It wasn’t just, or even mostly, that he was lonely. Arville was afraid he wasn’t going to be a very good Herald.
The “joke” (which Arville didn’t think was all that funny) had been that with the Gifts and other talents each of them had, combined with their faults, the four of them made one really outstanding Herald. Laurel’s variant on Empathy meant that virtually everyone she met liked her and wanted to help her. Like most Heralds, Rod and Alma could Mindspeak only with their Companions, but they both made up for that by being logical and practical. In Alma’s case, her ability to reason to a swift answer and her Artificer training amounted to genius. Rod was a natural leader; whenever things were going wrong, everyone, even those who didn’t know him, looked first to him for guidance.
But Arville . . .
He sighed. What do I have? I can run really, really fast. I’m not all that smart. Nobody ever wants me to lead. I’ve got Ryu, but a lot of people would mistake him for a monster. And I’ve got Luck as my Gift, which is nice for me but doesn’t do much for anyone else. Now he wished Elyn had flunked him and made him do a second year as a Journeyman. He felt woefully unprepared for all of this.
:And so do the others,: Pelas assured him. He looked up from where he’d been glumly contemplating the rear ends of Ruddy and Brownie. :And they miss you.:
Surely his own Companion wouldn’t lie, would he? “How do you know that?” he demanded. Well, not demanded. It came out a lot more plaintive than a demand.
:Because I keep in touch with their Companions. Why wouldn’t they miss you? You’re still all best friends, right?: Pelas tossed his head and gave Arville a sideways look. :Distance isn’t ever going to change that.:
Arville sighed again. Pelas wasn’t lying to him, but Arville couldn’t see how the Companion could possibly know that was true. Or it might be true now, but how long would it continue to be true?
The imagination that all too readily populated the world with ghosts, demons, and monsters was just as good at picturing how his best friends would discover how much better their lives were without him.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, tomorrow morning he was going to be pulling into his first village as a Herald on his own. He couldn’t make people like him the way Laurel did. No one ever looked at him—in his uniform that always looked too big, even though it had been fitted exactly to his size—and saw a leader or someone they could respect. If they had some sort of problem, he’d never be able to reason his way through it the way Alma could.
If it hadn’t been for Pelas trotting alongside, radiating confidence in him, he’d have turned the caravan around and gone straight back home to Haven, and . . . what, then? He couldn’t have Pelas if he wasn’t going to be a Herald. If he wasn’t good enough to sort out a tiny little village’s problems, how could he expect to handle the bigger problems in Haven? And he certainly wasn’t any kind of a teacher!
So there it was. All this had seemed doable back when he’d been one part of four, but now he was on his own. And there was no turning back.
:The only way out is through, Chosen,: Pelas said cheerfully.
He sighed. At least he’d be able to camp tonight in peace, make himself a good meal. Maybe break out one of those honeycomb travel cakes. By this time tomorrow, he probably would be so sick with stress he wouldn’t have an appetite anyway.
• • •
The first thing that Arville heard when he approached the tiny village of Sternbridge was shouting. Angry shouting. Alarmed, he decided to pull the caravan in under the shelter of some trees beside the river that stood between him and the village, tether the horses out, and ride in on Pelas. I’m not going to make much of an impression regardless, but I’ll make less of one if they think I’m a trader and not a Herald.
“Ryu,” he said as he unhitched Brownie and Ruddy, put halters on them, hobbled them, and tethered them in the midst of a lush patch of grass. “Will you stay here and keep an eye on the horses? I don’t want them wandering off or somebody stealing them.”
In reality he didn’t want anyone seeing Ryu before he had a chance to find out what was going on over there—where there was still angry shouting. And, depending on what he found, maybe not at all. Even though kyrees were native to the Pelagir Hills . . . or, at least, to the Pelagiris Forest . . . they weren’t all that common, and he didn’t want people to panic and think Ryu was some sort of monster.
“Rure, Rarrille!” Ryu said cheerfully and flopped down beside the horses, who were perfectly accustomed to him at this point. Arville went inside the caravan and changed out of the old working clothes he was wearing—a very worn set of Whites that were . . . technically white . . . and into a set of his brand-new and unworn Whites, picked up from the seamstress before he left. It wouldn’t matter, of course. He would never look like a proper Herald, like Rod, say, or Laurel. But at least he’d be in Whites and not Smudgeds.
Then he got Pelas’ working tack out of the storage box built into the side of the caravan and onto his Companion. This wasn’t as fancy as formal tack, but it did come with bridle bells, so as the two of them cantered over the hand-hewn wooden bridge to the little cluster of houses that called itself Sternbridge, the bells rang out cheerfully, announcing their arrival.
And, apparently, just in time . . .
There was the tiniest of tiny squares in this village, really little more than a common pump and watering trough surrounded by some turf where, presumably, people set up stalls during seasonal fairs. And it was there that Arville and Pelas found the heart of the commotion: what looked like everyone in the village either keeping custody of a young girl bound and weeping or attempting to erect what looked like the scaffold for a public hanging.
Their arrival distracted everyone enough that the girl managed to break away from her captors, stumble to them, and fling herself down practically underneath Pelas’ hooves, crying, “Herald! Herald! You must save me! I have done nothing!”
A few of the bolder members of the group started to rush forward to grab her again, but Pelas reared and lashed out with his forehooves as Arville hung on, desperately trying to look as if he were as confident and imposing as Rod. The villagers backed right off when Pelas uttered a challenging scream that put the hair up on Arville’s neck.
In fact, that alone was enough to stop all activity and babble dead and focus the attention of the entire group on Arville and Pelas.
Arville pulled himself up out of his usual slouch and set his face in a frown. “What’s going on here?” he demanded, and he felt rather proud of himself when the words came out with some authority.
Unfortunately, that only unleashed the babble again. All Arville could make out from the angry shouting was that the girl was accused of being a thief and that she had stolen some valuable objects, including jewelry, silver spoons, and some unidentifiable trinkets. Within minutes, his ears rang, and he began to get a headache.
:Let them yell themselves out, Chosen,: Pelas advised, stomping a warning hoof whenever anyone ventured too near. :Just sit there looking annoyed.:
That wasn’t hard at all, given that “annoyed” and “experiencing a splitting headache” invoked practically the same expression.
Finally, as Pelas had suggested they would, the villagers ran out of accusations to make. And faced with a Herald frowning silently at them from the back of a scary big Companion, they, too, fell silent.
“Did anyone see her take any of the things you claim she did?” Arville asked, the first question to pop into his head, along with the thought that Alma would certainly have demanded to know just that.
The villagers exchanged wary looks. Finally the one who seemed to have appointed himself to be in charge of the hanging admitted, “Well, no, but—”
Arville didn’t get him get any further. Now using Rod as his example, he barked, “And were your things found anywhere on her or in her possession?”
> The head man was clearly taken aback. Obviously he wasn’t used to being cut off by anyone. And it surprised another “Well, no, but—”
“She hid ’em somewhere!” someone else shouted, which started up another chorus of yelling. Arville waited that one out, too.
Meanwhile, he thought of another question Alma would have asked. “Didn’t any of you look for a hiding place?” he demanded in Rod’s voice. “She’s just a girl! You mean to tell me she was smarter about finding a hiding place than all of you are?”
As he had hoped, the implication that they were a bunch of wooden-headed boobs invoked a torrent of claims that “they had looked everywhere!”
To which Arville responded, “Then you looked everywhere, looked completely and thoroughly, and found no hiding place for the stolen goods, and you didn’t find them among her possessions or on her person. So what are you suggesting? That she stole them and threw them in the river or down a well? Is that’s what you think? But those aren’t the actions of a thief. Those are the actions of someone with something wrong in their head. And you can’t hang someone for that. Not in Valdemar, you can’t.”
The man who seemed to think he was in charge got all red-faced at this challenge to his authority and shouted, “We aren’t in—”
Pelas cut him off this time, with another trumpeting neigh, giving Arville time to think of exactly what Herald Elyn would have said to the claim that this village wasn’t in Valdemar. “Oh?” he asked, slyly. “You’re saying you’re going back on that petition you sent the Crown to be included inside Valdemar’s borders? Well, good, I’ll just send a message to intercept the platoon of the Guard that was on its way here to give you that garrison of protection you were asking for. That will save us a lot of money and trouble. I’ll just be on my way then.” And he picked up the reins as if to head back across the river.
It wasn’t only the terrified girl who wailed in protest at that—it was a good half of the villagers. In fact, they sounded downright panicked about it. Arville waited for a bit until they quieted down, then dropped his hands to the saddlebow. “Do I take that to mean you’ve changed your mind, and you are in Valdemar now?”
The man who considered himself in charge opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, looked around at his fellow villagers, and closed it once more, this time for good.
“All right, then,” Arville said into the silence. “So . . . here I am. And from everything you’ve told me, nobody saw this girl stealing anything, nobody found anything that she allegedly stole, and you’ve really got no evidence she did anything wrong. All you do have is a bunch of missing stuff and no idea where it went. Right?”
Mutters. Exchanged looks among the villagers, some baffled, some sullen, some exasperated, but no one denied the truth of what he had just said.
“All right, then. You untie this girl and let her go,” he ordered. “This is not how we do things in Valdemar. I’m here, and I will conduct an investigation. Who lost the silver spoons?”
A cross-faced woman standing next to the man in charge raised her hand.
“All right,” Arville said. “Since those are the most valuable of the missing things, I’ll start with you. Now untie this girl. If you want to lock her up in a shed with some food and water and a bedroll until I’m done, that’s fine. But there won’t be any hanging today.”
• • •
After everyone had dispersed and the girl had been locked up in a nice shed—one in the shade, with a bedroll, a clean pail of water, and the first food she’d had in more than a day—Arville spoke to the woman with the stolen spoons, who turned out to be the wife of the local miller. They were the most prosperous couple in the village, her husband was the one that had done most of the talking, and she had clearly egged him on to this hanging.
He wished he were a strong enough Mindspeaker to set a Truth Spell; if he were, the problem would be solved a lot sooner. He was just going to have to think like Alma and Rod: be logical, walk through this mystery step by step, and be patient. Well . . . being patient was not something he needed to imitate. He was always patient. He was the most patient of the four of them.
“So, Dame Eller, this girl—” he began.
“Yulia,” the miller’s wife almost spat, as if she hated the name right along with the girl.
“Yulia. She’s your servant? For how long?” Patiently, he extracted the story. Yulia’s parents had been traders whose caravan had been attacked by . . . something . . . just outside the village; ten-year-old Yulia had been found hiding in a chest inside it and was taken in by the Ellers to be their servant. Arville found that Dame Eller actually had no reason whatsoever to suspect the girl of being a thief except that during her first year as their servant, like any child, she’d snitched bits of food in the kitchen. And that had stopped once Dame Eller had beaten her for it.
In fact, there had been no apparent reason for Dame Eller to be so hateful toward the girl in the first place . . . no reason, that is, until the Ellers’ eldest son, Morten, had started meandering in the direction of the shed where Yulia was being kept, and his mother called him back in a tone of pure rage. It was easy enough to read that little story, even for someone as normally dense about people in love as Arville was.
It was Dame Eller’s insistence that Yulia was a thief that had gotten everyone else who’d had things go missing decide that she had taken their things as well. When he questioned the others, they all admitted that while there had been occasions when they had shown Yulia the object, or she’d had occasion to see it, they hadn’t seen her anywhere nearby on the day it went missing. And once he gently pointed that out to them, they started losing their enthusiasm for a hanging. And at that point, that was his main concern; it was pretty obvious that he needed to get to the bottom of this thing, but he wasn’t going to be able to keep Yulia safe and conduct an investigation at the same time.
By the end of the day, he had everyone but the senior Ellers in a somewhat chastened frame of mind, and some of those who hadn’t lost any valuables volunteered to make sure “nobody gets hot-headed again.” That was good enough for Arville, and he and Pelas went back across the river to the caravan around sunset, with enough time to fix a meal, water and feed the horses, and give Ryu a chance to go hunt for his own dinner before they settled into the caravan for the night.
He’d taken one of the bunks along the side for himself. He was tall, and the most comfortable one, across the front wall, just behind the driver’s seat, was too short for him. Ryu had that one. They both settled in, and Arville blew out the lantern so bugs wouldn’t be attracted inside and opened the windows so fresh air could come in before climbing up into his chosen bunk. He’d considered taking the bottom one, but on second thought, having several hundred pounds of grain above him while he slept didn’t seem like a good idea.
:So what are you thinking?: Pelas asked, as he tucked his hands behind his head and closed his eyes to think better.
:I can’t see how it’s Yulia. There’s no reason for her to steal those things. She can’t use them or wear them. There’s nowhere for her to sell them.:
:She could be taking them for revenge and throwing them down a well,: Pelas pointed out. :Or this could be a conspiracy between her and Morten Eller. She and he could have been stealing things, planning on running away together and selling it all in another town.:
Arville thought about that for a moment. :Well, if they’re going to run away together, Morten’ll find a way to distract the guard on Yulia, they’ll collect their loot, and escape tonight. If he’s in on it with her, he has to be getting nervous about me sniffing around. I dunno how we’d figure out if she was throwing things down a well or into the river, though—wait, I wonder if I could scare her into it, making her think I could put a Truth Spell on her?:
He sensed Pelas’ approval. :That can work, but if she’s innocent, as we both think, we need to consider other p
ossibilities. So who else were you thinking might be our culprit?:
Arville had a good answer for that. :Hoarder rat.: He knew from his Circuit with Elyn that the things were all over the Pelagiris Forest, and they were master thieves. Usually they stole food, but sometimes they stole shiny or colorful things and hid them in their nests. :I figured Ryu could literally sniff around tomorrow and see if he could smell one or more of them around where things went missing.:
Ryu’s Mindvoice was perfectly clear, as opposed to his speaking voice. :Wowsers!: he replied with enthusiasm, a nonsense exclamation he’d picked up from Alma. :Sure! Great idea!:
:Do the sniffing first,: Pelas advised. :If Morten, Yulia, or both are guilty, it will give them more time to get nervous. Well done, friends, we have a plan. I think we’ve earned our rest.:
• • •
He’d introduced Ryu to the villagers as his “Rethwellan mastiff.” Most of them knew a mastiff was a very big dog, none of them had ever seen a kyree, and Rethwellan was just the name of a foreign land to them, so they accepted the name—and Ryu himself—as being what the Herald said he was. Arville hated to lie . . . but he needed Ryu to be able to move freely around the village and see if he could sniff anything out.
Yulia was still where she’d been locked up last night. Morten was still moping around, staying within sight of the shed but out of sight of his mother. So unless they were extraordinarily timid (in which case, how had they been brave enough to steal anything in the first place?) or stupid (in which case, how had they been smart enough to steal and get away with it?), the idea that the two had been building a nest egg to run away on seemed to be a washout.
So that left Arville with his second-to-last card: sending Ryu around to every place things had been stolen from to see if he could sniff out one of the little purloining pests. They started at the site of the latest theft, figuring any scent would be fresher there. Dame Eller had just finished polishing her spoons and rinsing the polishing grit for them, laying them out on a towel in the sunlight on a table by a window to dry. Ryu went straight to the table in question, under Dame Eller’s gimlet eye, and began sniffing. And sniffing. And sniffing. With a very puzzled expression on his face.
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