Under the Vale and Other Tales of Valdemar

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I propose that we send Mages out with our border patrols and scouts, one Mage with a group of two or three trained fighters. The Mages can begin to assess the extent of the damage to the magical energy around the Vale and help guide Silverheart’s efforts to Heal it. If they encounter Change-Creatures, the Mages will also recognize which might be more than physical threats.”

  “What of the students?” someone asked. “Even if all the magic is gone, what should they be doing? We can’t send them out to the perimeters!” An immediate babble followed—some in favor of utilizing every resource the Vale had, others insisting that those who were not confirmed Mages should not even attempt to use magic until the lasting effects of the Storms were completely known.

  Winternight raised his hand, and the din drifted back to quiet. “The students will not go to the outer perimeters, but every bit of help is needed.” He paused again. “They will work within the areas where the scouts have already passed at least once, where they are not likely to encounter Change-Beasts. They will be searching these areas for trace magics, studying any changes in patterns, looking for subtle echoes of power.” A few more questions, these from some of the instructors, and Winternight gathered those few around him for private conference.

  Stardance shook her head and shifted backward, edging away from the group and drifting between the trees, headed for her too-empty ekele. She did not dare defy the direct command of the Elders that all the Mage-talented and trained of k’Veyas attend the meeting, but she had chosen to stand in a half-hidden spot on the outskirts of the assembly. It is all folly, anyway, she thought bitterly. Of what use were they, now that the magic had disappeared? What good was anything now that Triska was—she shut down the thought before she could complete it, returning to her anger to cover the aching void inside her. What good was magic, anyway? After all, it had been a centuries-gone excess of magic that had caused this nightmare. Maybe there was a lesson to be learned. Maybe their Shin’a’in cousins had the right of it—maybe it was time they did without magic entirely.

  She was almost out of view, almost free, when a gentle but firm hand fell on her shoulder.

  “You, too, will take part in the search tomorrow.” Windwhisperer’s voice, though quiet, was implacable.

  “What would be the point? There’s nothing left!” Hostile resentment lashed through her words.

  “We don’t know that for certain. But we need to find out.”

  “I can’t be what you want,” she muttered to the ground, unsure what the words meant even as she said them.

  “What would you be, then?” That quiet voice held no anger, no demand. She turned to look at him. The Elder’s face was as still as his words, giving her no impression of his thoughts.

  She shifted away, her eyes dropping again. “Once, I might have known. Now, there’s no point. It doesn’t matter.” She thought briefly of Triska’s cave, of working with the richly colored fibers and fabrics, creating beauty with functionality, and sharp loneliness arced pain through her heart before she shuttered her face. “Why go out there when it won’t change anything?”

  “Perhaps it won’t. Or perhaps it could.” The silence between them lengthened. “Out there, it may be that you could find an answer to my question.” She heard a faint shushing, like a breeze lifting the wide leaves outside her ekele, and she looked up once more, only to find herself alone on the sanded path.

  When morning came, Stardance found herself walking beyond the borders of the Vale, one of the first group of students assigned to a small section of the “safer” areas. Just as the confirmed Mages were partnered with experienced scouts and patrols, the students, too, were accompanied by younger fighters. Stardance was the youngest student in the group traveling to the east of the Vale, and the simmering resentment in the oldest scout trainee was palpable as he paced near her. Clearly, he felt that he belonged in the unexplored places, not in the safe areas with the students.

  “You don’t need to babysit me,” she finally snapped, knowing she sounded like a petulant child but not really caring. “If you want to go farther out, my Kir will let your bird know if I need assistance.”

  The scout, barely five summers older than she, gave her an odd look, but he didn’t reply. Instead, he allowed a little more space to drift between them, no longer matching his steps to hers but lengthening his stride until he moved first beyond her view, then beyond her hearing. She shrugged. If he went too far and found something he couldn’t handle, he would deserve it. He was good enough, at least, that it had taken only moments for her to not be able to hear him. No longer distracted by his angry presence, she frowned and returned her attention to her own task.

  The area she was to inspect was a rough wedge shape, curving outward from the Vale between a stand of large pines and a meadowed area and along the cliff edge that dropped down to the stream that would eventually join the Anduras. Pacing the approximate borders, using her Mage Sight to look for magical signatures or unusual tracks of anything the scouts might have missed, Stardance felt her frustration mount. It’s just useless makework , she thought angrily. There’s nothing out here--they just want to keep us busy until they can figure out what to do next. I don’t know why we’re even bothering. Even so, she continued with her task.

  At first, Kir had flown overhead, helping her keep track of where her wedge overlapped with segments being examined by the other students; their bondbirds were in the air for the same purpose. After she had finished the first circuit of her area and started a closer inspection of the inside of the wedge, she gave Kir permission to land.

  For several candlemarks, Stardance combed the forest, starting at the outer border of her space and spiraling inward until she reached the landmarks of the clearing that was the last, central piece of the area she was assigned to. She heard only the natural sounds of the forest, although as she neared the edges of her wedge she sometimes heard mutterings from the other students or scouts. At one point, she looked up to see the scout’s goshawk bondbird lazily coasting overhead, but she neither saw nor heard any trace of the young man himself.

  After another candlemark of pushing through brush and finding nothing of more concern than small rodents, Stardance stood in the small clearing that marked the “point” of her wedge. Releasing her Mage Sight with a sigh of relief, she loosened her water skin from her belt and took a drink.

  :Thirsty.: Kir’s MindVoice was her most plaintive. The falcon had alternated between soaring on the thermals and perching in trees near Stardance to watch her, her head cocked to the side as though she were trying to make sense of her mistress’ actions.

  :Come, then,: Stardance replied, lifting her hand for the falcon, who plummeted from the sky. Raising the bird from her arm brace to the leather pad on her shoulder, Stardance held up the water skin, tilting it so a careful stream poured into Kir’s beak. Kir shook her head, sending droplets spattering over Stardance’s face and hair. Stardance winced and pulled the water skin away, mock-glaring at her bondbird. The falcon was unchastened, her eyes glinting as she tilted her head, and Kir’s teasing amusement in the back of her mind drew out the first smile Stardance had felt since the last Storm. Since Triska . . . she stopped the thought abruptly.

  :I, at least, still have work to do,: she scolded the bird, but her tone was affectionate. Rather than return to the skies, Kir folded her wings back and shifted her talons on the leather pad, stabilizing her grip and rebalancing her weight so Stardance could move without disturbing her.

  Stardance turned in place, her irritation with the fruitless exercise of looking for magic now returning. She studied the clearing again, glancing to the sun for her bearings. As she recalled, this place had once had a strong ley-line, which had been tapped and drawn deeper toward the Vale to power the Heartstone. Most of the sections of forest the students were searching today contained at least one former line or node. Might traces of these have survived the Storms? Was that what the Elders had hoped they would find with their closer examinat
ion?

  She closed her eyes, the better to feel for any echo of the crackling energy of the magic, once so familiar to her, and expanded her Mage Sight outward. She Saw nothing—no lines, no web of energy to draw from—but she had a vague feeling, a sense that the magic was still there, somehow. She frowned in frustration. Not even sure how to go about it, she tried to change the focus of her Mage Sight, broadening and refining it at the same time. Suddenly, her mind seemed to twist, and she could See a faint tracery, limning everything around her with a subtle silver, fainter than the tiniest of ley-lines. To this odd Mage Sight, her shielded self was now surrounded by a faint haze of what she was sure was power, but she couldn’t tap it or shape it. How could anyone make use of this?

  “It looks like I seize the fibers, but is not so. Look deeper.” Triska’s voice rang in Stardance’s head so clearly that the girl opened her eyes and looked around the wild forest, expecting to see the beloved snout hovering just behind an exceptionally large leaf, laughing at Stardance for believing her to be gone.

  But even Kir was silent, and though the falcon liked to pretend to be aloof and regal, she would have been twittering like a magpie if anyone familiar were near.

  Stardance took a deep, unsteady breath, fighting back the crushing disappointment, the weight of loss heavy within her. Then she remembered when she had heard those words. It had been a spinning lesson, when she had been trying to use magic to help feed the fibers to the spindle faster—and had, of course, ended up with great clumps instead of smooth thread.

  After those words, she had watched Triska spin, this time with her Mage Sight, sure that the hertasi was using some innate magic. How else to explain how far superior Triska’s threads and weaving were? But Mage Sight had shown her nothing, just the glow of Triska’s door wards, like and yet somehow unlike those used in the training rooms.

  “Is in mind,” Triska had finally said. “Think to make self attractive to fibers, no more.” It hadn’t made sense to Stardance at the time, so she hadn’t given it further thought, but had continued to practice spinning without attempting to use magic.

  Could this faint magic be spun like the loose fiber into stronger thread? Stardance looked around the clearing, trying to remember where the lines had lain before the Storms. Unable to recall, she shrugged.

  “See if it works, first,” she muttered. “Time enough to reshape later.”

  :?: sent Kir.

  :Not you, silly thing. As if I’d reshape so much as a feather.:

  Kir preened her plumage briefly, then resettled on Stardance’s shoulder, tucking her beak behind the girl’s ear in a gesture of reassurance.

  Stardance closed her eyes, then opened her Mage Sight with that same twist of her mind until she could once again See the faint fog of diffuse energy around her.

  Like attracts like, she thought, and fed a tiny bit of her personal power outside of her shields, letting it drift and ripple a fine radiance over her skin, inviting the nebulous energies around her to join it.

  Long minutes passed, and she was about to throw up her hands and go back to the Vale in disgust, finished with this pointless task, when she again heard Triska’s voice in her head.

  “The silk waits for no one, but it will not be rushed.”

  Stardance fed a little more of her energy out to her surface, ignoring the first warnings of energy strain, imagining waggling fingers of magic waving “come, dance with us” into the energy-mist. So caught up was she by the image and the feeling she was creating that she almost missed the response of the magic-haze around her.

  It was exhaustion that caught her attention—or, rather, that she no longer felt exhausted, despite using her personal energy. Slowly, she brought her Mage Sight back into sharper focus and was astonished to See faint tendrils coalescing out the mist, drawn into her shields, replenishing her.

  Stunned, she thoughtlessly reached out, almost grabbed for those precious strands of power, until she practically felt Triska’s presence beside her and remembered what had happened when she had first spun thread, how everything had tangled together when she had stopped letting the fibers flow through her fingers and had started to reach urgently for them.

  Slowly, she stretched out to those tendrils with her coruscating Mage-fingers—bringing the strands together, plying one to the next and to the next with utmost care, until she had a tiny line started.

  It was a mere runnel, nothing like the ley-lines that had fed the Heartstone and powered the Vale, nothing even like the line that had once flowed through this very clearing, but it was still decidedly a line.

  But what to do with it? She couldn’t stand here forever, a living lodestone in the magic-haze.

  Now, she was unsurprised when Triska’s voice again echoed in her head. “Every weaving starts with the warp thread.”

  With Mage Sight and normal vision layered one on the other, Stardance examined the clearing, which stood on a slight incline. Like water, magic tended to run downhill, so she shifted, trailing the tiny threads of magic down the slope, careful not to move so quickly as to break even one.

  As she paced the lowest edge of the clearing, she found what she sought.

  Though not of the quality of a Heartstone, the large rock at the edge of the tree line seemed to have enough quartz in it to hold the power from this tiny line she had created. It would serve well enough for her to tie off a warp thread here. Maybe, once the power had gathered and grown, weft threads could be brought in to shape it, reweaving the network of lines that had once tracked through the Pelagiris. Or it could be guided to run its path elsewhere, perhaps even back to the Vale.

  With exquisite care, she reached out to the stone with her shimmering Mage-fingers, sending some of her own power to dance over the stone, to wave invitingly to the tendrils she had drawn with her. Ever so gently, she nudged the line she carried toward the stone. It wavered uncertainly, but she waited, dimming her own radiation bit by bit until the fine line quivered and with an almost audible snap fell into place, finding the stone and settling, sinking into the earth, drawing the energy-haze with it.

  Now separated from the support of the tiny tendrils of power drawn from the fog, Stardance staggered as a drain-headache blossomed into full power, drumming the insides of her skull. Kir launched to a nearby tree, chittering her concern, but Stardance kept her from calling to any nearby bondbirds. Moving slowly, keeping to paths that were as out of the way as possible, she stumbled, she hoped unseen, back to the Vale, barely able to climb the stairs to collapse onto the bedroll in her ekele.

  “Are you sure?” Winternight leaned forward, one hand twisting over the head of his staff. “None of the students were Healing Mage-talented, so far as we knew.”

  Dayspring nodded. “It was a ley-line and what resembled the beginnings of a node. I’m not sure why I scanned the safe areas we were crossing as we returned to the Vale, but I’m glad I did. It was tiny, but must have been formed by an external influence, not the natural gatherings of power in channels. There hasn’t been enough time for the magic to settle so cleanly. And this was the only place where I saw such a thing.”

  “We need to know who was in that area. We need that student, that Gift. K’Veyas has never had many Healing Mages, and now that Silverheart is the only one left, well, she’s wearing herself out.”

  “I never noticed signs of Mage Healing in any of the students I taught,” Silverheart added, her voice soft. She was too young for the lines that had creased her face in the last few days, strained not only by the Mage Storms themselves but by the demands of attempting to restore some balance to the power around the Vale. “But neither did I work with all of the trainees.”

  “My apologies for my lateness,” Windwhisperer said, brushing aside the curtains at the entrance to Winternight’s ekele. “There was a Change-Creature in the area I was working in, which delayed our return until we had dealt with it.” He shrugged off the questions. “Not magical, so the scouts will be better equipped to relate the details
. My younger son had an interesting tale, too, from his work in the safe area, but we can discuss that later. First, why the summons?”

  Winternight gestured to Dayspring, and the younger Mage spoke.

  “You assigned the students this morning, didn’t you?” Windwhisperer nodded. “We need to know who was in the area that went east toward the cliffs, between the stand of tallpines and the slope just before the meadow. There’s a ley-line and a node there, and they weren’t there when we went out this morning.”

  Only a close observer would have noticed the flicker in Windwhisperer’s eyes before he leaned back, his face as calm and still as ever.

  “There were three students in that approximate area, but as it happens I know who created it, for my son observed her. Stardance.”

  The other three Mages inhaled sharply.

  “I never taught her . . .” Silverheart murmured at last.

  Winternight was silent for a moment, studying Windwhisperer’s face. “Is your son near?”

  Windwhisperer nodded and bent his head toward his kestrel bondbird, who hopped off her perch and darted out the open window. “I thought you would want to speak with him, so I asked him to wait below and said I would send Tria when we wanted him to come up.”

  A moment later, the young scout tapped at the entrance, then pushed aside the curtains and entered the room.

  “Welcome, Nightblade,” Winternight nodded at a seat next to Windwhisperer, and the new arrival sat. “Your father tells us you were paired with Stardance in the searching of the safe areas today.”

  Nightblade lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug. “Not so much paired,” he replied after a moment’s thought. “I thought it would be best for the oldest scout to stay nearest to the youngest Mage student.” His voice left a subtle shade of emphasis on the fact that he was the oldest of those assigned to work in the safe areas with the students, hinting that he felt he deserved to be out with the rest of the fully trained scouts.