Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar v(-102

by Mercedes Lackey

  It wouldn’t be a big, heroic story, the kind that got put to music to inspire more heroics although, in the end, he supposed, it would be that kind of story too.

  “He wanted to be a Bard, but he couldn’t sing. He liked his tea sweet and his beer dark and the smell of apple wood smoke, and he had a friend named Shorna ...”

  Passage at Arms

  by Rosemary Edghill

  In addition to her work with Mercedes Lackey, Rosemary Edghill has collaborated with authors such as the late Marion Zimmer Bradley and the late SF Grand Master Andre Norton. She has worked as an SF editor for a major New York publisher, as a freelance book designer, and as a professional book reviewer. Her hobbies include sleep, research for forthcoming projects, and her Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. Her website can be found at

  http://www.sff.net/people/eluki

  .

  Aellele Calot’s family were smallholders, with a farm in the Sweetgrass Valley, north of the Terilee River and east of the Trade Road. The land there was all farming country, settled and serene (too far north to ever have to worry about Karsite raiders, too far south and east to fear bandits). She was a middle child (two older brothers and one older sister, two younger sisters born a year apart—and a caboose set of brothers) and middling in every way: middling height, middling brown hair, middling eyes neither gray nor blue. She could spin a little, weave a little, play the gittern and the drum, make cider and churn butter, and she had always expected that when she grew up, she would either marry and run a farm somewhere in the Sweetgrass, stay here on hers and help her Ma and Da, or move to one of the nearby towns and become an independent guildswoman.

  Or so she’d thought until the day that Tases came walking into her father’s dairy and said that she was Chosen.

  Aellele had asked him if he was really sure he’d come for her (because there were seven kids besides her tumbling around the farm, not to mention apprentices and hired hands), as Heralds weren’t people you saw every day (Aellele was twelve, and she’d only seen a Herald up close in person twice). But the Heralds and everybody else right down to the head of the local Grange made sure that everybody knew what their duties and privileges were when a Companion on Search came calling. And he said (inside her mind, where she heard the words just as clearly as if he’d said them out loud) that he was sure, and that his name was Tases, and that it was her he’d come for, not any of her sisters or her brothers, but that she certainly had time to eat her dinner and have her Ma pack her a bag and say goodbye to everyone before she came away with him.

  And she looked into his eyes, and they were bluer than jay-feathers or clear Harvest-tide skies, and she could feel something about him and something about her locking up together hand in hand. Aellele knew that it wouldn’t matter anymore whether the day was warm or cold; she’d always feel warm.

  And that was how Aellele went off to Haven to become a Herald.

  Only ... it wasn’t absolutely certain that she’d become a Herald, because being Chosen was really only the beginning. There were lessons—years of lessons. Some of them were simple, things she didn’t need so much but others did (reading and writing); and some were things she had a little bit of but now needed more of (math and history—not just Valdemar’s, but of every land that surrounded her—Karse and Hardorn and Rethwellen and Iftel); and others were things she didn’t know anything about at all (swordplay and diplomacy and legal codes and precedent). All meant to shape her and prepare her for the day when she and Tases would ride out on their first Circuit, accompanied by a senior Herald and Companion, of course, who would make the final judgment as to whether the two of them were ready to set off on their own.

  Privately, Aellele was sure that day would never come.

  She loved Tases (how could anyone not love Tases?) and she loved Haven and she loved the Heralds’ Collegium and she even loved some of her fellow students, because some of them were nobles (who knew it was their duty and honor to serve in this wonderful special way), and some of them were the sons and daughters of soldiers (who had been brought up to service in a different way), and some of them were from farming families just like hers (so it was almost like having her own family with her), and some of them were the children of tradesmen (who had led lives so different from hers that hearing about them was like hearing a Harvest Festival wondertale), and the ones she didn’t love, she liked.

  And she was pretty good in her classes (except for combat and self-defense, and it was early days yet, and the older students said that nobody satisfied either Master Alberich or themselves in the first moonturns of classes).

  But.

  Heralds (she heard this morning noon and night, more from the senior students than from the instructors, and she already knew—in the back of her mind—that the reason she wasn’t hearing it from them was because they didn’t want to scare any of the First Years to death) had to not only be perfect and right all the time, but they had to be nice, too. And being nice meant not being petty or small-minded or cruel or deliberately handing down a false judgment or a less-than-the-best-judgment just because they could get away with it, or shirking their duty, or ...

  The fact that Aellele knew that if she ever did such an awful thing she’d disappoint Tases horribly just made it all worse. And it didn’t matter how many times he told her she wouldn’t do something like that, that she was years away from ever even getting the chance to do something like that, well ... Aellele knew herself. Hadn’t she thrown a handful of feed at the head of the old rooster who’d pecked at her instead of scattering it properly—and more than once? And switched the salt for the sugar in the canister (making sure to leave a layer of sugar on top so the switch wouldn’t be noticed) when she’d known Saraceth was going to be baking something special for that boy she was courting? She’d said hurtful things—true things and flat lies both—more times than she could count, and gotten into fights, and stolen things (and lied about it), and when she came to reckon up all the bad things she’d done, it was a complete mystery to her why she was here at the Collegium at all.

  Tases kept saying there was time enough—years—to get it all right, but it wasn’t the part about being right that had her worried. She figured he could help her out with that. It was the part about being nice. She didn’t think there was anybody under the sun—not even a Companion—who could help her with that. And the real trouble was, all of her new friends didn’t think that would be a problem—at least not once they’d finished their training. And none of them seemed to have any doubts that they would finish their training, and their Circuits, and become Heralds, either. She knew that.

  That was the real joke.

  Because every Herald had a Gift, some kind of Talent that set them apart. It wasn’t the whole reason they were Chosen, but it was part of it. Farsight, Foresight, Fetching, Mindhearing and Mindspeech, Magesight, and the almost unknown Firestarting ... these were all Gifts with which young Herald-Trainees might show up at the Collegium to have fostered and nurtured. Some with the barest whisper, some with Gifts so strong they’d been a burden to them until their Companions arrived.

  And hers was Empathy.

  Not strong and probably never would be (Tases said she was lucky at that, because strong Empaths spent their time puking their guts out or learning to Shield, or both). But strong enough for her to be able to put herself into somebody else’s shoes whether she wanted to be or not. To know just how they were feeling, and if it wasn’t quite as good as setting a Truthspell, she could at least tell (most of the time) whether somebody thought they were telling the truth. At least if she was close enough or they cared enough. And the more she learned about her particular Gift, the more Aellele had to figure: if knowing what somebody was feeling wasn’t enough to make her a nice person, then she suspected there wasn’t any power anywhere in all of Velgarth that could make her into a nice person.

  That was depressing. Because being a Herald was important. And Heralds didn’t just maybe short the next farm on the
egg count because the neighbor boy had thrown a rock at them last sennight or not bother to take the spoiled apples out of the bushel because they were too tired and didn’t care if the basket was half-rotten by the time it reached market. And she would pack right up and go home this minute except for the fact that she couldn’t take Tases with her and she couldn’t leave him behind; and there wasn’t anybody here she could talk to about it because they’d all say “time enough to worry about that later,” and Aellele knew damned well that all “later” meant was the chance to make really big mistakes instead of middling little ones, and nobody (even Tases) would tell her what they did with Heralds who just didn’t work out. It was probably something so horrible that there weren’t even stories. (Except that even when she was trying to work herself up into a good scaredy-fit, Aellele knew that was silly. They probably just found work for them here in Haven where they couldn’t make a mess of things and just didn’t tell anybody why.)

  And four moonturns ago it hadn’t occurred to her to wish for being a Herald any more than it had occurred to her to wish for being a butterfly or a gryphon or a traveling Bard, but now that she got up every morning and put on Trainee’s Grays, the thing she wanted most in the world was to change out of them when the time came for Herald’s Whites and be able to ride her Circuit and have the people come up to her just like she’d seen them come up to other Heralds and know she could always be calm and fair and nice. And she was starting to think: “Well, maybe ...”

  And then one day everything went wrong at once.

  She had morning kitchen duty, and normally she enjoyed it, even if it meant getting up earlier than usual, but she’d been up late the night before studying, and she overslept. And Helorin (who was in charge of the floor) had to bang on her door and wake her up, and she’d already been late when she’d been hurrying to dress and wash, and her brush had caught on a tangle in her hair, and she’d flung it across the room in exasperation, and it hit the wall and broke her lamp, and then there was oil all over her course assignment and the rest of her half-done sennight’s work, and all over the floor, and when she looked, her brush was broken as well. By the time Aellele had cleaned everything up, she was too late for kitchen duty at all, and Tavis had to take her place, which meant she had to take Tavis’ task for the day, and Tavis had Linens, and Mistress Housekeeper was never pleased by anything (to the point that there was a brisk trade in desserts among the Trainees to avoid working under her).

  She was scolded in the kitchens for not showing up for her work shift, and again in her morning’s class because her paper was unfit to turn in; she had to spend most of lunch recopying it (and she’d been told it would still be marked down for lateness), and weapons practice was after her stint with Mistress Housekeeper, and by then she was so out of temper that she threw her practice weapon across the floor when she missed an easy counter and had to spend the rest of the class running laps.

  And all she could think of the whole time was that a Herald, a real Herald—someone who knew that lives might depend on whether she could keep her temper and keep her head—wouldn’t have thrown the damned hairbrush in the first place. Wouldn’t have thrown her sword across the floor. Wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t.

  She didn’t want sympathy, and she didn’t want advice. (She didn’t deserve the sympathy, and the only advice she was getting was “it’s going to be fine,” and she knew perfectly well that it wasn’t going to be.) So after dinner she took her pen case and her (new) lantern and a sheaf of fresh paper and the rest of her ruined coursework (which she fortunately had time to copy before she needed to turn it in tomorrow) to find a good place to hide.

  Back home it would have been up in the hayloft. The Collegium didn’t exactly have a hayloft (well, it did, but it was the loft over the Companions’ stable, and that wasn’t anything like a haybarn, and it wasn’t very private, either), and any place the Trainees were allowed to be in their free time was fairly public. They could go to the Common Room, or the Library, or down to the stable, or out to the paddock, or to their own rooms, and there were people in all of those but her room, and anybody might poke a head into her room at any moment to see if she was there, what she was doing, how she was feeling. And she thought she might hit the next person she saw.

  So since she couldn’t do anything else right today, Aellele figured she’d add trespassing to her list of sins, transgressions, and general total failures and go break in to one of the classrooms. It wasn’t exactly breaking in—since they weren’t locked—but she knew perfectly well that Trainees weren’t supposed to be in them outside of class hours. She blocked Tases out of her mind as well as she could (which wasn’t very, but she didn’t think she could bear his sympathy right now, and he was good about giving her privacy) and went off to find the one that was farthest from ... anywhere.

  Her penmanship had always been good (one of the reasons that getting lectured this morning on a paper too messy to turn in had hurt so much), and one of the joys of coming to the Collegium had been having as much fresh paper to use and almost as much time to write as she wanted. Recopying the pages was actually soothing (an essay on the history of the evolution of the Karsite religion, another one on the system of tithes and land taxes in the Jaysong Hills), and once she was done, she could crumple up the oil-spotted pages and toss them into the nearest stove. Then there’d be nothing left to show what had happened today. Oh, except for the fact that she’d broken the hairbrush Saraceth had given her as a special present when she’d left home just because she couldn’t hold onto her temper any better than if she were a two-year-old child.

  She looked up in surprise when the door opened, but the man coming in wasn’t anybody she recognized.

  It was a long-standing joke around the Collegium that Kailyon had been here so long that they should just give him Whites and have done. Kailyon didn’t mind the teasing. He was never going to wear Whites—no Herald he—but you didn’t need to wear Herald White (nor Healer Green, nor Bard Scarler, nor even Mage Yellow) to serve. And he was proud of the work that he did here, for it was vital.

  For every Herald (and Healer and Bard and Mage) and Trainee at the Collegium there were dozens of servants whose only task was to make it possible for those others to concentrate on their work. Some of the tasks were common to the four Schools and invisible (like the laundry), and some were specific to just one (like the small army of grooms who cared for the Companions when their Heralds could not, and in many cases, taught young Trainees who had never seen a horse—much less a Companion—what to do to keep their new friends comfortable), and some were similar in each of the schools but were managed separately (Bard or Mage or Healer or Herald, one must eat, but it was far more efficient to have separate kitchens and staffs for each). It was both an honor and a privilege to be in service at the Collegium, and it was a point of friendly dispute between the Collegium’s servants and the Crown’s servants (one that would never truly be settled) as to which staff held the more honored post. Certainly service to the Crown of Valdemar called for uttermost loyalty and uttermost discretion, but such qualities were required of those who served in the Collegium as well—from the lowliest laundress to the lofty and rarefied Collegium Seneschal, who was in charge of all of who served within the walls of the Collegium.

  Such as Kailyon.

  Kailyon had come to Haven as a child barely five years of age, gaunt and big-eyed and carried across a Herald’s saddle, brought to Haven along with news of sickness and a failed well. His earliest memories were of blue leather and silver bells, and of the world as it looked from the height of a Companion’s saddle, and the years after that were happy ones spent growing up in the household of one of the Collegium’s grooms. It was no surprise to anyone that he would seek to serve among those who had loved him and cared for him. And so he had, through King Sendar’s reign and into Queen Selenay’s, and if he was fortunate, he would continue to serve for many years yet.

  Like most of the servants at the Collegiu
m, Kailyon was an invisible presence to the Trainees. Some of them had grown up in houses filled with servants. Others had been servants, or been destined to be servants, before they had come here. It didn’t matter, since once they donned their Grays, all were equal within these walls. Though many of his fellow servants often grumbled—and loudly—about how completely they were ignored by the students (“They treat us as if we were furniture!” was a complaint he often heard), Kailyon never thought so. The business of turning a citizen of Valdemar into a Herald was a demanding task, and it left the young students little time to focus on anything else, and if they did not (for the most part) precisely notice the servants who made sure that their lives were comfortable and well organized, neither did any of them—from highest-born noble to orphan child of the streets—ever abuse the Collegium servants. That would be grounds for correction swift and stern, from teachers, senior students, and their Companions alike.

  As for a greater recognition, well, over the years, some of those who had begun simply as anonymous bodies in Trainee Gray ricocheting in-and-out of Kailyon’s orbit (for if he and his fellow servants were anonymous to them, well, the young Trainees were just as anonymous to the Collegium servants, really) had gone on to become friends, and Kailyon had followed the news of their lives as they exchanged Trainee’s Grays for Herald’s Whites, had greeted them with pleasure when they sought him out upon their returns to Haven—for the Collegium was home to the Heralds as well as school for the Trainees—and on a few sad occasions had heard it whispered that someone’s Companion had returned—alone—to seek rest and healing within the Grove, and hearing the name of the Companion, knew that he had lost a friend.