The Oath and the Measure

Now it seemed to Sturm that the chapel's books mocked him and his wasted years among thatch and squirrels and birds. He had traveled far from Solace, only to be brought to another dark room and these same books, on what he now realized to be most somber business.

'The fault is not entirely yours, lad,' Lord Stephan began mildly, and yet Sturm heard a strange confusion in his voice as the old man paced before the altar, his eyes downcast. 'Not entirely yours. This Vertumnus, it seemed, unsettled and surprised the lot of us.'

'How did that happen, Lord Gunthar?' Boniface asked mockingly. 'I assumed that the guardianship of the hall was under your… capable command, as is always the case on a banquet night.'

Gunthar snorted angrily and leaned against the chapel door. There was no love lost between the two superlative swordsmen, the result of a generation's fierce rivalry.

''Tis being seen to, Boniface! No need for your damned gloating and delight!' he rumbled, his gray brows smoldering.

'Well…' Lord Stephan interrupted, his dry voice melodious and soothing. 'Whatever the circumstance, we have no doubt finally met the fabled Lord Wilderness, and he's every bit as curious as the stories say.'

'The stories!' Sturm exclaimed, half rising from his chair. 'Do you mean to say you knew of this monstrosity, and… and…'

'We knew indeed,' Alfred replied. 'Lord Wilderness is the companion to a hundred rumors, and deaf is the Solamnic Knight who hasn't heard one of them. We knew of him but had never seen him. How could we have expected his visit? This chorus and burgeoning of vines?'

Gunthar glanced at Boniface angrily, and the four Knights settled into their private thoughts.

'The hour is late,' Alfred replied after a long pause, 'and our thoughts border on fancy. Perhaps we should address this in the morning/when sunlight shines on what has come to pass, rather than the curious double light of the moon.'

'I agree with Lord Alfred,' chimed in Lord Boniface, and Lord Gunthar nodded also.

'But wait. Who is Vertumnus?' Sturm asked.

Nervously the Knights exchanged glances.

'I have heard,' Lord Alfred began, 'that he is a renegade Knight whose path entangled with elves and all kinds of woodland foolishness. I have heard that he captains a band of Nerakan bandits down in his Southern Darkwoods.'

'I have heard Vertumnus is a druid,' Lord Gunthar declared. 'A great pagan priest whose heart is as hard and knotted as oak. His sanctuary in the Darkwoods is a forbidden place, where birds whisper the last words of criminals and the dead hang like fruit from the limbs of trees.'

Sturm frowned. That seemed even more fanciful than the renegade Knight.

'And I have heard,' chimed in Lord Stephan, stirring up dust, 'that the blood of the man is pure wizardry, that his dark eyes are fashioned from stone from the black moon Nuitari. I have heard that the Southern Darkwoods are all an illusion, born of the black moon and the sorcerer's dreams.'

'And yet he visits us in the Yuletide?' Sturm asked. 'And wizard or druid or bandit Knight, he gains our most listening ears? How… how did this happen? And why?'

'I expect,' Lord Boniface observed dryly, 'that Lord Gunthar will see to that answer shortly. How a single man could weave through vedettes of Solamnia's finest young men, leading that great boar after him…

'Great boar?' the four others exclaimed, turning in unison to Lord Boniface. The famous Knight frowned, and Alfred laid an uneasy hand on his shoulder.

'We…we saw no boar, Lord Boniface,' the High Justice explained. 'Perhaps the night's confusion… or the wine…'

'I tell you, 'twas a boar I saw!' Boniface insisted angrily. 'And if I saw it, 'twas there, by Paladine and Majere and whatever good god you could name!'

'Be that as it may, we saw no boar,' Alfred repeated patiently. 'Only the flock of ravens in the rafters…'

He paused as the other Knights stared at him in puzzlement.

'You… you saw no ravens,' he concluded bleakly. 'None of you did.'

'I did not look above me,' Stephan soothed. 'Though by Paladine and all the assembled gods, I remember the shrill and insulting dryads the Green Man brought with him.'

It was his turn to be the curiosity. The Knights gazed at him in perplexity.

'Something also of corn and murmuring bees, it was,' Stephan muttered, 'and a great bear, not a boar, danced in our midst.'

'No, no,' Gunthar corrected. 'It was Vertumnus alone. I'm positive.'

'A hall of mirrors, this business,' Stephan muttered.

'But the shedding of blood?' Sturm asked. 'The sap flowing from a wound?'

'Sap?' Lord Boniface asked incredulously. Four pairs of Solamnic eyes turned toward the lad, as though he had suddenly announced that the moons had fallen.

Stephan chuckled, and then suddenly grew somber, his eyes on the shivering lad who sat uncomfortably on the bench before him. 'The problem is, Sturm, that whatever we saw, we agree that you were wounded, that in rage you dropped Lord Wilderness, and we all heard the challenge afterward.'

'The boy was wounded?' Gunthar asked in alarm. He stepped toward Sturm and extended his hand. 'Where did he cut you, Sturm?'

'At my shoulder,' the lad replied, pointing to the wound…

… which had vanished entirely. The pure white fabric of his ceremonial tunic, unstained and untorn, covered the spot where the wound throbbed faintly. In silent bafflement, Gunthar and Alfred examined Sturm's shoulder.

'Whatever you're feeling,' Alfred pronounced quietly, 'I see no wound. And yet a wound would make sense. Without it, the last threats of that green monstrosity would be ridiculous.'

He looked at the other Knights, who nodded gravely.

'Whether you be wounded or whole, Sturm Bright-blade,' Lord Alfred continued, raising his index finger pontifically, like a scholar or lawyer, 'there remains the problem at hand. Whatever we remember, this thing-this swordplay and killing and rising from death and… and dripping sap, for the gods' sake! — 'tis more important than dryad or boar, or your wound, for that matter. For Vertumnus addressed you, and it was to you that his challenge descended.'

'Indeed,' Lord Boniface said, firmly but not unkindly. 'And now we must decide what this means.'

Sturm looked from face to face in the dimly lit library. Already the shadows in the room had shifted from the deepest blackness to a sort of foggy gray. Perhaps that, too, was a power of Vertumnus's music-to collapse a long night into a brief conversation. Or perhaps the time had passed so rapidly, like the years in Solace, merely because Sturm had not kept track of it.

Sturm was almost relieved when a soft rapping at the door signalled the entrance of the Tower sentries, or at least two of the company, whose honor or misfortune it was to speak for the threescore men assigned to guard the stronghold and the ceremonies therein. Shamefaced and shuffling, red to the ears and downcast of shoulder and eye, they stood in the doorway.

The sixty sentries were crack foot soldiers, gathered from all over Solamnia, schooled by the Order, and blooded in the Nerakan Wars. They were not the kind of men accustomed to nodding at their posts.

But out of their number, fifty had heard a soft, plaintive music rising out of the winter night. Some swore it was a folk song from northern Coastlund they heard on the brisk December wind; others thought it was something more refined and classical, the likes of which they had heard in the vaulted courts of Palanthas.

Some claimed it was a lullaby. But whatever the tune that reached the sentries who manned the walls from the Knight's Spur to the Wings of Habbakuk, it acted as a lullaby indeed, for they awoke hours later, tied to their stations by entanglements of vine and root, their comrades tugging frantically at the undergrowth that imprisoned them.

Lord Alfred listened in a fuming silence as the pair mumbled through their story. He scarcely looked at them as he dismissed them, his eyes on a tumbled stack of books that lay tilted and open on a lectern in the corner of the room. The door closed behind the sentries, and an enormous mutual sigh faded with their footsteps into the distant clamor of the hall.