Chapter 11: The Great Field

We came out of the hills in the middle of the afternoon, and the world changed for the second time that day.

What lay below us was so large, and so still, and so wholly unlike anything I had ever set eyes on, that the whole party drew up at the crest without anyone calling a halt. We sat the horses there a long moment.

The hills fell away in long shoulders to a plain that ran flat to the very rim of the sky — and the plain was on fire. I cannot put it better than that. It was covered, every visible acre of it, in flowers — wild ones, low and many-headed, growing thick as wheat — and they were in great patches of colour. Yellow. White. A deep blood-red. A purple that was nearly black where the sun caught it. A washed pale blue. And the patches did not lie neatly side by side as a man would have planted them. They were mixed up, all together, the way a child mixes up paints — a great red mouth bleeding through a long stripe of yellow, a finger of blue running into a pool of white, the whole vast plain tessellated and shaken and laid out under the sky as though some larger hand had spilled it from a sieve. And cut through all of it, in long sweeping curves, were paths of plain green — bare turf, no flowers — that had been eaten by the herds of goats moving through over the spring. The goats themselves were scattered like flecks of white pepper across the colour, and you could see the track of where they had been, day on day, in the green-cut lines.

“Gods above,” said Trimmel, who was no man for soft words. “I’ve heard of this. I never imagined.”

“The Great Field,” said Coll, who had ridden up beside him. “It’s all common land. Every shepherd in five days’ ride brings his beasts here in the spring, and they eat their fill, and the wool that comes off them in the autumn is the finest in the kingdom. We are very lucky in the year. Another month and the flowers will be over.”

Aelea had her hand to her mouth. She turned to me with eyes the size of plates and could not find a word for it.

“I know,” I told her. “I know.”

We rode down into it. The smell as we came among the flowers was strange — sweet and green and slightly bitter at once, a thing in the back of the throat — and the bees were thick. The goats let us pass without much interest, looking up from their grazing and dropping their heads again. The shepherds, scattered across the plain at very wide intervals, raised hands at us as we passed and went back to their watching, leaning on long staves and chewing on grass-stems. There was no other traveller in sight in any direction. A man could have ridden across the Great Field all day and seen no soul but his own party and the shepherds and their beasts.

It was the openest country I had ever been in. And on open country, on a long ride with no danger close, a party will spread.

Josen took Aelea up to the front with him, and Coll, who knew the ground, kept pace alongside. Maerith dropped back to ride at our mother’s stirrup, and the two women began to talk low together about something I could not catch the shape of. Trimmel rode mid-pack, alert in his easy way. Cinder brought up the rear at a distance, watching the road behind.

And my father came up alongside me, and matched my horse’s pace, and said, “Walk with me a while, Gord.”

It was not phrased as a request. There was a length of perhaps fifty paces between our column and the riders behind us, and another fifty between us and the riders ahead. He had chosen the moment. So had I, in the sense that I had let him choose it.

He looked across the flowers for a long time before he spoke.

“That bridge,” he said, finally. Almost conversational. “When did it go down.”

“Three winters back, Sir. The great floods.”

“And the order to rebuild it?”

“The summer after. You signed it yourself. You paid for the timbers and the masons out of your purse, when the lords would not.”

“Yes.” His voice was thoughtful, in a way I had not heard it in years. “I remember.” A long pause. “And I was told, before that year was out, that it was raised. Sound. The road open. By —” he did not finish the sentence, and I understood, watching the side of his face, that he was for the first time in my life saying this name to himself rather than to me. “By the man whose office it is to tell me what is true.”

“Yes, Sir.”

He rode on a while.

“Gord. I have lived a long time as the king. Men lie to me. I have known that since I was eight years old. I have a trade of knowing it. Lords lie to me about their harvests; my councillors lie to me about each other; the Queen —” he stopped. “Well.” A breath. “Even the Queen, in her way. They all lie, all of them, and there is a kind of lying I am used to and can read and turn to my use. That is the work of being king.”

I said nothing. I had not been spoken to in this voice by my father since before Bran’s death; perhaps never.

“But that lie. About the bridge. That is a kind of lie I had not allowed for.” He looked at me, and his eyes for one moment were entirely my father’s eyes, the man my mother had married. “He told me the bridge was up. And the bridge was not up. Gord, do you understand what kind of a lie that is?”

“I think so, Sir.”

“It is a lie about a fact. A thing of stone and timber. Not a lie about a man’s loyalty, or a measure of grain, or what a Lord intends in his heart — those I can weigh. A bridge is there or it is not. And he was unafraid that I would learn it.” His hand went to his beard, slowly. “Which means he was certain I would never come to look. Which means —”

He broke off. He did not finish the thought. I do not think he could. To finish it was to say aloud the size of what had been taken from him.

I let it sit between us. There was nothing I could add that would not unbalance the moment.

He breathed out. “The other thing. Last night. The woman.”

So he had seen.

“What is the right course there, Gord?”

That was a question I had been turning over since dawn, with no good answer. I gave the truth.

“I do not know, Sir. To intervene was to lose the cover, which was to lose the road, which was to lose my mother and my sister. To do nothing was to watch a kingdom be broken in front of me, an inch at a time, while I ate a stew.” I paused. “I sent her money in the morning, by a hand that was not mine. The disguise will let a man do that much. It will not let him do more.”

I had not meant to tell him. I did not know what he would do with it.

He sat his horse a long moment and considered me. “By Maerith, I take it.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Mm. Well chosen.” There was no warmth in it, but no anger either. He nodded once, as one might at a competent move on a board. “Your mother is, in any case, a far better judge of women than I have given her leave to be. I marked it, watching her walk back to the horses in the dawn.”

He had marked Maerith returning in the dawn. He had said nothing to me about it. He had said nothing to my mother. He had marked it.

I had been adjusting my picture of my father, slowly, for days. I adjusted it again.

He turned the conversation, then, and it was the turn I had been waiting for and a little dreading.

“Tell me, Gord. How is it that you sneak out of the palace at night?”

I went still in the saddle. I had not been ready for it to come from him directly.

“Sir?”

“Do not play me a fool, boy. You aren’t in your room half the nights of a season. I had thought, for a long time, that you were keeping a girl somewhere in the city, and I confess I was relieved by the idea — a man should have such things, and the worst danger to a boy your age is generally that of having no outlet at all. But last night you were too easy with the publican, and the publican was too easy with the order I never made. You knew the order. You did not know it from any council paper. You knew it because you have stood at the bottom of a wall and heard it given.” He looked at me, sharp. “Out with it.”

There was no profit in lying. He had it. And he was lucid in a way I had not seen him in years; lying to this version of him would be heard.

I told him. The path Davil and I had traced along the bare stone of the outer wall, the holds, the years of practice. The shabby inns at the foot of the city, the grey faces, the patched-and-patched clothes, the food, the talk. The single drink. The order in his name that he did not give. I gave him the shape of it. Not the names, not the Drunken Pig in particular, not the men in the back corner; I gave him what a son might give a king and not lose his head for it.

He took it in without interrupting. When I had finished he rode on a while.

“And how long has this been so?”