would be impossible to prevent that—which is why the presence of a spy in our village is far more serious than the raid. A one-namer loyal to his own kind would pretend to see nothing and forget at once. Only a traitor would remember and tell.”
They exchanged frightened glances. To have a friend, a neighbor, or even a relative eagerly retailing their harmless gossip, their petty complaints and disagreements, their every deed to an agent of the prince seemed too horrible to contemplate.
“If this is true, we must find out who it is as quickly as possible,” Nonen said. “I suppose his guilt will become obvious in time—there will be unmistakable signs of the prince’s favor— but that might happen too late to help us. We must identify him him at once.”
“Aya.” Margaya nodded grimly. “He won’t receive his full reward until the prince becomes peer. Then I suppose she will make him her first server.”
Arne had long expected to lose his office the same day the peer died, but he made no comment. “The traitor is my responsibility,” he said. “Mine—and the League’s.” They shuffled their feet uneasily. “There is one thing you can do,” he went on. “Find out why the log barricades weren’t in place and a watch kept on them. It wouldn’t have kept the guard out of the village, but everyone would have had more time to prepare.”
“The logs weren’t in place?” Nonen asked wonderingly. “Maybe there is more than one traitor.”
“Or maybe someone was lazy. Whatever the cause, it is important to find out who was responsible and make certain it doesn’t happen again. The barricades are your very proper concern, and an inquiry about them can be made publicly.”
Arne promised to press his own search for the traitor, and the three left immediately, pleased to have something to do. Arne thought it best not to tell them—he had decided not to tell anyone—he already had identified the prince’s spy.
He knew it would be a young person. The loyalty of the older crafters to their own kind was deeply ingrained, and all of them had good reason to resent the privileges of pampered peeragers.
Arne’s garden was surrounded by high walls. It was further shielded by his house, which was wider and much deeper than others on the street. The only windows the garden was exposed to were those of the lesson room on the upper story of the schooler’s house.
So the traitor had to be one of Wiltzon’s students, Arne reasoned—a youngster of limited ability, an inept prentice making no progress at all in his craft, one who had received very little praise in his life. He would know he could never rise far above prentice status, and he would prefer the promise of a fine future as a fawning court server to a life of drudgery in Midd. Such a one would be only too susceptible to the prince’s flattery.
Backward students sometimes were required to return to Wiltzon in the evening for extra lessons. This one must have caught a glimpse of Roszt and Kaynor—either when they arrived by way of Arne’s garden or later when they carelessly went out for a breath of fresh air before it was quite dark. The scouts from Slorn knew Wiltzon lived alone and anyway was to be trusted. It wouldn’t occur to them that the schooler might be giving a late lesson.
Under the pretense of reviewing the progress of Wiltzon’s students—a legitimate concern of his—he asked which of them had required extra attention lately. The worst offender was Barlin, Wiltzon said—a thoroughly inept carpenter’s prentice. Wiltzon described Barlin’s problems disgustedly.
“He has difficulty with everything, but it is numbers I have been drilling him on. Imagine—a carpenter’s prentice who can’t remember something he will need all his life. Other students his age learned their numbers sikes ago. He didn’t, so I have to give him extra lessons.”
Arne quickly established that Barlin had been standing near the windows to recite about the time Roszt and Kaynor arrived. “That is, he was trying to recite,” Wiltzon said. “All he did was look out of a window and stammer.”
“It is time Barlin was given a different vocation,” Arne said thoughtfully. “I will see to it at once.”
Arne sent for Barlin, an ungainly youth of sixteen or seventeen who was already terrified. He broke down and confessed at once. The raid had shaken him; he had seen his mother in tears over the damage the prince’s guard had done to their home. The prince herself had flattered him and coaxed him until he agreed to help her. She promised unspecified rewards, but he hadn’t done it with the thought being paid. No one had ever needed his help before, and he simply couldn’t refuse his beautiful prince. He hadn’t realized what the result would be.
It was an enormous tragedy, heightened by the fact that his father and mother were worthy people. If the Three were permitted to judge him, he would be ostracized for life. No village would receive him; no one-namer would work with him. He would have to become a herder, a solitary occupation that few one-namers cared for.
But Arne could temper judgment with mercy. He wrote Barlin’s release from the carpenter prenticeship and sent him off at once to the husbandman of another village who needed help with his cattle.
“No one-namer mentions a one-name secret to anyone,” Arne told him sternly. “If ever again you have the urge to do so, promise you will tell me before you tell anyone else.”
The grateful Barlin solemnly promised. Unfortunately, there was nothing to keep the prince from quickly buying herself another traitor or trying to. Arne would have to be eternally vigilant.
Old Marof returned early the next morning. No one had interfered with him when he approached Midlow Court from the south. He had seen the land warden at once and described the lasher raid to him, and that worthy official promised to tell the peer about it the next time he was able to talk with her.
The lashers at the watchposts had paid no attention to Marof when he returned to Midd Village, but for two days no one was permitted to leave—not even Arne, who protested that the peer’s first server had orders from the peer herself to carry out. The village was so completely cut off from Midlow Court that Arne’s daily instructions from the wardens failed to arrive. He was left wondering whether none had been sent or whether the lashers had dared to interfere with an official messenger. Finally he told Hutter, his student surveyor, to walk to the court, avoiding roads and keeping to the forest as much as possible, and see what was going on there. Hutter reported no sign of activity at all. Meadow and forest near the court, where the peeragers rode and played, were empty. If the one-namers were confined to their village, every peerager in Midlow seemed to be confined to the court, and the court itself was wrapped in an ominous silence. Everyone knew the peer was in the final throes of a fatal illness. Perhaps the prince already had seized power.
Or perhaps the peer was dead. One or the other must have happened. Hutter’s description was of a court gripped by fear or already in mourning.
Then the peer’s heavy four-wheeled coach rolled into the village, drawn by her favorite team of white horses. This time Arne’s watch system worked perfectly. Everyone was alert, and the coach’s approach was reported when it was still a kilometer away. The warning set the entire village aflutter and emptied mills and factories. By the time the coach climbed the steep slope to High Street and halted before Arne’s dwelling, the street there was crowded with suspensefully-waiting villagers. They knelt around the carriage in a circle as soon as it came to a stop.
The oddity was that it had no escort. There was no mistaking the peer’s ornately carved, fully enclosed coach, but the peer
Arne had been at work in the sawmill, in a pit beneath the machinery where a shaft had broken, and he was one of the last to hear of the coach’s arrival. With sawyers and prentices trailing after him, he hurried up the slope to High Street, picked his way through the kneeling villagers, and, brushing sawdust from his clothing, sank to his knees before the coach’s door.
Everyone watched breathlessly as the door slowly opened— but it was only the peer’s elder brother, the old land warden, who clambered out. He was a small, elderly man, comfortably rotund but surprisingly energetic and one of the few peeragers who did any work. His office was responsible for roads, forests, pastures, and agriculture. He had run it competently when he was younger, but as he advanced in years and afflictions, Arne assumed many of his duties, for which the old peerager expressed his gratitude with surprising friendliness. Their relationship was more like that between a fussy but affectionate uncle and favorite nephew than peerager and commoner.
They met often to discuss the peerdom’s problems, but always at court at the land warden’s garden lodge where he preferred to work. A visit to the village by a peerager was an extraordinary occasion—as unusual as the prince’s raid—and Arne knew the land warden would not make the journey merely because he had a message to
