Mercedes Lackey: Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

By noon, the little cottage was clean, but her temper was still high. She decided that since the wretched Heralds hadn’t let a closed door stop them from pestering her, she was going to finish her interrupted shopping. Serve them right if they turned up again and she wasn’t there.

She was close-mouthed to the point of monosyllabic with the village merchants, but they were used to that. Usually it was because she was, in her mind, still back at her loom. It wasn’t often that her temper was as frayed as it was today. But as she bought her bread and meat pies, her winter squash and her cut oats for porridge, her fruit and her soap and candles, she noticed that the shopkeepers were just as preoccupied as she was.

It was abundantly clear why. The entire village was abuzz with talk about Danet. And now, of course, everyone had suspected the worst of him. Even his own father, who held court in the taproom of his inn, holding forth about how his ne’er-do-well son had been a devil from the day he was born, and how no matter how hard he was beaten, all he did was shrug the punishment off and go and do what he liked.

This much, at least, Marya knew was a lie. Danet’s father had never so much as laid a willowwand to his back. Everyone knew how Danet could charm his way out of any scrape he got into. But Innkeeper Stens brewed the only decent ale and beer to be had in the village and imported the only mead and wine, so no one wanted to nay-say him. And as for the innkeeper, well, he was making sure that memories were being “corrected” by pouring with a freer hand than usual and forgetting to charge now and again.

So the only one in the village today who wasn’t singing the new song was Marya. And of course, everyone remembered that Danet was supposed to marry her. Looks both superior and pitying were cast on her, and plenty of curious ones too. But no one asked her anything. Perhaps they had already heard about the reception that Stefan and the Heralds themselves had gotten. Perhaps the black storm behind her eyes was more obvious than she had thought.

The upshot of it all was that she went back to her little cottage in the same temper that she had left it—and behind that temper was a sinking feeling. This was going to be a prime topic of conversation for the entire winter. And there was not one thing that she could do about it. Until something just as sensational took their minds off it, she’d be gawked at and talked about and whispered over until the thaw and hard work took peoples’ minds off scandal.

She put her purchases away, put the eggs to boil, cleaned out a squash and tucked it into a corner of the fireplace to bake, then stood at her window and found that she was torn between wanting to sit down on the floor and bawl like a child, and wanting to break something. She and her family had always been odd ducks here—the only people whose income came from outside the village, and the only ones who made things that no one in the village could afford. They had always kept to themselves, and when Marya’s father had gone off to be a Herald—

—and had he gone off to be a Herald, after all?—

That isolation had only increased.

She had reacted to the mocking as a child by throwing herself into the work—she did truly love the act and art of the weaving, the more intricate the better—and by going off somewhere no one would bother her and crying. This was often the dyeing shed; since the only way to get a big batch of a consistent color was to dye it yourself, that was what they did. Usually the shed was empty when a big tapestry was being made, so it was a good place to go to cry. Later, when she had mastered the craft of dyeing and was old enough to be trusted alone among all the boiling pots of dye and mordant baths, no one questioned why she wanted to take the job over. It was unpleasant in winter, hot in summer, and some of the dyes stank. Your hands turned colors, and it didn’t wash off, it had to wear off. Her mother was just happy not to have to do it herself.

It looked as if the mocking—in adult form—was about to begin all over again.

Never had she so agreed with the philosopher’s bitter observation, “The more I know of humanity, the more I appreciate my dog.”

Maybe she should get a dog.

As she stood in the middle of the now neatly organized room and contemplated forcing herself to the loom, there was another tap on the door. More diffident this time.

She answered it.

Both Heralds stood there, the elder, Callan, holding out the packet of letters. “We wanted to return these,” he said. “And thank you. They have been of incalculable help.”

She made no move to take them. “You might as well keep them,” she replied, her stomach twisting in knots that did not bode well for the squash baking at the fire. “I can’t imagine how they helped you.”

“We only got reports on what was happening as people sent them to Haven, which meant they weren’t in order of when Danet was in the particular village,” the second one—she still didn’t know his name—explained. “By the time we got a report, people had forgotten when, exactly, he was there, as well. So there was confusion as to dates by the Guard, confusion as to dates by the victims. When we tried to plot his movement on the map, it didn’t make any sense.”

“But he very kindly dates his letters to you,” Herald Callan pointed out wryly. “And although he doesn’t necessarily mention the place he is in by name, he usually lets something slip that has let us identify it. Now we know where he was, when. His course of travel is quite clear. He’s making his way south and west, by the easiest route.”

She frowned. “He’s not stupid. He can’t be planning to carry on this scheme forever.”

“We don’t think so, either,” Callan replied. “We think he intends to go to Rethewellan. His thefts by themselves have not been very large—the things he has taken have all been valuable, but not the sort of thing that someone would raise a huge hue and cry over. When he has defrauded people of money, it has not been large amounts. But impersonating a Herald, he has no expenses. People rush to give him food, shelter, anything he needs.”

She nodded slowly. “So all those little bits are adding up to a right tidy sum.”

“By the time he gets to Rethwellan, he’ll have enough to—” Here Callan paused. “Well, I am not sure I know what he plans.”

She thought it over for a moment, the same way that she thought over the design for a tapestry when it wasn’t something straightforward, like the family arms. She let her mind go blank and waited for all the pieces to come together.

When they did, she was glad she didn’t have anything breakable in her hand, for she would surely have thrown it.

“He’s going to trick himself out like a rich man or a noble,” she growled. “Then he will go looking for a woman with a lot of money, probably one older, or ugly. He’ll be very clever about how he approaches her so that she never suspects what he wants. He’ll make sure that in the end, it appears that she is courting him, rather than the other way around. He might marry her. He might just live off her, then disappear one day . . . and go find a new victim.”

“Now you see why we want you to come with us,” Callan replied. “You know how he thinks.”

She opened her mouth to give him a sharp retort, but then the memory of her neighbors’ pitying and smug faces rose up before her.

To have to face that for the next several weeks or months . . .

The tapestry she was working on would not be done before winter came and made it impossible to transport, and the owners were not expecting it before spring. She had no pets, no livestock, nothing that depended on her to care for it. She could just lock up the cottage and leave.