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

by Mercedes Lackey

  Tonight had been one of those nights when nothing whatsoever happened, or was going to happen, except, perhaps, a common brawl or two. The threatening storm had made people think twice about leaving whatever cramped little corner they called “home”—people with only a single set of clothing had to shiver in it until it dried on their backs if they got soaked through. The taverns had been half empty, and none of his informants had poked their noses out of their holes. When the sky above the rooftops to the west began flickering with far-off lightning, he had given up. He’d hoped to get back to the Collegium before the rain began, but luck wasn’t with him, it seemed.

  Then, again, perhaps it was.

  Heralds were common enough visitors here in the Bell that no one remarked on their presence. When Alberich arrived here, he didn’t wear his trademark gray leathers anymore, he wore Whites, which made him blend in with the other Heralds who frequented the place. Sometimes a Herald just wanted to get away from the Collegium, have a tankard or a glass of wine, flirt harmlessly with a serving girl. And why not? Heralds, as Talamir took pains to remind him, were only human.

  Sometimes a number of friends wanted to get together when they all came in at once; there really wasn’t a big enough room in the Palace where five or more could put their feet up and talk as long and as loudly as they wanted. You could get food anytime you wanted it, but it tended to be the sort of thing that could be fed to a great many people at once—and a bespoke meal, of exactly what one had a craving for, was something even Heralds sometimes fancied.

  The innkeeper took him to the Heralds’ parlor and showed him to a seat by a window, from which he could see, in the frequent flashes of lightning, rain pouring down as if it would never stop. A moment later, a serving girl brought him hot pigeon pie of his own, and a tankard of the innkeeper’s own bitter ale. It wasn’t Karsite, but it was close, and unlike the harsh brews of the mountains, it was good.

  The high back of the settle screened him from most of the room, which, in any event, was empty and likely to remain so if the weather continued to be this bad. There was no closing door to this room, and a low hum, like a hive of drowsy bees, came from the common room, in between peals of thunder. The contrast between inside and outside was so striking; storms like this commonly occurred in the mountains of Karse, but this was the first time he’d ever spent one sitting in a comfortable, warm seat with a hot dinner in front of him and the spicy scent of mulled cider in the air.

  He could remember dozens of these storms when he was a tiny child, when he’d huddled beside the smoking, struggling fire on the hearth in the middle of the room, while the roof leaked in a dozen places and more rain dripped down through the smoke hole in the middle of the roof. The shutters would rattle with the force of the wind, and his mother would hold him close as she carefully fed the fire with the driest bits of wood, to keep it alive. He didn’t remember the ones when he was in the temple, though; that sturdy wooden structure never left him with the fear that at any moment the roof would blow away. But the ones when he was older, helping out at the inn—yes. He’d be in the stable, helping to calm the horses, struggling to get doors closed, running all over with buckets to catch leaks. Or he’d be out in it, tying things down, bringing them in, and never mind the lightning striking near—too near!—and the cold rain soaking him through. The Academy was down in the valley, in a place that didn’t get storms like that, but once he was out with the cavalry—oh, he lived through plenty more of them. Most of the time, out in the open. You hoped for a chance to get your tents up first, and you’d wrap every blanket you had around your shoulders and watch the rain stream down off the edges of the canvas and know it would be a cold supper again. Being caught without shelter, though, was worse. The best you could do was get down in a valley, try and find the scrubbiest, lowest stand of trees, and get under them. You’d get off your horse, because with the lighting and thunder, even a trained cavalry horse could bolt. You’d use the canvas of your tent as a raincape, and hope it kept the worst of it off you, standing with your head down, one hand holding your horse’s bridle up near his nose, the other holding the canvas just under your chin, shivering, both you and the horse.

  Oh, this was better, much better, like so much of his life since he’d come to Valdemar. And yet, it was not enough, and he was not certain if the problem was within himself or Valdemar.

  He was glad enough that there was no one here. It allowed him to be left alone with his thoughts. He was rarely truly alone for very long.

  “I understand you’ve lost your first fight,” said someone at his elbow.

  The voice was female—familiar, but he couldn’t put a name to it immediately, for the words startled him so much.

  “Eh?” was all he could manage, as he swiveled to see who it was that had interrupted his solitude.

  “With a fish,” Herald—no longer Trainee—Myste amended, her glass lenses glittering with reflected lightning. She sat down across from him without waiting to be invited. “A rather small fish,” she added in Karsite, with a chuckle.

  The serving-girl, laden with Myste’s dinner, set her dishes down opposite Alberich’s, then she whisked back through the door to the common room, leaving them together.

  “Ah.” He found trying to see past those lenses rather disconcerting. “You have been speaking with Selenay.”

  He found it a relief to speak Karsite; Valdemaran was still a trial to him, and he had the sinking feeling that it was going to take years, even tens of years, before he was comfortable in it. He managed with his low-class personae mainly by being taciturn, knowing that the people around him wouldn’t recognize a Karsite accent anyway.

  “It’s more-or-less my job,” she replied. “It’s thanks to you I’ve got the job, I’m told—training with Elcarth, and Interning in the city courts with Selenay as the senior judge. I’m Elcarth’s Second, and Elcarth believes I should be ready to step into the Herald-Chronicler position within a year or two.”

  “Good,” he said, and meant it. “And what has my ignorance of fishing got to do with the Chronicles?”

  “Not a thing,” she admitted. “It just came up in our discussions. I just let people rattle on, you know; it’s the most effective way to learn things.” She paused, and tilted her head to the side. “I don’t suppose you would be willing to rattle on at me?”

  He opened his mouth to say no, then closed it again. It was an interesting thought. “And this would go into the restricted Chronicles?” he asked instead.

  “Possibly. Some things should be common knowledge, and by the time anyone reads my Chronicles, all of those covert identities you’ve got now are going to be outdated.”

  So she knew about what he was doing! Well, he shouldn’t have been surprised if she was Elcarth’s Second; she’d be reading the restricted Chronicles that he was writing. He wondered, knowing that she must know about the secret room here, if she’d come down on purpose to waylay him.

  She ate two or three bites, reminding him that his own dinner was getting cold. He started in on it; delicious, as always from the Bell’s kitchens. Pigeon pie was a delicacy in Karse; the only pigeons there were the larger wood pigeons and calling doves, hard to catch and reserved for those with falcons to take them. Here in the city, though, there were pigeon lofts everywhere, and the common rock doves bred like rabbits. It was rabbit pie that was the ordinary man’s fare in Karse, in fact. Rabbit pie, rabbit stew, rabbit half-raw and half-burned on a stick over the fire. . . .

  “I grew up on this—” Myste said, gesturing with her fork to her plate. “We had a loft in the back yard. I find I miss the taste at the Collegium.”

  “Hmm. It is good,” he agreed. “Not common fare where I come from.”

  “Well, here—in the city especially—you make up your pies with whatever you have to eat for supper in the morning, and drop them off at your neighborhood bake shop as you go off to work and pick them up when you return, along with your bread. Most people with small apartments or sin
gle rooms don’t have a bake oven; in fact, especially in the city, most people only have the hearth fire to stew over and not a proper kitchen at all.” Myste didn’t seem to want a response; she went back to her dinner, and he followed her example.

  “It is much the same in Karse,” he offered, “Save that there is no bake shop, or rather, the baking place is often the inn. And we steam food as often as stew it.” He well remembered the smell of the baking rabbit pies in the kitchen of the inn where his mother worked. They’d come out, and woe betide anyone who touched them, each with a particular mark for the family that had left them, and a star cut into the crust of the inn pies. He’d never gotten a quarter pie like this, hot from the oven. He and his mother had been on the bottom of the hierarchy of servants, and were treated accordingly. First were the customers, of course, then the innkeeper, his wife, and children. Then came the cook and the chief stableman, who got whatever intact portions the innkeeper’s family left. Then the cook’s helpers, the serving girls, the potboys who served the drink. Then the grooms in the stables and the chambermaids. Then, at last, Alberich, his mother, and the wretched little scullery maid and turn-spit boy. Which meant that what he got was broken crust, gravy, bits of vegetable. Or anything that was burned, over-baked, or somehow ill-made—too much salt, he recalled that pie only too well. But they got enough to eat, that was the point; once his mother got that job at the inn, scrubbing the floors, they never went hungry. There was always day-old bread and dripping, the fat and juices that came off the roasts and were collected in a drippings pan underneath. There was always oat porridge, plain though that might be, and pease porridge, the latter being such a staple of the common fare and so often called for that there was always a pot of it in the corner of the hearth. Pease porridge was the cheapest foodstuff available at his inn, and they sold a lot of it; when the pot was about half empty, the cook would start a new lot, so that when the first pot was gone the second was ready to serve. All of the inn’s servants could help themselves to a bowl of it at any time, even the scullery maid and the boy that sat in the chimney corner and turned the spit in all weathers. The innkeeper was thrifty, but generous with the food, not like some Alberich encountered over the years, who starved their help as well as working them to exhaustion.

  “Ah.” Myste stacked her emptied plates to the side with a sigh of satisfaction; Alberich pushed his beside them. “I don’t mean you to begin nattering at me at this moment, Alberich. I just meant that when you feel like it, I’d be glad of your addition to the Chronicles. And I don’t mind being a listener if all you want to do is talk. Think out loud, maybe. Or just talk to hear Karsite.”

  He smiled slightly. “Knowing your unending curiosity, I thank you for your patience.”

  “My curiosity has as much as it needs on a regular basis right now,” Myste replied. “You know, before Elcarth took me on, I was never satisfied. I wanted to know, not so much what was going on, but why. That was the thing that drove me mad, sometimes. Why had this or that law been made, why were your people such persistent enemies, why—Well, there are always more questions than answers. Now I’m able to find out my whys, more often than not, and more to the point, I’m entitled and encouraged to do so.” She smiled, and her lenses glittered. “Maybe that’s why I was Chosen; I can’t think of any other reason.”

  He laughed. “Is that why you were always such a thorn in my side, as a Trainee? That you could not be told to do a thing without wanting the reason for it?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t take orders well unless I know why the order is being given. And I’ll be the first to admit to you that I’m very lucky and have been unusually favored in that way. Most people can’t afford to indulge that particular luxury; they either follow their orders without question, or—well, there are unpleasant consequences for wanting answers.” She rubbed her thumb absently against the little “clerk’s callus” on the side of the second finger of her right hand, a callus created by hours of pressure from a pen.

  He nodded, wondering suspiciously if she was hinting at his past.

  “The more I’m in the courts, the more I realize that,” she continued. “As a clerk, well, I knew why I was doing what I was doing. It was obvious. Pointless, perhaps, but obvious.” She glanced up at him, sideways. “You know, you have to be a clerk, I think, before you realize just what a pother people make over nothing. And the sheer amount of ill-will that people seem to think must go down on paper, or die. Dear gods!”

  “What, letters?” he asked.

  “No. People mostly write their own vitriol in letters. We’re a literate people, Alberich; that’s mandated by the Crown. Just as Karsite children are required to go to the temple for religious instruction, ours are required to get instruction in reading, writing, and figuring. No, I meant legal documents, that’s mostly what a clerk handles. At least, my sort of clerk. There are others who do things about money, but I’ve never had that kind of head for figures. I saw a lot of wills.” She sighed. “A lot of wills. And depositions. And the documents involved in lawsuits. Well, since you’ve been acting as bodyguard to young Selenay, you’ve seen what happens when something gets as far as the courts!”

  He nodded again. “But it is important to them.”

  “Some people have too much leisure, if that’s what’s important to them,” she said sourly. “Wrangling over dead granny’s best bedcover, as if the fate of the Kingdom depended on it, when all the while down there in the South—”

  She couldn’t finish; she just sat there, shaking her head.

  He thought back about all of the things he had observed while Selenay sat, either in judgment as the principal judge or as an assistant when she was still a Trainee. “I do not understand it either,” he said, then added, with a touch of humor, “but then, I never had so many possessions that things took on a great importance to me.”

  She burst out laughing at that. “Whereas I have too many, thieving magpie that I am! So I suppose I should understand them! Then again, most of my possessions are books, so I still don’t understand why people would get into such a state over a few pence or a set of silver.” She looked ever-so-slightly superior.

  “And if it was dead granny’s library that was in dispute?” he asked shrewdly, to puncture that superiority.

  She saw it—and bravely took the blow. “There you have me. Dead in the black.” She laughed. “Oh, look. The rain’s starting to slacken up!”

  He glanced out the window. She was right; the downpour had turned into something lighter, and the lightning had moved off into the far distance. “It could be just a lull,” he warned, as she made as if to get up.

  “Could be, but I’ll take my chances. I need to get back up the hill; I’m tutoring a couple of Trainees.” She did get up then, and he found himself wishing she would stay.

  He stifled an impulse to catch hold of her hand to prevent her leaving, but she seemed to sense something, and turned back toward him.

  “I meant that, about nattering at me, Alberich,” she said. “You know, I don’t put personal things in the Chronicles. Not unless they’re reasons for something happening, and it would have to be a pretty important something. And Alberich?”

  “Yes?” Something had passed—was passing—between them. Something he didn’t recognize and didn’t understand. She stared at him; he sensed her eyes behind those lenses, oddly intent.

  “You might try talking to Geri as well. After all, that’s what he’s there for, isn’t it?” She had an oddly wry smile on her face. “Well, all things considered, that’s part of his job, I’d think—to be talked at.”

  And with that remarkable statement, she was gone.

  He sat there for some time, in the half-dark, wondering why this conversation seemed to have—well—a feeling of importance about it.

  :Perhaps because it’s another Herald?: Kantor asked.

  He hadn’t ever gotten such an odd feeling from anyone else, not even Talamir. :No, it’s not just that. She’s not an Empath, is
she?:

  :Not so far as I know,; his Companion replied thoughtfully. :But she does have one rather odd little Gift. She doesn’t have to cast the Truth Spell to know if someone is telling the truth, so long as she’s in close proximity to them. It’s why she’s in the city courts, in fact.:

  Interesting. Perhaps that was why she seemed to be able to get the people to tell her so much. Perhaps that was why she was so focused on needing to know the why of things. If you always knew that something was true or false, maybe your focus shifted from finding out the truth, to finding out the reasons behind it.

  If you knew that something was true, maybe that impelled you to talk to others, as well as listen to them.

  :Am I needed up the hill?: he asked. Kantor would know; the Companions always seemed to be more-or-less in contact with one another.

  Kantor’s reply was immediate. :No. And I’ve no objection to staying here in this nice, dry stable if you have something you need to do. Shall I tell them you’re going to be down here a while?:

  :Please do.: Myste might not be the right person to talk to about some of the things that were troubling him, but she was right about one thing. Gerichen was, and if he couldn’t take counsel with one of Vkandis’ own, who could he speak with? :Tell them—:

  He hesitated. :If anyone wants to know, tell them I’m going to visit a friend.:

  The Temple of the Lord of Light in Haven was a small one, situated between a saddlery and a chandler. Alberich thought the chandler a particularly appropriate neighbor, all things considered. Candles—next to the Temple of the Light? He wondered if the chandler knew.

  He’d gone back to the secret room and donned the garb of one of his more-respectable personae, in no small part because that persona was possessed of a raincape, an article of clothing that Herald Alberich had forgotten to bring with him this evening. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt for Lysander Fleet to be seen here. It was one more layer in the persona.