The First Reach

Year 0, late afternoon. The Malrien residence and the Sunward chambers, Valdris.

The man's name was Mareth.

He had come to the Sunward chambers at the eighth bell, escorted by Captain Moren, and he had stood inside the door for a long count, not speaking, because he had not been invited to speak yet, and because he had not, in his life, been in a Lord's chambers, and the protocol of the silence was the only protocol he was certain of.

He was a soldier. He was thirty-one. He had the Malrien-house badge on his shoulder, the small silver knot that meant he had served the Malrien guard for nine years. He had a wife. He had a daughter. The daughter was four. The daughter, the night before, had been frightened by a dog that turned out to be friendly. The daughter, that morning, had eaten a half a slice of bread with butter and had insisted on watching her father shave before he came on duty.

But at the eighth bell, Kaelith only knew Mareth's name. He knew that Mareth was a Malrien guard. He knew that Mareth had been brought to him because Mareth was bleeding internally from a knife-wound that the Malrien physicians could not stop, and that the bleeding had begun two hours after Kaelith had walked Lord Malrien back to the Malrien residence at the fifth bell.

The knife-wound had been delivered by a man Mareth did not know.

The man had walked into the Malrien residence kitchens at the seventh bell with a delivery of bread. The kitchens had not ordered bread. The man had killed two of the kitchen staff. He had walked toward the chamber where Lord Malrien was sitting under guard. Mareth had been at the corridor. Mareth had stopped him. The man had used a small thin knife. Mareth had taken the knife in the side. The man had then been taken down by three other Malrien guards. The man had not survived. The man's name had not been on him. Mareth had survived for two hours and was now bleeding inward in a way the physicians could not address.

The Malrien physicians had asked Captain Moren what Captain Moren had been told to ask if there was a wounded man whose body would not stop bleeding.

Captain Moren had said: bring him to Lord Sunward.

He had brought Mareth.

Mareth stood at the door.

Kaelith stood at the chamber's center, at the small table beside the bed where the small wooden horse rested, and where the packet of seven names rested beside it.

"Sergeant," Kaelith said.

"My lord."

"Sit. There is a chair beside the table. Sit."

Mareth came to the chair. He sat. He did not, in sitting, make any of the small noises a man with a knife wound usually made when he sat. He had been trained, for nine years, to make no noises that could be heard by his lord. He was making no noises now.

His face, however, was the wrong color.

Kaelith knelt in front of him.

He did not yet know, in any conscious way, what he was doing. He knew that the Codex had chosen him at the fourth bell of the morning, because he had felt the warmth begin behind his sternum, and had stood in the second courtyard and held what had been given to him, and had walked Malrien to the residence with the warmth growing slowly. He had not yet tested it. He had not yet known what it was for. He had, in fact, spent the rest of the morning in his chambers, with the warmth, doing the small work of trying not to overreact to a thing he did not understand.

He had not asked Nyra. He had not asked Tael. He had not asked anyone. He had decided, sometime in the long afternoon, that he would wait until the warmth told him what it wanted.

The warmth, when Mareth had come through the door, had wanted.

Kaelith laid his right palm flat on Mareth's chest, over the soldier's tunic, where the heart was.

He did not know what he was doing.

He held.

The chamber, for ten seconds, was the same chamber it had been.

Then it was not.

It was a kitchen above a bakery. There was a table. The table was wood. The table had been worn at the corner where, for many years, a small head had rested while the small head's owner was sleeping. The wood at that corner was darker than the rest of the wood, oiled by hair, by skin, by bread-crumbs the small head had not quite avoided.

The small head, in the kitchen, was Mareth's daughter. She was four. She was asleep on the table because she had been waiting for her father to come home, and she had insisted on waiting, and she had fallen asleep at the half-bell of midnight, and her mother had not moved her because moving her would wake her and waking her would mean explaining that her father had not yet come home.

Mareth's worst memory was not the kitchen. The kitchen was a backdrop. Mareth's worst memory was the fever that had taken his wife five years before, when his daughter had been eleven months old, and he had watched his wife die over a long bad week, and he had been too poor to pay the apothecary for the medicine the apothecary had said might help. The might had not been a guarantee. The medicine had cost three months of his salary. He had not paid. He had spent three days deciding not to pay. His wife had died on the fourth day. He had been sitting beside her bed when she had died. He had been holding her hand. The hand had become heavier in a way hands did not usually become heavier, and he had understood, at that moment, that he had become a man who had decided not to spend three months of salary on the small chance of his wife's life, and had been rewarded for that decision in the precise way the world did reward such decisions, which was by removing the choice from him and leaving him to live with what he had chosen.

His daughter, Aria, had been eleven months old. She would not remember her mother. She would remember only the painted likeness in the kitchen and the small things her father said, sometimes, when he was tired.

Mareth had been a Malrien guard for nine years. He had, during those nine years, sometimes thought about whether he would have paid the apothecary if he had been a Malrien guard at the time. The Malrien salary was twice what he had been earning then. He could have paid. He could have paid easily. The fact of being able to have paid easily, if he had only been who he was now five years earlier, was the worst memory.

The worst memory was not the death. The worst memory was the easily.

Kaelith, kneeling in front of Mareth in the chambers, in the late afternoon, with his palm flat on Mareth's chest, learned all of this in less than two seconds. He did not learn it as an account he was hearing. He learned it as a thing he had done. He had been in the kitchen. He had been at the bedside. He had held the hand. He had decided not to pay the three months of salary. He had made the decision. He had carried it. He carried it now.

The wound in Mareth's side, beneath Kaelith's palm, began to mend.

The mending was a thing Kaelith did not have to direct. It was the warmth's work. The warmth sent threads, like the smallest silver wires, from Kaelith's palm into Mareth's body, and the threads found the place where the bleeding was, and they wove the muscle back to its proper position, and they closed the small ruptured vessel, and they sealed the skin under the tunic, and they tied themselves off, and they were gone. The warmth in Kaelith's palm receded, slowly, like a candle lowering its flame to the wick.

Mareth, in the chair, took a breath that was not the breath of a dying man.

He looked at Kaelith.

Kaelith was crying.

He had not been aware of beginning to cry. He was crying without any of the small physical signs of crying. His face was steady. His shoulders were steady. His breathing was steady. His eyes were not.

He had not cried in eleven years. He had not cried when his parents had gone into the Cobalt River. He had not cried at the funeral. He had not cried at the small private ceremony two months later when the household had laid the cobalt-and-silver river-stone on the family chapel altar in their memory. He had been twelve at the funeral and twelve at the ceremony and he had held what he held the way he had been held, the way he had been taught to hold, by a mother who had whispered the small lessons of Aerros nobility into him from the time he was four.

He was crying now for Mareth's wife, whose name he did not yet know.

He was crying because he had, in two seconds, been the man who had decided not to pay three months of salary, and had felt the easily of having been able to pay in his right hand, and had carried that easily into his palm and through it into Mareth, and had received in exchange for the carrying the entire interior of Mareth's worst day.

The interior had not been given to him. The interior had been taken.

Mareth's wound finished mending under his palm.

He took his hand away from Mareth's chest.

The room held the small warmth for a moment longer, then released it.

Mareth sat in the chair. He looked at his side, at the place under the tunic where the wound was no longer.

He looked at Kaelith.

He said, very quietly, "My lord. Her name was Anlie. My daughter is Aria."

Kaelith did not know how Mareth had known to tell him.

Some small portion of what Kaelith had received had also gone the other direction. Mareth had felt, briefly, that someone else had been in the kitchen with him, beside the bed with him, holding the hand with him. Someone else had been there. Someone else had known.

Mareth did not know who.

But Mareth knew that the easily was no longer his alone.

He put his hand on his own side, where the wound had been, and he kept it there, and he did not stand up.

Kaelith stood up, slowly, and went to the chamber window.

Captain Moren had been at the chamber door. He had heard nothing from the chamber for the last fifteen minutes. He rapped once and entered.

He saw Mareth in the chair.

He saw Kaelith at the window.

He saw, on the table beside the bed, the small wooden horse, and the packet, and the unworn silver chain.

He understood that the chamber was a different chamber than it had been at the eighth bell.

"My lord," he said.

Kaelith did not turn. He looked at the lower Sward through the window. The lower Sward, in late afternoon, was the part of Valdris he had liked best for as long as he could remember. The bakers' carts were going home. The shutters were beginning to close. A child of perhaps six was being carried home on the shoulders of a man who, from the angle of the carrying, was almost certainly the child's father.

The child was holding the man's ears like reins.

Kaelith watched the man pretend to mind.

He watched the man not minding.

"Captain," he said, after a long count, "see that Sergeant Mareth is escorted home. Tell the Malrien residence that he is to have three days of household leave, paid by the Sunward house. Tell his wife, when he arrives, that the Sunward house will pay the apothecary's bill for any treatment his daughter requires for the next twelve years, including dental, including any small or large illness, including any treatment for the small things that may not be treatable now but may be treatable in twelve years' time. The bill will be sent to the Sunward steward when the Sunward house has a new steward, which will be in approximately one week."

He did not turn.

"Yes, my lord."

"And captain."

"My lord."

"Sergeant Mareth's wife was Anlie. His daughter is Aria. Please use her name."

Captain Moren stood for a moment.

He said, "Yes, my lord."

He left, with Mareth.

The chamber was, briefly, only Kaelith.

The packet was on the table.

The unworn silver chain was on the desk.

Kaelith stood at the window for a long time.

He did not, in the rest of the late afternoon, think about what had happened in any complete way. He held it. He held Mareth and Anlie and Aria. He held the easily. He held, also, his own seventy seconds at the carriage window, which he had been holding for eleven years and which now, for the first time, was no longer the only thing of its kind he was carrying.

The seventy seconds had a sister now. The sister was three months of salary. The sister was the medicine that had not been bought. The sister was a small head sleeping on a kitchen table while a wife died and a husband sat beside her bed.

He held them both.

He did not, in fact, know how he was going to hold the next one. There would be a next one. The Codex had chosen him for the holding. The holding, this evening, had a weight he had not, that morning, known the body could carry, and the weight was settling without the lightening he had half-expected from the carrying.

He stood at the window.

The man in the lower Sward was carrying the child up the alley toward the Lower Sward market. The child was still holding the man's ears.

Nyra came at the tenth bell.

She knocked once. She did not, in coming, do any of the small ceremonious paladin-house-call gestures. She came in.

She looked at Kaelith.

She looked at the packet.

She looked at the small wooden horse.

"Lord Sunward."

"Lady Brightblade."

"There has been an attempt on Lord Malrien's life."

"I know."

"There will be more."

"I know."

"My lord."

She did not, ordinarily, say my lord twice in two sentences. The second one was a thing.

"Yes."

"Captain Moren has just come past the chapter house. He has told me what happened in the chambers two hours ago. I have not, in nine years as a paladin, seen him this shaken. He did not ask me to come to you. He did, however, walk past the chapter house slowly, in a way that, knowing Captain Moren, was a request."

"I am all right, Lady Brightblade."

"My lord, you are not."

She came to the window. She did not stand beside him. She stood at his shoulder, paladin-style, the discipline-distance.

"You have been chosen," she said.

"Yes."

"By the Codex."

"Yes."

"I had not, until this evening, believed in the Codex."

"Neither had I."

"I am a paladin of the Order of the Silver Dawn. The Order has been waiting for the Codex's return for nine hundred years. I have been hearing about it since I was eleven. I have not, until this evening, believed in it."

"What do you believe in tonight."

She did not answer for a long count.

"I believe in Mareth's wound mending," she said, finally. "I believe in what Captain Moren saw. I believe that the warmth I am, at this distance, also feeling, very faintly, in this chamber, is the warmth my Order has been describing for nine generations. I believe in you, Lord Sunward, in a way I had not made myself ready to believe before this evening, and I am asking that you forgive me for the smallness of my believing in you, before today, on the basis of your council speech and your demeanor and the small Aerros gestures of a young lord. I had been, until the warmth, a paladin who was paying attention to you in a measured way. I am, now, paying attention in a way that is not measured. I will need a day or two to find the new measure."

Kaelith did not turn.

"Lady Brightblade."

"My lord."

"Stay tonight. There are guest chambers. The Sunward household has not had a paladin in residence since my father's time. You will be the first in eleven years. There will be more attempts. They will not all be on Lord Malrien."

"Yes, my lord."

She did not move from her shoulder-distance.

She did not, also, move away.

The lower Sward, at the tenth bell, had begun to light its small lamps.

Kaelith, with the warmth of the Codex's choosing settled, finally, somewhere behind his sternum, watched Valdris become evening.

He held Anlie. He held Aria. He held Mareth's easily. He held his mother's seventy seconds. He held, lighter and newer and growing all evening, the silver chain on the desk that he had not worn for two days, the small wooden horse, the packet of seven names, Lord Malrien's tired face, Captain Moren's careful punctuality, Master Tael's quiet refusal to record, Nyra Brightblade's shoulder-distance.

He held more, this evening, than he had ever held.

He did not mind.

End Chapter 6.