Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

out on their first Circuit, accompanied by a senior Herald and Companion, of course, who would make the final judgment as to whether the two of them were ready to set off on their own.

Privately, Aellele was sure that day would never come.

She loved Tases (how could anyone not love Tases?) and she loved Haven and she loved the Heralds’ Collegium and she even loved some of her fellow students, because some of them were nobles (who knew it was their duty and honor to serve in this wonderful special way), and some of them were the sons and daughters of soldiers (who had been brought up to service in a different way), and some of them were from farming families just like hers (so it was almost like having her own family with her), and some of them were the children of tradesmen (who had led lives so different from hers that hearing about them was like hearing a Harvest Festival wondertale), and the ones she didn’t love, she liked.

And she was pretty good in her classes (except for combat and self-defense, and it was early days yet, and the older students said that nobody satisfied either Master Alberich or themselves in the first moonturns of classes).

But.

Heralds (she heard this morning noon and night, more from the senior students than from the instructors, and she already knew—in the back of her mind—that the reason she wasn’t hearing it from them was because they didn’t want to scare any of the First Years to death) had to not only be perfect and right all the time, but they had to be nice, too. And being nice meant not being petty or small-minded or cruel or deliberately handing down a false judgment or a less-than-the-best-judgment just because they could get away with it, or shirking their duty, or ...

The fact that Aellele knew that if she ever did such an awful thing she’d disappoint Tases horribly just made it all worse. And it didn’t matter how many times he told her she wouldn’t do something like that, that she was years away from ever even getting the chance to do something like that, well ... Aellele knew herself. Hadn’t she thrown a handful of feed at the head of the old rooster who’d pecked at her instead of scattering it properly—and more than once? And switched the salt for the sugar in the canister (making sure to leave a layer of sugar on top so the switch wouldn’t be noticed) when she’d known Saraceth was going to be baking something special for that boy she was courting? She’d said hurtful things—true things and flat lies both—more times than she could count, and gotten into fights, and stolen things (and lied about it), and when she came to reckon up all the bad things she’d done, it was a complete mystery to her why she was here at the Collegium at all.

Tases kept saying there was time enough—years—to get it all right, but it wasn’t the part about being right that had her worried. She figured he could help her out with that. It was the part about being nice. She didn’t think there was anybody under the sun—not even a Companion—who could help her with that. And the real trouble was, all of her new friends didn’t think that would be a problem—at least not once they’d finished their training. And none of them seemed to have any doubts that they would finish their training, and their Circuits, and become Heralds, either. She knew that.

That was the real joke.

Because every Herald had a Gift, some kind of Talent that set them apart. It wasn’t the whole reason they were Chosen, but it was part of it. Farsight, Foresight, Fetching, Mindhearing and Mindspeech, Magesight, and the almost unknown Firestarting ... these were all Gifts with which young Herald-Trainees might show up at the Collegium to have fostered and nurtured. Some with the barest whisper, some with Gifts so strong they’d been a burden to them until their Companions arrived.

And hers was Empathy.

Not strong and probably never would be (Tases said she was lucky at that, because strong Empaths spent their time puking their guts out or learning to Shield, or both). But strong enough for her to be able to put herself into somebody else’s shoes whether she wanted to be or not. To know just how they were feeling, and if it wasn’t quite as good as setting a Truthspell, she could at least tell (most of the time) whether somebody thought they were telling the truth. At least if she was close enough or they cared enough. And the more she learned about her particular Gift, the more Aellele had to figure: if knowing what somebody was feeling wasn’t enough to make her a nice person, then she suspected there wasn’t any power anywhere in all of Velgarth that could make her into a nice person.

That was depressing. Because being a Herald was important. And Heralds didn’t just maybe short the next farm on the egg count because the neighbor boy had thrown a rock at them last sennight or not bother to take the spoiled apples out of the bushel because they were too tired and didn’t care if the basket was half-rotten by the time it reached market. And she would pack right up and go home this minute except for the fact that she couldn’t take Tases with her and she couldn’t leave him behind; and there wasn’t anybody here she could talk to about it because they’d all say “time enough to worry about that later,” and Aellele knew damned well that all “later” meant was the chance to make really big mistakes instead of middling little ones, and nobody (even Tases) would tell her what they did with Heralds who just didn’t work out. It was probably something so horrible that there weren’t even stories. (Except that even when she was trying to work herself up into a good scaredy-fit, Aellele knew that was silly. They probably just found work for them here in Haven where they couldn’t make a mess of things and just didn’t tell anybody why.)

And four moonturns ago it hadn’t occurred to her to wish for being a Herald any more than it had occurred to her to wish for being a butterfly or a gryphon or a traveling Bard, but now that she got up every morning and put on Trainee’s Grays, the thing she wanted most in the world was to change out of them when the time came for Herald’s Whites and be able to ride her Circuit and have the people come up to her just like she’d seen them come up to other Heralds and know she could always be calm and fair and nice. And she was starting to think: “Well, maybe ...”

And then one day everything went wrong at once.

She had morning kitchen duty, and normally she enjoyed it, even if it meant getting up earlier than usual, but she’d been up late the night before studying, and she overslept. And Helorin (who was in charge of the floor) had to bang on her door and wake her up, and she’d already been late when she’d been hurrying to dress and wash, and her brush had caught on a tangle in her hair, and she’d flung it across the room in exasperation, and it hit the wall and broke her lamp, and then there was oil all over her course assignment and the rest of her half-done sennight’s work, and all over the floor, and when she looked, her brush was broken as well. By the time Aellele had cleaned everything up, she was too late for kitchen duty at all, and Tavis had to take her place, which meant she had to take Tavis’ task for the day, and Tavis had Linens, and Mistress Housekeeper was never pleased by anything (to the point that there was a brisk trade in desserts among the Trainees to avoid working under her).

She was scolded in the kitchens for not showing up for her work shift, and again in her morning’s class because her paper was unfit to turn in; she had to spend most of lunch recopying it (and she’d been told it would still be marked down for lateness), and weapons practice was after her stint with Mistress Housekeeper, and by then she was so out of temper that she threw her practice weapon across the floor when she missed an easy counter and had to spend the rest of the class running laps.

And all she could think of the whole time was that a Herald, a real Herald— someone who knew that lives might depend on whether she could keep her temper and keep her head—wouldn’t have thrown the damned hairbrush in the first place. Wouldn’t have thrown her sword across the floor. Wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t.

She didn’t want sympathy, and she didn’t want advice. (She didn’t deserve the sympathy, and the only advice she was getting was “it’s going to be fine,” and she knew perfectly well that it wasn’t going to be.) So after dinner she took her pen case and her (new) lantern and a sheaf of fresh paper and the rest of her ruined coursework (which she fortunately had time to copy before she needed to turn it in tomorrow) to find a good place to hide.

Back home it would have been up in the hayloft. The Collegium didn’t exactly have a hayloft (well, it did, but it was the loft over the Companions’ stable, and that wasn’t anything like a haybarn, and it wasn’t very private, either), and any place the Trainees were allowed to be in their free time was fairly public. They could go to the Common Room, or the Library, or down to the stable, or out to the paddock, or to their own rooms, and there were