Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

“So. There I was—”

“A likely story.”

The Bard paused, inky nib poised over parchment. She hadn’t even written two words. “Do you want this report or not?”

She could hear the smirk in the Herald’s voice. “Can’t you just skip to the good part?”

“They’re all good parts!”

“Oh, fine then. You may continue.”

“You,” she said, stabbing her quill at the air, eyes still fixed on the parchment, “could test a Companion’s patience.”

“And often do.”

Lelia resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She took a big gulp of ale, then a deep breath, and squared her shoulders.

“So,” she said, scribbling once more. “There I was. Halfway to the middle of north nowhere, freezing my delicate Bardly bits off.”

Lelia’s teeth would not stop chattering. She had tried clenching them to make it stop, but that only made her feel like her teeth were going to crack from the strain.

I don’t remember the north being this cold when I was younger, she thought as she trudged forward. Mid-morning had started out warm, the snow melting a little, but by afternoon the temperature had plummeted, freezing what had thawed. Irregular gusts howled out of Sorrows to the north. Sunset threatened, casting hues of apricot and blush across the road.

“Sweet Kernos,” she muttered into her scarf, “I’m too young and precious to die.” Every breath she took tasted of greasy wool and the cold egg and onion pie she’d eaten for breakfast.

“I’m sure your overall adorableness is an important deciding factor for Lord Death,” a sweet voice said.

Lelia glanced in the direction of the speaker, and felt only a distant and winter-numbed surprise at seeing her best friend from the Collegium walking beside her, dressed out in the lightest summer Scarlets.

“Oh, hey, Maresa,” Lelia said. “Out for a stroll?”

Maresa snorted.

“I know. You’re not really here.” Lelia returned to focusing on trudging through the snow.

“Ah, but maybe I am?”

The voice had changed, and when Lelia looked again, it was her brother Lyle—more appropriately dressed in leather Whites—forging down the road with her.

“Really doubtful,” she replied to her figment, “but nice try. Still, I know you wouldn’t go anywhere without your horse.”

Her twin smiled at her, that heartbreaking, guileless smile that made her want to beat him over the head with a gittern and tell him to be more careful, dammit. He was safely out of gittern range, however, riding the Exile’s Road on the tail end of his first circuit with his mentor, Herald Wil.

“Oh, I could really be here,” Lyle said. “You’ve read enough stories. You know that strange things regularly transpire between twins.” The vision blurred, and he became a shade taller, his features sharper and his gray eyes less trusting. The Whites stayed the same. In his place was—

Lelia stopped, her narrative stalled.

“What?” the Herald asked.

“I am debating whether this bit is relevant,” she replied. “I was definitely hallucinating. My brother. Maresa . . .”

You. She toyed with the pendant around her neck.

“Too much time alone,” he said sagely.

“That, and I was half-starved, I couldn’t feel my extremities, and I’d been walking for candlemarks in the wind. My head had all sorts of reasons for dipping me into a vat of crazy.”

Her hand trembled with the name it was still poised to write—then she set the paper aside and reached for a clean sheet.

“Might be relevant,” she muttered to herself. “Might not. I’ll know later.”

She picked up the story a little further down the road.

“Lelia, you need a warmer jacket, and you should eat more.” The hallucination had kindly returned to being her brother, his lips curved in a beatific smile. “You can’t suffer for your work if you’re dead.”

“You think about yourself!” she growled back. “I’m not the one hoofing it around Evendim Sector under the tutelage of the Herald most likely to smother a burning orphanage with his own body!”

“Hickory,” Lyle replied.

“What?” she said, whipping her head in his direction—but no, he really wasn’t there. There may have been twins born with bonds strong enough to let their minds touch across massive distances, but Lyle and Lelia’s was not one of them.

This may all be delirium, but at least it’s a sensible delirium, she thought. The hallucination was right—it killed her to spend money on anything, but if she didn’t acquire a better jacket, it would just flat out kill her.

She shut her eyes against the glowing white snow and breathed in deeply.

A whiff of woodsmoke—hickory—caught her olfactory attention. Too real to be another waking dream. Squinting northward, she was pretty sure she could see a smudge of smoke against the horizon.

Village. Fire. Inn? Hopefully. Someone to make me clothes? Maybe. Her mouth watered. Food.

It took another half-candlemark for the promise of a village to resolve into something other than woods-moke and hope. It was not unlike many in this region: slate-roofed, large enough to sport a palisade, and with a central building in the square that was most certainly an inn.

She’d have wept for joy, if not for the fact that she was pretty sure her tears would have frozen on her cheeks.

“That’s how you wound up in Langenfield,” the Herald said.

“I was aiming for Waymeet.”

Stony silence.

She sighed. “I know. I missed by a few miles.”

A polite cough.

“Okay, I missed by a lot.” She took a long draught of ale. “Doesn’t matter. The ultimate goal is to get to Sorrows.”

“About that. Why?”

She shrugged. “One of my teachers at the Collegium always drilled into me to live Valdemar. Go to the battle sites, the weird forests, smell the smoke in the resin down at Burning Pines. I wanted to do that.”

She turned her mug. It was only one side of the jewel of truth. Just enough to convince an inquisitive Herald.

“And, as always, I wanted a song,” she added, flashing another facet.

“Oh?”

“Found it, even.” She grimaced. “I just didn’t know it when I first met her.”

Lelia staggered into the inn, and the middle of an argument.

“You ain’t listening!” a tall, powerfully built young man was saying to a petite blonde woman with greasy hair, tunic, and trews. He wasn’t quite yelling, but it was clear he was building up to that point. “There’re no bones on my hearth and none in my scrap pile!”

The girl flushed. “You were cooking a ham just last night—”

“I said I ain’t got any, and even if I did, I don’t know that I’d sell ’em to you! What part of that don’t you conjugate?”

“The p-part where y-you’re lying,” the blonde said in tones that could have frozen spirits of wine, even with her frustrated stammering. “And the w-word is c-c-cogitate, you country o-oaf!”

She spun and stormed toward the door, her warpath bent on bisecting Lelia—until she actually saw the Bard and stopped dead.

“Can I help you?” the young man said.