Oath of Fealty (17 page)

“Into Kolobia,” Paks said. “Or so I suspect from the information in Luap’s writings.”

“My family would not give it up or go into exile. They hid it except in their own domain, using Liart’s power and blood magery to preserve and strengthen it.”

“This will come out now,” Paks said. “Or will you try to hide it?”

“No. It must come out and it must end,” Dorrin said. “But there is more.”

“What?”

“This.” Dorrin ducked into the shadows of an empty stall, almost dark in the late afternoon. Light flared from her hands. “I have a little magery. I do not use it, but I have it.”

“The light of truth,” Paks said.

“No. The light of fire. It will burn.” The light died. In the darkness, Dorrin went on. “You saw my sword flare in Rotengre. It has its own magic, yes, but the light is its response to mine.”

“You’re certain it’s the old magery?”

“What else could it be? I never trained as a wizard. I’m not a paladin. The Knight-Commander of Falk made that clear.”

Paks led the way out of the dark stall into the stableyard. “Did you have any training in your magery? Anything useful?”

“No. What they wanted to teach me, I didn’t want to learn. I can light candles or kindle a fire, but nothing like the light you produced for the battle.”

Paks frowned. “I don’t know what other magics the magelords were supposed to have … though the Marshal-General said the evidence out there in Kolobia suggested a variety of things, from lifting rocks to healing.”

“The archives list a number of abilities, but they’re all supposed to require training,” Dorrin said. “Making light is the one they watch for in children, to see if they have the talent. Others are less likely to emerge without it, though it does happen.”

“What does it feel like, when you make the light?” Paks asked. “Does it feel hot, there in your hand?”

“No. I don’t feel anything. Do you?”

“Only inside,” Paks said. “In my heart, there’s a … a feeling of being … partly somewhere else.” She shook her head and chuckled. “I can’t describe it. Something feels open, and the light comes. Master Oakhallow told me that paladins’ powers come from the gods. But we ask for light, or healing, and it may or may not be granted.”

Dorrin looked at her, remembering the tall, yellow-haired peasant girl who’d impressed all the older veterans with her likeness to the Duke’s dead wife. But every recruiting season brought peasant girls and boys, artisans’ sons and daughters, into the Company, and Paks was not the only one who seemed special at first. She was not even the only one who had reminded them of Tammarion.

Now she bore the High Lord’s silver circle on her brow, proof of
the ordeal she had endured and the reward she had more than earned, and Dorrin was torn between resentment, admiration, and relief.

“I am not a paladin, but I would do what my people need,” Dorrin said. “The king told me to take my cohort, if they were willing, and they have agreed. I’m not sure it will be enough.”

Paks grinned. “Nothing’s certain, is it? But what bothers you most?”

“I’m not sure I’ll recognize everything that needs to be done,” Dorrin said. “I’m not sure I can stand against the magery they have.”

“The strength of their talent, or their training? Do you think your power is that much weaker, or is it that you don’t know how to use it?”

“Training, I suppose. Like a novice picking up a good sword, but having no skills, no experience.”

“You believe they could overpower you? Kill you?”

“I suspect so,” Dorrin said. “It’s not the danger to myself that I worry about—much, anyway. It’s what will happen to the land and people should I fail. Not just Verrakai land, either, but the whole of Tsaia. I don’t suppose you feel a call to come help me …”

“No,” Paks said. “I feel no call at all right now, but I can think of a way to help you, if you are willing.”

“And what is that?”

“If it is training you lack, then let us train your talents. Now. Perhaps it will not take as long as you think.”

“You could do that? You would do that?”

“I can try. We can try.” Paks grinned like a child about to try swinging from a vine over a river, all glee and eagerness. “What do you need most, do you think?”

Dorrin ticked them off on her fingers. “A shield against their magery, protecting not just myself but those I lead. A way to lock their magery, so they cannot use it. I saw one of my uncles do that once, to a half-breed, one of his bastards, who showed fight. Healing, if that’s in me—by legend, it had become the rarest of the gifts, and I never saw any of my family use it.”

“So first we find out what your gifts are, and waken them,” Paks said. “We should start, then, with the one you believe most difficult, healing.”

Dorrin felt her belly clench. Her family’s stories of the healing
magery all involved loss, despair, weakening … but Paks was right.

If it could be put to good use, she might save some of the children that way, healing whatever hurts had been done them … and being able to heal might win supporters from those long damaged by her family.

“Let’s go to my room,” Paks said. “Quieter there.”

Dorrin was expected at table with the king; she was sure Selfer or Bosk would come looking for her. “I must leave word that I’m busy—”

“I’ll tell them I wanted to confer with you.” Paks grinned. “For now, nobody interrupts me.”

P
aks’s room, at one end of the palace complex and a floor higher than her own, looked to have been a servant’s once. Plain, a pair of narrow beds separated by a carved chest, a bare wood floor. A wardrobe stood against one wall; the opposite had pegs at various heights. Paks’s cloak hung on one; her pack, neatly rolled, was at the foot of her bed.

“They could do no better for the paladin who saved their king?” Dorrin asked.

“They could, but I chose to move here,” Paks said. “I needed solitude, not care, for a while.” Her face had sobered, but now it lightened again. “Besides, this gives us the privacy I’m sure we need. Here—sit down on that bed.”

Dorrin sat, bemused by the shift in authority, as if she herself were a recruit facing a captain for the first time.

“Give me your hand,” Paks said next. Dorrin held out her hand; Paks’s hand on hers felt warm and dry and oddly soothing. Dorrin waited; Paks said nothing, but looked past her, into something Dorrin could not see. Slowly, she felt something else, something that seemed to pass from Paks to her, a strange tingle that ran up her arm and from there into her head, and down her torso. She wanted to pull her hand back, but Paks had a firm grip. She glanced up. Paks’s eyes were closed, her face unreadable, the slightest furrow of a frown between her brows, as if she were concentrating.

When Paks released Dorrin’s hand, she sat down on the opposite bed. Dorrin waited.

“That was … interesting,” Paks said. “Someone blocked your magery long ago, except for that light. Did you know that? Do you know who?”

“No,” Dorrin said. “I suppose my uncle, or a cousin.”

“I don’t think so,” Paks said. “From what you say, their contact would be evil, and leave a residue I should pick up. This was not an act of malice, but of protection. Who, that could do such a thing, might have chosen to do so?”

One name came immediately to mind. “The Knight-Commander of Falk,” Dorrin said. “When I trained there, when he found out who I was, I told him about my small talent. He let me stay, but said I must not use any magery while there, having learned only its wrong uses. He might have blocked it.”

“And not told you?”

“I can think of no one else,” Dorrin said. “He is the only one outside my family who knew that I had it.”

“Then we should ask him,” Paks said.

“He died,” Dorrin said. “Some years after I was knighted, I heard that he had died. The new Knight-Commander I have never met.”

“Ah. I wonder if he has the same powers. At least he is here; we can ask.”

“Do we need to involve him?”

Paks cocked her head. “I think so. I am not a Knight of Falk … I am not even a knight, for that matter, so I do not know what he did or how it was done. I do know we should not meddle in things like this without understanding them.”

“I will go—”

“No. I will go, and while I am gone, if you have such rituals as the Girdish knights have, to pray and prepare for a trial of some kind, that is what I think you should do. You have great deeds before you, Captain, and whether your magery can be restored and trained or not, you need time alone to ready yourself.” Paks leaned forward and patted Dorrin’s hand. “Do not worry, Captain. I will not be long.”

Dorrin sat on the bed, thinking. Worrying. Thinking how long it had been since she prayed to Falk in anything but a crisis. For the king’s life, she had prayed. For Paks’s safe return from torment, she
had prayed. But though she wore the ruby, it had been years since she prayed for guidance, for Falk’s Will to be clear to her. She had substituted, she realized, Phelan’s orders, Phelan’s well-being, for the will of the gods, though she held herself true to them as she understood them.

As she had understood them as a runaway, as a young woman.

Time to do more than that. Time to do better, to outgrow her role as Phelan’s captain, as Paks had long outgrown hers as Phelan’s soldier.

By the time Paks reappeared with the Knight-Commander of Falk—who looked decidedly grumpy at being dragged up flights of back stairs with little explanation—she had prayed for aid and guidance and felt, for the first time in years, connected once more to Falk’s Company.

“Captain Dorrin!” the Knight-Commander said. “So it is you I have come to see—Paksenarrion here would not say.”

Dorrin had risen; Paks, vanishing from behind him in the doorway, reappeared with a chair. “Here, sir—if you will take a seat—”

“Hmph.” He sat, still staring at Dorrin, frowning.

Paks moved past him and sat cross-legged on the bed opposite Dorrin. “If I may, Captain, I’ll explain—”

Dorrin nodded, and Paks began. “You have heard, sir, that Captain Dorrin has been appointed by the prince and Council in Tsaia to take over the dukedom of Verrakai?”

He glanced from one to the other. “No … I had not.”

“Well, then, she has. And the difficulty is, as I’m sure your predecessor told you, that the Verrakai retain the old magery—the outlaw magery—and misuse it to maintain their rule. And she herself inherited that ability.”

He nodded, now staring hard at Dorrin. “So my predecessor told me, when he was old and ill. She had it, but had refused to use it cruelly, and thus had left Verrakai for Lyonya and our Hall. I was surprised he accepted her—you.”

“Did he tell you everything?” Dorrin asked. “That I came under a false name, that my family pursued and demanded my return, that he protected me from them?”

“Not that you came under a false name, no. I would not have let you stay, had you done that to me.”

“I understand, sir,” Dorrin said. “But it was his decision at the time.”

“He was an interesting man,” the Knight-Commander said. “And he felt strongly about you. He was glad to see you linked to Phelan—he felt you had an important role to play there.”

“I did?” Dorrin felt only surprise. “He never told me.”

“He wouldn’t. But on the road from Tsaia, was it not your cohort who defended the king long enough to save him from attack—including by your relatives?”

“Yes, but—”

“So what, now, is your need? I’m assuming
your
need, since this paladin brought me here speaking of great need.”

“Yes, sir.” Dorrin put her thoughts in order. “As Paks said, and your predecessor probably told you, I inherited the family magery, but was never trained in its use—I refused to cooperate with the training they attempted and eventually escaped …”

“What was that training?”

“In cruelty.” Dorrin felt the familiar tremor in her hands, and clenched them together. “It—it was their belief that our power was retained because of … of blood magery. When a child—when I—first showed any talent—such as making light, then we were taken into the—the inner keep. The old keep, with its dungeon. And there made to see what they believed maintained our powers.”

“Describe it.” The Knight-Commander’s voice was hard and cold as winter stone.

Despite herself, Dorrin’s voice trembled. “It was … it was an animal, that first time. A rabbit.” She could still see it, in her mind, the terrified, trembling little creature, heart beating so fast and hard, nose twitching. She had felt its fear and her own had doubled. Other rabbits, in wicker cages stacked along one side of the chamber, all terrified. She tried to swallow; her mouth was nearly as dry as it had been then. “They showed me first … my uncle made light, as I had, and then … then he hurt the rabbit and it screamed and his light grew stronger.”

“How did he hurt it?”

“I—I don’t know for sure. I closed my eyes—” She had seen the aftermath, though. “He must have pulled off a leg … and then another … that’s what it looked like after …”

“How old were you? Did you not know already what to expect?”