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  She found a crowd of townsfolk and Mayor Rufous gathered at the edge of town, waiting anxiously for some word from the dam. She reined the horse in and held up her hand, commanding their attention.

  “We’re releasing the water slowly, so the river is going to start to rise. The men will be coming back soon; we don’t need them now. We need to move the work on the floating bridge back about a dozen furlongs from the current riverbank. Steen plugged the hole under the dam with ice, and is going to stay at the dam and keep it plugged until the lake has emptied.”

  Cheers, some a little hysterical with relief, rang out at this good news. She waited for the noise to die down, then continued. “He is staying up there to keep an eye on things; so are two of our men, who will ride to warn the town if for some reason the dam fails despite our efforts. They need provisioning and—”

  Well, she didn’t get a chance to say anything else, as townsfolk scattered in every direction. One man brought his mule and cart, a couple of women brought what must have been their own family’s supper, and several more brought blankets and water flasks and what looked like a small tent. Without a word, the man with the cart hopped up on the seat and headed for the dam when the cart was full.

  The men who’d come up from the town to chip out the spillway came trickling back; the last one arrived just as the sun dropped behind the hills. Abi waited, since she could see a clot of figures in the distance, which turned out to be the three Masters, Jicks, and the man with the cart.

  “How is it looking?” Abi asked, anxiously.

  “Stable,” Master Vance decreed. “I wish I knew how long it would take to empty out that lake, though.”

  By morning, the river was appreciably higher, and the water was full of mud. Abi and Master Vance rode up to the dam to see what progress had been made.

  The improvised spillway and the water level were both a lot lower. Steen looked as if he’d gotten some rest and at least two meals in. “The plug is holding, but I had to reinforce it,” he reported. “And last night I had to put in a temporary ice dam, but either the water has hit some harder soil, or the pressure against the dam is lower, because things slowed down again around dawn.”

  “Probably both,” said Vance, getting up on the hill to look at the lake. “Looks like the lake isn’t as big as I feared.”

  “But what are the townsfolk going to do once the lake is drained?” Abi asked.

  “That’s going to have to be up to them,” Vance replied. “We can’t stay here forever. They’ll have to decide if they want the dam back or are willing to do without it. If they want it, I’ll have Beyrn draw up plans and explicit instructions for repairing the old dam, but they’ll be on their own unless they have decided to join Valdemar.”

  Abi was of two minds about that; it didn’t seem fair to leave this town on its own with regards to the dam on the one hand—but on the other, Vance was right, and there were more towns and villages to be seen to, and they couldn’t allow this one to take up all their time.

  On the whole she was glad she wasn’t the one in charge of the group; this was not the sort of decision she was comfortable with making.

  * * *

  • • •

  The floating bridge was complete by the time the lake had finally drained. The river was still a bit muddy, but Master Beyrn assured everyone that eventually it would clear. Not that it mattered; no one in the town used river water for anything; there was a well on every street. Virtually everyone from the town had gone up to marvel at what the receding waters revealed—which included the remains of another town! This one looked about half as large as Ellistown, but the buildings must have been much taller, given the fact that the ruins were three and four stories tall. No one from Ellistown quite knew what to make of it; there had never been so much as an old tale to tell them the place had ever existed. Abi hadn’t seen it in person yet; she’d been too busy helping with the construction of the floating bridge and the scaffolding for what would become the stone bridge.

  Master Vance and Abi would have loved to have crawled all over those ruins, as they were in a style neither of them had ever heard of—but the mud on the floor of the former lake was at least waist deep, and it wasn’t going to dry up any time soon. Beyrn was just relieved that the crisis was over so far as he was concerned. He’d been happily drawing plans and explicit instructions, complete with pictures, of how to repair the existing dam or build a new one.

  Back at the encampment, he showed them to Abi, who checked them over for him. “I don’t think they’re likely to do anything about it this year, though,” she told him. “Mostly, they seem to be waiting for the mud to dry so they can treasure-hunt in those ruins.”

  “Honestly I hope they don’t replace it,” he said fervently. “And I don’t care if all my plans have been drawn up for nothing. That is a terrible place to put an earthen dam—or rather, downstream from it was a terrible place to put a town. What were they thinking?”

  “That the dam was going to last forever, obviously,” she replied, shaking her head. “Sometimes I don’t understand people.”

  Herald Stev had come over, curious as to what they were looking at, and overheard that last. “No one understands how fragile a human is like a Healer,” he observed. “And no one understands how fragile an object is like an Artificer.”

  “That’s probably true,” Beyrn agreed. “Speaking of fragile, how is the magician? He put in a remarkable effort.”

  Stev—snickered. Abi tilted her head and looked at him sideways.

  “If I didn’t know your father and thus you, I’d never say this in front of you, Abi,” Stev replied. “But magician Steen has been the recipient of so much gratitude from the ladies of this town that he’s having trouble walking.”

  Beyrn looked blank. Abi burst into peals of laughter. “Oh!” she gasped. “Oh, that’s good. That’s good!”

  Finally Beyrn got it, and turned red. Stev raised an eyebrow at him. “Don’t pretend you haven’t been taking advantage of the same thing, Master,” he said pointedly. “You’re the one that discovered the breach in the first place. And I know you haven’t been spending all your time drafting dam repair plans.”

  Beyrn turned even redder, and clamped his mouth shut. Abi decided that teasing him would be unkind.

  But she was sorely tempted.

  “Is there any word back from Haven about us?” she asked Herald Stev instead.

  He shrugged. “‘You’re doing well, carry on,’ is all that’s gotten back to me. I’ve sent three reports so far since we’ve been here. I didn’t really expect to hear anything else.”

  “Have you seen the ruins yet?” she asked him. He shook his head.

  “Then let’s take a couple of the hinnies up the river and—can you Send what you’re seeing back to your Companion?” she asked.

  “Yes, but what would be the point?” he replied.

  “Maybe someone will recognize what style those buildings are in. Maybe some scholar will want to document them. It’s knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t always have to have an immediate use.” She felt a little exasperated with him. Had the man no curiosity at all?

  “If you say so. At least it’s a good day for a ride.” He led the way to where the hinnies were picketed, as she mentally shook her head.

  The river was a bit higher than it had been when they’d first arrived, but the footings for the stone bridge were well back from the new banks, and so were the mooring points for the floating bridge. Abi was quite curious to see the ruins for herself; she hadn’t been back to the site since Master Vance had declared the water was safely draining.

  In fact, what she wanted to see, besides the ruins, was the place where the water had worked its way under the dam.

  They passed the spot where the newly released river joined the one that went past the town. She was surprised by how small it was.

  “Th
at doesn’t seem like much of a reason to have put that dam there,” she said, pointing at a “river” that Rolan could easily have jumped across.

  “But we don’t know why the dam was put there,” Stev reminded her. “It might have been for flood control—when a heavy rain hits these hills, water can rise faster than you can blink. It might have been as a reservoir for dry years. Or it might—hmm—” he said, and stopped, frowning.

  “What was your third reason?” she prompted him.

  “It might have been to hide the remains of that town,” he said slowly.

  The words hung in the air between them, the silence broken only by the hoofbeats of their hinnies.

  “Because—?” she ventured.

  “Because an enemy not only wanted the town wiped out, he wanted it utterly forgotten, taken off the map,” Stev replied grimly. “Because there was a plague, so the town was drowned along with whatever victims were still there. Because something happened there that was so terrible whoever lived there wanted it lost to memory. Or . . .”

  “Or?”

  “There was something in the town that whoever lived there didn’t want to escape,” he said at last. “You remember what Jicks said about things. Magical things. Maybe there was one of those in the town and the only way to confine it was to drown the entire town.”

  “And now . . . we’ve drained the water . . .” She swallowed.

  “However, I am pretty certain Steen would have said something if there was some terrible magic monster still alive in those ruins,” the Herald replied, with a shrug. “And I am far more inclined to believe in the evil of man than the evil of monsters anyway. I’d place my bets on an enemy that wanted all memory of the place erased.”

  “All the more reason for you to send images of it back to Haven,” she pointed out. “And besides that, there’s a reason you didn’t mention.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “That whoever lived there was so evil that good people wanted all memory of them erased.”

  He snorted, but smiled.

  Near the dam the “new” river was shallow enough that the hinnies were willing to wade across. That put them on the side where the dam was mostly intact, and there was actually a switchback path that took you up to the top of the dam that the hinnies had no trouble climbing. Once at the top, Abi looked down, and quickly found the roundish hole near the base of the dam that was the source of the seepage.

  “Doesn’t look all that big,” Stev said doubtfully, following her gaze.

  “The fact that we can see it at all means that the dam wasn’t that long from failure,” she said soberly. “These things don’t just leak out slowly in a controlled fashion, like opening up a bathtub drain. When they fail, they take a huge bite out of the dam, and everything rushes out in a wave.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” They both raised their eyes to the ruins in the center of what had been the lakebed; right in the middle of the valley, with the river cutting its way through the mud right down the center of the cluster of buildings.

  They were strangely unornamented, three and four story tall gray pillars with tiny windows. They didn’t seem to have roofs, unless the roofs were flat. The buildings huddled together like a covey of frightened quail, as if they—or the people who had built them—were afraid of the hills around them.

  “Huh,” Stev said, sounding surprised.

  “I wonder how they were made,” Abi said aloud. “Look how flat their surfaces are! They look as if they were cast rather than built.”

  “I can’t imagine living in a place like that,” Stev replied, but his voice sounded as if he was preoccupied and not really talking to her. Which meant he was Sending what he saw back to his Companion.

  I’m glad I nagged him into it.

  She turned her attention back to the ruins, and decided she agreed with him. She couldn’t imagine living in a place like that. Why such tiny windows? Surely the winters couldn’t be that bad here—after all, no one in Ellistown had windows this small.

  Then again, appearances might be deceptive. She had no point of reference in that sea of mud. Maybe the windows weren’t small. Maybe the windows were normal sized, but the buildings were bigger than she thought.

  It didn’t look like a place that could spawn a monster. It looked more like a place that would spawn soulless bureaucrats.

  She continued to stare at it, until finally Stev said, in a much more normal tone of voice, “Ready to go?”

  “Definitely.” She sent her hinny down the switchback trail ahead of his. “I can’t imagine there being anything worth looking for in those piles.”

  “I’m inclined to go with a modified version of your reason for why the place was drowned,” Stev replied from behind her.

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “Those things were too tough to knock down and spoiled the view so badly the only thing to be done with them was drown them. And their Artificers, so they could never build an abomination like that again.”

  Abi had to laugh.

  14

  “Frankly, I expected more whining,” Beyrn said to Abi, as their little caravan left the town, heading eastward, paralleling the Border with Valdemar. “The only thing we finished was the floating bridge.”

  “Plenty of distractions, I suspect,” she replied, holding back her hinny so he could ride up alongside her. “Someone pointed out that all that drying mud is probably the best soil for miles around, and now besides wanting to crawl through those ruins looking for treasure, the farmers all want to spread cartloads of the mud on their land. They’re already turning everything they can into a cart.”

  “Huh.” Beyrn blinked. “Is that going to do any good?”

  “Probably quite a lot,” she told him. “The land around here is poor. That’s why you don’t see the kinds of huge farms and fields of grain you do up near Haven. Buckwheat will grow here, and oats, and some vegetables, but it all takes manuring and a lot of tending. Whether or not people find anything in those ruins, that lake soil is pure gold. And I’m sure all the dead fish left behind will help matters.”

  “I thought you always lived on the Hill!” the young Master exclaimed. “How did you learn about farming?”

  “Keeping my ears open,” she said with a straight face. “Our fellow Trainees of all three Collegia come from all over Valdemar. All you have to do is listen and you learn a lot.” Then something occurred to her. “If you don’t know anything about farming, how did you know that dam was about to fail?”

  Beyrn colored. “Dams are my life,” he muttered, as if he thought she was going to make fun of him.

  “And I’m beginning to think bridges are mine,” she replied cheerfully. “Just think, if these people do decide they want Valdemar’s protection, you could come back here to Ellistown and give them something better, and be the one to personally direct the construction.”

  She might have told him that his true love was waiting around the next bend. He just lit up with a rare smile. “That’s true, isn’t it?” he said. But before he could say anything more, Jicks joined them.

  “What’s our next stop?” Abi asked. “And how far is it?”

  “About two days, and a village a lot smaller than Ellistown and a bit harder to get to,” Jicks replied. “That’s all the information I have.” She paused, then gave Abi a sidelong glance. “Now . . . I’m curious, and given your connections, I suspect you might have an answer for me. Just why is Valdemar going to all this trouble for a lot of villages that are barely self-supporting? Why do you even want them?”

  Beyrn looked indignant, and as if he was about to burst out with something confrontational, but Abi caught his eye and shook her head. “It’s . . . complicated,” she said. “The most obvious thing, and the thing anyone on the King’s Council will tell you, is that by expanding our borders, we prevent someone else, some un
friendly power, from moving in. So it doesn’t actually matter that these little towns and villages have nothing to give the kingdom. What matters is that we prevent someone hostile from taking over here—or prevent this area from turning against Valdemar by itself.”

  Jicks nodded. “All right. I can see that. But you said it’s complicated.”

  “There are reasons someone not from Valdemar probably wouldn’t understand.” She shrugged. “Let’s just say that Valdemarans don’t like to see people who need help and protection not getting any. But we can’t just ride in and force people to accept that help.”

  Jicks barked a laugh. “So you want me to believe you’re all doing this out of the kindness of your collective hearts, and you’re so sensitive you won’t come knocking on peoples’ doors until they invite you to? Pull the other one.”

  Beyrn got red in the face, but one look at Abi and he bit down whatever he was about to say.

  Abi just shrugged. “I told you that you’d have to be one of us to understand it.”

  Jicks chuckled and sent her hinny up to the front of the line to lead the way. Beyrn shook his head angrily. “That . . . rude . . . cow!” he spluttered. “Ignorant, pig-headed, blind . . .” he went on in the same vein for quite some time before he ran out of words. Interestingly, none of them were obscene. Wherever he’s from, he’s had a very gentle upbringing.

  “No one true way, Beyrn,” she reminded him. “If that’s what her experience has left her with, well, that’s sad. But don’t let her make you lose your temper over it.”

  He huffed a little, but gradually his anger ebbed. “Here I was thinking she was so well-traveled and had seen so much of the world, and I admired her for it! She’s nothing but an insular sell-sword!”

  “And that’s precisely why she’s so cynical,” Abi pointed out. “She’s a mercenary from the South. Most of her experience is with the worst of humanity, not the best. She doesn’t know how to recognize altruism when she sees it and probably thinks it’s just a granny’s tale that only children would believe in.” She looked ahead at Jicks’ erect back. “That doesn’t stop her from being kind when she thinks she can afford to be, or honorable, or good company. She’s still the same woman whose stories you laughed at a fortnight ago.”