Exile's Honor v(-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  Taver shook his head and mane, and whickered a laugh. :Oh, come now, Alberich, I am not so much as all that—a servant only, nothing more.:

  A servant! "As much a servant as—as the Firecat of legend!" he whispered, hardly daring to speak. "As the Guardian of the Gates of Paradise!"

  :Exactly so. No more than that.: Taver bent to touch a soft—and very, very material nose—to Alberich's ear. :Come, stand—put your hand to Kantor's neck, and look into his eyes as you did mine. And this time, open your heart to him, as you have not yet done. Give up your walls, Alberich of Karse. Take them down, and let him inside.:

  He could fight the command of one of Vkandis' Priests—he could no more stand against the same command as given by Taver than he could have fought a whirlwind. He did as he was told.

  He looked deeply into those sapphire eyes, and opened his heart. And Kantor stepped gracefully into it, and filled it, and until that moment, he had no notion how empty it had been, nor how lonely he had been.

  And as all of the knowledge and understanding and revelations that had come to him in the past few moments settled into place like doves coming to rest on their proper perches for the night, he knew, truly and completely, that there was Something above them all, call it Vkandis Sunlord or any other name. He could no more understand that Something than a flea could understand a man—but it was there. He would continue to have other doubts, other fears, but that one was gone.

  And there was something else, much nearer and homelier, that would also be with him as a certainty as rock-solid as the earth beneath him and undoubted as the sky above. No matter what happened, in the next moment, or moon, or year, or lifetime—he and Kantor would never be alone or lonely again.

  "Chosen—" he whispered, and buried his face in Kantor's mane.

  :Chosen,: Kantor replied, with all the love that great heart could hold.

  And it was—oh, yes—it was more, so much more, than enough.

  PART TWO

  THE TEDREL WARS

  8

  ALBERICH heard a sound that once would have prompted curiosity, and now only brought a dull, aching despair. Wagons were coming up the road to the Palace Gates, enough of them that the rumbling noise was audible even from the practice ground outside the salle. He knew what that meant. These days, there were no more fetes and celebrations at the Court that needed fancy foods, wines, and decorations. The burdens these wagons bore were grimmer by far. More grievously wounded folk, soldiers and civilians alike, coming from the battlefields to the south, where the forces of Karse grappled with those of Valdemar. People too badly hurt for their own Healers to tend, who had been sent here, in hopes that the masters at Healer's Collegium could make them whole—or, at least, mend as much as could be mended.

  All the fault of the Tedrels... the Tedrels, who had been set against Valdemar after all. It had been no rumor that Karse was hiring them, and once the lands lost to the Menmellith Province of Rethwellan were retaken, to be used as the Tedrel base, it had been Valdemar's turn to face them, face Karsite troops and Karsite Sunpriests backing the most ruthless mercenaries this world had ever seen.

  All of Valdemar—except himself—was of a single heart and mind in this situation. Everything must be done to defeat Karse. And had the enemy been anyone other than Karse, no doubt he would be feeling the same.

  But it was Karse, and he was torn, heart and soul, ripped in half between honor and desire. He wanted to go to the front lines himself, to put his considerable skill and knowledge to serve Valdemar. But there was a chance if he did, he would be fighting and killing his own people, and he wouldn't know it until it was too late. The Tedrels had no livery except among their own blood; it could be anyone in the front lines. He would not have cared, if only it had been the Sunpriests and the generals that served them that he slaughtered, but it wouldn't be, would it? They would be safe in the rear, or far, far away, and he could not depend on anything except that it would not be only Tedrels he helped to kill. No, mixed in among the Tedrels, and certainly serving them in their camps, would be ordinary people, simple people, who had no quarrel with Valdemar and would have been happy if they had been left in peace. His people, the ones he had pledged himself to serve.

  And besides, even if he found a way to help without facing his own folk across the edge of a sword, he wouldn't be allowed to go. If he set foot outside of Haven, there were powerful people who would be certain that he was doing so to betray Valdemar. And having deserted Karse, how could he blame them for that assumption? When a man turned his coat once, it took no great stretch of the imagination to think he might do so again.

  Whenever his mind wasn't otherwise occupied, it was thoughts like these that came flooding in, and with them, a tide of guilt and depression. People who had become his friends, his brothers and sisters, were going south into danger—and here he was, safe in the sunshine of high summer in Haven.

  He was glad that at least he had a task, something he could do honorably. Now he knew, only too well, some of the pain that Aksel must have felt when he remained training the cadets, while his trained cadets went off to do the fighting. And he knew the agony of being torn between desiring the best for his land, and knowing he could not support what the leaders of his land had joined hands with. Aksel himself must be feeling that same agony, for Aksel had given Valdemar's spies some of the information that warned them that the rumors of the Tedrels' hiring was true. It must have been by Vkandis' will, surely, for the information had come well before the first attack on the border of Valdemar, with enough time to prepare for that attack and those that followed.

  These were not battles, these were wars—where the Tedrels moved into land opposite the Border, fortified it, then launched campaign after scorched-earth campaign from spring through autumn and then vanished, only to pick and fortify a new spot during the winter from which to pillage a new territory. Each time they did this, they effectively halted all farming, all commerce in that area, decimating it and leaving it barren and trying to recover. It was a diabolical plan, and there was nothing that Valdemar could do to thwart it without crossing the Border into Karse themselves, which Sendar (wisely) would not allow.

  And damn-all use my Foresight is against them. The magic that the Heralds called Gifts and that Karse called "witch-powers," Alberich found less useful than the exaggerated tales had led him to expect. Oh, he had Mindspeech, and very powerful, but it was of use only with other Heralds with Mindspeech and with Companions—and in setting the Truth Spell, which he seldom used. He probably could reach across the length or breadth of the country with it, but he never left the city of Haven; he was never allowed to leave. And he had ForeSight, that ability to glimpse what was to come—but it didn't stretch ahead more than a mark or two. It was a Gift that might be invaluable on a battlefield, except that he wasn't allowed near the battlefields. Of course, it was also an erratic Gift, which manifested irregularly and unpredictably, certainly not one he controlled... certainly nothing he could use from here to help in the Tedrel Wars. It seemed to work only in cases where something he could do, immediately, would change what was to come.

  The Tedrel Wars; everyone called these seasonal blights by that name now. Little wars, leeching wars, stretching now into the fourth year. Every spring, a new little war, more deaths, more fresh-faced youngsters going out to face the foe, and Alberich wondering—as surely Dethor wondered—had he trained them well enough, prepared them well enough? Could he? Could anyone? It wasn't only Heralds he trained, it was young Guard officers, those Healers that would accept training in the use of weapons, and even some of the highborn youths who volunteered, out of a sense of duty and with dreams of glory in their hearts. He trained them, and he sent them out, and he never knew if any of them would return.

  Valdemar bled from a wound that was not allowed to heal, that weakened her steadily. Alberich knew this, knew that when the Tedrel commanders judged the land weakened sufficiently, they would turn a little war into an all-out campaign. And
there was nothing he could do about it. If it hadn't been for Kantor, he would never be able to sleep at night—but Kantor had his own ideas about what was good for his Chosen, and when Alberich was prepared to spend another sleepless night staring at the ceiling, his gut in a knot and his head throbbing, he would sense Kantor moving into his mind like a storm front, and then—

  Well, then the next time he saw the ceiling, it would be morning. Last night had been one of those nights, leaving him singularly irritable, and not at all inclined to be charitable toward any of his pupils. Charity could—would—get them killed. Especially the one before him now.

  Alberich surveyed his latest pupil, and reflected that Trainee Myste was at least providing one thing for him: a distraction from grief. Although she was providing a little grief of her own, of a different sort.

  The middle-aged woman looked right back at him, her hazel eyes unnaturally large behind the thick glass lenses she wore, held to her face by a frame of wood, with leather straps that buckled behind her head, flattening already straight brown hair. She had a set that she normally wore that had lighter frames with sidepieces of wire that hooked over her ears, but those kept flying off during any sort of exertion; this had been the best they could do for weapons' practice, and it wasn't very good. Her peripheral vision was poor enough, and the frames of the lenses made it worse. And they were a handicap in another way; the first thing that an attacker would do would be to try to smash them. But she was virtually blind without them, so what could he do? Her short-sightedness was just the first in a string of handicaps that made her woefully unsuited to be a Herald.

  He thought she looked particularly aggrieved this afternoon, but it was difficult to tell what her expression was on the other side of that wood-and-glass mask.

  Physically, she was utterly unprepossessing, and looked like what she had been before she'd been Chosen; a sedentary scribe and clerk. He had no idea why she of all people had been Chosen, at a time when fighting Heralds were what was needed, not clerks, and how he was going to turn her into a fighter he had no clue. He despaired; she—well, he didn't know for certain how she felt. Frustrated, surely, at the least.

  She was the single clumsiest Trainee he had ever attempted to teach, bar none. He didn't think this was on purpose, though, for even though she clearly didn't want to be here, she did try until she was black and blue. Even if she'd come here as a child, she'd have been clumsy, he suspected, but this business of learning weaponcraft late in life, a task to which she was utterly unsuited, must seem utter madness to her. He didn't blame her for being irritated and unhappy.

  What was the point of putting her in this position anyway? She couldn't see without those lenses; she would lose them in a fight, and then she would be blind, and how was he supposed to train her to overcome that? Though there were tales of blind warriors with preternatural abilities in both Karse and Valdemar, those had all been about men and women who had been trained since early childhood in their craft, who brought skilled bodies and the finely honed senses of hearing and smell and touch to bear on the problem of being unable to see.

  Not a middle-aged clerk who had been bent over a desk all of her life. She would arrive at the front lines only to return in days in one of those wagons. If she returned at all. Which he doubted.

  She sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, recapturing his wandering attention. "Weaponsmaster, all due respect, but we both know I'm hopeless at this. It's a complete waste of your time to try and train me to use this."

  She gestured at the sword she carried—and she spoke in Karsite.

  In point of fact, if it were not for the fact that she couldn't fight, couldn't shoot, and couldn't defend herself, she'd be in Whites at this very moment. Self-defense was the only skill she lacked to enter her Internship, for she'd known most of what a Trainee learned long before she was ever Chosen. There was nothing about the history of Valdemar and the Heralds that she didn't know before she came here. She mastered the fine points of the law with the indifferent ease of someone who had spent years copying legal briefs. In fact, anything having to do with the written word, including no less than four languages, was of no difficulty to her. And she was the only person besides Alberich himself who was a fluent and natural speaker of his own tongue, learned directly from old Father Henrick before Alberich had set foot on the soil of Valdemar.

  "There's a saying in Hardorn," she continued. '"You shouldn't attempt to teach a goat to sing. It will waste your time, hurt your ears, and annoy the goat.' I can say without fear of contradiction that the goat is getting annoyed."

  He had to smile at that; she blinked behind those thick lenses, and emboldened, continued. "I keep asking this question, and no one will answer me. Can you give me one single, good reason why I have to learn weaponswork? And 'because all Trainees have to' is not a good reason. After all—" she set her chin mulishly, "—you don't make all Healers learn weaponswork, so why should every single Herald have to?"

  Since he had just been about to say because all Trainees have to, he found himself stymied. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and regarded her thoughtfully. "Just what would you do if you were ambushed in the field?" he asked.

  "Run," she replied promptly. "I'd cut loose my saddlebags, if I was mounted, throw away my belt pouch if I was afoot, and run. Chances are, whoever attacked me would be after my things and any money I had, not me. I'd let them have what they wanted. Things can be replaced, and while they'd be scrambling after loot, I'd be getting farther away."

  :That was a good answer,: Kantor observed.

  "And if you had to help villagers with a bandit attack?" he persisted.

  She laughed. "Give my advice and go for help!" she replied. "Not that anyone would be likely to take the military advice of a dumpy, bookish female who's half blind, no matter what uniform she was wearing. But riding Aleirian, I'm as fast as any Herald, faster than any other messenger, and once I'm within Mindspeech range of any other Herald, I can relay my information."

  :Another good answer. She's full of them, isn't she?:

  :She's full of... something.: He sighed. She wasn't intimidated by him, not in the least, difficult creature that she was. She didn't care that he was Alberich of Karse, only half trusted even by the Heralds. "I know all about you from Henrick. And from Geri as well, of course," she'd said on meeting him, meaning Gerichen, once-Acolyte, now Priest; Geri, who'd become as much of a confidant as Alberich ever made of anyone. Simple sentences, but the way she'd said them had left him wondering just what it was that they'd told her. And later, he wondered what, and how much, she had written down, for she seemed to be always writing everything down in little notebooks. She always had one with her. When she wasn't writing things, she stared in a way that made him feel she was memorizing everything, so that she could write it down later.

  :So how are you going to answer her?: Kantor prompted. :She has a good point; you're never going to make her into any kind of a fighter. You were just thinking that the first thing that anyone seeing her would go for is those lenses, and then what?:

  Then she'd be blind, of course, and utterly helpless. No, she was right, very right, the best thing she could ever do if attacked would be to run away.

  Could running be the answer, then?

  :It should never be said that Herald Alberich refused to find a better way when one existed,: Kantor said. :Besides, if she can't fight, they won't send her to the front lines; they'll use her to replace a Herald who can fight and send him instead.:

  "Put that away," he said abruptly. "You are right. I would be no kind of Weaponsmaster if I could not match the weapon to the student, not the student to the weapon. And escape might be the answer, however unlikely that weapon might be. Come into the salle, into the sitting room, and we will discuss this."

  He didn't miss her smile of triumph, not that it mattered. She wasn't going to get off as easily as she thought; there might not be fighting practice, but she was going to find herself trainin
g until she was in far better physical shape than she'd ever been in her life. There would be extra riding classes for one thing; if her Companion was going to be running, she had better be in shape to stick with him, no matter what he had to do to get away. And if she was going to count on being able to run away, Alberich was going to make her into a competitive foot racer, whether she liked it or not.

  Some of that clumsiness, at least, can be trained away.

  She followed him into his living quarters; Dethor wasn't there at the moment. One of the Healers was trying a new treatment for his swollen joints, a course of bee venom, for beekeepers swore that the stings of their charges kept the ailment away from them. By now, Dethor's bones were painful enough that he was more than willing to tolerate even the stings of angry bees in hopes of getting some relief.

  As a reward for his cooperation, he'd get a massage with hot stones and a treatment for his hands of hot sand afterward, something that did give him consistent relief, even if it was only temporary.

  Myste took one of the chairs in front of the window; Alberich sat opposite her. "We need to think," he told her. "We need to find a way to make the things you can do into weapons. Running, for instance." He pondered that for a while. "I'll trade you saying for saying—in the hills in Karse there's a proverb, 'The hound that chases two hares catches neither.' If you are going to run—we need to contrive a way that you can create more than one thing for your pursuers to go after."