Juliet McKenna - The Warrior's Bond

Hollow confusion filled me. “You’re dismissing me from your service?” The Sieur’s words and my own echoed inside my head.

“It’s time for you to be your own man again,” the Sieur said with a sigh. “You’re a good man, Ryshad, and a loyal one. Since you’d see this choice as a betrayal, I have to be the one to make the decision for both of us. If I’m wrong, tell me so and I’ll beg your pardon most humbly, but I gave you that armring to honour you and I won’t see you wear it until it chafes you beyond bearing.”

All I could do was slide the gleaming copper down my arm and over my wrist. A selfish qualm assailed me; I could hand it back to the Sieur spotless but leaving his service like this would surely tarnish my reputation irrevocably.

Messire held out his hand and I took a step to place the gleaming circle on his palm.

“Thank you.” The Sieur turned the ring with careful fingers, frowning. “I gave you this to honour you, Ryshad, and I won’t see you dishonoured by such a turn of events. None of us could have foreseen the way this game would play out.”

He set the armring aside, reaching down into the shadow between his chair and the wall. Grunting slightly, he lifted up a pale wooden box, decorated in squares and rectangles cut with precise black inlay. “This should convince you of the value I place on your service.” He fished in a pocket for the key to the neat brass lock. “And anyone else looking to crow over you. You’ll have to move out of the gatehouse, naturally, and it won’t be fitting for you to eat with the servants any longer, but you can stay in a grace house until the turn of the season at least, longer if need be. Take your time to decide what you want from your future, Ryshad; don’t make any hasty decisions. Don’t let other people’s needs sway you either, not D’Alsennin’s nor anyone else. As I said, it’s time for you to be your own man.”

I was still tongue-tied. I tucked the key in my belt-pouch and took the box. It was wide enough to need both hands and surprisingly heavy for its size. As I tucked it under my arm, the tight-packed contents made barely a chink.

“Come and see me if you’ve any questions,” the Sieur said briskly. “Naturally, I’ll vouch for you with any merchant or landlord or—” Inspiration failed him and I saw sadness hanging heavily over his head.

That wasn’t something I could face so I bowed low. “My thanks, Messire.”

Finishing the duty roster didn’t seem important. I walked out of the residence and round behind the kitchens to sit on the stone rim of Larasion’s fountain in the middle of the herb garden. I set the wooden box down beside me and looked at it. When a chosen or proven man is handed back his oath on retirement, all those sworn to the House assemble to see the Sieur hand over some valuable expression of his esteem. By long custom the man thus rewarded hands the coin back, declaring that the privilege of having served the Name has been honour enough. When that day came for Stoll or Fyle, they’d be well able to pay the Sieur such a compliment, secure in the knowledge that they had a grace house until their death and a pension to draw from D’Olbriot coffers at the start of every season. Now I had no such shelter from whatever storms might fall on my unprotected head.

I wondered what was in the box but made no move to unlock it. Whether it was copper or noble Crowns made no real difference. For the first time since I’d fetched up on D’Olbriot’s doorstep, a lad desperate for some direction in his life, I was facing a future without certainties, without any right to a roof, to food, to support from my fellows.

So why did I feel so absurdly relieved? Emotions were tumbling through my mind in the peace of the herb garden and trying to make sense of them was as easy as trying to catch the sparkles of sunlight in the water of the fountain, but time and again what I felt was relief. It gave way to apprehension, then turned into perverse defiance, but each time I came back to relief.

I got myself in hand. What would I do now? Where would I go once my period of grace was over? The prospect of trying to convince my mother I’d not been turned out in dishonour was a daunting one, and the year would have turned and come full circle before Hansey and Ridner ran out of sly comments. That alone made the notion of going back to Zyoutessela unwelcome. Anyway I could no more go back to stonecutting than I could beg the Sieur to swear me to his service again.

Then there was telling Livak how dramatically our plans had gone awry. There’d be no future for the pair of us as proven man and his lady managing D’Olbriot affairs in some comfortably distant city. So some good had come out of all this, I smiled wryly to myself. The Sieur was right; I’d forgotten just how tedious close attendance on the Name could be. My smile faded. Perhaps he had done me a favour, but I still felt rebuffed. True enough, it was plain things couldn’t have gone on as before, but I wasn’t sure I liked having the decision taken out of my hands like this.

But that’s what swearing your service away does for you, some rational corner of my mind scolded me. Sitting here in the sage-scented calm, I had to admit that submitting to other people’s decisions had been galling me of late. Whatever else I might do, I decided, I wouldn’t be swearing myself to Temar. Swearing service as a young man had been easy, putting my fate into another’s hands a relief. Life had been clearer then, a puppetry tale of predictable characters in stock dilemmas making black and white decisions. As a grown man I’d learned life was far more complicated. My own desires were a mass of contradictions to begin with and I knew full well people around me wore more faces than a masquerader.

Which was all very well as far as philosophical musing went, but what next? My mother had never been one to tolerate indecision. “You can’t buy a bun and still save your penny,” she’d always told us as children. I unlocked the box to see how many buns I could buy with Messire’s assessment of my worth.

“Dast’s teeth!” I could buy my own bakery with the stacks of white gold packed tight with scraps of silk tucked in each hollow. I could buy the land to grow the wheat and a mill to turn the grain to flour and still have silver to squander.

My spirits rose. Messire always said there’s no point repining over what’s already done, didn’t he? Livak and I had set ourselves to his service at the turn of the year in order to earn the coin that would give us choices for our future. Well, I had a whole casket full of choices here, and if Livak had won any aetheric lore from her travels whatever Planir or D’Olbriot owed her could only widen our options still further.

Before I made any decisions, whether to buy that flour mill or outfit a mercenary troop and go off to claim the throne of Lescar, I needed to talk to Livak. I locked my box and tucked it securely under my arm, trying to remember where Casuel had said he was going to be today. He could bespeak Usara, I decided. Usara would know where Livak was and what she was up to. Then I’d go back to the gatehouse and finish off that roster; I could at least take my leave of that duty on my own terms.

You have a remarkable collection of animals.” Temar hoped this was the right thing to say, and more, that he didn’t sound as bored as he felt. Doubtless polite chitchat with the Emperor was a duty of his new rank but he’d rather be getting on with the five score and one things he had to organise before sailing back to Kel Ar’Ayen.

“Though it’s not quite what one expects in such a nicely Rational garden, is it?” The Emperor tossed a nut at a tiny, white-faced, copper-haired ape sitting quietly in the corner of a cage. It watched the treat land without visible change in its expression. “But it’s become rather a contest between the Houses, to send me some beast never before seen in Toremal, some exotic rarity bought from an Aldabreshin warlord or some hairy curio snared in the Great Forest.”