"Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep,
"
--Henry IV Part One; II.iii

"I really think they're far too young for this," Veralidaine Sarrasri-Salmalìn whispered to her husband, propping herself up on the bolster with her elbows. They had hashed it out the evening before as she swept and he built up the fire, in hushed voices and spelled-out words at supper, and again late into the night while sitting on the hearth. But now, in the early gray morning, Daine had thought of something else. "Everyone'll think we're doing it as a warning -- making a moral lesson out of it," she continued. Mistress Sievers was taking her children for that reason. In principle, Daine did not think that such lessons were a terrible thing for a child. Numair claimed to have seen thieves and counterfeiters hang from the Bridge of the Damned in Tyra from as long as he could remember. 'Every morning,' he had said, 'I walked to Master Agrippa's school, and I walked by the bodies as if they were nothing more than a stray kitten.' These things stayed in one's memory: she would never forget Granda holding her shoulder while they watched Gallan soldiers in sun-glittering mail execute a group of bandits. In principle, again, there was not, perhaps, anything wrong with this. Children grew up seeing chickens and sheep slaughtered to be eaten – and chickens and sheep were innocent beings. To her, or to Sarralyn, a lamb was as full a spirit as a man. There was no reason to hold the death of a wicked human to have some sort of sacred nature that the death of an animal did not. And she could not think of a better way to impress the wrongness of such crimes. But here -- what clear lesson could be derived here? Thom of Pirate's Swoop had not had a traitor's heart. And when children were so young, when they might not even understand the import of death, there was never any good could come of the lesson of any execution, let alone this one.

But, "They need to know," Numair had said again and again last night. "They need to know how powerful the crown is, and what the worst is that it can do. We're subjects of Tortall by choice, but Sarra and Rikash are born Tortallan. They need the example from us of what it means to serve a king and to be loyal." And so he had won her over in spite of herself. What Daine had always thought of as her country-bred plainness was revolted by pretending to the children that they approved of something that they truly witnessed only out of necessity. Only the need to show their own loyalty would bring her and Numair to stand in the crowd before the scaffold tomorrow -- today.

It wasn't that they didn't approve, Daine checked herself mentally, except that, well, she didn't; Numair didn't either, of course, nor did any of their university friends. To be sure, it was necessary -- tragic, but necessary. The Crown was well within its rights and the demands of justice. Maybe things had gotten out of hand at the University -- even Numair reluctantly admitted that there might be too freedom for the masters and their students -- and necromancy for whatever cause was condemned by the Gods: blasphemy as well as an affront to decency. Daine was not used to having decency conflict with her own feelings; she wasn't used to being outside the common experience or going against the authorized opinion. It wasn't, she told herself, that she was blindly obedient to tradition and authority – as the Wildmage, how could she be? -- but that the Contés were good and fair kings whose decisions accorded with the dictates of religion and common sense. Now, either the king was unjust -- a position she could not in her good faith as a subject take -- or her notions of right and wrong were skewed, and she was sure that they were not. Or it was that things were simply much more complicated than right and wrong. This kind of iffy morality had nothing to teach her children in the usual way, and they were too young to understand the more complex lesson proper to it.

"Numair," she said, "I really think it wouldn't--" But her husband's side of the mattress was empty. There were many nights that she had spent alone in the time they had lived -- and slept -- together. He would be setting up some experiment, or off in the Drell River Valley diverting the river's course, or she might be tucked in the fork of a desert tree as she gathered information on the Bazhir in bird form. But if one ever had to leave in the middle of the night, each always waked the other, particularly now that the children were old enough to ask questions about their parents' whereabouts. Daine pushed herself up to a sitting position; Ah, he had lit a candle in the main room: she could see it through the curtain. She ought to get up and find out what the matter was. If only it weren't so cold -- why had Numair let the heat-spell fade away? Or had he not set it last night? They had been talking, and perhaps he had forgotten. Oh don't be such a delicate city-dweller, she told herself. Ma had never cast a heat charming and Snowsdale was much farther north. It wasn't even winter, she scolded. With a small sigh, Daine turned the blankets back from her legs and got out of bed. Her house shoes were in their usual places; she scuffed them on as she arranged her shawl.

Sarralyn was sleeping soundly; Daine stood, transfixed as she always was, watching her daughter's small and perfect hands clutch the cloth doll Lady Eleni had given her for a gods-mother gift. Sarralyn's hair, as dark as her father's, spread out on the mattress. She couldn't. She couldn't take little Sarra to watch a man die. Daine knew that if she came too near Rikash's cradel, her son would wake. Sarralyn had not been nearly so fussy. Nevertheless, she could not resist looking in on Rikash, too, just in case. He, too, was fast asleep. A restive baby sleeping more surely at night than a hard-working man? There was something not right in the world when this was its way.

"Numair?" She whispered as she pulled back the curtain. He hadn't heard her, for there was no answer. Numair sat at the table; his head was in his hands. He didn't look up as she came around behind him: perhaps he did not see her. "Oh, Numair." Daine put her arms around her husband. As she held him, feeling his upper body shake with his suppressed crying, she wished that she hadn't been so ready to complain about the faded heating. "Oh, Numair, darling." There was nothing to say. It would not be all right. It would not all work out. The time for those consolations was past. "At least come sit by the fire with me, Dear-heart." She half-pulled him up and led him to the hearth with one hand and took his candle with the other. They had banked the fire for the night, but a little glow and warmth remained. "Yes," she murmured over and over as she rocked Numair as though he were little Rikash, "Yes, it is terribly sad. And it isn't fair." Cradling her husband's head in her lap, Veralidaine stared into the darkening hearth. The fire that had blazed up to warm dinner and heat the kettle for the children's baths was barely-alive embers now. She knew that they would get through this -- Numair, her family, the University -- but she could not see how.


NOTE: I know I promised to finish this soon, but I'm going to be away from a computer for a while, so the last few chapters may not come until August.