Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar

by Mercedes Lackey

  Sherra turned so quickly she slapped her tail against Vesily’s fetlock. “Daylight is burning.”

  The hertasi resumed her Path out of the swamp.

  Vesily snorted and stamped in place, over a dozen times, but Sherra never looked back—or at least she did not look back in a way that the Companion would recognize as such. And when no one sees a tantrum, then technically, the tantrum never happened.

  But Vesily did, indeed, follow Sherra.

  Vesily was caught in a mud-bog twice before they made it to the edge of the Mire, once deep enough to reach the bottom of the saddle she bore; as a side benefit being stuck had the effect of making her too weak to argue with Sherra’s advice. Sherra talked Vesily through how to escape the bog—how moving slowly and deliberately would allow mud to fill in to the vacuum that moving her limbs left behind—but it was exhausting, and most maddening, it was something that simply could not be paused. The effort had to be deliberate and continual, until freedom. And, in some kind of sick cosmic comedy, the mud hole butted against a rock shelf.

  A circular one. And it, too, had mud tracked onto it by what appeared to be a human.

  Vesily and Sherra looked at each other. :Is that—?:

  “A Changecircle, yes,” Sherra agreed. She bent to look at the tracks, and then peered into the Circle itself. “What is in here is not from this part of the world. That patch of reeds, it’s dying. All those sedges are the wrong color, the wrong height.” She followed the tracks to a stunted tree. “And now I see what must have happened. Your human could not take direction from the sun because of the clouds, but look, here is moss on the tree. The problem is, it is growing on the wrong side of the tree, because the tree itself was turned about in the Change, and has not grown new moss yet. Your person took bearings from the side the moss was on, and for whatever reason did not recognize this is a Changecircle.” She spotted something else . . . something that was very much not good . . . and groaned. “I am so sorry,” Sherra said.

  :Why? What?:

  Sherra held up a torn bit of yellow-dyed cloth, only as long as one of her own fingers. She flicked out her forked tongue, which vibrated up and down at the very tips. “There is blood in this mud. The taste of it is faint but there. Whoever your Chosen is, they’re losing blood and I can’t sense any of the protective oils like we have. Or rather, wait—not much of it. There was some, once.” Sherra frowned and searched a little more, blinking her nictating lids against a persistent cloud of midges. “These little scraps of cloth seem to be discarded bandages.”

  There was a flattened patch of grasses, vines, and mud, and then a faint trail of broken greenery headed in what, by the mistaken bearings, would be what the Chosen thought was east. That meant the Chosen was headed back into the Mire.

  :My Chosen’s mind is feeling worry and despair, and fear. Of death. But not for herself? Himself? That way.: Vesily nodded her head twice to show Sherra the way, but Sherra already knew. The Path had changed direction, now that they’d reached that Circle, and now was a critical moment. “Vesily,” Sherra began, “We should rest here where the ground’s solid and—”

  :I know,: Vesily stated. :But I can’t. I know I should rest but I feel like I’m killing my Chosen if I wait.:

  “You could kill your Chosen and yourself if you don’t wait. There is a saying among guides and scouts—‘sometimes you must be slow to be fast.’ Being too bold means you get stuck or hurt, and spend your time extricating yourself instead of making miles.” Sherra reached up to pat Vesily’s foreleg. “You have done everything you could, and you were smart when you could have been reckless. Don’t do something stupid now.”

  :My Chosen is in there!: Vesily cried in Sherra’s mind, and the Companion stamped her hooves. :What if we rest a candlemark here and find my Chosen a candlemark too late? What about your guide-wisdom then?:

  “And what if we do not rest, rush in, and get delayed two candlemarks because we were too tired to see a mudpit? Believe me to my last breath, Spirit Horse, that is far more likely. You don’t know how lucky we’ve been this far. But I am concerned by this too. I say that we rest now, as best we can, and then we let our emotions push us when we need it the most.”

  Vesily stood, watching the middle distance, in the direction of her Chosen. She didn’t chase after her Chosen, at that moment, and Sherra took it as the victory for wisdom that it was and wasted no time getting fresh water and food. Sherra had an uneasy feeling that she hoped Vesily couldn’t pick up on—that this was no longer a guide trip and more of a salvage and rescue journey. She didn’t ration her food as if she’d need it for a return leg. Something told her she’d only restock at the Vale, this time, because she couldn’t get home. She found herself examining her weapons and triple-checking their thumb releases when she “heard” Vesily’s Mindspeech.

  :She’s insane,” the Companion said softly. :She’s—everywhere she turns is the right direction, she thinks. She crawls and then rests, wants food and cold water. But it’s so incoherent. She falls down, holds her belly, thinks of—everything. Randomly. I know her direction, Sherra, but I don’t know her. :

  Sherra tugged on Vesily’s tail. “Come here. Lie down and sleep. Look, your kind believe in destiny, yes? That spirits guide you to where you need to be? Our kind, we know these things to be true. Our spirits are agents of change long after the beings they were are dead. So lie down, here, and listen to me. Would the spirits that guide your people lead you through this, only to have you fall short?”

  :Your logic is flawed,: Vesily retorted petulantly, :Because why would your agents of change allow my Chosen into the swamp again?:

  Sherra frowned again. “I don’t know. Maybe they couldn’t reach her for some reason having to do with the Mire, or the Changecircles, or how her mind is.” Wait. What was that the Companion had just said? “What do you mean, my agents of change and your Chosen?” She blinked, thinking fast. “You mean that your Chosen is Tayledras?”

  :She isn’t Valdemaran. She keeps thinking of places and people I don’t recognize, and there are images of birds of prey and magic. Big stones that glow. A lot of bathing, a lot of food. A shadow of a gryphon, maybe. But no places in Valdemar that I have ever heard of.:

  “There is a chance things are not as bad as they seem. Many Tayledras can survive in the wild.” Sherra didn’t mention that probably three-quarters of the Hawkbrothers never left a Vale more than once a year. It might help Vesily’s morale if she went right on thinking that all Hawkbrothers were scouts.

  The overcast sky darkened as they set off again and soon drops of rain made rippling rings in the swamp-water. Thunder boomed from their left, then right. The drizzle picked up, and by the time they were again deeply into the swamp, it was a downpour.

  This had its advantages; the rain was clean to drink, and it kept many of the dangers of the Mire hunkered down. But it was absolute misery to trek through.

  Finally Vesily stopped. :This is ridiculous. I can go faster with you on my back, and you weigh almost nothing. Take to my saddle.:

  Sherra hesitated, looking up at the Companion through the pouring rain. “Ah . . . I cannot ride, Lady,” she admitted.

  Vesily snorted. :Neither can most of the Chosen when we Choose them. Take to my saddle.:

  Sherra didn’t argue; she simply crawled up onto the saddle and let the Companion pick through the deeper parts of the swamp. Vesily seemed to take the direction straight from her mind now; certainly she was going exactly the way that Sherra sensed they should.

  The storm picked up. About three hundred horse lengths away was deep swamp. Again, mixed blessings; it would shelter them from the storm, but be slower to traverse. Out here they were exposed, and dusk was already here. Gods forfend, they might even be struck by lightning out here. There certainly was a lot of lightning around to be struck by. One particular cloud-to-cloud lightning flash lasted so long that it illuminated the entire Mire as clearly as bright daylight.

  It lit up a particular somethin
g at the edge of the deep swamp.

  Sherra leaped onto a vine-twisted snag for a better look, hanging on to Vesily’s saddle for stability. Visibility was poor, thanks to the rain, even for her sharp eyes, but she was sure she caught a patch of yellow, like the bandage fragments in the Changecircle, amidst the orange glow of what she hoped was not webbing. It was at the base of a huge tree, of the kind that only the Pelagirs could produce. Sherra knew of only six other of this kind, and this was half again bigger than those she had known before. Its form was twisted and massive, and its trunks split into scores of branches, and each of them in turn into dozens more, all weighed down with vines by the thousands, each as big as Sherra’s arm. It did not obscure the canopy; it was the canopy, reaching far beyond what Sherra had ever seen from anything in the Mire. It filled the horizon so that the lightning seemed to come from inside it. In more than one of the gaps between the trunks, an orderly latticework could be seen, but it emitted light of its own, rather than shining silver in lightning. The larger sections glowed a mottled deep orange, and the thinner parts were a brighter orange, all about the brightness of an oil lamp. As they moved closer, Sherra hoped they were human- or hertasi-made, but with a sinking heart, she recognized them as being more akin to spiderwebs than ironwork. Her Pathfinding told her there, that is where they must go. “I see something,” she began to say, but her heart rate surged when she saw, despite the rain, that there was something in the water. Moving. A serpentine distortion in the rainsplashed surface, sending a wake behind it, angled towards the patch of yellow, and it was—it was bigger than the Spirit Horse, by far. Her other Gift almost physically hit her, and she spoke without thinking. “We need to move, Vesily, we need to get over there now, right now!”

  It was a bad thing to say to a Companion that was wound up too tight already about her Chosen, and Sherra regretted it right away, because Vesily lurched up from the muck and took Sherra with her. Sherra’s “Wauuuugh!” would probably not be mistaken by anyone as a war cry, but Vesily seemed spurred on by it. The hertasi managed to hang on as the Companion plunged desperately for the tree, but right now she couldn’t tell which direction was even up for what felt like a day of being pounded by water, mud, debris and reeds on one side, and Companion on the other. It was less than a minute, it turned out, and Sherra regained her senses when Vesily finally slowed alongside the patch of yellow she’d spotted.

  The patch of yellow was a woman, in Hawkbrother clothing, or rather, it had once been. Face down, on the arched, forked root of an ancient tree, the woman appeared to be on her knees with her belly between the fork, though the waterline obscured anything below the waist. Every spot of exposed flesh was ravaged by insects, her clothing torn away and used as makeshift bandages. Sherra jumped off of Vesily’s side onto the tree itself, then scrambled down to where the woman was. Sherra braced for the worst, but discovered the woman was alive. Carefully, Sherra lifted her head up from the moss and found the woman’s eyes opening, and turning towards Vesily.

  In her mind, Sherra heard the words, :I Choose—: and then got a profound sense of confusion from Vesily. :Wait.: Sherra got a mental impression akin to a case of mistaken identity.

  “Chosen or not, we need to get her out of here,” Sherra snapped, and pulled up on the woman’s shoulders. Sherra’s footing slipped, and she tried again, and finally backed off to rig a rescue noose with her waxed rope. Sherra became aware of a taste in the air, something like the bleach the Tayledras used on cloth and cookware but with a tinge of copper. It was a little anesthetic, in fact, numbing the hertasi’s tongue the longer she was near the latticework. She blinked, realizing that she was standing on some of this glowing latticework, and looked up, following the lattice from one joint, to another, to another. They made a platform, three horse-lengths wide, that was in turn caged in by many smaller strands. Every part that glowed was warm, like a living thing.

  Sherra couldn’t stop herself from looking. She had to see what was in the cage of strands, even while her intellect screamed at her that she didn’t really want to know.

  She pulled herself up on the strange resinous links of the platformed cage, finding that the stuff wasn’t like spiderwebs; it didn’t flex in the slightest. The stuff was as hard as any wood she’d ever felt—even when it was as thin as an arrowshaft it might as well have been a roofing beam. Sherra’s claws held firm and she pulled herself up to peer into the cage. Inside she saw, lit in that mysterious orange glow, a single egg as large as Sherra. It was so ornate in design that it was more like an artwork of an egg than it was like any egg she’d seen before. Whorls and pits and bands of color repeated around its circumference, and it was on a nest of sorts made up of smooth riverstones. It sat, as if it was a display, in the center of a dished platform of tiny resin rods woven so tightly Sherra probably couldn’t have wedged a finger between them.

  In the distance, just after a roll of thunder, the roar from the Mire sounded again. Sherra’s danger-sensing Gift nudged her, and she climbed down quickly to rejoin Vesily and the stricken woman. The Companion was resting her head against the woman’s forehead, as if trying to push strength into her. “We’ll get her up into saddle. It will just take time.” And again, she spotted movement in the water. If it had just been a dark shape, she wouldn’t have the sense of terror with it—no, this shape displaced so much water that the surface swelled upward, and the hertasi had a dreadful feeling of what was coming. Stepping back up on the root, Sherra dug out the vial of repellant oil and slung the liquid in a wide arc, on woman, Companion, water, and tree alike. “That will buy us some time,” she snapped, and looped the rope on Vesily’s pommel. “Step in, yes, there. There,” Sherra directed, until Vesily was in position, and then the hertasi pulled, hoisting the barely conscious woman up. She was heavy. In a few more tugs they understood why.

  She was very much pregnant.

  :My Chosen—: Vesily said in astonishment.

  There was no time left to say more before the water around them opened up.

  What had been an ominous swell finally broke the surface, and it was a snake beyond the measure of any that Sherra had seen before. To Vesily’s eyes it was an image of death itself. Lighting cracked all around them, further reinforcing the snake’s demonic appearance. Translucent fins and frills, some bitten through, cut, or marred by unknown decades of combat for Mire supremacy, were backlit by a roll of lightning that all but blinded Sherra. It projected not just a sense of fear, but also of great age, and tremendous weight. Sherra sensed, as it reared up farther into the rain-streaked air, that a hundred Companions couldn’t match the sheer mass of even the part of the great snake that was exposed outside the water. Its eyes weren’t even discernable, among the complex of scars, scales and plates of its head, and that somehow made its visage even worse. Its head was wider than Vesily was tall, and Sherra wouldn’t even be a snack to it.

  No rescue was going to come for them. No gryphons from the sky, no Hawkbrothers from the ground—here there was only terrain that wanted to kill them, storm that wanted to blind them, and this implacable, ancient creature that wanted to eat them. There was no escaping any of it, and they knew it.

  The three of them could only stand there, paralyzed. Sherra’s danger-sensing Gift went quiet. Her Pathfinding Gift took over. And it told her—stay here.

  The snake opened its mouth. It gaped upward at the rain, as if gathering the downpour to drink, and extended its tongue. Its tongue was easily as wide as Sherra’s entire body, and ended in flexible, spike-like points half a horse length long. As the titanic monster lowered its head again, it closed its mouth, leaving the tongue extended to whip up and down, taking in the air. Thunder boomed closer than ever before, and the snake weaved its head side to side. Sherra pulled on the rope, getting the pregnant woman onto Vesily’s back, but the whole time the hertasi watched the demon snake. Her limbs just worked on their own. Vesily was rooted in place, and Sherra could sense Mindspeech screaming, but not directed toward her. She wrenche
d her attention away from the snake and looped her rope here and there in Vesily’s tack, cinching the woman to the saddle. It was as well, because Sherra could see what was left of the woman’s legs. It was best that there was little light here. The bandages the woman had made covered only a few of the gouges in her lower legs, and Sherra could—

  —could not taste or smell the wounds at all. In fact, she could not taste or smell anything at all.

  If it had been possible for Gifts to be independent of her and exude an aura of smugness, they would have. They had led her here, to the Chosen and safety, as one.

  “This tree,” Sherra whispered to Vesily. “Get in closer to this tree. Climb up if you can, but be careful. Look down. Look away from the snake, Vesily. Listen to me. Look away and get in closer to the tree.” Vesily turned her head and looked dazed in the orange glow. She took a few sidesteps in and the snake swung its head and stopped when Vesily did. It was clearly tracking the movement.

  :Something about this tree or this—stuff—is dulling the snake’s senses. The lightning blinds it. The heat from this lattice hides us. The vapors from the tree numbs its ability to taste us. The rain and thunder deafens it,: Sherra projected hard to Vesily.

  At that moment, the roar of the unknown beast of the Mire sounded over the thunder, and it was close. Closer than Sherra had ever heard before. The giant snake unfurled every spike and fan it bore, in its most threatening display, first in one direction, then another. The display slackened and then the snake scanned its head up high around the stormy swamp, then low, and then gathered itself. It knew there was prey here. Somewhere.

  Another roar came from the deep swamp, closer still. Despite the rain, despite the splashes and ground cover, it actually echoed.

  That was enough for the snake. Its body tensed into a rigid S-shape and then it uncoiled and headed to the southwest. Its body seemed to never end, pushing wave after wave against the tree roots where Sherra, Vesily, and the Chosen hid. Sherra followed the fleeing snake with her eyes as long as she could, and then Vesily and Sherra both Mind spoke to each other, simultaneously.