The Oath and the Measure

Chapter 20

The birdsong was shrill and insistent about him — jay and sparrow, the tilting sound of the robin, and loud above all the larksong that haunted his ears when he moved and the singing died.

Sturm sat up and looked around. He was where they had carted him, as best he could reconstruct from his fevered, fitful moments of waking. The pool was there, and the oak, and the grassy, sunstruck clearing, but Vertumnus and his party were all gone-no Jack Derry nor dryad nor druidess. Sturm lay alone at the foot of the oak, his armor and sword beside him, neatly arranged, so that it seemed like a husk or abandoned cocoon.

He reached over and touched the breastplate. The bronze kingfisher was unnaturally warm, green with verdigris and neglect, as though the armor had lain there for some time. Pensive, Sturm pulled the shield toward him, blinking at the dust-muted sun on its dented boss.

Suddenly someone coughed behind him. He started at the noise, spinning about.

Ragnell stood at the edge of the clearing, her dark eyes fixed on him.

"Y-You!" Sturm exclaimed, reaching for his sword. He checked himself at once. She was, after all, an old woman, and the Measure forbade-

"My intentions are peaceful," Ragnell announced. "Peaceful but instructive."

"I… I must have been wounded," Sturm explained as the light hurt his eyes and the clearing swam and rocked. "I must have… must have been…"

Ragnell nodded. "Seven nights," she said. "A week you have slumbered. And there were dreams, I trust. Momentous dreams of things to come, which you might call prophecy but I should call augury…"

Her words confused him, but her voice was slow and insinuating. It twined into Sturm's thoughts with the subtlety of weeds and overgrowth, until he wasn't sure whether he was thinking the words or she was saying them. He shook his head, trying to dislodge her voice, and when that failed, he tried to stand.

"I'm wounded still," he said, his voice dry and breathless.

"Of course you are, Sturm Brightblade," the druidess replied, her tanned and wrinkled face expressionless. "The thorn is still with you, deep in your shoulder, next to your heart." Ragnell watched him intently. "Look at your hands," she commanded.

Sturm did as she said, and he gasped at the sight. Green raced through his veins. His fingernails, too, were green. His hands were dark and leathery, like those of Lord Wilderness.

"What…" he began, but Ragnell's voice rose irresistibly from the back of his head, spreading over his thoughts like thick, entangling vines.

"He awoke…" the voice began, and the clearing dissolved in mist, leaving nothing but the woman and the shimmering water and the night. Suddenly the white moon rose behind her, its light a thin corona about her green, billowing robes, reflecting like fox fire over the surface of the pool. Sturm reeled in dismay, knowing at last that he still dreamt.

The wound in his shoulder stained his tunic green, then violet, then a deep and abiding black as the sap streamed and settled. Speechless, he looked at his hands. Instead of paling with the loss of blood or sap or whatever flowed from his shoulder, they now burned with a bright green that passed into iridescence.

Ragnell's countenance changed as she approached him steadily. From a wizened old woman, villainous and sly, she became a creature of great beauty-dark hair and dark skin and dark eyes in a dazzlement of darkness, and she smiled with such gentleness that his heart was touched. He fell to his knees, yearning to be with her, whether to be loved as a child or a man he was not sure.

This is a temptation, he thought, looking at the soft lines of her breasts through the green robes. Sent from the Green Man, it is. A trap. I am supposed to… to…

I do not know what I am supposed to do, except deny her.

The air smelled of cedar, and somewhere beyond the night and moonlight and reflections, there returned the sound of the flute.

Perhaps this is the last allurement, Sturm thought. Perhaps Vertumnus waits beyond this dream, and at last the search will be over.

The woman stopped and drew back her hand. She folded her arms upon her breasts and her lips moved, mouthing words that passed through Sturm's thoughts and imaginings. But he couldn't say that he heard them, nor was it Ragnell's voice that spoke them, but a deeper voice now, a voice familiar and yet just beyond the grasp of his memory.

A man's voice, it was, and it conjured something to do with snow and midnight and urgent departures.

Sturm opened his tunic and looked at the wound in his shoulder. The thorn had worked its way near his breastbone, deep and barbed and ugly. He saw with a start that it was moving even further. It would soon sink beyond sight and retrieval into his darkest interior, where it would do its last, irreparable damage.

Ragnell leaned forward and touched the gash. Sturm cried out and pushed her hand away.

"No!" he cried out. "This forest has wounded me enough! You have done great damage-to me, to the Order, and to my father in the siege of Castle Brightblade!"

The druidess shook her head slowly and smiled. "Many were the Knights of Solamnia who fell in that… 'rebellion,' as you call it. But your father was a decent man and not one of the ones I killed."

"Then… then…" Sturm tried to answer, but the clearing swam away from him, and he staggered and fell to his knees.

Vaguely Ragnell clutched at the lad's tunic, but he tore himself from her grasp.

Ragnell smiled beautifully, incredulously. "Well, then," she said softly, casting her hand across the roiling waters. "If I am a temptation, let us see the terms of tempting."

At her touch, the pool stilled, and framed in the white moonlight, Sturm saw his reflection strangely transformed to a dark lad all in green, leafed and vined, his hair entangled with dew and crowned with holly and laurel.

"By Huma!" he swore. "It's Jack Derry!"

"Not Jack Derry but you," the druidess proclaimed. " 'Tis your own self translated, Sturm Brightblade. Beyond Oath and Measure, into the depths of your being."

"Another druidic dream!" Sturm replied scornfully, turning his head from the reflection.

The pool still lay in front of him, and his face was still looking back-serene, sylvan, unchanged. He knelt before the tranquil pool, and the reflection knelt to face him.

"Does… does that lie in the depths of me?" Sturm asked.

Ragnell set her hand on his shoulder. Her reflection appeared in the water, bent and greatly ancient above his kneeling arboreal image.

"That and much more, Sturm Brightblade," she said. "A great wisdom beneath Measure and Oath. Yours is the choice, however. I can remove the thorn, or… I can change it to music."

"To music?"

The druidess nodded. "An inner music that will pierce and unite your divided heart like a tailor's needle, stitching it together to a wholeness past damage. The music will stay with you for the rest of your life, and it will change you utterly. Or I can remove the thorn."

She leaned forward and stirred the waters of the pool. "Either way, the choice is yours," she urged.

Sturm swallowed.

"Choose," the druidess urged. She pointed to the wound in his shoulder. While she had spoken, the thorn had worked its way still deeper into Sturm's flesh. It lay between muscle and bone now; Sturm could barely move his arm. It was green to the elbow now, and the color spread slowly upward.

" 'Twill go deeper and do deadly work," Ragnell announced. "Fear hot the music. Soon, Sturm Brightblade, you will be part of the woods and the great green of midsummer."

"No!" Sturm shouted. Around him, he heard the sharp, startled shrieks of rousted birds. "Remove the thorn, Ragnell!"

"If I do," the druidess threatened, "you will never see your father." She turned away from him and walked toward the edge of the clearing.

She is lying, Sturm thought, following her. She is lying, just as Caramon and Raistlin were not at the Tower of High Sorcery, and Vertumnus was not at the walls of the Knight's Spur. She is a dream, and she is lying, and all this reading of dreams is only foolishness, and what I should do is…

"Ragnell!" he shouted. Beyond her, deep in the thick blue aeterna, something scurried and rushed away. "Remove this thorn from my shoulder I"

"No." Her reply was soft, uncertain.

"I can choose," Sturm said triumphantly. The words passed through him surely and swiftly, and they were so certain that for a moment, he thought they were not his own. "To the last of this and anything," he said, "I can choose."

"So you can, Sturm Brightblade," the druidess agreed after a long pause. The flute song gave way to the lonely sound of a solitary lark, and in a moment, that music, too, had faded. "Take your sword then, and your Oath and Measure."

She turned to him, and with a strangely sorrowful look, reached to his shoulder and removed the thorn.

"The strength will return at once," she declared as all of them-thorn and druidess, pool and clearing-began to fade before the lad's astonished eyes.

"And you will never have to choose again."

Mara carried the body of the spider to a little knoll at the edge of the forest, where the trees gave way to grass and stone and moonlight, and where, if you looked west through the rapidly thinning foliage, you could see the village fires of Dun Ringhill.

For such a large and spindle-shanked creature, Cyren was surprisingly light. It was as though the spider's departing life had left a thin, papery husk behind it, like a broken cocoon or a locust shell.

Already his legs were dry and brittle.

Mara scarcely knew where she carried him, and even less why she did so. Around her, the forest was loud and menacing, a dark landscape of grunts and whistles and snapping underbrush. She climbed over a felled maple, then through a thicket of briars that scratched her and clung to her clothing.

Once in a great while, there was moonlight through the branches, and Mara could look up to unobstructed sky, to the deepening violet of the heavens above her, and the neighborless stars.

It was as though the forest had turned against her, and everything in her elven blood was fearful and poised. Time and again, there were harsh, unfamiliar rumblings in the underbrush, something gobbling and wounded and angry. Then soon after would come a brief silvery outburst of a flute nearby, so beautiful and ominous she thought she had imagined the song. More than once, she longed to leave dead Cyren behind her, to rush toward the open and light and cool breezes, to scale a vallenwood and clamber to the top of the forest, where the sky would reveal itself.

Through all of this, she wept.

"Enchantments!" she muttered bitterly, tugging the creature around a squat outcropping of rocks. "It is not supposed to be this way. Princes and kings are trapped in the guise of frog or bird, or they are turned to stone or doomed to a century of sleep. The old stories lied to us, for a stone or frog or bird can become a prince as well, it seems. I was in love with Calotte's enchantments."

Suddenly the whole thing struck her as funny. Laughing bleakly, she seated herself on one of the stones, looked long into the dull, multiple eyes of the spider, and laughed until the tears fell again.

Then, by incredible chance, she caught a whiff of wood-smoke from somewhere to her right, so faint that she might well have imagined it, and again she hoisted Cyren's body, growing heavier the longer she traveled, and plodded off in the direction of the smell.

The spider hoisted over her shoulders, she scrambled up a rise, pulling herself the last few steep yards by bracing her feet against the thin trunk of a sapling willow. Then it was light, fresh air, and the windswept clearing above the dwindling forest.

Tenderly she set the spider down. She knelt on the top of the hill and drew forth her knife. Intently, almost reverently, she began to dig a grave in the rocky soil. As she did, she sang a mourning song from the west, learned in her travels with the creature she buried.

"Always before, you could explain

The turning darkness of the earth,

And how the dark embraced the rain

And gave the ferns and flowers birth.

"Already I forget those things,

And how a vein of gold survives

The mining of a thousand springs,

The seasons of a thousand lives.

"Now winter is my memory,

Now autumn, now the summer light

So every spring from now will be

Another season into night."

So she dug and sang the song again, until a horse nickered behind her and a shadow passed over her. Jack Derry approached and knelt beside her. Silently, with that healthy confidence she had grown to trust in their travels together, and also with an unaccustomed seriousness, the gardener drew forth his knife and joined in the digging.

By midnight, the creature had been placed solemnly in a bed of leaves, then covered over by Jack as Mara played an ancient elven air, sweet and elegiac in the purple night. She played, and slowly, incredibly, the red moon Lunitari rose from behind a stand of poplars and joined white Solinari overhead.

Astonished, Mara looked beyond the surprising intersection of the moons to the high and cloudless sky above Lemish. There the bright helix of Mishakal shone, blue and white in the earliest morning. Jack smiled.

It was later that morning, or a morning soon after, when Sturm awoke in the midst of the forest. Dressed in full armor, he lay beside a slow, moss-clogged brook in a strange, solitary place he had never seen. Vines and tendrils and briars grew thick about him, and all around the foliage was undisturbed, as though he had been dropped onto this spot softly from a great height.

He rubbed his eyes and rose up. It was a moment before he noticed the change in his movement, the renewed strength in his arm and the vigor in his legs. Amazed, he looked at his hands, which were ruddy and familiar, rid of the green that had haunted his veins and his dreams.

"Dreams…" he murmured, and felt his shoulder. The skin was smooth, unscarred, and his arm was limber, completely restored.

"Where do the dreams leave off?" he asked himself, and crashed clumsily through the thicket.

For a long morning and afternoon, Sturm Brightblade wandered the Southern Darkwoods, his apprehension rising. He remembered the words of Lord Wilderness at Yule-tide: "If you fail to meet me at the appointed place, on the appointed night, your honor is forever forfeit." And so he searched for Vertumnus's trail, his eagerness tumbling into bafflement as one path after another emptied him onto the plains of Lemish, north of the smoke and the bunched huts of Dun Ringhill. Like a maze designed by a capricious forester, each trail led him back to the same spot, and each time, Sturm was surprised by his arrival, as the path issuing from the forest appeared to be different.

He spent the night at the wood's edge. The trees seemed to recoil from his small campfire, and by morning, he discovered that his campsite had moved or the woods had receded, for he lay a good hundred yards from where he had bedded down.

Puzzled, still bleary from sleep, he approached the woods and found that the trail had vanished. Several brief sorties into the borders of the woods led him back to the same spot, and it dawned on him gradually that the forest itself was rejecting him. He could enter the woods forever, but whatever road he took would lead him back out at once.

"The first night of spring has passed," Sturm said to himself, his despair rising as yet another path into the forest led back to the campsite. "I have missed my appointment with Lord Wilderness, or squandered it in dreaming. I have dishonored my vow."

And yet he was still alive. The wound in his shoulder had not "blossomed" in some ominous, fatal way. Indeed, he examined his shoulder and found no trace of a wound-nothing except the faintest flutter of discomfort when his fingers pressed too hard against the spot.

Something told him the struggle was not over, that he would meet Lord Wilderness if he kept to the search a little longer. Shielding his eyes, he stared north and south down the thick, impenetrable border of trees and briars, then turned toward Dun Ringhill.

"Of all the places I have been," he whispered, shouldering his sword like an infantryman's pike, "I expect I am least welcome in that village, but surely the secret lies there."