Exile's Honor

in a knot and his head throbbing, he would sense Kantor moving into his mind like a storm front, and then—

Well, then the next time he saw the ceiling, it would be morning. Last night had been one of those nights, leaving him singularly irritable, and not at all inclined to be charitable toward any of his pupils. Charity could— would—get them killed. Especially the one before him now.

Alberich surveyed his latest pupil, and reflected that Trainee Myste was at least providing one thing for him: a distraction from grief. Although she was providing a little grief of her own, of a different sort.

The middle-aged woman looked right back at him, her hazel eyes unnaturally large behind the thick glass lenses she wore, held to her face by a frame of wood, with leather straps that buckled behind her head, flattening already straight brown hair. She had a set that she normally wore that had lighter frames with sidepieces of wire that hooked over her ears, but those kept flying off during any sort of exertion; this had been the best they could do for weapons' practice, and it wasn't very good. Her peripheral vision was poor enough, and the frames of the lenses made it worse. And they were a handicap in another way; the first thing that an attacker would do would be to try to smash them. But she was virtually blind without them, so what could he do? Her short-sightedness was just the first in a string of handicaps that made her woefully unsuited to be a Herald.

He thought she looked particularly aggrieved this afternoon, but it was difficult to tell what her expression was on the other side of that wood-and-glass mask.

Physically, she was utterly unprepossessing, and looked like what she had been before she'd been Chosen; a sedentary scribe and clerk. He had no idea why she of all people had been Chosen, at a time when fighting Heralds were what was needed, not clerks, and how he was going to turn her into a fighter he had no clue. He despaired; she—well, he didn't know for certain how she felt. Frustrated, surely, at the least.

She was the single clumsiest Trainee he had ever attempted to teach, bar none. He didn't think this was on purpose, though, for even though she clearly didn't want to be here, she did try until she was black and blue. Even if she'd come here as a child, she'd have been clumsy, he suspected, but this business of learning weaponcraft late in life, a task to which she was utterly unsuited, must seem utter madness to her. He didn't blame her for being irritated and unhappy.

What was the point of putting her in this position anyway? She couldn't see without those lenses; she would lose them in a fight, and then she would be blind, and how was he supposed to train her to overcome that? Though there were tales of blind warriors with preternatural abilities in both Karse and Valdemar, those had all been about men and women who had been trained since early childhood in their craft, who brought skilled bodies and the finely honed senses of hearing and smell and touch to bear on the problem of being unable to see.

Not a middle-aged clerk who had been bent over a desk all of her life. She would arrive at the front lines only to return in days in one of those wagons. If she returned at all. Which he doubted.

She sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, recapturing his wandering attention. 'Weaponsmaster, all due respect, but we both know I'm hopeless at this. It's a complete waste of your time to try and train me to use this.'

She gestured at the sword she carried—and she spoke in Karsite.

In point of fact, if it were not for the fact that she couldn't fight, couldn't shoot, and couldn't defend herself, she'd be in Whites at this very moment. Self-defense was the only skill she lacked to enter her Internship, for she'd known most of what a Trainee learned long before she was ever Chosen. There was nothing about the history of Valdemar and the Heralds that she didn't know before she came here. She mastered the fine points of the law with the indifferent ease of someone who had spent years copying legal briefs. In fact, anything having to do with the written word, including no less than four languages, was of no difficulty to her. And she was the only person besides Alberich himself who was a fluent and natural speaker of his own tongue, learned directly from old Father Henrick before Alberich had set foot on the soil of Valdemar.

'There's a saying in Hardorn,' she continued. ''You shouldn't attempt to teach a goat to sing. It will waste your time, hurt your ears, and annoy the goat.' I can say without fear of contradiction that the goat is getting annoyed.'

He had to smile at that; she blinked behind those thick lenses, and emboldened, continued. 'I keep asking this question, and no one will answer me. Can you give me one single, good reason why I have to learn weaponswork? And 'because all Trainees have to' is not a good reason. After all—' she set her chin mulishly, '—you don't make all Healers learn weaponswork, so why should every single Herald have to?'

Since he had just been about to say because all Trainees have to, he found himself stymied. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and regarded her thoughtfully. 'Just what would you do if you were ambushed in the field?' he asked.

'Run,' she replied promptly. 'I'd cut loose my saddlebags, if I was mounted, throw away my belt pouch if I was afoot, and run. Chances are, whoever attacked me would be after my things and any money I had, not me. I'd let them have what they wanted. Things can be replaced, and while they'd be scrambling after loot, I'd be getting farther away.'

:That was a good answer,: Kantor observed.

'And if you had to help villagers with a bandit attack?' he persisted.

She laughed. 'Give my advice and go for help!' she replied. 'Not that anyone would be likely to take the