Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

:Verati says Tamis says to be ready.:

:What?: That was all the protest he had time for as Verati charged out from between the trees, screaming a challenge as she galloped through the camp. Gone was the stout old lady who fell asleep being brushed, replaced by a gleaming white dervish ridden by a rider in white whirling a sword above his head.

A man screamed on the side of the camp, going down under her hooves.

Eight.

Diving forward under the lance, Jors took the man who held it to the ground as Gervis answered Verati’s challenge. A crossbow bolt slammed into packed dirt. The distinctive crunch of shattering bone was nearly drowned out by another scream.

Verati charged back out of the trees, closer to the fire, sending the raider with the wounded thigh rolling away from her hooves. Bardi seemed to be dealing with the boy. Jors got his hands on the lance, drove the butt hard into the lancer’s stomach, and twisted just in time to block a blow from behind. Gervis reared. Herin dropped the rope and ran.

“Call them off!”

Jors looked down to see a lance point driven into his stomach, the edge sharp enough to cut through his leathers. Pain caught up a second later as blood began to dribble out of the tear. “Call them off,” Adric repeated. “Or I’ll gut you.”

“It’s too late,” Jors told him. On the other side of the fire, the boy threw himself up onto a horse and rode out into the darkness. Adric was now the last man standing. “You’ve lost.”

“No.”

“It’s over.”

“No!” His eyes were wild. His chest heaved. Blood seeped through the bandage on his shoulder. “Not possible! We were riding against farmers! Shepherds! Stupid villagers!” He spun on one heel, shifted his grip, drew back his arm, and hurled the lance directly at Bardi, silhouetted in front of the fire, snarling, “Her fault.”

Bardi and the lance in flight. Then a white blur. The lance took Verati in the throat. Blood sprayed. She slammed to her knees, Tamis flying over her head.

Jors took Adric down, quickly, efficiently, not even thinking of what he was doing. Gervis was already there when he slid to his knees by Verati’s side. The blood had already begun to puddle, it was pouring so fast from the wound.

:You cannot save her, Heartbrother.:

:Maybe not her, but Tamis . . .:

The old man lay crumpled, reaching back weakly for his Companion. He still wore his scarf wrapped around his throat, and instead of a sword, his cane lay broken by his side. Jors had seen dying men before, and he knew he saw one now. He moved him, carefully, until he could touch Verati’s face. She sighed her last breath against his fingers.

Tamis smiled. “Every story,” he said, his voice barely louder than the breeze in the surrounding trees, “has to end.”

He moved a finger just enough to wrap a line of silver white mane around it. “Stop fussing,” he murmured. Then he closed his eyes. And never opened them again.

“My fault?”

Jors looked up to see Bardi standing on the other side of Verati’s body, the firelight glinting on the tears running down her cheeks.

“My fault?” she repeated.

“No.” He tried to put all the reassurance he could into his voice. “Not your fault.”

“I just ... I just couldn’t let them ride in and ride away. I just needed to do something. I just needed . . .”

She needed her story to start.

One of the raiders was dead, skull caved in by Gervis’ hoof; the rest they tied with their own ropes, trussed up by their own fire waiting for justice. Only the boy had gotten away, and Jors found himself hoping he made it safely to the border, that he carried the story home of how Valdemar’s borders were defended—farmers, shepherds, villagers not there for the plundering.

Bardi helped him take off Verati’s saddle, then watched as he tucked Tamis up against her side. “What do we do now?” she asked, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“We wait until help comes,” Jors told her, moving to build up the fire. The villagers might not have followed him, but he knew, knew without a doubt, that they’d followed Tamis. One thing to let a young man in Herald’s Whites save the day and another thing entirely to let an old man do it. While they waited, he’d tell her a story. Practice the story he’d write in his report.

It wouldn’t be a big, heroic story, the kind that got put to music to inspire more heroics although, in the end, he supposed, it would be that kind of story too.

“He wanted to be a Bard, but he couldn’t sing. He liked his tea sweet and his beer dark and the smell of apple wood smoke, and he had a friend named Shorna ...”

Passage at Arms

by Rosemary Edghill

In addition to her work with Mercedes Lackey, Rosemary Edghill has collaborated with authors such as the late Marion Zimmer Bradley and the late SF Grand Master Andre Norton. She has worked as an SF editor for a major New York publisher, as a freelance book designer, and as a professional book reviewer. Her hobbies include sleep, research for forthcoming projects, and her Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. Her website can be found at

http://www.sff.net/people/eluki

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Aellele Calot’s family were smallholders, with a farm in the Sweetgrass Valley, north of the Terilee River and east of the Trade Road. The land there was all farming country, settled and serene (too far north to ever have to worry about Karsite raiders, too far south and east to fear bandits). She was a middle child (two older brothers and one older sister, two younger sisters born a year apart—and a caboose set of brothers) and middling in every way: middling height, middling brown hair, middling eyes neither gray nor blue. She could spin a little, weave a little, play the gittern and the drum, make cider and churn butter, and she had always expected that when she grew up, she would either marry and run a farm somewhere in the Sweetgrass, stay here on hers and help her Ma and Da, or move to one of the nearby towns and become an independent guildswoman.

Or so she’d thought until the day that Tases came walking into her father’s dairy and said that she was Chosen.

Aellele had asked him if he was really sure he’d come for her (because there were seven kids besides her tumbling around the farm, not to mention apprentices and hired hands), as Heralds weren’t people you saw every day (Aellele was twelve, and she’d only seen a Herald up close in person twice). But the Heralds and everybody else right down to the head of the local Grange made sure that everybody knew what their duties and privileges were when a Companion on Search came calling. And he said (inside her mind, where she heard the words just as clearly as if he’d said them out loud) that he was sure, and that his name was Tases, and that it was her he’d come for, not any of her sisters or her brothers, but that she certainly had time to eat her dinner and have her Ma pack her a bag and say goodbye to everyone before she came away with him.

And she looked into his eyes, and they were bluer than jay-feathers or clear Harvest-tide skies, and she could feel something about him and something about her locking up together hand in hand. Aellele knew that it wouldn’t matter anymore whether the day was warm or cold; she’d always feel warm.

And that was how Aellele went off to Haven to become a Herald.

Only ... it wasn’t absolutely certain that she’d become a Herald, because being Chosen was really only the beginning. There were lessons—years of lessons. Some of them were simple, things she didn’t need so much but others did (reading and writing); and some were things she had a little bit of but now needed more of (math and history—not just Valdemar’s, but of every land that surrounded her—Karse and Hardorn and Rethwellen and Iftel); and others were things she didn’t know anything about at all (swordplay and diplomacy and legal codes and precedent). All meant to shape her and prepare her for the day when she and Tases would ride