Chapter 37. Custody - Part III

"Mercy, my lord, mercy—" Aldous had got himself onto his knees in the fouled dirt, hands up, the fight gone out of him entirely. "I made a grave mistake, I see it now, I did not know you, I swear before every god I did not know what you were—"

"Yes. Well." Sael looked at him, then looked, with some discomfort, at the state of him. "Perhaps you might go and clean yourself first."

Aldous blinked up at him.

"I only mean," Sael went on, "that it is difficult to conduct a serious matter with a man in your present condition, for you as much as anyone. Go and wash. Change your clothes. Then come back, and we will speak properly." This was quite hard to say so directly. "Take your time. There is no dignity to be found in the version of this where you grovel like that, and I would rather not remember you by it."

"Once he is clean," Oz put in from the ground, "he will be in a fit state to roast, which is the more relevant preparation. Go on, old fart. Wash behind your ears. I would hate for you to meet the fire smelling of your own bowels; even you deserve better than that. I shall be waiting."

"You will do no such thing, Oz."

"I will do a small amount of it."

"You will do none of it." Sael turned back to the kneeling man. "You are not going to be roasted. You are going to be handed over to the proper authorities of Bey and judged under the law you agreed to, which is a far worse fate for a man like you than anything my companion has in mind, and considerably slower." He let that land. "But do not think of running between now and then. I have put a mark on you. I will know where you are at every moment, waking or sleeping, whether you are one field from here or forty. Wherever you go, I have already arrived. Do you understand me?"

Aldous nodded fast, and did not seem inclined to test it.

"Good. Go and wash."

The old man got up and went, unsteady, giving the settling remains of his elemental a wide berth, and the crowd parted around him without a word.

Sael turned to Eron.

The boy had come out a little from behind his coat during the last of it, watching the whole thing with an expression Sael could not fully read, which was not surprising, given the morning the child had had.

"Little Eron," he said gently, crouching to his level again. "I would like you to show me where you lived. Only that. You don't have to go inside, and you don't have to speak to anyone. Will you take me there?"

Eron looked at him for a moment, then nodded.

Sael straightened and glanced back at Ilsa.

"Would you hold things here while I'm gone? Keep the freed ones together, keep the guards bound, and see that nobody wanders off." He looked around. "And put some order into this place. You're better at that than I am, and they'll listen to you."

Ilsa inclined her head. "Go, grandpa."

He set a hand lightly on Eron's shoulder, and the two of them started off through the parting crowd, toward the far edge of the village, alone.

Behind them, Oz fell into step for a moment at Sael's heel, muttering.

"You should have roasted one. Not the boy's mother; someone middling, an accomplice, someone no one will miss. A single example. Fire and blood, Archmage, that is the only grammar people out here have ever been taught to read. They will nod at your marks, your authorities and your law, and the moment your cloud is over the horizon they will go straight back to the wagons, because you gave them a stern word, a court four days away, and I gave them nothing to be afraid of."

"You are too violent, Oz."

"I am correctly violent. There is a difference, and it is lost on you."

"Go back and help Ilsa, will you?"

Oz made a low, disgusted bok, but he went.

They walked out of the square and into the village proper, and Sael looked at it as they went.

He had taken in the poverty of the place from the cloud, but that had been the poverty of poor houses and thin smoke, the ordinary kind. On foot it was something else. He could feel it now. The soil under the packed dirt of the lane was thin and sour, worked past the point where it could give anything back, holding no more warmth than old ash. The few trees between the houses still held their shape but barely qualified as alive; he could feel the slow labour in them, roots pushing into ground with nothing left to give, each one spending more than it drew back and losing the difference a little more each year.

And there were no elementals. None. Not the small drifting ones that gathered wherever water ran clean or things grew well, not even the faint background presence he was used to feeling in any place that still had some vitality in it. This valley had been scraped down to the stone of itself. Nothing wanted to live here anymore, and the things that did were only enduring it.

It changed the shape of his anger, though it did not lessen it. He had come down thinking of a village that sold its children out of hardness. What he was walking through was a village that had been dying by inches for longer than any of them had been alive, in a place the world had drawn a line around and then forgotten, and he found the two facts sat together without cancelling. They had done a monstrous thing, but they had also been left here to do it. Both.

He filed it, and kept walking.

Eron quietly went along at his side, leading without quite seeming to, his feet knowing the turns. He had not said anything since the square. Then, at the mouth of a narrow lane, he slowed.

"Mr Lord Archmage?"

"Just Sael is fine. Yes?"

The boy did not look up at him. He was looking at a low house at the end of the lane, one like the others, thin smoke at its chimney.

"Will you..." His voice was very small. "Will you hurt my mother?"

"...Good question," Sael said, though he didn't answer it. "Let me ask you something first, and I'd like your honest answer, not the one you think I want. You know what she did. Do you think she should be punished for it, under the law, for justice to be done?"

"What would they do to her?"

Sael didn't soften it. The boy had asked plainly and deserved a plain answer.

"Well, selling a subject of the kingdom is a serious crime under the Charter of Bey. Not a hanging one; they would not take her life. But she would be taken from here. Bonded to labour, most like, for a term of years, in the crown's service or someone the crown assigns her to, until the crime is judged paid off. She would not be free, and she would not be here, for a long time. That is the truth of it."

Eron said nothing at all.

"You don't want that, it seems."

"...Why does she have to be punished?" It came out low. "What's the point of it? Of... jus-tiss."

"Justice," Sael said gently. "It's an old idea, bent into a great many ugly shapes over the years, but underneath it's a simple one. When a person is wronged, something is owed to them. Justice is the attempt to see that debt answered, so the one who was hurt can move on, and so that the one who did the harm cannot simply do it again to the next person and the next. It exists to protect people who would otherwise have no protection. That is what it is for, when it is working. It is not for making the guilty suffer. The suffering is only ever a means, and a poor one at that."

"How do the wronged one move... on?"

"There are many ways, and different people need different ones. For some it is enough to be believed, to have someone with the weight to matter look at what was done and say plainly that it happened, and that it was wrong. Being seen can be most of it. For others it's that the harm is repaid in some form, that what was taken comes back or is made good, so the loss doesn't just stand there forever. For others still it's knowing the one who hurt them has been stopped, and can't reach them again, so the fear can finally be put down."

He let the boy have that much before the last of it.

"And for a few, the way through is forgiveness. Real forgiveness, given freely and meant. It's the hardest of them and the rarest, and no one can be owed it or made to give it. When it's real it can free a person more completely than any of the others."

Eron walked on with that, his hand still in Sael's.

"Then... what if I forgave her?" he said finally.

Sael looked at him.

"Then that would be a good thing," he said. "For you most of all. Carrying a wrong that hasn't been set down is a heavy thing to walk with, and a child should not have to. If you could forgive her and set it down, truly, then you could go on from it without it following you. That would be a mercy, and mostly a mercy to yourself."

Eron was quiet again. And then he asked the question he seemed to have been building toward the whole time.

"But then." He looked up at Sael. "If the point of it is for me to be able to move on... and I forgive her, and I can move on... then doesn't that mean she doesn't have to be punished at all?"

"Hmm." Sael was quiet a step or two. "That is a very good question. Better than most grown men would think to ask."

He kept it plain.

"I would say forgiveness belongs to you, but justice belongs to everyone. They are not the same thing, and they don't answer to each other."

Eron looked up, not following yet.

"Say someone steals my coat. I might forgive him. I might even decide not to ask for it back. That is mine to give, because it was my coat. But the law doesn't say no one may steal Sael's coat. It says no one may steal. That law isn't only protecting me. It's protecting everyone else's coat too, including people I'll never meet, and the ones this thief hasn't robbed yet."

Eron was working through it.

"You can forgive what was done to you, Eron. That part is yours, and no one can take it from you or tell you not to. But you're not the only child who was sold out of this village, there were others before you. And you can't forgive what was done to the others. That isn't yours to give. Nor can you forgive it for a kingdom whose law was broken, since those debts aren't in your hands."

They walked on a moment.

"So your forgiveness would matter. More than any sentence a court could hand down, to my mind. But it wouldn't be the only thing that mattered. Those are two different questions, and only one of them is yours to answer."

Eron's hand tightened in his.

"But she's my mother." It came out fast now, the words he'd been holding the whole walk. "She looked after me. When I was sick she stayed up, and when there wasn't enough she gave me hers and said she wasn't hungry. She cared about me more than anyone. I don't want... I don't want her to be taken away, or hit, or punished, not because of me or because of what I said. I don't want that to be what I did."

"I know," Sael said.

They had reached the house. He stopped at the door and lowered himself once more to the boy's level.

"We will see how this is best settled. Come."

Eron looked at him a moment, then nodded.

Sael straightened and knocked once, and the door opened.

A woman stood in it, thin, tired, younger than her face. Her eyes went past Sael on instinct, down, and found the boy at his side, and she went very still. Her hand rose to her mouth. The breath went out of her in a small gasp.

"Hello there," Sael said.