Briarheart

by Mercedes Lackey

  “It was wonderful meeting you,” I replied, and I impulsively threw my arms around his neck to hug him. He didn’t pull away, so I guess he liked it. “I hope we’ll be friends.”

  “Oh,” he said, lolling his tongue out in a wolf grin. “We already are. Good night, Miri. Tell your King and your wizard about this, but no one else. Remember what I said about someone getting hold of it and going on a slaughter of Light Fae. This is not a weapon we want many people to know about. I’ll let Brianna know that you have it if she doesn’t already. She’s like that.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I GOT BACK TO THE PALACE WELL IN TIME TO CHANGE. AND I toyed with the notion of hiding the sword under my mattress, but once I thought further, that seemed like a really bad idea. I knew Belinda checked under there all the time—not because she suspected me of hiding anything, but because she suspected the serving maids of not doing their job of turning the feather bed and chasing all the dust out of the bed frame every day. If this sword was important enough to have been left where no one would find it all these years, I probably shouldn’t do anything like stick it under the mattress. So, before Belinda came in to “help” me dress, I got into my gown and strapped my new sword on over the gown but under the surcoat and went to see if Papa and Mama were still dressing.

  They were, although their body servants were just now putting the finishing touches on their outfits. Papa was facing the door as I came in, and both his eyebrows shot up into his hair at the sight of my new “accessory.” The sideless surcoat didn’t hide it nearly as well as I had hoped it would.

  “I think we can manage ourselves now, thank you,” he said to the body servants who were hovering over both of them, tweaking seams and twitching sleeves into place. All four of the servants bowed and retreated to join the other servants filing into the Great Hall for dinner. “I trust you have an explanation for this?” Papa asked as soon as they were out of earshot. Mama turned, and one hand flew to her lips as she started with surprise.

  “I do,” I said, and I did. Explain, that is. When I was done, there was absolute silence in the room.

  “I didn’t know anything about this,” Mama admitted. “So far as I know, my family is just of a line of gentlefolk and esquires with the occasional knight.”

  “Well, this does answer the question of how they got to be gentlefolk and esquires in the first place,” Papa said thoughtfully. “It also tells me why Lionel’s Champion was always called the Nameless Knight—it wouldn’t have done for the Champion to have been revealed as a woman back then. You know the rest of the story, don’t you, Miri? The Usurper got backed into a corner by Lionel’s army and demanded single combat. The Usurper chose a Dark Fae as his Champion. He obviously intended to cheat by using magic rather than pure combat. But he got put down in three moves and was forced to yield.” Papa gestured at the sword at my side. “Well, now we know why. It wasn’t the Infinite Light being on the side of right and good, it was Wizard Steward’s magic sword.” He put one hand at the back of his neck and rubbed it as he thought. “Obviously, you can’t just leave it lying around in the open. And I want Gerrold to have a look at it.”

  “That’s what Lobo the wolf said. But I can’t hide it in my room, and we can’t hide it here, and if I wear it, I’m going to get more wagging tongues.” Squires, and I was technically a squire, were not allowed to wear weapons to meals. Only select knights known for their sober behavior and moderation when it came to drink were allowed to do that. Quarrels broke out now and again when people were in their cups, and they were bad enough when people had only eating knives available. There would, of course, always be those select knights inside the Great Hall, and the Royal Guard inside and outside of it, to take care of a surprise attack by an enemy.

  “Ah!” Papa’s face lit up. “I know. I’ll wear it to dinner; given the events at the christening, no one will think twice about it. You and Gerrold can take it up to his tower when dinner is over. You keep it overnight. By that time, I’ll have a word with the armorer and Delacar, and we’ll have a secure place for it in the morning. I’ll tell them as much as they need to know.”

  So that was what we did. And during dinner, Papa got up and had a word or two with several people; one of them was old Gerrold. Gerrold winked at me when no one else was looking. When Mama and Papa got up, I did too, and I talked idly with Nathaniel and Elle for a little bit. When Papa and Mama went to the privy stair, I followed. This was a little later than I had been retiring lately, but by this time, everyone knew the Companions had gotten a day to rest and weren’t surprised to see me up so late. At the stairs, Papa passed me the sword, belt and all; and Gerrold and I went up the back stair while Mama and Papa went back out to the Great Hall and then went into the garden, where there was going to be music.

  Once we got up into the Royal Suite, Gerrold and I made our way through the maze of rooms above it until we got to the little staircase that went up into his tower.

  Wizards always have a tower. That’s because wizards are known to keep odd hours, and there are often noises and lights and sometimes bad smells coming from their quarters. A tower keeps that sort of disturbance away from the rest of us. Gerrold’s was very nice. There was a long spiral staircase that came up through the floor to what looked like a pretty stone cottage in the round with two floors and a really excellent set of fireplaces. You would have thought that it would be drafty and cold, but it was always cozy unless it was a warm, sunny day and he had the windows open. The windows had exceptionally thick glass in frames that you could open to let the bad smells out and stout shutters to keep out winter winds. I guessed that Gerrold slept on the second floor; I never went past the first, so I never saw that part of the tower.

  Every inch of wall on the bottom floor was covered in shelves. Some had books, some had bottles and jars and boxes of ingredients, some just had interesting things on them. Even Papa isn’t old enough to remember the wizard before Gerrold; I was told he had a much more disturbing notion of what should be on display—he went in for preserved animals and animal parts. Everywhere. On the shelves, on the floor, and hanging from the ceiling.

  Gerrold prefers his animals whole and alive. He has a pet crow, a pet ferret, a pet tortoise, three cats, a hedgehog, an owl, and an ancient raven that rarely moves except to look at you out of one rather bored eye and dismiss you before it goes back to sleep.

  As usual, I looked around for a chair that didn’t have anything in it, and I ended up picking a stack of books out of one at random and sat down. I laid the sword across my knees. It was promptly sat on by the tortoiseshell cat, which jumped up into my lap.

  “Trust a cat to find the center of attention and occupy it,” the wizard chuckled as he moved another cat off his chair and sat down across from me with the cold hearth between us. “Now, before I have a look at it, give me the whole story, will you?”

  It didn’t take long, and while he thought about what I had to say, I relaxed and looked around because there’s always something interesting in his tower.

  He had all the windows open, and glass-and-horn wind guards over all the candles, but there was only just enough of a breeze tonight to keep the room aired out and comfortable. No one had ever told me how old he was, but wizards do tend to live longer than most people, so he was definitely at least seventy. His hair was a silvery gray, cut in a slightly untidy bowl cut. Gerrold liked to wear comfortable tunics and loose trews in colors that didn’t show stains and burns, and if you didn’t know who and what he was, chances were you’d take him for some faithful family retainer or a slightly eccentric old uncle of someone in the Court. He dressed up in fancy velvet robes with lots of gold and silver symbols that no one else knew the meaning of when he wanted to impress, but I think he preferred being nondescript most of the time. And Gerrold rarely wore his pointed hat. He hated the hat even though it’s the one thing that people know about wizards, that they always wear a pointy hat.

  It was impossible to tell what color his eyes were.
In some lights, they looked gray; in others, a smoky brown; in others, there was a hint of green. He’s a wizard. Mystery is what he’s made of.

  “I wonder,” Gerrold said, looking keenly at the sword on my lap, “if being immune to Fae magic means that you won’t be able to use Fae magic when you’re wearing it?”

  “Well, that would be inconvenient. Shall I try?” I asked. I liked that about Gerrold; he got straight to the practical side of things. I’ve often heard wizards described as “vague” or “fuzzy minded.” Neither of those applied to Gerrold.

  “Something harmless, please,” he said, his eyes getting crinkles at their corners as he smiled. “We don’t want to alarm the cats. Or the birds. Or both.”

  I did the most harmless thing I could think of: making a little light at the end of my finger. He had me try it again with the sword unsheathed. I still had no problem—although I got the distinct feeling that if I had tried to pull Fae magic into the hand that rested on the sword, I wouldn’t have been able to.

  “Excellent. I think we can assume that you’ll be able to use human magic as well,” Gerrold said. “Yes, Miri, it appears to me that you have the ability to do human magic as well as Fae. And, yes, I know you don’t know how; once you have a reasonable mastery of the Fae side of magic, I’ll take you on as a pupil.” He paused and looked at me speculatively. “Although… there are a few simple things I should teach you that will be immediately useful, so perhaps we can add the occasional lesson after dinner.”

  I didn’t groan, but it took an effort. I was already exhausted by the end of the day, and now Gerrold wanted to add more lessons. Really?

  “Meanwhile, may I examine this sword?” Gerrold asked, and he did not hold his hand out for it until I picked it up and offered it to him hilt first. Which showed a nicety of feeling, I thought.

  “Wizard Steward never mentioned this blade in any of the writings he left behind,” Gerrold said, perching a pair of wire-wrapped glass lenses on his nose and peering earnestly at the hilt. “Of course, if he’d done so, the weapon wouldn’t still be a secret, would it?”

  This was clearly a rhetorical question, so I kept my mouth shut and petted the purring cat. I noticed that there was a faint scent of balsam in the room now, and it had a hint of warmth to it that told me it was coming from the candles. Gerrold had been experimenting with scented wax again, and I hoped that he’d share his new recipe with the household chandler.

  “However, I cannot believe he did not leave the formula for creating it somewhere. After all, what if it was lost or destroyed in some way? Someone would need to make another, wouldn’t you think?”

  Another rhetorical question. Now he bent over the steel blade. “So, if he didn’t leave the secret behind in his writings, then where did he…”

  He stopped talking, as if he had spotted something. And he sketched a few symbols—at least I think they were symbols—in the air with his index finger. He paused, then sketched a few more. He paused again, then sketched one final glyph.

  And the entire length of the blade lit up in lines of tiny glowing words. Gerrold didn’t say anything. He just smiled in satisfaction.

  He passed his hand over the sword as if he was wiping something from the blade, and the writing vanished just like that.

  “That was how to make another sword,” I said. “He wrote the instructions on the blade of this one! So the next wizard to see it could memorize it just in case!”

  “Exactly so. I’ll have another look at it when I’m prepared to commit it to memory, but for now, I think I shall give you this fine blade back and let you get your rest.”

  I tried not to, but I yawned anyway.

  Gerrold chuckled. “You are obviously in need of it, and my day is just beginning.” He stood up and escorted me to the stairs leading downward, like the kind gentleman he was. “This has been a very exciting and profitable day for all of us.”

  “It has. Good night, Wizard Gerrold,” I said, starting down the stairs and holding the hem of my gown up with both hands. It would be pretty stupid of me to get this far and break my neck on the stairs because I didn’t hold my gown up!

  “Good night, Squire Miri,” he said from the square of light above me.

  “Squire Miri.” That had a very nice sound to it.

  The look on Belinda’s face the next morning when I pulled the sword out of my bed was beyond price, because the very last thing she would have suspected of me was that I would be sleeping with a sword. And even better was the look on her face when I said, “Papa’s orders,” before she could think of a single word to say.

  Her mouth opened once, then shut firmly, and she nodded. I had been prepared to argue some more, but it looked as if I wasn’t going to need to. Whether it was my dogged persistence in the face of my own exhaustion and her disapproval or her respect for the King, she was going to accept this without an argument.

  When I got down to the courtyard, Sir Delacar and the armorer were both waiting for me. Delacar put the rest of the squires through a trot around the courtyard to warm up; the armorer crooked his finger at me and I followed.

  The armorer is probably the most important man in the palace who’s not a noble. He is the man every fighting person in the entire palace depends on to keep them as safe as they ever can be in a battle. He knows when to call them in to make alterations, and he chooses the right weapon for them.

  He’s always in light armor except when he’s in the smithy working on some specialized piece that needs tricky adjustments. He doesn’t do most of the actual work of making the armor we all wear; that’s for his three smiths. But they are there to get his detailed knowledge pounded into their skulls with the relentless steady beat of hammer on anvil. And one day, the best of them will take over his job and select a new journeyman to take his place. Not too soon, though, I think. The armorer’s body is the body of a man half his age, corded with the muscle of someone who has spent his entire life making things to save ours. He can wield the heaviest of hammers with scarcely a sweat and carry entire armloads of chain mail as easily as I can carry a stack of clean gowns.

  As I had half expected, he led me into the armory, but we went deeper into that building than I had ever been before to a room filled floor to ceiling with racks holding shallow man-size chests. He pulled one off one of the top shelves. And considering that the chest itself was heavy and probably contained a full set of battle armor, that was quite the feat.

  The lanterns on the wall between each rack gave us plenty of light to see by, and the room smelled of oil and leather, with a faint hint of damp. The armorer bent down, opened the chest, and unfolded the oiled leather that lay over the top of the armor in it.

  “This is yours,” he said. He had a pleasant baritone voice. “This is your combat armor. Try not to grow too fast.”

  As I’d expected, it was chain mail, which was the lightest of the metal armors, the one that offered the best protection from everything but crushing weapons and that was the easiest to move in. It was a much better set than the one I’d already been given; the links were strong, riveted like the other set, but much smaller than the links in my practice suit. At his nod, I bent to pick up one sleeve.

  It moved like very heavy fabric. It actually felt liquid, sensuous in my hand. For one moment, I contemplated what an entire gown of the stuff would be like.…

  Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself as the armorer bent down and picked up the contents inside the oiled leather. “Feel along the inside top of the chest for the catch,” he told me. I did, and I pulled up the entire bottom of the chest. Which, obviously, was a false bottom. I could already see where this was going, so I laid the sword and belt inside it and lowered the false bottom again. It didn’t quite fit right, so I pulled it back up, took the sheath off the belt, took the blade out of the sheath, and laid them side by side. I tried the bottom again and felt the catch click shut properly. The armorer arranged my chain mail back in the chest, closed it up, and put it up on its shelf.
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  “This will do for now,” he said. “But I’m having a proper lady’s chest with a false bottom brought up to your room as soon as I can finish it. I was told there’s not room to spare in your chamber for an armor chest, so you can stow your gowns in it too. I’ll transfer the sword myself before it goes up. There’s no use in your having such a thing if you can’t keep it where you can get to it in a hurry.”

  That was more words at once than anyone I know had ever gotten out of him. I puffed out my breath with relief, since having the sword where I could get to it was exactly what had been on my mind.

  “Your knight is waiting,” he said meaningfully, and I headed out at a trot.

  Four days later, there was a chest in my room when I came up to change for dinner. Because we Companions were essentially doing combat training all day long, I was almost never out of my trews and tunic until I came in for dinner. The six of us ate luncheon together, rested together, and did pretty much everything except eat dinner together, which was when the ranks became all too apparent. Giles was all the way down at the far end of the room at the servants’ tables. The rest were scattered all over the room. I had some ideas about this that I was brooding over, but the sight of the new chest knocked them right out of my head.

  Unlike the very utilitarian chests that held the armor down in the armory, this one was beautiful and I couldn’t imagine how the armorer had had it made in a mere four days. Unless—of course. He’d found a craftsman with a chest of the proper size and had the false bottom built into it rather than starting with the false bottom and building around it.

  At any rate, the chest was a beautiful piece of work. The color of honey, the top was carved with tiny wild briar roses and vines, and it was polished and waxed so smoothly that the wood felt like silk under my fingers. Belinda caught me sitting beside it and nodded with approval. “First time you’ve been given anything that befits a young lady,” she said, which told me that she still had not forgiven me for turning into a warrior and that she probably never would.