Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

  Reluctantly, almost as if he could read the thoughts of the lad in front of him, the caped man drew his sword. Sturm’s blade flicked out in a clumsy arc. The caped man’s sword turned the blow with a quick, feline grace. Again Sturm lunged at his opponent, this time with a forceful thrust, but the caped man parried it easily, almost thoughtlessly. Sturm stumbled forward, caught off balance by the sheer recklessness of his own attack. He fell to one knee and skidded over the wet ground, scrambling to his feet at the sound of the caped man’s laughter.

  Spinning about in rage, Sturm raised his sword above his head and brought it whistling down in a sudden, blindingly quick movement. It was all the caped man could do to raise his sword. Blade crashed against blade, and the rainy hillside echoed with the sound.

  Both men staggered back, each surprised at the force of the blow. Quietly they regarded one another through the dwindling rain, on a hillside furrowed and torn by their awkward battle.

  The caped man rubbed his shoulder and transferred his sword to his left hand. Slowly, confidently, he pointed the blade at Sturm, who looked down at his own blade, shattered and useless in his hand.

  In desperation, Sturm drew his knife, stepped back, and stared into the glittering eyes of his enemy, who closed with him confidently, preparing for the final blow.

  Chapter 11

  The Surprising Visitor

  ———

  The caped man was on him at once, all quickness and slippery dark strength. Sturm felt a hand snake to his wrist and then, with a quick and violent shake, send his knife flying into the tall grass. He struggled desperately, but the man was too strong for him, pinning his shoulders and pushing him onto his back.

  Dazed, Sturm felt the sword’s blade at his throat.

  “Be still!” the caped man shouted. Suddenly he looked around him, alertly and uneasily, as if his words had echoed across the plains, across the continent itself. He sprang to his feet and sheathed the sword, brushing back his hood in the same crisp, athletic movement.

  “You …” Sturm began, but the surprise stole his words.

  “Jack Derry it is, sir!” the young man whispered with a fleeting smile. “You remember me from the Tower? The gardener? With the barrow in the courtyard?”

  “Y-Yes,” Sturm replied, as the name and the face came together in his memory. Here in the dividing moonlight, Jack Derry looked unnaturally youthful, his face smooth and beardless like that of a small boy. On closer look, though, the soft brown eyes were weatherworn with hard travel, the black hair matted and tangled, and his leather breastplate was tattered and cracked, its ornamental green roses faded but still recognizable.

  It was Jack Derry, all right. But something about him was different—different beyond weather and attire.

  “But how … how did you … and why?” Sturm sputtered, struggling for words.

  “Questions go better in a dry spot, somewhere out of the rain,” Jack replied softly. “When you show me that spot, you can ask and I can answer.”

  Sturm’s eyes narrowed. The water coursed off his muddy face. “How do I know that this isn’t a trap?” he asked.

  “By the Seven!” Jack Derry swore, reaching out and grabbing Sturm’s arm, “What need had I for traps a moment ago, when my blade’s edge rested on your throat?”

  It was a convincing argument. Convincing, that is, unless this Jack planned a greater crime, needing only a guide to the elf maiden, who suddenly seemed smaller, more vulnerable than Sturm had thought her before.

  “No,” Jack said quietly, his face close to Sturm’s now, so that the lad saw only the gardener’s sharp, black eyes and smelled only the deep odors of root and moist earth. “I mean none of you harm. Lead on, Sturm Brightblade. It’s best we get out of the cold.”

  Panic-stricken, Cyren had wrapped himself up in webbing. He dangled helplessly from a single thick filament in the back of the cave, a struggling cocoon of gray silk. Mara was at work on disentangling Cyren, her knife sawing at the webbing as Sturm and Jack entered the cave, behind them Jack’s squat little mare, whom they had collected on their way to the shelter.

  “I need your help,” Mara urged, looking over her shoulder.

  Sturm set down his broken sword and started to her side, but Jack passed him by, crouched beside Mara, and freed the spider with an effortless turn of his sword. Cyren scrambled to the topmost strands of the web, where he clung and shivered.

  “It is the spider in him that … that frightens him so,” Mara explained unconvincingly.

  “I wondered why neither of you came to my aid,” Sturm replied.

  Mara looked at him, then at Jack, and shrugged. “I said there was something out there besides wind and rain,” she said impatiently. “I do not recall telling you to attack it.”

  “But …” Sturm began and, looking from elf to spider to gardener and back again, seated himself abruptly on the floor of the cave.

  “Never mind what might have been, Master Sturm,” Jack said, crouching by the fire and extending his muddy hands to its warmth. “There are other questions you have, and rightful they are, and I shall do my utmost to answer them now.”

  Jack had followed Sturm’s pursuer, it seems, and in following had uncovered a conspiracy of sorts.

  That was the only way Sturm could explain the strange report from the High Clerist’s Tower. Jack, it seems, had trundled his wheelbarrow after the Knight and his squire, Derek, and what the gardener heard was a litany of traps and entanglements for Sturm, stretching from the Wings of Habbakuk to the borders of the Darkwoods themselves.

  “Snares of all sorts Lord Boniface had planned,” Jack said, his gaze alert and unnervingly intent. “From ambush to pitfall to something about the ford I couldn’t hear for the distance.”

  “Perhaps there was more you did not hear, Jack,” Sturm suggested. It seemed impossible: Lord Boniface, his father’s friend, conspiring with Derek to bring him down on the road to the Southern Darkwoods. Why would he sink to such treachery?

  And if it were treachery he fashioned, why bother with a lad not yet even a squire?

  Sturm leaned forward toward the fire. It was all too suspicious. There was something about this messenger that hinted at more than greens and servitude, though what it was he could not quite locate. And Jack was hardly the simpleton he played in the Tower.

  There was trickery somewhere in the midst of this, he feared. And yet …

  “Distant it might have been, sir,” Jack continued, not at all disturbed at Sturm’s disbelief. “So distant a fox might not have heard it—that I’ll give you.”

  He looked at Sturm, and his black eyes narrowed. For a moment, there in the firelight as rainy afternoon passed into rainy evening, the gardener looked like a rough carving wrought from oak or alder by some ancient forest people.

  “I’ll give you distance,” Jack Derry murmured ominously. “But what do you make of your stay in the castle? And poor Luin’s shoe—who loosened the nails, I ask you?

  “And last, who was it that gave you the marred sword? For it shows plainly here where the break was begun before our fight.…” He pointed to a tiny, perfectly straight notch running all around the broken blade’s snapped edge.

  “Coincidences, all of them,” Sturm replied, the edge of a question in his voice.

  “ ‘Coincidence’ is Old Solamnic for ‘I don’t know,’ ” Jack said to Mara with a wink. “Now, now, Master Sturm,” he added hastily. “There’s no need for challenge and fisticuffs, for you can believe me or believe me not; it’s no concern of my own.”

  “And yet you have followed us for days now,” Sturm said, staring angrily across the fire at this unexpected visitor.

  “Followed you? I think not!” Jack replied merrily. “I’m bound for your part of the world, I’ll grant, to visit my mother. But our paths divide there, if you’re asking me. Or even now, if you’d rather.”

  “You mean to tell me you didn’t come all this way to warn me?” Sturm asked. “That our meeting here on the
plains in the middle of a downpour is just …”

  “Coincidence?” Jack asked with a curious half-grin, and he and Mara burst into laughter.

  Sturm blushed angrily.

  “So be it, then, Jack Derry,” he pronounced, mustering his most Solamnic demeanor. “If what you say of Boniface and other matters are true, then we’ve no choice but to hole up here and wait for him. If he’s planning to undo me, for whatever reason, he’ll have to come here to find me.”

  The gardener only smiled. “We can’t have that, Master Sturm, if what I’ve heard bandied about the Tower has any truth to it. You’ve an appointed time, they tell me—something about the first day of spring. You might have noticed last night that the moons, great Solin and Luin, crossed in the sky.”

  Sturm dared not look at Mara.

  “If you’ve aught of astronomy,” Jack continued, “you’d know that ’tis a rarity, occurring only every five years or so, and this year it falls a week before the first night of spring.”

  A week! Thank Paladine and all the gods of good that I’ve a week left! Sturm rose and turned from the fire.

  “Boniface could be a month in coming. A year,” Jack Derry went on. “It would stand him well to wait, for you to miss your … assignation with the Green Man.”

  “You’re no gardener, are you?” Sturm’s hand moved slowly toward his broken sword. You’re a trap, Jack Derry. You’re the doing of Lord Wilderness … or an apparition … or … or …

  “How can you say that, Sturm Brightblade? Did you not see how well I kept the Tower gardens?”

  A dull pain laced through Sturm’s shoulder—nothing as sharp as he had felt at his wounding, as he had felt in Castle di Caela or the copse on the plains, but a heavy, deadening soreness that spread to the tips of his fingers.

  He couldn’t grasp the sword.

  “No … no, Master Sturm,” Jack continued. “I’m as much a gardener as aught else, and little I care for this involved Solamnic schemery.” His eyes darted to the pommel of Sturm’s sword, then directly, disarmingly back to the lad’s face.

  “Though you’re a fine one and of a proud heritage, or so they tell me, I didn’t travel these miles just to warn you or be in your august presence. Bound to the edge of the self-same Southern Darkwoods, I am, to a little village called Dun Ringhill where my ancient mother awaits me with an ancient mother’s excitement and yearning for her long-lost boy gone north to make something out of himself in the court of the Knights.”

  “Dun Ringhill?” Sturm asked.

  “Still two days’ ride from here,” Jack said. “In your boots, it’s a walk of four or five days, through plains and riverbeds down along the borders of Throt, where the goblins camp. And in Lemish, where the village is, you’ll find no friend of the Knights, either.”

  Jack rose from the fire and walked over to his squat little mare. He stroked her gently on the muzzle and muttered something to her, something lost in the downpour outside and the crackle of the nearby fire. The mare raised her head, snorted, and turned toward the mouth of the cave.

  “I expect, then, I shall be taking my leave of you,” Jack offered, leading the mare toward the outside and the loud, rushing shower. He paused at the cave mouth, foot in the stirrup, preparing to mount and ride into the rain.

  Mara elbowed Sturm, who spoke up despite his pride and anger.

  “Jack Derry?”

  Jack stood at the cave entrance, still and expectant.

  “Jack … do you know any blacksmith in … Dun Ringhill, is it?”

  “Indeed I do, Master Sturm,” the young gardener said, his face still turned. “My cousin Weyland, ’twould be. A fine smith he is, too.”

  “Fine he must be,” Sturm replied, his eyes on the heart of the flame, “for shoeing old Luin here is apprentice work, but reforging a sword …”

  Jack turned about and stared hard and levelly at the young man by the fire.

  “Weyland Derry can forge a sword to your liking, Master Sturm Brightblade,” the gardener said quietly. “And your welcome in Dun Ringhill will be such as fits the Order. All according to the Measure, ’twill be, and such as you’ll come to expect of my people.”

  Boniface huddled against the rain, watching the wavering light in the distant cave.

  There were too many around the boy. First the elf maiden and her spider—unpredictable at best, and therefore dangerous. Then the simpleminded gardener, if simpleminded he was, or if even a gardener, who had wandered to these parts for the gods knew what reason. To waylay Sturm Brightblade now would involve too many innocent lives. Too many blades. Too many chances for at least one to escape and tell others.

  Who would not understand.

  Once before, Lord Boniface Crownguard had dealt with witnesses. That time it had been an awkward Knight from Lemish, new to the Order and the Measure.

  He had not understood, either, and what had befallen then was entangled, messy, nearly disastrous.

  So there ought to be no witnesses, Boniface thought, and smiled. There would be other chances later. At the ford and in the village …

  He rose and mounted, riding east, the hoofbeats of his black stallion muffled in the driving rain.

  They departed the next morning when the rain lifted. Sturm and Jack walked ahead, leading the horses. Mara rode atop Acorn, Jack’s stocky chestnut, who also bore the weight of the elf’s belongings easily if not cheerfully. Behind the party, scurrying along from high grass to rocks and back to the high grass, avoiding sun and open spaces, Cyren the spider kept pace unevenly.

  At Jack’s advice, Sturm traveled no longer toward the famous ford near the Vingaard Keep. If there were, as he was coming to suspect, good truth in Jack’s warning about the snares of Lord Boniface, then all major fords would be perilous.

  Instead, the party turned due east, straight toward a narrow passage of the river where Jack claimed that the swimming was as safe as the fording. High above them, the kingfishers darted and dove, and had he been looking for omens, Sturm could have taken great courage from the ancient Solamnic symbols on the wing.

  He trudged gloomily beside the young gardener. It wasn’t enough, it seemed, that he was doomed to certain failure against one as resourceful and skilled as Vertumnus, for now the best swordsman in Solamnia was also laying for him if, by some miracle, he survived his brush with the Green Man.

  That is, if he could believe Jack Derry. It seemed preposterous—like something out of an ancient story of blood and dark oath and revenge. Boniface was his father’s friend. Angriff had saved him from Lord Grim, had grown up beside him. They had fought together, had studied and suffered and blossomed in wisdom … and …

  Finally there was the Oath and Measure.

  It could not be true. Boniface could not be a traitor.

  Sturm brushed his gloved hand softly over Luin’s neck. Slowly, gradually, sensation returned to his fingers, and he turned his mind to other things—to the dwindling days and the long road ahead of him.

  The new path took the party through rich pastureland north of the ancient stronghold of Solanthus. In some spots, the ground was greening, expectant, and the first migratory birds had returned from their winter stay in the sunny north. Amid the signs of spring, Sturm could look to the south across the level miles and see the fabled fortress, gray and hazed at the farthest reaches of sight. It was fertile in history and lore, the very kind of place he dreamed of visiting. Yet he dared draw no nearer after what Jack Derry had told him. Boniface could be anywhere on the plains, and assuredly his allies could be found in all places.

  Sturm sighed and tugged at Luin’s rein.

  “Why so gloomy, Master Sturm?” Jack inquired, steering Acorn gracefully around pooling waters that might well mark dangerous ground. “Rejoice that we have left the rains behind!”

  “It rushes toward spring, Jack Derry,” Sturm replied. “Too swiftly, I fear, for my liking. A week only remains until I have to show myself in the Darkwoods, ready for a reckoning with Lord Wilderness himse
lf.”

  “Look about you, Master Sturm,” Jack observed quietly. “Where is Vertumnus, and where is the hook and line with which he draws you east?”

  “You don’t understand,” Sturm protested. “First there’s the wound. I know they laugh about that at the Tower. They say I imagined my wounding, but it is there, by Paladine! But more importantly, it’s the honor of the challenge. I cannot do otherwise. You don’t know, Jack. There is no Measure for gardeners.”

  Jack smiled curiously and rubbed his chin.

  “No Measure but the sun and the moons and the seasons,” he replied. “I’m grateful for those.”

  “And I for the Measure,” Sturm said, much too quickly. “And … and of course for this lovely day.” He looked around, trying to wear a mask of cheeriness. “A mild tag end of winter it is, Jack. No frost, and the birds returning. Mild as the spring of ’thirty-five, I’ll wager.”

  When the farmers talked of mild springs, they talked of the year 335. Sturm remembered it well, though he was but ten: the thaws of winter and the flowers starting to bloom in the gardens of Castle Brightblade.

  “Mild it is, sir, though I don’t know about no three thirty-five,” Jack said and pointed to the east. “Best that we stop in these parts for the night,” he suggested. “We’re safer this close to the stronghold, what with the bandits and raiders about.”

  Jack looked at Sturm solemnly.

  “I’d rather Master Brightblade wasn’t surprised,” he warned, “when he finds out how the folk in the countryside take to his Oath and his Measure.”

  The evening was quiet, an enormous relief to Mara, but especially to Sturm. For the first night in almost a week, the lad slept the healthy sleep of a young man, secure in the knowledge that Jack Derry watched over the encampment.

  There was something about the gardener that called for a sort of wild reliance. Sturm had felt it in the long day’s journey as Jack read the shifts in the wind as a swordsman reads the feints and thrusts of his opponent. Jack was a reliable, even an inspired woodsman, but so, no doubt, was the dangerous man Sturm rode forth to challenge.