by Hilari Bell
Given that Tobin had always been his father’s favorite, and it was Jeriah’s fault he’d been trapped in the Otherworld in the first place, that was generous.
“The goblins will bring him back.” Jeriah tightened Glory’s cinch. “I wouldn’t have let them go without me if I wasn’t certain. You know that.”
“I know.” His father sighed. “It’s just . . . Never mind. I’ll ride with you part of the way.”
He went to get his own horse, and Jeriah took a deep breath and tried to be fair. It was because of him that Tobin had gotten involved with the sorceress—although she was the one who’d dragged his brother into the Otherworld! And their father had broken his own honor trying to get Tobin off for Jeriah’s crime. The fact that Jeriah hadn’t asked—or wanted!—either of them to do either of those things meant nothing.
I think we’ve all learned an important lesson about telling each other the truth, his mother had said. As if she wasn’t the biggest liar among them!
Still, she had a point. Telling the truth, most of it, had created a tattered peace between him and his father, and riding together through the sprouting fields wasn’t nearly as awkward as it had been. Jeriah resolved to be more truthful in the future. As soon as he finished just one small deception.
“The crops . . . everything looks good.”
His father snorted. “Do you even know what’s planted in that field?”
Jeriah looked at the rows of ruffled leaves. If it had been late summer, when the plants were bigger, he’d have had a better chance. “Beets?”
“It’s lettuce.” But his father’s face held wry humor, instead of the grim patience that would have been there only a few weeks ago, and Jeriah laughed.
“I’ll never make a farmer. You might as well give up on me.”
“I think I will,” said his father. “Oh, not give up on you. Beets and lettuce are very different, but I plant both of them, because both have their place.”
And was he lettuce, Jeriah wondered, or a beet? “Thank you, sir. Soon Tobin will be home, so you won’t have to do without either beets or . . . What’s going on with the dike? I thought you’d decided not to repair it.”
Most of the goblins who’d found a home in the flooded village had followed Cogswhallop into the Otherworld, but not all of them.
“Don’t worry about your friends,” his father said. “After what you’ve told me, they’re welcome to make their homes anywhere on my land. And our people are already putting out goblin bowls, if they ever really stopped, no matter what the priests said.”
“Yes, but you told me rebuilding the dike was too much work, since we’ll just have to pack up and move to the north in a few years anyway.”
“But you said the Hierarch doesn’t favor the relocation,” his father pointed out. “Now that he’s no longer being drugged—I can hardly believe a priest would dare to drug the Bright Gods’ Chosen one! But now that he’s recovering, will the relocation go forward at all?”
It was exactly what Koryn had feared.
“The reason for it still exists,” said Jeriah uneasily. “The barbarian army is still there, no matter what’s been happening to the Hierarch. If anyone’s figured out how to drive them back across the desert to their own lands, I haven’t heard about it.”
“Yes, but the relocation was Master Lazur’s idea. Now that he’s dead, perhaps some means to deal with them can be found.” This from a man who was more inclined to cautious pessimism than most! “In any case, I’ve got some idle hands now that the planting’s finished. If we can repair the dike and drain the fields before midsummer, the houses might dry out before irreparable damage is done to their structure. But I sent Alan to explain all this to your goblins, including my offer to help them build their own homes, before we ever started work on the dike. He said he felt silly, rowing out to the middle of that deserted square and shouting at empty houses, but they’ve heard my message. I won’t leave them homeless, I promise you.”
Now, that was the least of Jeriah’s worries.
Could his father be right?
Koryn had told him that in bringing down Master Lazur, Jeriah had stopped the relocation as well. She’d cursed him for destroying the whole Realm, condemning everyone in it to death with that one act. And he knew that whatever else had passed between them, she’d never forgive him for that. He didn’t need her forgiveness!
Besides, surely she might be wrong, and his father might be right?
She had slapped his face. Of course he’d wanted Mistress Koryn to slap him. A misplaced flirtation had been the best excuse he could come up with to abandon her in that ravine, where her crippled leg would trap her while he exposed Master Lazur’s treachery. She’d been working for the priest, and Master Lazur was plotting against the Hierarch himself! It was only when Jeriah remembered how slender, how frail she’d looked in the moonlight . . . He snorted. Her leg might be crippled, but Koryn was tougher than he was, in every way that mattered.
He didn’t miss her, either. It was only guilt—completely misplaced guilt!—that kept the last thing she’d said to him hovering in his mind, like a wasp he didn’t dare ignore or crush.
But . . . could she have been right?
Glory’s springy walk carried him rapidly down the road that led to Brindleford. From there Jeriah could turn either north, to the City of Steps, or south. Looking at the orderly fields he passed, the tidy farms, Jeriah’s worry deepened. The command to relocate had never been rescinded, but would people be repairing fences and barns that they’d have to abandon soon?
And if they were planning to resist, were they wrong? Koryn and Master Lazur had believed that the Realm couldn’t stop the barbarian army anywhere in the wide spread of the Realm’s South- and Midlands. Bright Gods knew the Southlanders and the army had been trying! Master Lazur had believed that their only hope to hold back the barbarian army was the ancient wall that spanned the narrow neck of land that joined the Realm to the great northern woods. Jeriah’s old commander had agreed with them.
But Master Lazur had also been drugging the Hierarch into imbecility, so he could control the council himself. Commander Sower had spent half a dozen years trying to stop the barbarian army as it pressed farther and farther into the Southlands. And Koryn’s whole family had been slaughtered by barbarian warriors. So their judgments might well have been unduly influenced.
Were they right? Did the relocation really have to go forward, or was there another way?
Jeriah had wanted, desperately, to go into the Otherworld and bring Tobin back himself. It had been clear from the start that the sorceress had seduced his brother. Having watched his mother use her own dark beauty, Jeriah understood how much influence a beautiful girl could wield. But once she realized that the Otherworld would kill Tobin, surely the sorceress would let him go. And Jeriah had come to know the goblins. When they made a bargain, or thought they owed you, they kept at it till the debt was paid. Cogswhallop would bring Tobin back any day. They might be back already!
If Jeriah really had put the Realm at risk to save his brother, then he had to set it right. And for the first time in years, he wasn’t assigned to anyone’s service. Nevin had reclaimed his old post as the Hierarch’s body squire, and although Master Zachiros had promised to find Jeriah “something to do, I’m sure,” he currently had no job at all. No one was expecting his arrival. Leaving Jeriah free to go south to the border, and see for himself if the relocation really was necessary. Because if the barbarians couldn’t be stopped, then it was up to him to set the relocation in motion once more.
When Jeriah had first ridden to the Southlands, to join his older brother fighting the barbarians, the journey had taken three weeks. He was familiar with the way the land grew drier and the weather hotter, with each day he traveled. He hadn’t expected to be stopped in Marvele, a full three days’ ride from where he’d stopped the last time.
“You don’t want to go south of here, lad,” a grizzled trooper told him. “Not unless y
ou want to see bits of your liver being picked out of some barbarian’s teeth.”
“I’d heard they’d made a push,” Jeriah said. “But I didn’t realize . . . They took over a quarter of the Southlands!”
“About that,” the soldier agreed. “They’ve been resting up since then, recovering. Bets are running high on whether they’ll wait out the summer, like they used to, or make another big push soon. Now that they’re camped in the Southlands and don’t have to cross the desert to fight us, the smart money’s on another summer attack.”
“Your money?” Jeriah guessed.
The trooper grinned. “All I’ve got to do is survive to collect, and I’ll be rich enough to live like a lord behind the great wall.”
So the South, or at least the soldiers posted there, assumed the relocation was going forward as planned. Did their officers?
“Where’s Commander Sower these days?” Jeriah asked.
The trooper didn’t know. It took Jeriah several hours to learn that Commander Sower was currently posted out of Grayven, and most of the next day’s ride to get there.
During the journey, Jeriah rode alongside enough patrols to learn that despite the familiar red tabards, with the church’s golden sun gleaming on their breasts, the army had changed. Last year most of the soldiers had possessed the lighter skin and hair of men from the center and north of the Realm. Now, almost two-thirds of them had the dark hair and swarthy skin of Southlanders. Refugees? Almost certainly, which explained why the mood of the army had changed too.
When Jeriah had been here before, most of the soldiers were men sent by their landholders, who owed the Hierarch a levy of men to defend the Realm. Those men had been more interested in going home than in fighting anyone—and many of the injustices Jeriah objected to had sprung from that. He understood that the commanders couldn’t simply release any man who wanted to go, but flogging a man half to death for trying to return home to be with his wife when their first child was born was too harsh.
The subcommander who’d ordered that punishment had soon found his tent swarming with ants—Jeriah, by dint of several childhood experiments, knew that ants would follow a honey trail for an amazing distance. The next inspection of the subcommander’s troop had been so disastrous that Jeriah still grinned at the memory . . . and the subcommander had been reduced to a common trooper.
Jeriah had also used practical jokes to cover more serious activities, carrying messages for the conspirators who had sought to overthrow the cadre that controlled the council, to reform abusive laws, both in the army and in the Realm at large. Which probably explained the sour expression on Commander Sower’s face when Jeriah was shown into his office.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “I thought you were bedeviling, ah, serving the Hierarch now.”
If Sower knew he’d come here on his own, he would send Jeriah away.
“Yes, sir,” said Jeriah smoothly. “As you seem to have heard, I was honored with an appointment as one of the Hierarch’s body squires.”
And that appointment hadn’t been taken away from him—only the job had—so technically . . .
“Then what are you doing here?” Commander Sower repeated.
There was a time when you either had to press forward or yield. And Jeriah had never been good at yielding.
“I don’t know how much else you might have heard about the Hierarch,” Jeriah began carefully. “Lately, that is.”
Sower’s brows drew down. “I’ve heard some rumors. I also received an official report that Master Lazur was hanged for treason. Couldn’t believe it. The man was the architect of the relocation and the army’s best advocate in council. And they say he tried to poison the Hierarch? Nonsense!”
“I’m afraid that part’s true,” said Jeriah. And he hoped this man never learned how much he’d had to do with that truth being uncovered. “Oh, not poison. But he did try to give the Hierarch a drug that would make him . . . compliant.”
In fact, Master Lazur had been giving the Hierarch that drug for seven years, but that was something no one was allowed to know.
“Well,” said Sower blankly. “What a demonish mess.”
“Exactly so, sir. And that’s why I’m here. Everything Master Lazur had a hand in is now considered suspect, including the reports he made about conditions here on the border. There will be an official inquiry, of course—”
“They’re already here,” Sower told him. “In Helverian, last I heard, some twenty miles from the border. They show no signs of moving closer.”
Jeriah made a mental note to avoid the official inquiry at all costs.
“I think the Hierarch suspected that kind of thing might happen,” he improvised. “That’s why he sent me, and a few others, to gain a . . . less formal impression of what’s really going on.”
“You’re here to spy on the army?” Anger began to dawn in Sower’s expression.
“If I was here to spy, I wouldn’t have told you,” Jeriah said drily. “All I’m here for is to gather some unofficial information to compare with the official reports.”
“So the Hierarch knows what kind of self-serving scum the council sent,” said Sower. “That’s the first encouraging news I’ve heard in weeks.”
“Well, sir, you know what official inspections are like.”
Sower nodded. “But what am I supposed to do with you?”
“Assign me to a commander on the border,” Jeriah told him. “Someone who’s seen some action and can tell me the truth about the barbarians and what it will take to stop them.”
Sower sighed. “I’m not sure it’s possible to stop them. Just slowing them down is hard enough! Yes, it would be a very good idea to give the Hierarch a clear picture of what’s going on down here. I’ll assign you, as an aide, to Commander Malveese. Tell him it’s temporary, so you won’t dislocate his command structure when you depart.”
He was already looking for a blank sheet of paper. A few minutes later Jeriah left the office, orders in hand, which would perfectly position him to learn what he’d come here to learn.
Of course, his resolve to tell the truth was in pieces—again. Though nothing he’d said was technically a lie, except for the part about the Hierarch sending him. And if Jeriah reported whatever he discovered to the Hierarch, he could make that part true in spirit, if not in fact, so it wasn’t a lie either. Technically.
Commander Malveese had the typical Southlander’s dark coloring and stocky build, the Southlands’ soft accent—and perhaps a bit of the Southlands’ laziness as well. He assigned Jeriah to a troop without seeming to think much about it, which suited Jeriah just fine.
Three-quarters of Jeriah’s troop were also refugee Southlanders, and their iron-clad hatred of the barbarians reminded him of Mistress Koryn. If determination alone could defeat their army, the barbarians were done for. But under the soldiers’ hatred lurked a deep depression.
Over the next few days, as Jeriah’s troop patrolled the border, he heard many tales of battles—both won and lost—against howling madmen with supernatural strength, who never tired and had personal demons that guarded them from death. Maybe that accounted for the fact that all the soldiers wore their full accoutrement of chain mail and metal plates, though most of the men in Jeriah’s previous patrol had found full armor too hot and cumbersome for the warm Southlands.
Jeriah dismissed the wilder stories. Koryn had said something about barbarian magic, but she’d been maddeningly vague about what it was. Jeriah had never fought the barbarians himself, but he’d seen their bodies carried back to camp for burial, so he knew they could be slain. And the Southlanders really wanted to slay them, so their persistent belief that the barbarians couldn’t be beaten seemed strange.
Jeriah decided to ask Malveese about it, so on the next border patrol that the commander led, he pulled his horse up to the front of the loose column.
“You’ve seen something?” Malveese asked, scanning the brushy slope intently.
The S
outhlanders took patrolling much more seriously than the troop Jeriah had served with last year—these men had lost their homes to the barbarians’ last major attack. But that had been in the summer, when it was well known that the barbarians never attacked, so the army’s strength had been much reduced. Now they were kept at full strength all year round, and the barbarians hadn’t launched a major offensive since. Which made his comrades’ constant alertness a bit tiresome.
“No, sir,” Jeriah replied. “Nothing to report. I just have a few questions.”
“Finally.” The commander sighed. “I was beginning to think you’d never get around to it.”
“To what, sir?”
“To your spying for the Hierarch, of course,” said Malveese. “Did you think I wouldn’t check up on you?”
“Ah . . .” That was exactly what Jeriah had thought.
“It was no secret that you were dismissed from the army to take up a post in the palace,” Malveese went on. “And it took very little for me to learn what post you achieved. Commander Sower didn’t say much, but the subcommander you served under bragged about you at quite unnecessary length.”
Jeriah blinked. The subcommander had detested him, and as for the rest of it . . .
“I was given a post in the palace because my mother once served the previous Hierarch’s mother,” Jeriah said. “Not much to brag about. As for being appointed as the Hierarch’s body squire, well, I was there and available when the job became vacant.”
“And now you are here to spy on the army for him,” Commander Malveese concluded. “Oh, don’t protest—I think it an excellent idea. Besides, there was something else I heard about you. Not from the officers, but from the common soldiers. They say Jeriah Rovan has no stomach for injustice.”
“Ah . . . ,” said Jeriah blankly. He hadn’t thought anyone had noticed that his pranks were aimed at people who deserved them.
“There’s a great injustice here,” the commander said soberly. “Will you take it to the Hierarch and make sure he knows of it? The other Southland landholders, they say no one is listening.”