Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

  Boniface nodded. “And if the occasion comes …?”

  “Open the dam when the boy approaches midcurrent,” the assassin intoned, shifting from foot to foot with a strange, padding sound. “Let the Vingaard Drift do the rest.”

  “And then?”

  “Let no word pass of our doings, of our dealings,” was the answer, and then in Old Solamnic, the ancient tongue surprising and corrupt on the lips of this hooded conspirator, “and dispose of my accomplices.”

  “Dividing the gold will be far easier,” Boniface joked in the time-honored language of ceremony and song, and Derek found himself recoiling from his knightly master as well as the gnarled monstrosities with which he dealt.

  What is this? the lad thought, his thickheaded arrogance sliding from him like a layer of dirt under a heavy rain. Where does your honor take you, Lord Boniface of Foghaven?

  But he said nothing, and Derek Crownguard sat in the saddle as gold—half of the gold in question—passed between Knight and assassin, with the promise that the rest would follow when the boy’s body was fished from the river. In silence, the squire followed his Knight up the sloping rise of the riverbank and north toward the keep, where they would shelter the rest of the night by innocent fires, talking Oath and Measure with the garrison.

  “What if …” Derek began, but Boniface waved away the words, his arm batlike under the dark canopy of his cape.

  “Who would believe them?” he asked, his voice steady and sinister. “Who among honorable folk would trust the likes of them against the word of a Knight of the Sword?”

  He turned in the saddle, regarding his squire with a cold and level gaze.

  “Be thankful ’tis an orphaned brat, without the uncles and cousins sniffing the blood of every Crownguard after the deed is done. If that were the case, you’d not be clean of this, nephew.”

  He shot Derek a withering stare. “What is more, I shall trust in your silence on this matter, as you shall trust that, given circumstance and the reason to do so, I am fully capable of dealing with … inconvenient witnesses. Indeed, I have done so before.”

  His gaze became distant, abstract. Derek liked it even less.

  Lord Boniface shook his head, suddenly and fiercely, as though wrestling himself away from attending to an obscure music. He rose in the saddle and blinked stupidly.

  “Tomorrow we return to the Tower, to gather the last … contingencies.”

  On the plains of Solamnia, the ancient Vingaard Keep in sight, Derek Crownguard received his own instruction. And learned what would befall him if he did not follow the lessons.

  In the early evening, Sturm awoke to music, to the touch of soft hands. Two beautiful women hovered over him, perched like tiny impossible birds in the thick branches of the oak. Red-haired and pale they were, and almond-eyed like elves, though smaller by far. Both were dressed in thin silver tunics.

  “Dryads!” Sturm gasped, recalling the legends of enchantment and imprisonment. He started to his feet. Quickly and firmly, the two restrained him.

  “Hist!” one whispered, pinching his lips with her delicate fingers. She smelled of mint and rosemary. “Tell the Master, Evanthe!”

  Vainly Sturm tried to slip away from the dryad, but her grip tightened, as did the grip of the roots about his legs. He couldn’t move. Then, awakened by his struggles, the greater pain returned, rushing over his chest and shoulder. He remembered the wound he had taken, the black thorn in his shoulder.

  The pain returned, but with it came the music, tumbling from the branches like a sweet and silvery rain. Sturm looked around him for Mara, but in vain. Then softly, melodiously, the bewitching creatures at his side began to sing.

  Their voices twined with the sharp descant of the flute, which sported through the words like an otter through silver water. Despite his confusion and precarious balance, Sturm found himself smiling, and he propped himself up on an elbow, searching again for the elf maiden.

  Vertumnus mused at the foot of a holly not ten yards away, his leafy face uplifted, a brace of owls at his shoulder.

  Sturm groped about for his sword, scattering dryads and roots and fallen leaves. The Green Man continued to play, his expression serious and unfathomable. Slipping, wincing with pain, Sturm touched the hilt of the weapon, but it didn’t budge from its home in the fire-blackened heart of the tree, and his fingers slid uselessly over the shining metal.

  Meanwhile, an unlikely company had joined with Lord Wilderness. From concealment in the surrounding woods, a deer emerged, then a badger. Three ravens circled about the oak and perched amid the high branches, joined incongruously by a small brown lark, and all around Sturm the branches seemed to blossom with squirrels. Finally, out of the shadows came a white lynx, who curled at Vertumnus’s feet and regarded Sturm with gold, translucent eyes.

  The lad tried to speak, but words and breath eluded him. The dark pain from his wound passed through him once more, and he saw and felt no more.

  “Evanthe. Diona,” Vertumnus ordered. “Untie the lad.”

  “And after, sir?” Evanthe asked. “Set him in the heart of this tree?”

  “Water the floor of the forest with his human blood?” Diona asked eagerly.

  “No more imprisonment,” Vertumnus declared. “And no more death. By the turn of the night, he will have passed through both.”

  “You’ll give him to her!” Diona hissed. “To that incanting hag with her roots and potions!”

  “She’ll herbalize him!” Evanthe protested. “No fun for us in vegetables!”

  Vertumnus smiled mockingly. He held the flute in the outstretched palm of his hand and breathed over it softly. The instrument vanished, and in the face of such quiet and powerful magic, the dryads ceased their clamor.

  Luin and Acorn shambled placidly into the clearing, hitched to a green covered wagon, bound to the traces by vine and woven rope. At the reins of the vehicle sat Jack Derry, his eyes intent on the lad in the tree. With a quick, respectful nod and smile, he acknowledged the presence of Vertumnus.

  “Welcome back, my son,” Vertumnus said. The dryads bowed to Jack, and from the smoldering branches of the oak, the lark descended, alighting on his shoulder.

  “How is he, Father?” Jack asked, guiding the wagon to a place beside Vertumnus.

  “Ebbing,” Diona replied, her hand shifting to Sturm’s neck, the white fingers gently searching for his pulse. “He has endured much and suffered the wound. His life is low and dwindling even further.”

  “Untangle him, Jack,” Vertumnus ordered.

  “As you wish, Father,” Jack replied dutifully, with a theatrical wink at the dryads, who blushed and turned away. “Though I cannot see what you’ll make of him. Nobility and idiocy war within him, and I’m pressed to tell you which has the upper hand.”

  “You move through the two worlds like water, Jack Derry,” Vertumnus scolded indulgently. “You know nothing of the divided heart.”

  “It appears that this … arboreal monster nearly divided his heart for him,” Jack observed dryly, touching the wound at Sturm’s shoulder.

  “The treant knows neither good intent nor evil, neither human nor elf nor ogre, neither friend nor trespasser,” Vertumnus explained impatiently. “And yet it is one of us, no monster. You have known that since your infancy, Jack. It has not changed since you left.”

  Vertumnus said nothing more. While he watched as Jack lifted Sturm from the charred ground, he gestured idly, almost absently, and the flute reappeared in his hand.

  “I suppose,” Jack said, hoisting the Solamnic lad to his shoulders, “it would not be too bad having Sturm here among us. There would be much I would have to teach him, though.”

  Vertumnus snorted. “And much he could teach you, Jack Derry, of things formal and stately and abstruse. You’ve grown like a weed, boy, but five summers in the growing makes for a green tree and a green lad.”

  “At five years old in the court of Solamnia,” Jack teased, “I would be toddling and toying and w
eeping at slights, like this one did, no doubt.”

  “He did no such things,” Vertumnus said quietly. “Even at five years old.”

  “Even then you knew him?” Jack asked. “Then no doubt you knew this … celebrated father of his.”

  “It was another life, another country,” Vertumnus replied dreamily, twirling the flute on his finger. The ravens alighted at his feet, hopping alertly and staring curiously at the bright glittering thing in the Green Man’s hand. “But I knew Angriff Brightblade. Served under him in Neraka, all the way up to the siege of his castle.”

  “What happened to Angriff Brightblade?” Jack Derry asked. “Has the boy a prayer of finding him?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t know,” Vertumnus said, lifting the flute.

  “Then why bring him among us, tugging him by his green wound?” Jack asked in exasperation. “You’ve no news of his father, and—”

  “But news of his father’s undoing I do have,” Vertumnus said. “Why Agion Pathwarden and the reinforcing army never reached Castle Brightblade is old history to the Solamnics, but who it was that arranged the ambush …”

  “And you’ll help Brightblade plan revenge?” Jack exclaimed.

  “Nothing could be further from my intentions,” Lord Wilderness replied gravely. And he lifted the flute and played and remembered.

  As Vertumnus played, the waters stirred before him. Lost in his thoughts and memories, he recalled a distant winter, a time of arrivals, when Lady Hollis had brought him back from a murky sleep.

  He had never been sure what had happened. He remembered the midnight assignation that he and Lord Boniface had kept with the bandits, remembered his shock as money and conspiracy had passed from Knight to brigand. He remembered the aftermath, being accused of betraying the Order, slipping his guard at night, and the winter and the walking. The safety of the walls dwindled behind him and the snow was a curtain ahead of him as, blindly and foolishly, he sought a path to the east, a clear road to Lemish and home.

  All about, it was cold, and the snow was relentless and the wind so loud that soon he lost all bearing, all sight and reason.

  He remembered the torchlight in the far encampment and how that light swelled in the darkness and snow until it seemed like a moon or a sun ahead of him, instead of the death he feared it was. He remembered stepping into that light, the ragged men on all sides of him, and the curses and the blows to his head, punctuated by the fierce vowels of his native language. He tried to answer amid the battering rain of stick and club and knotty fist, and then there had been the sudden blow to his left shoulder, the sharp black dagger of pain above the heart. The world went suddenly white, then dark. Then away.

  Finally he remembered this place. He awoke with an old hag over him, singing a long restorative verse. He remembered all of those many words, for each of them, in the way she sang them, spread warmth through his extremities and breath through his paralyzed body. And with each word, age slipped from the singer’s face, and she recovered a lost and incomparable beauty—almond eyes, brown skin, and dark hair shining like the winter sky.

  Slowly and painfully he had begun to move—first a finger, then a hand. He clutched at the grass beneath him, plucked a blade, then another. But he was still too weak—he couldn’t raise his hand. So he closed his eyes and rested, secure in the woman’s song and care. He saw nothing but green, green, and he slept and dreamt of leaves and of springtime and of roots deep in the soil.

  It seemed like a hundred years. It seemed like time immemorial. And yet he was here, in the Southern Darkwoods, companion of dryads and owls and of this beautiful, mysterious woman. She had given him life, had made him blossom. She had given him the flute and the knowledge of the modes.

  And now there were others—others who threatened his life and his kingdom. He had come to know them all, and he had come to forgive them. But forgiveness was not surrender: The Darkwoods grew in his blood and were irrevocably his.

  His song was over, rising through the moonlit branches of the vallenwoods. Slowly, almost lovingly, Vertumnus leaned over the lad in the bed of the wagon, whispering something to Sturm that nobody, not even the dryads, ever heard.

  Years later, in the High Clerist’s Tower, in the cold of a late February, those words would return to Sturm while he slept. Waking, he would not be able to call them out of the murky country of his dreams, nor would he pause too long in the recollection, for Derek would have led scores of Knights to the slaughter in the dark day before, and the morning would be a rush of arms and preparation.

  But the words were simple. “You can choose,” Vertumnus said. “To the last of this and anything, you can choose.”

  “He will live, won’t he, Father?” Jack asked anxiously. Evanthe snaked her arm through his and kissed him mischievously, her small lips poised behind his ear.

  “One way or the other, he will live,” Vertumnus declared. “If all goes well in the Lady’s care. Now sing, Evanthe. Diona, sing with your sister. While we carry the lad to Hollis, sing the song of the forest.”

  He turned to Jack with a sudden, wild-eyed roguishness. “You sing, too, Jack. You have your father’s fine tenor voice as well as his sword hand. Or so you must, for his are on the wane.”

  Jack smiled and scrambled onto the driver’s seat of the wagon, leaving his worries at the blackened foot of the oak. It was a fine tenor voice indeed with which he began the song. The wagon began to move, with Jack at the reins, and the dryads, each astraddle the neck of one of the horses, joined in sweetly and quietly, letting Jack carry the burden of the song.

  Jack Derry sang, and his father accompanied him, the flute flashing over the notes and over the silences between notes. Had Mara been there, at once she would have recognized Vertumnus’s playing for the magic it was by the elaborate technique that filled the pauses in the music, the spaces between words. The wagon departed the clearing, the foliage closed around it, and soon all was silent by the clearing and pool except for the fading singing and the brisk and imaginative sound of the flute.

  In one of the silences between verses, Sturm’s sword dislodged from the tree and tumbled to earth. The scar it had made in the wood healed instantly, and leaves sprouted in wonderful profusion upon its branches. When the music resumed, this time only faint and at the edge of hearing, two knots on the trunk of the tree darkened, then moistened and glistened as the treant wakened, once again opening its ageless eyes.

  Chapter 19

  The Dream of the Lark

  ———

  Sturm slipped in and out of sleep as the wagon moved deeper into the forest. He opened his eyes to a dark green canopy and imagined it was night, that he had slept away the day in travel.

  But travel to where? And from where? He could remember the events of that morning only vaguely—something about a moving tree, an armed adversary. Vertumnus was in his memory as well, and despite himself, Sturm kept returning to a recollection, cloudy and fevered, of Jack Derry driving a wicker chariot into a clearing.

  Covered by green and fever and clouds, he dozed, his sleep interrupted by snatches of song from somewhere, a distant song without echoes, muted as though it rose from the heart of a lamp or a bottle.

  Closing his eyes, he listened for the briefest of whiles. Fitfully, the shape of a copper spider passed over the inside of his eyelid like an afterimage following a flood of light. He thought of Cyren, then of Mara, but the thoughts tunneled back into darkness and sleep, and the afternoon passed in dreams he would never recall.

  Suddenly the chariot bed flooded with light. Sturm blinked and gasped, tried to sit up, then tumbled back into a feverish stupor. Strong hands were moving him, of that much he was certain, and the light quickened above him, dodging through leaves and needles, and the air was immediately fresh and pine-scented.

  He thought he saw Jack Derry once standing over him, but the brightness of the air was so green and excruciating that he couldn’t tell for sure. Twice he overheard parts of a conversation he gu
essed to be between the dryads, for the voices that spoke were high and pure and musical, like the sound of crystal wind chimes.

  “Dying?” one of them asked, and “Not so” the other answered.

  Then he started, trying in vain to move. For leaning above him was the Druidess Ragnell, smelling of herb and peat moss, her wrinkled face a mask of riddles.

  They have taken me back to Dun Ringhill, Sturm thought, fear and anger rising with the fever. But above him, the face blurred and wavered, as though he saw it reflected in disturbed waters, and when it reappeared, it was beautiful and dark and green-eyed, the face of a woman no older than forty, her black hair crowned with a waxy wreath of holly.

  Sturm saw the Lady Ilys in the back of her eyes, but it was not Ilys. Though fevered, he was sure of that. “Let it begin,” she whispered, and behind her, a choir of birds burst into song.

  The tranquil pool before Sturm shivered with the slightest breeze, and the sides of the tree opened around him, forming a rustic chair of sorts in which he rested, his sleep impenetrable and calm.

  Muttering, lifting their thin skirts above their knees, the nymphs danced away into the forest, leaving the wounded Solamnic with the other three. The success or failure of the Lady Hollis’s doctoring was of no concern to them, the great theater of battle between Knight and treant having reached its loud and spectacular conclusion.

  And they despised the Lady Hollis, the gnarled old druidess who went by the name of Ragnell back at Dun Ringhill and who had become a minor celebrity for her assaults on Solamnic castles some six years earlier. For some unexplainable reason, Lord Wilderness had taken her to bride.

  Diona, never quite believing the folly of men, turned back once before they lost Vertumnus entirely behind a thick stand of blue aeterna. Setting her hand to the short evergreen, she parted the branches and peered toward the clearing. For a moment, distressingly, she thought that the druidess looked ever so much younger, that her hair was dark and her back lithe and straight.