The Deed of Paksenarrion

by Elizabeth Moon

  Aliam Halveric bowed, welcoming, and the Lady inclined her head. She came through the gate, looked around, and crossed glances with Paks. Behind her Serrothlin and Amrothlin, not looking at one another, moved to stand beside Aliam.

  “Lord Halveric, we have known you from afar; it is our pleasure to know you in your own steading.”

  Aliam bowed again. “Lady, you are most welcome here, as your kin have been and will be.”

  “As for us, we shall hope that your friendship endures, Lord Halveric.” She looked around. “You have not walled out the trees entirely,” she said, noticing the fruit trees trained against one wall. Under her influence their winter buds had opened into leaves and snowy blossoms. “I will mend them,” she said, “when we must leave; it would be ill grace to leave you with frost-killed bloom. May we greet your family?”

  “Of course, Lady.” Aliam called them forward: Estil, then his children in order, and theirs. The Lady smiled at all, but Paks saw true joy in her face when one of the grandchildren reached out to her unbidden.

  “What, child? Would you come to me?” She held out her hand, and the baby, still unsteady, toddled forward and wrapped chubby fingers around it. “Can you say your name, littling?” She looked up at the mother, Hali’s wife.

  “He doesn’t say anything yet, Lady; his name’s Kieri, for the Duke, Lord Aliam’s friend.”

  “A good name, a brave name; gods grant he grows into it. He’s bold enough now.” She laughed softly, for the baby had grabbed her robe, and was trying to stuff it into his mouth. “No, child, that’s not food. Best go to your mother; she’ll find something better for you.” She picked the baby up and handed him over in one graceful move; the child’s eyes followed her as his mother turned away.

  Then she turned to Paks. “And you must be Paksenarrion, who found the scrolls that Luap wrote long ago, and freed the elfane taig.”

  “Yes, Lady.”

  Her glance swept the courtyard, and cleared it without a word. The others moved quickly into the buildings; the two elves reappeared with seats, and she waited until they were placed. Paks felt the immense determination behind her courtesy, the weight of years and authority. With a fluid gesture, she sent her son and nephew away, and seated herself. With no less grace, the Lady set about to make her position clear.

  “My son and nephew,” she began, “brought troubling word of you, Paksenarrion, and of your quest. I had hoped never to face this hour. My daughter was dearer to me than you can know, mortals with many children; when she died, and her son disappeared, my grief matched my love. Once that grieving eased, I laid their memories to rest, and hoped to find solace in her daughter. When first I heard of the boy again, it was that he had borne such injury as left him with no knowledge of himself, and none of his elven heritage. A lesser grief than his death, you might say, but not for me, nor for any who loved him. Patterns end; patterns mangled are constant pain. By the time we found him again, he was here, alive—” she glanced around the courtyard. “In this safe haven. If he could mend, it would be with such love as you gave. So I was told.” Paks noticed that she neither gave Kieri Phelan’s name, nor asked if they knew it.

  “But why didn’t you—?” began Estil. Aliam squeezed her hand. The Lady frowned slightly.

  “The elf who brought word, Lady Estil, had it from a ranger first. Then he came himself: Haleron, a distant kinsman, much given to travel in mortal lands. The boy was badly damaged, he told me, in body and mind both. He found no trace of memory that he could use, only the physical signs that we elves read more easily than you. To be sure, he would have had to invade the boy’s mind—a damaged mind—and risk more damage to it. As well as endure the pain of it himself.” She turned away; Paks saw her throat move as if she swallowed.

  “Then it was you, who sent the elves all those times,” said Aliam. “And we thought they liked us.”

  The Lady met his gaze directly. “Lord Halveric, they—we—did. We do. You cared for a lost child, a hurt child, and one of our blood—healed him as well as you could. We are forever in your debt; do you think I would shift the borders of the Ladysforest to visit someone for whom I had no regard?”

  Aliam shook his head, speechless.

  “You ask, and rightly so, why we told you nothing and did nothing. First, for the boy himself. With such damage as Haleron believed he had suffered, we were as likely to harm as help, if we tried to stir his mind. I hear that Paksenarrion can attest to the truth of that—” She looked at Paks, who nodded. “And we judged it would not help him to know what he had lost if we could not restore it. We waited, watching him for some sign that he was healing in more than the body. If his memory returned, if any of his elven abilities came forth—”

  “Could they, without your guidance?” asked Paks.

  “Yes. Lord Halveric knew his sister, who without our aid came to her full powers. She was our second reason for saying nothing. You will remember: the year he came to you was the year his father died, of grief, we were told, for his dead wife and lost son. Already she had been brought up to bear the rule. Unless the prince showed that he was returned to himself, we would be unfair to her, and unfair as well to the realm, to champion a crippled prince over a princess of great ability. You thought that yourself, Lord Halveric, did you not? When you first suspected who he might be?”

  “Yes.” Aliam looked down at his clasped hands. “I had no proof—and she was just coming to coronation that next year—But how did you know what I thought? I never told—”

  “You told the Knight-Commander of Falk. He is part-elven, one of my great-great grandsons.”

  “Oh.” Aliam looked stunned.

  “And of course he told me what he knew—which wasn’t much. I wish you would tell me now why you thought Kieri Phelan was the prince.”

  “He told me, finally, when he was my senior squire in Aarenis. I—don’t want to go into all that happened, but he told me what little he remembered. Seeing him like that, looking older as men in pain often do, he had a look of the king . . . and his few memories made sense of it.”

  “What did he remember? Haleron said there was nothing in his memories but pain and despair.”

  “Well—” Aliam ran his hands over his bald head. “I’m not sure now I recall all he said. Little things, as a very small child might see them. A bowl he ate from, tall windows, a garden with roses and a puppy. A man who picked him up—I think that may have been the king, Lady; he remembered the green and gold colors, and a fair beard. He remembered riding with his mother, he said, and traveling in the woods—that’s what caught me, you see—and being attacked.”

  “That’s more than I thought he had,” said the Lady quietly. She smoothed her robe with one graceful hand. “Haleron caught none of that.”

  “The older lords at court remember the puppy,” said Paks.

  “Yes, it knocked him down, or some such. He remembered that, and being lectured for hitting it.” Aliam cocked his head at the Lady. “Forgive me, but one thing still confuses me. If he is the prince, and half-elven, why doesn’t he look like it? All the half-elves I’ve seen show their blood—it’s one thing that made me think he couldn’t be the prince after all.”

  “A good question. Even then, there were humans who feared such strong elven influence, and so my daughter thought it would be easier for her children, if they looked more human. This is a choice we have, when we bear children to humans—how much the sinyi blood shows. As well, part of what you see in us is the practice of our abilities, as a swordsman’s exercise with a sword shapes his arm and shoulder. Had the prince grown up with that training, he would show some of it—but he would still look more human than elven, as his mother chose.” Aliam nodded, looking thoughtful.

  The Lady frowned again, and leaned toward Aliam. “Lord Halveric, is it true that you did not know anything of the sword you found?”

  “The sword? You mean, where it was from? No—nothing—that’s what I wrote.”

  “Yes, but—” She roll
ed her robe in her fingers. “It’s so hard with humans—you surprise us sometimes, with your gallantry and wit, and yet it seems you know nothing. That sword was famous at court; everyone knew it—”

  “But I wasn’t at court then!” Aliam’s eyes snapped. “I was a boy—a page—at my uncle’s. I never saw it!”

  She shook her head. “I thought you were being courteous—offering to let us decide whether to try the sword or not.”

  “You were what?!”

  “I truly did not know that you knew nothing. Amrothlin suggested you might not know, but it seemed impossible you could not. And when you said you were giving it as a wedding present—”

  “To his wife,” said Aliam.

  “I thought that was your way of letting the gods decide.”

  Aliam stared at her a long moment. “Would you have told me,” he said, “if you’d known I didn’t know?”

  “I—don’t know. Possibly. At the time, as you said, he seemed as fit to rule as the new king, who had no taig sense and no way to beget any.”

  “But then when nothing happened, why didn’t you—?”

  She sighed, and moved her hands slightly. “Lord Halveric, I thought you had left it to the gods, by gifting his wife. Someday he would draw the sword; someday it would act—or, if the gods willed otherwise, it would not. What was I to do? We do not meddle much in mortal affairs, but we were never far from him. We never saw or felt aught to show that he had come to know who he was, or had found any of his elven abilities.” She shook her head until her hair shimmered around her. “We were wrong in that, Lord Halveric—I say it; I, the Lady at the heart of my Forest and home. Wrong to think you knew, when you said you did not, and wrong to think we knew, when we knew only from afar. But believe me if you can, my lord, we intended no wrong.”

  “I believe you,” said Aliam heavily.

  “But the wrong was done,” said Estil suddenly, out of her silence. “We all did it, and for us—for me, at least—it came from taking the quiet way, the easy way. Forget, I thought. Forget, put it behind, look to the future—as if the future were not built, grain by grain, out of the past.”

  The Lady looked at her with dawning respect. “Indeed, Estil Halveric, you speak wisely there. We singers of the world, who shrink from disharmony, may choose silence instead of noise, and not always rightly.”

  “And now will you help us, Lady?” asked Paks.

  “I would do much to serve this land, Paksenarrion, and much to serve both you and the Halverics—but I am not yet convinced that my grandson can take the throne in any way that will serve.”

  “Because he has not remembered who he is?”

  “Because of that, and because he turned to darkness after his wife’s death. Even in the Ladysforest, we heard of that, and of his campaigns in Aarenis. We want no civil wars here, Paksenarrion, no hiring of idle blades to fill out a troop and impose his will where he has no right.”

  “It may not have been so bad as you thought,” said Aliam.

  The Lady turned on him. “It was indeed as bad—and worse than I have said. And the only bad I know of you, Aliam Halveric, is that you stayed with him through that and supported him.”

  “You mean Siniava?”

  “I mean after Siniava. Do you think we get no word at all?”

  “Lady—I don’t know if you can understand—” Aliam’s hands knotted together.

  “I understand evil well enough,” she said crisply, “even in my own family. It stinks the same everywhere.”

  “I would plead, Lady, that things happened which rubbed the same scars. When Siniava tortured his men and mine at Dwarfwatch—”

  “Lord Halveric, there is always an excuse. I know that. Such a man does not do wrong for no reason. But there are always reasons. Are we to set him on a throne—in this kingdom, set between Tsaia and Prealith and the Ladysforest—to have him find excuses to turn mercenaries free in the forest, as he turned Alured free? You will pardon my saying this: I know of your son Caliam’s loss; I know how that angered you. Had it been only the torturing of Siniava—”

  “But they didn’t!” Paks burst out. “They didn’t—”

  “Because you withheld them, isn’t that so?”

  “Well—yes—but—”

  “If you want to talk policy with elves, Paksenarrion, you must be ready to see all the truth and speak it.” She turned back to Aliam. “Had it been only that, I would worry little. But you know—all of you here know—that it went farther than that. Much farther. We do not want—I do not want—the man who helped Alured reduce the coastal cities to show the same character in Lyonya. We would agree to no one’s rule, who had done such things, elf or human. Elf least of all, for in this realm where so many fear us, even hate us, an elf’s misrule could finally breach that old agreement between human and sinyi. Should we prove ourselves what so many already say we are? Arrogant, cold, uncaring, quick to anger? Should we risk confusion with the iynisin, to give space to his taste for cruelty?”

  “Lady, no!” Again Paks broke in. “Please—let me tell you what I know of my own experience—”

  The Lady looked at her without smiling. “Paksenarrion, I will listen. But I realize he is capable of love, and caring, for a few. You remind him of his wife, I daresay, or even his daughter; you have seen the private side of tenderness which all but the worst men have. As a king, it is the other side, the outer, that concerns us here.” Paks, immersed in the power that flowed from the Lady as steadily as water from a spring, inexhaustible, nonetheless found herself able to perceive more clearly what indeed the elven nature was, and what its limitations. Firstborn, eldest of the Elder Races, immortal, wise as the years bring wisdom, elves were due reverence for all this . . . and yet not gods or demigods, however powerful. Created a choir of lesser singers by the First Singer, they were so imbued with harmony that they endured conflict only in brief encounters, resolving such discords quickly, in victory or retreat. It was not weakness or cowardice that made them withdraw, again and again, when evil stalked their lands, but that they were made for another purpose. This was their gift, with living things or elements or pattern itself to repattern into beauty, endlessly and with delight. From this came their mastery of healing, of the growing of plants, the shaping of the taigin, for they alone, of all peoples of the world, could grasp the entire interwoven pattern of life the High Lord designed, and play with it, creating new designs without damage to the fabric. So also they enchanted mortal minds, embroidering on reality the delicate patterns of their imaginings.

  Yet powerful as they were, as powerful as music that brings heart-piercing pain, tears, laughter, with its enchantments, they were as music, subordinate to their own creator. Humans need not, Paks saw, worship their immortality, their cool wisdom, their knowledge of the taig, their ability to repattern mortal perceptions. In brief mortal lives humans met challenges no elf could meet, learned strategies no elf could master, chose evil or good more direct and dangerous than elf could perceive. Humans were shaped for conflict, as elves for harmony; each needed the other’s balance of wisdom, but must cleave to its own nature. It was easy for an immortal to counsel patience, withdrawal until a danger passed . . .

  She took courage, therefore, and felt less the Lady’s weight of age and experience. That experience was elven, and not all to her purpose. Kieri Phelan himself was but half-elven; his right to kingship came with his mortal blood. And as she found herself regarding the Lady with less awe, but no less respect, the Lady met her eyes with dawning amazement.

  “I will grant your ideas,” Paks began slowly. “Others have said I look much like Tamarrion. It may well be that he has turned a kinder face to me than to strangers. But I am not speaking—now—of his treatment of me.” The Lady nodded, and Paks described the Duke’s generosity to his own, from recruits to veterans, and to others who had served him, however briefly.

  “That last year—” Paks took a breath before she said it. “He was wrong, Lady. I will say that, and Lord Ha
lveric knows I bear the Duke no grudge. He was wrong to support Alured as long as he did; I think from what I saw that he was unhappy about it, but had given his word, not knowing what Alured would do. Any man is wrong to be unjust, whenever he is. But did you not say, a little bit ago, that you had been wrong? And the Halverics said they had been wrong.”

  The Lady stiffened; Paks heard the Halverics gasp. Before the heavens fell, she rushed on.

  “He was wrong then; I have been wrong, too. But he has asked the Marshals of Gird back, Lady, and apologized for sending them away. He said before the whole Company that he had erred, that he had been hasty in anger. Does that sound like an arrogant man, a man eager to judge harshly, delighting in cruelty?”

  The Lady sat long without answering; twice Paks opened her mouth to speak, and shut it again, fearing she had already said too much. Finally she gave a little shake, like someone waking from a reverie, and turned to Paks with a smile.

  “It speaks well of any man to gain the love and respect of a paladin. You are not lying about this, though you may have put the best face on it that you could. I did not know he had called in the Marshals. If he admitted his errors—then—I have less fear, though I am not confident. At least he might not be an evil king.”

  “Kieri’s a Knight of Falk, too,” said Aliam. “At least, he was knighted, though he never took the vows and wears no ruby. Good thing, too, or it’d have given him a fit of conscience when he became a Girdsman.”

  “He’s not a Girdsman,” said Paks.

  “What? Of course he is—or was—and I suppose is again, if he’s made his peace with them.”

  Paks shook her head. “No, my lord. He talked to the Marshal-General in my presence. He supported Tamarrion in the Fellowship, and encouraged it, but he never took the vows. He told the Marshal-General that he had always felt withheld from such vows.”