Changing the World Read online

  “Or he has simply gotten better with practice,” she replied, dismissing the whole notion of these nebulous “Gifts” with a wave of her hand. “Tell me what he’s done.”

  As Callan and Sendar talked, she listened carefully. It was clear that neither of them had any idea how to counter Danet’s hold over an entire village. An enormous part of that hold was the white horse that he, or someone at least, had trained. The animal was amazing. It did things that neither man had thought possible for an “ordinary” horse.

  “Clearly it’s not ordinary at all, it’s an exceptionally intelligent and well- trained horse—which means it can almost do as much as an exceptionally well- trained dog,” she said tartly. “He probably paid a pretty sum for it. So, the problem is, he has these people wrapped around his fingers, they’ll look at his fancied-up horse and not see any differences between it and your Companions, and you don’t know how to prove to these people what’s what without—what?”

  “We can’t force a Truth Spell on anyone who’s not been brought up in judgment,” Sendar said gloomily. “Right now it’s our word against his. And they think he’s a Herald.”

  “Had you considered kidnapping?” she asked.

  They both blanched. “Breaking the law is not an option,” Callan replied faintly.

  She shrugged. “All right. Then I might have a plan.”

  They rode into town and headed straight for the inn where Danet was holding court. He looked startled to see two real Heralds, but the expression didn’t last long and quickly turned to his usual self-confidence.

  He has the high ground here, and he knows it.

  His expression slipped when she slid down off from behind Callan, however. He went absolutely blank.

  “Hello, Danet,” she said pleasantly. “I see that you have convinced all these people that you are really a Herald. I wonder if they would still believe that if they knew you had taken Elise Garen’s silver locket. After you slept with her, of course. And you ‘borrowed’ over forty coppers from Tulera that you never intended to repay.” She went down the list, adding, sadly, all too frequently “After you slept with her, of course,” and paid close attention to the faces of some of the women around him. Doubt was creeping in. Not much, but—

  “Of course, you must be a Herald now,” she went on, doing her best to sound perfectly calm and even. “Because look, you have the uniform, just like Herald Callan and Herald Sendar. And you have the Companion . . .” Now she turned to where the rather lovely white horse was peacefully standing, quite untethered, a few feet away. She had to admit he had managed a rather good imitation of a Companion. If you didn’t look too closely. “Of course you do.” She took a few steps nearer. “Or . . . do you?”

  Before anyone could move to prevent her, she dashed forward. As she had expected, the horse was too well trained to shy away, although it did throw up its head in surprise and snort.

  She lunged, and the hand she had held concealed in the folds of her dress slapped the flank of the horse, the wad of rags saturated with dark walnut dye leaving a huge brown smear on its white hide.

  “Of course, everyone knows that Companions are white because dirt and all just evaporates right off them,” she continued as Danet and his little knot of admirers stared in shock. “So, to be fair, I should do the same to the others. With the same dye, so you can’t claim that I’ve used something different on them.”

  She turned and wiped the dye off on the other two, creating identical swaths of stain on their satiny hides. “Now, let’s just see—oh, look.”

  The two Companions had gotten a look of curious concentration on their faces the moment the rags touched them. And the dye was already fading!

  Within moments it was gone, and their coats were as pristine as they had been before. Meanwhile the large, ugly brown stain remained on the flank of the oblivious horse.

  “Goodness me,” she said sweetly. “It looks as if your Companion is a fake, Danet. And if your Companion is a fake—what does that make you?”

  Danet looked wildly about for help, but his former admirers were backing away from him with expressions ranging from doubt to accusation. She had a fair notion that the accusatory ones were the women he had already slept with.

  Herald Callan stepped forward and clamped one hand on Danet Stens’s shoulder.

  “Danet Stens, I am taking you into custody to answer to one hundred and seventeen counts of theft, thirty- five counts of fraud, three counts of breach of promise . . .”

  Danet could only stand there, looking stunned.

  The Guards had arrived just as the Heralds had said they would, and they took Danet into custody. They did not take the horse. Marya put a claim on it, and since no one seemed willing to contest her for it, she got it. She immediately dyed all the blue tack a nondescript brown. She thought about further dyeing the horse, and decided to turn the streak into a patch, adding another couple just to make it look more natural. And significantly less like a Companion.

  With Callan and Sendar to escort her back home, she got the hang of riding a real horse fairly quickly. And they could actually have conversations, riding three abreast, better than they had when she’d been pillion. She talked, for the first time, about her father. How devastated her mother had been when her letters were never answered. How miserable her childhood had been. They were troubled, apologetic, and on the whole their reaction came as close to satisfying her as much as anything ever would.

  She was grudgingly coming to the conclusion that Heralds might not be so bad, when they reached Silver-gate just as the first hard frost hit. By that time she was glad to see her own cottage again. She made arrangements with innkeeper Stens to board her horse with him. She had plans for that horse. She had decided that she liked travel. She had it in mind that from now on, she just might deliver her tapestries herself, now and again.

  She had just gotten the cottage opened up, warmed by the fire, and fit to live in again when—

  There was a knock at the door.

  She opened it. Callan and Sendar were there . . . with a wooden dispatch box.

  “When you told us about your father, well, it didn’t sound right,” Callan said without preamble. “So we sent off to Haven to find out what we could. And . . . there is no other way to put this: What you and your mother always believed was a lie.”

  She felt as if she had been slapped, and Sendar quickly added, “Not what you are thinking! He was Chosen to be a Herald. But he never abandoned you. Not willingly. Here—” He thrust the box at her. “Here are all the letters he tried to send, which your grandmother turned back. He was never allowed to contact your mother. He tried, but he was also in training, and he couldn’t leave Haven and the Collegium until the Midwinter celebrations and the holidays, and then—”

  “Then it was too late. He got sick. A lot of people got sick that year. And he died.” Callan shook his head, sorrowfully. “The Collegium tried to contact your mother one last time, but they were turned away again.”

  Marya blinked, too stunned to actually feel anything yet. Finally, she stammered, “Come in,” and took the box to the table.

  There she took out all the letters, all the wonderful, loving, and then increasingly desperate letters, and read them carefully. That was when she knew, suddenly, exactly why her grandparents had done what they had.

  Marya’s mother had been doing the bulk of the weaving. Marya herself was showing early promise even as a toddler. But if they left to join their husband and father—

  Rage filled her one last time, a terrible rage that swept through her—

  And then exploded into tears.

  She wept for her mother, herself, and the father she had never known. She wept for the bitter, selfish old man and woman who had kept their daughter miserable in order to keep her. She wept, first on Callan’s shoulder and then on Sendar’s, until she couldn’t weep any more, and allowed herself to be led to her bed, where she fell asleep fully clothed and awoke in the morning feeling—em
pty. The anger was gone.

  What was going to take its place, she didn’t know. But the anger had been washed away on the tide of tears.

  She reread the letters, knowing that she would do so many more times to come, reread them with a heart open to what was in them. And as she put the last of them back in the box, there was a knock at the door.

  It was Callan and Sendar again, this time loaded down with all the shopping she would need for the next week and more. “We thought it was the least we could do,” Sendar said cheerfully. “We’ll be going back to Haven, but we wanted to thank you. We never could have managed without you.”

  “You certainly could not have, you highborn babies,” she said, tartly, but with a bit of a smile. “No more notion of what common people are like than the man in the moon. And thank you, thank you very much. But you can do me one more favor. Since that’s your direction.”

  “Certainly,” Callan nodded. “We owe you a very great deal, still.”

  “Take this message to Lord Poul Haveland in Haven.” She held out the folded paper. “I’ll be taking that commission he wanted me to do after all. And I would be obliged if some of that Companion hair could be sent along in the spring so the creature can be the proper white and not a fraud.”

  And if the Herald in that tapestry looked something like her misty memories of her father . . . well. That would not be bad, either.

  For Want of a Nail

  by Rosemary Edghill and Denise McCune

  Rosemary Edghill has been a frequent contributor to the Valdemar anthologies since selling her first novel in 1987, writing everything from Regency romances to science fiction to alternate history to mysteries. Between writing gigs, she’s held the usual selection of weird writer jobs and can truthfully state that she once killed vampires for money. She has collaborated with Marion Zimmer Bradley (Shadow’s Gate), Andre Norton (Carolus Rex), and Mercedes Lackey (Bedlam’s Bard and the forthcoming Shadow Grail). In the opinion of her dogs, she spends far too much time on Wikipedia. Her virtual home can be found at http://www.sff.net/PEOPLE/ELUKI/ (Her last name—despite the efforts of editors, reviewers, publishing houses, her webmaster, and occasionally her own fingers—is not spelled Edgehill.)

  Denise McCune has been writing since she was eleven—which was (coincidentally?) right around the time she fell in love with Valdemar. She has worked in the social networking industry for nearly a decade, and not having enough to do writing novels and short stories, she decided to launch Dreamwidth, an open source social networking, content management, and personal publishing platform. Denise lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where her hobbies include knitting, writing, and staying up too late writing code.

  Navar was an ordinary man. A soldier, and a good one, rising from common foot soldier in the Baron’s levy to sergeant of his company, but his true gift was to go from here to there unseen; and so Captain Harleth had used his talents for scouting, for the Barony of Valdemar was beset on every side by enemies. Not those that came by day, for all knew that the Eastern Empire was at peace, but those that came by night, for the Iron Throne ruled by fear and blood and dark magic, so that no man might call his soul his own.

  In later years, many claimed to have known Baron Kordas Valdemar’s mind, to have plotted with him for their exodus into the unknown West. Navar was not one whose status gave him entry into the councils of the good and the great, but he thought that such words were no more than idle tavern talk, the speech of men who wished to be seen as greater than they were. True enough that Soferu, who wore the Wolf Crown and sat upon the Iron Throne, was but a man. True as well that he was not a man like any other, for lust for power ran as hot as magery in Soferu’s veins, and so the Iron Throne was an iron boot upon men’s necks, and an iron collar about men’s throats, and an iron chain about men’s minds, and only a fool would sow treason farther than he must.

  And Baron Valdemar had been no fool.

  Only he, and Juuso Beltran, whose line had served Valdemar’s as seneschal since the lands had first come into Valdemar’s hands, and Terilee, Valdemar’s lady, brave and bright as a swordblade, had known all Lord Valdemar’s heart and mind. The three of them had warded their plans with subtle spells (so Navar heard later, and this tale he was moved to credit)—not wards that would draw the attention of the Hellhound Mages of the Imperium, but layer upon layer of subtle shields of misdirection, a deception as artful as a swirl of autumn leaves concealing a doe from the hunter’s bow.

  Of the journey to freedom itself, Navar knew as much as any man, for a scout’s skills were as vital as a mage’s when one must make one’s way through lands first hostile, then unknown. They brought with them not merely the household troops that a barony was permitted to arm and muster, but nearly all who dwelt within Valdemar’s bounds—all save for the baron’s eldest son. Lord Dethwyn, fostered as was the custom at Soferu’s court as hostage against his father’s obedience, would have willingly ascended to his father’s honors across his father’s grave were he granted the slightest chance. When Valdemar’s second son Restil came of age, he was meant to join his brother at the Wolf Court. It was not unknown for the sons of inconvenient nobles to perish at court so that their fathers’ lands might return to the emperor’s gift, and it was—perhaps—the thought of losing both his sons as much as anything else that caused the baron to move when he did.

  It was the work of a year—hard travel, and sometimes terrifying; through the empire, then (by stealth and misdirection) across the kingdom of Hardorn, and at last into the western lands, which Hardorn did not claim—that brought them to haven. And Haven it was in truth, the city that they built upon the banks of the river that Valdemar named for his lady. Some had died on that journey, but their numbers were greater at the end of it than at the beginning, for the rumor that their fellowship journeyed to a freedom beyond the persecution of the Empire had spread, and those who did not join them in the first days of their exodus followed them in the sennights and moonturns that followed. To all who came seeking asylum, Valdemar—now King Valdemar—granted it, for the work of building a kingdom was the work of many hands.

  For Valdemar now ruled a kingdom. The lands Baron Valdemar could now claim as his own were vaster by far than those that he had once ruled at the emperor’s pleasure, and he ruled now at no man’s pleasure save his own. And just as Valdemar’s lands had grown, so had the army grown into a great force of many companies, many captains, many sergeants, and Harleth now styled general over them all.

  That growth was the reason Navar was now uneasy.

  The days in which Navar had known every man and woman with whom he served were long gone—had been gone since before they had come to rest in their Haven. Thirty years ago, when he had been new come to the baron’s levy, he had known everyone his duties brought him near, both holder and servant alike. He had been able to measure the hearts and minds of all who sought to command him. Any soldier knew that just as there were good orders and sensible orders, there were bad orders and senseless orders, and it was a good soldier’s duty to evaluate each given order to see where it fell. He had seen countless lives saved by a swift-witted sergeant playing sunstruck at precisely the right time, and he had kept his own list (in his mind, never written where agents of the Iron Throne might see, for no one would think to look within the thoughts of a common sergeant, and Navar played the fool better than most when there was need) of those whose orders he himself would “lose” for precisely long enough to ease their disaster.

  In Baron Valdemar’s holdings, that had been possible. In King Valdemar’s country, it would not be possible for long. In the moonturns since they had settled here, many men and women had stepped forward to take places of service, and that was well and good, for the tally of things to be done to create their safe haven was so great that no one man could oversee them all. King Valdemar could direct their work from long before sunup to long past sundown and still not make every decision that must be made.

  Thus far all of them had prov
en to have hearts as good and as kind as King Valdemar himself. But how long, Navar wondered, before someone with honeyed words and subtle magic stepped forward to cloak a desire for power in a promise that his actions were in Valdemar’s best interests? Had they made this long and frightful journey only to stand vulnerable at the end to one who would seek to rebuild the empire with themself at its head? King Valdemar was a good and honest man and would likely raise young Restil to the same values, but—after him?

  How long until Valdemar’s people had to flee tyranny once again?

  Navar kept his suspicions quiet, for lessons learned in the shadow of the Iron Throne would take longer than a single year of flight and a few moonturns of safe haven to fade away. They had reached their new home in autumn and suffered through their first winter scrabbling to feed and shelter themselves, for provisions ran as low as spirits ran high. But if nothing else, there was good timber and good grazing in plenty, and what began as a bedraggled city of camp tents in the first weeks of autumn was a crude (though growing) settlement of wooden huts by spring. Stakes and stone cairns marked the location of future streets and roads, so that the building could progress in an orderly fashion. All through the fall and winter, those who could be spared from the labor of building and hunting had ridden out to map and explore, for the new kingdom of Valdemar was an unknown place. Navar had been among them, for no longer was he Baron Valdemar’s only scout, nor yet one of a dozen. Four score served in the King’s Army who had once been the baron’s huntsmen, or his spearmen, or common farmers, and (as all the army) they wore, not the uniform of the baron’s guard, but ordinary clothes, with nothing to mark them out save a gray brassard worn upon their left arms. Yet both caution and weather dictated that the scouts did not go far from Haven.