Exile's Valor

They were taken to a little room, windowless, lit by a single lantern, that held a single chair. The chair was for the prisoner, whose legs would be tethered to it; Myste and Alberich would be free, so that they could evade any attacks he might try.

The prisoner was brought in and his legs shackled to the legs of the chair. He was as pale as a snowdrift when he saw who was there to speak with him.

Slowly, and carefully, Alberich outlined exactly what he had observed, while the man listened, jaw clenched, eyes staring straight ahead. “So,” Alberich finished. “What have you to say for yourself?”

He half expected the man to flatly deny everything, but after a long, tense silence, he spoke.

“I cannot tell you what you want to know.”

A candlemark later, Alberich and Myste left the jail. There was a frown of frustration on Herald Myste’s round face.

Alberich didn’t blame her. The man certainly had been paying people to try to foment discontent against the Queen—quite a few of them, in fact, but with, by his own admission, limited success. And he had been doing so on the orders, and with the money, of someone else.

The only problem was, he didn’t know this “someone else.” He had never even seen the man’s face.

Myste had not even needed to cast the Truth Spell to force the truth out of the man; her own innate Truth- sensing Gift had told her he was telling them everything he knew. He himself had a grudge against the Crown in general, and Selenay in particular, for when she had served her internship in the City Courts of law with Herald Mirilin, she had made a ruling against him. So there was his personal motive—

But who had sought out this man with a grievance against Selenay? Who had supplied him with the money and the idea to foster rebellion?

And why?

Only one thing was absolutely certain; the trail came to a dead end now. It was unlikely that the man would ever be contacted again, for someone astute enough to find him in the first place would certainly be sharp enough to discover he had been arrested and know not to use him again.

“Now what will you do?” Myste asked, as they neared the Collegium.

“Keep looking,” he said, and shrugged.

There seemed nothing more he could say. Or do.

***

The closing in of winter always brought one definite disadvantage to the weaponry classes; much of the time practices and lessons had to be held in the salle instead of out of doors. This limited the kinds of lessons that could be given and the way that practices could be held. Every season brought its difficulties for a Weaponsmaster; in spring and summer there were torrential, cold rains to deal with, it was difficult to muster enthusiasm for heavy exercise in high summer, and in the winter, of course, there was the cold and the snow. Well, if the job had been easy, anyone could have done it.

Alberich still held some outdoor archery classes in the winter, but when, as today, snow was falling thickly, with a wicked wind to blow it around, there wasn’t much point in keeping the youngsters at the targets. Yes, they would find themselves having to fight for their lives under adverse conditions, but adverse conditions affected the enemy, too. And as for needing to hunt, well, no Herald was going to starve because he or she could not hunt in a blizzard; Waystations were stocked with sufficient supplies, and every Herald on circuit carried emergency rations. During their last year, each Trainee would get an intense course in survival hunting and disadvantaged combat, and there was no point in making the youngsters utterly and completely miserable for the sake of showing them what it was like to be utterly and completely miserable. Not even the Karsite Officers’ Academy did that to its students, and having seen what life was like at the Collegia, Alberich knew that the lessoning he’d gotten at the Academy was harsh, and not at all conducive to training youngsters like these.

Besides, with the Tedrels gone, and Karse itself essentially neutralized for a while, the only enemies that Heralds were likely to encounter in the field were bandits and brigands.

Now, as Alberich well knew from long experience, bandits and brigands are humans; they are essentially lazy, or they wouldn’t be trying to steal rather than earn an honest living, and they are just as attached to their own creature comforts as any other humans. Given a choice in the matter, they wouldn’t attack under adverse conditions either. By night—certainly. In ambush, definitely. In a blizzard? A flood? A raging storm? Not likely. In fact, in all of the time that Alberich himself had led his men of the Sunsguard against the bandits on the Karsite border, never once had he encountered a band moving against a target when the weather was foul. That didn’t mean it was impossible, just unlikely. That made the circumstance something to guard against, but not something that required extensive training.

So, when the snows began to fall in earnest just after the noon meal, Alberich herded the next class to arrive into the salle itself. Which occasioned the inevitable delay in the cleaning of boots at the door, and the taking off of