Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [40]
“Tell you what,” Dorrin said. “I’ll have a Marshal of Gird at the big house, and maybe the Marshal will come visit you—not to poke and pry, just visit—and maybe someday you’ll want a Marshal nearer than that.”
“Guess I don’t mind that,” said a woman with a baby slung on her hip.
“Now let’s see the rest of this—you’ve done so much work in so little time—” The villagers led them from cottage to cottage, bragging on one another. This one had found the stand of reeds, and that one had found a better lens of clay to seal between the stones, and these two men had gone all the way to a village more than a day away to learn how to use the reeds instead of grass. And would m’lord mind if someone added a room or a shed to their cottage?
“All from a well being renewed,” the Marshal-General murmured.
“It saves them work, and they don’t have that curse operating here,” Dorrin said.
“They have hope again, because of you,” the Marshal-General said. “But they need direction. You might have time to direct this one, but not all your villages. They must learn to make better decisions themselves, not because they were ordered to. Girdish Marshals and yeoman-marshals can teach them.”
“They don’t know Gird,” Dorrin said. “And it’s been less than half a year. Send me a Marshal or two by all means, but let the people see first that I welcome them.”
The Marshal-General shook her head. “It goes against my training to have lords intervene between the people and Marshals of Gird.”
“Particularly when they aren’t Girdish themselves, I expect,” Dorrin said. “And have used magery.”
“That, too,” the Marshal-General said. “Though here, they needed your magery.” She sighed. “I cannot regret inviting Paksenarrion to join the company of paladins, but she certainly did start a cascade of events that still hurtles … somewhere. And I don’t know where.”
“You blame Paks for this?” Dorrin waved her hand at the well, the village.
“Would you say she had no part in it?” the Marshal-General said. “Was the Duke’s Company the same for her being in it, even before she came to Fin Panir?”
“Mmmm … no. She kept Kieri from torturing Siniava, and then—when she left—it was as if by her leaving he recognized Alured’s cruelty …”
“And then she found Luap’s scrolls in that elf place, whatever it was, and brought them to us. Her capture in the far west, all that happened after …” The Marshal-General’s voice faltered; Dorrin glanced over to see tears on her cheeks. “Her healing by a Kuakgan, her time in Lyonya as a ranger, all of that led inexorably, I see now, to her finding that Kieri Phelan was in fact the heir to Lyonya’s throne. Once she named him, once Paks’s sacrifice saved him from the Bloodlord—” She spat aside. “—all your lives changed. All our lives changed. Tsaia and Lyonya cannot be the same. Even Fintha and the Fellowship of Gird cannot be the same. She was the rock falling from the cliff; all our lives were set in motion by that fall.”
“And yet—”
“And yet she is a sheepfarmer’s daughter from somewhere beyond Three Firs, and Three Firs, which I’ll wager you’ve never seen, is nothing but a village stuck to the side of a hill by the roots of its three fir trees. We sent someone there to learn more about her. End of the peddlers’ track, it is, one of a hundred such villages where the good land meets the moors. I heard all about the pig farmer’s family her family wanted her to marry into—the boy was relieved; he was scared of her and is happy with the baker’s daughter.”
Dorrin laughed. “I cannot see her as a wife, no.”
“Nor I. She asked that a sword be sent to her family if she died in Vérella. One will be, for her family deserves to know what she did, but we’re trying to gather the stories of her, as we do for all paladins.”
“Will you tell the bad things?”
“We must.” The Marshal-General looked away. “That is why the stories of paladins are not quickly told, or lightly. I want her to come back to Fin Panir with me and share the tale of her deeds, all of them.”
“The Lady of the Ladysforest, who