Crown of Renewal (Legend of Paksenarrion) (70 page)

“Aye,” came from most, though there were mutters as well.

“Well, then. I will hear what Marshal Pelis has to say, and then I will hear from Hoorlow Council. Then I will tell you what I think. In
the meantime—” She glanced at the sun’s angle. “—I think it’s near nooning, isn’t it? Time to have summat to eat. It’ll take me a glass or so to hear everyone out.”

Across the square, she saw people drifting away from the edge of the crowd. Those nearer, however, stood their ground, obviously intent on waiting it out. She smiled at them; they did not smile back. “It is market day, isn’t it? We’ve traveled far; we’re hungry. Donag, see to everyone’s needs—I’m partial to a bit of old cheese and a garlic sausage.”

She dismounted and turned to Marshal Pelis. “Let’s go inside, Marshal. My head’s had enough of this sun.”

“Yes, Marshal-General.” He led the way to the door. Arianya glanced back; the stubborn part of the crowd had taken a step nearer but been blocked by the mounted knights. She hoped everyone would have sense. She was sure someone wouldn’t.

Grainmarket’s interior held the group of accused mages: men, women, youths, children, one a babe in arms. Arianya ignored them for the moment, following Pelis to the platform, where she bowed to the relic in its niche.

“Gird’s grace on this grange and all who enter,” she said, turning to look at the group. She recognized a woman she’d seen the previous year selling dyed yarn, evenly spun. “I remember you,” she said, approaching; the woman shrank back a little, pushing a child only hip-high behind her. “You’re a spinner and dyer, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” the woman said, looking down. “Please … don’t hurt ’im.”

“I’m hoping no one will be hurt,” Arianya said. She looked at the others, sure she must have seen some of them at the fair in previous years. Yes—that man—he’d brought a lathe and turned legs for chairs and smooth rounds for other uses. And that one, who’d had furls of cloth. “Are you all from Hoorlow?”

“Not all of them,” Marshal Pelis said. “Some are from the vills about. Came here for sanctuary, some.” He cleared his throat. “See here, Marshal-General, I know what you’ve wrote—you don’t want childer killed, and I’m with that, but what about adults?”

“Adults?”

“Felis over there. Seen using magery to lift a stone.”

Felis, skinny and tall, hunched his shoulders as Arianya looked at him. “You have the lifting magery?” she asked him. “When did it come?”

“Just after last year’s fair, Marshal-General. I’d gone down in the back, couldn’t work, and my old mother, she’d gone blind; she couldn’t do much. So one night I said, like anyone might, too bad I’m not a mage, so’s to lift stone another way, and next mornin’ a half loaf of bread come to m’hand. I dropped it, bein’ so startled, but then … I tried it again and it worked. Could move stone up to this size—” He held his hands apart. “And anything else that weight. Went back to work that day, and no trouble to anyone until a mage-hunter spied on our vill.”

“It was that Haran,” a woman said, and two others nodded. “Said she was on the way to see her sister’s youngest, who’d just had a babe and sprained her ankle. Doby took her in, let her stay a day or so …”

“Haran?” Arianya said. “Where did she say she was from?” Haran, the Marshal who had been angry with Paks for “weakness” and whose relative had defended killing children with mage-powers and died in the trial of arms he demanded.

Shrugs, glances back and forth. Finally the first woman said, “Somewhere sunsetting or summerwards, I think, but I don’t recall she gave a name.”

“She’s here,” another said. “She and the other mage-hunters. It’s them yelling for stoning and burning.”

Marshal Pelis held up a hand, and the group fell silent.

“I don’t think Gird wants anyone killed who hasn’t done wrong,” Arianya said. “I don’t see that using magery is any more wrong than using a tool to make work easier. So, Marshal Pelis, you did right to bring these people into the grange and give them sanctuary. But we still have to convince the people outside.”

“You know this area holds by traditions,” he said. “They don’t like change, and they believe magery is evil.”

“It’s not as evil as murder,” Arianya said. “Unless it’s used to murder. And I’m sure you’d have told me if any of these had used theirs to murder.”

“Indeed I would. And they haven’t. But I don’t know how you’re going to convince that mob in the square. They’re convinced it’s magery that’s kept the rain from falling and the river from running. Made the marshes dry enough to walk across dry-shod.”

“I must hope Gird gives me the words,” Arianya said. “Perhaps he’ll send rain—that might help.”

“I doubt it,” Pelis said. He sighed. “I reckon this is the day we’ll all get our heads bashed in, but better that than giving up.”

The people outside probably felt the same way, Arianya thought. “Is there a way out the back?” she asked. “Can these escape while we talk to the crowd out front?”

He shook his head. “They’re already back there with weapons, lookin’ to cut anyone down who comes out. I put yeomen there, but I don’t know how long they can hold out.”

“Then I must pray for Gird’s aid and face whatever comes if it is not his will to grant it,” Arianya said. She felt heavy and cold even though the day was, like all the days for too long, hot and bright. This might well be—probably was—the day she would die, and she could not argue that she deserved better. It was her leadership that had failed, as she had failed Haran in not noticing how the woman slid into arrogance and hatred. Her prayers as she and Pelis stood there were for the mages and the mage-hunters both, that they would come to find peace with one another.
No more hating
, she prayed.
No more killing
. Peace washed over her, and a fragrance of roses. Alyanya, at least, accepted that prayer.

At the door, High Marshal Donag tried to talk her out of going back outside. “You could let me talk to them—what if they kill you?”

“Gird died to prevent the killing of one innocent child,” Arianya said. “Should I flinch from dying to prevent the massacre of a dozen?”

“It’s not necessary—”

“It is very necessary. Not just that I’m the Marshal-General but that I’m the Marshal-General they’ve decided to hate. I must be the one in front.”

“In armor, then.”

“I’m crazy, perhaps,” Arianya said. “But not stupid.”

She moved toward the door; the others moved away, letting her through this time. She felt very unlike the way she had expected to
feel … not heroic, not scared, not much of anything but determined. The children were innocent: that much she knew for sure.

Jeers from the crowd as she came into view. “You will not kill those children,” she said. She spotted Haran wearing a Marshal’s tabard, to which she was no longer entitled. Haran’s expression mingled contempt and anger.

“They’re mages! They’re evil!” came from several sides.

“They’re
children
. Gird wouldn’t let you kill one child … I won’t let you kill these!”

“Then we’ll kill you.” That was Haran’s voice; others chanted their support. “Kill her! Kill her!”

“You can certainly try,” Arianya said. “But you won’t get to them until I’m dead. And I am not going down without a fight.” She drew her sword.

Those in front of the mob, armed with hauks and ordinary sticks, stopped their advance at the sight of drawn swords. Five—she and four of Knights of Gird—were outside—enough to block the door. The children and the rest of the loyal Girdish were inside the grange.

The first arrow bounced off her chest plate, not even scratching it. A homemade bow, she judged, and not a good one. Or a good archer.

“Gird would not kill these children,” she said, keeping her voice calm.

Growls and mutters from the crowd. Someone in the back began another chant: “Kill … kill … kill the demons.” Voices joined until it made one roar, bouncing from wall to wall: “KILL! … KILL! … KILL! …” Another arrow struck, bounced away. One hit her helmet, hard enough to feel. Other arrows followed, aimed at the Girdish knights, but none penetrated. The first stone flew past, missing her head by a handwidth. Then one hit her helmet. Her vision blurred and darkened for an instant.

The very air thickened with malice, and she remembered the account one of the magelords in Kolobia had written of Gird’s death—the thickened air, the way Gird had spoken words that seemed to condense all that anger and hatred into a darkness—a cloud?—that he then took in and swallowed and fell dead.

She needed those words, and she did not know them. The writer
had not written them down. Possibly no one could write them down. She glanced up in time to see another shower of stones and beyond them, above the buildings, just such a darkness. Boiling, churning darkness like the most dangerous of summer storms, but silent … and under it a pallid sickly light that no one else seemed to notice felt completely and utterly wrong.

Words—I need the words
—She sent the prayer as strongly as she could even as two stones hit her, shoulder and thigh, and one of the men beside her staggered and almost fell.

Nothing happens the same way twice
. She did not recognize that voice.

The mage-hunters screamed at the crowd, the crowd roared, surged forward … and with a resonant thrum as if the heartstring of the world had been plucked, a blaze of light stabbed down, followed by a CRACK and then boom of thunder so loud Arianya was sure her ears were broken. She had an instant to see a line of black, blasted bodies between her and the rest of the crowd, with others fallen just behind them, when the water came.

It was not rain like any rain she’d been in before. Not individual drops at all, but water in a mass like tipping a barrel onto a fire: solid water, cold, heavy, drenching her in an instant. She couldn’t see; she couldn’t hear anything but a vast roar; she couldn’t breathe. She bent over, trying to make an air space in front of her face; water bounced back up from the paving stones and splashed her face, but she could breathe in short gasps. Water pounded her back, soaking through the surcoat, the mail, the arming shirt. She was wet through in seconds; water ran down her drenched legs, filling her boots; it ran under the back of her helmet and around her head inside it, dripping out of the front, slightly warmer than the rest.

Despite the roar of the water, she heard the clatter of wood and the splat of wet cloth as market stalls collapsed under the pounding rain and the cries of those pushed to their knees by the force of the rain. Water rose on the stones of the street, flowing back down toward the Hoor; bits of trash floated by, fruit from the market, a basket, someone’s head scarf, a stick long enough to have held up an awning. The city smells, the dirt, the trash, the jacks, combined with the
fresh smell of the rain. She tried to look up; she could just see that the men beside her were down on their knees … and so was as much of the crowd as she could see before she ducked her head again to breathe.

A roof gave way somewhere nearby, with timbers cracking and a different tone of falling water added to the din. Her back was sore from being pounded; she felt she’d been beaten. The water ran clear over the stones now, all the dust and filth of a city street carried away. A frog swam by, then a small fish of the kind found in some wells. Still the water came down, as if the gods were filling the whole world with water. Now all she could smell was the water itself, the smell that rises from clean wells of pure water on a hot day.

As suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped. A ray of sunlight pierced the clouds. Arianya pushed herself to kneel upright, blinked, swiped the water from her eyes.

And there, in the sunlight, in a patch just large enough for it, stood a cow. A dun cow. A dun cow whose dry glossy coat gleamed in the sunlight. A cow with a garland of fresh flowers around its neck, roses and bluebells and snow-daisies. The cow looked around the square, then walked over to her as others also looked up and struggled to rise. Arianya could not move. A perfectly dry dun cow with a garland of flowers around its neck appearing suddenly in the street after such a rain? It could be only one cow.

The cow looked her in the eye with its mild gaze, then reached out and swiped her face with its rough tongue—part caress, part correction. Its breath smelled of mint and green grass and roses.

“Gird,” Arianya said.

The cow swiped her with its tongue again. Arianya reached up and grasped the shiny horns, and the cow lifted its head, helping her stand. Joy burst through her; all doubt and guilt fled. Around her others were rising now, their faces filled with astonishment and joy instead of hatred and anger. They were alive. She was alive.

She stood with her hand on the neck of Gird’s Cow, and the people stared.

“The cow’s not wet,” someone said.

“It’s got flowers—they aren’t wet!”

“It’s Gird’s Cow,” Arianya said.

“But—”

And someone else interrupted. “Gird’s Cow—I heared of that. But it was just a cow’s hide over sticks, they said.”

“Is anyone hurt?” Arianya asked. “We need to help them.”

One of the knights walked over to the sodden, blackened bodies of the mage-hunters. “Naught we can do for these.”

“We can bury them,” Arianya said. “And mourn the hatred that brought them to this.”

A fresh breeze sprang up, bringing more scents of wet grass, fresh flowers, hope. Now the clouds shifted apart, the sun gleaming on wet cobbles, the stones and bricks of houses, the wet clothes. Steam rose from the street as it dried.

The angry mob had dissolved into individuals—family members checking on one another, neighbors teasing neighbors about how they looked as if they’d gone swimming in the river, merchants too happy to have survived to complain about the collapsed stalls, the missing wares.

“Reckon we needed a good washin’ out and coolin’ off,” one man said to Arianya. “We was all that hot and bothered.”

“Reckon we all did,” she said, wringing out her surcoat.

One by one people came up to pat Gird’s Cow, who stood quietly, tail swinging gently back and forth. The wet caresses left no mark on the cow’s shining coat. Occasionally, the cow would swipe her tongue onto someone’s hand or someone’s face, but that was all.