At least he could ride better now, he thought. The unexpected pleasure of that. Among the wonders of the time for him, looking back, was that he liked his horse, and riding the springtime roads as summer came.

—

I did. I really did come to love that horse.

Chapter XII

As has been said, it is a source of wonder how differently chroniclers can record the same events.

These variations apply not only to high dramas in the world. The memoirs of two cloth merchants in Batiara, describing a modest transaction, can do so with extreme and sometimes startling differences.

Even in stories told within a family, never written down, only shared around a table or by a fire or in a field working with a horse and plough, dramatically varying recollections are more usual than easy agreement. We regard our own memories as truths, when they are often just the stories we have told ourselves over time. They become the truth we live by, or with. They become our lives.

But when there are chronicles to read—when the events are indeed high drama, involving war and fire and many deaths—the discord manifest in words written and preserved can be significant. Not just as to getting at some “real” truth, which is impossible in many cases, but also for observing how history gives rise to legend—to moments at the heart of how a people come to see themselves.

This is the case as to the story of the Maiden’s army and the Battle of Azingar, near the northern coast of Ferrieres.

King Hardan of the Anglcyn, for example, was either a monster, savagely killing anyone he encountered, burning because he could, enraged by what the storm had done to him, and fearful of an uprising back home—or he was a fierce and brave military leader, refusing to let misfortune at sea cause him to falter in what he saw as Jad’s mission for his country.

King Roch of Ferrieres? He was a madman, briefly emerging at unpredictable intervals from slack-jawed, blank-eyed drooling and clawing at his cheeks and arms—or he was a gallant leader of his people, once afflicted by demons that had been vanquished with Jad’s help at that time.

And the Maiden? Jeanette de Broché? Ah, well. The differing views of her are well known. They mark the hopeless entangling of history and story and legend, past the point of ever sorting them out.

—

In the mornings on first awakening, and at day’s end when he had his last meetings with his commanders among the nobility, Robbin de Vaux felt too old for what he’d been asked to do for Ferrieres.