Exile's Valor

“Why are you here?” he heard himself saying, and could have hit himself for how it sounded.

But she didn’t seem to take offense at his words or his tone.

“Well—” she began, and hesitated. “Mixed motives, actually. I wanted to find out what you’d done with the youngsters. I must say that the ones who had gotten your lesson were nicely subdued for my classes; it was only the ones that hadn’t gotten to ’play’ that were wound up like tops. And, um—” another hesitation, “—I, um, enjoy your company. And one other thing—” she added, hastily, before he could decide if she was blushing or not. “Keren slipped a little. Well, she didn’t really slip, so much as I browbeat it out of her when she brought me a dress, of all things, to mend for her.” She laughed. “I mean, Keren? In a dress? Please! That was odd enough, but a dress that looked like that? ”

“Like what?” he asked, unthinking.

“A dockside whore,” she replied, with cheerful bluntness, and it was his turn to flush. “She said she didn’t want to take it to the Collegium seamstresses, because it was supposed to be a secret, and then tried to backtrack. Well, needless to say, I got the whole story out of her.”

“So you know?” he asked, feeling a little guilty that he hadn’t told her before this, seeing that he’d been thinking about asking for her help anyway.

“Hmm. I guessed, before this. Too many evenings when you weren’t here in the Complex, too many times when you knew things you shouldn’t have about parts of Haven you weren’t supposed to have ever visited,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean, I can put two and two together—and unlike some of our colleagues with some rather lofty ideas about Heraldic duties and honor, I know a bit about the practicalities of life. Anyway, I just wanted you to know that if I can help, without getting in the way, I’d like to. Keren might fit in some of the wilder parts of Haven, but I know the craftsmen’s districts inside and out.”

That stopped him cold. It hadn’t occurred to him that Myste might want to volunteer. Or that she would actually have some inside knowledge that he didn’t. He’d thought he would have to persuade her, then train her.

“It’s not as if I’d have to act a part, like Keren,” she continued. “I’d just have to be what I was before I was Chosen. An accountant, a clerk, ordinary. Believe me, people like me are just invisible as long as we keep our mouths shut. No one thinks anything about having us around. We’re a kind of servant, and no one ever pays any attention to the servants.”

He didn’t know how true the latter statement was, but the former was true enough. “There could be danger in this,” he warned.

She raised an eyebrow. “You might not think it, but there’s danger in being an independent clerk. You don’t always know just who is hiring you, or for what—or at least, not until they ask you to run two sets of books, or you get a look at papers you weren’t supposed to see. That never happened to me, personally, but I know those it did happen to. And there’s stories about people turning up missing after taking certain jobs.” She chuckled weakly. “Well, that’s probably what most of the people who knew me think is what happened to me. I know for a fact that none of them realize I was Chosen.”

Well, she was on that last battlefield for the Tedrel Wars, and she’d volunteered for that, too. She’d faced danger there, certainly enough. “I might then ask you for help,” he said carefully.

“Ask, and you’ll have it,” she said. And then seemed at a loss for anything else to say.

But he didn’t want her to leave. They sat in awkward silence for a long time. And when the silence was broken, they both broke it at once.

“Can you tell me—”

“What of interest have you—”

They both broke off, flushing. Alberich was just a little angry—at himself. Surely he was more than old enough to have a simple conversation with an interesting woman without blushing like a boy! Particularly this one, that he had shouted at, cursed at, and forced to learn things she adamantly did not want to learn!

“You first,” she said, gesturing.

He paused. What did he want to say? It suddenly occurred to him that there was a lot he didn’t know about her. He might as well start with that.

“So. What was Myste, the clerk, like?” he asked. “What was her life?”

She laughed. “Boring. But—” Her eyes grew thoughtful behind those thick lenses. “But you don’t know much of anything about the ordinary person in Valdemar, of the middling classes, do you? I know a lot about all of that, in Haven, in particular. So even if I’d be bored by it—”

“Please,” he said, with a slow smile. “Tell me.”