The smallwood was loud with the sound of boys, and Lymas sat at the edge of it, where the grass gave out to bare dirt, and watched them ready their war.
Autumn had been through the wood and stripped it bare. All the green of the year lay down now in a carpet of gold and rust and brown, deep enough in the hollows to lose a small boy to the knee, and the trees stood up out of it grey and patient against a sky the colour of old pewter. The light came down through the empty branches and lay in long pale bars across the leaves, and where the boys ran through it the bars broke and swam. It was cold. A thin wind came off the northern hills and set the high twigs ticking together like the fingers of someone counting, and carried the smell of woodsmoke from the keep, and under that the wet brown smell of the year dying. Not so cold that a boy would mind it. Just cold enough that the running boys went red in the face and steamed like horses, and the one boy who did not run drew his cloak a little closer and was glad of the sun where it found him.
Nori had brought the ribbons. He had cut them off some old quilt his mother had given up on and torn them into strips and soaked them in dye, and the dye was poor stuff and the colours had run, so that the boys went about now with their hands stained and the ribbons bleeding faint rings onto their wrists. He held them up one at a time and the others snatched.
"Blue," said Nori, and Torinn took the blue and bound it low across his brow and bared his teeth.
"Red," said Nori, and big Dahl took the red, because Dahl liked to play the one everybody was allowed to hate. The pale sky-blue nobody wanted, and so it fell to little Pim, who was the smallest and complained the loudest and got it anyway.
That left the dark green, and Nori carried it across the leaves to where Lymas sat and tied it himself about Lymas's arm, careful and serious, the way Umr tied things, and stood back to look at his work. Lymas felt his face go warm. "There," Nori said. "Now you're proper."
"I was always proper," Lymas said, and Nori grinned and ran off to be tied into his own colour, and Lymas turned the loose end of the green ribbon in his fingers and looked at the field they had chosen for the morning's battle and began, without meaning to, to win it.
That was the thing he could do. He had worked it out a long time ago, on a morning much like this one, when the shame of sitting still while the others ran had risen up in him so high he thought he would choke on it, and he had opened his mouth to say something bitter and instead had said, Dahl, you fool, you've put your strong men where the ground's against them, and Dahl had looked, and moved them, and won. After that they came to him. He could not run the field but he could see the whole of it at once, the way you cannot see a thing when you are in the middle of running across it, and the boys had given him that to do because it was the one thing he could do better than any of them, and a boy will forgive you almost anything if you can make him win.
"The high ground by the broken oak is the only ground worth holding," Lymas told them, and pointed with the good straight ash stick Nori had peeled smooth for him and left across his knees. "Dahl, take it and don't come down off it for anyone. Torinn, you've to come up the dry creek with the sun in your eyes, so come fast and come screaming or don't come at all. Pim." He considered Pim, small and sky-blue and friendless by the rules of the game. "Everyone's against you. Make them pay for every step."
Pim brightened wonderfully at being told he was hated, and took up his position, and the others took theirs, and Lymas set his hands to the wheels of his chair and pushed himself a little forward over the soft ground until he could see it all, the oak and the creek and the gap in the trees where the battle would turn. The left wheel caught a root and he had to rock it and haul before it came over, and his shoulders burned with it, and then he was where he wanted to be, with the whole field laid out before him like a thing drawn on a table. His ground. He lifted the ash stick high over his head so they could all see it, a dark little banner against the silver sky.
"For the Cherians," he called, and they roared it back at him, and the cold air went sweet in his chest, and for as long as the stick was up and the boys were answering it, he was not sitting still at the edge of anything. He was in the middle of everything. He was the middle of it.
They went at it, and it was a fine battle. Dahl held the oak and broke two sticks holding it and bellowed fit to bring the keep down. Torinn's imaginary men came howling up the creek and were thrown back and came again and the second time broke through, and Dahl declared himself mortally slain and crawled behind the oak to die at length and loudly and then get better.
Pim, hated and alone, charged the entire field at once with his sky-blue ribbon streaming behind him like the tail of a small furious comet, and was set upon by every other boy together and beaten down laughing into the leaves, swearing revenge with his mouth full of them. And Lymas commanded it all. He sent his men wheeling to the creek and called the feints and the falling-back, and kept the stick high, and shouted until his throat tore, and was happy.
Then the small thing happened that always happened.
Torinn, charging past, swept too close, and Lymas threw the stick up to ward him off, and Torinn's own stick caught it and knocked it spinning out of his hand. It came down in the leaves a little way off. Not far. A few feet, no more.
"The Cherian general's disarmed!" Torinn crowed, wheeling away delighted. "Somebody take his hills!"
Lymas was laughing still, but the laugh had gone thin at the edges. "Bring it here," he called. "Nori. My stick." But Nori was away down in the creek with the battle roaring in his ears and did not hear, and the others were a knot of arms and breaking branches, and the stick lay in the gold leaves a child's arm-length from his hand, close enough to see the pale smooth place where Nori had peeled the bark, and Lymas leaned for it.
He put his hand down and stretched until his shoulder cracked. His fingers found cold air and the edge of a leaf and nothing else. He set his other hand to the wheel and hauled, and the wheel turned and met the same root it had met before and stopped, and would not go on no matter how he dragged at it, and the stick stayed exactly where it was. A leaf turned over in the wind an inch from it, as if to show him how easy a thing it was to move, if only you were the right kind of thing.
Something went hot and tight behind his eyes.
It was nothing. It was a peeled stick in a pile of leaves and he could buy a hundred like it. But the boys were running and the stick was there and he could not reach it, and the not-reaching opened in him all at once into something far older and far larger than a stick, a whole black well of it, and he could not get his breath around the size of the thing. His heart slammed. His face crumpled before he could stop it. He hated the chair under him. He hated the root. He hated, for one ugly breath, the running boys themselves, for their easy careless legs.
And the ground moved.
He felt it first in the wheels, a fine fast trembling, as though something very large had stirred in its sleep a long way down. He looked at the dirt by his hands and the dirt was alive. The loose soil between the leaves had begun to shiver and run, grain by grain, fine as poured sand, sliding toward him and away and toward him again, and he understood with a cold falling horror that it was moving in time. It was keeping his time. It was beating with his heart.
His breath stopped. The trembling climbed. A thin runnel of soil lifted clear of the leaves and hung in the air a hand's width up, the grains turning slowly over and catching the grey light, and Lymas tasted grit on his tongue, dry and bitter, the taste of a place he had never been, sand where there was no sand for a hundred leagues. Stop, he thought, and the thought had no words really, only a child's pure fright. Stop, stop, what am I, stop.
The horn blew.
It came from the front gates of the keep, one long low note that climbed the cold air and would not stop climbing, and at the sound of it the trembling in the earth let go all at once, as though it too had paused to listen. The hanging soil pattered down into the leaves. The boys froze on the field. A second note came under the first, lower and sadder, and the two of them braided together and hung over the wood.
When Lymas looked again the ground was only ground. The stick was only a stick. His heart was slowing. He turned his own hands over and looked at them as if they belonged to a stranger.
"That's the gate horn," said Torinn, all the war gone out of him.
Through the bare trees, beyond the low wall at the wood's edge, the great gates of Liongate were swinging in, and a single horse came through them at a hard spent gallop, its neck dark with sweat, its rider folded low along it. Even at that distance Lymas knew the colours. Not the dark green of home. Grey, and white, and a washed pale gold. The colours of the high seat at the Three Steps. His grandfather's colours, killing a horse to reach them.
The boys were already drifting toward the wall to look, the game forgotten, gathering up their bled ribbons as they went. But Lymas did not move. He sat very still at the edge of the smallwood with the green loose on his arm and the cold settling into him, and he watched the grey rider come, and a flat strange certainty opened in his chest like a stone let go above a well, falling and falling and not yet struck the water.
He knew. Before the horn's last note had thinned away, before the rider was halfway to the keep, before any man had said a single word to him, Lymas knew. His grandfather was dead.