Oath and the Measure Read Free

the empty chair, “is dark and grim and wise in the depths of the night. But you have no joy in following it. Even this festival shows so.”
    “Who are you, outlander, to tell us of our joys and our festivals?” Lord Alfred boomed. “A thing of leaf and patch and tatters, to speak of Huma’s waiting chair?”
    Gunthar and Stephan turned suddenly toward the shadows, then back again, their faces unreadable in the shifting light. Suddenly Lord Alfred stepped from behind the table and, pointing at the Green Man, addressed him in a voice usually reserved for horses and underlings and untrained or untrainable squires.
    “Who are you to question our customs, the thousand year waiting of our dreams? You—you
walking, tooting salad!
”
    “Old man!” Vertumnus retorted and lurched, stopping mere inches from the High Justice. “You empty, gilded breastplate! You vacant helmet and flapping banner! You mask of laws and absence of justice! You tally sheet! You plodding ass with a snout for letters, foraging honor in a barren plain! If a prophetic breeze passed by you, you would mistake it for the flatulence of your brothers!”
    Sturm shook his head. The strange name-calling was too fanciful, almost silly, as though it were a duel of bards or, even worse, a quarrel of birds in the rafters. Lord Alfred MarKenin was the High Justice of the Solamnic Order, to be addressed in respect and deference and duty, but the Green Man rained words upon him, and, stunned and spellbound, the High Justice only staggered and fell silent.
    All about Sturm, his comrades fidgeted and coughed, their eyes on the windows and rafters. For a band of lads who delighted in banter and wrangling, they, too, were strangely quiet. Occasionally a nervous laugh burst out of the shadows, but no squire dared to look at another, and certainly none dared to speak.
    Now Lord Stephan stepped forth, his eyes bright with a sudden amusement. Sturm frowned apprehensively, for the old man was half wilderness himself, teasing the young knights from the strictest observance of the Oath and laughing at the far outreaches of the Measure, where grammar and table manners were set in stone for even the youngest Solamnics.
    It was a head wound sixty years back, suffered in someobscure Nerakan pass, that had rendered him oblique and irreverent. He seemed to be enjoying this shrill exchange, and Sturm realized, with rising embarrassment, that the old man was clearing his throat.
    “What, Lord Vertumnus, would you have us do?” the old man asked, his voice still loud and firm after eighty-five years. “What would you have of us, if we are hypocrites and masks of justice? I see no widows, no orphans with you. What have
you
done for the poor and the outcast and the unfortunate?”
    “I have made you ask that question,” Vertumnus replied with a sly smile. “You are an old fox, Stephan, full of more wisdom than a bloodhound could find in the rest of this roomful of addleheads. And yet the old fox doubles back on his trail, turning on his own stink until he circles the woods and goes nowhere.”
    “Poetry instead of policy, Lord Wilderness?” Stephan asked, his white beard rising like spindrift as he settled himself with a grunt and creaking of knees directly in front of the Green Man, who neither flinched nor backed away.
    “What I do for orphans is not your concern,” Vertumnus answered calmly, “for it does not change the ruinous shires of Solamnia, the vanishing villages and the fires and the famines and the new, unspeakable dragons. No orphan here would question
me
. No, he would second my outcry.”
    He paused, his dark eyes searching the room.
    “That is, if there were aught of orphans here.”
    You are wrong, Lord Wilderness, Sturm thought, shifting his feet, preparing to step forward.
    But no. “Orphans,” he had said.
    “Besides,” Vertumnus continued, “
I
have sworn no oaths to protect them.”
    A torch fluttered and gasped in a sconce near Sturm Brightblade,