The Wayward Knights

Chapter 1

About the same time as Torvik sighted Suivinari Island, the lord and lady of Tirabot Manor in the lands of mighty Istar received a guest.

Sir Niebar ducked his head gracefully to pass through the doorway into the narrow tower chamber where Sir Pirvan and Lady Haimya waited. The two men, both Knights of the Rose, greeted each other formally, then embraced. Sir Niebar actually chuckled.

"It has reached my ears that your people are wagering on how soon and how often I will knock my head on your doorways," he said. Long before he wore any emblem of the Knights of Solamnia, he had been known as Niebar the Tall, and the years had left him much of that height.

Pirvan said nothing. He could tell that his chief and comrade had brought ill news and was trying to hide it behind lightness, as an army's scouts might hide behind the smoke a grass fire. But Niebar had not succeeded Sir Marod of Ellersford at the head of the "secret work" of the Knights of Solamnia without the courage to tell plain truths sooner rather than later.

"If any contrive your downfall, we will punish them as they deserve," Pirvan's wife said, smiling.

"I am not so old that I have lost the power to judge the height of a door, or lost the suppleness to pass under it," Niebar said. He lowered himself onto one end of a bench hat was, save for a chest and two fading, moth-riddled tapestries, the sole furniture of the chamber.

From the way Niebar moved, Pirvan judged that these words were something of whistling in the dark. Stiffness in the joints did not kill, the way congestions of blood in the brain did, but they could make a man miserable or even unfit for a knight's work.

When Sir Marod died three months ago, Sir Niebar had made no secret of preferring to let Pirvan step directly into command of the secret work. However, the Grand Master and the high knights disagreed; Pirvan rose one rung on the ladder rather than two.

"Would you care for refreshment?" Haimya asked.

Niebar shook his head. "The last stage of our journey was easy. Our stop for the night had ample water, kender left out fruit and bread, and word of our strength has reached all the bandits in this part of the country."

This was likely true. Niebar took even more seriously than most a knight's duty not to lie to another knight. Pirvan still thought that he heard more behind it.

So did Haimya. Her eyebrows twitched and one shoulder lifted slightly. She had a whole arsenal of these subtle gestures and movements, which Pirvan could read like a scroll after more than twenty years of being wed to her.

"The kingpriest is dead," Niebar said.

Pirvan made a gesture of aversion from the thieves' underground of Istar. Haimya made several of her own. Then she threw her husband a speaking look. Her right to be here did not carry the right to prod Niebar to greater eloquence. Prodding her husband was another matter.

"We heard not even the smallest rumor," Pirvan said. He frowned. "Was it sudden?"

"So sudden that tales of poison are already abroad in the streets of Istar," Niebar said.

Pirvan needed no further looks from Haimya to understand where this was leading. He needed only to contemplate Niebar's too-carefully commanded face.

"Am I suspected?"

Niebar shook his head but simultaneously tugged at his beard. Pirvan knew a moment's wild temptation to tug at his own beard, then challenge Niebar to a beard-tugging contest that might go on until both were clean-chinned.

Instead, Pirvan shrugged. "What can I say, but this: I owe Sir Marod more than I owe any man, living or dead. Without him, I might at best be an aging thief in Istar. I would never have known Haimya, and the gods themselves could not reward the giver of such a gift."

Haimya actually blushed at those words, and squeezed her husband's hand.

"But I never suspected the kingpriest of involvement in Sir Marod's death," Pirvan continued. "Even had I done so, I would have thought of the honor of the knights, and my own. Also, I am no longer friends, as I once was, with the thieves of Istar. I have no one answering to me there who could poison the kingpriest, even if I were foolish enough to ask it. More likely they would buy the goodwill of the kingpriest by poisoning me, and taking my head to him in a sack of salt."

Niebar sighed, as if he had just laid down a burden. "I beg your pardon that I had to ask, but the orders came from the Grand Master," he said.

"Is he suspicious?" Haimya said. Had her voice been a sword, the Grand Master would have done well not to turn his back on her.

"No," Niebar said firmly. "But he needs to placate those who are, both in Istar and among the ranks of the knights themselves. I thank you for your frankness and even temper. "

Had anyone else come with such questions, they might not have met either," Pirvan said. "Now can we offer you refreshment? We need to think what a new kingpriest may mean, which means more talking than I can any longer do dry-throated."

"By all means," Niebar said. "Or rather, by means of a discreet servant. And-is this chamber warded?"

Pirvan pronounced four words, each rolling on through five or six syllables. He felt a prickling behind his ears and eyeballs as he pronounced the last word.

"Now it is," he said. "A gift from our old friends, Tarothin and Sirbones. They bound the room with the spell so that anyone at need could ward the room with those words I just uttered. They will come back next year to renew it. For now we are safe with what I have just done."

"I remember now, that you commanded a modest spell or two of your own," Niebar said. He sighed. "I would gladly command one myself, to bring down a pegasus to ride for the next few weeks. The death of the kingpriest will mean work for us all."

Even in the days when all of Istar's priests could meet in a single room there had commonly been one who was first among equals. His title varied. "Kingpriest" was only the most recent and still not accepted by all. It was also a recent development that this first-among-equals was considered a true office, to which a man was, for lack of a better term, elevated. Although in this case, "recent" was a relative term. Istar's priests had thought of themselves as a united body for several centuries.

The ways of becoming the leading priest in Istar had been many and various over the years. Once, it was said, a "principal priest" lived so long that by the time he died, so had all those who knew how to choose his successor, and the priests of Istar had no leader at all for nearly five years.

That would not be the case now, Pirvan knew. The dead kingpriest had reigned barely seven years, after being elected (it was said) through fear of a quarrel with the merchants over his predecessor's fondness for intrigues, assassinations, and general ruthlessness. If this kingpriest had not zealously sought to do good, he had at least cautiously sought to avoid evil. His death was hardly good news, still less so if it was by assassination.

"Of course," Niebar added, "we have only the priests' word that the death was sudden. It could well be that the man died of some common illness that he neglected until it was so far advanced that he needed a god, not a healer, to save him. He who sits on the kingpriest's seat must find room for more work in any given day than most princes."

"All is honorable to the kingpriest's memory," Haimya said. "But what it has to do with us, you have not made clear. Unless the succession to the high seat is likely to be bloody, otherwise of concern to the knights?"

"Our best judgment is that it could be both," Niebar said. "The Servants of Silence were disbanded, true. Many then hired themselves out to priests with more ambition than scruples. Also, the street-corner howling that humans alone have true virtue in the sight of the gods is as loud as ever."

Haimya looked as if she wished to spit, but contented herself with suggesting that all such loud, wrong persons be drowned in hobgoblins' privies. Pirvan said nothing, but frowned. He kept that dour cast of countenance so long that Sir Niebar seemed on the verge of fidgeting when the other knight at last spoke.

"Have you come to urge us to abandon Tirabot Manor and flee into Solamnia?" Pirvan asked.

"I would not use the word 'flee,' myself," Sir Niebar said primly. "No one among the knights will doubt your courage in coming to Dargaard Keep, however, or some other place beyond the reach of the kingpriest and his minions."

"It is not certain that the next kingpriest will have minions," Pirvan said. "As for courage, I would doubt my own if I fled. So might those left behind."

"They are not of the knights," Sir Niebar said, then flushed as he realized how ill chosen his words might seem.

Haimya plucked his stammering attempts at an explanation out of the air, like a falcon swooping on a fat pigeon. "That does not mean they are nothing," she said. "I doubt you meant to say so. But too many among the knights these days seem to think only of what serves the Orders, forgetting all that the Oath and the Measure say about protecting those in need. Have you become one of those knights with short memories, Sir Niebar?"

"I have not," their visitor said. "Because I have not, I remember Sir Pirvan's rare value to the knights, and through them, to all under the knights' protection. Your duties to protect extend far beyond the border stones of Tirabot Manor, Sir Pirvan. Or has your memory begun to fail?"

"My memory is quite sound enough," Pirvan said sternly, "to tell me that Sir Marod forbade you to raise this matter with me, some while ago. He used rather strong words, or so I have heard."

Niebar's face showed the ghost of a smile. "From anyone else who used such language, I would have demanded satisfaction," he said. "Well, perhaps not from you or your lady. But Sir Marod-"

"If you say 'Sir Marod is dead' as an excuse for folly, I will carve out your tongue," Haimya interrupted in a tone that could have frozen a waterfall.

"I was about to say that Sir Marod was also concerned about your folk being used as hostages, to divert you from the concerns of the knights," Sir Niebar said, with the ghost of a smile. "Do you not have a duty to spare them that danger, if you can?"

"If I can, yes," Pirvan said. "Are you offering help to that end?"

"Were you really a thief, Pirvan?" Niebar laughed. "Or did you sell your father's candles and honey in the marketplace, always getting the best of the bargain?"

"Some call that thieving, too," Haimya said. "But I swear this much: I shall hold my tongue while Sir Niebar offers his aid."

"Then the gods are still among us, working miracles," Niebar said. "What next, a kender king-?" at which point Haimya drew her dagger (still sheathed) and mimed cutting the knight's throat.

Pirvan ordered more wine and a plate of dried gooseberry cakes, tested the warding of the chamber, and resolved to open his mind as wide as his ears, to Sir Niebar's offer.

He did not doubt that peril could come to the innocent from the ill will of the kingpriest. He merely doubted that he could do much against it by fleeing over the border into Solamnia like an escaping slave!

Night had come to Tirabot Manor, and with it sleep, to all except those whom nature made wakeful, or whose work kept them up nights. One of these was a shepherd, whose pipes floated on the breeze up from the pastures beyond the Silver Creek bridge.

Two others were those who listened to the piping, the lord and lady of Tirabot Manor. They sat side by side on a bench in a newly-carved window in their chamber, large enough to let in sun by day and fresh air by night. It was too high for rams or other siege engines to easily reach, and iron shutters lay ready to guard it against projectiles or intruders.

"Sir Niebar is not a fool," Haimya said at last.

"I did not say he was," Pirvan answered. "Did you hear me thinking it?"

"I heard you thinking that he was a poor guest for raising the matter again."

"I think less of that than of his not keeping his men-at-arms away from our table," Pirvan joked. "They ate as if they had starved for a week."

"Perhaps they had," the lady said, smiling. "Niebar is most likely here without a purse from the knights. We do not know how far his own silver runs."

"One more reason for not abandoning the manor. A landless knight is not the best fitted to pay for others' secrets out of his own purse."

"True," Haimya said. "But we need not abandon our people to spare ourselves abandoning the manor."

Pirvan looked at Haimya. He always took pleasure in that, even when as now she was swathed in a heavy woolen robe against the night's chill. Under that robe lay a woman whom he could hardly believe had been his wife and lover for more than twenty years, and mother of three children, two of them old enough to wed.

"I think what you have to say is too important to trickle out in riddles," he told her, "like a man disposing of a night's beer."

"How unfit for a lady's ears, such crudeness!" Haimya said, in tones of mock horror.

Is the plain truth unfit for a gentleman's?" Pirvan riposted. It would be pleasant to set to one of their verbal duels, which at this hour seldom ended other than in bed. But they needed an answer for Sir Niebar before he departed at dawn.

"I was thinking of Vuinlod," Haimya said. "Any of our folk who could not live under the kingpriest could find homes there."

Pirvan understood. Under Lady Eskaia, the little port city in northern Solamnia had grown into a refuge for every sort and condition of folk who needed tolerant neighbors and few Istaran spies. Haimya's notion made sense, as Pirvan understood it, but it was not without flaws either.

"Aurhinius is no danger," Haimya said, as if she had read Pirvan's first objection on his face. "Eskaia has him eating out of her hand."

"A good way to find crumbs in the sheets of a morning, if I recall the days when we were young like that," Pirvan began. He broke off at a mock-slap from Haimya.

"Solamnia is still bound by the Swordsheath Scroll and the Great Meld with Istar," he went on. "What of them?"

"What of it?" she answered. "Have the kingpriests' notions of justice yet been enforced on Solamnic territory, even under the most zealous of the breed?"

"Not yet." He did not add that it would go hard with their people if this changed, because in such case it would go hard with everyone. There would be no safety for the just and honorable anywhere under the sun, or at least anywhere Istar's reach extended.

"I suppose we could pay Eskaia that visit she has been urging upon us these past two years," Pirvan said. "Take as our guards enough trustworthy folk so that they can bring back word of life in Vuinlod. Then those whom we urge to go will not be leaping into the unknown like apes from a vine."

Haimya patted his cheek, then drew him to her and kissed him. "That will answer Niebar well enough, I think. And now that we have done our duty…"

The kiss lengthened. Presently she led him to the bed and shrugged herself out of her robe. A warming pan in the bed had done its work, so that Pirvan was not cold even in the brief moment after he disrobed and before Haimya embraced him.