The Oathbound

by Mercedes Lackey

  “There’s more than one school; mine is White Winds. Um, let me go to the very basics. Magic has three sources. The first is power from within the sorcerer himself, and you have to have the Talent to use that source—and even then it isn’t fully trained by anyone I know of. I’ve heard that up north a good ways they use pure mind-magic, rather than using the mind to find other sources of power.”

  “That would be—Valdemar, no?”

  “Yes!” Kethry looked surprised at Tarma’s knowledge. “Well, the second is power created by living things, rather like a fire creates light just by being a fire. You have to have the Talent to sense that power, but not to use it so long as you know it’s there. Death releases a lot of that energy in one burst; that’s why an unTalented sorcerer can turn to dark wizardry; he knows the power will be there when he kills something. The third source is from creatures that live in places that aren’t this world, but touch this world—like pages in a book. Page one isn’t page two, but they touch all along each other. Other Planes, we call them. There’s one for each element, one for what we call ‘demons,’ and one for very powerful creatures that aren’t quite gods, but do seem kindly inclined to humans. There may be more, but that’s all anyone has ever discovered that I know of. The creatures of the four Elemental Planes can be bargained with—you can build up credit with them by doing them little favors, or you can promise them something they want from this Plane.”

  “Was that what I saw fighting beside you when you took out that wizard back in Brether’s Crossroads ? Other-whatsit creatures?”

  “Exactly—and that fight is why my magic is so limited at the moment—I used up all the credit I had built with them in return for that help. Fortunately I didn’t have to go into debt to them, or we’d probably be off trying to find snow-roses for the Ethereal Varirs right now. There is another way of dealing with them. You can coerce them with magical bindings or with your will. The creatures from the Abyssal Plane can be bought with pain-energy and death-energy—they feed off those—or coerced if your will is strong enough, although the only way you can ‘bind’ them magically is to hold them to this Plane; you can’t force them to do anything if your own will isn’t stronger than theirs. The creatures of the Sixth Plane—we call it the ’Empyreal Plane’—can’t be coerced in any way, and they’ll only respond to a call if they feel like it. Any magician can contact the Other-Planar creatures, it’s just a matter of knowing the spells that open the boundaries between us and them. The thing that makes schools of magic different is their ethics, really. How they feel about the different kinds of power and using them.”

  “So what does yours teach?” Tarma lay back with her arms stretched along Kessira’s back and neck; she scratched gently behind the mare’s ears while Kessira nodded her head in drowsy contentment. This was the most she’d gotten out of Kethry in the past six months.

  “We don’t coerce; not ever. We don’t deal at all with the entities of the Abyssal Planes except to send them back—or destroy them if we can. We don’t deliberately gain use of energy by killing or causing pain. We hold that our Talents have been given us for a purpose; that purpose is to use them for the greatest good. That’s why we are wanderers, why we don’t take up positions under permanent patrons.”

  “Why you’re dirt-poor and why there’re so few of you,” Tarma interrupted genially.

  “ ‘Fraid so,” Kethry smiled. “No worldly sense, that’s us. But that’s probably why Need picked me”.

  “She‘enedra, why don’t you want to go to Mornedealth?”

  “I—”

  “And why haven’t you ever told me about your home and kin?” Tarma had been letting her spirit-teacher’s last remark stew in the back of her mind, and when Kethry had begun giving her the “lesson” in the ways of magic had realized she knew next to nothing about her partner’s antecedents. She’d been brooding on her own sad memories, but Kethry’s avoidance of the subject of the past could only mean that hers were as sorry. And Tarma would be willing to bet the coin she didn’t have that the mystery was tied into Mornedealth.

  Kethry’s mouth had tightened with an emotion Tarma recognized only too well. Pain.

  “I’ll have to know sooner or later,she‘enedra. We have no choice but to pass through Mornedealth, and no choice but to try and raise money there, or we’ll starve. And if it’s something I can do anything about—well, I want doubly to know about it! You’re my Clan, and nobody hurts my Clan and gets away with it!”

  “It—it isn’t anything you can deal with—”

  “Let me be the judge of that, hmmm?”

  Kethry sighed, and visibly took herself in hand. “I—I guess it’s only fair. You know next to nothing about me, but accepted me anyway.”

  “Not true,” Tarma interrupted her, “She accepted you when you oathbound yourself to me as blood-sib. That’s all I needed to know then. She wouldn’t bind two who didn’t belong together.”

  “But circumstances change, I know, and it isn’t fair for me to keep making a big secret out of where I come from. All right.” Kethry nodded, as if making up her mind to grasp the thorns. “The reason I haven’t told you anything is this; I’m a fugitive. I grew up in Mornedealth; I’m a member of one of the Fifty Noble Houses. My real name is Kethryveris of House Pheregrul.”

  Tarma raised one eyebrow, but only said, “Do I bow, or can I get by with just kissing your hand?”

  Kethry almost smiled. “It’s a pretty empty title —or it was when I ran away. The House estates had dwindled to nothing more than a decaying mansion in the Old City by my father’s time, and the House perquisites to little more than an invitation to all Court functions—which we generally declined graciously—and permission to hunt the Royal Forests—which kept us fed most of the year. Father married mother for love, and it was a disaster. Her family disowned her, she became ill and wouldn’t tell him. It was one of those long declining things, she just faded bit by bit, so gradually that he, being absentminded at best, really didn’t notice. She died three years after I was born. That left just the three of us.”

  “Three?”

  Kethry hadn’t ever mentioned any sibs before.

  “Father, my brother Kavin—that’s Kavinestral—and me. Kavin was eight years older than me, and from what everyone said, the very image of Father in his youth. Handsome—the word just isn’t adequate to describe Kavin. He looks like a god.”

  “And you worshiped him.” Tarma had no trouble reading that between the lines.

  It wasn’t just the dim light that was making Kethry look pale. “How could I not? Father died when I was ten, and Kavin was all I had left, and when he exerted himself he could charm the moss off the wall. We were fine until Father died; he’d had some income or other that kept the house going, well, that dried up when he was gone. That left Kavin and me with no income and nowhere to go but a falling-down monstrosity that we couldn’t even sell, because it’s against the law for the Fifty Families to sell the ancestral homes. We let the few servants we had go—all but one, my old nurse Tildy. She wouldn’t leave me. So Tildy and I struggled to run the household and keep us all clothed and fed. Kavin hunted the Royal Forests when he got hungry enough, and spent the rest of his time being Kavin. Which, to me, meant being perfection.”

  “Until you got fed up and ran away?” Tarma hazarded, when Kethry’s silence had gone too long. She knew it it wasn’t the right answer, but she hoped it would prod Kethry back into speaking.

  “Hardly.” Kethry’s eyes and mouth were bitter. “He had me neatly twined ‘round his finger. No, things went on like that until I was twelve, and just barely pubescent. Two things happened then that I had no knowledge of. The first was that Kavin himself became fed up with life on the edge, and looked around for something to make him a lot of money quickly. The second was that on one of his dips in the stews with his friends, he accidentally encountered the richest banker in Mornedealth and found out exactly what his secret vice was. Kavin may have been lazy, but he wasn
’t stupid. He was fully able to put facts together. He also knew that Wethes Goldmarchant, like all the other New Money moguls, wanted the one thing that all his money couldn’t buy him—he wanted inside the Fifty Families. He wanted those Court invitations we declined; wanted them so badly it made him ache. And he’d never get them—not unless he somehow saved the realm single-handedly, which wasn’t bloody likely.”

  Kethry’s hands were clenched tightly in her lap, she stared at them as if they were the most fascinating things in the universe. “I knew nothing of all this, of course, mewed up in the house all day and daydreaming about finding a hidden cache of gold and gems and being able to pour them in Kavin’s lap and make him smile at me. Then one day he did smile at me; he told me he had a surprise for me. I went with him, trusting as a lamb. Next thing I knew, he was handing me over to Wethes; the marriage ceremony had already taken place by proxy. You see, Wethes’ secret vice was little girls—and with me, he got both his ambition and his lust satisfied. It was a bargain too good for either of them to resist—”

  Kethry’s voice broke in something like a sob; Tarma leaned forward and put one hard, long hand on the pair clenched white-knuckled in her partner’s lap.

  “So your brother sold you, hmm? Well, give him a little credit, she‘enedra; he might have thought he was doing you a favor. The merchant would give you every luxury, after all; you’d be a valued and precious possession.”

  “I’d like to believe that, but I can’t. Kavin saw some of those little girls Wethes was in the habit of despoiling. He knew what he was selling me into, and he didn’t care, he plainly did not care. The only difference between them and me was that the chains and manacles he used on me were solid gold, and I was raped on silk sheets instead of linen. And it was rape, nothing else! I wanted to die; I prayed I would die. I didn’t understand anything of what had happened to me. I only knew that the brother I worshiped had betrayed me.” Her voice wavered a moment, and faded against the howl of the storm-winds outside their shelter. Tarma had to strain to hear her.

  Then she seemed to recover, and her voice strengthened again. “But although I had been betrayed, I hadn’t been forgotten. My old nurse managed to sneak her way into the house on the strength of the fact that she was my nurse; nobody thought to deny her entry. When Wethes was finished with me, she waited until he had left and went inquiring for me. When she found me, she freed me and smuggled me out.”

  Kethry finally brought her eyes up to meet her partner’s; there was pain there, but also a hint of ironic humor. “You’d probably like her; she also stole every bit of gold and jewelry she found with me and carried them off, too.”

  “A practical woman; you’re right, I think I would like her. I take it she had somewhere to hide you?”

  “Her brother’s farm—it’s east of here. Well, I wasn’t exactly in my right mind for a while, but she managed to help with that for a bit. But then—then I started having nightmares, and when I did, every movable thing in my room would go flying about. Mind you, I never broke anything—”

  “Since I gather this was a ‘flying about’ without benefit of hands, I would think it would be rather unnerving.”

  “Tildy knew she hadn’t any way of coping with me then, so she took me to the nearest mage-school she knew, which was White Winds. It only took one nightmare to convince them that I needed help— and that I was going to be a pretty good mage after I got that help. That’s where I got Need.”

  Kethry’s hands unclenched, and one of them strayed to the hilt of a plain short-sword wedged in among the supplies tucked into the shelter.

  “Now that’s another tale you never told me.”

  “Not for any reason, just because there isn’t much to tell. We had a guard there, an old mercenary who’d been hired on to give us a bit of protection, and to give her a kind of semiretirement. Baryl Longarm was her name. When I was ready to take the roads, she called me into her rooms.”

  “That must have had you puzzled.”

  “Since she didn’t have a reputation for chasing other females, it certainly did. Thank goodness she didn’t leave me wondering for long. ‘You’re the first wench we’ve had going out for a dog’s age,’ she said, ‘and there’s something I want you to have. It’s time it went out again, anyway, and you’ll probably have to use it before you’re gone a month.’ She took down this sword from the wall, unsheathed it, and laid it in my hands. And the runes appeared on the blade.”

  “I remember when you showed me. ‘Woman’s Need calls me, as Woman’s Need made me. Her Need I will answer as my maker bade me.’ ” Tarma glanced at Kethry’s hand on the hilt. “Gave me a fair turn, I can tell you. I always thought magic blades were gold-hilted and jewel-bedecked.”

  “Then she told me what little she knew—that the sword’s name was Need, that she was indestructible so far as Baryl had been able to tell. That she only served women. And that her service was such that she only gave what you yourself did not already have. That to her, a fighter, Need gave a virtual immunity to all magic, but didn’t add so much as a fillip to her fighting skills—but that for me, a mage, if I let it take control when it needed to, it would make me a master swordswoman, though it wouldn’t make the least difference to any spell I cast. And that it would help Heal anything short of a death-wound.”

  “Rather like one of Her gifts, you know?” Tarma interrupted. “Makes you do your utmost, to the best of your abilities, but bails you out when you’re out of your depth.”

  “I never thought about it that way, but you’re right. Is there any way Need could be Shin‘a’in?”

  “Huh-uh. We’ve few metal-workers, and none of them mages—and we don’t go in for short-swords, anyway. Now, what’s the problem with you going back to Mornedealth? Changing the subject isn’t going to change my wanting to know.”

  “Well, you can’t blame me for trying-she‘enedra, I have angered a very powerful man, my husband—”

  “Crap! He’s no more your husband than I am, no matter what charade he went through.”

  “—and a very ruthless one, my brother. I don’t know what either of them would do if they learned I was within their reach again.” Kethry shuddered, and Tarma reached forward and clasped both her hands in her own.

  “I have only one question, my sister and my friend,” she said, so earnestly that Kethry came out of her own fear and looked deeply into the shadowed eyes that met hers. “And that is this; which way do you want them sliced—lengthwise, or widthwise?”

  “Tarma!” The sober question struck Kethry as so absurd that she actually began laughing weakly.

  “In all seriousness, I much doubt that either of them is going to recognize you; think about it, you’re a woman grown now, not a half-starved child. But if they do, that’s what I’m here for. If they try anything, I’ll ask you that question again, and you’d best have a quick answer for me. Now, are you satisfied?”

  “You are insane!”

  “I am Shin‘a’in; some say there is little difference. I am also Kal‘enedral, and most say there is no difference. So believe me; no one is going to touch you with impunity. I am just crazed enough to cut the city apart in revenge.”

  “And this is supposed to make me feel better?”

  “You’re smiling, aren’t you?”

  “Well,” Kethry admitted reluctantly, “I guess I am.”

  “When a child of the Clans falls off her horse, we make her get right back on again. She‘enedra, don’t you think it’s time you remounted this one?”

  “I—”

  “Or do you prefer to live your life with them dictating that you shall not return to your own city?”

  Her chin came up; a stubborn and angry light smoldered in her eyes. “No.”

  “Then we face this city of yours and we face it together. For now, make a mattress of Rodi, she‘enedra; and sleep peacefully. I intend to do the same. Tomorrow we go to Mornedealth and make it deal with us on our terms. Hai?”

  Kethry nodded,
convinced almost against her will, and beginning to view the inevitable encounter with something a little more like confidence.

  “Hai,” she agreed.

  Two

  Kethry envied her partner’s ability to drop immediately into sleep under almost any circumstances. Her own thoughts were enough to keep her wakeful; add to them the snoring of her mule and the wailing of the wind outside their shelter, and Kethry had a foolproof recipe for insomnia.

  She wanted to avoid Mornedealth no matter what the cost. Just the thought that she might encounter Wethes was enough to make her shudder almost uncontrollably. In no way was she prepared to deal with him, and she wondered now if she would ever be....

  And yet, Tarma was right. She would never truly be “free” unless she dealt with her fear. She would never truly be her own woman if she allowed fear and old memories to dictate where she would or would not go.

  The disciplines of the Order of White Winds mandated self-knowledge and self-mastery. She had deceived herself into thinking she had achieved that mastery of self; Tarma had just shown her how wrong she was.

  It’s been seven years, she thought bitterly. Seven long years—and those bastards still have power over me. And I’ll never be an adept until I break that power.

  For that, after all, was the heart of the White Winds discipline; that no negative tie be permitted to bind the sorcerer in any way. Positive ties—like the oath of she‘enedran she had sworn with Tarma, like the bond of lover to lover or parent to child—were encouraged to flourish, for the sorcerer could draw confidence and strength from them. But the negative bonds of fear, hatred, or greed must be rooted out and destroyed, for they would actually drain the magician of needed energy.

  Sometimes Tarma can be so surprising, see things so clearly. And yet she has such peculiar blind spots. Or does she? Does she realize that she’s driving us both to the Plains as if she was geas-bound? She’s like a messenger-bird, unable to travel in any direction but the one appointed.