Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

very words were bitter on her tongue. “At least I wasn’t left pregnant and alone. Just alone.”

She got up and washed the bowl and spoon in the sink.

“Well . . . that’s what they’re here about. Danet, that is.”

She turned, slowly. He was twisting those too-clean hands together and staring at them. With guilt, she thought.

“What do you mean, they’re here about Danet?” Her voice was dangerously soft.

“All I know is what they told me,” he replied, cringing a little. “They’re here about Danet, and they need your help. That’s all.”

“You can pick yourself off that bench and you can march yourself back to them, and you can tell them from me that Danet Stens can rot in hell for all I care, and there’s an end to it!” She was unaware that she had picked up her sharpest kitchen knife and was holding it, until Stefan’s eyes went to it, and he gave a little yelp. She slapped it down on the table. He jumped. She pointed with her chin. “The door’s that way.”

He took the hint and scuttled out.

She moved her chair closer to the fire and took up her knitting. It was soothing; she never did patterns and never had more than one color on the needles, although she would use up all the little ends of her weaving by making them into crazy-colored knitted blankets and scarves. After all the intricate pattern weaving she did during the day, it was restful to be doing something with no pattern and no counting except to cast on. She made smocklike sweaters out of rectangular shapes that needed only to be sewn together. In winter she could layer on as many of those as she liked to keep warm. It wasn’t as if anyone cared what she looked like.

It wasn’t as if she wanted anyone to. One heartbreak in a lifetime was enough.

Oh, she remembered Dan, all right. Handsome, witty, charming . . . everyone liked him, and she had been so flattered when he started to pay attention to her. Though her mother had eyed him with suspicion and disfavor whenever he showed up, she’d been absolutely and utterly sure that her mother was suspicious for no reason at all. Who wouldn’t love Dan?

Oh,it was true that he didn’t seem to do a lick of work, but why would he need to? He did what he did best for his father, bring in business to the little tavern with his ready stories and skill at games. He didn’t get paid for that, of course, but that didn’t matter. She was already doubling the family business with her weaving. Once it became widely known that she wasn’t just copying old cartoons for her tapestries, that she was making original images, she’d be turning business away. He could do what she couldn’t: flatter and please the customers, so she could concentrate on the weaving.

She had it all planned out in her mind.

And then, between one day and the next, he was gone.

There had been some talk about some thefts—she dismissed them out of hand, and then the whole village had been forced to do the same when letters came back telling how he had been carried off by a Companion to be a Herald. The whole village had been forced to admit that they’d misjudged him, and although she got her letters with some misgiving at first, still, she was getting letters. She was not replaying her mother’s story all over again.

But then the letters began to change. It seemed as if every other line ended with “. . . but of course, you wouldn’t understand.” At first it made her anxious and bewildered. Then, as the tone grew more and more patronizing, it made her angry. “Then explain it!” she demanded, more than once. It wasn’t as if she were stupid! If he thought she didn’t understand, well, if he would just—

But the letters grew fewer and fewer and finally stopped altogether.

By that time, her feelings had turned as bitter as her mother’s. She threw herself into her work. Her mother died in the middle of that winter, but at least Marya could congratulate herself that she’d had every possible comfort. Not even the mayor’s wife had such a fine goosedown bed, pillows, and comforter. Not even the mayor was served such savory morsels when she could bring herself to eat. It was all that Marya could do for her when the bitter love had turned again to anguish in her mother’s last illness, and she spent her last breaths weeping and calling for her lost lover.

Oh, how she hated the Heralds.

Her anger made the needles fly, and row after row of knitting grew beneath her hands. Stefan was an idiot. But then again, the entire village was Herald- mad. Probably all of Valdemar was Herald- mad. Little girls and boys made white stick horses and played at being Heralds. You found decorations of Heralds and Companions everywhere. There were more ornamental white horse heads than there were representations of the actual arms of Valdemar. The one and only commission she had ever turned down was for a tapestry of a Herald and Companion—the noble family of someone whose son had been Chosen. She had used the rather specious argument that she would never be able to get the Companion and the uniform white enough, and that the white wool would soon become dingy. They had countered that they would send her Companion mane and tail hair to make into yarn, hair that would never get dingy, because Companions literally shed dirt. She had replied (without attempting it) that Companion hair could not be made into yarn and that she could not in all good faith take on such a commission knowing that Herald and Companion would soon become a grayish yellow. She never heard from them again.

And I would starve to death before I—

There was a knock at the door.

She did not rush to get up. She put up her knitting, made sure the fire was burning cleanly, while another couple of knocks came, and only then did she get up to answer it. Stefan could just wait out there with the night insects biting him.

Serve him right if he was covered in welts tomorrow.

She opened the door, intending to tell him brusquely to be off and slam it in his face again. But it wasn’t Stefan who was out there.

It was the two Heralds.

A moment of shock and rage held her rigid. And that was when the older of the two said the one thing that kept her from slamming the door in their faces.

“Danet Stens is not a Herald.”

They sat stiffly side by side on her weaving bench. She sat stiffly in her chair, hands uncharacteristically idle.

But she was listening. And what she heard from the two Heralds—

“. . . as far as we can tell, he did not begin by deciding to impersonate a Herald,” the older of the two— Herald Callan—was saying. “He sent back letters that he had been Chosen, we think, largely to cover up the thefts he’d committed here. But approximately a month later, he seems to have understood that if he actually put the full ruse into motion, he would have a free hand to do virtually anything.”

She nodded, slowly. “But why keep on sending letters back?” she asked suspiciously.

“Until we find him, we can only speculate as to why,” said the other, who had not yet given his name. “We have a lot of guesses—the most likely is to keep people from associating him with the thefts until enough time had passed that the losses were forgotten or at least the victims had given up on finding the thief.”

She shook her head, puzzled. “I’d heard rumors of thefts but—you talk as if these were something large, and I certainly didn’t hear anything about that—”

The Heralds exchanged a look. “I can’t speak for the victims,” the elder said, after a moment. “But . . . given the circumstances . . . I believe the items were purloined in a way that would have been very embarrassing to the victim if it had been made pub—”

That was when the younger interrupted. “He was sleeping with women—and one or two men—and making off with small valuables. Most of them were married.”

Shocked for a moment, she sat there, blinking. She thought about some of her mother’s comments. She thought some more about the curious silence that had followed Danet’s disappearance. And still more about the times when he’d said he had something or other to do for his father . . .

“How did you—”

“When we began tracking him, we knew where he had come from, and we had an old list of things that had been reported as missing to the Guard,” the younger said bluntly. “We’ve been interviewing the people who reported them stolen all day. Enough time has passed that when we told them that Danet is not a Herald, we usually got the truth out of them.”