by Morgan Smith
Nesta was my first real friend, in a way, because she liked to tell me what adorable things Meryn might have said or done during the day, and I was always willing to listen to that. When I realized that we had progressed to discussing other topics, it was too late. I rather liked her: she was funny and opinionated and gossipy in a way that was curiously free of malice, and I wouldn’t, I knew, willingly have done her harm.
I grew friendly with the others, too: Iain was good at bringing us together, which was lucky for me, and having named himself my cousin, he had given me a bit of standing.
Feargal really was his cousin, of course, he’d been orphaned young and had scarcely known any other home, he and Iain growing up like brothers. There was Baile from Carric, not the brightest boy but wholly good-hearted and well-meaning, there was Daire, who was the youngest son of a southern lord the Lady had trade connections with, and Elen, who was the best archer among us. She had a sour wit and was quick to take offense, you had to be careful with her.
You would think that over the years there, I would have gained some confidence. I was, within a twelve-month, acknowledged as the best fighter - even Cowell admitted that I was not altogether worthless on the field, and would, if I applied myself and did not succumb to arrogance, possibly make a decent warrior someday. If I was not the most congenial of companions, I was not considered a social outcast, either: if there was any plan or activity afoot, I was included as a natural and expected participant.
Nor was there ever, on the part of any adult, even the slightest suggestion that my education and keep at Gorsedd was less than my due, or in any way grudgingly bestowed. The Lady went out of her way to make me feel more than welcome, always. Indeed, she frequently singled me out with marks of favour, sometimes inviting me to dine with her in the little solar above the hall, asking for my thoughts on Meryn’s education and taking a kindly interest in my progress with the sword.
Thus, my life seemed charted: Meryn being bound for the priesthood, the Lady’s thought was that we should hold our lands together at Penliath as Gorsedd’s continued ally, with me as the mainstay for the more practical day-to-day affairs. She saw immediately that no vow or bribe would be necessary to make sure I would support Meryn in every way needed - instead, she inculcated in me the belief that Meryn’s calling would be my surest defense against a complex world, and I could not argue this point. Meryn did seem wise beyond her years, and her Gifts were obvious early on: she mastered the smaller magics before she could manage her eating knife without aid, and she frequently saw into the heart of things in a way that was uncanny.
But early experience leaves its mark. I knew in my bones that I balanced on the frailest of reeds and that even the smallest breath might push me back out into that cold and unforgiving world. I distrusted everyone and everything, sure in my knowledge that my life was both worthless and ill-fated, and that sooner or later, some mis-step or my own bad luck would knock me back into the pit.
Chapter Six
I have said before how the Lady of Gorsedd’s counsel was sought by many.
More and more frequently, the old duke would send an invitation to her to come up the river to speak with him. It was an equally short journey from the holy isle, yet he called upon her more often than the Reverend Mother, perhaps because, having ruled her son’s lands for so long, Lady Ilona was more worldly, and less tied to the priestly hierarchy than those of Braide. She saw that too narrow an identification with their priorities was not always the wisest course for the rest of the country, and her counsel was, in fact, directed towards loosening those tight bonds that had begun so many hundreds of years ago. Indeed, it was indisputable that until the old duke had taken power, whichever Reverend Mother was current at Braide ruled in Dungarrow, as well, in all but name.
And more often than not, as we grew older, these visits included us. The Lady felt our exposure to the ducal court was useful, and showing off Iain as a young man with well-born fosterlings around him was both purposeful and gratifying. Our clothes and jewels were intently inspected before packing, to be replaced or augmented if Lady Ilona felt we did not show Gorsedd to advantage, and we were severely admonished about table manners, courtesies and the general need to watch ourselves and each other.
One met everyone at Dungarrow Castle, sooner or later, and understanding who was allied to whom, and where they stood in the pecking order, these were thing that the Lady seemed to feel were instructive. It wasn’t long before I had worked out, though, that our “training” in this constituted a fairly efficient spy service for her, and that our education might not be her first concern.
It may have been our second or third sojourn there when I met Einon, and he became, despite the difference in our ages, my truest companion. Like Meryn, he seemed from the first to see into my hardened heart, and inspire me, unwillingly, to a devotion that ran against all common sense.
He was the Duke’s grandson, and the closest thing to an obvious heir the old man had.
There were other contenders, of course. Feargal, for one, had a clear enough claim through a shared great-grandparent, and he was wealthy, attractive and just those few years older than Einon, so that a fair argument could be made.
Feargal, however, had no such ambitions. He was a lighthearted boy with an irresponsible, rather wild streak, and like me, an early convert to Einon’s cause. We could both see how Einon’s intelligence and his passionate love of justice would serve the land better than any mailed fist or gambler out for their own advantage would. We were younger then, and idealistic, raised up on tales of honour and heroic self-sacrifice, and we believed in Einon.
It was the practice ground that sealed my fate. I was the last, as usual, to set aside my sword, and the others were long gone.
Einon had lingered, though, watching me run through a series of moves Cowell had devised for me to practice, so that I could switch from offensive to defensive stances more smoothly. When I stopped at the water trough near the gate to sluice off some of the sweat, he was still there, watchful and wary in a way I recognized. It was my own face, reflected back.
He had a hard life, I thought. Young as he was, he was tied to a court filled with men and women looking either to cozen him into supporting their aims or determined to trip him up and spoil his chances. It wasn’t hard to see that this had taught him some of the same lessons my life had given me.
“You fight well,” he said. I shrugged. I’d discovered there was no right way to answer comments like these. Either one came off as stupidly humble or a loutish braggart, neither of which made you any friends.
“Lord Tiernan thinks I am not likely to make a swordsman,” His tone was flat. I couldn’t tell, with any surety, if this judgment upset or annoyed him. It had come as a simple statement of fact.
“Well,” I said cautiously, “You have barely begun, really. Cowell says it can take a lifetime to reach your true potential.”
“I think it is not that simple.”
I waited - I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t fraught with peril on some level. I’d watched Tiernan’s training sessions, which seemed designed more to humiliate the boy he was teaching than to actually impart any useful skills. Mind you, Tiernan, too, had a claim to the succession, albeit a negligible one. There might be a method to that training. I wasn’t fool enough to say any of this aloud, though.
“You fight differently than most,” Einon said. “You aren’t the tallest, or even the fastest, not really. But you beat them, most of the time.”
I said, still cautious, “In practice, though. I’ve never had to face someone in true combat. That’s the real test, not the practice ground, isn’t it?”
“Well, that is all anyone will base your skills or mine on, for now.” This time, I caught the barest trace of bitterness underneath the calm tone.
And I understood it. I had felt that same resentment in my own heart, those first months at Gorsedd, when even some of the stable hands had a better grasp of shield-work tha
n I had had. And I knew where Einon was headed, with me - I knew what he wanted to ask, and how much it would cost him to do so. He could be exposing himself to ridicule, to accusations of weakness, to assumptions of inadequacy.
And he knew nothing about me, after all.
Those suspicions of weakness, inadequacy, or gullibility - those were all things he could not afford. Those are the things that stay with you for years, no matter how much your conduct or expertise might change. People are curiously loath to believe in anything good, if there is even the barest rumor of evil or incompetence there to supersede it.
I thought, illogically, of Meryn. They were nothing alike, of course. And yet, something in his eyes, when they met mine, was the same. An understanding, and an acceptance, things I had met with so rarely in my life, that it was a sharp, hard shock of recognition and of promise.
“Look you,” I said finally. “I can’t say that I would be anyone’s best choice as teacher. But maybe we could find a time and place - where we couldn’t be disturbed - and we could spar a bit. See if there are things that you could improve on. If you’d like.”
He’d learned, even then, a fierce control. It was only by the tiniest movement of his shoulders that he even hinted at his relief that he had not had to ask outright.
“There’s a little walled court by the old stables,” he said. “No-one goes there, and the gate guards can’t actually see into it from the wall. We could manage an hour at least, if we went while Tiernan’s at Council.”
I nodded. “I’ll bring the gear. No one will even notice if I’m the one hauling a couple of swords around. Tomorrow, then?”
No one ever just practices. You have to talk about things, and then someone reaches for an analogy to illustrate their point, and the next thing you know, you are making your case on a point of honour, or the advantages of peregrines over goshawks, or why your grandmother swore by bean porridge on frosty mornings.
And there you are: privy to how someone’s mind works and what they care about, and either you know that you will have to tread warily with them forever or you are fast friends. Sometimes, as with Einon and I, it was a bit of both.
Chapter Seven
There is a thing that happens, when people grow comfortable with their position in life. They take it as holy words that they are entitled to what they have. Along with everyone’s tendency to see themselves as “the good ones”, they give themselves additional justifications not only for keeping things as they are but then enlarging upon it and demanding more for themselves as their due.
Inevitably, tyranny reigns.
It is true enough that having wrested control of secular affairs from the priesthood - a hard-fought battle and one well worth fighting - that things were better for most people. Even itinerant labourers found it easier to make ends meet when the local priestess could no longer simply commandeer their bodies or their earthly goods on demand. Farmers could lay by stores for less plentiful times and the nobility certainly gained much by not having to submit every decision to the whims or scrutiny of the local servants of the Mother. The well-connected and the well-born amassed greater fortunes than ever before, while still keeping the holy ones’ good will by not stinting on gifts and outward respect, and that was good for those below them, too.
From our line of sight, things had then gone badly wrong.
As the men and women who had seized control of Dungarrow grew older and secure in their victory, they had become hardened with it. They had promised fairness, and in a sense, they’d delivered, but “fairness” was now taken to mean the same tithes and fees for everyone, regardless of individual circumstances, and the difference of a one-twentieth share from a rich man and a poor one meant that in some years, even the lesser gentry suffered serious deprivation and hunger, while the well-to-do got fat on the proceeds.
Their crime was mostly age, as far as we, in our youthful arrogance, were concerned: age seemed to us to bring with it an inflexibility of mind as well as a miserly, self-centred stance where the men and women in power seemed bent on merely replacing the evil they had suffered with an evil that benefitted them instead.
We felt that we were different, and that we would remain so always.
We wanted a world where even the least among us could be free from outright devastation, and where exalted position came with some enforceable responsibilities. It seemed madness to drive people to the desperate, despairing edge, especially mad when the people doing this had once suffered from much the same condition.
Trevian, who was another one of Iain’s cousins, the old lord of Gorsedd’s sister-son and temporarily Iain’s heir, should he not get another, well, he had some trenchant things to say about poverty and greed. His lands were under constant threat by his overlord, who considered Trevian’s holdings as a back-up larder in lean years, and treated Trev as if he were still a toddler and addled into the bargain.
We of Gorsedd weren’t the only ones, of course. Our little circle grew to include most of the younger folk who were brought in their parents’ wake to the ducal court, and even a few older landholders and nobles, who had seen what unchecked greed was doing to us all, they, too, began to lend quiet, tacit support to the idea of change.
Yet until Einon articulated our rages and our dreams, it had been an incoherent, unspoken sense of wrongness. He laid out in no uncertain terms just what we meant by all this, what we faced, and how for some of us, it might tear our lives apart. We would have to break with the past, and in some cases, with people we loved. It was dangerous talk, dangerous talk that could lead to dangerous deeds, but for some of us, that was, perhaps, the appeal.
It was all just talk, at this point. Even so, over the years, Einon drew us together, bound by these values, but ultimately bound ever tighter by our love for him. He was curiously charismatic even at an early age. There was something about him that made you believe in impossibilities, and in your own best self, and it held us together even when outside forces would have predicted otherwise.
Those of Orleigh, for example, did not willingly spend time with those of Gorsedd, at least not without blood being shed. It was an ancient feud, but at this moment in time, it was at the simmering stage, not boiling point. And so Iain did not draw daggers when Guerin of Orleigh became part of the growing pack of admirers around Einon, and Guerin managed to rein in a natural bent towards sarcasm when he directed any comments to Gorsedd’s heir. They were stiffly, scrupulously polite to each other, and tried desperately not to discuss the same issues, since they could not bear to be seen to either agree or to quarrel.
Beholden to Gorsedd as I was, I had to follow the same line, but Guerin, a little older than we were, was able to separate loyalties from personalities, and always treated me with a lazy kind of respect, as if he expected me to have thoughts of my own. He was right in this - I could see clearly that the old, clannish enmities were as much a problem for Dungarrow as the rapaciousness of the nobles - but I kept these thoughts to myself. Guerin had a mischievous streak that I distrusted. I wasn’t ever secure enough to risk Iain’s friendship for even the slightest sign of agreement with anything Orleigh might say, and waited to see where Einon’s judgment lay before committing myself to anything aloud.
It might have gone on like that forever. At our age, it certainly seemed as if it would, since none of us had any real power - even Feargal only acquiesced, as I did, to the decisions about his property that Lady Ilona “advised”.
I cared less about it than he did, but Penliath was not anywhere near as exalted or extensive as Feargal’s holdings were. I shared it with Meryn, as well, and she needed me to make good decisions on her behalf. We, at least, were lucky in that Lady Ilona had found us an excellent steward. The woman came, twice yearly, to report soberly on the harvest or the year’s shearings, while I fidgeted and agreed to whatever plans for the future she and Lady Ilona thought best.
Despite our taste for rebellious discussion, our live were normally placid. We changed so little and
so slowly that I, at least, was unaware that time was passing faster than I knew.
To teach us our craft, we were sometimes taken along on springtime coastal patrols near Dungarrow Castle, to be parked in some out of the way place in the hills to watch as real soldiers swept the beaches clean of raiders. Before leaving us, the troop commander would read us dire lectures on remaining where we were, and reminding us that we were only there on sufferance and to observe the tactics of how fighting was when death was imminent. We came armed, but that, he sternly announced, was to get us into the habit of war. We were not heroes. We were useless baggage he had been saddled with. He expected us to obey orders and stay put.
They were confident and self-assured, those warriors, secure in the experience of multiple seasons of success, and we shared that easy trust. We envied them, not quite grasping that battles are chancy affairs and that fate can turn on the tiniest of mis-steps, despite the frequent warnings from our teachers about the tides of war.
One blustery morning, though, as we sat on a hillock a half-mile above the beach, everything changed.
The troop had ridden down, as always, at good speed, swords out, against a ragtag little band of raiders, all Istaran by the look of it, who were just reaching the shore when it became apparent that someone had miscalculated badly.
Another, larger group of fighters emerged from a fold in the hills, well inland from their comrades just landing. A dozen or so of them broke off, running to attack our troopers from behind, while the bulk of the group began heading for the higher ground.
Heading, in fact, directly towards us.
It took a long moment for it to sink in. We stood, immobile and disbelieving, waiting for this to change, waiting for our troops to see and ride to our rescue, waiting for the unthinkable to vanish and for our untroubled world to return.
They were almost on us before years of training finally took hold.