The Oath and the Measure

Chapter 6

Deep in the Southern Darkwoods, lying in a hammock of vine and leaves, Lord Wilderness closed his eyes and set down his flute. Around him, the light was distorted, green and amber, as though the woods themselves were a dark and curving glass.

The hammock was suspended between two ancient oaks above the foundation of a ruin even more ancient. Moss-covered stones dotted the clearing like worn teeth, outlining faintly the foundation of a small building, perhaps a moat house or monastery, no doubt abandoned and left to fall apart some time back in the Age of Might.

Vertumnus's eyes flickered open suddenly. Perched above him in the branches of an ancient oak, two dryads stared down at him in perplexity.

"You could have killed him!" hissed the smaller of the pair, her black hair knotted in a long coil. Her voice was rich and sinister, like the rush of wind over dried leaves.

Vertumnus did not answer. Slowly he folded his hands on his chest, and for a moment, he looked like the statue of an entombed king, still and regal and unfathomable. The dryads stirred uneasily above him, the tall one scrambling down the side of the hammock as nimbly as a spider down a web until she came to rest by the side of the Green Man and nestled against him, her face buried in the green thicket of his beard.

"I know ye're not for killing him," she whispered seductively, her voice flute music and her touch the light flutter of a bird's wing. "And it makes no difference to us. But daunt him and confuse him and send him addled back to his creed-bound brothers. Do it! Do it now!"

Vertumnus chuckled, and the wind whistled through his laughter.

"You're as bloodthirsty as stirges, the whole oak-dwelling lot of you," he rumbled. "And as foolish and insistent as magpies."

The leaves rustled as he waved away the dryads.

"Begone with the both of you! 'Tis morning and time for me to sleep."

He stretched, and the dryad at his side scrambled out of the hammock and onto the dried leaves of the forest floor. Pouting, she stared at the green prodigy half-drowsing in the branches above her, his voice filled with alien wonder and magic.

"Not one of us, are ye," she accused. "Not yet. And no longer one of them, though ye may yearn for the days gone by."

Vertumnus only laughed and turned in the hammock. He shook his head, and acorns rained through the netted vines, and for a moment, the air shimmered with a thousand swirling samaras. With glittering black eyes, he regarded the dryad, his gaze warm and amused but unreadable.

"Who are you to say, little Evanthe, whither I yearn or aspire?"

From somewhere amid the thick, spreading branches of juniper, a great owl descended, alighting on the clews of the hammock, a sprig of sharp blue berries in its beak. Vertumnus winked at the owl, ironically regarding the sulking nymphs below him.

"As for now," he yawned, "get ye to an oak tree, and my companion and I will drowse and dream the dreams of the nocturnal and wise." Vertumnus arched an eyebrow, turned to the owl, and waved away the nymphs once again-this time more impatiently.

Angrily the dryads glided toward the center of the woods, looking back over their shoulders once, then a second time, at this unmanageable green mystery in their midst.

"Ye'll never be one of us!" the little one shouted tauntingly. "Though ye're green as a sapling, as a summer leek, ye'll never be like us, Lord Wilderness!" Then both of them vanished into the dappled light of the forest depths.

Vertumnus smiled and closed his eyes.

"Diona," he whispered, raising the flute to his lips, "you will never imagine how little that troubles me."

Serenely the Green Man looked into the dark vault of the forest. He touched his lips to the flute, then lowered it, spoke a few soothing words to the owl in a language of whistles and cops and of wind through the high branches, and the great bird nestled in the spreading thicket of his hair. Vertumnus raised the flute again, and the rest of them came from the shadows-nightingale and tiercel, elk and squirrel and bat, and a single amber-eyed lynx.

Slowly Lord Wilderness began to play, in the stately ninth mode that the bards call Branchalan. The startled owl took to wing as the hammock in which the man lay bristled with a fresh growth of leaves. Though the world and the weather around him was still in the tag end of winter, it was suddenly high summer.

Vertumnus played, and flowers budded and blossomed about him, entwining their thin, hollow stems in his beard and hair. Quickly he shifted to the tenth mode, the serene and lilting Matherian, and the air about him wafted with sweet fragrances. On the branches above him, the songbirds nodded, lulled by the lovely smells, and gradually they began to sing along, as they had in the fog on the Plains of Solamnia.

The Green Man's eyes twinkled with delight. For the eleventh mode was next-the Solinian, the Song of the White Moon, the Granter of Visions. Throughout Ansalon, ears were turning, lifting to the air where,' soft and almost undetectable, the melody arising from the Southern Darkwoods would fall upon them.

Swiftly the green fingers danced over the body of the flute, flashing and blurring as the music quickened. Vertumnus looked to the gray patch of morning sky above him, visible through the opaque net of branches, and slowly watched it fill with the white face of Solinari.

The eyes of Vertumnus flashed and widened. The dance was beginning. The branches no longer obscured the sky but, caught in the music and the light, they seemed to shrink into a netting of scars on the surface of a glorious moon.

The shimmering surface of the orb turned green as Vertumnus played, clouding with a distant celestial storm. The clouds swirled and boiled silently, and from the midst of their turmoil, images arose, peopling the surface of the moon.

It was like a mirage, like a scene more vivid than memory but less vivid than sight. Crossing the surface of Solinari as though moving across the face of an orb, a party of a dozen dwarves trudged from rock to insubstantial rock.

Vertumnus squinted and continued to play.

Two of the dwarves stopped in their ghostly passage, shadows poised on the lip of the moon. They looked at one another, sniffed, and shook their heads curiously, as though trying to dislodge something from their ears.

Vertumnus smiled, his lips above the embouchure of the flute. It was like this always: The music reached them as a strange disturbance of thought, an elusive thing they wouldn't remember a moment after it tumbled away from their hearing. Yet the Solinian mode was the song of changes. Those within hearing would be changed by the music-that is, if they chose to listen. Some changed subtly, some profoundly, but all who had ears to hear would be touched somewhere in their deepest, most inward heart, and afterward the song would never leave them.

The dwarves vanished as quickly as they had risen from the clouds on the moon, and in their stead, three Knights rode by on horseback, scarves wrapped about their faces against a driving winter wind.

One of them, bareheaded, his dark hair flecked with gray, reined in his horse beneath a snow-covered stand of juniper. Half hidden in the shadow of evergreens and in the dodging light of the moon, he turned his face heavenward, listening to the music with controlled focus.

Something about his bearing seemed familiar… familiar indeed…

But he was gone before Vertumnus could look more closely, vanished into the green roil of clouds about the moon. At his vanishing, Vertumnus lowered the flute, and suddenly, as though a levelling wind had passed across its surface, Solinari blazed forth with a silver light…

Then suddenly, inexplicably, it began to wane.

Vertumnus shook his head sadly, his long green locks dripping with dew. Now he would locate the lad again, before the moon was a crescent, a sliver, before it was gone entirely into newness and dark. He would find the one who would occupy his time until the first of spring. Briskly, amusingly, he played a simple eighth-mode jig, so simple that it was scarcely magic. The dryads, hearing the song from their bowers deep in the woods, stepped from the trees and approached him, trailing oak leaves and a strange silver light.

"There are other dancers far more promising, Vertumnus," Diona urged.

"One of the Knights," Evanthe suggested. "Even a brace of dwarves would be more entertaining."

Vertumnus played on as though he did not hear them. Indeed Sturm looked like a plodding prospect, a singularly unimaginative young man bound by custom and convention. What the nymphs did not know was how this Bright-blade concerned him-how the quarrel at Yule had warred with Vertumnus over the months. It was time for the lad to learn difficult instruction, about blood and forbearance and the shimmering fraud at the heart of his beloved Order. In the absence of a father, Vertumnus had taken it upon himself to provide the lessons.

Evanthe had been right before. Vertumnus could have killed Sturm Brightblade once, twice, perhaps many times. For the dark thing that followed the lad on the fog-littered plains, a thing that answered to no man and to few gods, danced to the music of Vertumnus. It had neared the boy, had almost overtaken him, but at the last moment, the Green Man had piped it northward toward Kalaman and the bay beyond.

It was too soon for dark things, too soon to test the boy so strongly. There would be perils enough and eventual death. But not now, for the dance was young. And spring was still a fortnight away.

Quickly, in mist and the swelling moon, Vertumnus searched for Brightblade. Over the plains the music swept like a wind, circling about Vingaard Keep, down the great river as far as Thelgaard Keep and still searching, searching all of Solamnia until…

With the last solemn notes of the tune, the fog dissolved before an ancient castle, ruinous and abandoned. Vertumnus's dark eyes widened.

The dryads exchanged unreadable glances.

"He is there, Evanthe," Vertumnus whispered. The last of the fog fell away, and there sat Brightblade, unsteady on his lathered mare. Shaken by fog and fire and a breakneck ride, he seemed diminished, small inside that absurd Solamnic armor.

"It almost makes for pity," Diona said, her dark hand resting on the Green Man's shoulder.

"Not mine," Vertumnus replied, in his voice a last hint of winter. "My branches are bare of pity."

So he and the owl and the dryads watched as the lad rode through the dilapidated gates of Castle di Caela.

"A place that you know, Lord Wilderness?" Evanthe whispered teasingly, her lips at the Green Man's ear. Vertumnus smiled, but he did not answer.

Sturm dismounted and walked the mare across the moss-covered stones of the courtyard, past booths and buildings in disrepair to the mahogany gates of the castle keep, weathered but still intact. The lad tried the door, and with some wrestling managed to yank it open.

"He's a strong one, your dancer!" taunted Diona. Vertumnus raised a long green finger to her lips, pressing playfully until the dryad winced and turned away.

Now the boy stepped inside, and the midday light shone briefly, fitfully into the darkness of the keep.

"He is in the great anteroom now," Vertumnus murmured, "with its tapestries, and its golden birds, and its marble banisters."

"Tell us about it," Evanthe whispered. "Tell us, Vertumnus."

Lord Wilderness closed his eyes and raised the flute to his lips. Something serene, perhaps, in a more magical mode, or something piercing and light…

"Vertumnus! Look!" hissed Diona. He opened his eyes as a shadowy figure crossed the distant courtyard like an unwelcome specter in a dream. From shadow to shadow flitted the man, caped and hooded and low against the walls. To the great mahogany door of the keep he came, set hand to the door…

… and closed it, violently and suddenly, wedging it shut with a dagger. As quickly as it had come, the figure slipped away, and from inside the keep came the muffled sound of the lad beating frantically, helplessly against the jammed door.

Vertumnus lay back in his hammock, the flute silent as his fingers danced across it aimlessly.

"That one," he mused. "That… hooded one."

With a delighted smile, he turned to Evanthe.

"I know him! I know him by his gait, his every movement."

With a laugh, he rumpled the hair of the dryads, pushing them playfully from the hammock.

"Go to the lady, Evanthe! Diona! Tell her the dance has become more interesting by far!"

And as the nymphs rushed off through the thick evergreens, Vertumnus leapt from the hammock and shook the mist from his long green locks. He slipped the flute into his belt and scrambled from the tree. A long journey lay ahead of him, but it was short compared to the road he had traveled for six years.

"Boniface!" he breathed. "By all the stars unfortunate and fortunate, Lord Boniface Crownguard of Foghaven! He's onto something. Now the music moves more quickly."

Boniface turned from the door of the keep, shaking his head to banish the strange humming noise in his ears.

He was content now. Surpassingly content. For now, the inquisitive lad was locked within the fastness of the tower.

It had taken all his riding and knowledge of geography to arrive at the castle before Sturm Brightblade. He had dismounted in the dark of the stables and slipped across the bailey, having barely the time to secure all the doors from the keep so that once the lad entered, it would be impossible for him to leave. All along the ground floor of the thousand-year-old tower, the doors were wedged impossibly shut. The sheer drop from the upper window was further assurance.

Boniface sighed, leading Luin to a rain-filled trough, from which the little mare drank loudly, the noise drowning out the hammering and shouting at the thick door, the unnatural gnat song in the winter air.

It was not the most pleasant of tasks, this locking of boys in towers. Sturm would most likely starve, and even if great good fortune let him escape, he would be delayed long enough from his forest appointment that his honor would be…

What was the Green Man's phrase? "Forever forfeit."

It had to be done, though, Boniface told himself as he led Luin toward the shadowy stable. It had to be done, because in asking after his father, Sturm might uncover the truth about the siege of Castle Brightblade.

He was too young to understand that truth, or how Angriff had threatened the very life of the Order.

Boniface rested his forehead against the warm flank of the mare, remembering. He remembered how Angriff Brightblade had returned from Neraka with visions, with extraordinary danger in his soul. At once they all had noticed the change in the man, how his swordsmanship flowered, how he had become more skilled and reckless and inventive.

Somehow it was a little… disturbing. After all, Angriff was newly wed at the time, and his father, Lord Emelin, had only recently passed into Huma's breast, leaving Castle Brightblade to the care of his son. It just seemed that Angriff would have been more… conservative.

Boniface shrugged and leaned against the trough.

Angriff had been a puzzle. Always a puzzle. Like that time in the garden, shortly after he returned, when the two of them had walked a narrow path lined with flowers, Boniface a dozen steps behind him and the air loud with finches and sparrows.

Boniface had come around a stand of larick and found his friend bent on the path, gloved hand lightly touching the petals of a green and silver rose. It was as if Angriff was… absent for a moment, that the flower held something he was desperately trying to remember or recover.

Boniface stood there, with his friend lost in thoughts of rare gentleness, with the sunlight of May slanting through the leaves of the Calvian oak so that all of them-Knight, trail, and silver flower-were cast in a curious green. Hardly the place for ill musings, it was.

But Boniface had thought, although idly and no more than tactically, that here would be a fitting place for ambush, if evil intent were to meet with a secluded spot in a garden and a great swordsman for once unwary.

He shuddered and dismissed such a dark musing.

Boniface smiled to recall it now. He had indeed been young that day in the garden.

Nonetheless, his thoughts had moved elsewhere, to the rose that Lord Angriff cupped in his hand and to other, tamer thoughts beyond that. But Angriff suddenly drew sword and rose quickly. He looked down a bend in the garden pathway, under an aeterna bush, then whirled about and made for the delicate wrought iron gazebo in the terraced center of the garden. He acted unsettled, distracted. He leaned against the scrolled gateway of the little building, as if he had been overtaken by some strange and sudden malady.

It was then that Boniface called the servants, thinking he would need help in carrying Angriff to the infirmary.

The servants arrived, flushed and breathless, but by that time Angriff was composed, thoroughly alert. He brushed aside Boniface's bracing hand and ordered the men to search the garden. They came back soon, assuring the Knights that the premises were secure.

Then Angriff had turned to him wearily.

"I am sorry for this immoderate display, Bonano," he said, using the childhood name Boniface hated but endured from his capable friend. "But when I stooped to admire this silver rose, there suddenly came upon me a change in the… energies of the garden. It is what you learn in Neraka, in the face of bandit swordsmen, when your heart and sword hand must learn to sense the intention and impulse of your enemy.

"I felt it just now, here in the garden," he said. "And I saw no one except you. Not even a squirrel or dog."

Angriff grinned and brushed back his dark hair wearily. "I must be more tired than I had imagined," he confessed, and it was hours before Boniface could set aside his own astonishment long enough to tell him that the "change in energy" was his own.

Even more than insubordination, more than irreverence at tournament and in the councils of the mighty, it had been that moment, remembered and magnified over the passage of years, that sealed Angriff's future for Boniface. It was why the Brightblades had to vanish forever.

And why, by simple logic, the boyhad to vanish, too.