Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar Page 11

  :You’re learning already.:

  Evita winced, not liking the direction the world seemed determined to take her. :So there’s no place for compassion? No room for assistance? Are you saying those things make no difference?:

  Camayo snorted. :Even the most brutish don’t believe that. Compassion, charity, aid. Some of the most wonderful concepts in all the world; but, like all things, knowing when and how to use them is the key.:

  :The Collegium will teach me . . . that?:

  :Not directly, perhaps, but you will learn it. And so much more.:

  What she once dreaded, Evita could scarcely wait to start. :What are you waiting for, Camayo? On to Valdemar!: She clambered onto his back.

  Camayo broke into a ground-swallowing gallop. They could not possibly arrive too soon.

  A Charm of Finches

  Elisabeth Waters

  Maia was working in the mews of the Temple of Thenoth, the Lord of the Beasts. The birds were all out in the weathering yard, which gave her the chance to make some improvements to their quarters. She had been a fletcher before coming to Haven, and she had Animal Mindspeech as well, so she was familiar with birds, although she was more accustomed to wild birds than tame ones. In fact, when she had moved to the city of Haven, some of the wild crows from home had chosen to come with her and Dexter, her raccoon friend.

  But even a tame bird could become incoherent if badly upset, and something had upset the owner of the new voice she suddenly heard in her head. :No! . . . sharp . . . hard . . . hurt!: Maia set down her tools and headed toward the voice, meeting the novice who had been sent to fetch her on the way.

  He led her to the infirmary, where Sara, a young Healer Trainee, was attempting to hold a finch in place so she could Heal it. Maia couldn’t see the full extent of its injuries from the doorway, but she could see a miniature dagger stuck in one wing. The bird, which was a combination of colors (gold, purple, red, and blue) not commonly found together in nature, thrashed about mindlessly, and the confusion was made worse by a girl of about ten who was sobbing hysterically. She was being restrained by a man who was probably her brother; the resemblance was strong, but he didn’t look old enough to be her father. He also looked extremely annoyed.

  “Maia!” Sara looked up in relief. “Can you get through to the bird? I can’t do anything to help it if it won’t hold still!”

  “May I suggest that we start by clearing the room?”

  The young man scowled at Maia. “I’m not leaving without my dagger.”

  “You’ll get it back much faster if you wait for it outside,” Maia said calmly. “The sooner the room is quiet, the sooner we can remove it from the bird’s wing.”

  He promptly left, dragging his sister with him. By the hair.

  Once the door had been closed and the girl’s crying was at least muffled, Maia moved to stand at the shoulder of the Healer Trainee and mentally reached out to the bird. :Be still, little one.: The bird stopped thrashing, looked at her, and cocked its head, obviously trying to puzzle out what sort of bird Maia was. She held the link with it while Sara removed the dagger and worked her Gift on the wing. Now that the bird had stopped fighting, it didn’t take long.

  “All done,” Sara said with relief, placing the bird gently in a cage at the side of the room. “It was a lucky hit—”

  “It must have been well-nigh miraculous to hit a moving target that small!”

  “No, I meant lucky from the bird’s point of view. It didn’t hit anything vital, nothing broke, and the wing should heal cleanly with no loss of flying ability.”

  “That’s good news.” Maia picked up the dagger and studied its jeweled hilt, frowning. “I’ll return this to its owner, shall I?”

  Sara sighed. “I wish I could confiscate it.”

  “I sympathize, but I don’t think you have grounds for that,” Maia pointed out. “But we can keep the bird, at least for a while, if you express enough concern for its recovery.”

  That got a grim nod in reply. “That, I can do.”

  Maia opened the door and the two of them went out into the courtyard, where the girl sat on a bench, sobbing quietly, while her brother paced impatiently.

  “Here you are,” she said, handing him the dagger. He took it without so much as a word of thanks. “I was wondering,” Maia asked, “what do you use that for? It seems too small for any practical use.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said flatly. “It’s a cloak pin.”

  “Oh.” That would explain why it’s so sharp.

  The girl joined them then, asking anxiously, “Is Aurelia all right?”

  Sara smiled gently at the child. “I believe that she will be, but she will need to need to stay here for a while until her wing heals.”

  “But I want to take her home now!”

  “Be quiet, Lena.” Her brother sounded more bored than annoyed now. “Nobody cares what you want, and it’s not as though you don’t have four more of the stupid things at home.”

  “But she’ll be lonely,” Lena protested.

  “She’s resting now,” Sara said encouragingly, “and she’ll heal more quickly here under the Peace of the God. We’ll take very good care of her, and you can visit whenever your parents allow.”

  “My parents are dead,” Lena said bleakly. “He’s my guardian.” She indicated her brother with a slight jerk of her head.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sara said, then hastily added, “about your parents.”

  “She can visit here at any reasonable hour,” her brother said, “as long as her governess accompanies her.”

  Sara nodded in acknowledgment, and the brother and sister left without further argument—or any word of thanks. Both girls looked after them, and Sara shivered. “He reminds me of a snake,” she said with distaste.

  “No,” Maia shook her head. “A snake will curl up next to you in search of warmth. That man is so cold I don’t think he cares about warmth.”

  Lena was back early the next morning; Maia found her huddled in the courtyard when she came outside. To her surprise, Dexter was curled up in the girl’s lap, allowing her to pet him.

  “Where is your governess?” Maia asked, hoping the child hadn’t been wandering around the streets by herself. This was a fairly good neighborhood, but even so . . . She sent a mental call to a crow perched on top of the wall surrounding the temple, asking if he and his flock would be willing to keep an eye on Lena. A few crows diving in to attack could deter nearly any would-be attacker.

  “She’s in bed with my brother.” At Maia’s horrified gasp, Lena quickly added, “it’s not her fault. She doesn’t even like him, but if she doesn’t do what Markus wants, he says he’ll dismiss her without a character. And he’ll do it, too. I told the cook where I was going, so somebody will tell her when they get a chance.”

  “I hope your brother doesn’t miss you,” Maia said. “I don’t think that would be good for either your or your governess.”

  “You’re keeping Aurelia because you don’t think I took good care of her, aren’t you?”

  “She really does need time to heal,” Maia said, heading toward the infirmary. Lena fell in at her side, carrying Dexter cradled in her arms. “But the Healer and I did wonder how she came to have your brother’s cloak pin stuck in her wing.”

  Lena looked stricken. “I wish I knew,” she replied. “I wasn’t in the room when it happened. It was just my brother and his friends; I went in when I heard the birds screaming. Aurelia was pinned to the wall, and the rest of them were all out of their cage and flying around near the ceiling.” She shuddered. “It was horrible—and a couple of my brother’s friends had daggers in their hands. I don’t like his friends.”

  Maia decided that as soon as Lena left she was going to see if she could find out from the bird what had actually happened. Home didn’t sound like a safe place for the bird—or the child either.

  When Maia finally got a chance to communicate with the bird, she discovered that home was not only unsafe, it was v
ery, very strange. She had thought that she’d seen the worst of big brothers—hers had been executed with the rest of his group of bandits after they attacked a Herald and her Companion—but Lena’s brother was . . . well, Maia couldn’t find the right words to describe him. Of course, the finch couldn’t either, but it did give her a good view of what happened before its injury.

  A group of young men lounged around the parlor, drinking to excess and making jokes—Maia thought they must be jokes, because the men were laughing at them, but they made no sense to her.

  “To the Brotherhood of the Bereaved—long may it flourish!”

  “To long, drawn-out funerals!”

  “To devoted servants who attend them along with the entire family!”

  Each seemingly meaningless utterance got another round of drinks to accompany it, and each one appeared to be funnier to the men making the toasts, even as the voices making them became so slurred that Maia couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  Two of the young men either fell asleep or passed out. Markus and the two others who were still conscious looked at them in disgust.

  “We need priests who can hold their liquor,” Markus remarked.

  “I’m bored!” one of the others said petulantly.

  “Me, too, Lars.” The other one looked around the room in search of diversion. “How about a hunt?” His eyes lit on the birds, and both Maia and Aurelia shuddered as he came toward them, opened the cage, and pulled them out. He continued to reach into the cage until he had all of the birds loose, and then he walked over to where Markus’s cloak lay over the back of a chair. He pulled out the cloak pin and held it up. “I’ll wager ten gold pieces that I can hit one of the birds with this.”

  “Nah,” said Lars. “It’s too small, Algott. I’ll bet I can hit one with my dagger before you can hit anything with that!” He pulled out a dagger and stood poised to throw it.

  Algott threw the cloak pin, and it pinned Aurelia to the wall by her wing. Maia was nearly blinded by the pain and the shock, but she was fairly certain that, with the cloak pin out of play, Algott pulled his dagger. She thought he said something about another wager, but the rest of the birds were screaming, and then Lena was there and she was screaming too, and there was a woman who detached Aurelia from the wall with gentle hands and put her into a box . . .

  Maia pulled her mind free from Aurelia’s memories. “We’ll keep you here as long as we can,” she promised the bird.

  Between them, Sara and Maia managed to keep the bird for three weeks. Lena came to visit every day, accompanied by her governess. Her brother did not return, for which Maia privately thanked every god she had ever heard of. She also prayed that Thenoth would keep Markus far away from His temple.

  Meanwhile, the crows that Maia had asked to watch out for Lena had exceeded both her instructions and her expectations. They seemed to like Lena, but, in addition to watching her, they also watched Markus. Not because they liked him—but because they disliked and distrusted him. By the time Aurelia was healed enough to return home, Maia knew what the toasts the bird had heard the day she was injured were about.

  In an extremely successful endeavor to supplement his inheritance, Markus had started his own religion and recruited a few of his friends to be “priests”—in return for a share of the income, of course.

  The Brotherhood of the Bereaved took “offerings” in return for promises to say prayers for the deceased. The reason they were fond of long funerals attended by servants as well as family was that it gave them a chance to search the house while everyone was out. They didn’t steal anything—usually—but they looked for evidence of how much money the mourners had so that they could suggest the maximum possible amount for the “offerings.”

  The other thing they looked for was blackmail material, and one of the few exceptions to their “don’t take anything that will be missed” policy came when Markus stole the diary of a young woman who was now, thanks to the deaths of the remainder of her family, a considerable heiress. The diary told, in unfortunate detail, of her feelings for a young man she shared math classes with at the Collegium. Both of them were Blues—students who were not future Heralds, Healers, or Bards. She had been taking classes because her family lived in Haven and was in attendance at Court year-round, while he was studying to be an artisan. Markus, of course, ignored what this said about the young man’s intelligence and determination and concentrated on the fact that he was not of noble birth.

  By the time Markus had spent a few weeks paying “condolence” visits, the poor girl was convinced that the artisan didn’t love her, was in love with someone else, and would find her feelings for him hilarious and would ridicule her to all their classmates. Having completed step one, Markus moved on to step two, and now he was betrothed to a girl who would make him three times as rich as he already was. He was also pushing for an early wedding, while the girl desperately tried to stall on the grounds that she was in mourning.

  Maia was sufficiently dismayed by the situation that she spoke to her first friend from Haven. Although Clyton was not, as Maia had first thought when she saw him, a horse, her Gift of Animal Mindspeech worked with him. Both of them had strong “voices” and were located near each other—the Temple of Thenoth being in the next circle of the city down from the Palace and the Collegium—so she didn’t have to leave the temple to talk to him. Given the fact that he was both male and not susceptible to blackmail, he wasn’t as sympathetic to the girl’s plight as Maia was, but he must have spoken with his Chosen, because the next day Samira came to visit the temple.

  She didn’t look like a Herald; instead of her Whites, she was dressed in the sort of clothing a moderately prosperous storekeeper might wear, and she carried a kitten in a basket.

  “If anyone asks you,” she told Maia, once they were sitting together in a corner of the courtyard, “I brought the kitten because he hurt his paw.”

  “How?” Maia asked.

  “He’s not really hurt,” Samira said, as if Maia were missing the point.

  “I know he’s not hurt,” Maia replied, “but we should keep our stories straight. Did he get it caught in a door?”

  “That will do,” Samira nodded. “Clyton says that you’re upset about something, but he doesn’t seem to understand why.”

  Maia poured out the whole story, from the bird injured by drunken idiots to the made-up religion to the theft and the blackmail. “There’s got to be something we can do!” she finished indignantly. “It’s just wrong!”

  “We can’t do anything about the blackmail unless the girl is willing to file a complaint. Do you think she’s up to that?”

  Maia shook her head emphatically. “She’s just lost her entire family, and I suspect that she was the scared-of-her-own-shadow type even before that.”

  “Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if they made up their religion to make money for themselves,” Samira said. “Remember, ‘there is no one way’—people in Valdemar are free to worship as they choose.”

  “But it’s not a real religion,” Maia protested. “If they believed in any sort of god, they wouldn’t dare make such a mockery of faith! Not to mention their total lack of concern for people’s feelings—how would their patrons feel if they found out they’re not saying prayers for their deceased loved ones?”

  Samira’s gaze was suddenly intent. “Say that again.”

  “That they don’t care about anyone’s feelings?” Maia asked in confusion.

  “No, the part about not saying the prayers they’ve been paid to say.” Samira looked at her in triumph. “That we can do something about. For them to take money and fail to perform the service they took the money for is fraud—and that’s illegal.”

  “We’d still have to prove it,” Maia pointed out. “I could testify that they’re spending all night drinking in the parlor until they pass out—assuming that a court is going to let me swear on the basis of what I’m getting from a charm of finches . . . ”

  “A cha
rm of finches?” Samira laughed. “Is that really what a group of finches is called?”

  “Yes, really,” Maia said. “After you told me that a group of crows is either a murder of crows or a storytelling of crows, I started keeping a list of the strange things that groups of animals are called. But does a court accept witness through Animal Mindspeech?”

  “We don’t need it,” Samira said. “If they’re questioned under Truth Spell it will be obvious they’re not doing the rituals. But we need someone to pay them to do the rituals, and that’s hard to ask of anyone who has been recently bereaved.”

  :Maia could do it.: Clyton’s voice sounded in both their heads.

  “But I’m not bereaved—” Maia started to protest, and then remembered that, technically, she was. “Oh, that’s right. My brother did die less than a half-year ago, and while I don’t feel particularly grieved by the death of an abusive brother who ran a group of bandits, tried to kill both of you, and was executed for it, I could certainly pay for prayers for him. I can simply say that my brother died, which is true, and that I feel that he needs praying for, which is equally true.” She looked down at her hands which had clasped themselves tightly in her lap. “I’ve been selfish,” she added softly. “I’ve been so happy here in Haven, and my life is so much better than it was while he was alive. I should at least have prayers said for him—by a real priest. However wicked he was, he was still my brother.”

  “You can have all the prayers said for him that you like,” Samira said. “I’ll even arrange for some. My religion tells us to forgive our enemies. Besides, I gained you as a friend out of his attempt to kill me.”

  “There’s one problem with my going to Markus and paying him to pray for my brother,” Maia pointed out. “He’s seen me.”

  “How many times?”

  “Just once, I think. The day that his sister first brought her bird to the temple for healing.”