The Oath and the Measure

Kneeling before Vertumnus, Sturm wrestled down his terror. He murmured the Solamnic funeral song in bleak preparedness for the falling sword…

Which touched his left shoulder, then his right, with a stroke that was light and affectionate and playful.

'Arise, Sir Sturm Brightblade, Knight of the Forest,' Lord Wilderness chuckled.

In consternation and anger, Sturm glared up at his opponent…

Who had mocked him and dismissed his honor and taken his weapon…

Who had wrenched the Measure even from chivalrous death…

'The life you owe me, lad,' Vertumnus said, 'is the one you would spend in swordplay and vengeance.'

Sturm stared at him, dumbstruck and questioning.

'My son has told you of… Lord Boniface Crownguard?' Lord Wilderness began. 'And you have seen his handiwork before you on the road to the Darkwoods?'

'I–I cannot say that road has been easy, Lord Vertumnus,' Sturm replied haltingly. 'But I cannot believe it was Lord Boniface's doing.'

'Think!' Vertumnus urged angrily. 'Bandits and assassins paid in Solamnic coin from here to the Clerist's Tower, a gauntlet of misfortunes and accidents, the one gift you received from Boniface purposefully flawed… Simple mathematics could tell you the answer if your Oath and Measure weren't blinding you to the truth!'

'But why?' Sturm asked. 'If Lord Boniface Crownguard is capable of such treachery, why waste it on the likes of me?'

'Why?' Vertumnus asked, and suddenly music filled the littered yard, as though somehow the wind passed over the flute at his belt, drawing song out of it. 'Listen, and look to the reforged blade of your sword…'

He could not help but look, and in the heart of the blade, Sturm saw a snowy landscape, the metal swirling from silver to white. Sturm squinted and looked closer…

A sinister, shadowy company of men, cloaked and hooded against the driving snow, assembled at a remote pass. At the head of the column, a man was seated on horseback, his hood tilted back despite the weather. Bearded and scarred he was, as if he were carved from rubble and dried branches.

The man was deep in conversation with another, elegantly dressed in Solamnic armor. The Knight had come with scant escort: another Knight, it seemed, and three foot soldiers. His armor beaded with melted snow, the Knight in command slipped a scroll into the rugged man's knotted hand and pointed through the boiling frozen air to a dark passage between rockfaces.

'Through that pass they will come,' he said.

Sturm knew the voice. He started to shout, but the music surged about him and silenced him.

'The standard will be that of Agion Pathwarden,' the man said. 'Red centaur against a black mountain.'

The rough man huddled more tightly in his cloak. 'And for this such a generous payment, Lord…'

'Grimbane,' the man replied. 'You know me only as Lord Grimbane.'

'Illusion!' Sturm shouted, wrenching his eyes from the vision. Vertumnus sat atop the anvil, regarding him curiously and a little sadly. 'It… it must be illusion! It must… '

'But if it is not…'

'I shall wreak such revenge that…' Sturm began.

'No.' Vertumnus slipped gracefully from the anvil. In two long strides, he was beside Sturm, hand clasped tightly on the lad's shoulder.

Sturm gasped. The pain was gone… the wound…

'No,' Vertumnus repeated. 'It is no illusion. For I was the other Knight, Sturm Brightblade. I rode in the snow to that remote pass, where scroll and payment were handed over to the brigands. Along with the infantrymen who accompanied us. And when Agion fell and the castle was doomed, I was the one that Boniface blamed.'

Dumbstruck, Sturm dropped the sword. Blinded by tears and anger, he groped for the blade on the smithy grounds, while Lord Wilderness continued serenely.

'I followed him into the mountains and the driving snow, buoyed by my love for the Measure, my delight in the honor Lord Boniface had conferred upon me by asking me to accompany him. The love and delight changed to loathing and rage when I watched him conspire, watched the money pass from Knight to bandit.

'But there was nothing I could say. I returned to Castle Brightblade, where Boniface, doubling over his tracks like an old fox in the snow, used the Code and the Measure and the whole damnable Solamnic machinery to convict me of his treachery. When I left the ranks and wandered into the risking snow, I knew nothing of Hollis and the change that awaited me. I thought I walked toward death, toward a slow fading into ice and slumber, but I preferred such a death to that exacted by the Order-to the shedding of my blood and my joy beneath the nails of a bloodless, joyless company.

'But I have not brought you this far for a bloodletting. Solamnic revenge is a nasty, entangled thing, as hot and poisonous as spiders coupling. And no to your Oath and Measure, too, and the pride your Order derives from them. For the Measure may be revenge by rules, but still it is revenge, still intricate and vicious.'

'Then… then what?' Sturm almost shouted.

Vertumnus crouched beside the lad.

'Stay in the Darkwoods,' he said. 'Forgive Boniface… the Order… your father… the lot of them. Forgive them and leave them behind you. Forgive them.'

'But there is the Oath and Measure!' Sturm insisted. 'A thousand years of law-'

'Have done no good!' Vertumnus interrupted vehemently. 'They have made monsters of the Crownguards and the Jeoffreys, have slaughtered nameless thousands, have cost you a father and wounded you past hope, past recovery, unless…'

Fearfully, angrily, the lad scrambled away from the man in front of him, striking his shoulder against the stones of the well. Tripping over a discarded andiron, he lurched to his feet at last, his eyes clenched in pain and desolation and anger, his knuckles white on the hilt of the sword.

Blasphemy. I shall not have it. By Huma and Vinas Solamnus and Paladine himself, I shall not have it!

'My father is the Order now!' Sturm cried out, his voice thin and anguished in the silent yard. 'My family is the Order! Go back to your woods and leave me alone!'

He awoke lying on the anvil, the scabbard in his hands. All about him, the smithy had vanished, and with it the stable. A solitary Luin grazed peacefully amid a nearby vine-covered orchard, and Lord Vertumnus was nowhere to be seen.

The music had stopped. In one direction, then another, Sturm moved, circling about the anvil and facing in all directions, hoping the song would resume, would guide him to Vertumnus. But the whole village was silent-thickly, oppressively quiet.

Luin raised her head and whinnied, but Sturm heard nothing.

He looked above, and the wind was diving silently through the trees. The leaves rustled noiselessly, and overhead a flock of geese moved quickly south in their seasonal migration toward the cooler regions, their wingbeats and cries inaudible.

'What?' Sturm asked aloud, starved for a sound, even that of his own voice. He shouted again, and again a third time.

It was the only sound in creation, and it shivered before it lost itself in the deep and abiding silence around it. Then out of the silence came the dull, regular sound of a drum in the distance. Sturm strained to listen, to follow the sound, but wherever he turned, it was equally faint, and wherever he moved-toward Luin, toward the anvil, back toward the center of town-the sound was unchanging, muffled.

He was in the village green before he recognized it as the sound of his own measured heart. He stopped and drew the sword. In the quiet around him, he heard the scuttle of leaves, a high wind sighing in the branches…

And at once, unexplainable by all of his rules and codes and instructions, he knew that he would never again find the Green Man.

Vertumnus leaned back in the low notch of the vallenwood limbs, staring intently at the clouded surface of the forest pool below him. At the foot of the tree sat the Lady Hollis, and beside her was their son, Jack Derry.

Weyland the smith crouched nearby amid a dozen of his fellow villagers, his beefy hands involved in an