Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

echoed through my head. Promise you’ll be careful. I’d sworn a sacred oath, and attacking a red-robed priest wouldn’t be careful at all. It would be, as Cara said, stupid. Stupid enough that the priest might just burn me right there.

I forced my anger down, dousing it as surely as I’d once doused the flame I’d called into my hands. It’s not a witchpower, I thought defiantly, but I spoke not a word as Conor led me away. I caught a glimpse of my parents, both of them fighting not to cry. I heard Conor whisper, so low none but me could hear, “I’m sorry, Tamar.” Then I entered the carriage. Conor shut the door behind me, leaving me alone in the dark.

No, not alone. I heard Cara sobbing softly. As my eyes adjusted, she looked up at me, her eyes bright with tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m trying to be brave. Only—”

“Only you knew what was going to happen.” Her power was invisible, yet no less forbidden than mine. She could see the future.

Cara nodded, not denying it, but not speaking the nature of her power aloud, even now. “It’s not so bad. We still have some time, I know.” Yet the bleak look she gave me made the carriage seem suddenly cold.

I had nothing to say to that, so instead I drew her close, not caring that she was a girl. She let me, not caring that she was a merchant’s daughter and I was a farmer’s son.

“I wish we could have lived in some other time,” Cara said. “There will be miracles in other times. But not for us.”

Later I learned they often drug the children they take away, but Cara and I were so quiet, the priest saw no need. We didn’t say anything more as the carriage began to move, taking us away from our homes and all we knew. We just held each other in the dark, cut off as we were from the Sun’s bright rays.

The surest sign of last year’s fire is this year’s bright green field. If flames scour the land one season, new growth sprouts the next.

There are seeds that cannot grow without fire.

Twice during our journey the carriage stopped and another child joined us.

The first was a girl, drugged and bound, who thrashed and moaned as if from bad dreams. Yet once, for just a moment, she opened her eyes and looked up at us. My own eyes were used to the dark by then. I saw how still Cara grew as she returned the girl’s gaze.

“It’s not your fault,” Cara told her. “Truly it isn’t.”

I didn’t know what Cara meant, but the girl did. She sighed, closed her eyes, and slid into quieter sleep. The priest didn’t drug her again.

The second child was a boy, bound only, trembling from head to toe. “It’s all right,” Cara told him. “They won’t hurt you. You’ll be a priest one day. Only try not to speak up in geography class. Nothing good will come of it if you do.”

The boy nodded, and his trembling eased. Beside me, Cara sat up a little straighter, all sign of tears gone. As the carriage began to move once more, she whispered, “I know now, Tamar.”

“Know what?”

Cara’s smile was sad but real. “What I need to do.”

It was some time before I knew what Cara meant.

In the meantime we arrived in Sunhame—that great city, said to be designed by Vkandis himself, which I never dreamed I’d see—and were taken to the Children’s Cloister. There I realized one more thing Cara must have already known: that no one meant to burn us, not yet. They meant to train us—to be priests if our studies went well, or else to be servants to priests if those studies went poorly.

We still have some time. I remembered Cara’s words, yet still I felt a small spark of hope. Maybe we had more time than Cara thought.

To my surprise, I enjoyed my studies, even though I’d never been much of a student at the village school. I enjoyed improving my reading and writing. I enjoyed studying Vkandis’ writ. I enjoyed learning my own history and reading glorious accounts of times my people had turned invaders away, or else invaded and claimed some land of their own.

I learned, too, all the things that priests did. Red-robed priests might take children from their families and black-robed priests might light fires in which children burned, but priests of all colors also defended our borders, looked after the sick, and tended to families who lacked food or clothing. They brought Vkandis’ wisdom to the smallest villages, just as Conor had. And sometimes they spoke with the Sunlord directly, in order to gain wisdom and carry out His will.

Alone in my small room after evening prayers, I listened for Vkandis’ voice, too, but I never heard it. If I felt any anger at that, I forced it down, just as I’d forced my anger down when the red robe took me away. Instead, I prayed harder, and I kept listening.

I longed, during those lonely evenings, to call flame to my hands, but I forced that longing away as well. Only in dreams did I set my power free, where none but Vkandis could see.

No matter that the God never spoke to me; He also never betrayed me to the priests with whom He did speak. I took some hope from that, too.

Maybe, if I studied hard enough and prayed well enough, the Sunlord would decide to spare Cara and me after all.

We can put a fire out by smothering it or by mixing it with water.

Yet it only takes one missed coal to keep a fire alive. Fire will wait, invisible and silent, for tinder or anything else that can catch.

I didn’t see much of Cara at the Cloister. Girls were taught apart from boys, and there were fewer of them, just as there were fewer female priests. We shared the same dining room, though, and passed each other in the halls between classes.

Once in those halls I saw Cara lean close to a girl who walked beside her and whisper a few words. I thought nothing of it.

Then another time, I saw her nudge a girl’s foot beneath the dining room table, just as that girl was about to speak.

A third time I heard a soft knock on the door across the hall from mine, late at night. When I opened my own door, I saw Cara speaking to the boy who peered out of his room, though girls and boys were forbidden in one another’s quarters.

I don’t know what Cara told them. I don’t know who else she spoke to. I only know that for all of my first year at the Cloister, there were no burnings. The priests remarked on how unusual that was. They thanked Vkandis for blessing us so.

Yet I knew we weren’t only blessed by the Sunlord. We were also blessed by Cara, who had figured out indeed what she needed to do.

As the first year gave way to a second, though, I grew uneasy. Be careful, I thought, whenever I passed Cara in the halls.

But she hadn’t sworn an oath to be careful. Only I had done that.

Fire starts small. A spark, the scrape of flint on steel, a candle’s flame. Any of these can burn the world.

Any can be extinguished by a gust of wind or a human breath.

Halfway through our second year, the youngest children began whispering about a bright spirit who looked after them. When I heard that, I broke the rules myself to sneak up to Cara’s room.

She opened the door before I knocked and drew me inside. “I know what I’m doing,” she said. “I never tell them how I know what I know. I’ve broken no oaths.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. She’d already answered all I meant to say.

Cara brushed a strand of dark hair from her face. Her unbound hair fell past the shoulders of her gray nightgown, making her look like a spirit indeed. She was beautiful, I realized, and wondered why I’d never noticed before. I reached for her, then drew away. Visiting one another’s rooms wasn’t the only thing forbidden to male and female students.

Cara drew me close instead and brushed her lips gently against my hair. “I’ve always had so little time, Tamar. So I do what I can, while I can, in Vkandis’ name.”

Her words sent ice down to my bones. I drew back a little. “The priests don’t know it’s in Vkandis’ name. If they knew, they’d say demons guided you, not the Sunlord.”