One-namers were permitted to drive a wagon when their work required it, but they were forbidden to ride a horse or travel in a carriage without a special pass signed by every peerager on the peer’s council. The peer pooh-poohed that and sent his father a two-wheeled carriage and a team of horses. For a time Arjov traveled freely wherever the roads could take him, and Arne went with him; but soon the old man became too weak to ride in the carriage. Arne was the peer’s first server in all but the title before he was fifteen, with his father—now an invalid—advising him when he was able.
Arne had known about the hiding places from infancy because there was one in his own home. From time to time strangers visited Midd Village, arriving and leaving by darkness and sometimes resting there for a few daez. Several of the dwellings on High Street, the street at the top of the village, had secret rooms designed to accommodate such visitors. The dwellings were connected by underground passages, and concealed doors in their garden walls provided escape routes into the thick forest that grew just above the village.
Arne didn’t learn about the League of One-Namers until he began to act as his father’s assistant and had to meet with these mysterious visitors himself. Most of them were League messengers, and he knew without being told that the momentous secret they represented must be guarded with his life and never mentioned.
Visitors of a different sort passed through the village once or twice a sike. Sometimes there were families among them with young children. When they left, the villagers gave what they could from their surpluses to replenish the travelers’ supplies. Sometimes one or two families from Arne’s village—inconspicuous families that were unlikely to be missed—left with them. They were never mentioned again.
Arne’s father died when he was sixteen. The peer and all of her wardens attended his burying, and the following day she invited Arne to Midlow Court. In a lengthy, impressive ceremony, she invested him as peer’s first server. He felt far too young for such a responsibility, but the peer gave him her full confidence and promise of support, and the other peeragers—all except the prince—seemed friendly. The prince looked more beautiful than ever with her long, flowing blond hair, but throughout the ceremony she glowered at him as spitefully as she had on that fateful day when she lashed him.
Arne returned to the village, to the one dwelling that could ever seem like home to him, and found it empty. His father was dead; his mother had moved out. It was her simple but decisive way of informing him that he was now a man, with a man’s responsibilities, and even though he was young for it, it was time for him to be wived, to chose a mate and rear his own family. As for her, she was still young enough to make a new life for herself. Within a few monts she was wiving Kellan, a woodworker whose wife had died of an illness, and though she continued to visit Arne almost daily, she soon had another child to occupy her.
Arne buried his sorrow and loneliness in work. The responsibilities were overwhelming despite his thorough prenticeship, and his workload was staggering. He had to know where everyone was, and what everyone was doing, and why. He had to know what needed to be done today, and tomorrow, and a tenite hence, and—planning ahead—next esun, next sike, and the one after that. He had to know what to do in emergencies.
That was only the beginning. He had to tell people what to do and when to do it, and often he had to explain how to do it and why. Then he had to see that it was done. Without his father to remind him, he had to know that planking must be sawed now and put in the kiln for next Reso’s bridge repairs, or that the growing herd of cattle would require an increase in silage capacity, or that it was time for the annual inspection of window panes at the palace, or that servers of the no-name warden, the peerager in charge of no-namers, should be reminded to send work crews to plow the village garden plots for planting.
The villagers were slow to extend to Arne the trust in which they had held his father. Many refused to believe he deserved his high position. Some felt he had been favored because of his father; others, that the peer appointed him because he had promised to place the interests of peeragers above those of his own kind. Arne knew his career might depend on how he handled the first crisis he had to face. In the meantime, he tried to be himself and do his work as well as he could.
The test came early. A long-standing dream of adult one-namers throughout the Ten Peerdoms became known to Arne only when it ended in catastrophe. The families that left the village in the dead of niot were headed westward to a new peerdom beyond the reach of peers and lashers—a peerdom of one-namers, a peerdom where they could manage their own affairs, educate their children, and guarantee a full measure of freedom to all.
Weslon scouts, one-namers themselves, sometimes ranged far into the wilds beyond the Weslon frontier. On one such trek they found an easily defended, fertile valley, and over the years one-namers who could slip away without being missed made the secret journey westward, a few couples, a few families at a time with whatever they could take with them. The community seemed to be thriving. It held the promise of a place of refuge for all one-namers, and a strong one-name peerdom could have imposed a measure of control on those peers given to periodic persecutions of their one-name subjects.
That dream of a more secure future was shattered by an exhausted messenger who awakened Arne in the dead of night and sobbed out his dreadful news. A marauding band of lashers had caught the new community by surprise and inflicted an orgy of rape, arson, murder and pillage on it. The survivors were starving.
Arne took charge of the rescue efforts. He juggled his accounts to make food available, and he invented errands to cover the absence of those he sent westward to assist the fugitives. The new settlement’s survivors were brought back to the Ten Peerdoms and distributed among one-name villages from Weslon to Easlon. By the time they were settled in their new homes, one-namers of all ten peerdoms knew they could rely on Arne as they had on his father, but their dreams of security in the west were gone forever.
Arne handled problem of Egarn with the same tireless efficiency. He brought Egarn, Roszt, and Kaynor to Midlow, found a secure place for Egarn to work, helped him scrounge through Midlow’s ancient ruins for materials he needed, and took complete charge of supplying him and his helpers with food, clothing, and outside support.
He selected Egarn’s guards and assistants from one-name refugees who were drifting into the Ten Peerdoms in increasing numbers. All of them had been crafters, and between them they possessed the skills to do or make almost anything Egarn needed. Arne preferred them to the local one-namers. No one was likely to miss them, and they were happy to have a place to stay and a meaningful occupation. They didn’t understand what Egarn was doing, but they knew that he, like them, was a refugee, and that he was working for the mysterious destruction of the Peer of Lant and her armies. Assisting him gave them an opportunity to strike a blow of their own, however small and indirect, at the evil force that had wrecked their lives.
The group was so self-contained that apart from Arne, no more than three residents of Midd Villager knew the secret workroom existed. One of them was Marof, who who had been Arjov’s personal server and now served Arne in the same way. Because he was accountable to no one but Arne, he was available for outside errands or whatever additional help was needed at the ruins. Another was Wiltzon the schooler, who visited the workroom as often as he could and helped as much as he could. He was as fascinated as any historian would have been with the opportunity to watch history while it was happening. The third was Gevis, Wiltzon’s young assistant schooler.
One-namers had a strongly ingrained ethic concerning the secrecy of one-name affairs. They grew up knowing that the stranger occasionally glimpsed in their midst was never to be mentioned. Those who chanced to see Roszt or Kaynor on a visit to the schooler, or one of Egarn’s helpers sent to Arne with a message, forgot about it without really noticing it. No one had ever spoken to anyone about such a thing until now. That was why the presence of a spy in the village was so alarming.
Egarn’s revelations about the Honsun Len had troubled Arne severely. Obviously something should be done to prevent the cruel brain damage to no-namers, but he had no idea what it might be. It would take sikes to rear a generation of no-name babies with normal brains, and a tremendous program of deception to keep the project secret, and Arne feared the Ten Peerdoms’ time was running out.
Time was running even faster in the Peerdom of Midlow. Shortly after Egarn’s arrival, the peer had been stricken. Her health grew steadily worse, and for days at a time she was incapacitated both physically and mentally. This made no difference to Egarn’s work. The peer would not have been told the Great Secret in any case, and Arne obtained more by craft than she could have bestowed on them even if she had favored Egarn’s project.
The peer’s failing health diminished the significance of distant events in Lant and even those closer at hand in Weslon. While she lay dying, the prince hovered in the background like a storm about to happen. One-namers had long been aware of her intention to reduce them to slavery and transform Midlow into a tyranny. It was not
