Page 14 of Valdemar

Isla sniffed. “Oh, it’s probably something like, ‘You must do one utterly unselfish act,’ which sounds like the one thing these two are completely incapable of.”

“Harsh, but a fair assessment,” Silvermoon agreed. “But . . . unless there is something we are missing, something as simple as unselfishness won’t break the curses. Although, in our lore, you would have to be completely unaware that doing an unselfish deed breaks the curse, because if you know that, and you do an ‘unselfish deed,’ it won’t actually be unselfish. The intent modifies the result, and doubly so with chaos-formed magic, and we agreed we wouldn’t like the results. So we haven’t told them that.”

“It’s a touching story, but where do we come into this?” Kordas wanted to know.

“Well, I was hoping I could persuade you to take them in. You have some of the finest mages I know of in the Old Men and Jonaton. You handle magical energies in ways we do not, and that might make the difference.” He paused for a drink, which Jelavan had in Silvermoon’s palm before his fingers were even fully extended to reach. Jelavan consciously slowed his movements around Valdemarans—who turned out to startle hilariously easily, the Tayledras thought—yet it was still swift. Fascinatingly, the hertasi’s handoff was in a smooth arc, with the cup pitched forward and back in motion before being fully righted. It struck him as something perfectly Tayledras: quick, quiet, artful, and mindful of the way the world worked. In this case, the effect of motion on liquid and how to counteract its inevitable sloshing. Things like this delighted Kordas. His mind was fully engaged, and it felt good.

Silvermoon’s pause was long enough for a deep drink, as he took his time arranging what followed. “You have a much larger population than we do, and certainly much, much larger than their villages. Novelty, and an entirely new environment, might keep them distracted for a while. Be careful to ensure they are guided well, and kept happy. And occupied. You can find ways for them to make themselves useful, and since you are not related to either of them, you can make that a condition of feeding and housing them, without them whining about it. And you have a great many sensible adults who will be able to keep them out of further mischief.” He sighed. “I am very weary of having to reinforce everyone’s shields to prevent thrice-daily emotional breakdowns because these two aren’t grown up enough to control themselves. We start in training mental discipline before the baby’s even dry.” Everyone had a chuckle over that. The challenges of guiding youth appeared to be universal.

Kordas glanced at Isla, who nodded slightly. “Given how much we owe you, of course we will,” he said.

“Then let there be love,” Silvermoon smiled. “Let there be love” was a Hawkbrothers phrase that amounted to “Who am I to know fate? Allow it to be what it will.” “I am almost speechless with gratitude,” Silvermoon proclaimed. “In case you were generous in this, we brought them with us. They’re waiting at the Gate now,” he continued, getting up without haste. “We’ll just send them through when we leave. Or rather, we’ll put Shadowdancer in a wheelbarrow, and Sunsinger can tote her across himself. But there is something else that brings me here, which is not as promising as the lovers’ future. It seems you have a neighbor.”

Ha, so the Hawkbrothers have already given them names of their own. Well, Lythe Shadowdancer and Rothas Sunsinger will certainly do to differentiate them from the Valdemarans. They weren’t exactly one people yet, but he had presided over a number of Hawkbrother-Valdemaran marriages in recent years.

“If you mean we finally found that Lord Legenfall set himself up off to the east, and managed to ally himself with a local mage, we know,” Kordas told him.

“That ‘local mage’ is not someone to be trifled with,” Silvermoon said warningly. “We’ve had our eye on him for some time. Well, we think the mage is male. I’m not sure of what his limits are, because we’ve observed him doing some impressive things from a distance. We’re not sure why he never challenged us, but he could. And your runaway lordling could persuade him to challenge you. So be on your guard.”

“We’re never off our guard.” Kordas sighed, joining his friends. “Well, let’s go meet your two troublemakers. Or at least, the one that’s awake.”

• • •

“. . . and as a condition of feeding and housing you two, you’ll have to make yourselves useful.”

So far, Restil had held his peace as his father laid out how things would be done for the two strangers. Kordas was to be the stern leader in this little display; Restil was to be the sympathetic peer, once his father had left. It was a game they often played, and they played it to perfection. Since it appeared that Hakkon had learned his lesson, Restil and his father had decided to bring Hakkon in on the game as well, so Hakkon was silently watching, listening, and learning.

For his part, Restil was sympathetic. He’d had two episodes of what his mother called “a pash” in the last couple of years, instances where he really did believe he was truly in love, and it had been . . . well, he’d had nothing to compare the feelings to, so he’d been upside-down emotionally, confused, and at once desperately happy and desperately unhappy. But he’d been able to get over them when the objects of his affection—one of them a Tayledras scout named Redarrow—had not reciprocated, and (fortunately) were kind about letting his hopes down. It had been the worst emotional pain he had ever felt in his life. He’d been sure he would never get over it. He had, of course, but at the time . . .

And he could not imagine how badly it must hurt when something like these curses kept you from your lifebonded beloved for all but a few precious moments of the day. Lifebonds were serious business. The intimacy of love, it could be said, as if you had been blended with someone. People had quite literally died of broken hearts and souls when they lost their partners. People think a lifebond is something to be desired. Those people have no idea what they are talking about.

“I’m not going to ask you what you can do. I’m going to tell you what you will do,” Kordas continued. “You, Lythe Shadowdancer—since you are awake and aware all night long, you will walk the top of the manor wall every night from full dark to false dawn. You will deliver their midnight meal to the guards, and you are to make sure they are awake as they stand watch. I’m aware this is not a challenging task, but it’s a necessary one, and by taking it, you free up someone who has senior skills to you.”

Lythe Shadowdancer had the good graces to look chastened. Of course, by this time, she had already been rejected by her own village and friends, and was very well aware of how much of a nuisance she and Rothas were to the Hawkbrothers. So she just bowed her head, clasped her hands in front of her, and said, softly, “Yes, sir.”

She certainly was very good to look at, and Restil, now with ten years of experience with how “village beauties” tended to run young men—and not so young men!—ragged to cater to their whims, had a pretty good idea that her current treatment alone would have been quite the shock to her system. And being subject not only to this curse, but to the repercussions of her lifebond, had surely shaken her to the core. But there could not have been a more perfect example of a “beautiful heroine” for a wonder tale, with her enormous violet eyes, her ravenwing-black hair, her perfectly sculpted face, and her exceptional figure. If this was the Empire . . . she’d be snatched up and carried off to the Emperor’s Court to join his private circle of . . . well, there’s no polite name for what she’d wind up as once the Palace had her. And then no polite name for the only thing left if the Emperor was done with her. I’m glad she’s here, whatever happens.

“As for you, Rothas Sunsinger, you are to be given over to my mage Koto until you learn full control of those Gifts of yours. In the meantime, because my people are mostly not mages and don’t have their own shields, Koto will put you under a very tight personal shield to keep you from affecting everyone around you.”

Restil felt the reaction to that immediately: resentment and anger, like a jarring melody atop the droning misery the lifebond was causing Rothas. And Koto stepped forward and slapped the back of Rothas’s very blond and very handsome head.

“HEY!”the young man shouted angrily—but the feelings he was broadcasting stopped—or in the case of the misery, dimmed. “What—”

“So smacking you in the head works,” Koto observed dispassionately. “Good. I’ll use that if nothing else works.”

“You can’t do that to me!” Rothas seethed.

Koto smirked. With his round, bald head and face a map of smile wrinkles, he looked very jolly, and mostly was—but he was, according to Sai, a “take no prisoners” type when it came to magical discipline. “On the contrary, I can,” he retorted. “The Baron, our leader, has put me in charge of you. If you don’t like it—” he pointed to the door, “—you can leave and take your chances with the wilderness. The Hawkbrothers have washed their hands of you. Your own people, as you know, won’t have you, because you’re projecting misery wherever you go. No one else in the Barony will help you—not because we tell them not to, but because you’re essentially an emotional cesspool, and nothing you can contribute is worth having to put up with being as sunk in misery as you’ll make them. You and love have not yet reached an understanding of who is in charge, and love likes to take up lots of room. You won’t be severed from each other, don’t worry. I am not the enemy of love. I am, though, implacably annoyed by what it does to the ordered mind. You both are going to learn how to live in control of your own selves. Or not.” Koto added, “We aren’t monsters. We’ll kit you up with everything you need to live in the wilderness except food—which we can’t spare—but you’ll be on your own.” Koto narrowed his eyes and smiled just a pinch. “And we’ll give you two knives.”

Ouch. Koto’s implying they’ll kill each other if they end up in the wilderness. That’s diabolical. I love that guy.

Lythe clutched Rothas’s elbow, face full of fear. She didn’t have to say anything; after a moment where he seethed with rebellion, he abruptly deflated, and the waves of opposition stopped without Koto needing to smack him again.

Koto nodded. “Good. That’s a good start. I’ll come for you at dawn.” He saluted Kordas with two fingers, and left.

They were all standing in the “main” room of one of the four-room living spaces in the wall. Kordas had assigned them one that was as far from anyone else as possible. It had been sparsely furnished with a rough table and four stools, a fireplace, a kitchen counter, a sink, and a hand-operated water-pump that was fed from the shared cistern above, which in turn was fed by rainwater and “pipes” grown by the Mother to the water table below. The next room contained the staircase up, a drain, a jakes, a tub, a second pump, and a water reservoir built into the back of the first room’s fireplace, which held water for baths that would be kept warm by the fireplace in the first room. Upstairs were two rooms with bedrolls on the floor. Restil rather doubted that the second of those rooms would be in use, but you never knew.

The couple’s belongings—probably more than they had arrived with when they were taken to the Hawkbrother Vale, since the packs were almost as tall as they were—were at their feet.