Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  He still loved the Forest, loved the green silences, the huge trees, the sounds of it. He couldn’t get anyone else in the village to see what drew him there; when he tried, they looked at him with suspicion and even a little fear, just as they had looked at his parents.

  But he could have borne even that, if he still had them. Dad - Mum - why didn’t you come back? Why did you leave me alone? Why did you let the Forest take you away from me?

  The pain returned, greater for having been bottled away beneath his anger and rebellion. His eyes flooded with tears, his throat knotted, and he pounded his hand against the bark of the tree until his knuckles were raw and scraped. Loneliness filled him until there was no room for anything else, except for anger at the insular villagers who hadn’t even bothered to mount a search party when his parents didn’t return. It didn’t matter to these fools that the exotic furs his Mum and Dad brought back had been the only thing that kept traders coming to the village! Oh, no - because they went out into the Forest, everyone was just certain that something would follow them back into the village, something too big and monstrous to get rid of! There hadn’t been a particle of evidence that something like that had any chance of happening, but it didn’t matter; his Mum and Dad had been watched like criminals every time they came back from a trapping run. And they’d felt it; how could they not have? So they would go back out more and more often, spending less and less time in the village. And maybe that was taking on too much risk in the middle of the mage-storms. Maybe that was why, after an agony of waiting, he knew that they wouldn’t come home this time.

  They’d left him behind because there was going to be another mage-storm coming, and Justyn and some of the others had persuaded them not to risk his safety along with their own. He’d protested, but they’d slipped off during the night, leaving him with the innkeeper as they usually did. By the time he woke up the next morning, they were gone, and the wind and snow had obliterated their trail. He’d tried to follow, but had been forced to turn back.

  He waited and waited, going out every day to watch for them, sure each dawn that he would see them coming in laden with their prizes.

  But this time he had watched in vain, for they didn’t return.

  Darian was left to the village to care for, and it hadn’t taken them long to figure out how to dispose of him. Within a day or two of being certain that Darian’s parents were never returning, the village elders had quickly apprenticed him to Justyn. Justyn had long been after his parents to bind Darian over to him as an apprentice; Justyn had told them that he had the Mage-Gift, and that it had to be trained or it would be dangerous. Mum and Dad only laughed at him and told him he was a silly old fool if he thought a boy could be dangerous to anything or anybody. But the villagers had been only too ready to believe in the danger, and only too happy to get him disposed of - and more than once there’d been intimations that “disposed of” is exactly what he’d be if they detected any connection between him and these weird times. They told him then, and they continued to tell him frequently, that he should be grateful to them for seeing to his care, and for persuading his parents to leave him behind on that last trapping run. They never stopped telling him how grateful he should be, in fact. There was even a hint behind it all that it was a good thing that his parents had been lost - because now he, Darian, would no longer find his own life at risk in the Forest.

  The tears welled up again.

  Needless to say, he wasn’t grateful.

  I helped them! They said I did! When they set the traps, I was the one up in a tree, watching and listening for danger - when they needed an extra set of hands, I was right there, and when they were tired, I was the one who was still fresh enough to tend to dinner or build the fire up. Maybe that hadn’t been true back when he was just a little boy, but it had been the past couple of years, and there was no denying it. They’d been able to concentrate on the work at hand instead of having to keep one eye on the work and one watching for peril or approaching weather.

  And - maybe - that was why they hadn’t come back.

  That was the stuff his nightmares had been made of for the last year. He kept thinking of times when he’d been there when they’d needed him - when they needed a third set of hands on the rope in a blizzard, when he’d spotted large carnivores stalking the camp - even when he’d been up a tree and had seen the signs of a bad storm coming up without warning. Had a pack of some magic-twisted horrors ambushed them, attacking them until finally their defenses were all gone? Had a terrible storm overwhelmed them? Had it been simply accident, the falling branch, the hidden crevice, the slip in the dark that left one or both of them crippled and helpless? Was that why they didn’t return? Because they’d counted on his eyes and ears to warn them, his extra hands on a knife or a bow to help fight off danger, and he hadn’t been there? He’d never been bad with a knife, and he was even good with a short bow . . . could it have made the crucial difference?

  Or was it something else? Had they been caught by bandits, eager to steal their precious furs? Had there been an avalanche, or had one or both of them fallen through the ice while crossing a river? Horror of horrors - had they been caught in a Change-Circle and Changed themselves? Were they out there even now, rooted to the spot as half-human trees, or wandering in some shape not even he would recognize?

  He couldn’t shake the conviction that if he had been along, they would have all come back to the village as usual. Somehow, some way, his mere presence would have made the difference. He knew better than to try and tell this to anyone in the village; he’d tried once to tell Justyn, and the old wizard had told him that he was overreacting, that whatever had happened to his parents had nothing to do with him. After that, he had kept his guilt and fears to himself.

  But he couldn’t help but think that if he had been along, his parents would have had that extra set of hands and eyes that would have kept them safe, and brought them through whatever it was that took them away.

  And that was what made it all the more horrible.

  Here, in this refuge, away from the fools who didn’t understand, he could let his real feelings out.

  Why? he cried in silent anguish, face turned up to the canopy of leaves, both fists grinding against the back of the tree, Why did you leave me? Why didn’t you take me with you? Why did you leave me all alone?

  His body shook with silent sobs, and tears coursed down his cheeks, soaking his patched and much-mended shirt. It was too small in the arms for him by far, but he wouldn’t let anyone take it from him, nor would he give up the leather vest that went with it. She had made him the shirt, and he had cut and stitched the vest, and those two articles of clothing were all he had left of them.

  Why? he asked them again and again, until there was nothing left in the world but sorrow and guilt. Why did you leave me alone?

  Finally, his body trembling in every fiber, he collapsed in on himself, curled into a ball, and sobbed, muffling the sound of his weeping in his arms and the bark of the tree. He wept himself dry and exhausted, until there was no more strength left, even for a single tear.

  Before Justyn was satisfied that Kyle’s injury was no longer life-threatening and was as clean as one herbalist could make it, there was a great deal of blood spilled on the stone floor of his cottage. It wasn’t the worst wound he’d ever tended, but it was definitely one of the messiest. Justyn had finally stopped the bleeding with a compression bandage, and after liberally dosing the woodcutter with brandy and poppy-powder, began stitching the wound closed with a curved needle and fine silk thread. Kyle was a stolid enough fellow, and in a way it was a blessing for both of them that he was so very insensitive (and, one might as well say it, stupid), for he didn’t seem to mind the ugly wound and the stitching half so much as the two farmers who’d brought him in. Vere and Harris grimaced every time Justyn put a stitch in, and Harris, who had no livestock at all but a few chickens, relying on the loan of his brother’s oxen to plow his own land, was looking a bit green ab
out the face. Kyle had just sat quietly, as if he were a good plowhorse waiting for a new shoe to be fitted. The brandy and poppy concoction made the muscles of his face go slack and relaxed, and he leaned back in his chair, propped up by Harris and Vere, blinking sleepily whenever the needle went in.

  I could be generous, Justyn thought. I could suppose that he’s in shock by now. Except that he hasn’t any of the symptoms of being in shock.

  Such stolidity in the face of serious injury had been the hallmark of some of the mercenary soldiers Justyn had tended in the past - the long gone past, so removed from what he was now that it might be the past of another person altogether. There were just some men who never felt much of anything, either physical or emotional. In general, they got along well with their fellows, and they made good enough soldiers, for although they never displayed the least bit of incentive, they always obeyed orders without question. And, if a woman didn’t mind being the one to make all the decisions, they made perfectly amiable husbands and fathers. Certainly their phlegmatic temperament never led to beatings or other abuse. There had been times when he envied them that easy acceptance.

  Virtually everyone in the village was cast from the same mold, and it wasn’t at all difficult to tell that Vere and Harris were Kyle’s cousins. All three of them were husky, light-haired, and brown-eyed, but Harris and Vere were darker than Kyle, and Kyle had features that were much more square. Justyn sometimes wondered if the reason he and Darian had never quite been accepted by the villagers was a simple matter of appearance; both he and Darian were thin and dark, in stark contrast to everyone else here. Or at least, he amended mentally, I was dark until my hair started going gray.

  “He’s gonna be laid up a couple of days,” Vere said with irritation, his thick brows furrowing in a decided frown. “That means we’ll have to spare someone from field work to keep an eye on him so he doesn’t get into trouble, all juiced up with that poppy like he is. Can’t you magic him, ‘stead of sewing him up like usual?”

  “I’ve told you before,” Justyn said patiently, manipulating the needle through a particularly tough patch of skin, “I’m not a Healer, I’m an herbalist, a surgeon, and a bone-setter. I would have to use a complicated magic spell to do what you suggest. Whatever it was that the Heralds did to end the mage-storms fractured all the magic, and left it scattered around like a broken mirror. It takes a long time to gather up enough shards of power to work any spells. It’s very tiring, it exhausts all the magic that’s nearby, and then, if you really needed some magic to be done in the case of an emergency, I wouldn’t be able to do it. What if something bad came out of the Pelagiris, and I couldn’t protect the village? You wouldn’t want that now, would you?”

  The farmers both shook their square, shaggy heads, but they also looked skeptical and cynical, and Justyn could hardly blame them. After all, no one in Errold’s Grove had ever seen him work anything involving powerful magic, and they had no reason to think he could do anything much.

  And they have every reason to doubt me, he admitted to himself, taking another careful, tiny stitch and tying it off.

  “Besides,” he added as an afterthought, “you can get Widow Clay to watch him. She can’t work in the fields with that bad leg, but she can still weave baskets, or knit and sew while she keeps an eye on him, and who knows? She might decide that he’s better than no husband at all, and then your wives won’t have to cook and clean for him anymore.”

  Justyn felt a bit badly that he was talking about Kyle as if the woodcutter wasn’t there, but in a sense he wasn’t. He’d had enough poppy and brandy that he wouldn’t recall a thing that had been said once the drugs wore off. And even if he did, Justyn rather doubted that he’d take offense at any of it, since worse things had been said in his presence that he never took offense to. He felt no guilt whatsoever about setting up Widow Clay, however. The good Widow had been setting her cap at him of late, and that was something he wanted to put an end to by whatever means it took! The last thing he needed was some meddling woman coming in here and “setting his life to rights.”

  Both the farmers brightened at that idea, and they didn’t say anything more about magic. Instead, they exchanged the kind of cryptic sentences that almost amount to a code among close kin, and Justyn gathered that their conversation had something to do with a plan to persuade the Widow Clay that her best interests lay in dragging Kyle over the broom. Justyn rather doubted that Kyle would mind if she did; he’d probably accept being married with the good - natured calm with which he accepted having his leg stitched up. As for the Widow—well, she'd have nothing to com­plain about in Kyle.

  Justyn continued to sew the two sticky flaps of skin together with tiny, delicate stitches a woman would have envied, but the meticulous work was not engrossing enough to keep his mind off the past.

  The irony was, at one time he would have been able to mend a minor wound like this with magic, using magic to bind the layers of skin and muscle together, leaving the leg as sound as it had been before the injury. Granted, his grasp of power had been minor compared to the great mages like Kyllian and Quenten, but at least it had worked reliably— and what was more, it probably would be working better after the end of the Storms than the magics of those who were his superiors in power. He had never used ley-line magic, much less node-magic, and the loss of the ley-lines would have made little difference to him. He had been a hedge-wizard, one of those who practiced earth-magics, with a little touch of mind-magic thrown in for good measure, and he had served in the ranks of Wolfstone's Pack, a mer­cenary company recruited by Herald-Captain Kerowyn to aid Valdemar and Rethwellan in the war against Hardorn. His had been a minor role in that Company; using the earth-magics to tell him where the enemy was and how many his numbers were, helping patch up the wounded, helping conceal their own men from the enemy and his mages. Kerowyn's Skybolts had worked with the Pack in the past, and they were one of the few mercenary Companies she felt sure enough of to trust in the treacherous times when Ancar still ruled Hardorn. All that had been explained very care­fully to the members of the Pack, as had the risks and pos­sible rewards, and the Company had voted unanimously to take the contract. After all, it was Captain Kero they were talking about; no one who took the same side as she did ever found himself working for people he would really rather have lost down a mine shaft. And usually no one found himself facing a situation where foreign commanders were spending mere lives like base coin that they couldn’t get rid of fast enough.

  Justyn had only just hired on with the Pack, and he’d been eager to see some real fighting, to get right into the thick of things. But he had quickly discovered that the place of a junior mage, a mere hedge-wizard, was going to be back with the support-troops.

  And foolish me, that wasn‘t enough excitement for me.

  He tried to volunteer every time they called for able bodies, but wisely the commanders kept passing him right over - until they came to the desperate running battles with Ancar’s troops that decimated their own ranks and left the commanders little choice but to put a weapon into the hands of anyone they could spare and hope for the best.

  Justyn had been a good enough archer, but his mind-magic had given him an edge; as long as he got his arrow going in the right direction, he could think it into a target. With a bow in his hands, he impressed even the archery-sergeant, and so they kept him with the archers, and he got more than his share of excitement. Until his first battle, he’d thought that actually killing someone might be a very difficult thing, for he would be thinking his arrow into the body of a man, not a straw target - but then when he saw what he faced, there was actually a grim and melancholy sort of pleasure in it. “Hell-puppets” were what the other fighters called Ancar’s line-troopers; conscripted and controlled entirely by blood-magic, Ancar had depleted the countryside for fighters, and had raised the power for the spells that controlled them by killing their families in cold blood. When Justyn killed one of the troopers, it was actually a longed-for release
for the poor clod.

  Spell-bound and spell-ridden, for most of them that arrow came as a blessing, taking them out of Ancar’s hands and on to a place where their loved ones were probably already waiting. Ancar had not used his people well, to say the least, and Justyn found himself sending prayers along with each arrow.

  And as for the officers and mages commanding Ancar’s troops - there was great pleasure in ridding the world of creatures so depraved and sadistic. And perhaps it was wrong for him to feel pleasure in killing even something as vile as Ancar’s toadies, but he couldn’t find it in his heart to regret taking even one of them out of the world.

  And fighting was a great deal more exciting than grinding herbs, lighting campfires, and sealing wounds. When the archery-sergeant had halfheartedly given him the option to go back with his old group, he’d declined.

  And, to be honest, I felt more like a man. I was actually doing something, and other men, other fighters, praised me for it. How could I go back to work among the cooks and the mule-drivers?

  It wasn’t only the members of the Pack who praised him, either. He’d met several of the Valdemarans in the form of some of the Guard when they’d picked up a stray squad or two along the way, the sadly-depleted remnants of a Valdemaran Company that had been holding the line before the Pack came to reinforce them. They thought he was a fine soldier, and said as much as they all shared exhaustion and the rare hot meal between engagements.