Limits of Power

by Elizabeth Moon

  “Indeed so,” Arcolin said. “Thank you.” He had noticed that his first wagon had the tailboard neatly fastened up, and no one could have told that it carried two passengers, a former thief and a gnome.

  “I don’t know what gods we’ve offended to get another Siniava, or worse. And if he can dispose of one city at a time—”

  No need to answer that. They both sat, silent on their horses, as the last Fox Company wagon passed. Then the caravan master reached out; Arcolin clasped arms with him, turned his horse back across the road, crossed the ditch on the far side, and cantered along the grass way until he reached the head of the line again, where he rejoined Cracolnya and Garralt. He told them what the caravan master had said.

  By the time Fox Company reached their destination, just outside Ifoss, Arcolin had heard more rumors from both traders and Foss Council officials. Fear of fever had cut off all travel from downriver through Cortes Cilwan, though rumor had it some traders knew back roads, both north and south of the Guild Road. Travel was up on the difficult western route north from the Immerhoft Sea, starting at the port of Confaer, then upriver to Cha and Sibili and overland to Pliuni. Foss Council, sure Ifoss was their weakest city, the most likely to be infiltrated by spies, asked Arcolin to camp there.

  Ifoss lacked a fortified encampment for them to use, so laying out the camp for a full season’s occupation by three cohorts in a flat space outside the city’s east gate meant making a secure perimeter and then arranging everything within it. Nothing new to Arcolin, but Arvid—released now from hiding under canvas in a supply wagon—seemed fascinated by the process. Arcolin had no time to explain everything to him and advised him to stay out of the way.

  “You’ll have your own tent, you and Dattur, near mine. We all use the same jacks—that’s over there, where you see them digging a trench. There’ll be two more jacks trenches outside the perimeter.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Arvid said.

  “You can have a jug in your tent at night, if you need it, but you’ll have to empty it.”

  “Do you want me to get anything from the city today?” Arvid asked.

  “No. I want to introduce you to the Marshal first. Once the Marshal’s got you on the rolls, you’ll be safer.”

  Arvid looked dubious but nodded. Arcolin waved over a sergeant, who led Arvid to one of the tents, and watched as Arvid set his bundle of clothes inside it and came back out.

  Once the camp was organized, Arcolin led Arvid through the city to the local grange. Marshal Porfur of Ifoss Grange was a lifelong Fossian who had been to Valdaire only three times in his life. “Too big, too noisy,” he said, looking out the grange door to the drill field and the wooded hills rising beyond. “We had enough noise in Siniava’s War. So, your friend wants to become Girdish?”

  Arcolin glanced at Arvid, who wore his merchant’s garb and a glum expression. “Yes,” Arvid said.

  Porfur smiled at him. “Come, man, it’s not as bad as all that. The Count tells me you have a letter from the Marshal-General herself. And from a Marshal in Valdaire. If you’re worried about the exchange of blows—”

  “Oh, no,” Arvid said. “It’s not that. It’s the Ten Fingers. I get mixed up.”

  “As long as you mean to follow them,” Porfur said. “Let me see your letters, please.” When Arvid handed them over, Porfur moved to the light at the door and read them carefully. “Did you see that relic come alight?” he asked, looking at Arcolin.

  “No, Marshal. I wasn’t in Valdaire then. But I talked to Marshal Steralt about him, and will stand as his sponsor.”

  “And you told Marshal Steralt in Valdaire that you had been a thief … even a Guildmaster?” Now Porfur looked at Arvid.

  “Yes, Marshal,” Arvid said.

  “And you now foreswear that allegiance?”

  Arvid took a long breath, then let it out sharply. “Yes, Marshal.”

  “Do you have tokens of identity with the Guild?”

  “Yes, Marshal.” Arvid fished out the familiar medal and held it out. “I would not advise any person unfamiliar with thieves’ ways to use it.”

  “I don’t want to use it!” Marshal Porfur sounded so shocked that Arcolin almost laughed.

  “Marshal, sometimes one wants to … to infiltrate another … um … operation.”

  Porfur scowled. “You think the Marshal-General wants you to do that?”

  “She did ask me to trace stolen property,” Arvid said. “I suppose she has others who might be asked to do other things.”

  “Then you keep it. I trust the gods will punish you if you revert to thievery.”

  “Perhaps Count Arcolin would keep it for me,” Arvid said.

  “Me? Not likely,” Arcolin said. “I have a mercenary company to take care of. The Marshal-General’s not going to ask me to run her errands.”

  “Put it away,” Porfur said. “Now, Arvid: you will stand on the platform and recite the Ten Fingers.”

  Arvid stepped up onto the platform, and—for a man who claimed he found them confusing—recited the Ten Fingers with only a few mistakes. Arcolin suspected those were deliberate, but Arvid seemed to take the subsequent oath with due seriousness.

  The exchange of blows almost went very wrong indeed, but Arvid was able to pull his thrust at the last moment; Porfur was not that good.

  “I need not worry about your fighting skills, I see,” Porfur said. “But that does not excuse you from grange duties, Arvid. All newly sworn yeomen must come to drill night every hand of days for a year, barring illness or an excused absence. When the campaign season is over, I will send a letter for you to give to a grange in Valdaire, if you stay there with Count Arcolin, or wherever you go after that. Should Count Arcolin need to move the troops, he will tell me, and I will arrange something for you.”

  “Thank you, Marshal,” Arcolin said. “If I have other troops with no duties, I presume they’re welcome to come along to drill night?”

  “Of course. We go a year and more here without visitors, so they’re always welcome.”

  On the way back to the camp, Arvid said, “Drill? Every five days? With…”

  “Your fellow Girdsmen,” Arcolin said. “You’re not some over-privileged noble, Arvid. You’ve been among common folk all your life.”

  “Not this kind of common folk.”

  “True. You may find you like them better than you think.”

  “Gird has a truly wicked sense of humor,” Arvid said.

  “I expect you’re right,” Arcolin said. His own relationship with a gnome clan—finding out he was considered a prince in their terms—must be some deity’s jest. Gird’s? He didn’t know.

  Arcolin’s duties as commander kept him busy for the next hand of days, but despite having more than three hundred troops, it felt easier than the year before. Foss Council had always been the most organized and reliable of the Guild League city-states. He also now had the other captains and more support staff along, as well as Arvid to take some of the work of supply off himself and his staff. But on drill night, he went along with Arvid and three hands of off-duty soldiers from the Company.

  Porfur and the grange members stared for a long moment, and then Porfur said, “Welcome! Welcome to you all, yeomen of Gird.”

  By the end of that evening, all were sweaty and some were bruised. Arvid, walking back to camp with Arcolin, had a spring in his step.

  “Not so bad as you thought, eh?” Arcolin asked.

  “No,” Arvid said. He rubbed the back of his head. “No … not bad at all.”

  A hand of days before Midsummer, Arcolin received a letter from King Mikeli, who seemed more amused than upset at Arcolin’s new status as a gnome prince. He quit worrying about Mikeli’s reaction and instead practiced his gnomish daily with Dattur.

  At dawn on Midsummer, he found Dattur waiting outside his tent, having been there—he learned—since the turn of night. “The prince named my debt to Arvid Semminson paid in full,” Dattur said. “Is true?”

  “
It is so,” Arcolin said.

  “Now it is my duty to the prince,” Dattur said.

  “Would you like to go north and rejoin your rockbrethren in the stonehold?” Arcolin asked.

  “Is not my wish, but my prince’s command,” Dattur said.

  “Without practice, I might not learn and remember more of kaprist-islik,” Arcolin said.

  “Humans forget,” Dattur said.

  Arcolin already knew that gnomes thought they themselves did not forget anything, ever. “Yes,” he said. “We do. To learn kaprist-islik, I need someone to practice with. And I do not know enough Law.” He paused. Dattur said nothing, standing attentively before him. “But kapristi in the north, in the new halls, have no prince with them, and no word from me. Perhaps they need to … to communicate. Someone to carry my words to them and their words to me.”

  “If need, estvin send,” Dattur said.

  “You stay, then,” Arcolin said. “Teach me kaprist-islik; teach me Law.” Dattur bowed. He did not smile, but Arcolin sensed approval of his decision. He was not sure whether Dattur really wanted to stay in Aarenis with him—if this represented some power play on the part of that gnome—or if he wanted to be sure his new prince learned how to be a gnome. Dattur continued to wear human clothes in his size, shifting to darker colors but not into gray, though Arcolin offered again to supply cloth.

  “When in halls,” Dattur said. “When prince tells estvin Dattur is not kteknik, then clothes … but others will have made cloth by then.”

  In the meantime, Dattur took over duties somewhere between personal servant and squire. He even joined in Company weapons practice. Arcolin had done his best to explain to the troops what Dattur’s position was, so no one laughed outright when he lined up in formation that first time with hauk and shield … and no one thought of laughing again after that first bruising practice.

  “I had no idea,” Burek said, after watching Dattur demolish an opposing line. “I thought he’d be trampled.”

  “Rock strength,” Arcolin said, though he, too, was surprised. “In the north, we’re told that the gnomes taught Father Gird warfare, but nobody’s seen them fight for lifetimes.” Just as well, he thought, that no humans had provoked them to it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Andressat

  Filis Andressat rode eastward out of Cortes Andres before dawn, across the gently rolling hills below the escarpment. On this familiar journey—for he visited Cortes Cilwan on Andressat’s business at least twice a year—he had refused his father’s offer of an escort. He would spend Midsummer at Cortes Cilwan without having to endure insinuations from the regent that quartering his escort and their horses was a drain on the boy count’s resources.

  By the time he got back, maybe his father and brothers would have given over their harping on his attitude toward that bastard. At least the man had had the sense to know he could not fit in and had taken himself back to Fox Company. This half-year later, Filis recognized that Burek was—though a bastard—the kind of man he himself would have liked as a brother or nephew if only Burek had not been Ferran’s get on a servant. By all accounts, he was a fine young officer. But the public scolding the Count had given Filis for that earlier outburst still rankled, and the constant comments by his brothers did nothing to make Cortes Andres comfortable.

  The cool morning mist burned away quickly, summer’s steamy heat replacing it. Filis stayed to the shadier forest tracks as long as he could and by evening had come to his own command, the easternmost Andressat fort. He gave his captain the latest news from Cortes Andres and left his usual orders, as he did before every absence.

  The next morning, he set off again. He passed the cluster of stones marking the Andressat–Cilwan boundary just as the sun rose. Toward noon, he came out of the woods on a bare hillside with sheep spread out on its slope. He reined in and glanced around for any sign of people. He spotted two typical sheepdogs and then the shepherd, sprawled facedown on the short grass. Taking a midday nap, no doubt. Below the pasture, Filis saw the deserted farmstead he remembered, relic of Siniava’s War: several roofless huts and a barn mostly whole. Sometimes he stopped for lunch there; once, in a storm, he had spent the night. The old well held good water.

  To the north, a thunderstorm towered high, rumbling steadily as growing storms did. Already wispy veils of rain fell across the valley, thickening even as he watched, moving nearer. That shepherd was due a drenching, if he didn’t wake up.

  Thunder rumbled louder; a breeze lifted his hair. Filis grinned. Race or wet, that was the choice. He sent his horse down the slope at a hand gallop, certain the hoofbeats would wake the shepherd if the thunder didn’t.

  Chill air met him ahead of the rain, and rain lashed his face in the last few strides to the barn. Inside, most of the roof remained; he led his mount to the driest corner, loosened the girth, and opened a saddlebag for the sausage, cheese, and bread he would eat for lunch.

  Not long after, he heard the clatter of hooves and baaing of sheep outside. Then they poured in, a wet, gray, sheep-smelling mass of woolly backs, black ears and faces. His mount whinnied and stamped; the sheep scuttered back, only to be chivvied in by the dogs. The dogs shook themselves, then growled at him. Filis kept a firm hand on his mount’s bridle. Finally the shepherd came in, a boy now wrapped in a ragged cloak. He called the dogs to heel.

  “Sorry, surr,” the boy said, in the accent of the region. “I see you go in, but t’dogs don’t.” He stared at Filis in the gloom of the storm-darkened barn. “Who yurr be? Where be goin’?”

  Filis had come this way before but had not seen this boy; it spoke well of the child that he asked, given the times. “I’m from Andressat,” he said. “On my way to Cortes Cilwan to visit relatives there.”

  The boy nodded. “It come rain,” he said. “Won’t clear afore dark, maybe. Share bread?”

  “Yes,” Filis said, though he had no desire for the coarse hard bread the boy would have. “I have cheese.”

  The boy smelled of wet sheep, wet dog, and dirty boy, but the ritual of sharing food meant Filis must take a hunk of the boy’s bread, as the boy took a hunk of Filis’s cheese. That close, Filis was a little surprised to see that the boy was a redhead whose pale skin had freckled heavily. Red hair was rare in this area; he tried to remember the nearest vill with a redheaded adult who might be this boy’s parent. The boy ate rapidly, almost gulping the cheese, looking past Filis at the horse, then at Filis’s hands, at the rings he wore.

  “Yurr from Andressat,” the boy said, after wiping his mouth. “Yuh know t’ count?”

  “All in Andressat know the count,” Filis said. Of course the boy would notice his horse, his rings. He wished he’d left his gloves on, but too late for that now. For an instant he felt a twinge of anxiety, but he had his sword and he could take the boy and the dogs as well if he had to.

  “Jus’ wonder,” the boy said. “Yurr rich, though.” His gaze flicked to the horse, back to Filis’s hands, and then to the hilt of his sword.

  “Not very,” Filis said. “Only one horse.” The boy just stared. The back of Filis’s neck tickled. Well. He could ride through rain if need be. He stood up, eased his way through the sheep, and looked out into the storm. The branch laid across the opening was no barrier for his mount—an easy hop, even onto wet ground. Rain still fell, though less heavily, and it looked lighter to the east. He turned back to see the boy edging toward his horse. “Storm’s breaking up,” he said, and the boy jerked to a halt. “I’d best be on my way.”

  “Still rainin’,” the boy said. He stood oddly, feet a little wide.

  Filis dropped his hand to his sword hilt, casually, as if checking its readiness. The boy’s eyes narrowed, then he moved away from Filis and the horse. “Not that hard,” Filis said. He was in no real danger, he was sure; probably the boy had only wanted to filch more food from his saddlebags. But the two dogs, now standing alert, ruffs bristling, were worrisome.

  He turned his mount so he could see
the boy and the dogs while he tightened the girth he’d loosened, then mounted and rode at the sheep; they scattered from his path, leaving an opening. A touch of his spur, and the chestnut rose on his haunches and hopped over the branch into the rain outside. The rain had lessened enough that he had no need to stop and unroll his cloak from his pack.

  Filis rode on through the afternoon, wondering about that boy. The sheep—ordinary sheep for this region. The dogs—sheepdogs for certain. The boy, though … all the past year he’d seen no sheep on those hills. People might be moving back into the old vills, but … easy for brigands to buy some sheep and set them and a boy out to watch for travelers.

  For himself in particular? Unlikely. But not many travelers went from Andressat to Cortes Cilwan by this route, not since Siniava’s War. There’d been talk at home about the brigands the year before, in Vonja outlands. Burek had fought them, his father told him, with what was now Fox Company. Brigands who might be in the pay of the Duke of Immer.

  As the storm moved up the Immer lowlands to the west, blocking the sun, the afternoon stayed gloomy. At first he saw no hoofprints on the muddy track he rode. The track forked at a well; there had been a vill here once, but only tumbled stone walls remained. Filis watered his horse and pressed on. Here he found tracks: someone else had ridden, driving cattle. A small flock of sheep or goats had crossed the tracks of cattle and horse. He passed farmsteads, men and women at work in the fields, a child perched on a rock watching geese. A familiar vill, women on wooden pattens taking water from the well, their skirts splashed with mud. Bare-legged children, mud to the knees, chased one holding a leafy twig: some game. They all watched him pass; he smiled and nodded, and so did they. All the same as usual.

  As he came to another fork, he paused. A faint trail led right, to the hump of ground where he usually camped in an old stone shelter. If someone had set a watch on him, it would be wise to avoid his usual campsite. He could reach a vill he knew, not until well after dark, but a place he was sure would be safe. He’d stayed there before, and even when he passed through, he gifted the headman with a coin. He turned his horse left to the wider track.