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  For Shia, the next candlemarks passed in a blur of treating the wounded, moving from one injured person to the next. Thankfully, Calli was for the most part accurate in her assessment of the severity of injuries. Sergeant Dara had been knocked unconscious, but her other wounds were minor. She regained her senses while Shia was applying healing poultices to the cut that laced across her leg, and it was clear that she was in full possession of those senses. She began directing the remaining guard, propped up in her cot, the captain’s sword bared across her knees. She even dictated a message that two of the merchants’ sons would take down the mountain roads to Torhold on the fastest of the town’s horses.

  Calli Stadres proved a surprisingly capable pair of hands assisting Shia, readily learning how to mix the basic poultices and clean and dress the lesser injuries. And if, between one patient and the next, she always walked down the hall to stand for a few moments at the door to the room where her husband slept, bandages swathed around his head and shoulder, Shia could hardly blame her.

  When they had finished tending the last injured merchant, Shia was pleased with her work. She even thought that her herbs might be able to bring around a few of those that Calli had thought would not last. Josette, the innkeeper, she was sure, would make it, although she herself wouldn’t be able to take credit for that. The old woman was just too stubborn to, as she put it, “let ’em put paid to me if’n I wouldn’t let ’em put paid to my inn.” She had grumbled and complained about the damage to the inn while Shia had “fussed” over her, but she had finally accepted the sleep tea and let her body get to the more important business of healing.

  Shia was glad, though, that she had been gathering in the area of the mountain where she had been, at that height, several of the best wild plants for bleeding injuries developed a higher potency. And today she had harvested an inordinate amount of those plants, more than she ever needed for the normal injuries of the remote mountain town. This was not the first time, however, that she had harvested without thinking about it. Every so often she would gather herbs in a daze, seeming neither to hear what was around her nor even to see what she was doing. She had learned to trust it, those rare occasions, for what she gathered in those moments was always used—like the time when she and her mother had gone to harvest feverdraw, and she had found her basket full of the elm bark they used in tinctures and teas for throat ailments, and that winter a coughing illness had stricken the town.

  “Pira, stop twirling about like that! You’ll make me too dizzy to think!” Calli Stadres laughed as her daughter danced in the shaft of sunlight that lanced across the sunroom, her outstretched hands scattering tiny bits of seed-fluff that floated and glinted in the air around her. Her mother turned back to the worktable, reaching one hand around to rub her lower back. “Some days, I don’t know how I’ll ever keep up with two—” Her voice cut off when she saw Shia’s face, and she lunged forward to take the mortar and pestle from the young woman’s hands before she dropped them.

  “Shia, what is it? What’s wrong? Are you well?”

  Shia leaned forward until her head rested on the cool stone slab laid across the top of the table, trying to calm the roiling in her stomach.

  “I . . . am well,” she managed. “Captain Dara . . .” her voice trailed off as another wave of something that felt like pain and anger hit her. Then, as soon as it had come, the feeling fled, replaced by the same surety of wrongness that she had felt up on the mountain when the town was first attacked. She pushed her hair out of her face and met Calli’s worried eyes.

  “I think the troop has been ambushed.”

  “How do you . . . ?” Calli’s eyes widened when Shia only shrugged, and she glanced over at Pira. The young girl had stopped twirling but just stood in the sunbeam, looking at her mother in confusion. Calli took in a slow breath of relief that her daughter had not been affected, then nodded slightly.

  “I’ll check the bandage kits while you rub the powders for the poultices. We’ve set so many supplies aside from caring for the traders that we shouldn’t need to prepare too much new.”

  By the time Captain Dara brought the wounded of her small troop back to the room in the Stadres household that had served as a makeshift infirmary since the first attack, Calli and Shia had prepared enough that they were immediately able to care for the worst of the injuries. This time, at least, none were life-threatening.

  Shia unwrapped the hasty field bandages and held Lieutenant Fellan’s arm tightly, trying to keep from jarring his newly realigned shoulder as she attempted to match up the shattered bones of his forearm. “You seem to have had the worst of it of all the group,” she murmured. He had already bitten his lip to bleeding on the ride back to the town, and her liquor-laced herbal concoction for pain had barely started to take the edge off.

  “Don’t know how they do it,” he muttered hazily. “They dance around the town when there’s traders, then slink off into nowhere. Traders’re coming ’round less, too. If’n we can’t stop ’em, it’ll be a thin winter. Cap’n Dara’s good, but she’s only one.” He grunted as Shia made a last shift of his wrist, then settled to a drugged sleep as the herbs deepened their effects. Letting his arm rest on the splint on the low table beside them, Shia closed her hands lightly over the break, trying to sense if anything still was out of place beneath the skin. Her fingers tingled slightly, feeling the heat of injury spreading up from his flesh, and she held her hand there for a longer moment, as though she could force the angry heat to subside and the bone to knit together.

  Binding the lieutenant’s arm securely to the slats of her splint, Shia glanced over to where she could see the captain standing and talking to Calli and one of the other injured guardsman. Lord Corus had sent his approval for Dara’s field promotion to captain as soon as he had learned of the first attack, but as they had suspected, Torhold had not been able to spare any militia to pursue the bandits. Even Torhold’s Healer had only given a half-day’s visit to check on Breyburn’s injured. He had come a day or two after the first attack, glanced at the dead who were about to be buried, briefly examined those who were not yet back to their activities, then returned to Torhold, saying only, “The girl’s mother must have had good skills to teach her that well, for all that no one knew where she’d come from.”

  Accepting that they were on their own, the townsfolk had resolutely taken matters into their own hands. Dara had taken any and all volunteers from the townsfolk or the shepherd and small farm families outside the town, training up some to join the town guard, others to simply learn how to stay alive if the bandits came back into the town. And come back they had, though none of their raids had the impact of the first. Rather, they picked away at the town and the trader caravans, making trade sporadic and shattering the cycles of the town’s summer. The season was half over, but it felt as though it had barely begun, for few of the townsfolk had been able to work as they usually did.

  Captain Dara held out her arm to Shia, wincing just the slightest bit as she dabbed the sharp cleansing ointment over the edges of the wound. “It’s been months now, and we can’t find the bastard,” she said. “That’s what bothers me. He runs aground as soon as we get close. We’ve picked off his band and found most of his hidey- holes, enough that I don’t think he’ll be back soon, but he keeps slinking off. Bad enough that they’ve been coming back all summer, but if he has time now to go back to wherever he came from and find more men, he’ll be back as soon as the rains are done next spring.”

  Shia sighed as she put down the cleansing pad and reached for her bowl. “Lieutenant Fellan is right. You’re only one. You need to take more care for yourself until Lord Corus can approve your new militia. No one else has the training, experience, or personality to lead the guard. Torhold can’t spare anyone now, any more than they could when Captain Nolan was killed in the first raid.”

  “My young men—and the two girls—are doing well enough, especially since Fellan’s arm healed up so quick and he was able to help with th
e training again. They did well enough to take on an ex- merc bandit who thought to control the trade routes down from the quarry and the tin mines. We’ve stopped him for this year, at least.” Despite her frustration, the new captain’s satisfaction with her troop was palpable.

  Holding the edges of the wound together, Shia applied her poultice and started wrapping bandages, her fingers tracing along the length of the wound beneath the fabric, feeling the heat from the angry gash. An absent part of her attention drifted down to the injured flesh, almost willing the healing to happen. She didn’t notice the startled way the captain’s eyes flicked up to her, so absorbed was she in considering the importance of Captain Dara’s success or failure. If they had indeed done enough damage to the surprisingly well-organized bandits to keep them from attacking for the last moon of the summer, the harvest and preparations for winter and the spring rains could go back to normal. Or normal enough to make do.

  “At least the sheep and the goats have already been brought back down to the town green,” she said at last. “And the traders won’t fear to bring the grain supplies up here now, so we’ll be able to winter the animals well enough.”

  The captain nodded, her eyes considering the young woman seated beside her. “We should think about increasing the grain stores this year, just in case. How are your harvests coming? Josette says her bones are telling her that it’ll be a long winter and a hard rainy season.”

  Shia smiled fondly. “No one would ever dare suggest that Josette’s bones are telling her that she’s too old to spar with the youngsters. Calli and Pira have helped me gather, though, and Calli is allowing me to experiment with growing some plants in the sunny room next to the chapel. It’s close enough to the kitchen fires that I think it will stay warm enough to keep some of the hardier stock alive all winter.”

  She didn’t add that she thought that Josette’s bones were right, and that she had already prepared for a long and hard season away from the mountain’s wild herbs.

  Drawn by some unnameable call, Shia opened the side door off the Stadres’ kitchens and glanced out over the garden. As she expected, the rain was pouring down, creating lakes and rivers where in summer there were plant beds and paths. No sane creature stirred out of doors during the unpredictable flash rains, yet here she was, somehow knowing that she needed to be somewhere other than tucked securely in Calli’s tiny spare room, where she had spent the winter tending her experimental plants. Tugging her cloak up around her ears, she darted out through the sheeting rain and splashed around to the front of the house, finding a spot just under the eaves that was a little less wet. Not knowing why she was standing there, she stared down the main road for long, cold minutes, until she saw movement that was not falling rain coming towards her from the edge of her vision.

  Mud-spattered, worn out, he was everything a Companion on Search shouldn’t be—nothing like the gaily caparisoned mare who had come for Teo. He was so drenched, it was impossible to tell where the lathered sweat ended and the cold rain staining his coat began. He didn’t even look white anymore, just a muddy dark gray. Yet he was unmistakably what he was—even to the bells on the soaked harness, though their ring could not be heard above the rain pounding on the roofs.

  This time, Shia was the only one who stood in the square, rain running in rivulets down her face. Light glowed out of the windows around the square, and she suddenly hoped that no one was even looking out to see this bedraggled colt slogging through the fetlock-deep mud.

  And then he was standing before her, his sodden nose brushing her cheek, his glorious, impossibly blue eyes swallowing hers.

  :I’m sorry you had to wait so long for me, Chosen.:

  Tears mingled with the rain on her face, streaming warm with cold, and Shia collapsed heedless to her knees in the muck, weeping out the agonizing emptiness of the last four years.

  The Companion—Eodan, she knew without words—folded his forelegs and lay in the mud beside her, curving his neck around to draw her slight form against his steaming side, his warmth seeping into her bone chill.

  :I came as soon as the King’s Own Companion said I was ready—although he warned me about the spring rains in Breyburn.: There was a note of self-deprecating amusement in his rich MindVoice. :You will learn that patience is not natural to me.:

  “What about Pira? She’s Gifted, I’m sure, so shouldn’t you be for her . . .” Shia finally managed to get words past the rawness in her throat.

  :Her Companion is more patient than I—Pira is still a little too young to begin the training. You, my Chosen, should never have had to start this late.: There was a strange note of regret coloring his MindVoice as it echoed in Shia’s head. :It would have been different if—: he cut off his thought, then abruptly changed the subject, nudging gently against her shoulder.

  :Come, Chosen, it’s a good thing you’ll soon be wearing Trainee Grays, for those leggings are unsalvageable.:

  Shia gave no response to his jest, lost in the wonder of Eodan’s presence, and yet baffled by the forlorn ache still within her, deeper than the presence of Eodan beside her—even part of her—could reach. Without words, she knew that Eodan knew, and regretted, that it was there inside her, that dull pain, that lost feeling of incompletion.

  :Trust me, Chosen. You will understand soon. When we are in Haven, I think.:

  Shia turned to stare at him in disbelief, astonished at her own courage in thinking to argue with a Companion. “In Haven? What about Breyburn? I can’t just up and leave them—and it’s folly to go anywhere during the flash-rain season.”

  Eodan shook his head at her, and only now did she finally hear the jingle of his harness bells beneath the drum of the falling rain. :Chosen, you have been patient enough for two, but now that I am finally with you, this will be my time to practice it myself.:

  The Last Part of the Way

  by Brenda Cooper

  Brenda Cooper has published over thirty short stories in various magazines and anthologies. Her books include The Silver Ship and the Sea and Reading the Wind. She is a technology professional, a futurist, and a writer living in the Pacific Northwest with three dogs and two other humans. She blogs and tweets and all that stuff; stop by www.brenda-cooper.com and visit.

  Three riders passed beneath trees shrugging fall color into the wind. Each time a gust spurted through, cold and edged in winter, it plucked gold and orange and brown leaves and sent them to tangle in the riders’ hair and crunch under the hooves of their mounts. The redheads, Rhiannon and Dionne, would have been impossible to tell apart except that Rhiannon wore flamboyant Bardic red and Dionne a soft and subdued Healer green. The women shared the same red hair, bright blue eyes, slender figures, and the same deep laugh lines. They rode similar horses: big sturdy bays with wide white blazes and patient, alert walks. One of the horses had white socks and the other didn’t. Between them, a much younger man named Lioran sat easily on the back of a white Companion, Mila. Everything about Mila was neat and trimmed and nearly perfect, while her Herald wore his long black hair unkempt, had stains on the knees of his white uniform, and a sad silence on his face.

  Dionne and Rhiannon had been riding circuit twenty-five years now and were too old to keep peace on the borders or fight teenaged toughs. But even usually peaceful towns needed healing and song, so they were sent around the easy middle of Valdemar, far from border skirmishes and the beasts of the Pelagir Hills and the intrigues of Haven. The twins were often assigned a young Bard or Healer who needed a safe year or two to gain confidence. But they’d never before been asked to take a Herald along. A mudslide had buried his family, and in fact his whole town; everyone he knew. The news had come to him right after he was given his Whites, right after he’d packed his belongings onto his Companion for a trip home to the small town of Golden Hill.

  After two weeks, Dionne despaired of helping him. She watched Lioran’s face as Rhiannon’s musical voice chided him, “There will be things you can do, even in Shelter’s End.”

 
His voice came out gloomy. “There won’t be anyone under forty there.”

  “You’ll be there,” Dionne responded, allowing only a bit of the disdain she felt into her voice. No one said you had to like a patient, or even a Herald. “We go where we’re needed, and don’t whine if we don’t like it.”

  “I wish we could just go past. I don’t want to stop in a retirement town, or a town at all. I want the woods.”

  Rhiannon looked as though she wanted to skin him, but all she said was, “The wind’s chill. We’d better find a place to make camp. We don’t really want to ride in on them at night, anyway.”

  “How about right here?” he asked.

  “How about you and Mila find someplace a little more sheltered?” Rhiannon countered, the impatience in her voice enough to make Dionne wince, although Lioran didn’t bother to react. Mila cast both women a baleful look, turning her head slightly side to side, watching each of them with her bright blue eyes. Although Dionne had no Mindspeech, she imagined Mila’s thoughts going something like, “He’s young. He’s hurt. He’ll come around.” Dionne grinned back at her, wishing for a way to tell the Companion how much she appreciated her patience. And how much she wished she had more of it handy. The boy got on her nerves.