The Oath and the Measure

Chapter 14

The village was no more than twoscone huts and a large central lodge, huddled together at the very edge of the Southern Darkwoods. It seemed to grow out of the forest rather than border it, as though it would be hard to tell where village left off and wilderness began.

Dun Ringhill was brightly lit for the dead of night-candles in every window, townspeople on the steps and in the streets, carrying torches and lanterns. Under other circumstances and in other company, Sturm might have found it inviting, festive-even lovely, in a rural sort of way. But not tonight: The whole village had turned out to see the prisoners, and the welcome was not friendly.

Sturm trudged before the militia, through a gauntlet of wintry stares. The children were too thin. That was the first thing he noticed. One of them, then another stepped forward, hands outstretched in the time-honored gesture of beggars, but adults drew them away, scolding them with cold, flickering phrases of Lemish.

Sturm frowned, straining to catch words of Solamnic or Common in the midst of the talk. He heard nothing but Lemish, its streams of long vowels and silences, like the distant sound of voices on another floor of a house.

Occasionally someone would hurl things at him. Dried mud, dung, and overripe fruit sailed from the midst of the crowd and skidded along the hard dirt path, but the attacks were halfhearted, and none of the projectiles came all that close to their mark.

Mara walked quietly behind him, in the surprisingly gentle custody of a big rough peasant whom Captain Duir called Oron. Duir himself escorted Sturm, his company cautious and firm but not harsh.

"What are they saying, Captain?" Sturm asked on more than one occasion, but Duir did not reply. His sharp eyes remained fixed on the village hall ahead of them, where a bonfire burned in the midst of the square. As they approached the blaze, two of the guards led Acorn and Luin off through the crowd toward the village stables. Sturm watched them for as far as he could see in the darkness and deceptive light. Wherever the stable lay, the smithy would be nearby.

"Keep your eyes ahead of you," Captain Duir ordered. "What're ya gawkin' after, anyway?"

"The smithy," Sturm answered, turning to the square ahead of him, where the bonfire danced and roared. "I've business with your Weyland."

"A confident lad, y'are," the captain observed, "that your business with us will be over soon."

"And confident are your people," Sturm replied, "whose thin children throw ripe fruit at visitors. Where does your village get apples in March, Captain Duir?"

The guardsman's hand tightened on his wrist.

"You'll be taking all things up with herself, I'd reckon," he replied.

"That would be the druidess?" Sturm asked.

But Captain Duir did not reply. With a gesture that could have been polite or mocking, he led Sturm and Mara across the square to the bonfire, where a wicker throne sat empty, surrounded by a dozen guards.

Sturm had grown used to the shape and feel of a storybook rural village, having spent a good part of his life on the outskirts of Solace, a place obscure in that time, though famous scarcely a decade later. When Jack Derry spoke of Dun Ringhill, Sturm had looked forward to a cozy little hamlet, the houses fashioned neatly of wood or wattle and daub, each roof freshly thatched and each fence tidy and in good repair.

But Lemish was unkempt, and its people completely unabashed by rough living quarters. The houses were large and circular, built of planks and wickerwork, their roofs of heavy, sodden thatch. Smoke trailed through a large hole in the middle of each roof, so Sturm guessed that the houses were warmed by a crude central fire.

It was to be expected, Sturm thought. He had heard that the Lemish people still lived in the Age of Darkness, the homes of their most powerful rulers scarcely hovels by Solamnic standards.

But what he had not expected was the square-the blossom and the green of it. In the midst of a drab and forbidding village, the houses on the square were sprouting, leaves and vines burgeoning from their walls as though the planks were still alive, still sending forth shoots and branches.

There, in the midst of a man-made forest, Sturm and Mara awaited the Druidess Ragnell.

She stepped from beneath a canopy of leaves, three beautiful girls strewing her pathway with lavender and lilac. The old woman was bent practically double, her face wrinkled and dark like the shell of a walnut and her white hair tangled and thin. Sturm thought of the sea effigies, the spindly, life-sized dolls made of mud and wood that dotted the coasts of Kothas and Mithas, put there to create the illusion from afar that the coastlines were garrisoned and watched.

The old woman wobbled to the wicker throne and, assisted by the young girls, seated herself with a long, expressive sigh. As quickly and silently as birds, the girls hastened away, their olive skin lost in the forest and dwindling torchlight, until at a great distance, Sturm could barely see their white robes flitting among the trees like wraiths.

"What d'you bring me, Captain Duir?" the druidess asked, drawing Sturm's attention suddenly and swiftly back to the square and the light and the hideous old creature perched on the wicker throne.

"A Solamnic, Lady Ragnell," the captain announced. "A Solamnic and his companion, an elf."

"The Kagonesti are welcome among us," Ragnell announced. "Give the girl the freedom of the village."

Guardsman Oron stepped politely, even shyly, away from Mara. The elf maiden stood in the midst of the militia and milling, begging children, uncertain what to do or where to go. Questioningly, she looked at Sturm, who mouthed the simple word "Go!" Almost reluctantly, she pushed through the crowd to the edge of the firelight and the edge of village square, where she stood for a moment, then backed into the shadows.

Left alone to face the druidess, Sturm turned uneasily toward the wicker throne. What lay ahead of him was uncertain now, made cloudier still by the strange stories he had heard of the druids in these parts. Sturm hated uncertainty, and he steeled himself for whatever surprises the ancient woman had in mind.

Druidism was only a rumor to most Solamnic Knights. Existing at the pale outskirts of the other religions, it seemed purposefully to go against them all, so that druids were called "pagans" and "heretics" by the Solamnic clergy. In some parts of Ansalon, they were said to worship trees; others practiced a strange and changeable magic, one that waxed and waned with the seasons rather than the mages' moons. There were darker things the lad had heard, but standing by the village bonfire, he pushed those frightening stories to the back of his mind.

He blinked nervously at the ugly old woman-hooknosed, a livid scar snaking down her right cheek. Only the gods knew where she had earned that badge of honor, and perhaps even they didn't know the customs of druids in Lemish.

This Lady Ragnell, wrinkled and scarred, was apparently the chief druidess, whatever that meant. The village folk and the guardsmen treated her with reverence and respect, much as the Knights would treat a noblewoman, but they also listened to her opinions and followed her decrees. Now Sturm had no choice but to listen. The old woman leaned forward on the throne, her black eyes aglitter.

"Solamnics are trespassers in these parts, lad. Or didn't you know?"

"I am bound on a journey to the woods beyond you," Sturm declared in his best knightly manner. He strode forward and squared his shoulders, for the first time aware of the weeds and mud from the river fight. He wished he had the authority, the confidence of a Lord Alfred or Gunthar. His voice, new to challenge and proclamation, seemed frail and cracking in the midst of this rustic assembly.

Ragnell shrugged and folded her hands almost daintily in her lap. For a brief moment, more fleeting than a rising tongue of flame, Sturm imagined how she must have looked when she was young. She must have been striking then; perhaps she had even been beautiful. But a century had passed, and slowly she had receded into the wood around her, becoming gnarled and arboreal.

"Y'are bound nowhere, boy," she replied. There was no unkindness in her voice, no menace. "Y'are bound nowhere but here, until we figure on… your unriddling. Until that time, there's a place for you in the roundhouse, in a room we've prepared for your visit."

"Perhaps there is better welcome for me," Sturm suggested, "at the house of Jack Derry."

The druidess blinked. "When Jack Derry left here," she replied, "the path brushed over with leaves and snow behind him. There's not a huntsman in Lemish could track him where he went, and none in my employ would want to."

Sturm swallowed uncomfortably, averting his stare from the angular face of the druidess.

"Years have passed," she maintained. "No longer do I know of Jack Derry."

Traitor! Sturm thought angrily, his face flushed and heated. He opened his mouth, but he could find no words.

"But I know your Order," Ragnell continued, "and I know history. And neither makes you a good introduction. Our country is still no friend of yours, our people no friend of the Order."

"Which does not mean that I intend you harm," Sturm replied.

"But it is more likely that you intend us harm than good," the druidess answered, leaning back in the throne and looking off into the fire, as though she divined the future or gathered the past.

"It has always been so," she continued quietly. "Your Knights have ridden across this land like a plague of winds, scattering villages and hopes in the relentless pursuit of something you call lawful and good. But there was a time, only a few years ago, when the menace of your righteousness was swept back, almost swept away."

"The Rebellion?" Sturm asked, remembering his flight through the snowy mountain pass in the care of Soren Vardis.

"The Outcrying, we call it," Ragnell answered solemnly.

"When the peoples of Lemish and Southlund and Solamnia rose against a grim, self-righteous Order."

She paused, revealing a crooked, gap-toothed smile.

"We just about broke the backs of your horsemen, too," she proclaimed. "I am Ragnell of the Sieges, you know."

"I… I'm afraid our history does not… record that name," Sturm replied, tactfully and haltingly. The old hag laughed and waved her knobby hand through the smoky air as though she brushed aside his history as well as his words.

"The Vingaard Keep fell to my forces, as did Castles Brightblade, di Caela, and Jochanan. But it's the fall of the Vingaard Keep that earned me my name."

Dumbstruck, Sturm gaped at the cackling old woman. Instinctively he reached to his belt, but his shoulder wrenched and his hand groped the air aimlessly.

Little did it matter, Sturm thought bitterly as he gathered himself and locked gazes with the woman seated before him. For after all, his sword lay broken, wrapped in a blanket on Luin's saddle. He wished for a dagger, for garrote or poison-for anything to cut short the monstrous life that sat and gloated before him.

For this was the druidess of whom Lord Stephan Peres had spoken that day in the High Clerist's Tower when he had given Sturm the shield of Angriff Brightblade. This was the woman who had laid siege to Castle Brightblade-the woman who, if the darkest prospects were indeed true, had killed his father.

Through the dark, muddy back streets Mara wandered, the sounds of the gathering dropping away behind her, replaced by an odd, expectant silence-by the calls of nightingales and owls and, now and again, the faint and restless sound of a horse in a stable.

She followed the sound of the neighing to a barn at the edge of town. Luin was there, sure enough, and in the stall beside her was Acorn, tranquil with hay and home. For a moment, Mara hesitated before the animals, thoughts of escape seductive in her imaginings. Silvanost was an easy fortnight's ride from Dun Ringhill, and astride a healthy horse, she could be at the foot of the Tower of the Stars within ten days.

But there was Cyren to think of: Cyren, who had scurried away at the first sign of trouble and who no doubt roamed the nearby plains, building his web and mourning her capture and starting at noises in the night. Until she found him, she could not hope to leave.

Then there was Sturm Brightblade. He was clumsy, yes, and his fool's honor had cost her reunion and years and, back at the Vingaard River, almost her life. But a fool's honor is a kind of honor nonetheless. Whatever disaster Sturm had courted, he had done so with the best of intentions.

There in the hay-smelling stable, Mara leaned her face against the warm flank of Jack Derry's little mare. Acorn snorted drowsily, her thoughts no doubt on a well-earned sleep after a well-earned supper.

"I couldn't ride off and leave the simpleton, now, could I?" Mara asked nobody in particular, her chin resting on Acorn's back. "Someone has to stay with him and protect him. The Lemish don't take kindly to his sort, and here he is in a hostile town, under guard and…"

She paused. Alertly she listened, her elven ears sharp and discerning, but it was only a mouse in the loft she heard.

"… and weaponless," she whispered, completing her thought. "But for that there is remedy at hand!"

Swiftly the elf maiden retrieved the broken sword, still wrapped in its blanket, and set out to find the smithy.

Weyland the smith was large even for his trade-large and ruddy, his forearms as big around as her waist. Though he was friendly enough and mild mannered, the mere physical presence of the man was enough to daunt her, and Mara lingered in the doorway of the smithy as the prodigious blacksmith seated himself on a bench and unwrapped the sword.

"This one, is it?" he asked, his voice like the rumble of rockslides in the mountains.

" 'This one'?" Mara asked. "D'you mean you've seen it before?"

"Indeed I have, m'lady," the smith replied, turning the gorgeous Solamnic hilt in his enormous, soot-blackened hand. "I'm good at the remembering of an heirloom blade, on account of in Dun Ringhill, we seldom pass down anything more than poverty. This one I saw… oh, six weeks back or so. Middle of winter, it was, when Lunitari began her approach…"

"Into the same part of the sky as the white moon," Mara said. She was surprised that the smith was a stargazer. "The boy that brought it to you…"

"No boy, m'lady, but a full-grown bearded man," the smith corrected, still examining the sword. "From the north, he was, by the sound of him, but I'm not the kind to ask 'em their origins."

He laid the broken sword-first the blade and then the severed hilt-on the bench in front of him, a look of shrewd speculation on his face. His finger traced awkwardly over the runes that lined the blood gutter of the sword.

"Should have asked him, though," Weyland observed, "seeing as his request was so odd and all. For he wanted me to flaw this sword."

"Haw it?" Mara asked.

"A hairline crack. A stress point in the metal," the smith replied. He raised one huge hand and gestured. He could have gone on and on, listing numerous ways he was able to render a blade defective.

Able, it seemed, but not willing. A disgusted sneer touched the corner of his lip, and he spat unceremoniously into the furnace. "Don't do that kind of work, though," he explained. "Scoundrel's work, to mar a weapon."

He looked at the blade lovingly and picked it up once more. "Barbarian's work," he said, "to mar a blade such as this. But the man was a gentleman, on a fine black horse with a mounted servant and all, so you'd think he was on procession through the country. Wanted me to ruin the sword, and flaw it so's it would break beyond reforging-shatter like porcelain into a score of pieces that never quite fit together again."

Mara nodded. "His name?" she asked.

"Oh, I couldn't tell you that, m'lady. He never gave it, nor were we even on speaking terms after I refused his business. Just rode out of town in a huff, saying he could find the man who would do the job better. I wondered then why he'd come so far south for a smith if he could find as good a one in his own parts."

Weyland squinted and examined the sword's edge.

"Don't think he did, though. My master might have done it-leastwise he, of all the smiths I know, had the skills to do so."

"Your master?" Mara asked. The confidence and assurance of the big man in front of her hinted at no master. She couldn't imagine Weyland's apprenticeship.

"Oh, yes, indeed," Weyland agreed. "Solamnic, he was, and he heard voices in the metal. But treachery was no more his practice than it is mine, and he's the only other smith I know could cause or mend what you see before you."

Mara gazed at him wonderingly, and Weyland nodded.

"Yes," he said. "I can fix this sword, m'lady, and would gladly do so."

"Thank you," Mara said quietly. Now she had to figure how to get the blade to the prisoner. With a quick bow, she backed from the room, turned and raced back toward the stable. Among the contents of her bundle, wrapped and placed upon Sturm's back for most of their journey, she had hidden a bow and arrows.

The pack lay open over two bales of hay. For the life of her, Mara could have sworn that it had been tightly bound and gathered when she had taken the sword from the stable. But the building was dark, and her duties had been rushed and urgent. No doubt she remembered cloudily, if she really remembered at all.

Whatever the case, it was open now. Spilling into the faint moonlight were her belongings: a bronze harp and three penny whistles, two robes and a pouch wherein lay her childhood collection of shells, Cyren's brooch, his ring with the green dragon seal of Family Calamon…

The bow was nowhere to be found. She knelt above the blanket, above her treasures and the baled hay, a rising uneasiness plaguing her thoughts.

"Is this what you're looking for, m'lady?" a rough voice asked from behind her.

Mara wheeled about. Captain Duir stood over her, holding her bow and the quiver of arrows. Beside the captain stood the enormous Guardsman Oron, a dim look of disappointment on his face.

"Oh, we are sorry to have found this arsenal," the captain proclaimed with a crooked smile. "And we are even more sorry that, bearing the trust and goodwill of the Druidess Ragnell, you have come back to retrieve your weapons. I suppose that your next intention was… to depart?"

"No," Mara replied, and the captain's eyes narrowed.

"Well… if you intended to bear arms in our gentle village, then to what purpose?"

"I… I…" Mara began, but she knew that Duir had trapped her.

"I see no choice," the captain said slowly, as Oron walked toward her, his big hand extended, "but to prepare your quarters as well in the roundhouse. The freedom of Dun Ringhill was a privilege gladly granted by herself, but you have shown to be more Solamnic than Kagonesti."

They escorted her by the smithy. Weyland filled the doorway, blocking the light of the forge behind him. He watched them take her back toward the green, toward the roundhouse and the cell beside that of the captured Solamnic.

Weyland shook his head, his thoughts opaque and distant. Then he turned to the forge, closing the door behind him, but not before he picked up the long blade lying on his bench, shining silver and red by the light of the fire.

Had he not been working the bellows, he might have heard yet another party pass as the night turned and the village folk retired to their circular huts and beds of straw. For outside the smithy, something scurried by, stepping lightly and carefully through a nearby alley, whirring softly like a cricket. Yet somewhere within its strange, inhuman language lay human words and human fears and mourning.