Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar

by Mercedes Lackey

  :We’re leaving. Now.:

  The Path broke upon Sherra’s mind, as welcome as a ray of sunshine would have been. She led the way, as sure as if she had been in her own little house. And somehow it was a Path free of obstacles, of mudholes, of sinks and snakes and crocodiles and perils. The rain did not let up, but didn’t get any worse either, until they were out of the Mire. When they arrived at a clearing, lit by a sliver of moon, Vesily stopped suddenly and a streak of gray went through the air past them, and looped back. A Tayledras bondbird owl looped over them twice, then vanished into the distance. A candlemark later, a dyheli stag crashed out of the forest, and accompanied them until they crossed a cartpath leading to the Vale. The dyheli vanished into the forest and by morning, in the haze of pain and fatigue, the three travelers felt warm hands helping them along, lifting them, and tending to their aches and travel wounds.

  By noon, in the embrace of the Vale, the three became four.

  The Tayledras woman, with the help of the Vale’s Healers, gave birth to a son.

  :My Chosen,: Vesily Mindspoke to the baby, and nuzzled at him with her warm, soft nose. Vesily’s blue eyes shone in the thousand lights of the Vale, and she looked to Sherra, who was wrapped in blankets nursing a bowl of soup.

  “A little young for a Herald, isn’t he?” Sherra asked.

  Vesily’s eyes showed mirth and she whickered, and then returned to nuzzling the child. :Yes. Yes. But it is all right. You have showed me the wisdom of patience. The moment to leave will come in its own time and there is no use in rushing forward to exhaust us both to no purpose. I will wait.:

  In Burning Zones We Build Against the Sun

  Rosemary Edghill and Denise McCune

  At the coronation of Queen Alliana, an envoy of Karse had told her that if she and all her people renounced their heathen ways and banished the white horse-demons from their land, Vikandis Sunlord would welcome them as His worshipers. And that King Nabeth of Karse would surely consent to her marriage to his eldest son, Prince Salaran. Of course she had refused both offers, saying Valdemar was pleased with things as they were, and any who wished to worship Vikandis in Valdemar were free to do so, so long as nothing they did violated Crown Law. The coronation festivities ended, and the Karsite envoy departed, and everyone was sure that was the end of things.

  Less than a year later, Alliana was forced to summon her armies to defend her borders. Hardorn remained neutral, but that did not mean she would obstruct the Karsite armies traveling across her frontiers to strike at Valdemar from the east.

  It soon became clear she did not dare, for the red-robed priests of Vikandis Sunlord conjured demons to wage their war, and the Sunsguard carried with it captives to slake the demons’ blood-hunger until the moment they would be loosed against the foe.

  Hedion could hear the sound of the screaming from the foot of the hill. The voice had gone thin and hoarse with a sound, not of fear or pain, but of a fathomless unslakeable rage. He paused a moment to collect his strength for the climb up the path to the guard tower. Two years ago—five—the hike would have been nothing. These days, weariness burdened his shoulders and made his very bones ache. He looked upward toward his goal, wincing when the sunlight threatened to rekindle his headache. South of the Old Quarry Road—though not even the Collegium’s Bards could say what had been quarried here, or when—the air was sharp and cold even in summer, and the sun was mountain bright. Here in Yvendan they were only a few miles from the invisible line where the Terilee River changed its name to the Sunserpent River.

  From the border that separated Valdemar from Karse.

  He pulled the hood of his cloak forward in a futile attempt to shade his eyes, and sighed as he began his ascent. Every Healing took its toll these days, awakening savage headaches that never quite went away. He knew his old mentors would tell him to rest, to take care of himself, that a Healer’s health and stamina were his greatest tool and he should husband them always.

  He couldn’t do that.

  Every day of rest was a day someone who needed him suffered. Died, if he didn’t reach them in time. Nor was that the worst. The worst was what they might do to others.

  He wrenched his mind determinedly from the well of memory and quickened his pace up the hill.

  “Healer, thank goodness you’ve come!”

  “I came as soon as your message reached me,” Hedion answered. “You’re Captain Dallivant?”

  The garrison commander hung back, looking wary. The man who had greeted Hedion was a captain, to judge by his uniform. His face bore the characteristic bruises of one whose helm had deflected a sword-blow. The bruises were faint now. Perhaps a sennight old. Karse had tried the border here around that time.

  “Yes, sir. Is it true what they say, you can—”

  “You don’t have to call him ‘sir,’ Dallivant, he isn’t in the army.” The new speaker was the garrison commander. A veteran, from his scars. A good man, but a hard one. “You’re Healer Hedion? The Mindhealer?”

  “Yes.” Hedion waited. He couldn’t do his work if people meant to get in his way. There was a trick—simple but effective—that usually gained him the cooperation he sought. He listened intently. Yes. There. “Tell me, Commander Felmar—did Brion hurt anyone before you captured him?”

  Felmar grimaced, refusing to acknowledge—aloud at least—that Hedion had impressed him. “Had to put down three of the horses after he got at them. Broke Maret’s arm before we got him down. Don’t know why I bothered letting Dallivant talk me into waiting on you, except I thought he might like to say a few words before we hanged him.”

  “Sir! You can’t!” Dallivant burst out. “Brion would never—”

  Hedion held up his hand for silence. He’d had this conversation, or a variant of it, more times than he could remember. But it was necessary every time.

  “You don’t strike me as the sort who’d hang an innocent man, Commander.”

  “Innocent!” Felmar snorted. “He had blood all over him—and Maret saw him!”

  “Maret saw a Karsite weapon. A demon,” Hedion answered.

  “Pull the other one, Healer. Demons can’t come over the border,” Felmar said.

  “No,” Hedion agreed. “But the damage they do can.”

  At least he had Felmar’s grudging attention now. Behind them, from the closed door of whatever storeroom was being used as a makeshift cell, the screaming continued, as regular and monotonous as if it were a mechanical sound from an unliving source.

  “We all know demons can’t enter Valdemar. No magic can,” Hedion began, his voice taking on the gentle, distant, lecturing quality of one who seeks to instruct, not confront. “We also know the Karsite priests can summon demons, and do. That’s why the war’s gone on as long as it has—we don’t dare chase the Karsites across the border and finish them once and for all.”

  Felmar growled, faintly, deep in his throat, as if he wanted to disagree, and couldn’t.

  “Of course, we do cross the border,” Hedion continued. “With a Herald or two in the vanguard, you usually have enough warning the Red Robes are bringing up one of their creatures in time to retreat. But sometimes you’ll just send out a scouting party—volunteers, they know the risks—and sometimes the demons can’t be seen.” He stopped, pushing the hood of his robe back to rub his aching eyes. “When their horses spook, though, your men know it’s time to run for it. The thing is—” He stopped, taking a deep breath. “Sometimes running isn’t good enough. Sometimes the demons get them anyway. Only it isn’t an injury you can see. It’s here,” he tapped his forehead. “Inside. And there’s nothing they can do. It’s like a poisoned wound. When it gets bad enough . . . things happen.”

  “It wasn’t Brion’s fault, sir, I told you it wasn’t!” Captain Dallivant said, his words tumbling over each other with his haste to speak them. “He’d never hurt a horse, never, not in a thousand years, sir, Brion comes from horse country, and—”

  Felmar made a curt gesture, demanding sile
nce. “And you can Heal this ‘demon curse,’ Healer Hedion?”

  “If it were a curse, I’d tell you to have your company priest pray over him,” Hedion snapped. “It’s an injury to his mind. And that I can Heal. Now show me where he is—and tell me you won’t just hang him when I’m finished. Otherwise, this is a waste of my time.”

  Commander Felmar looked a bit taken aback by such plain speaking. “I—If it was a demon, I guess he’ll tell me, won’t he?”

  “Yes,” Hedion answered. He shouldn’t be this tired before starting a Healing, but it wasn’t just an innocent man’s life at stake. Felmar meant to hang young Brion. You weren’t manacled when you were hanged. Your hands were bound with rope. Brion would be able to break those bonds—easily—and he’d do far worse than just slaughter a few soldiers if he did. He’d escape. And a Karsite demon would be loose in the Jaysong Hills—one no Gift could sense nor Wards could ban.

  He turned to Dallivant. “And when I’m finished, tell his friends to keep a close watch on him and tell him everything I’ve said. I don’t care what he thinks or what he wants to believe. Nothing he did after he was demon-touched was his fault, and I won’t have someone I’ve Healed slitting his own throat out of stupidity.”

  The silence stretched until Felmar cleared his throat. “Well, I think we’re finished, Healer. Kailes, take the Healer to the prisoner.”

  “Yes, Commander.” A young woman armored—incongruously—as if she were expecting immediate battle rose gracefully from her seat at the desk at the back of the hall. “If you’ll come with me, Healer?”

  The message that had reached Hedion was less than a sennight old, but young Brion-from-horse-country looked as if he had aged a moonturn in that time. He was nearly naked, long red gouges in his skin showing that he’d ripped off his own clothes everywhere he could reach. His knuckles were red and puffy from constant battering at the stone, and his wrists were raw and scabbed—not because of any mistreatment, or because the shackles were too tight, but from his constant attempts to drag his hands through them. His lips were puffy, bitten and bleeding, and the cell, cold as it was, stank of human waste.

  “We’ve tried to feed him, and, and give him blankets, Healer,” Kailes said. Hedion could sense guilt and shame radiating from her like heat from a stove. “It doesn’t matter what we do. He throws the food and rips up the blankets. And he won’t stop—”

  “It will be over soon, Kailes. Now go and leave us alone, please.”

  “You—you won’t hurt him, will you, Healer?” she asked uncertainly, her cheeks flaming with embarrassment at asking.

  “I’m sorry,” Hedion answered. “I probably will. But I’ll save his life.”

  The door closed behind him, and Hedion took a moment to remove a shim of soft wood from his belt-pouch and jam it into the crack between the door and the frame, wedging it in tightly. Few cells locked on the inside, and he didn’t want his Healing interrupted. He removed his cloak and belt, piling them carefully in a corner, then added his overtunic. It was cold in the cell, but it was also filthy: as Kailes had said, Brion had flung all the food brought to him as far away as he could manage, and hadn’t bothered with the chamber pot. There were two trays—obviously dinner and breakfast—sitting on the floor far outside his reach. Hedion didn’t really blame whoever it had been for not wanting to get too close. He bent down and picked up a tankard. Sniffed at it. Water. Good.

  The screaming had stopped when he entered the cell. Now the damaged, demon-imprinted creature was staring at him silently, bloodshot eyes startlingly blue in a face as pale and glistening as a rock-grub.

  “You’re thirsty, I know,” Hedion said soothingly. “I’ve brought you water. See? Here it is.”

  The manacles that shackled Brion were connected by a three-foot length of chain threaded through an iron ring. Madness if you wanted to try to control a prisoner, humane if you were chaining someone to a wall. Hedion approached Brion deliberately, noting the rusty streaks of blood on the stone floor where the boy had scoured his heels raw. The streaks gave him some idea of Brion’s reach.

  “Water,” he said again, in the same low soothing voice. “Here it is. I won’t take it away.”

  He held the mug out to the boy, but just far enough away so that Brion had to strain toward it, pulling himself to his knees and hanging the whole weight of his body from the manacles that circled his wrists. In that position, there was little he could do to harm anyone. Hedion held the mug of water to Brion’s lips, and as Brion slurped greedily at it, Hedion reached out and placed his other hand on the crown of Brion’s head.

  There was always a moment of panic when you began a Mindhealing. The spirit, his teachers had told him, yearned to protect itself, and feared the touch of another mind as a weak swimmer feared deep water. To give in to such panic was dangerous, a thing that could cause the Mindhealer to lose himself and the one he sought to save. Hedion was an Adept; he conquered the panic with an indrawn breath and sank into the depths of Brion’s mind.

  There were a thousand metaphors for what Healers did—all ways to clothe in homely ordinary words a thing that could not be expressed in words at all. For Hedion it was as if he unknotted the tangled strands of a spoiled weaving until they could be rewoven and made smooth. Or as if he tilled and seeded a garden, freeing the earth of weeds and stones so the young plants could grow strong and tall. Or cleaned a cow-byre that had grown filthy and poisonous through years of neglect, so that it became a safe haven once more. Or walked through a darkened wilderness, seeking a lost and frightened child.

  Or all of these at once.

  Inside his mind, Brion was frozen in the terrified moment when the demon had touched him, the power of it enough to force his wounded spirit to attempt to remake itself in the demon’s image. When you become the thing you fear, you no longer fear it. But see, Brion, I am here, and the demon is not. Look at me, Brion. Look to me . . .

  Over and over he fought the same battle: defeating the conjured demon-image inside Brion’s mind, calling to that mind to see itself as whole and well and free. Brion’s screams rang off the stone walls of the prison—Hedion could hear them, though they seemed far away and irrelevant—since each time he defeated Brion’s inward demon, it carried Brion with it into its death-agonies.

  But it also grew weaker. Each time it died Hedion could sense more of Brion behind it.

  “Help me! Oh please, please—can’t someone help me?” Brion cried at last.

  Hedion did not allow the relief he felt to pass from his mind to Brion’s. Fear—doubt—mistrust—could undo all his work in an eyeblink.

  I’m right here, Brion. Take my hand. Look at me.

  A whole and healthy mind does not need Mindhealing. That was the first lesson Hedion had learned. To use his power to force himself into a healthy mind, to shape it according to his will and not its owners’, would be an utter betrayal of his Gift. And so the second lesson he had learned—so deeply ingrained that by now it was reflex—was to surrender—instantly—to the push of a Healed consciousness trying to regain the isolation and solitude of normalcy by banishing the intruder from itself.

  Hedion did not remember what it was like to be isolated and solitary in his own mind. If he ever had been, it had been a very long time ago.

  As he surrendered himself to the thrust of Brion’s mind, his awareness of his surroundings sharpened. His knees hurt; he was kneeling on the stone. The cell stank. He could hear Brion’s hoarse breathing, shading into tears. Hedion drew a deep breath, and clenched his teeth as the first hammerblow of the headache struck him behind the eyes. He would not cry out. He wouldn’t.

  “Ypon—Ypon—” Brion gasped. “What have I done?”

  “Nothing,” Hedion answered. “You have done nothing.”

  “Ypon” was a goddess who took the form of a white mare; well, Dallivant had said Brion came from horse country. Hedion pushed himself to his feet, and this time he did groan as the change of position made his headache flare into
brighter agony.

  “Wait here,” he said, as if Brion could do anything else. “I’ll get someone to unchain you.”

  On unsteady feet, Hedion walked to the door. He had to force himself to bend down to pick up his belt so he could use his knife to unjam the door, and the effort left him feeling sick and exhausted.

  But he’d won.

  One more time.

  Afterward they always wanted to celebrate. Hedion just wanted to sleep. He got his way more easily these days—probably because Healings left him looking like a man in desperate need of a Healer himself. Brion had been taken away to the infirmary—Dallivant had gone with him—and Commander Felmar had just offered Hedion the use of his own quarters when Hedion got to his feet and sighed.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Commander. But thank you for the thought.” He swayed, and reached for the back of the chair to steady himself, when a young woman, mud-spattered and wild-eyed, burst in to the room.

  “Commander—” she said, sketching a salute sloppy from weariness. “The Mindhealer—has he left yet? I missed him at Chapel Hill and Semolding—he’s got to come—have you—”

  “I’m right here,” Hedion said. Forcing his voice above a whisper was an effort, but he managed.

  The messenger’s name was Esclinet and she’d been chasing after him for three days. There’d been an outbreak of madness at Stone Tower—not one person, or three, but dozens. Hedion knew all that in an instant. Esclinet was so terrified—her father had been one of the first afflicted—and so exhausted that her mind shouted out the message she was terrified of forgetting. It struck Hedion with the force of a blow, and he tightened his grip on the back of the chair. To show her how weak he was would only frighten her more. For the same reason, he let her gabble out her message, interspersed with directions and advice he didn’t need.