Choices

by Mercedes Lackey

  “But, really,” she continued, “I don’t anticipate any problems. I did as the King asked and participated in the Season, I’m marrying a suitable man from a highborn family, and we are reestablishing my family, which would otherwise die out, leaving a lot of land and money for people to squabble over. The King is more apt to be surprised that your father disinherited—” She broke off.

  “What?”

  “How many people actually know that your father disinherited you?”

  Keven stopped to think. “I don’t know. For all I know he’s told people I’m dead, but if it’s not gossip at Court . . .” He looked warily at her. “Why are you grinning like that?”

  “I’m visualizing your father’s face when the King thanks him for allowing you to leave his family to join mine. Especially if he does it publicly.”

  Both of them started laughing together.

  Cloud Born

  Michele Lang

  Sparrow was weary of waiting.

  A year and more had passed since she and her heartmate had encountered the pain of the Forest of Sorrows first hand. Funny how she and Cloudbrother had rushed to Haven with their little son, ready to warn the world of the threat growing in the north, and then their headlong flight had turned to a long vigil.

  Somehow, the world had kept turning while they cooled their heels in Haven.

  Now, Sparrow and her son Tis stayed at her older brother Keeth’s house on Haven’s outskirts, waiting for her heartmate, Cloudbrother, to return from the Heralds’ Spring Council.

  A Herald cannot act without the knowledge or the sanction of the Crown. Again and again, the Council of Heralds had assured Cloudbrother that they were considering the best way to address the dangers they all faced.

  Once, Sparrow would have chafed at the delay. But motherhood had taught her patience. The world would reveal its secrets to her in its own sweet time.

  Sparrow’s big brother, Keeth, was in the Guards, and a fine, loveable dunderhead he was. He and his loud, teeming clan had welcomed her and her quiet, dark little son into their family bosom, to stay indefinitely if need be.

  She loved Keeth dearly, but he gave her a headache, too. He and his mate had seven sons; all of them had joined the Guards too and had married, and not a one of them had left their home down the Hill yet. As a girl back in the tiny northern village of Longfall, Keeth had seemed like such a man of the world to her, traveling all the way to Haven to protect Valdemar by joining the Guards.

  But so much had happened since Keeth had left. In the middle of all this noisy domesticity, Sparrow realized that over the years she had changed from an unsure, quiet farm girl into . . . somebody else. Keeth had now become the rooted one, the domesticated one.

  She enjoyed the family cacophony. But Sparrow, hidden within the screeching flock of her brother’s house, still looked forward now to the open road.

  Sparrow sought quiet places in the meantime. She was sitting on the front porch steps, shelling peas on a cloudy afternoon. Tis was outside with her, where he wanted to be, playing in the damp and the drizzle. Oddly intense, he was digging with a stick in the soggy dirt of the empty road, making what looked like elaborate maps of an imaginary world.

  And all at once, Cloudbrother and his Companion, Abilard, reappeared like a thunderclap of a vision. All at once, her heartmate was back, after a fortnight cloistered away with his Herald kin.

  And he was furious.

  His face was red to the roots of his silvery hair, his jaw clenched as he sat tall and slim on his Companion’s back. Cloudbrother’s eyelids, sealed shut by a childhood fever that had robbed him of conventional sight, hid the subtleties of his rage from her.

  Sparrow’s heartbeat pounded in her ears, a warning drum. “My love,” she said, her voice sounding loud and strange to her from inside her own head. “It’s so good to see you again. Two weeks seemed like two years. Tell me your news.”

  At the sound of her voice, Cloudbrother’s features crumpled, and the rage fled out of his body like a banished demon. He went from fury to exhaustion in a single moment.

  Sparrow ran down the steps to him then, and rested her hand on his knee as she leaned against Abilard’s flank, half a hug. “Abilard, welcome as always. You both seem like your feathers are well ruffled.”

  :Much news for you, dear,: Abilard Spoke into her mind. :Much mystery as well.:

  Before Sparrow could reply, Tis ran over on his sturdy toddler’s legs.

  “Mama, up!” he commanded, and Sparrow, his faithful servant, scooped him into her arms, and in one swinging movement mounted him in front of his daddy. Tis buried his grubby little fingers in Abilard’s glorious mane, and Cloudbrother wrapped his arms around the boy in a full, open embrace.

  Cloudbrother sighed. “After a year and more, at last the Council has made its decision. We’re not going to Lake Evendim after all.”

  The news hit Sparrow like a physical blow. “Not going? What?”

  Before they had fled, Cloudbrother had sworn an oath in the Forest of Sorrows to heal the strife up north in the waters of Lake Evendim. It meant his life to try . . . their surviving the encounter in the Forest had been a near thing. He had come to Haven to bend his knee and ask for permission to travel to the Lake region to face the danger, as Heralds do.

  And, after a year of waiting, he had been denied.

  His face was pinched with failure. “They refused to tell me why,” he said. “All they would say was there is much afoot near Evendim, and I must pursue my quest elsewhere.”

  His fingers shook as he stroked his boy’s tangled jet hair. “I told them that I had sworn an oath . . . It didn’t matter.”

  Sparrow swallowed hard. By now, Cloudbrother was used to exercising his power, to prevailing over hard odds. He had grown unaccustomed to the bitterness of falling short of the mark.

  She reached for his hand and squeezed his fingers. “No, love, you speak too harshly. The Heralds on the Council care, of course they do. You swore an oath to ease the Forest’s pain,” she said slowly, reaching for another way even as she spoke the words aloud. “You did not swear as to the means. We know the answer is hidden in the depths of Evendim, you and I. But that doesn’t mean the answer could not be found anywhere else.”

  Cloudbrother’s lips trembled. “I know. But the Forest cried out for water. And healing. A little sprinkle here in Haven is nothing near enough to restore the balance in the North.”

  “So, I guess we’ll have to look elsewhere? Maybe the answer is hiding right under all of our noses.”

  Cloudbrother smiled then, a grim little smile. “Oh, no, I’m not done with my news. The Council is sending me on a delicate mission now. One I am not permitted to postpone.”

  Sparrow stroked Abilard’s velvet-soft flank, almost against her will, just to give her fingers something to do as she suffered alongside her heartmate. She sensed the tension lurking in the rolling muscles under the glossy white-silver of the Companion’s coat.

  Cloudbrother kissed the top of Tis’s head. The little boy, shielded from his father’s emotions, pulled on Abilard’s mane, wiggled his stubby fingers to nest even deeper.

  “They are sending me—us—to Iftel,” he whispered, almost too quietly for Sparrow to hear. “I am to go as an ambassador, as part of a relief mission. They said I am welcome to take you both as well. To see if I can help with the terrible drought they are suffering in Iftel’s interior.”

  Iftel!

  Sparrow had only heard the word spoken aloud a couple of times in her entire life. Iftel. The hidden, walled-away land that had joined the alliance of nations but still hid its secrets from the outside world.

  The name evoked in Sparrow faint and weird images of strange and distant scenes, too outlandish for her to imagine as real. Nobody in Valdemar really knew what happened beyond the barrier of Iftel’s borders.

  Somethi
ng Cloudbrother had said penetrated through her fanciful images to bring her back to earth. Something important.

  “Wait. Did you say . . . drought?” she asked, almost as an afterthought. The idea of traveling to Iftel seemed so ludicrous, the reason why seemed almost unimportant.

  “Yes, drought,” he repeated, louder now. “I told them everything, how the Forest needed water desperately to restore the balance. I told them we knew the secret was hidden in the depths of Lake Evendim. And they are sending us in the opposite direction, into the middle of a drought!”

  Sparrow couldn’t help it. She started to laugh.

  “It is more than absurd,” she said finally, through her laughter. It was the kind of laugh you couldn’t hold back at a funeral, the laugh of somebody trying very hard not to cry. “It is amazing. It can’t be a coincidence, sweetheart. It just can’t. The Council is sending you there for some good reason we don’t understand.”

  :Sparrow speaks true. The Council is nothing if not economical. If it can combine diplomacy with magery, the Council will do it,: Abilard said gently. :Success is failure turned inside out, you know. You think you failed to convince them, dear Chosen. But it is clear to me that the Council believes you may serve our quest best in the East, not the West. With good fortune, we may heal the Forest even as we bring aid to our ally Iftel. There is often an economy in goodness.:

  Cloudbrother tried to stay mad, Sparrow could see it. The fury kept him grounded, gave him energy. But at his bottom, he was more patient than Sparrow could ever be . . . he’d had much more practice in setback, in lack and in trouble too. He had learned to be patient as a child, learned to accept pain, sickness, and heartache young.

  He knew better than even Abilard that what his Companion said was true. Often healing in one place can lead to healing in another. That was true inside a single body’s heart, and it was true for the land as well. Any farmer’s girl would know the same.

  “They paid you a true compliment,” Sparrow said. “A mission to Iftel. By the Mother! That is the stuff of legends, my love. And what hey, we can always visit Lake Evendim for a pleasure cruise someday. A little getaway, when all of this is done.”

  That coaxed a lopsided, more genuine smile out of him. “All right. I bow to fate. You have a way of finding treasure in the dust, Sparrow. If anybody, it’s you who’ll find fresh water and a secret balm in the middle of a drought. Can’t hurt for us to try. We’ll make it come out right somehow, even upside down and backward.”

  Sparrow sighed, letting her tension out and pure happiness in. “There you go, my love. Spoken like a true Herald.”

  She led Abilard to the back of her brother’s big, ramshackle house so they all could tell Keeth and the family the big news. They were heading out, that very night, on a mission too secret for the family to know.

  * * *

  • • •

  The journey took weeks. They started along the eastern trade route leading to Hardorn, pausing at the town of Trevale to stock up on supplies before turning north. After that, it was mostly sleeping at Herald Waystations along the way, until they reached true wine country.

  The Vineyard Hills rose south of the Iftel border, terraced and crisscrossed with gnarled rows of grapevines snaking over the hill crests and separated by rows of trees and bushes acting as a windbreak. It was lush, voluptuous farmland, more fertile than Sparrow had ever encountered before.

  She was used to the rocky, hilly country up north near the Forest of Sorrows, stony ground that bred farmers who were flinty and closed-off, like the land.

  This was another kind of country. Their last few days in Valdemar, they stayed at a remote vineyard with winemakers who offered them a guest room, and by night the air was scented with lavender, rosemary, and grapes ripening on the vine.

  But as they turned north from there, the landscape abruptly turned dry. The track they followed to the end metamorphosed from Haven mud, to rich earth, to dry dust. By the time they reached the Guards’ outpost a day’s ride from the Iftel border, the rolling hills they traversed were no longer green and russet with flowers, but brown and dead.

  They reported to the captain of the Guard outpost at Norflam, to check in as was customary for diplomats on foreign missions preparing to leave Valdemar. Captain Russ received them in the anteroom, while Abilard waited in the swirling dust outside the door. The Captain was agog to learn of the purpose of their mission, and even more amazed by the sight of Thistle in the party.

  The Captain didn’t offer them a seat. And she ignored Cloudbrother to speak directly to Sparrow.

  “You’re going where?” she blurted without any kind of formal greeting. “And with that little lad? It’s within my rights to hold you here for your own safety, you know.”

  Sparrow’s face flushed as she cradled Tis closer on her left hip. “We’re like you, ma’am. We go where we must for the good of Valdemar. And my little fellow travels easy . . . he’s a regular man of the world now, wouldn’t you say?”

  The captain shifted uneasily in her rough wooden chair. “I never was much about the littles, to tell you true. I always thought they needed to be wrapped in silk and kept off the ground until they could walk for themselves.”

  “Maybe you got raised that way, but up in the Northern reaches we learn to stand on our two feet pretty young.”

  Captain Russ didn’t have an answer to that. She turned her attention to Cloudbrother, his pale, expressionless face, his closed for good eyes.

  But still she spoke to Sparrow. “How do you take care of them both, I want to know?”

  Sparrow’s jaw clenched. She took a sharp breath, then forced her voice to stay even and calm. “I don’t take care of my heartmate, he takes care of me. He’s a Herald—don’t you recognize his Whites? His Companion, outside the door? I know they are dusty from the road, but I assure you they were both snowy white when we left Haven. The Crown itself chose Herald Cloudbrother for this mission. And he can talk too, you know. He hears just fine.”

  Captain Russ leaned way back in her chair, as if she wanted to put distance between Cloudbrother’s handsome, pitted face and her own. “No offense, sir Herald, but if you can’t see, how are you going to figure out what to do? I haven’t been to Iftel, nohow, but posted way out here, you do hear the stories. You hear the rumors. The general gist is that it’s boring, nothing to see. But . . . something’s eerie about the whole place. Off. Wrong. With all due respect, sir, how you going to figure out the lay of the land, get your little wife and son out of there in case of trouble?”

  Cloudbrother drew himself up to his full height, crossed his arms. “I’m a Herald. I’ve managed until now. And if the Council has chosen me for the job, I must be the Herald best suited for it.”

  “But . . .” the Captain squared her shoulders, cracked her thick knuckles. “You, well . . . you can’t see!”

  Cloudbrother smiled. “I see better than you, Captain. You’re from the Ashkevron lands, I can tell by the lilt of your speech. This is your first posting, and you have been here less than two years.”

  Captain Russ half-rose from her chair, spluttering, then remembered herself and plopped back down again. “How—how do you know that? Some kind of sorcery?”

  Sparrow’s heartmate shrugged, grinned, and for a flashing moment he looked just like he did as a mischievous five-year-old boy, before the fever had robbed him of his ordinariness. “No. I just have my wits about me. I remember the post list from the year I graduated, over two years ago, and your name wasn’t there. And there are many ways of seeing, besides the regular kind. No true way, Captain, remember. Only the way that works.”

  “Thank you for your welcome, Captain,” Sparrow said. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to get my boy settled and our gear set to rights before we head off this morning.”

  Sparrow knew when to stop talking. She stood next to Cloudbrother, silent, as the Captain
considered the three of them once again.

  “I don’t like it,” she finally said. “I don’t appreciate it. But I better accept it. You’re free to leave, and may Vkandis Himself watch over you out there. Because I can’t charge over the border and save you if there’s trouble.”

  “I know, Captain,” Cloudbrother said. “Thank you. We will manage.”

  Sparrow’s heart thrilled with the mystery of the journey and the danger of it. She was not a Herald, but she was sharing the quest of the man that she loved.

  * * *

  • • •

  Their ride to the border was almost disturbingly uneventful. The dust rose up from the dry track they traveled, half-choking them on a blustery, blazingly sunny early summer day.

  Tis napped fitfully as they rode, wrapped tightly against Sparrow’s back. She figured that keeping him out of the way—and out of sight if possible—would make it easier at the border crossing.

  She had expected a great stone wall, some physical marker of the boundary that separated the hidden land of Iftel from Valdemar. With a line of fearsome warriors guarding the top, lances pointed at them or something.

  Perhaps a fortress-like barrier protected other stretches, but here there was nothing.

  And yet both Abilard and Cloudbrother knew the moment they had reached the border.

  Abilard drew to an abrupt stop. :All at once, we are here,: he announced in Sparrow’s mind, and she was sure, in Cloudbrother’s mind, too.

  “Ah, Star-Eyed,” Cloudbrother whispered, as if he didn’t realize he was speaking aloud. “Watch over us, protect us in the land of your beloved.”

  Sparrow echoed his heartfelt prayer in her own mind, because now that they stood together at the border, she was filled with an enormous, formless anxiety, a cloud that mingled with the dust and half-choked her. She had never really expected to leave Longfall, and here she was on the edge of a virtually undiscovered world.