Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [77]
“True,” Arvid said. Nothing was going to stop the whole recital, everything this boy knew about Paks, he could tell. “Don’t forget to watch out the window.”
“I won’t. And then—” He rattled off the tale as told by students in the training college; Arvid corrected nothing. “And why are you here?” the boy asked when he’d done.
“To tell the Archivist what I know about Paksenarrion, for your records,” Arvid said. “At the Marshal-General’s request.”
“Tell me,” the boy said. “Please, please …”
“I cannot, at least not until I have told the Archivist, so the tale will not have details worn off by retelling.”
The boy scowled. “Well … a promise to the Marshal-General. I suppose you mustn’t, then, but after … afterward, please come and tell me … us …”
“If the Marshal-General permits. See here, Baris, I am not your tutor; I have no right to interfere.”
“But you’re in the—” The boy’s voice dropped even lower, to a murmur. “—Thieves’ Guild.” Louder, again. “Why do you care about the rules?”
“We have rules, even in the Guild,” Arvid said. “Just different ones.” He caught the faint sound of a door closing across the courtyard. “You had better go now, Baris, and if you wish to know what that word means from my lips, I trust you will not chatter about meeting me, more than a glance in the room and being sent away.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” the boy said, moving to the doorway. “This is too good a secret.”
Arvid lay back on the bed and closed his eyes, listening to the boot-heels and voices in the paved yard outside—Marshal Perin and another Marshal had met and paused to talk—and wondering if any boy that age could keep a secret even one turn of the glass. He had, he recalled, but he had been brought up to it. Still, it was comforting to know that Girdish boys were normal: mischievous and wily. He might find something other than stuffy sanctimoniousness here.
He opened his eyes when Marshal Perin knocked on the door frame.
“You must come to the High Lord’s Hall and swear before witnesses you have no intent to steal the necklace and that you believe it is in danger,” he said. “And I warn you, you are not likely to fool us or the gods in the Hall.”
“And then?”
“And then the senior Marshals’ council will do as you say, to safeguard it,” Marshal Perin said.
The necklace lay, glittering in lamplight, on a folded cloth in the middle of the table. Arvid did not come near it. It would have looked good on Paksenarrion; he wished she’d put it on. Around the table four Marshals of Gird stood guard, and Knights of Gird guarded the door, inside and out. Arvid had suggested bringing in the rockfolk who were presently guests of the Fellowship, envoys from their respective kingdoms, but the Girdsmen did not agree. He looked at their arrangements and nodded.
“What you must understand,” he said to those suspicious faces, “is that your fine stone walls are as water to them. They command stone the way you command your own flesh. Stay alert—change guard often, to others you trust, at the first hint of sleepiness—it can be a glamour.”
He himself would not be in the room with the necklace, but in the treasury chamber where it had been kept, now bare but for the sapphire and two gold coins he placed in the center on a stool as a lure. He lit the lamps—he would need them, though the rockfolk wouldn’t—and settled himself in a corner to wait. A carafe of water, a bowl with a hunk of bread for the hollow feeling one got midway between the turn of night and dawn, should he need it. Outside, in the corridor, Knights of Gird stood guard, lest the dwarf and gnome get past him.
Arvid eased his legs from time to time, wiggled his shoulders, waved his arms, but did not walk about. Without a glass to watch the fall of time, he had only his own