Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar v(-101

by Mercedes Lackey

  Kelvren itched all over again, thinking about that. “Thanksss,” he growled, but the boy must have thought he was referring to the food.

  “Y’welcome sir. I have to wait for the sack when you’re done, so please don’t tear it up much. I don’t have too many.”

  Kelvren nosed into the bag and tasted at it with an extended tongue. He hadn’t expected prime cuts, but it looked and tasted as if he was getting the least wanted body parts from whatever animals they had at the time. There were a couple of knuckle joints, and what looked like some backstrap from a—well, he wasn’t sure. Could be pork. Could be horse. Could be deer. Could be tax collector. He hoped for horse. A short leg here, a few feet of entrails, six chicken feet and a hoof. Well, that part was identifiable at least.

  It might be best just to eat it all, without looking too closely.

  The boy was as far back against the side of the tent as he could manage, knees folded up to his chest and hands holding the hat in front of him. He stared at the gryphon.

  Kelvren pulled his face out of the sack and regarded the boy. “Don’t be afrrraid,” he said, blood dripping continuously off his beak.

  “Yes, sir. No, sir. Not afraid, sir.”

  “Hurrrh,” Kelvren growled, and got another few pounds of the stuff down his gullet. “Ssso. Why sssend you up herrre? What did you do wrrrong?” the gryphon asked. He was only half joking.

  “Lot of the town figures you’re really dangerous, sir. And they need all able bodies down there, but I don’t really count so much, and some of the folk, they want to stay with what stock they’ve got left to ’em in case you went down there, you know, on a rampage or somethin’. Monsters always rampage, they said.”

  Kelvren narrowed his eyes and peered out of the tent, letting his mood smolder for a long while. “Alwaysss,” he growled.

  “That’s what I’m told, sir.”

  “Ssso. I am a rrrampage-to-be, and they sssend a boy to brrring me food? You mussst be verrry brrrave.”

  “Not so brave, sir. I get the work no one else wants, and I go with it. Gets my mum and me a little coin. Privy needs cleared out, fence strung through swamp, cleanup after calving, I’m who they get. Like I say, isn’t so bad depending what you compare it to. There’s folk out there losin’ limbs and eyes and all. I figure I’m doin’ all right. An’ if somethin’ happened to me, they said they’d just get someone else, so it’s all proper.”

  “You’rrre herrre becaussse they can do without you if I ate you, and you’rrre—content with that?”

  The boy shrugged and smiled. “Not like I want to get eaten, sir, but if I did get all killed, I’d still have had a life. Been told I shouldn’t have, enough times, I figure I’m lucky havin’ even a short one.” He pinched the edges of his hat, staring at the water drips that fell from it while Kelvren finished the remains in the bag. “It might not be such a bad thing, anyway. They say you go to a really nice place when you die, where everything’s warm and pretty. It’s supposed to be a place where folk really like you no matter what. You probably know how it is, bein’ a monster and all. No one can really be welcome everywhere.”

  Kelvren nudged the bag a few inches sideways toward the boy. “Ssso I am learrrning.”

  The boy picked up the bag and knotted the cords. “An’ anyhow, I have my mum, an’ she’s good to me no matter what, even now that all’s this happened. She said we were just about to get rich, too, which woulda been nice. Still, all the army trouble can’t go on forever.” He wiped his bloodied hands on his trousers. “Uh—thanks for not tearing up the bag or eating me,” he said cheerfully, and put his soggy hat back on.

  “Anytime,” Kelvren replied, still mystified by the boy’s logic.

  The boy smiled, and waved back as he tromped out through the muddy field toward his town.

  “This haze is . . . intolerable,” Treyvan growled in Kaled’a’in, lashing his tail in anger. “I can’t do any better with my distance viewing, and that Herald with that FarSeeing Gift just left for the Deedun front. The Storms haven’t so much made things unreliable as they’ve made them . . . hurrh . . . unfamiliar. This all would have worked five years ago and now it is giving us nothing. All we know is where the target is. And just a glimpse.”

  “Did the glimpse show you anything useful?” a small voice crooned from below Treyvan. The gryphon turned his hawklike gaze down past his magic instruments to the hertasi in the vast room with him. The little lizard creature looked up at the gryphon with a wide-eyed but unafraid expression.

  “Rrrhhh. A Changecircle near by a Valdemaran Guard camp. A gryphon body in a tent. Head down, wings flat.” Treyvan pondered. “Signs of heavy injuries but tended to. Looked like Far Westerner, but he was no gryphon I know. I couldn’t read an identifying radiant—” Treyvan snapped his head up suddenly. “No radiant aura, Pena. No distinctive life glow to Mage-Sight. No wonder it was so hard to find him. He wasn’t shielded, there was just nothing there to shield. I was looking for gryphon aura traits, but I must have passed him by a dozen times since he seemed to only come across as a common animal from such a search.”

  The hertasi looked alarmed. She obviously knew what that meant. “Hirs’ka’ursk you think? He’ll be dead soon,” is all she could think of to say.

  “We’ll see about that,” Treyvan growled, with an undertone of determination, and stalked to a massive cabinet. He reared up onto his haunches, laid both claws flat on the upper corners, and dug his thumbtalons into the sockets in the trimwork. He twisted them and spoke “hiskusk,” and the sound of long metals rods shifting and clanging into place sounded from inside. The cabinet unfolded. Mage-lights inside gleamed off of teleson sets, a massive leather and brass harness, steel fighting claws, a narrow breastplate and more. Treyvan pulled out and shouldered on one side of the harness, while the hertasi rushed in to clip and buckle the other side of it. More hertasi rushed in after three sharp whistles from the gryphon, and preparations for a flight gained momentum quickly. Three telesons were wrapped and packed into a flat case, and at a nod from the gryphon, the fighting claws were packed as well. Treyvan called out instructions of what must be brought, and side pouches were stuffed with arcane materials and clipped to the harness. Before long, a swarm of the little lizards were readying him for flight and unlacing his talonsheaths. When Treyvan reached the outdoors, he shook his wings and tested the harness for fit. Another pair of hertasi affixed his ornamental breastplate and cinched it tight, while another one added several more pouches to his flight harness. “Pena. That downed gryphon is going to need a trondi’irn. Get Whitebird ready for travel right now. Tell Hydona I am going north.”

  Pena, the senior hertasi, turned to her charges still inside. “Get Whitebird ready for travel right now. Tell Hydona that Treyvan and I are going north.”

  Treyvan gave Pena a look of disbelief, even as she turned to clamber into heavy insulated clothing. He opened his beak but was stopped short by the senior hertasi poking a stubby finger up at him. “You know how this works, Treyvan. If you need supplies, you can’t stop mid-spell to go fetch them. You get caught up in your magic and you know it. You don’t get fed enough, you get cranky. And if you got hurt yourself, who would see to you?” Pena nodded firmly, slapped her tail once on the pavestones for emphasis, and pulled her hood and glass goggles on as they were handed to her by another hertasi scampering by. “Now just pay attention to where you fly and give me a smooth ride, understand?”

  Hallock Stavern, leaning on a greenwood stick that was either a too-short crutch or a too-long cane, glared at the clerk in the tent with him, and stabbed a finger on the papers and palimpsests heaped on a table that was obviously once a door. It still had the handle and hinges. “Now you listen to me, I want answers, son, and I want them now. Is help coming from anywhere for the gryphon? Anyone, anywhere? I’ve got the rank to push you into Karse in your shorts if you so much as—”

  The clerk held up a hand, looked up at the officer, and snapped completely. “No, you listen
to me, you overbearing bastard. The dispatches were sent and there is nothing new from Haven. Nothing. Nothing. You understand? Look at this.” He slammed his ink-stained hands on the stacks of documents. “This is what I have to deal with. Every bleeding soul in this camp, and three other camps, want messages, and they’re all demanding them of me. Send me to Karse naked if you want. Please! It will get me out of here, but until you get twenty more clerks to replace me, you will damned well wait like everyone else! Sir!”

  Hallock rocked back slowly. He narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms, as the clerk sat down. After a long moment he replied, “I should damn well promote you for talking to me like that, son.”

  “There’s no need to wish a curse on me, sir,” the clerk replied. “I know what the gryphon did for you. We all do. But no news is no news. When I know something, there’ll be a runner sent for you.”

  Hallock frowned but had to accept it. “I’ll be making the rounds of wounded, then. But I’ll come back. Good luck.”

  The clerk didn’t even look up as he resumed scrawling notes on teetering piles of papers. “Same to you, sir.”

  Hallock caught himself rubbing at the wide scar on his forehead, then hobbled his way out into the mess of the encampment. Woods had been cleared on either side of the main trade road, which had become the main thoroughfare of a tent city—well, a city designed by a drunken mob, maybe. There were no straight lines to get anywhere, and tents clustered around every tree that was too heavy to clear cut. Ropework between those trees appeared to have been done by myopic giant spiders during fits of seizures, and anything from canvas to blankets had been strung up as shelter. The poor tinder gained from the smaller felled trees made the cook fires underneath the canopies smoke and struggle for life. The main local source for firewood was a nondescript sort of scrubby, scrawny bush with annoying short thorns. It grew all over for miles, except for a former Changecircle at the edge of the camp. No one wanted to even set foot on that Circle, even though it was set perfectly atop a circular mound that probably had the best drainage, and view, of any of this mud-ridden swamp.

  The most orderly part of the whole encampment was on either side of the wide road to the river’s edge, where the grain mill was. The miller moved in with a family in town, and volunteered his home as a command post. Most of the officer corps had settled into the mill tower, which was the tallest building for many miles around. The rooms above the grindstones served as operation planning rooms for security reasons. In truth, it was mainly because the rooms were warm, dry, and had fireplaces—some comfort despite the incessant grind of the millstones.

  Hallock should technically be in there now, but the drone of the mill gave him a headache. So did the thick concentration of junior officers arguing tactics, where they tried to justify staying inside where they were “needed.” Most of the staff at the mill mean well, but they didn’t seem to understand: an army can not be administrated—it must be led. After the southern border wars, the turmoil of the Storms and the strife the Changecircles brought, one leader after another retired from service. Few command veterans had stayed in field service after all of that. Stavern’s First, his commander of the Sixteenth Regiment, had been the most experienced field commander the Guard could send northward at the time. He knew the protocols as the woman’s subordinate, but he hadn’t known her well. She’d fallen when Hallock had. The morning that he’d been cut loose from the Healer’s tent and the yellow ribbon removed from it, he heard the horns sounding the mourning notes. She had been buried already.

  And here he was.

  A new stripe tacked on the sleeve.

  A new ribbon under the badge.

  Brevet promotion. First of the Sixteenth, Captain Hallock Stavern.

  A senior officer, maybe, but still one of the regulars in his heart.

  Filthy and unpleasant as the cantonment was, at least here he was with the Guard. He hadn’t gained his previous rank by nepotism or bribery, he’d gained it by genuinely believing in what the Guard could be, and his soldiers knew. Just the fact that he was in the muck, waving off occasional offers for help, and took his time checking in on the units didn’t go unnoticed. If he had to plod along on a crutch to see to the soldiers’ well-being, rather than pass by in a driven carriage, then that’s how it would be done, and the mill be damned.

  He stopped in at one of the larger tents, an open-front, thirty-pole affair where cots and poorly strung hammocks were every one filled with the wounded. The most open section of the ill-set compound tent held a score of uniformed women and men with boiling pots of water, sorting rough buckets of more-or-less straight wood. Six of those in the hammocks were unconscious, but two were snoring, so that was a good sign. The ones awake were, healthily, complaining of officers and strategies. These twenty-some souls were the barely ambulatory Guard soldiers who were left over from most of the northern clashes. As was the Valdemaran tradition, if they weren’t fit to ride or march, they had been put to work. Those that still had full use of their hands were engaged in basic fletching. All Guards that were rated for field combat knew how to make arrows, bolts, and spears of several types, of whatever native materials could be scrounged.

  Supply trains were on the way from the south, and a wagon or two arrived every few candlemarks during the day. Proper, larger tents were being unloaded even now by a mix of the Guard and the local, but now largely unemployed, populace. Harvest crews would never come, so the large households that depended on them for their crops now faced hardship. The stalks and rushes from the grain harvests wouldn’t be collected, and peddlers who sold the baskets and other wares made from them would have no goods, and so on down the line.

  The locals were being compensated for their goods and work, but a government chit didn’t change the fact that so soon after the terrors of the Storms, when hope was building up again, their livelihoods had been smashed.

  Still, where there is life there is hope, he thought as he looked around the convalescents’ tent. And here I am alive to see it. And I’ll see Haven again and walk its streets again with Genni.

  “First. Sir.” The senior officer of the tent gave him a salute with her one unbandaged hand. Even that was unexpected; most decorum went out with the slop in places like this. “Good t’see y’back with us,” she said, and it didn’t take a genius to read the subtext.

  “Thanks, Corporal. You being seen to well here?”

  The obvious answer came right on cue. “Well as can be expected, sir.” A couple of others chuckled—no matter what region you were from or what Valdemaran dialect you spoke, some answers are utterly predictable. Things sobered up quickly as she spoke her mind. “Whole thing’s been a bit of a toss, honestly. It’s not a proper deployment, we say, ’cause we’re moving against, well, our own really. Ain’t a one of us feels right bein’ here ’cause of moving on fellow Valdemarans. We ought not be fightin’ our own.” The senior enlisted man nearby coughed, discreetly trying to wave the corporal down from making some kind of blunder. She gave him a rude gesture with a few fingers. “ ’Ey, it’s true. We talked ’bout it an’ that’s how we all lean. First’s got the right t’ know how we feel, even if we are stuck as gimps.” She looked back to Hallock. “Might be a black mark on m’record to say all that, sir, but just the same, I’d as soon not get promoted in the Guard over fightin’ my own countrymen.”

  Hallock leaned a little less on his stick and eyed everyone there who’d meet his gaze. “It’s not exactly treasonous to say this kind of thing, but it bends some regs. Someone with less ribbon than me might bust down hard on you over what you just said. So why tell me this, of all people?”

  Hallock felt himself unexpectedly moved from the words that followed. Right here were all of his country’s virtues summed up in a few minutes of hesitant confession. The corporal spoke up first.

  “Because you’re here, sir. I mean, we coulda writ it up, an’ sent it all official. Or could’ve gotten a clerk t’pass it’round in rumor-mail. But fact is, sir,” sh
e hesitated, but then saw others nodding. “Fact is, sir, we get put off duty roster, there ain’t much use for us. ’Cept as idle hands an’ cot-warmers—but we ain’t got idle minds, an’ we’re still Guard even if we get stuck off t’ bleed-in-place.” Another soldier grunted at that particularly derogatory term for convalescents.

  “We told you, ’cause you came here to us. Not us to you. An’ that means a bunch to us gimps.”

  Murmurs of agreement came from around the tent. A junior enlisted footman added, “You bein’ so close to bein’ one yerself, sir, we figured you’d understand better than the mill.” The group nodded to that as well. “Isn’t everyone gets magic-saved by a—” and he looked around for suggestions. “By one of those. Gods and spirits got t’have plans for you, sir, that kind of thing just doesn’t happen to regular folk like us. We figure y’gotta be somethin’ amazing for that t’happen.”

  Hallock steadied himself on his staff again, and licked his lips. “There is something amazing, at that, but I’ll tell you what,” he began. “We were under orders and got hit hard. A gryphon none of us had ever met struck out of the sky like a thunderbolt and near laid down his life to help Valdemaran soldiers just like me and you. Then he near killed himself just so I could get home to see my wife.” He looked to each of them, completely holding their attention. “Every one of you here lost blood, bone, or tooth defending your fellow soldiers. You didn’t even know their names, but you bled for ’em just the same, so they could get home to their families.” He shook his head and leaned on his walking stick more heavily. “You’re lookin’ the wrong way here. You think I’m special because a fury shot out of the sky and fought to save Guard? To save me? Hell, no.” He paused for a few breaths, looking at each of them again. “You’re all amazing because you’re like him.”