Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar

by Mercedes Lackey

  “You should know,” Aiden noted.

  “Shut up.”

  “Breath,” Kasiath said quietly.

  “What?” The family turned to look at her and she blushed slightly.

  “Breath,” she repeated. “Breath rhymes with death.”

  “That vexing hand that . . . ?”

  “Endeth breath.”

  “Yeah. Sounds like The Poet, all right,” Padreic allowed.

  “Sounds like our Kassie has the makings of a poet as well as a birder,” their grandfather teased.

  “Hm.” Aiden fixed their sister with a look of mock severity. “And where were you last night, Kasiath Dann,” he demanded, his tone belied by the smile that kept trying to twitch at his upper lip.

  She cast him a sharp glance but didn’t answer.

  “So, we’re looking for a young person who’s already in love—here, Sulia, she’s wet,” Jakon said, handing his niece to her mother just as she started to fuss.

  Aiden snorted. “That could be anyone from Paddy to Hektor,” he noted. “And half the city in between these days.”

  “It’s a wide circle,” Thomar allowed. “Better cast a wide net and soon, boys. I’ve a bet on with Kiel Wright’s Da that you lot’ll find The Poet before he does.”

  “Oh, we’ll find him, Granther,” Raik promised him. “Won’t we, Hek?”

  His older brother nodded thoughtfully.

  Later that evening after Jakon and Raik had left for their shifts and the rest of the family had headed off to bed, Hektor joined Kasiath at the small rooftop coop where she and Thomar raised both domestic and messenger birds.

  “Anything you want to tell me?” he asked gently.

  Returning the bird she’d been tending to its box, Kassie shook her head.

  “It’s not you, though, is it?”

  She smiled wistfully at him. “I’m not well-educated, Hek,” she pointed out. “An’ I can’t get my hands on books an’ paint, can I?”

  “No. But I’m thinking you know someone who can.”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure yet.”

  “A friend of yours, though?” he asked leaning against the coop.

  “It could be. But I shouldn’t like to say anything until I was sure.”

  “Fair enough.” He straightened. “Go be sure. But if it is a friend of yours, tell ’em to stop, all right? There’re better ways to tell someone you love ’em than by scrawling it on a wall.”

  “I will.”

  “Laryn, you have to stop.”

  “But I can’t stop, Kassie! How can I possibly stop while the love of my life remains unaware of my most true feelings for him!”

  The girl Kassie was arguing with spun about, her long braids smacking against her shoulders with the motion. Across the sunlit artist’s studio, her father glanced up then, from his work, then just as quickly bent his head to it once again. For a moment Kassie felt some of the depths of Laryn’s passion, then, shaking herself firmly, Kassie took the girl’s elbow and drew her outside to the small, walled garden at the back of the studio.

  Of an age, the two had met one afternoon three years ago when Laryn’s father, one of Haven’s premier sign painters, had set up shop across from the Iron Street Watchhouse. Kassie and Thomar regularly cared for the watchhouse messenger birds, and one day rather than wait on her granther, who could spend hours “visiting,” Kassie had wandered across the street to where Laryn was sitting just outside the shop, trying to paint a black border on a tavern sign for her father with one hand while holding a book with the other. Kassie had taken over the brush and Laryn had read her “the True and Stirring Tale of Berden’s Ride.” They had become good friends after that, despite Laryn’s tendency to overdramatize far too much for the more serious girl’s liking.

  Now Laryn clutched at her friend’s arm with a shiver of desperation. “Do you think he saw them?” she asked breathlessly.

  Kassie blinked rapidly to keep the other girl’s emotions from overriding her own. “Who?” she asked.

  “Why, Jarred Chandler, of course, haven’t you been listening to me?”

  Kassie frowned. “Isn’t he that tall boy who’s learning the gittern with you?” Laryn’s father was successful enough to pay for all three of his children to attend private lessons; her friend had tried her hand at so many musical instruments in the last three years that Kassie had lost track of them all.

  “Oh, yes,” the other girl’s expression grew dreamy and once again Kassie had to blink rapidly to keep her own feelings in the foreground.

  “He walks past each and every one of those sites on his way to lessons every day,” Laryn continued. “So do you think he’s seen my declarations of love?”

  “I can’t imagine he hasn’t by now. The letters are all quite large,” Kassie answered. She was rewarded by a beaming smile and basked in it for just a moment before bringing herself firmly back on topic. “But I know the Watch has seen it, Laryn, and they’re calling it vandalism.”

  “Vandalism! How could they!” Laryn sank onto a low stone bench and Kassie felt her own eyes fill with indignant tears at the sight. “It’s art expressed in its most tactile and basic form!”

  “Well, yes, of course it is, but can’t you express yourself just as well on paper?”

  Laryn waved a hand weakly in her direction. “Paper’s much too restrictive a medium to express all the emotions I feel churning about inside me. I could fill a volume ten times the size of the biggest book I’ve ever seen and it still wouldn’t be enough. That’s why I chose the walls, you see,” she added brightly, sitting up straighter as she waxed to her subject. “They’re large enough. Barely,” she added after a moment’s reflection. “And no one else seems to mind, do they?” she added in a reasonable tone. “Everyone I’ve heard speak of my work seems to be eagerly awaiting the next one. And besides, the Great Bard Dion used walls as a venue before being discovered and invited into the Bardic Collegium when she was not much older than I am now.”

  “Who?”

  Laryn’s expression changed to one of exasperation. “Oh, please, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about her already, Kasiath? I read you a whole volume’s worth of her poetry just this summer? She lived some two hundred years ago?” Laryn gave a loud snort of impatience. “O! How I wouldst have your love be like the lily flower, where birds do sing for oft an hour?” she declaimed.

  Kassie started guiltily. “Oh. Right. The one who wrote about birds.”

  “They were a metaphor, but yes, the one who wrote about birds.”

  “Fine, yes, I remember her, but this isn’t two hundred years ago, Laryn, and you’re going to get into trouble. I’m going to get into trouble now that I know for sure that you’re The Poet. Hektor’s already figured out that I know more than I’m tellin’ an’ he’s going to expect me to tell him.”

  “Hektor? Isn’t he the one with the tousled, black hair and the smoldering eyes?” Laryn asked, the dreamy expression back in her voice. This time, however, her tone caused Kassie to frown in confusion.

  “What? Hek? Well . . . .” She struggled to see her older brother as a besotted thirteen-year-old girl might see him and then shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “Oh, well, that’s all right then.” Laryn jumped up happily. “I shall just go over to the Watchhouse directly and explain the whole thing to him and he’ll understand, I’m sure he will. He has the heart of a poet, I can tell.”

  Laryn tripped back into the studio, kissed her father on the top of the head, then sailed outside and across the street with Kassie drawn reluctantly along in her wake.

  Word of The Poet’s identity spread quickly and, although some of Haven’s citizens expressed both surprise and disappointment that he turned out to be a thirteen-year-old she, some of the city’s more astute gamblers were seen with extra money in their pockets.

  Laryn herself was kept busy not only cleaning the walls of her creative endeavors—with Kassie’s grudging help—but also in answering the dozens of entreaties for lo
ve poetry and requests for private and public readings from taverns and alehouses across the city. Her father put a swift stop to those; however, he did allow her to attend one public reading at a gathering at the Compass Rose Tavern arranged by retired artificer Daedrus for his cousin, Master Hiron of the Bardic Collegium.

  Meanwhile, the walls of Haven returned to their previous unadorned state. Hektor, somewhat wistfully, he had to admit, put the entire incident behind him until an irate blacksmith summoned the Watch one week later.

  Hektor read the shaky blue-painted letters scrawled on the rough surface of the forge wall with some difficulty.

  Away your yearning passion’s cry,

  And send on threads of gossamer forth,

  On winds of gale or hooves of horse,

  No more requited sad remorse.

  He winced. “That one’s the worst so far,” he noted.

  Beside him, Aiden nodded. “Better go talk to our budding Bard again.”

  “That wasn’t me!”

  In her father’s studio, Laryn fixed Hektor with an indignant scowl. “I would have thought you of all people could see that in a trice! I don’t ever leave the first line hanging! It’s awkward! And besides, forth and horse don’t rhyme, do they? It smacks of . . . haste!”

  “Haste?”

  “Haste. And besides,” she added in a somewhat petulant tone, “Papa has locked up his paints and taken away all my brushes.” She drew herself up. “And even if he hadn’t, I promised Master Hiron that I shouldn’t resort to expressing myself on the walls of Haven any longer. He’s promised me a place at the Bardic Collegium. He says I have the Bardic gift of Projective Empathy, like the great Dion and the great Valens. Does this poem project any empathy for you? No,” she answered for him. “So you see it couldn’t have been me.”

  “So who do you think it might have been, then?” Hektor prompted.

  “Clearly an admirer of my ...” She stopped in mid-sentence, her face brightening considerably. “It might be Jarred!” she exclaimed. “Yes, it might be! He has seen my work and now that he knows it’s me, he’s answered it! It is true love! I knew it was! Oh, I must fly to him, I must! May I, Papa, say yes, won’t you say yes! I shan’t be more than a moment, I promise!”

  She clung to her father’s arm and he just nodded weakly. As she ran for the door, he glanced apologetically at Hektor. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. If it is the boy’s hand, I’ll pay to have it removed.”

  “Have him remove it himself,” Hektor answered resignedly. “For that matter, have her help him. If the rest of Haven’s youthful poets see them at it, it might discourage them from following in their footsteps. Besides,” he added, unable to keep a faint smile from tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Who are we to stand in the way of true love, eh?”

  Later that evening, as a crisp autumn breeze whispered along the capital’s quiet thoroughfares, Hektor stood at the end of Saddler’s Street, considering what he might say to Ismy Smith. Years before he’d tried his hand at impressing her with a bit of poetry of his own—as Aiden had reminded him—and although he didn’t think he could manage it today, he wondered if their granther hadn’t had the right idea in reading someone else’s aloud.

  As he made for Ismy’s door, the words of Laryn’s first public poem came back to him.

  A scattering of flowers fall,

  Upon the paths your foot may tread,

  And to my love I give my all,

  Lest morrow find me stiff and dead.

  He paused with a faint shudder. “Maybe not,” he decided.

  Change of Life

  Judith Tarr

  The world was coming to an end again. The wedding was in three days, and the bride was barricaded in her room and refusing to come out. The groom had stalked off in a roaring snit. Both had declared, loudly and at length, that the wedding was off. Off, by all the gods and powers.

  Marlys could hear Ronan chopping wood out behind the cow barn. From the sound of it, he was proceeding with rather more violence than efficiency. After the third sulfurous expletive and a long pause, the sounds of ax on wood slowed down, as did the cursing.

  She released the breath she had been holding and went back to embroidering the hem of Ginee’s wedding tabard. One more handspan of excruciatingly elaborate vinework and she was done. “And that will be that,” she said with relief so deep it came out flat.

  “You are a fortunate woman,” her friend Brenna said from amid a billow of fine white linen that would, on the day, drape the bride’s table. “I’ve still the two girls to go, and Karol has been making eyes at that girl from Longmeadow. I’ve years of bridal nightmares still ahead of me.”

  “And you said I was mad to marry as young as I did,” said Marlys. “Not that you weren’t perfectly right, but when I look at five girls married fair to decently and number six about to be, no matter what she might be thinking right this moment, I must admit I’m not sorry to be finished with it. Three days from now I’ll settle down to a fine and pleasant life as a mother-in-law and a grandmother, and watch in unbecoming glee as my daughters suffer through all the horrors of motherhood that they visited on me.”

  Brenna grinned. A woman lost a tooth for every baby she had, the grandmothers liked to say, and Brenna was proof of it. But she was still a handsome woman with her thick iron-gray hair and her fine aquiline features. Marlys used to envy that profile bitterly when they were younger. Now she was content to admire it, and to reflect that while she might not have been blessed with such dramatic looks, she still had all her teeth, and her fair brown hair was barely gray yet, either.

  “Somehow,” said Brenna, “I don’t see you as the retiring sort. Don’t you still dream about having adventures?”

  “Six children and a husband leaving before number six came and a dairy to run and a menagerie of animals that the children acquired and left me to take care of when they up and married? That’s not an adventure?”

  “You know what I mean,” Brenna said.

  Marlys met her friend’s stare. Yes, she knew. Farm and family were just life. Adventures were kings and queens and Heralds and magic and saving the world. “Every child dreams about that,” she said. “Then she grows up. I’ve got enough to do breaking that filly Ginee doesn’t have time for now she has a household to set up, and keeping the filly’s dam in work, and even with the girls taking over the dairy, you know they won’t let a day go by without asking me for something desperate and urgent that no one else can know or answer or do.”

  “Still,” said Brenna with a distinct tinge of wistfulness, “don’t you sometimes wish you could walk away from it all? Pack a bag and saddle the horse Ginee foisted on you and set out to see what’s over the hill?”

  “I know what’s over the hill,” Marlys said. “More villages just like this one. A string of towns. Haven, eventually. Where the adventures are. Where they can stay. I’m happy where I am.”

  She believed it when she said it. Maybe Brenna did not, but she shook her head and gave it up, and went back to hemming the tablecloth.

  Marlys had no business letting that conversation stick in her mind, but it had lodged in there and would not let go. It was still there that afternoon as she cleaned stalls in the horse barn, hiding out from the chaos in the house and doing something useful while she was at it.

  Ginee and Ronan were speaking again, which was a good thing. The wedding was back on. The baker had sent word that one of her ovens had caught fire that morning, but the other ovens were still working and the bakery was only a little scorched. She thought she would still have the bread and pastries done in time for the wedding feast.

  “She thinks,” Marlys muttered to herself, catching a load of manure fresh out of the horse in her waiting pitchfork and tossing the odorous pile into the cart. “She’d better, or never mind Ginee, I’ll pitch a shrieking fit.”

  Ginee’s mare slanted an ear at her and snorted. She was head down in a manger of hay, lost in equine bliss. Marlys scratched the ample bay rump
with the fork, which elevated the bliss to nose-quivering rapture.

  Marlys laughed at her. “Silly horse,” she said, tossing the fork into the cart—to the mare’s visible regret—and trundling the lot down the barn aisle to the stableyard.

  The manure pile was getting high. Time to set the boys to taking it apart and spreading it in the fields.

  After the wedding. That was the way of Marlys’ world these days. Everything was wedding, wedding, wedding. And then when it was over—what?

  Peace and quiet. Back to the daily round of farm and dairy, with Marlys’ little bit of adventure added in, the horses that Ginee had bequeathed her.

  She had never ridden a horse before she married. She loved them, dreamed of them, admired them from afar, but horses were working stock on the farm, and the lovely light-boned saddle horses that she yearned after were far out of her family’s reach. She expected to live a life of faint and bittersweet regret for that, as a woman did, while the rest of her went on to be a wife and a mother and a grandmother.

  Of all her daughters, only Ginee, the youngest, had inherited her mother’s love of horses. She had not inherited Marlys’ acceptance of the way things were. What she wanted, she found ways to get. She made friends with the horse farmers down the road, traded milk and curds and her own attempts at cheese for riding lessons, and for a while between short skirts and her wedding to Ronan, apprenticed to the trainer.

  Ginee had moved on, but her first dream was still there, like Margali’s flock of finches in their cages, Kaylin’s horde of barn cats, Elspeth’s ancient and flatulent dog . . .

  Daughters dreamed. Mothers inherited the detritus of their dreams.

  “Sometimes,” Marlys said to the filly in her paddock on the other side of the manure pile, “mothers get their own dreams after all, a few decades late.”