Magic's Pawn

why can't they mean it and listen to me?

He blinked, and looked again at the little figures below, still pounding away on each other, like so many tent pegs determined to drive each other into the ground.

He turned restlessly away from the window, stood up, and replaced the lute in the makeshift stand he'd contrived for it beside his other two instruments.

And everywhere I turn I get the same advice. From Liss - ' 'don't fight, do what Father asks.'' From Mother-crying, vapors, and essentially the same thing. She's not exactly stupid; if she really cared about me, she could manage Father somehow. But she doesn’t care - not when backing me against Father is likely to cost her something. And when I tried to tell Father Leren about what Jervis was really like -

He shuddered. The lecture about filial duty was bad enough - but the one about 'proper masculine behavior' - you'd have thought I'd been caught fornicating sheep! And all because I objected to having my bones broken. It's like I'm doing something wrong somewhere, but no one will tell me what it is and why it's wrong! I thought maybe Father Leren would understand since he's a priest, but gods, there's no help coming from that direction.

For a moment he felt trapped up here; the secure retreat turned prison. He didn't dare go out, or he'd be caught and forced into that despised armor - and Jervis would lay into him with a vengeful glee to make up for all the practices he'd managed to avoid. He looked wistfully beyond the practice field to the wooded land and meadows beyond. It was such a beautiful day; summer was just beginning, and the breeze blowing in his open window was heady with the aroma of the hayfields in the sun. He longed to be out walking or riding beneath those trees; he was as trapped by the things he didn't dare do as by the ones he had to.

Tomorrow I 'II have to go riding out with Father on his rounds, he gloomed, And no getting out of that. He'll have me as soon as I come down for breakfast. 

That was a new torment, added since he'd recovered. It was nearly as bad as being under Jervis' thumb. He shuddered, thinking of all those farmers, staring, staring - like they were trying to stare into his soul. This was not going to be a pleasure jaunt, for all that he loved to ride. No, he would spend the entire day listening to his father lecture him on the duties of the Lord Holder to the tenants who farmed for him and the peasant-farmers who held their lands under his protection and governance. But that was not the worst aspect of the ordeal.

It was the people themselves; the way they measured him with their eyes, opaque eyes full of murky thoughts that he could not read. Eyes that expected everything of him; that demanded things of him that he did not want to give, and didn't know how to give even if he had wanted to.

I don't want them looking to me like that! I don't want to be responsible for their lives! He shuddered again. I wouldn't know what to do in a drought or an invasion, and what's more, I don't care! Gods, they make my skin crawl, all those - people, eating me alive with their eyes -

He turned away from the window, and knelt beside his instruments; stretched out his hand, and touched the smooth wood, the taut strings. Oh, gods - if I weren't me - if I could just have a chance to be a Bard -

In the days before his arm had been hurt he had often imagined himself a Court Bard, not in some out-of- the-way corner like Forst Reach, but one of the Great Courts; Gyrefalcon's Marches or Southron Keep. Or even the High Court of Valdemar at Haven. Imagined himself the center of a circle of admirers, languid ladies and jewel- bedecked lords, all of them hanging enraptured on every word of his song. He could let his imagination transport him to a different life, the life of his dreams. He could actually see himself surrounded, not by the girls of Treesa's bower, but by the entire High Court of Valdemar, from Queen Elspeth down, until the visualization was more real than his true surroundings. He could see, hear, feel, all of them waiting in impatient anticipation for him to sing - the bright candles, the perfume, the pregnant silence –

Now even that was lost to him. Now practices were solitary, for there was no Lissa to listen to new tunes. Lissa had been a wonderful audience; she had a good ear, and knew enough about music to be trusted to tell him the truth. She had been the only person in the keep besides Treesa who didn't seem to think there was something faintly shameful about his obsession with music. And she was the only one who knew of his dream of becoming a Bard.

There were no performances before his mother's ladies, either, because he refused to let them hear him fumble.

And all because of the lying, bullying bastard his father had made armsmaster -

'Withen - '

He froze; startled completely out of his brooding by the sound of his mother's breathless, slightly shrill voice just beyond the tiny door to the library. He knelt slowly and carefully, avoiding the slightest noise. The last thing he wanted was to have his safe hiding place discovered!

'Withen, what is it you've dragged me up here to tell me that you couldn't have said in my solar?' she asked. Vanyel could tell by the edge in her voice that she was ruffled and not at all pleased.

Vanyel held his breath, and heard the sound of the library door being closed, then his father's heavy footsteps crossing the library floor.

A long, ponderous silence. Then, 'I'm sending Vanyel away,' Withen said, brusquely.

'What?' Treesa shrilled. 'You - how - where - why? In the gods' names, Withen, why?'

Vanyel felt as if someone had turned his heart into stone, and his body into clay.

'I can't do anything with the boy, Treesa, and neither can Jervis,' Withen growled. 'I'm sending him to someone who can make something of him.'

'You can't do anything because the two of you seem to think to 'make something of him' you have to force him to be something he can never be!' Treesa's voice was muffled by the intervening wall, but the note of hysteria was plain all the same. 'You put him out there with a man twice his weight and expect him to - '

'To behave like a man! He's a sniveler, a whiner, Treesa. He's more worried about damage to his pretty face