll go belly up. That’s his pattern of behavior! But the Jarl of Methden will go all out, don’t you think? And from everything I’ve seen, it would be a mistake to hit him in his own territory. Like Forthan said, ground is important. Don’t you think he’ll fight?”

  Keriam had gone through the academy with David-Jarl Ndarga of Methden. “Oh yes. He’ll fight,” Keriam said grimly.

  “Then we have to catch him outside Methden, right? Outside his territory, but before he gets to the Rualan border and drags us into war. I have to get there first, so I can pick the ground. It’ll be just like the academy, won’t it?” Senrid’s voice pleaded. “Patterns.”

  Keriam said, “I can’t predict the outcome, Senrid. You’ve studied Headmaster Gand’s command text, from long ago. Think of what the man said about himself. That could speak for me. I’m excellent at analyzing what has happened, but I’ve never been good at predicting what will happen. The best I can ever give you is a set of possibilities, culled from the records. That’s why I teach, and don’t command.”

  Senrid rapped his knuckles on the desk. “How does this sound? You send the order for West Army to split. Give me two wings of horse, no, better make it three, a full company, for Waldevan’s got three wings of his own. Then send the rest to ride south for . . . here. Where Methden borders with the Rualans.” He pointed to the plain map on the wall adjacent to Keriam’s desk. “The West Army winter quarters are closest to Waldevan, which means I can threaten him first, soon’s my company gets there. Should only take them a day, or three if the weather is bad. Then I’ll transfer down here, and walk the ground, until the rest of West shows up. By then I’ll have a plan. I’ll pick the ground. I’ve already been studying the terrain maps, and I think I know where to look, because I know maps never give you a real feel for what’s actually there.”

  Keriam said, “And if Waldevan fights? If he wins?”

  “Then I’ll probably be dead, and it’s up to you,” Senrid retorted with a toothy grin.

  Keriam stared down into that face. The fair hair came from both Senrid’s parents, but the eyes that gazed back at him so intently were Evan’s eyes, the Indevan-Harvaldar everyone had loved.

  Grim memory seized Keriam, beginning with the days when David Ndarga of Methden had been riding mates with Kendred, the king’s oldest son, until Kendred’s unsuccessful revolt against his father had caused him to disappear, after which David’s loyalty had gone to Indevan. Who had been an excellent king until his younger brother, Tdanerend, (it was everywhere believed) stabbed him in the back.

  Tdanerend, as regent for five-year-old Senrid, had ordered the entire city guard out in search for the assassin, and the regent had even put a deserter-turned-thief through a grisly execution, but the man had maintained to the end he wasn’t anywhere near the royal castle that night. Everyone believed he’d been a scapegoat, but after Tdanerend had handed out savage floggings for rumor-mongering among castle guards saying so, the rumors went underground.

  More than ten years later, Keriam still felt like a coward for not speaking up, and he knew many others did as well, but what could they have done? Accusing the regent would not have brought Indevan back, but it would have touched off civil war. Tdanerend had made concessions and promises to gain powerful support among ambitious jarls, or those who wanted to become jarls, enough to make the outcome uncertain. The only sure thing would have been a high body count.

  David Ndarga, like the other jarls, had thereafter been forced to swear fealty to Tdanerend or die with the knowledge that his family would be replaced by Tdanerend’s sycophants. And so Indevan’s dreams of justice had died on that balcony with him.

  Keriam shifted uncomfortably, and Senrid stilled, a rarity for him, and waited as Keriam considered the present. Waldevan, Keriam was sure, would back down. He was a weasel. Had always been one. But David Ndarga of Methden was a wolf: loyal to his old mates and to an image of Marloven Hess that had not existed for ten years; fiercely bitter toward everyone else.

  “It might work,” he said finally.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bereth Ferian

  “YOU are?” The journeymage named Sigini threw her head back, pale hair rippling, blue eyes wide in astonishment. “You are?” No, that wasn’t astonishment. That was affront. The senior mage student l
ooked at Hibern as if she’d spat on the beautiful marble floor.

  Hibern stared back. Fhlerians were like that, everybody said. Fhlerians sounded arrogant because of those Venn-sharp consonants and the drawled vowels of their version of Sartoran. Because those strong enough to become citizen-warriors, with the right to vote for their own government, considered themselves better than anyone else. They were all that way, it was nothing personal.

  Not true, Hibern decided as she met that unfriendly gaze. It didn’t take mind powers to guess what this Fhlerian was thinking: But you’re a Marloven.

  Sigini opted for the veneer of politesse as she asked, “Why would the Queen of Sartor pick you for a study partner?” Her fellow mage students crowded around, some sharing her expression of personal insult as she added, “You are her own age. You cannot possibly be ahead of us.”

  “Not in general studies.” Another girl hefted her mage notebook. “But she must be in non-human magical studies, as she’s with Erai-Yanya of Roth Drael.”

  “Tsauderei probably arranged it,” a tall boy interjected, his tone reasonable, but speaking as if Hibern weren’t there in front of them. “She’s probably a compromise, since either mage school wouldn’t like the other being so honored.”

  Sigini, who looked about eighteen, rolled her eyes. “Of course. That explains the diplomatic side of it.”

  Hibern breathed out through her nose, trying to rid herself of the irritation Sigini obviously wanted her to feel. Not long ago, Erai-Yanya had told Hibern, “You’re going to meet with jealousy, I expect. Remember, no one at either Sartor’s or Bereth Ferian’s school knows Atan, much less who might be best for her. They are all thinking, quite naturally, that they should have been picked. It’s human nature, and if you’re going to work with mages of both schools for the good of the world, you must learn how to deflect such slights, and forget them.”

  Hibern forced a smile at Sigini, who someday might save Hibern’s life, or the other way around. “Speaking of diplomacy, I don’t want to be late.” She walked out of the lecture room.