Chapter 43: What Sir Gareth Saw
Gareth Varus had served House Gannon for thirty-one years. In that time, he had seen many things and stripped off every illusion he had ever held about noble blood.
And he had come to realize a few things.
Blood guaranteed nothing.
That was especially true in the case of the Fourth son of his grace, the Duke.
He had trained dull dukes’ sons and brilliant stable boys. He had watched talent rot in palaces and grow in mud. Three decades with the sword had taught him one thing with certainty- the sword did not care who your father was.
Which was why he could not sleep tonight.
He sat by the banked fire with his blade across his knees - an old habit, older than his knighthood - and watched the young master’s tent, and thought about what he had seen in the clearing.
Enlightenment.
It was something hard to believe, but the young master had displayed something out of common sense, and that was the trouble with it.
Every man who lived by cultivation had heard the stories. The mage of Tellis Spire who woke from a fever speaking the third circle. The monk of the Iron Steps who watched a leaf fall for six years and rose from his mat a Grandmaster. Sudden understanding, decades arriving in a night. The mages called it the descent of insight and built their whole tradition of meditation around chasing it. Among swordsmen it was rarer, but it existed. Gareth had once shared a winter garrison with a man who claimed to have witnessed it, and the man had talked about it the way other men talked about ghosts.
Gareth was fifty-eight years old and had never seen it himself.
Until yesterday, apparently.
He went over the evening with a soldier’s thoroughness. The young master had collapsed for two days after receiving that reward from the heavens, or whatever it truly was.
Gareth had told the column it was exhaustion - the young master had worked hard in the stronghold managing everything - so that was the obvious conclusion he could come to.
He had even privately sat by the carriage each night with his hand near his sword, because a healthy man does not simply sleep for two days. Then the young master had woken, picked up a blade he previously could not even grip correctly, and performed the Falling Talon form of the Gannon house swordsmanship with perfect stance.
There were knight-captains in the Dukehold who had drilled that art for twenty years and still couldn’t perform it perfectly.
’Is he a genius, then?’ Gareth thought. ’Was it there all along, drowned in wine, and something on this road shook it loose?’
He considered the idea seriously, because it deserved serious consideration.
Then he set it aside, because it did not fit.
A genius hides in the body. Gareth had spent nineteen days with the young master’s body, and that body had no secrets from him. It was soft, ill-kept, ruined by years of neglect, and it fought its owner’s intentions at every step. Whatever had arrived in that clearing had not grown up out of that body. It had come down into it from somewhere else. Gareth had watched the young master’s face while he cut, and it had been the face of a man remembering, not discovering.
Remembering what? Remembering whose?
Gareth fed a stick to the coals and admitted to himself, with the flat honesty he reserved for reports to the Duke, that he did not know. It was the fourth thing about this journey he did not know.
He did not know why a wastrel had stood up in an inn and put his own name between a Maren fist and a commoner girl. He did not know where the arithmetic had come from that took a noble house apart in five days without drawing a sword. He did not know why the heavens had chosen this particular young man, out of all young men, to hand an enlightenment.
And he did not know - this was the question that kept him by the fire - why none of it troubled him.
’His Grace asked me to bring him safely to the Wall,’ Gareth thought. ’He did not ask me what I would find on the way.’
Across the camp, in the shadow of the cart, the grey-eyed boy was awake too, sitting against a wheel with his wrapped sword in his arms, watching the same tent Gareth was watching.
Their eyes met over the coals.
Neither looked away for a moment. Two sentries acknowledging each other across a dark yard.
Then the boy’s gaze returned to the tent, and Gareth’s returned to the fire, and the night went on.
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In the morning, the column moved north, and the land began to empty out.
Encrid watched it happen from horseback. He had given up the carriage, to his own amazement, because the new body-knowledge covered riding too. Though his horsemanship skill hadn’t changed in proficiency or rank - the saddle had stopped being torture and become merely unpleasant.
Encrid wanted to find out what else the new forced integration had improved - so he was trying out everything.
The pines thinned as they travelled.
The stony fields gave way to moor, and the moor to a huge tilted plain of frost-burned grass that ran north as far as he could see. No trees. No smoke. Just wind.
There were no farms out here. No villages. The last one had been two days back - a cluster of turf-roofed houses around a shrine, where the whole population had come out to watch the column pass in silence.
"They don’t see many people going north," Harun had said. "And fewer coming back."
By afternoon, Encrid heard something new.
At first he thought the wind was changing. Then he thought it was thunder, though the sky was a clear, freezing blue. Only when the road bent around a shoulder of rock and the land dropped away did he understand what he had been listening to for the past hour.
Water. A great deal of water.
The Riven.
Encrid reined in at the top of the descent, looked at the river that separated the world of men from the Wall, and forgot to breathe for a moment.
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