Within moments it was gone, and their coats were as pristine as they had been before. Meanwhile the large, ugly brown stain remained on the flank of the oblivious horse.
“Goodness me,” she said sweetly. “It looks as if your Companion is a fake, Danet. And if your Companion is a fake—what does that make you?”
Danet looked wildly about for help, but his former admirers were backing away from him with expressions ranging from doubt to accusation. She had a fair notion that the accusatory ones were the women he had already slept with.
Herald Callan stepped forward and clamped one hand on Danet Stens’s shoulder.
“Danet Stens, I am taking you into custody to answer to one hundred and seventeen counts of theft, thirty- five counts of fraud, three counts of breach of promise . . .”
Danet could only stand there, looking stunned.
The Guards had arrived just as the Heralds had said they would, and they took Danet into custody. They did not take the horse. Marya put a claim on it, and since no one seemed willing to contest her for it, she got it. She immediately dyed all the blue tack a nondescript brown. She thought about further dyeing the horse, and decided to turn the streak into a patch, adding another couple just to make it look more natural. And significantly less like a Companion.
With Callan and Sendar to escort her back home, she got the hang of riding a real horse fairly quickly. And they could actually have conversations, riding three abreast, better than they had when she’d been pillion. She talked, for the first time, about her father. How devastated her mother had been when her letters were never answered. How miserable her childhood had been. They were troubled, apologetic, and on the whole their reaction came as close to satisfying her as much as anything ever would.
She was grudgingly coming to the conclusion that Heralds
She had just gotten the cottage opened up, warmed by the fire, and fit to live in again when—
There was a knock at the door.
She opened it. Callan and Sendar were there . . . with a wooden dispatch box.
“When you told us about your father, well, it didn’t sound right,” Callan said without preamble. “So we sent off to Haven to find out what we could. And . . . there is no other way to put this: What you and your mother always believed was a lie.”
She felt as if she had been slapped, and Sendar quickly added, “Not what you are thinking! He
“Then it was too late. He got sick. A lot of people got sick that year. And he died.” Callan shook his head, sorrowfully. “The Collegium tried to contact your mother one last time, but they were turned away again.”
Marya blinked, too stunned to actually feel anything yet. Finally, she stammered, “Come in,” and took the box to the table.
There she took out all the letters, all the wonderful, loving, and then increasingly desperate letters, and read them carefully. That was when she knew, suddenly, exactly why her grandparents had done what they had.
Marya’s mother had been doing the bulk of the weaving. Marya herself was showing early promise even as a toddler. But if they left to join their husband and father—
Rage filled her one last time, a terrible rage that swept through her—
And then exploded into tears.
She wept for her mother, herself, and the father she had never known. She wept for the bitter, selfish old man and woman who had kept their daughter miserable in order to keep her. She wept, first on Callan’s shoulder and then on Sendar’s, until she couldn’t weep any more, and allowed herself to be led to her bed, where she fell asleep fully clothed and awoke in the morning feeling—empty. The anger was gone.
What was going to take its place, she didn’t know. But the anger had been washed away on the tide of tears.
She reread the letters, knowing that she would do so many more times to come, reread them with a heart open to what was in them. And as she put the last of them back in the box, there was a knock at the door.
It was Callan and Sendar again, this time loaded down with all the shopping she would need for the next week and more. “We thought it was the least we could do,” Sendar said cheerfully. “We’ll be going back to Haven, but we wanted to thank you. We never could have managed without you.”
“You certainly could not have, you highborn babies,” she said, tartly, but with a bit of a smile. “No more notion of what common people are like than the man in the moon. And thank you, thank you very much. But you can do me one more favor. Since that’s your direction.”
“Certainly,” Callan nodded. “We owe you a very great deal, still.”
“Take this message to Lord Poul Haveland in Haven.” She held out the folded paper. “I’ll be taking that commission he wanted me to do after all. And I would be obliged if some of that Companion hair could be sent along in the spring so the creature can be the
And if the Herald in that tapestry looked something like her misty memories of her father . . . well. That would not be bad, either.
For Want of a Nail
Rosemary Edghill has been a frequent contributor to the Valdemar anthologies since selling her first novel in 1987, writing everything from Regency romances to science fiction to alternate history to mysteries. Between writing gigs, she’s held the usual selection of weird writer jobs and can truthfully state that she once killed vampires for money. She has collaborated with Marion Zimmer Bradley (
), Andre Norton (
), and Mercedes Lackey (
and the forthcoming
). In the opinion of her dogs, she spends far too much time on Wikipedia. Her virtual home can be found at
(Her last name—despite the efforts of editors, reviewers, publishing houses, her webmaster, and occasionally her own fingers—is not spelled Edgehill.)
Denise McCune has been writing since she was eleven—which was (coincidentally?) right around the time she fell in love with Valdemar. She has worked in the social networking industry for nearly a decade, and not having enough to do writing novels and short stories, she decided to launch Dreamwidth, an open source social networking, content management, and personal publishing platform. Denise lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where her hobbies include knitting, writing, and staying up too late writing code.
Navar was an ordinary man. A soldier, and a good one, rising from common foot soldier in the Baron’s levy to sergeant of his company, but his true gift was to go from here to there unseen; and so Captain Harleth had used his talents for scouting, for the Barony of Valdemar was beset on every side by enemies. Not those that came by day, for all knew that the Eastern Empire was at peace, but those that came by night, for the Iron Throne ruled by fear and blood and dark magic, so that no man might call his soul his own.
In later years, many claimed to have known Baron Kordas Valdemar’s mind, to have plotted with him for their exodus into the unknown West. Navar was not one whose status gave him entry into the councils of the good and the great, but he thought that such words were no more than idle tavern talk, the speech of men who wished to be
