Limits of Power

by Elizabeth Moon

  But she had drawn her sword—only the attackers were many. As a child, he had not seen them all before he was yanked away, before he fell … He did not remember striking his head, but he remembered the waking. Rough hands, harsh voices, cords binding him, too tight.

  He had never thought to be here again, in this dire place—he looked again at the peaceful trees, the empty dell with the little outcrop of rock to one side, as beautiful as the rest, except for his memories. He knew tears were running down his face.

  “Sir king—is there aught—”

  “It happened here,” he was able to say after a few moments. “We were riding, just down there. They rose up from the ground, men in dull clothes. She cried out—I did not know why. She grabbed me from my mount, but that hindered her—”

  “Sir king—” Their faces around him now were as strained as those he remembered, but not in cruelty or anger. He saw love and compassion instead, mingled with amazement that he remembered.

  “I must … stop here awhile,” he said. He dismounted. His knees nearly failed him, but he stiffened his legs and managed to walk down the gentle slope. Walking helped: he was not a terrified child on a horse now. He was aware of the Squires behind him, but he ignored them; they did not press closer, leaving him space. His memory called up details he had long forgotten—the sound of his mother’s breathing, her horse’s squeals as swords struck, the smell of her blood as she took wound after wound. He had been facedown over her saddle bow, clinging with his hands to the horse’s harness, unable to help. He could not have helped by being upright; he knew that, but …

  It was as if he could see the course of the fight still marked on the ground. Here exactly she had cried out and snatched at him, tried to wheel her mount away … but more had risen from concealment, hemming the horse in, grabbing its reins, striking at it, finally slicing deep into its legs, crippling it. He had a last remembered glimpse of her—a memory that had lain deep-buried all these years—her face turning to him as he fell and then … nothing.

  Mother … I lived. I am here. She had been full elf; he could not hope that in some afterlife she knew that. Elves died, when they died, without any spirit to survive. But he said it again anyway, this time aloud. “Mother, I lived. In spite of all. And I am trying to be what you and my father wanted, a good king for all in this realm.”

  He heard nothing, felt nothing, but when his tears ceased, he felt easier. He still did not know who had plotted against his mother and against him, but he was alive. He breathed in the fragrance of the violets that now carpeted the ground, rose from his knees to walk the circuit of the glade, touching trees, rocks, bending to touch the violets.

  “We will camp here tonight,” he said.

  “Here?” asked Berne. “Is this not a cursed place?”

  “No,” Kieri said. “These trees, these flowers, even these rocks had no part in the evil done here. I know elves make no memorials to their dead, but I am only half-elf, and I would make one for my mother. Pitch the tent up there—” He pointed back up the slope. Unbidden, a wisp of melody came to mind, and he found himself humming it as he walked across the glade to the rock outcrop. He picked a few violets and laid them there.

  After a few moments, the silence deepened; he felt enclosed in a space apart, though when he glanced back, he could see his Squires setting up camp. Was this leftover elven enchantment … or something else?

  He waited, resting in that bubble of silence, of peace, until it slowly faded. Whatever it had been, he felt it was proof that the glade was not cursed, that he was right to be here.

  Nothing disturbed them that night. Kieri woke a little before dawn, as usual, and as the first rays of sun filtered into the glade, he saw what he first thought was a vision. Where only violets had been the day before, a royal purple carpet, now a scatter of objects lay, glinting in the early light. And the rough rock on which he had laid his bouquet was now smoothed and shaped into the very shape he’d thought of having carved. The violets he had placed, still unwilted, lay on a polished shelf under an arch.

  He walked over to the objects. He’d thought any jewels had been stripped from his mother’s body, but here lay a ring and a twist of ruddy gold. He’d been told her body had been laid straight in the way of elves; nothing had been said of these things the earth had now returned to him, baubles less precious than herself.

  Or you. Kieri shivered. It was his own mind, he was sure … and yet he had heard the voices of the bones, of his father and sister and the others. He picked up the ring, the gold torc he now recalled his mother wearing around her neck, the enameled fitting with the leaping hound and stag entwined that he recalled from her belt. They were all bright and clean as if they had just come from a jewel case. A little enameled box that rattled softly as he picked it up … His fingers found the catch easily, and there were the tiles he remembered, blue and green and red, with the runes on them in gold and silver. It had been a selani set, a game he had just been learning … and what had he been told about it? A game we play? He’d not seen it anywhere since. He’d played with the tiles, stacking them, arranging them in patterns, and then his mother had put them back in the box and said, “Your grandmother will teach you.” Teach him what? Was it an elven game?

  He looked at the tiles more closely, sighed, and poured them back into the box, latching it again. Selani … how could he have forgotten that name? But in the years of slavery, he hadn’t known his own name for a long time.

  What should he do with these things? Did they belong here or … Not here. He shivered again. It must be Falk … he touched his ruby and murmured a prayer. When he had gathered all that lay in the grass, he took them back to the camp and showed his Squires.

  “I didn’t see those yesterday,” Berne said.

  “Nor I,” Kieri said. “They were here when the sun came … and did you see the rock?”

  They looked at the rock, then at him. “Did you carve that last night, sir king?”

  “No. Yestereve, I thought of having it carved, exactly like that—a marker of my mother’s death, a place to remember her—but I’m not a stonecarver. I could not have done it.”

  “Save by magery,” Berne said.

  “I’m not rockfolk,” Kieri said. “And elves have no power over stone, do they? Even the Lady had rockfolk carve out her underground stronghold. Besides, I would know if I were doing magery; I would feel the power leave me. I felt nothing; I slept the night.”

  “What’s in this?” asked Panin, another of the Squires, pointing to the box.

  “Selani tiles,” Kieri said. “Do you know that game?”

  “Selani? I don’t know the word.”

  “They were my mother’s—she was starting to teach me to play the game. You don’t know it?”

  “I never heard of it. How do you play it?”

  “I don’t know … I hadn’t learned yet. I do remember she said my grandmother would teach me. Perhaps it is an elven game.” He opened the box and showed them the tiles. “I don’t know what these symbols are, either.”

  “That one’s truth,” Linne said, one of the half-elf Squires.

  “Truth?”

  “Yes … and look, this one here. This is untruth.” She flicked the tiles around. “Honor … dishonor. Reward … disgrace … danger…”

  “And this was a game?” asked Panin.

  “So I was told,” Kieri said. He could not now remember anything of the game. He had liked the colors, he did recall, and the glitter of the silver and gold. “What kind of game …?” He picked up the tile marked with “Truth” and ran his finger over the rune.

  “Would it be like dice?” one asked. “Shake them in the box and pour them out? Toss them?”

  “We could see,” Berne said. “Sir king?”

  “I am not sure.” Kieri picked up Untruth and held the two in one hand. What question could such answer? He shook them in his hand, and thought, This was the place, and released them.

  On the cloth Truth lay upright
; Untruth had landed blank side up. Both were red; both had gold runes. It could be chance, after all. But the chill that ran down his back suggested something more than chance.

  “I heard once,” one of the new Squires, Ceilar, said, “that the elves had ways of telling what would come and of divining the inner aims of other elves. These might be such, might they not?”

  A game, his mother had said. But was it? Adults might say that to a child when the truth was more complicated, even dangerous. He picked up Untruth again and looked more closely. Was that gold, or … he picked up Truth again … no. Not gold, but fool’s gold. He shivered … this, like all the rest, had come to him for a reason, a reason that had survived his mother’s death, and by a power he did not know or understand.

  “The gods may reveal it,” Kieri said. He was not sure which of the gods. His mother had been full elf, so her god would have been the Singer, for whom the only name he knew was Adyan, Namer. He touched his ruby again. Falk had a name for truth and mercy, for keeping oaths and releasing prisoners. Here, in this place, he had to wonder if Falk had had anything to do with releasing him … and why, if so, Falk had let him suffer so long. The old sorrow rose again, though this time he could breathe through it. Here, in this place, he had changed from the child he had been and started on the road to the man he now was. None of this had been his choice, but since then he had made many choices, and they had led back here, to the place of no-choice.

  “Is there a tile with a rune for choice?” he asked, looking back down at the dell below with its carpet of violets.

  He heard the gentle clatter of the tiles as Linne turned them all. “Yes, sir king. One for choice, and one for coercion. That one can also be read ‘necessity.’ ”

  “I am not surprised,” he said. He took a breath and let it out slowly, reaching for calm. “You know what happened here, but … you may not know all that grew from this seed.”

  “We were robbed of our queen, your mother, and you … the heir,” Panin said. “And you suffered…”

  “Yes. And as you would expect, that changed me—would have changed any child. But what I see now is a pattern. It started here, for me, though for my mother perhaps it must have started somewhere else, some other time—this was her pattern’s end. I had no choice then, or for years after, being young and unable to choose anything—my master chose for me, chose pain and humiliation. When I was freed … the only choice I had was to take the chance or not take it. And I took it. But I did not feel it as a choice … I felt it as inevitable. I long thought that the man who saved me had laid a geas on me … that it was his will that I escape, more even than my own desire to flee.”

  “And was it?”

  “I do not know. I do not know if it matters. But the choices I made later mattered. I am not the man my father wanted—though his bones are satisfied, they tell me now. I am not the man my mother hoped for, to whom she had given—” He stopped abruptly. He had told no one what Amrothlin had told him, that his mother had transferred her power to create an elfane taig to him. “To whom she had given her elven heritage,” he said. “I am the man my choices made me. And here is where I learned that choices could be unmade. Here, in what should have been a safe place for her and for me.”

  “What of the robbers?” Jostin asked.

  “Dead men were found here, weren’t they?” Kieri asked. “I remember being told that. Robbers, they said. What did those who found them do with the bodies?”

  “I don’t know … Would they have buried them? Burned them?”

  “And risk harm to the land? And ugliness?” He looked again at the scene … the violets, the stone now a graceful little shrine with its offering of flowers. “I think they would have taken the bodies away, somewhere beyond the bounds of the elvenhome.”

  “If they didn’t find the … your body, sir king, why didn’t they search for you?”

  “I have heard two tales—one that they did but did not find me because they did not cross the sea, and one that they assumed I was dead and the body simply not found, scattered by animals, perhaps.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. What matters is … coming here, these things that rose to meet me, and that stone. It is meant to complete something, this pattern, and to begin another pattern. Each of these things means something, not merely the tiles of the game—if it was a game, and not my child’s misunderstanding.” He turned to the other objects: the ring, the torc, the fitting for the belt. “I think I am meant to learn why these were given me and to consider my choices, past and future. And to do it here.”

  “How long, sir king?,” Panin asked. “We will need provisions if we stay long.”

  “I do not know,” Kieri said. He sighed. “Until it is done. I have had little leisure in my life to stay in one place and think. I trust it will not be too long, for I would not want to worry the queen and my Council. Only two of you need stay with me. The others—Berne and Varne, continue to the east and let the Sea-Prince know of the changes since he left. He met you both at the wedding. Jostin and Ceilar, return to Chaya and tell the queen of what I found. Send back two other Squires with provisions enough to reach Prealíth—we will need a courier service to and from the Sea-Prince if he agrees, the sooner the better. If I do not return betimes, start back here with more provisions. I will write the letters now.”

  He saw protest in their expressions, but they left him to write the letters and set to dividing provisions and other supplies. The Sea-Prince—he hardly knew the man and nothing of his attitude toward elves, though he had been escorted through this forest by them. By the same way? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Perhaps wrapt in elven magery and allowed to see nothing. A land looking to the sea would value ship timber: mastwood and sparwood. Did Prealíth have forests, or was it mostly farmland or scrubland? He could not remember that from either journey.

  Change has come, he wrote. The Lady of the Ladysforest was murdered by one of the iynisin, and you and I, lord prince, must see to our borders that she long guarded. Would the Sea-Prince even know what iynisin were? If he did, would he be insulted to have it explained? You may know iynisin by another name: these are those who rebelled against the Singer when the First Tree sang with the first Kuakgan. Some call them kuaknomi or blackcloaks. Pray send your envoy, that we may discuss how best to accomplish what profits us both. These my envoys are King’s Squires such as you met on your recent visit, and will return your messages to me, or guide your envoy, as you desire.

  To Arian he wrote of what he’d found, what had happened, and what he thought he was supposed to do—a much longer letter—and begged her to share any thoughts she had about it. He asked if she’d ever heard of the game selani, and did his best to draw the runes on all the tiles. Ask the elders, he concluded, if they ever saw such things or heard my mother use the term. Especially the Seneschal.

  Then he handed the letters to the two groups of Squires and bade them take provisions for their own journeys. “I have no positive warning that the Sea-Prince would do you harm, but he remains a stranger, so stay together, rather than one return to me, unless there is great need.”

  They bowed. “Yes, sir king.”

  When the four had ridden away, the glade’s silence seemed once more to close in; Kieri walked down to the little shrine and knelt there. He laid the ring on the shrine’s shelf. The stone was pale green, nothing as dark and rich as emerald but like clear water in a deep pool over white stone. The design incised on its rounded top showed a fern frond, the setting heavy gold. His mother had worn it on her heart-thumb, he recalled. Now, as he watched, a flicker of light rose from within the stone. He glanced aside a moment. No ray of sun was near: this was the stone itself. Under the fern frond, another design showed, etched in light: a dragon shape, tiny but perfect in detail. Then it faded again.

  His heart thundered in his ears. Was this a dragonspawn, somehow captured or about to break free in scathefire? But the ring suggested no menace. He looked at his hands. He wore his father’s ring on his swo
rd hand, a peculiar stone that flashed red-in-green. He’d been told it was the symbol of the power shared by human and elven.

  He picked up the ring, kissed it, and slid it onto his heart-hand thumb; it fit as if made for him. The light returned again; the tiny dragon seemed to writhe, his hand and arm tingled, and then the stone showed clear pale green again and the sensation vanished.

  When he put the gold torc on the shrine, the twisted strands brightened, then slowly untwisted to show something gleaming between them … the strand on which they were wound. White, glowing like polished ivory, itself twisted … he reached out, and the gold tightened, closing over it again. He laid his hand on it. He felt it was something magical, but he had never seen anything like it. No vision or word came to him, but the conviction that he should wear it. He ran his hand over the thing … His mother’s neck, as he remembered it, was smaller than his own. But when he set it about his, it also fit precisely, comfortable … even comforting.

  Well. The belt clasp next. The bright enamel shone as if lit from within, which did not by this time surprise him. Tiny letters appeared like those on his father’s and sisters’ bones; he could read those, though the words made little sense at first, jumbled together as they were. They faded before he could read them clearly.

  Finally, the only object left was the box of selani tiles. He set that on the shrine. The clasp opened of itself, and the lid lifted. The box inverted itself, pouring the tiles out on the shelf. Two rolled off the shelf; Kieri caught them in his hands. Both were green, their runes in silver. He didn’t recognize them, but the meaning seeped into his mind as he held them. Loyalty. Regard. Not opposites, this time.

  He considered loyalty: to whom had he been loyal, and who had been loyal to him? To Aliam Halveric … to his oaths, to his kings, to his soldiers … and he had known loyalty from them. Regard? Yes, that, too.

  He laid those two on the shelf, and another two stirred. He picked them up. Pair by pair, the same thing happened—runes he could not read revealed themselves and sometimes gave him alternatives and sometimes merely examples. He did not understand the colors … why loyalty and regard were green, and courtesy and kindness were red and blue, respectively, but all of that kind—virtues or valued qualities—had their runes in silver. The ones with opposites had their runes in gold and false gold.