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

She had never been outside the village. Suddenly, she wanted to.

“All right,” she growled. “But I won’t be staying in any of your Herald shacks.”

“We would never expect you to!” Callan said hastily. “They aren’t build to hold more than two anyway. How soon can you leave?”

“No longer than it takes me to pack.” She didn’t need much, either. She wasn’t some fancy lady that needed fuss and bows and scent. Just her clothing, her brush and her toothscrubber. She turned her back on them and went into the cottage. How hard was it to pack, after all? It wasn’t as if she had clothing she had to go through. What she wore for every day was good enough.

To keep the Heralds busy while she packed, she took the squash out of the fireplace corner and set it in front of them with salt and pepper on the table. And even though she had never packed for an overnight trip before, it really was no great task to have everything in a neat bundle in a short period of time.

They weren’t even finished eating by the time she was done. So she ate one of the meat pies, then put the rest of the food in her basket well wrapped up and put it next to her bundle.

To her surprise, without prompting, the Heralds cleaned up after themselves and washed all the dishes to boot.

“We’ll get our things and the Companions,” said the younger. And so they went off, leaving her to tidy what little there was left to do, and shut and lock the door. They didn’t leave her waiting on her stoop long, either. They must not have unpacked their own bags. Long before she became impatient, they came riding up to her door, a pillion pad behind Callan.

Without a word, the younger got down, boosted her up behind Callan, and showed her how to hang on. He took her bundle and basket up and tied them up on top of his own bags, and they were off.

Being up on the back of an animal was a new sensation. It made her nervous at first, but after the first few paces she began to enjoy it. It was quite odd, being half again taller than she was used to. And the astonished looks that the villagers gave her as they rode through were altogether gratifying.

This might not be so bad, after all.

They stayed in inns, and not nasty ones, either. She’d heard about the nasty ones from some of her suppliers of dyes and the yarns and threads she couldn’t get locally and from the merchants who carried away her commissioned tapestries. No, these were nice, tidy places where she wasn’t afraid to sleep in the bed for fear of being carried off by vermin. The food was decent, not fancy, but she didn’t particularly trust food that came all covered in sauces and spices and hiding inside crusts. She got her own small room. There was always a bathhouse. The younger Herald—she finally learned his name the third day out—also made sure that she put her laundry with theirs. For the first time since she was a young child, she was fed by someone else, housed by someone else, waited on by someone else, taken care of by someone else. It was a way of life she suspected she could get used to very quickly.

She noticed that the Heralds “paid” for these stays with some form of paper scrip, and she finally wondered aloud how Danet was managing this without leaving some trail behind.

Sendar, the younger of the two, just shrugged. “They are not that difficult to forge; no one bothers because until now no one has ever tried to impersonate a Herald. All he had to do was get his hands on one, and if he is a decent copyist and could carve a copy of the Circle stamp, he could make as many as he liked. So many are turned in we’d never find the forgeries among the real ones.”

She sniffed a little at that. It seemed rather too chancy a system to her.

She’d heard that riding was hard, that people were generally aching and sore when they weren’t used to it. But maybe the people who had told her that were not used to working at a loom. She was a little stiff and sore, but it wasn’t bad; then again, she was riding on a Companion—maybe they were different.

She began to pay attention to the Companions. Aside from their brilliantly white coats and blue eyes, a suspicion began to dawn on her. On the fifth evening, when Callan and Sendar had finished their plotting and planning over another nice, plain supper, she voiced it.

“Your Companions can’t do anything a really good trained horse can’t do,” she said, perhaps a bit more tartly than she had intended.

Two sets of startled eyes met hers. “Well,” she insisted, “They can’t. Or at least, a really good trained horse can make it look as if he’s doing the same things. Five years ago, an animal trainer came through at Fair time, and his horse could do just about anything. Sit up like a dog, lie down, follow any command he gave it, count, add. I was watching, and he gave it signals, because I gave him a complicated sum, and the horse got it wrong just as he did. But Danet saw the same trainer. All he had to do was find a white horse trained that well, and get it to take signals from him, and there you go! Companion. Just keep painting the hooves silver when no one is watching, and plenty of white horses have blue eyes.”

She thought a long moment more, while the truth of her words penetrated to them. “It makes me wonder now if he didn’t plan this all along. Maybe he even had a horse ready for him when he ran off.” That thought didn’t help her at all; if anything, it made the deception even more bitter, because he clearly had never intended any of the things he’d promised her, and she’d had the wool pulled right over her eyes. But she wasn’t one to lie to herself.

“If he planned that far ahead,” Callan said, slowly, “Then he has surely planned for the moment when real Heralds confront him.”

“He’ll brazen it out long enough to buy himself some time, then bolt while you’re dealing with all the people that think he is the real one and you are the imposters,” she pointed out. “He doesn’t need long.”

There was silence. “This is why we asked you to come along,” Callan said, ruefully. “You know how he might think, and you point out things that we would not consider—”

“Like trained horses?” She shrugged. “I hope you can work out some sort of plan to deal with this. I’m just a weaver.” And with that, she took herself up the stairs to that extremely comfortable little room.

When she came back down in the morning to enjoy a truly fine breakfast, they still hadn’t come up with much of a plan other than, “We are going to have to scout this out without him finding out we are Heralds.”

“And what are you going to pose as?” she asked.

They both blinked. “We hadn’t gotten that far,” Sendar said.

She sighed and dug into a really outstanding slice of egg-and-bacon pie. “He won’t have set up in a town. When he settles in for winter, he needs a small village so he can charm everyone in it. And the one or two who are suspicious will keep their mouths shut for fear of antagonizing their neighbors. That means everyone will know everyone else, and you cannot impersonate someone local.”

“We could be peddlers—” Sendar began.

She laughed. “Where is your cart? Your packhorse? Do you know anything about the sorts of things that a peddler who visits a small village is likely to carry? Do you know the right prices? What a fair trade would be? I doubt that either of you knows the first thing about mending a pot, so posing as tinkers is not going to work either.”

As they began to look nonplused and flustered, she helped herself to biscuits and butter. Finally she took pity on them. “Instead of trying to do something you don’t know anything about, what can you do?”

They exchanged looks again. “We’ve never thought about it,” Callan finally replied.