Valdemar 06 - [Exile 01] - Exile’s Honor

by Mercedes Lackey

  And damn-all use my ForeSight is against them. The magic that the Heralds called Gifts and that Karse called “witch- powers,” Alberich found less useful than the exaggerated tales had led him to expect. Oh, he had Mindspeech, and very powerful, but it was of use only with other Heralds with Mindspeech and with Companions—and in setting the Truth Spell, which he seldom used. He probably could reach across the length or breadth of the country with it, but he never left the city of Haven; he was never allowed to leave. And he had ForeSight, that ability to glimpse what was to come—but it didn’t stretch ahead more than a mark or two. It was a Gift that might be invaluable on a battlefield, except that he wasn’t allowed near the battlefields. Of course, it was also an erratic Gift, which manifested irregularly and unpredictably, certainly not one he controlled . . . certainly nothing he could use from here to help in the Tedrel Wars. It seemed to work only in cases where something he could do, immediately, would change what was to come.

  The Tedrel Wars; everyone called these seasonal blights by that name now. Little wars, leeching wars, stretching now into the fourth year. Every spring, a new little war, more deaths, more fresh-faced youngsters going out to face the foe, and Alberich wondering—as surely Dethor wondered—had he trained them well enough, prepared them well enough? Could he? Could anyone? It wasn’t only Heralds he trained, it was young Guard officers, those Healers that would accept training in the use of weapons, and even some of the highborn youths who volunteered, out of a sense of duty and with dreams of glory in their hearts. He trained them, and he sent them out, and he never knew if any of them would return.

  Valdemar bled from a wound that was not allowed to heal, that weakened her steadily. Alberich knew this, knew that when the Tedrel commanders judged the land weakened sufficiently, they would turn a little war into an all-out campaign. And there was nothing he could do about it. If it hadn’t been for Kantor, he would never be able to sleep at night—but Kantor had his own ideas about what was good for his Chosen, and when Alberich was prepared to spend another sleepless night staring at the ceiling, his gut in a knot and his head throbbing, he would sense Kantor moving into his mind like a storm front, and then—

  Well, then the next time he saw the ceiling, it would be morning. Last night had been one of those nights, leaving him singularly irritable, and not at all inclined to be charitable toward any of his pupils. Charity could—would—get them killed. Especially the one before him now.

  Alberich surveyed his latest pupil, and reflected that Trainee Myste was at least providing one thing for him: a distraction from grief. Although she was providing a little grief of her own, of a different sort.

  The middle-aged woman looked right back at him, her hazel eyes unnaturally large behind the thick glass lenses she wore, held to her face by a frame of wood, with leather straps that buckled behind her head, flattening already straight brown hair. She had a set that she normally wore that had lighter frames with sidepieces of wire that hooked over her ears, but those kept flying off during any sort of exertion; this had been the best they could do for weapons’ practice, and it wasn’t very good. Her peripheral vision was poor enough, and the frames of the lenses made it worse. And they were a handicap in another way; the first thing that an attacker would do would be to try to smash them. But she was virtually blind without them, so what could he do? Her short-sightedness was just the first in a string of handicaps that made her woefully unsuited to be a Herald.

  He thought she looked particularly aggrieved this afternoon, but it was difficult to tell what her expression was on the other side of that wood-and-glass mask.

  Physically, she was utterly unprepossessing, and looked like what she had been before she’d been Chosen; a sedentary scribe and clerk. He had no idea why she of all people had been Chosen, at a time when fighting Heralds were what was needed, not clerks, and how he was going to turn her into a fighter he had no clue. He despaired; she—well, he didn’t know for certain how she felt. Frustrated, surely, at the least.

  She was the single clumsiest Trainee he had ever attempted to teach, bar none. He didn’t think this was on purpose, though, for even though she clearly didn’t want to be here, she did try until she was black and blue. Even if she’d come here as a child, she’d have been clumsy, he suspected, but this business of learning weaponcraft late in life, a task to which she was utterly unsuited, must seem utter madness to her. He didn’t blame her for being irritated and unhappy.

  What was the point of putting her in this position anyway? She couldn’t see without those lenses; she would lose them in a fight, and then she would be blind, and how was he supposed to train her to overcome that? Though there were tales of blind warriors with preternatural abilities in both Karse and Valdemar, those had all been about men and women who had been trained since early childhood in their craft, who brought skilled bodies and the finely honed senses of hearing and smell and touch to bear on the problem of being unable to see.

  Not a middle-aged clerk who had been bent over a desk all of her life. She would arrive at the front lines only to return in days in one of those wagons. If she returned at all. Which he doubted.

  She sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, recapturing his wandering attention. “Weaponsmaster, all due respect, but we both know I’m hopeless at this. It’s a complete waste of your time to try and train me to use this.”

  She gestured at the sword she carried—and she spoke in Karsite.

  In point of fact, if it were not for the fact that she couldn’t fight, couldn’t shoot, and couldn’t defend herself, she’d be in Whites at this very moment. Self-defense was the only skill she lacked to enter her Internship, for she’d known most of what a Trainee learned long before she was ever Chosen. There was nothing about the history of Valdemar and the Heralds that she didn’t know before she came here. She mastered the fine points of the law with the indifferent ease of someone who had spent years copying legal briefs. In fact, anything having to do with the written word, including no less than four languages, was of no difficulty to her. And she was the only person besides Alberich himself who was a fluent and natural speaker of his own tongue, learned directly from old Father Henrick before Alberich had set foot on the soil of Valdemar.

  “There’s a saying in Hardorn,” she continued. “‘You shouldn’t attempt to teach a goat to sing. It will waste your time, hurt your ears, and annoy the goat.’ I can say without fear of contradiction that the goat is getting annoyed.”

  He had to smile at that; she blinked behind those thick lenses, and emboldened, continued. “I keep asking this question, and no one will answer me. Can you give me one single, good reason why I have to learn weaponswork? And ‘because all Trainees have to’ is not a good reason. After all—” she set her chin mulishly, “—you don’t make all Healers learn weapons-work, so why should every single Herald have to?”

  Since he had just been about to say because all Trainees have to, he found himself stymied. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and regarded her thoughtfully. “Just what would you do if you were ambushed in the field?” he asked.

  “Run,” she replied promptly. “I’d cut loose my saddlebags, if I was mounted, throw away my belt pouch if I was afoot, and run. Chances are, whoever attacked me would be after my things and any money I had, not me. I’d let them have what they wanted. Things can be replaced, and while they’d be scrambling after loot, I’d be getting farther away.”

  :That was a good answer,: Kantor observed.

  “And if you had to help villagers with a bandit attack?” he persisted.

  She laughed. “Give my advice and go for help!” she replied. “Not that anyone would be likely to take the military advice of a dumpy, bookish female who’s half blind, no matter what uniform she was wearing. But riding Aleirian, I’m as fast as any Herald, faster than any other messenger, and once I’m within Mindspeech range of any other Herald, I can relay my information.”

  :Another good answer. She’s full of
them, isn’t she?:

  :She’s full of . . . something.: He sighed. She wasn’t intimidated by him, not in the least, difficult creature that she was. She didn’t care that he was Alberich of Karse, only half trusted even by the Heralds. “I know all about you from Henrick. And from Geri as well, of course,” she’d said on meeting him, meaning Gerichen, once-Acolyte, now Priest; Geri, who’d become as much of a confidant as Alberich ever made of anyone. Simple sentences, but the way she’d said them had left him wondering just what it was that they’d told her. And later, he wondered what, and how much, she had written down, for she seemed to be always writing everything down in little notebooks. She always had one with her. When she wasn’t writing things, she stared in a way that made him feel she was memorizing everything, so that she could write it down later.

  :So how are you going to answer her?: Kantor prompted. :She has a good point; you’re never going to make her into any kind of a fighter. You were just thinking that the first thing that anyone seeing her would go for is those lenses, and then what?:

  Then she’d be blind, of course, and utterly helpless. No, she was right, very right, the best thing she could ever do if attacked would be to run away.

  Could running be the answer, then?

  :It should never be said that Herald Alberich refused to find a better way when one existed,: Kantor said. :Besides, if she can’t fight, they won’t send her to the front lines; they’ll use her to replace a Herald who can fight and send him instead.:

  “Put that away,” he said abruptly. “You are right. I would be no kind of Weaponsmaster if I could not match the weapon to the student, not the student to the weapon. And escape might be the answer, however unlikely that weapon might be. Come into the salle, into the sitting room, and we will discuss this.”

  He didn’t miss her smile of triumph, not that it mattered. She wasn’t going to get off as easily as she thought; there might not be fighting practice, but she was going to find herself training until she was in far better physical shape than she’d ever been in her life. There would be extra riding classes for one thing; if her Companion was going to be running, she had better be in shape to stick with him, no matter what he had to do to get away. And if she was going to count on being able to run away, Alberich was going to make her into a competitive foot racer, whether she liked it or not.

  Some of that clumsiness, at least, can be trained away.

  She followed him into his living quarters; Dethor wasn’t there at the moment. One of the Healers was trying a new treatment for his swollen joints, a course of bee venom, for beekeepers swore that the stings of their charges kept the ailment away from them. By now, Dethor’s bones were painful enough that he was more than willing to tolerate even the stings of angry bees in hopes of getting some relief.

  As a reward for his cooperation, he’d get a massage with hot stones and a treatment for his hands of hot sand afterward, something that did give him consistent relief, even if it was only temporary.

  Myste took one of the chairs in front of the window; Alberich sat opposite her. “We need to think,” he told her. “We need to find a way to make the things you can do into weapons. Running, for instance.” He pondered that for a while. “I’ll trade you saying for saying—in the hills in Karse there’s a proverb, ‘The hound that chases two hares catches neither.’ If you are going to run—we need to contrive a way that you can create more than one thing for your pursuers to go after.”

  “Dropping my packs—” she began.

  “But what if there is something in your packs that you’ve been entrusted with?” he countered. “What if it’s in the winter, with no Waystations near? If you drop your packs, you won’t have what you need to survive. It won’t do you much good to escape from bandits only to freeze to death in a blizzard.” He brooded over the idea for a moment, then the answer came to him. “I think we should add a bit of extra equipment specifically for you—packs and belt pouches that you’re meant to throw away.”

  “What?” she asked, “Stuffed with straw or the like?”

  He shook his head. “No, not that, actually. If you drop worthless decoys, it won’t be long before bandits and brigands all know that the packs you drop are worthless, and they’ll ignore them and go for you again. No, that hare won’t run—there will be just enough in the decoys to satisfy an ambusher without making it look as if you’re an especially juicy target, and to make certain that attackers chase the packs, and not you. And the same for belt pouches; from now on, you’ll be carrying at least two small extras, both full of coppers, and if someone attacks you, you’ll throw them in opposite directions, one to either side of your line of flight.”

  She was happy enough about the planning, but visibly unhappy when he brought her back outside and put her in front of the obstacle course. “Run the course, then run it again,” he told her mercilessly. “And keep running it until I tell you to stop. Running away isn’t going to do you any good if you can’t actually run any better than Dethor on a bad day.”

  And he left her to it, with a faint feeling of having—for once—gotten the better of her. Irritating woman. Not that he didn’t like her; she not only had the advantage of being one of the few people he could converse easily with in his own tongue, she was an interesting and lively conversationalist. And besides not being afraid of him or intimidated by him, he got the feeling that she respected him in a way that was quite flattering, when she wasn’t trying to get the better of him. Why was it that she entered every conversation with the goal of somehow trying to win?

  Well, she could just work some of that out over the hurdles. Meanwhile, he had a class of young archers to put through their paces.

  When he told Dethor of his solution to the problem of Myste over dinner, the Weaponsmaster chuckled. “Good solution,” Dethor replied. “A very good solution. But I hope it isn’t one we need to use. I’d much rather that the Heraldic Circle can find a position for her that makes the best use of her talents here in the city. Whatever those talents are.”

  “At the moment,” Alberich replied, with just a tinge of sourness, having had to find reasons why every single obstacle in the course was one she needed to learn to negotiate, “Arguing and writing. Little enough of anything else, have I seen.”

  “Heh. I’ve seen those little notebooks of hers—” Dethor blinked. “Now, why didn’t I think of this before? Herald-Chronicler, of course! Elcarth’s doing it now, but we want him for Dean of the Collegium, and we need to start training him in that—” His voice faded off as he got that faraway look in his eyes that meant he was thinking, and probably Mindspeaking with his Companion. Alberich now knew that look very, very well.

  And Dethor was right, of course; with all of his own reading of the Chronicles, he could see how being the Herald-Chronicler would easily be a full-time job. It wasn’t just the doings of the Heralds that the Chronicler covered, it was everything; anything that had any impact on any part of the Kingdom larger than a small village.

  :What do you think?: he asked Kantor.

  :That it’s probably the reason she was Chosen,: Kantor replied. :She gets onto a story like a rat-terrier and won’t let go of it until she’s shaken it free of all the facts.:

  Annoying little dogs, rat-terriers. All yap and idiotic courage—or was that “stubbornness?” Still. Come to think of it, that described Myste rather well. . . . Or, perhaps, she was more like a cat, one of those mouthy ones that wouldn’t stop caterwauling, came when you didn’t want them, and wouldn’t come when you did.

  :We’re in nasty times. Someone has to be willing to put down nasty facts without editing them,: Kantor continued. :And you like cats. You like rat-terriers, too.:

  He ignored that last. :Hmm. Nasty facts like my little exercise tonight?: he replied.

  :It ought to be written down somewhere,: Kantor countered. :Maybe not for common consumption, but if someone doesn’t record everything, no matter how unflattering to the Heralds it is, the next generation is going to get
the idea that we’re all plaster saints. Then when someone has to do something underhanded for a good reason, nobody will be willing to do it. . . . :

  He sighed. There was that. And plenty of Chroniclers in the past had created “auxiliary Chronicles” that not everyone was allowed to read, Chronicles that recorded mistakes, blunders, errors in judgment, and jobs undertaken that were somewhat less than the letter of the law, all in unflinching detail. Not the sort of thing one gave the children, of course, but these Chronicles, and not just the standard texts, were what Alberich was studying as history. Just now he was in the middle of the very brief Chronicle of Lavan Firestorm; some of the soul-baring on the part of Herald Pol and King Theran was enough to make the heart ache. He could relate all too easily to the litany of “should haves” and “could haves.”

  Well, if Trainee Myste—who was certainly being allowed to read and study the unexpurgated versions of the Chronicles—was able to combine the qualities of detachment and tough-mindedness that the job required, especially now, well done to her. Elcarth probably wasn’t; he was too tenderhearted to be unflattering to people he liked, even when it wasn’t possible to get to the truth without being unflattering.

  Mind, only a handful of people would know that for certain within Myste’s or Elcarth’s lifetime, because the Chronicles weren’t written for the present generations, they were written for the future, and very few Heralds other than the King and the King’s Own were allowed to see what their current Chronicler wrote. And then it was in terms of editing by similarly tough-minded Heralds, and only to ensure accuracy.