Chapter 19: What the Oath Was

Tor sat at the head of the table.

He waited for us to settle. We settled. Lirien came wearing a new dress, a very formal gown. Aelea came last, brought by her mother and seated between Wenna and me in the place that had not been laid before — Mal must have set it while we had been coming up from the bowl, and I had not seen her do it, and now there were ten of us at the long table where there had been eight at lunch.

Aelea had not been at the morning’s table. She had been at the bowl with Mal during the first round. She had had the running of the dell while the kings had been failing each other. Now she was at the table. She did not, I thought, know precisely why she had been brought to it, but she understood that she had been brought, and that brought meant sit and be quiet, and she sat and was quiet with the composed look of an eleven-year-old who has been given an unaccustomed office and is determined not to lose it.

Tor laid his hands on the table.

“Friends. There were oaths sworn between your kingdoms and this forest, in the long years before either of your great-great-grandfathers had stood up out of his cradle. The oaths are still sworn. They are sworn upon both your houses and they are sworn upon the country between them, and they have been kept, in their different ways, for the better part of a thousand years.

“The oaths are two. They are the oldest things in either of your countries. Both your houses received them. Both your houses received them on the same terms.

“The first oath is this. Live in peace with your neighbour.

“The second oath is this. See that your people are well fed, and satisfied in their lives.”

He stopped.

He looked round at us.

“That is the whole of it. Two sentences. Each of you was given them, in your founders’ time, in this dell, at this table, in plainer language than even I have used. The acceptance of them was the founding. Without the acceptance there is no kingdom. With the acceptance there has been, until now, a kingdom in each of your places.

“I would like, with your indulgence, to take some of the afternoon discussing how the oaths are going. I have my own view. I would like to hear yours.”

There was a long silence.

It was the kind of silence you get at a table where men have heard a thing they had not been expecting to hear, and are individually working out whether they can pretend not to have heard it.

Brandt was the first to speak.

He spoke with the small clipped voice of a man who had decided, in the half-minute of the silence, that the way through this conversation was not to take it on its own terms.

“Sir. With respect. I do not concern myself with oaths sworn by men a thousand years dead.”

“Sire?”

“They were not my oaths. They were the oaths of the men who founded my house. The men who founded my house are not present to defend them, and I am not bound by them. My country runs on what I make of it, not on what some farmer of a king in a forest accepted before there were boats on the Sernon. Oathbreaker is a word for men who care about being called oathbreaker. It is not a word that touches me. I have never claimed to be an oathkeeper either.”

He looked round the table to see who would object.

Tor did not respond. He turned, instead, to Lirien.

I had been about to look at Tor, and I had to wrench my eyes off him and onto Lirien because Lirien was the place Tor was looking, and Lirien’s face was — was —

Her face had gone the colour of old paper.

She had not, I thought, moved through the whole of her father’s three sentences. She had held herself in her chair with the particular stillness of a person inside whom something is breaking. The breaking was not visible in the way the kingdom’s breaking was visible in my father’s grey at the introduction; it was deeper than that, and quieter. Her father had said in seven sentences what she had been working against her whole adult life. He had named it. He had named it in front of the man he had brought her here to meet. He had named it across a table from her brother. He had not, in the saying, thought of her, or of what the saying would do to her.

She did not look at her father.

She did not look at me.

She looked at Tor.

Tor held her eyes for a beat that was, I thought, the length of a small mercy. Then he turned to my father.

I had, in that beat, made a decision I would mark for the rest of my life. From the moment of seeing Lirien’s face, I was going to take my cues from her. The diplomacy of the table had been my father’s and Brandt’s; the diplomacy of the room was about to be hers, and mine, and Caedric’s. And I saw, across the table, that Caedric had made the same decision in the same instant. He was looking at his sister. He was not looking at his father. He had read what I had read.

The room had three new participants at this table, and the kings had not noticed.

“Algus,” said Tor.

“Yes.”

“Tell me about the first oath as your house holds it.”

My father had had longer to prepare than Brandt had. He had been watching Brandt fail and had been composing himself. He spoke with the careful gravity of the council chamber.

“I am at peace with my neighbour to the degree my neighbour will allow it. Where my neighbour will not allow it I am at war as the throne demands. The Westhold is the present matter. The Westhold is mine in law and it is mine by inheritance and I have been defending it, no more and no less, against an aggression that is not mine to make peace with until it has stopped.”

“And the second.”

“My people are fed. The granaries are kept. The kingdom has not gone hungry in my time.”

“Yes,” said Tor.

He said it the way a teacher says it when a student has given an answer the teacher had been expecting and does not now need to engage with on its surface. He waited a moment, then turned to me.

“Gord.”

“Yes.”

“Is that so?”

It was the question I had been afraid of from the moment Tor had named the oaths.

I had, in eighteen years, never been asked at a table at which my father was sitting whether what my father had just said was true. I had been raised in the certainty that such a question would not be permitted to come at me. I had not, until that moment, registered how deep that certainty had gone.

I sat with it.

I did not look at my father.

I looked at Lirien because Lirien was where I had decided I would look.

She was looking at me. Her face was still the colour of old paper. She was, I thought, asking me with her eyes a question I had not yet had time to put to myself. Are you going to lie too.

I was not going to lie too.

I said, slowly, because the words had to come up out of a place they had been buried in for some months: “No. It is not so.”

My father did not move.

“The first oath my father holds in good faith. He believes he is at peace with his neighbour to the degree that can be sustained. He has been wrong about that, I have come to think, in ways I cannot yet entirely name. But he believes it. The first oath is not where the failure is.

“The second oath — “ I stopped. I looked at my father. He was looking at me with the same eyes he had had at the truth-telling, only on his face this time, instead of the loneliness, was a tighter thing that I could not read. “The second oath my father has been failing for some years. He has not seen it failing. The granaries are not, in the small villages, what the kingdom’s tally says they are. The lords have been taking what the throne does not see. The poor have been plundered, and the law in many small places — “ I caught a phrase out of an old song I had not, until that moment, thought to put on my tongue at this table, and the phrase came up out of me by no will of my own — “ — the law a lie in many small places. The kingdom is drowning, in its own fair lies, in ways my father has not let himself see.”

I had spoken without meaning to in the words of the verse.

I had stopped the verse before the third line. I would not say the brothers in arms. Not at this table.

Across from me Lirien’s right hand had closed on the edge of the table.

Her face had not changed. Not visibly. But a small thing had happened in the corner of her mouth — the smallest possible thing — and I had caught it because I had been looking. She knew the verse. She had heard it. Possibly she had been raised on a version of it in her own kingdom. She had recognised the lines I had quoted as lines she had carried herself.

She let her right hand off the edge of the table.

I returned my eyes to my father.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I have not, until this road, been able to see it. I see it now. I would not be a son who lied at this table when his father had asked him a question, and a host had asked him a question, and a man on the other side of the table had been told the question would be answered honestly. I cannot. I am sorry.”

My father did not speak.

Tor said, gently: “Algus.”

“Yes.”

“Your son speaks the country I walk. I have walked the country between your kingdoms for longer than your kingdoms have existed. I have seen the fat lords. I have seen the villages that have stopped sending their daughters into service because there is nothing left for the daughters to be paid with. I have seen the granaries that are full while the children of the same villages are thin. I have seen the bailiffs who take a widow’s cow in the public room of the pub and dare her to speak in front of her neighbours. I have seen what your son has just described, and worse. I’ve watched all their suffering. The second oath has been failing in your kingdom for the better part of forty years, Algus. It did not begin under your hand. It has worsened under it. I am not telling you to indict you. I am telling you because the oath is the foundation of the gift your house received, and you cannot keep the gift if you do not keep the oath.”

My father, slowly, said: “What gift.”

There was a long pause.

Tor said, very plainly: “The white stone.”

My father’s eyes did not move.

“Algus. The walls of your great castle. The flags of your floors. The stone of your hall. The piers of the bridge across your moat. Every stone of every wall that has been called the white stone of White Stone since your kingdom had a name. The stone does not weather. The stone does not age. You have noticed. Every man and woman who has stood inside those walls for a thousand years has noticed. You have, in your house, the legend that it is the craftsmanship of the founders. The legend is not true. The stone was laid by my hands. It was laid as the visible sign of the acceptance of your founder’s oath. It was given to your house as the kingdom’s endowment. It is not gift, because a gift can be taken back. It is not contract, because a contract can be broken. It is a giving of one man’s standing into another’s hands. The stone is yours so long as your house holds its oath. So long. Not longer.”

My father had gone the colour of old paper. The same colour as Lirien’s, only on a different face.

He did not, I thought, look at any of us. He looked at the stone of the dell’s edge — the long flat slab on which Mal had laid the lunch-fruits — and he stayed looking at it for the length of three breaths.

He said, after a while: “I did not know.”

“No,” said Tor. “Your father did not know. Your grandfather did not know. The knowledge was carried out of your house perhaps six generations ago, by an heir who decided he did not need to be carrying it. It can be carried back.”

“The walls —”

“Stand because the oath has been substantially kept. The oath is failing now. The walls will not fall this year, or next. They will fall in the year the oath is fully broken. That is what the giving was. Of one man’s standing into another’s hands.”

My father did not reply.

He had not yet had a thing to do with his hands. They had been on the table since the table had begun. He left them there.

Tor turned to Brandt.

“Brandt.”

Brandt looked up. He was, I thought, a man who had been hoping the conversation would not come to him.

“Yes.”

“Tell me about your oaths.”

“I have told you. They are not mine.”

“Indulge me. Tell me about the first.”

Brandt set his jaw. He spoke flatly, the way a man speaks when he is being made to do a thing he resents.

“The first oath. Live in peace with your neighbour. I am at peace with my neighbour to the extent he will let me have what is mine. He will not. So we are at war. This is the order of things. The Westhold is Seronian. He holds it; I will take it. Until then, no peace. Beyond that I have made peace with every kingdom east of the Seron and most of those south, and they pay me tribute, and we trade on my terms. I am the most successful king of the present age in respect of peaceful neighbours. I keep that oath.”

“And the second.”

“My people are fed. My country is wealthy. My court has the highest table in the eastern world. The merchants are full. The harbours are busy. The traders pay their taxes happily because the taxes are reasonable and the roads are kept and the bridges stand. Money flows. The people are fed and the people are satisfied. Ask any man at any market in any city in my country. The country is the richest it has been in any king’s reign in two centuries. I keep the oath. The oath is kept by wealth. Wealth is the only oath-keeping that has ever lasted.”

Tor said: “Yes.”

He said it the same way he had said yes to my father. He turned to Lirien.

“Lirien. Is that so?”

Lirien sat for a long second. She had been waiting for this question; she had also, I thought, hoped it would not come. She had been hoping her father would do better and that she would not have to do this. He had not done better. She was going to have to.

She turned her face to her father first. She gave him the small grave look of a daughter who is about to disobey publicly.

“Father. I am sorry.”

“Lirien —”

“Father. He has asked. I will not lie.”

She turned to Tor.

“No. It is not so. The country is wealthy at the level my father sees. The country is not wealthy below that level. I have walked among the people of our cities and the villages of our south and the towns at our great bridges, and the people are not fed in the way my father thinks they are fed, and they are not satisfied. They are afraid. They speak softly. They speak of the lords my father has put over them — who, like my brother’s words just now about oath-keepers, do not concern themselves with the welfare of the men beneath them. The lords take. They take what they have always taken and they take a little more each year. The people pay because the alternative is the small ugly things the lords’ men do in the night. I have seen those things, and they hurt me so bad. I have seen the houses they have happened in. I have heard the language people use when they speak about the throne, when they think no one of the throne is listening. And we have that same peace with the other kingdoms. The kingdom is wealthy at the throne and ragged at the ground. We are burning.”