Free Oath and the Measure by Michael Williams

notice.
    Backward Derek toppled into the bed of the wheelbarrow, but his fall was cushioned by its rather fresh contents. He lurched from the wheelbarrow, stumbled, and fell, and Sturm finished the funeral song in a loud and exultant voice.
    Stephan and Gunthar stood on the battlements above the boys, peering down on them and watching the strangemorning music come to pass.
    “All Brightblade, that one is,” Lord Gunthar said softly to his old friend.
    “Not
all
Brightblade,” Stephan allowed. “But, the gods willing, he is Brightblade enough.”

    Sturm smiled again as he saddled his horse. He felt wild and unsettled and strangely free.
    Derek had blushed and fumed and backed away, this time very carefully, leaving his first-family arrogance behind him in the snowy courtyard. Lord Boniface had emerged furiously from the steps leading to the Knight’s Spur and caught the soiled squire by a clean sleeve.
    “How dare you pass the morning in horseplay,” Boniface growled, “when I’ve a hundred tasks remaining for you before sunrise!” They trooped away across the courtyard, the Knight berating his squire and battering him with question after obscure question. The gardener Jack covered a gap-toothed smile and pushed the wheelbarrow off after them, humming Sturm’s tune ever so quietly.
    Sturm chuckled as he watched the procession. No doubt Derek would be doused and then sent to his carpeted chambers now, angry and flustered, rehearsing what he should have done or said when the upstart from Solace turned on him, roaring with laughter and dirges.
    “Give him a day, Luin,” Sturm whispered to the mare, who snorted affably in the slowly dispersing dark of the stable. “Give Derek a day, and let me be far away on the road, and there’s no telling what the story will be as to what took place this morning in the courtyard.”
    Already the castle grounds were defined in a pale gray light. The lamps in the tower seemed dim now, and overhead the bats and glowing vespertiles rushed to the safety of cave and lowland barnloft. Deep on the plains, the horizon took shape.
    The sun had risen by the time Sturm led Luin into the courtyard and up to the southern gates. Lord Stephan was there to see him off, mist trailing through the white strands of his beard. Gunthar was there, too, and he inspected the young man sternly, making sure his horse was properly saddled and that his inherited armor fit him with Solamnic propriety.
    “These ancestral arms are a bit … outsized, lad,” Gunthar proclaimed in disappointment, staring skeptically at Angriff’s breastplate, so wide and swallowing that it looked as if someone had dropped Sturm into a cage. “Perhaps you have a more suitable fit in your quarters?”
    Sturm shook his head.
    “A closer fit, yes, Lord Gunthar. But more
suitable?
I think not. For I am the Brightblade, called to a challenge by Lord Wilderness. My legacy rides with me to the gods know where.” The lad masked a smile. It was a speech he had rehearsed while combing the mare, and he thought it was all resonant and Measured, a fitting exit line and a fitting prologue to his own great adventure.
    Pompous little bumpkin, Lord Stephan thought with gentle amusement. Rattling about in that coffin of a breastplate. We’ll see how well ‘the Brightblade’ and his legacy weather the coming news.
    “The gods know where, indeed, Sturm Brightblade,” Stephan announced aloud as the great oaken gates of the Clerist’s Tower opened behind him. “But your first destination is no doubt the Southern Darkwoods, and the way to that place Lord Vertumnus … insists on showing you, it seems.”
    Sturm’s eyes widened as he looked over Stephan’s shoulder. Inexplicably, vines had grown from the cobblestones at the foot of the Southern Gates, spreading over the huge passageway like an enormous green web. And out on the wings of Habbakuk, tumbling south and east into the rocky foothills, a narrow swath of grass had risen from