Luap shivered. “If we stay here, they’ll find us frozen as hard as these rocks.”
“Not yet. I’ve never seen any place like this—or heard of it, even in songs.”
Luap sighed, and climbed the rest of the way out, shivering, to crouch beside Gird. “Probably no one ever saw it before.” At Gird’s look, he said, “Human, I mean. Gnomes, dwarves, elves, yes.” He squinted, blinked, and realized that the snow came down less thickly… he could see downwind, now, to the dropoff and beyond… “Gods above,” he murmured. A wet snowflake found the back of his neck and he shivered again.
“Uncanny,” said Gird. It was the same voice with which he’d come down from the hill before Greenfields, quiet and a little remote. As the last of the snow flurry wisped past, scoured off the stone by the incessant wind, Gird stood and looked at the wilderness around them.
It seemed larger every moment as the veils of falling snow withdrew, and a little more light came through the clouds. Vast vertical walls of red stone, cleft into narrow passages… Luap realized that Gird was moving toward the edge of their platform, and followed quickly.
“Don’t get too near—”
“—the edge. I’m not a child, Luap.” A gust of wind made them both stagger and clutch each other. Gird pulled back and glanced upward. “Nor a god, to stand in place against such wind. I will be careful.” He looked back and up. “There are trees—up on that next level—” Luap squinted against the wind and saw an irregular blur of dark and white, that might have been snow-covered trees. He looked into the wind, and saw the edge of cloud, with light sky beyond it, moving toward them, visibly moving even as he watched. He nudged Gird, who turned and stared, mouth open, before turning his back to the wind again. “A very strange place indeed, you found. Not in the world we know, I daresay.”
As the cloud’s edge came nearer, the wind sharpened, probing daggerlike beneath Luap’s clothes. He found it hard to catch his breath, but he no longer wanted to retreat to the safety of the magical place… he was too interested in the widening view. Light rolled over them from behind, as the cloud fled away southward and let sunlight glare on the snowy expanse. Luap squinted harder, suddenly blinded. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he stared until his body shuddered, reminding him of the cold.
Wall beyond wall, cleft beyond cleft, stacked together so tightly he knew he could not tell, from here, where those clefts led. Stone in colors he had not imagined, vivid reds and oranges, and far away a wall of stone as white as the snow—unless it was a snowfield on some higher mountain. And a distant plain, apparently almost level, glaring in the sunlight until his eyes watered.
“Not good farmland,” said Gird. Now even he shivered; he swung his arms and added, before Luap could replay, “Now let’s get back in; I’m famished with cold.”
They struggled back against the wind, eyes slitted, and found the entrance by almost falling in. Luap led, this time, and nearly fell into the stair’s central well when his boots slipped on inblown snow. He did not care. He felt that something had opened, inside his head, a vast room he had not known he owned, furnished with shapes he had not know he wanted to see until he saw them. Beauty, he thought, setting one foot carefully after another. It’s beautiful.
Behind him, he heard Gird’s comments about the impossibility of farming in land like that with inward amusement. He had nothing against farmland; he liked to eat as well as anyone. But these red rocks, streaked with snow were not meant for farmland. Trumpets rang in his head. Banners waved. Castles, he thought. And then again: Beauty. And then, slowly, inexorably, Mine. My own land. My… kingdom. As in a vision, he saw the arrival of his people, the mageborn, saw them come out into the sun atop that great slab of stone, saw the awe in their faces. He went down slowly, step after careful step, listening to Gird behind him. He did not notice how far they had gone before the cold wind no longer whistled down the central well; he simply assumed, he realized later, that the entrance would close itself.
He waited for Gird to reach the bottom of the stairs, and let Gird lead the way back into the hall. “I wonder if it’s the same every time you go up,” Gird said, in the tone of one who would find it reasonable if either way. Luap almost turned and went back to find out, but restrained himself. He could come again, alone: he could find out by himself if his land (he thought of it already as his, without noticing) was there. He didn’t notice that he had not responded until he realized that Gird had stopped and was peering at him. At once he felt the heat in his face, as if he had been caught out in an obvious lie. But Gird said nothing about that.
“You must have been cold,” he commented. “And now your blood’s coming back: your face is as red as raw meat. Mine feels like it too.” And indeed he was flushed, almost a feverish red. Luap felt an unexpected pang of guilt.
“I’m sorry—” he began, but Gird cut him off. “Not your fault. I’m the one insisted we stay out up there so long. Brrr. It may be spring in Fintha, but it’s winter here—let’s go back, unless you have a magical feast hidden here somewhere.”
“Alas, no,” said Luap. He led Gird back to the center of the pattern on the dais, and reached for his power, this time with confidence. It seemed but a moment, a flicker of the eyelid, and they were once more in the cave’s inner chamber. Gird coughed, and the cough echoed harshly, jangling almost. Luap led him out, with a concern more than half real, to their campsite just inside the cave’s entrance. Their horses, cropping spring grass outside, paused to look, and Gird’s old white horse whuffled at him.
Outside, the day had waned to a moist, cool evening. Luap built up the fire quickly, noticing that Gird still shivered from time to time.
“Are you all right?”
“Just cold.” He sounded tired as well as cold. Luap wondered if that way of travel, which he found exhilarating, felt different for the one who was taken, like a sack of meal in a wagon. “I don’t like caves,” Gird said, peevishly. “They all have something… this one that chamber, the gnomehalls their secret passages and centers, and gods only know what in that place you found, whatever it is.” He hitched himself around on the rock, and spread his hands to the fire Luap had built. “And I’m still not sure why you showed me that. Do you know yourself?”
“Not really.” Luap put the kettle on its hook, and added more wood to the fire. He should have brought a keg of ale. That would have kept Gird from asking awkward questions… but Gird being Gird might have thought that a suspicious thing to do. “I thought you should know about it; I thought it should not be a secret.”
“Umph. It was meant to be a secret, I’d wager. Meant to be, and kept a secret, all those years, until you stumbled into it. And that’s something I’ve always wondered about—” He coughed, a long racking cough, and Luap offered him water. Gird gulped a mouthful, and coughed again. “Blast it! You’d think I was an old man, hacking and spitting by the fire.” Luap said nothing, in the face of Gird’s shrewd gaze. “So… is that what you think?” Luap managed a shrug he hoped looked casual.
“You’re older than I am, but Arranha is older. To us you’re just Gird.” Not quite true; others had commented, this past winter, on that same enduring cough.
“That horse has slowed down,” Gird said, jerking a thumb at the white blur standing hipshot just outside the cave. “He hardly moves out of an amble, these days.” Luap looked at the horse, and met dark eyes that looked no more aged than a colt’s. Gird never admitted anything unusual in his horse, but everyone else realized that it had never been a stray carthorse. Where it had come from, no one knew, but Luap had heard more than one refer to it as “Torre’s mount’s foal.”
“Horses age faster than men,” Luap said, ignoring the snort from the cave entrance. “And you were willing to sit out in that snowstorm longer than I was.”
“That’s true.” Gird prodded the fire with a stick; sparks shot up, and shadows danced on the cave walls. He looked around. “It was homelier with an army in it.”
Noisier and smellier, Lu
ap thought, remembering quarrels and hunger. Now they had plenty of food, warm dry clothes without holes, warm blankets to sleep in. “Sib’s ready,” he said, lifting the lid on that aromatic brew. “We’ll be back to a town tomorrow.” If he was lucky, Gird would not get back to his previous topic. He dipped a mugful for Gird, another for himself, and set the loaf by the fire to warm. They had an end of ham, the mushrooms they’d gathered on the way, a handful of berries, a few spring ramps. Gird drank his sib in three gulps, then held his mug for more. Luap served him, silent and hoping to remain so. He offered a slice of warm bread, with a slab of cold ham. Gird took it as silently, and bit off a chunk.
Silence lasted the meal, then Gird belched and sighed. “Strange place. A long way from here or anyplace I ever saw. They don’t look like the mountains near the gnome princedom. Elves… dwarves… they will not thank you for sharing their secret, when they find out.”
“I thought perhaps they’d lost it.” That sounded strange, even as he said it. “Forgotten it,” Luap amended. “There’s no sign anyone’s used it.”
Gird blinked. “But you haven’t been watching. How would you know?”
“I—don’t.” He had been sure, from the utter blankness of the chamber in this cave, the empty hall there. No smells of occupation, no stir of air, no sounds. He was sure the place had been waiting for him, would be empty any time he returned to it, until he took others there. If he took others there. His heart quickened, and he took a long breath. He would not think about that now.
“How much sign did we leave?” Gird went on. “In a day or so, whatever snow we tracked in will have dried. That’s large country, out there. You could take an army through this cave, a tensquad a time, and send them out into that, and a day later no one could tell.”
Luap hoped his face showed nothing; he felt the sweat spring out under his arms and on the back of his neck. He cleared his throat and forced a shrug. “But until we know where there is, what good is that?”
Gird nodded. “That’s sense. We’re not wandering folk, any more; we have no need of more lands. There’s plenty amiss here to clean up. You’re right, lad; my mind just wandered a bit. And I should thank you for showing me, not keeping it to yourself. You’re right; someone else should know it exists, someone human, I mean. But it’s lucky we didn’t know during the fighting. Some would’ve wanted to hide from trouble that way.”
He almost told Gird then. His mouth opened; he said the first words that came into his head… and they were not those words. “It would have complicated things,” he said, and ducked his head and pretended to yawn. Towers, walls, castles slid through his mind, peopled with mageborn men and women and children, living together in peace, far from the quarrels Gird never wanted to hear about, where he could learn the ways of his powers, and use them to prove they were not dangerous.
“Tires you, does it? Traveling that way?” Gird prodded the fire; Luap managed another yawn as the flames danced high for a moment, and nodded. He was tired but not from that. From being caught in the old trap of Gird’s mistrust, from being penned in too small a pen.
Chapter Nine
Gird came from court as grumpy as Luap had seen him. “Your folk I expected to be difficult; mine I thought had more sense.”
“What now?”
“A petition from over northeast somewhere, to have all the mageborn children tested for magical powers and then destroy them. The magery, not the children. I think. I don’t know how many times I have to tell them—!” He broke off, scrubbing his forehead with a fist as if to wipe out the memory. “It will work in the end; it has to work.”
“Maybe it won’t,” said the Rosemage quietly. “What then?”
“Not another war,” said Gird. “We’ve had enough of that.” That no war didn’t mean no killing they all recognized. “Look at Aris and Seri; they’re fast friends. They get along with both peoples.” The Rosemage opened her mouth, but closed it again. Gird knew, as well as she and Luap, that few mageborn had Aris’s talents, and few peasant-born had Seri’s experience of friendship. You can’t, Luap thought, make an alliance work because two children get along. More likely, Aris would trust too much in his own goodwill, and some superstitious peasant with no goodwill at all would bash his head in for him. That Seri would then gleefully avenge him wouldn’t help at all. He wondered what Gird would do if someone killed Aris as a mageborn—would that finally convince him that the two peoples would never mix? Or would he ignore that as stubbornly as he’d ignored all the other evidence?
“We could leave,” Luap said, as if continuing the conversation interrupted long before. No need to say how or where: Gird had not forgotten that.
“All of you?” Not quite disbelief, but a tone that made clear Gird’s opinion. Root and branch, child and lady and old and young?
“All of us.” Luap shut his eyes a moment, seeing them all in the echoing arches of that great hall, hearing in his mind’s ear the voices racketing off stone. How could he feed them? “We could farm that other valley,” he said. “Small-gardens…”
“Most of us aren’t farmers,” said the Rosemage. Damn the woman—she should realize it was their best hope. “Small-gardens don’t yield grain…”
“There’s a plain beyond,” he said. “Maybe that would produce grain. Or something Arranha said, about the terraces used in Old Aare; we could build terraces. And if we aren’t farmers now, more of us are than were. We can learn. Better that, than—”
“You want to run away!” Gird’s anger blazed from his eyes. “You won’t give it a chance!”
“I’ve given it a chance!” The moment he said it, he knew he’d lost; if only he had said we instead of I. He got his voice under control and tried to mend the unmendable. “Gird—sir—however much you want the mageborn to blend in, most of the others don’t. They’ve told you themselves. Even some of the Marshals; you know why you didn’t send Aris to Donag’s grange. And Kanis, in the meeting two days ago—”
“Kanis is a fool,” Gird said through clenched teeth. “And you’re another. You ought to see it, you of all of us, if blood-right stands for anything. Does your mother’s pain mean nothing to you? You are ours as much as theirs—” He flicked a glance at the Rosemage, not hostile, but acknowledging, and went on. “You could be the bridge between us, Luap, if you’d work at it, instead of haring off after some scheme to make yourself a comfortable niche with your father’s folk. You don’t have the right to say: the peoples must say. The mageborn, if they want to leave on their own, can go without you. They don’t need you, except to cause them trouble: you’ve sworn to take no crown, and what can you be, without one, but temptation?”
“That’s not fair!” He wanted to say more, but he had ruined his chance, and knew it. Gird would not budge now, not for a season or so. Yet he could not keep quiet. “You know I have traveled the land, more than you yourself, carrying copies of your Code, and trying to show your—the people—how harmless, how loyal, a king’s son can be. And they don’t trust me yet. What more can I do?”
“Quit saying ‘my people’ and ‘your people,’ for one thing. Quit thinking it, for another. The distance between a merchant trading across the mountains and a shepherd lass who’s never been away from home is no less than the distance between the mageborn and the…” Even Gird wanted a name for the others, and though he refused to say “my people” the words hung between them in the impervious flame of reality. He cleared his throat, avoiding the term, and kept going. “If I can expect the merchant and the shepherd, the cheesemaker and the goldsmith, to live under one law, what is so hard about the other?”
The Rosemage warned him with her eyes, but he could not desist. Gird must someday see the truth, he was convinced, and if he kept at it, perhaps it would be sooner. He did take time to choose his words carefully. “Gird, you set no limits on craftsmen or merchants or farmfolk, so long as they stay within the law, but what would happen if you told farmers they could not farm, or weavers they could not weave?�
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“Why would I do that?” Gird asked. “And what has that to do with—”
“The mageborn powers, Gird. You want them given up, as if they were wicked in themselves, rather than talents like a dyer’s eye for color or a horse-trainer’s skill with horses.”
Gird cocked his head. “Talents like other talents? I think not, lad, and if you believe that you’re fooling yourself.”
“You let Aris heal: that’s a mageborn talent.” He hoped his envy did not bleed into his voice. Every time he saw Aris, his own talent ached within him… perhaps he too could heal, if only Gird would let him try.
“Healing is a gift of the gods. Yes, I know, it was said to be a mageborn talent, but what mageborn in my lifetime had it? We saw no healing; we saw wounding and killing. I let Aris heal, yes, because some god’s light shines through that boy like a flame through glass, but you notice I haven’t let him do it without supervision. The gods I trust; his mageborn talent I trust no more than this—” He flicked his fingernails in derision. “Healing is a service; it’s not a way of getting power over others. Will you—you of all people—tell me the mageborn don’t use their talents to get power?”
“That’s not fair!” It was already too late; Luap felt the last strand of control fraying. “You trust that Marrakai whelp—born and reared in the privilege you claim to despise. You trust a stripling boy of whom you know nothing but another child’s report—and I’ve worked with you for years, gone everywhere at your command, and you don’t trust me—”
“And why should I?” Luap had not seen Gird that angry at him for years. “You tell me that—and remember what you did, Selamis-turned-luap. The first time I saw Aris use magery, it was to heal, and he gave his own strength to it. The first time I saw you use magery, you tried to kill me, to force me to accept your rule. Right after swearing you sought no crown, you tried that—should I then trust you?”
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