The Oath and the Measure

The two of them sat on horseback overlooking the Vingaard Ford.

Eight miles south of Vingaard Keep, the ford was the most common passage from the west of Solamnia to the east. The old caravan routes crossed the river at these rocky shallows, and in the oldest Solamnic instructions of geography and survival, it was said that all paths to the mountains, to the castles and towers that guarded the ancient region, passed over the river at this time-honored point.

It was a dated teaching. There were a dozen fords along the Vingaard, some of them veiled, some forbidden by the Measure for reasons lost deep in the Age of Might. Nonetheless, commerce from Kalaman, Nordmaar, and Sanction still crossed the river at the Vingaard Ford, where sharp eyes at the keep stood vigil against bandits and darker things.

They must have blinked, those sharp eyes, or the climbing fog off the river and the special darkness of this moonless night must have obscured all view from the towers of the keep, for the two rode unnoticed down to the banks of the ford, the hooves of their horses wrapped in cloth and muffled.

The smaller of the men leaned forward in the saddle and sneezed, unaccustomed to the long riding and the moist night air.

'Hist!' the taller one warned, reaching for the reins of his companion's horse. 'You'll call down a rain of arrows with that racket, Derek Crownguard!'

'I don't understand this, sir,' Derek whispered. 'Veiled missions far to the east in the middle of a cold night, the servants sworn to silence at our departure, and you've threatened me from the Wings of Habbakuk to this very spot as if we were bound for battle.'

'Which we may be,' Boniface replied, pushing back his hood. 'Which we may be, beyond what you have reckoned.'

He was more pale, more furtive than Derek had seen him before, his small eyes haunted and calculating.

It will serve me better not to argue with him, the boy thought, but he kept at it nonetheless.

'You said yourself that he was in the Darkwoods, Uncle. Rotting in a druid prison, you said. That when they tired of keeping him-'

'I know what I said!' Boniface snapped. He rose in the saddle and leaned forward, his breath hot with wine and something animal and fearful.

'But that is not enough, Derek!' he whispered. 'We must be safe beyond my imagining. If he were to escape, by wildest circumstance or through some hidden skill it has taken him years and terrible danger to show… why, the roads must be ready for him.'

'This road was made ready a fortnight back,' Derek protested, knowing his words went unheard.

Boniface pushed back his hair nervously.

'But a fortnight is a year in the memories of… of those we employ,' Boniface explained, his voice high, a little too loud.

Derek frowned and leaned away from him, combing the mist for signs of the mercenaries. It had been like this since midmorning, when Boniface had cornered him in the stables.

'Ready two horses,' the Knight had growled, his eyes cold and haunted, his grip tightening on the lad's shoulder.

'As… as you wish, sir,' Derek had replied, fumbling at once with the tack. He saddled the horses in silence, knowing by instinct that none of his questions would be answered until they were well on the road to whatever destination figured in Boniface's fevered strategies.

The gates of the tower had closed behind them and they were well into the Virkhus Hills before Lord Boniface revealed that destination. Even then, only 'Vingaard Ford' had passed his lips. The rest were calls and urgings and cursings as they rode the horses briskly over the plains, through the drowned grass and the unseasonably cold air as mist rose off the flanks of the horses and the tower dipped from sight among the mountains.

Derek shivered. Spring was indeed a long way off, regardless of the calendar and the appointed turn of the season. He would have passed from unkind thoughts to grumbling had he not seen movement by the riverbank, a slight shifting of the shadows.

'Over there, sir!' he whispered, pointing to where the shadows parted from the deep fog about the river. Three squat forms approached them, hooded and crouched, gliding up the banks quickly like gnarled, stunted wraiths.

Boniface breathed deeply. By instinct, his hand moved to the hilt of his sword as the horse twitched nervously under him.

I don't like this, Derek thought, alert for more of them in the tangling mist.

Boniface raised his hand, and one of those approaching-the tallest one, the one in the middle-raised his in response. The other two hung back a moment, half lost in the thickest part of the river fog.

'Lord Grimbane, is it?' the approaching one asked. There was something dry in the voice that hinted at centuries of stone and heat. It seemed out of place in these surroundings, and Derek recoiled from it by instinct, wrestling with the reins to keep his panicking horse from galloping madly away.

Only Boniface held steady. 'Grimbane' evidently was the name he had chosen.

'Not so loudly,' he whispered. 'You are in hostile country.'

The assassin-for assassin he was, despite Boniface's softer words for the arrangement-chuckled low and cruelly.

'Is this not Solamnia?' he asked. 'And are you not… my friend?'

'Do you know what to do?' Boniface asked curtly, raising his hood once more.

'Trust me,' the assassin hissed. His hand snaked to the dagger at his belt, and to Derek that hand seemed… seemed scaled, of all things, like the back of a reptile. Behind the assassin, a cape switched and billowed unnaturally.

Surely not, Derek thought, his hand on the withers of his horse, calming the frantic animal. Surely it is some trick of the mist.

'Trust you?' Boniface asked. 'Tell me what you are to do, and in the order you are to do it. Then we shall talk of trust. We shall talk of payment then, too-of the gold that comes to the trustworthy and the silent.'

'Dam the waters upstream,' the assassin began, the monotone of his voice signaling that he repeated memorized instruction. 'Post the lookouts. If the occasion comes, it will be one lad-on foot or on horse, no matter- the sign on his shield a red sword against a yellow sun.'

Boniface nodded. 'And if the occasion comes…?'

'Open the dam when the boy approaches midcurrent,' the assassin intoned, shifting from foot to foot with a strange, padding sound. 'Let the Vingaard Drift do the rest.'

'And then?'

'Let no word pass of our doings, of our dealings,' was the answer, and then in Old Solamnic, the ancient tongue surprising and corrupt on the lips of this hooded conspirator, 'and dispose of my accomplices.'

'Dividing the gold will be far easier,' Boniface joked in the time-honored language of ceremony and song, and Derek found himself recoiling from his knightly master as well as the gnarled monstrosities with which he dealt.

What is this? the lad thought, his thickheaded arrogance sliding from him like a layer of dirt under a heavy rain. Where does your honor take you, Lord Boniface of Foghaven?

But he said nothing, and Derek Crownguard sat in the saddle as gold-half of the gold in question-passed between Knight and assassin, with the promise that the rest would follow when the boy's body was fished from the river. In silence, the squire followed his Knight up the sloping rise of the riverbank and north toward the keep, where they would shelter the rest of the night by innocent fires, talking Oath and Measure with the garrison.

'What if…' Derek began, but Boniface waved away the words, his arm batlike under the dark canopy of his cape.

'Who would believe them?' he asked, his voice steady and sinister. 'Who among honorable folk would trust the likes of them against the word of a Knight of the Sword?'

He turned in the saddle, regarding his squire with a cold and level gaze.

'Be thankful 'tis an orphaned brat, without the uncles and cousins sniffing the blood of every Crownguard after the deed is done. If that were the case, you'd not be clean of this, nephew'