Ordination

by Daniel Ford

  “Back in Ashmill Bridge. Grateful innkeep.”

  “The one with the thieves living in his cellar?”

  “The same,” Idgen Marte replied with a nod. She leaned across the table and placed her free hand lightly on Allystaire’s left arm, near his wound. “I know it isn’t a day of celebration, but it seemed a good time. Besides,” she added, leaning back, “I’ve got to sew that up, and nobody ought to take my stitching sober.”

  “Your stitching did not hurt last time.”

  “You were unconscious,” Idgen Marte noted. She lifted her mug and sipped.

  “Are you two still talkin’ about wounds?” Torvul snorted, and tucked into his own mug.

  “Leave it, dwarf,” Allystaire barked, before finally taking a careful, savoring sip of the brandy Idgen Marte had brought him, his eyes dimming briefly in pleasure.

  “Well why should she need to stitch it if you’ll just heal it yourself, anyway?” Torvul wiped foam off his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “I have never tried to heal myself,” Allystaire replied, “and even if I could do as you say, I cannot reach the wound itself.”

  Torvul gave Allystaire a flat, disbelieving stare, his lips pressed into a thin line, and finally said, “Son, how in the Cold did you live this long in the paladin trade without me?” Then he held up a hand to forestall the answer that Allystaire was about to spit back at him. “Why’ve you never tried to heal yourself?”

  “Does not seem the Goddess would give me a Gift like that for my own use.”

  “Hard to do Her work if your arm’s off, though, isn’t it? Why in the Cold would the Lady not want you able to tend to yourself if you’ve a need? That’s foolish talk.”

  “Fine,” Allystaire said, and flexed his arm, as if trying to place his hand against the wound itself. “Even assuming I can, how do I reach the wound?”

  Torvul sighed, pushed back his chair and hopped off of it. He walked around to Allystaire’s side of the table, took his left wrist in one strong, rough hand, and guided it over to the skin of his right arm. “Did She ever tell you you had to touch a wound in order to heal it? The body’s all of a piece, boy. Different bits, yes, but all working together. Do it.”

  Allystaire sighed and settled his fingers against the skin of his right arm; his left arm was still weaker, a little cold to the touch. He slowed his breathing, closed his eyes, and tried to sense himself, his own hurts, expecting failure.

  It was remarkably easy. He could feel the hole in his muscles in his left arm, the damage the poison had done before Torvul had been able to stop it. His senses extended so far that he could feel the accumulation of the years in his knees and his back, what years of wearing armor had done to his shoulders, the twisted places where blades and maces and arrows and lances had left their marks. Could I sweep all of that away? The Goddess’s song thrummed in his head and his hand, amplified by the fact that he was healing himself. Have the strength of my youth back, unwounded?

  Allystaire felt as though the healing was quick. He poured the song, the compassion he knew the Mother felt for the wound he had taken in her service, into the injured arm. Muscle knit; where bone had chipped, it smoothed itself and strengthened. He felt the wound closing, felt the skin mending itself, and he stopped just as the puckered whiteness of a new scar appeared on his flesh.

  “Why’d that take so long?” Allystaire was suddenly jolted back into awareness by Idgen Marte’s query, which sounded dim and distant to his ears.

  He blinked his eyes open. Torvul and Idgen Marte crowded him, staring with concern in their features.

  “What? It took as long as it typically does.”

  “You were gone for a span, lad. Didn’t answer us, either. Stones above, I would’ve had time to go get another beer. And drink it. And then get another after that, and I wouldn’t have missed anything.”

  Idgen Marte seized his left arm and held it up, running her fingers over the skin where the wound had been. “Why’d you leave a scar instead of just mending it?”

  Allystaire thought on this for a moment, and, after shaking his arm free from Idgen Marte’s grasp, he paused for a quick sip of brandy. “I was lost for a moment. Feeling the wound, feeling all the small hurts I have gathered up in my life.”

  Torvul’s thick brows knitted closely. “Fix all that up while you were in there? Stones above, what I wouldn’t give to have the sprightliness of youth about me again. Just shave seven or eight decades off like a beard—”

  “Seven or eight decades? How old are you?” Idgen Marte, ever curious, was quickly distracted.

  “Old enough. My folk live a long time. Enough about me, though,” Torvul said, pointing with his near empty mug at Allystaire. “So, you do it?”

  Allystaire shook his head. “No. Healing the wound I took, well, Torvul…you were right about that. The others, though? I thought, what if I could take them away, have the strength of my youth again? Take what I know now with what I could do then…” He stopped, downed the rest of the brandy. “I realized what a terrible idea it was.”

  “Cold, Ally, if I’d half as many scars as I know you do, I’d be in a dress somewhere, embroidering—” Idgen Marte stopped cold, searching for a word. “Whatever it is that rich cows in smothering dresses embroider. How could it be a terrible idea?”

  “When I was given my first command by Gerard Oyrwyn, I was younger than many of the knights who were told to hop to my word. The Old Baron told them all, to forestall the grumbling, that the reason he had put me in charge was because I knew the most important lesson a fighting man could ever learn: that fighting hurts.”

  “Not if you do it right,” Idgen Marte retorted.

  “Still, he was making a point; all these scars, these old wounds, they all taught me something. They are why I know what I know now. What would I be if I took them away?” Allystaire shook his head and stood, slowly and heavily, wearied by healing himself and by a day of exertions. “I would be no paladin if I let myself forget what it means to be hurt. Goodnight.”

  He turned to Torvul and extended his right hand. The dwarf raised a brow, but stood, and clasped Allystaire’s arm, hand to forearm. Allystaire smiled faintly and said, “We have had our arguments these days, Torvul. We must be brothers now, with all that entails. Some of my words were meant to cut, and were not worthy of me. Or of you.” He gave the dwarf’s arm a pump, then let it drop.

  “There is much to talk of in the morning, but now, I am for bed.” He stumped heavily out of the room and slowly up the stairs, which creaked under his weight.

  The other two watched him go, and Torvul drained the last bit in his mug, then tilted it toward him and eyed its empty bottom disapprovingly. “How in the Cold do we live up to him?”

  “Live up to what the Goddess asks of you,” Idgen Marte replied. “Whatever Gifts She bestowed, whatever charges She laid on you, they’re different to what She gave him, different to what She asks of you.”

  Torvul set down his mug and let out a slow, somewhat shaky breath. “There’s a reason She called him first, though.”

  “She didn’t,” Idgen Marte pointed out. “But you’ve not met the Voice yet.” She shrugged and gathered up double handfuls of mugs to carry back to the weary innkeep, who leaned sleepily against his bar. “No doubt there’re reasons She called us when She did. I won’t lose sleep over it.”

  Torvul shook his head. “Not what I meant. You just want t’follow him after a bit, don’t ya? You’re around him for a time, you see that he means precisely what he says, he’ll do what he dares, that he doesn’t give a good Cold-damn who’s standing in his way, and he was probably like that before the Lady’s favor. Now with Her behind him, what chance does anyone stand?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he could be the best thing to ever happen to the baronies. Or the worst. A stone pulled from the right place can
start an avalanche that’ll bury a nest of trolls. Old dwarfish saying, that. There’s a another side to it, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Once you start it, you can’t guarantee it’ll bury only the trolls.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Of Songs and Singing

  Dawn was slow to come the next morning. Allystaire stood outside the inn, facing east, watching slow streaks of yellow and orange reach tentatively into the persistently dark blue of the sky above him. Thornhurst is to the east, he thought, and the Mother’s temple, and Mol. Then suddenly, he said aloud, “Cold! How did that place come to seem like home? And why do I long for the wisdom of an eleven-year-old lass?” He shook his head as if to clear it and looked back to the darkened windows of the inn.

  The morning was chill, and he was glad of it, for he wore as much of his armor as he could stand: dark and scarred breastplate over-hanging his shoulders, lower guard of his vambraces on his forearms, leather-and-iron gloves, plates sewn onto a knee-length leather kirtle around his waist. His helm was tucked under his right arm and his shield hung from his left.

  “Dressed for business, are we?”

  Allystaire smiled and replied without turning around. “I am a vigilant man. And yet you always manage to sneak up like a footpad on a drunk merchant.”

  “Drunk merchants are more careful with their links than you are with your life.” Idgen Marte rapped a hand against his armor. “Not taking any chances today? But then, no greaves, no chausses…”

  “Long way to ride today, and besides, greaves and chausses are freezing near useless unless you know you are staying horsed. Too hard to move on foot.”

  “Best you start wearing all of it, or nearly all, I think,” Idgen Marte replied. “You know you could’ve sensed me coming if you’d been thinking on it. I know I’m not the only one who feels that sometimes.”

  Allystaire shook his head. “You are not. When it seems like it matters, on watch, or in battle, if I concentrate even for a moment, I know precisely where you are. I suspect if we work at it, we can learn to know more than that. Probably Torvul and Mol, as well. Just have to try it and see.”

  “And there have been times I have heard words you thought, but did not speak. What do you make of that?”

  “Nothing, until it happens when we mean it to, and not just when we are close to the Goddess,” Allystaire replied. “I think it likely that She has given us these other Gifts, and simply not spoken of them. Mayhap they are just a result of being connected through Her. I am not made for such metaphysical theorizing.”

  “Well I’ll theorize alone or with Torvul if I have to, but if these other Gifts, or these accidents, whatever they are, if they can help stop days like yesterday, then we need them.”

  “Yesterday worked out fine.”

  Idgen Marte strode around to face Allystaire directly. “Barely. Had the assassin time for another shot, you’d be dead. Had they been smart enough to send two or three, you’d be dead. And make no mistake,” she added, raising a fingertip to the level of his chin, her cheeks darkening a bit, “they will now. They were watching or listening somehow, and they know what happened, and they’ll not make the same mistake again. I won’t have this end because you’re being careless or lazy or just thick.”

  Allystaire took this in quietly, and then carefully reached out and lowered Idgen Marte’s hand from his face. “You know I am not any of those things. Not even thick. And you know also that if I did die, that this, whatever it is, does not end.”

  “There’s meant to be five of us,” she insisted, pulling away her hand and rapping on his breastplate with a knuckle. “And you, we can’t spare.”

  “We do not even know who the fifth of us will be yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she insisted with a shake of her head. “I know what I know. Without you, what would we have? I’ve stood at the head of men in battle, but I’m no leader. Nor is Torvul. Mol is brilliant and stubborn and wonderful, but she’s still a lass of less than twelve summers. Besides,” she went on, a bit of her signature grin twisting the corner of her mouth, “I’m not done finding out where your story is going.”

  “It is not a story.”

  “It will be when the bards get ahold of it. Just wait.”

  Allystaire sighed and rolled his eyes, and Idgen Marte turned from him to face the oncoming sunlight.

  “Where are we riding, then?”

  “Londray,” Allystaire responded with finality.

  Idgen Marte merely nodded and started back to the inn, its windows now fully bathed in the glow of sunrise. “I’ll go wake the dwarf.”

  “The dwarf is already awake, thank you.” Torvul’s voice boomed from the front step of the inn, and he was already dressed in his traveling jerkin and using his cudgel as a walking stick. “Though don’t get used to it. I mean to address this rising with the dawn business with Her Ladyship at the first opportunity. After we go over this plan to ride straight into Londray.”

  “Torvul,” Allystaire said, turning his face from the sun, which had grown much brighter since he first stepped out, “I have thought on it, and it is where we are meant to go. Listen,” he went on, forestalling the dwarf’s argument with a raised hand. “Listen, and you might learn something. We have two sets of enemies—that we know of. Could be more, but two we can identify: the Church of Braech, and the sorcerer. Both powerful, both dangerous. The latter mayhap more of both. Yet we can precisely locate the Church and not the sorcerer. That means we go there and clear the board, then marshal ourselves to face the enemy that remains. If I were caught between two armies in hostile territory, it is exactly what I would do.”

  “What if the sorcerer strikes back at these folk again, hrmm?”

  The paladin shook his head quickly, lips pressing into a thin line. “He had all day yesterday if he wished. And they are not his target. More than likely by staying here we would be putting these folk in danger.”

  Torvul stopped, as Allystaire’s hand fell. “Well,” the dwarf murmured, “you aren’t as dumb as you are ugly, I suppose. Let’s wait till the village is up, though.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve words to say to them, and I’ve something to give them. And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make it.”

  “Please tell me it is not dwarfish spirits.”

  “Of course not. Potions.”

  “Do try not to sicken them all.”

  “Potions’ll work fine.”

  “What makes you certain of that,” Idgen Marte called after him, as the dwarf started for his parked wagon and, no doubt, the tools and workshop within.

  The dwarf turned back and smiled wryly, but brightly. “Faith.”

  * * *

  Torvul was gone for long enough to leave Allystaire and Idgen Marte to bargain and pay for provisions for the road out of their dwindling supply of silver links. When the mule was loaded and the horses ready, Torvul finally emerged from his wagon, cradling a small crystal bottle in his right hand.

  “Well, have you said what needed saying?” He eyed Allystaire with furrowed brows.

  Allystaire blinked in surprise. “The only words I have said this morning have been about what biscuit, beer, and meat they could afford to sell us.”

  Torvul’s lips compressed in frustration. “So these people have seen some of their own murdered, and their minds turned into a sorcerer’s toys, and you mean to ride away like it was just a quick stay? Leave your links on the table and tie the tent closed on your way out, eh?” The dwarf stopped, hefted his potion, and turned away, grumbling.

  “What can I say to them that the Goddess did not already say?” Allystaire’s question was as much to Idgen Marte as to Torvul, for the dwarf was already stumping up the stairs and throwing open the door to the inn.

  “Probably not much,” Idgen Marte said, but then she gave him a shove in the back anyway
. “But best to give it a try. The Goddess can be a bit overwhelming; compared to Her, even you aren’t likely to give them a fright.”

  With a deep breath, Allystaire followed the dwarf inside. The proprietor, whose name they’d learned was Henrik, was up and about, as were his wife and children, going about the morning tasks—laying fires, preparing bread, sweeping. The endless sweeping. Cold, I’d go mad, Allystaire thought. Torvul had cornered Henrik by the bar.

  “Of course you’re the headman hereabouts. Man who makes the beer is always in charge,” the dwarf was saying, as Allystaire and Idgen Marte stopped a few feet away.

  “I don’t actually make it, I just buy—”

  Torvul interrupted with a brusque wave of his hand. “Doesn’t matter. Your place has excellent beer and you’re the one who puts it here. Point is, folks are gonna come.” He lifted the crystal bottle in his hand and pointed to it. “See this? Something for your village, for the farms about.” He slid it into one of the pouches on his jerkin, unhooked the pouch, and set it down carefully on the bar. “There ain’t much of it, so you’ll need to be careful with it.”

  “Right,” Henrik said, laying his hands one atop the other on the end of his broomstick. “What…what is it?”