It looked as if the mocking—in adult form—was about to begin all over again.
Never had she so agreed with the philosopher’s bitter observation, “The more I know of humanity, the more I appreciate my dog.”
Maybe she should get a dog.
As she stood in the middle of the now neatly organized room and contemplated forcing herself to the loom, there was another tap on the door. More diffident this time.
She answered it.
Both Heralds stood there, the elder, Callan, holding out the packet of letters. “We wanted to return these,” he said. “And thank you. They have been of incalculable help.”
She made no move to take them. “You might as well keep them,” she replied, her stomach twisting in knots that did not bode well for the squash baking at the fire. “I can’t imagine how they helped you.”
“We only got reports on what was happening as people sent them to Haven, which meant they weren’t in order of when Danet was in the particular village,” the second one—she still didn’t know his name—explained. “By the time we got a report, people had forgotten when, exactly, he was there, as well. So there was confusion as to dates by the Guard, confusion as to dates by the victims. When we tried to plot his movement on the map, it didn’t make any sense.”
“But he very kindly dates his letters to you,” Herald Callan pointed out wryly. “And although he doesn’t necessarily mention the place he is in by name, he usually lets something slip that has let us identify it. Now we know where he was, when. His course of travel is quite clear. He’s making his way south and west, by the easiest route.”
She frowned. “He’s not stupid. He can’t be planning to carry on this scheme forever.”
“We don’t think so, either,” Callan replied. “We think he intends to go to Rethewellan. His thefts by themselves have not been very large—the things he has taken have all been valuable, but not the sort of thing that someone would raise a huge hue and cry over. When he has defrauded people of money, it has not been large amounts. But impersonating a Herald, he has no expenses. People rush to give him food, shelter, anything he needs.”
She nodded slowly. “So all those little bits are adding up to a right tidy sum.”
“By the time he gets to Rethwellan, he’ll have enough to—” Here Callan paused. “Well, I am not sure I know what he plans.”
She thought it over for a moment, the same way that she thought over the design for a tapestry when it wasn’t something straightforward, like the family arms. She let her mind go blank and waited for all the pieces to come together.
When they did, she was glad she didn’t have anything breakable in her hand, for she would surely have thrown it.
“He’s going to trick himself out like a rich man or a noble,” she growled. “Then he will go looking for a woman with a lot of money, probably one older, or ugly. He’ll be very clever about how he approaches her so that she never suspects what he wants. He’ll make sure that in the end, it appears that she is courting him, rather than the other way around. He might marry her. He might just live off her, then disappear one day . . . and go find a new victim.”
“Now you see why we want you to come with us,” Callan replied. “You know how he thinks.”
She opened her mouth to give him a sharp retort, but then the memory of her neighbors’ pitying and smug faces rose up before her.
To have to face that for the next several weeks or months . . .
The tapestry she was working on would not be done before winter came and made it impossible to transport, and the owners were not expecting it before spring. She had no pets, no livestock, nothing that depended on her to care for it. She could just lock up the cottage and leave.
She had never been outside the village. Suddenly, she wanted to.
“All right,” she growled. “But I won’t be staying in any of your Herald shacks.”
“We would never expect you to!” Callan said hastily. “They aren’t build to hold more than two anyway. How soon can you leave?”
“No longer than it takes me to pack.” She didn’t need much, either. She wasn’t some fancy lady that needed fuss and bows and scent. Just her clothing, her brush and her toothscrubber. She turned her back on them and went into the cottage. How hard was it to pack, after all? It wasn’t as if she had clothing she had to go through. What she wore for every day was good enough.
To keep the Heralds busy while she packed, she took the squash out of the fireplace corner and set it in front of them with salt and pepper on the table. And even though she had never packed for an overnight trip before, it really was no great task to have everything in a neat bundle in a short period of time.
They weren’t even finished eating by the time she was done. So she ate one of the meat pies, then put the rest of the food in her basket well wrapped up and put it next to her bundle.
To her surprise, without prompting, the Heralds cleaned up after themselves and washed all the dishes to boot.
“We’ll get our things and the Companions,” said the younger. And so they went off, leaving her to tidy what little there was left to do, and shut and lock the door. They didn’t leave her waiting on her stoop long, either. They must not have unpacked their own bags. Long before she became impatient, they came riding up to her door, a pillion pad behind Callan.
Without a word, the younger got down, boosted her up behind Callan, and showed her how to hang on. He took her bundle and basket up and tied them up on top of his own bags, and they were off.
Being up on the back of an animal was a new sensation. It made her nervous at first, but after the first few paces she began to enjoy it. It was quite odd, being half again taller than she was used to. And the astonished looks that the villagers gave her as they rode through were altogether gratifying.
This might not be so bad, after all.
They stayed in inns, and not nasty ones, either. She’d heard about the nasty ones from some of her suppliers of dyes and the yarns and threads she couldn’t get locally and from the merchants who carried away her commissioned tapestries. No, these were nice, tidy places where she wasn’t afraid to sleep in the bed for fear of being carried off by vermin. The food was decent, not fancy, but she didn’t particularly trust food that came all covered in sauces and spices and hiding inside crusts. She got her own small room. There was always a bathhouse. The younger Herald—she finally learned his name the third day out—also made sure that she put her laundry with theirs. For the first time since she was a young child, she was fed by someone else, housed by someone else, waited on by someone else, taken care of by someone else. It was a way of life she suspected she could get used to very quickly.
She noticed that the Heralds “paid” for these stays with some form of paper scrip, and she finally wondered aloud how Danet was managing this without leaving some trail behind.
Sendar, the younger of the two, just shrugged. “They are not that difficult to forge; no one bothers because until now no one has ever tried to impersonate a Herald. All he had to do was get his hands on one, and if he is a decent copyist and could carve a copy of the Circle stamp, he could make as many as he liked. So many are turned in we’d never find the forgeries among the real ones.”
She sniffed a little at that. It seemed rather too chancy a system to her.
She’d heard that riding was hard, that people were generally aching and sore when they weren’t used to it. But maybe the people who had told her that were not used to working at a loom. She was a little stiff and sore, but it wasn’t bad; then again, she was riding on a Companion—maybe they were different.
She began to pay attention to the Companions. Aside from their brilliantly white coats and blue eyes, a suspicion began to dawn on her. On the fifth evening, when Callan and Sendar had finished their plotting and planning over another nice, plain supper, she voiced it.
“Your Companions can’t do anything a really good trained horse can’t do,” she said, perhaps a bit more tartly th
an she had intended.
Two sets of startled eyes met hers. “Well,” she insisted, “They can’t. Or at least, a really good trained horse can make it look as if he’s doing the same things. Five years ago, an animal trainer came through at Fair time, and his horse could do just about anything. Sit up like a dog, lie down, follow any command he gave it, count, add. I was watching, and he gave it signals, because I gave him a complicated sum, and the horse got it wrong just as he did. But Danet saw the same trainer. All he had to do was find a white horse trained that well, and get it to take signals from him, and there you go! Companion. Just keep painting the hooves silver when no one is watching, and plenty of white horses have blue eyes.”
She thought a long moment more, while the truth of her words penetrated to them. “It makes me wonder now if he didn’t plan this all along. Maybe he even had a horse ready for him when he ran off.” That thought didn’t help her at all; if anything, it made the deception even more bitter, because he clearly had never intended any of the things he’d promised her, and she’d had the wool pulled right over her eyes. But she wasn’t one to lie to herself.
“If he planned that far ahead,” Callan said, slowly, “Then he has surely planned for the moment when real Heralds confront him.”
“He’ll brazen it out long enough to buy himself some time, then bolt while you’re dealing with all the people that think he is the real one and you are the imposters,” she pointed out. “He doesn’t need long.”
There was silence. “This is why we asked you to come along,” Callan said, ruefully. “You know how he might think, and you point out things that we would not consider—”
“Like trained horses?” She shrugged. “I hope you can work out some sort of plan to deal with this. I’m just a weaver.” And with that, she took herself up the stairs to that extremely comfortable little room.
When she came back down in the morning to enjoy a truly fine breakfast, they still hadn’t come up with much of a plan other than, “We are going to have to scout this out without him finding out we are Heralds.”
“And what are you going to pose as?” she asked.
They both blinked. “We hadn’t gotten that far,” Sendar said.
She sighed and dug into a really outstanding slice of egg-and-bacon pie. “He won’t have set up in a town. When he settles in for winter, he needs a small village so he can charm everyone in it. And the one or two who are suspicious will keep their mouths shut for fear of antagonizing their neighbors. That means everyone will know everyone else, and you cannot impersonate someone local.”
“We could be peddlers—” Sendar began.
She laughed. “Where is your cart? Your packhorse? Do you know anything about the sorts of things that a peddler who visits a small village is likely to carry? Do you know the right prices? What a fair trade would be? I doubt that either of you knows the first thing about mending a pot, so posing as tinkers is not going to work either.”
As they began to look nonplused and flustered, she helped herself to biscuits and butter. Finally she took pity on them. “Instead of trying to do something you don’t know anything about, what can you do?”
They exchanged looks again. “We’ve never thought about it,” Callan finally replied.
She bit back the reply of “Well, then start thinking about it!” and just left them to it.
They discussed it for far too long in her opinion, coming up with all sorts of things that were likely to fall apart the moment someone in the village asked a few questions. She was actually learning a lot about them, although they were probably utterly unaware of the fact. It became clear to her that neither of them had ever done what she would consider “work” in their lives. Which meant they were both from some highborn family or other, the sort of people who commissioned her tapestries.
Usually they managed to knock the legs out from under each others’ schemes, which at least showed a modicum of good sense in her opinion. Once in a while she had to remind them of what life in a small village was like, how everyone knew everyone else, and how Danet, once he had ingratiated himself, would have the upper hand.
But finally it was Sendar who came up with something even she had to approve of.
“We make up a religion and become monks or priests of it,” he said, finally. “Something humble, inoffensive. Vows of poverty, nonviolence, all that. We can crib things from any religion we care to, and it won’t matter—no one can say we got it wrong because no one will recognize it, and we can exclaim about how wonderful it is that our god says the same as the other god if anyone notices the cribbing.”
“Why would you be traveling?” she asked. “People will want to know.”
“We’re going from one remote chapter house in Valdemar to another in Rethwellan,” Callan said with confidence. “I’m from up near the Iftel border, and I doubt your Danet will know anything about that area. We’ll say we’re from up there, and just make up another village in Rethwellan.”
That seemed to be a good, sound plan to her, so she kept silent while they worked out the details of their new religion. Sendar did point out with some humor that it would be important that it didn’t look attractive. The last thing they wanted to do was to create followers for a made-up religion. So aside from the vows of poverty, abstinence, and chastity, they decided that complete vegetarianism was probably going to be the most effective against country folk wanting to join up. She agreed. “Country folk like our meat and cheese and eggs,” she said. “And in case you get some odd little fervent duck who decides this is all very lovely anyway, make it a requirement that the entire family join this religion before any single member can.”
“Ah, yes, the unity of the family is of the utmost importance,” said Sendar, pulling a grave face. “Only when the family is united can such serious matters be properly decided.”
They knew they were catching up to Danet when, as they entered village after village, certain timid souls would come up, quietly, as they sat at a meal. “Pardon, Herald,” the diffident speech would be begin, “But I wonder if . . . well, this just didn’t seem right, somehow . . . do you know of a Herald Danet?”
And thus would begin the revelations. Small things mostly. Suspicion of taking a bribe. A girl’s dazzled infatuation with the white uniform taken advantage of. Sometimes things gone missing. Occasionally, instead of a quarrel being solved, having it fanned into a feud.
These things delayed them, though not, to Marya’s mind, intolerably, since she didn’t have to do much but listen and verify that no, Danet wasn’t a real Herald and yes, he’d taken similar advantage of most of the people in her own village. Free from the need to keep her mouth shut over it, there was a certain relish in being able to name names and reveal a great many indiscretions. It felt a little like revenge, in a way.
And a strange thing began to happen. She found herself becoming the recipient of similar sad little stories. Rather than confiding them to the Heralds, perhaps out of embarrassment, people seemed much more comfortable telling their tales to someone who was just like them, but whom they would never have to see again. A confluence of commonality and anonymity, perhaps. She began to take careful notes, turning them over to the Heralds at the end of the day. When Danet was found, would these things serve to determine his punishment?
She hoped so. His crimes against her were . . . well, not crimes at all. Breach of promise? But there had never been any actual promise. He never stole anything from her but her happiness. But this was certainly a way in which she could exact revenge for that.
Each place they stopped and had to sort things out, Danet was “nearer” to them in time. He had been there two months ago . . . a month ago . . . a fortnight . . .
It was clear he was not aware he was being followed, and it was time for the two Heralds to scout ahead in their guise of humble priests. They claimed they had also summoned help. How, she was not at all sure, since they hadn’t sent any messages back that she had seen. But they wanted the people of
Springdale to be convinced that Danet was a fraud first, so that he had no way to make them rise up against the real Heralds and whatever “help” was coming.
They left her behind in that village, still coaxing stories from people, and this time, having to do something new: She had to urge them not to follow in the false Herald’s wake, and try to summon him to justice themselves.
“Think about what you would have said when he was among you,” she pointed out. “The bastard has a charm that is almost magical. When he is around you, he can talk you into thinking almost anything he wants. You like him and want to believe him. If you go after him, all that will happen is that he will turn the people of Springdale against you—you’ll be the outsiders, and outnumbered, and he will easily persuade them that you are, for one reason or another, disgruntled over his judgments. Sore losers.”
Somehow she managed to persuade them. She wasn’t quite sure how, because she had not been very diplomatic about it.
Actually, “not very diplomatic” was an understatement. She’d been her usual blunt self. She usually sat them down at a table near the fire in the inn and ordered beer for them. After all, why not? The king was paying for it. Then she began with, “Don’t be an idiot,” and ended with, “I know because he did it to me.” Some people started off a little bristly, but when it become clear that she wasn’t being personal, eventually they ended up nodding their heads and going away, if not satisfied, at least prepared to allow the real Heralds to handle it. It might have been her powers of persuasion, but she was more inclined to think it was the beer.
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