Page 2 of Valdemar

The trees that remained were hardy, and handled winter just fine. But it was sad to him that no one born after they’d come down would ever see those towering beauties whose tops seemed to brush the very clouds. It made the glimmers of sun through the leaves all the more poignant, as father and son rode in no particular hurry at all.

“Good day for this,” Restil observed, happily. Like his father, he looked his best in a saddle, and Kordas smiled to see it.

Aura, his current Valdemar Gold mount, pranced a little and shook her mane, as if she had read his mind. He patted her neck and winked at Restil, who was mounted on his own Gold, Stanzia. At nineteen, Restil was still young enough to think that to be truly impressive on horseback he needed to be riding a stallion, and Stanzia responded to Aura’s playfulness by sidling over to her with that look in his eye. Aura tolerated his behavior until he was within the exact distance it took her to snake out her head and snap her teeth at, but not into, his neck, her formidable incisors just grazing his hide.

With an affronted snort, Stanzia somehow leapt sideways, bucking a little, and surely rattled Restil’s bones. A true son of his father, the young man was too good of a horseman to be unseated, or even unsettled, but he winced, so his father knew he’d felt it.

He looks like his mother at that age. The only thing he got from me was my hair. That meant a slight build, an angular face that was attractive without being conventional, stormy gray eyes, and his father’s black, curly hair.

Hair so abundant and so enthusiastic about growing that it was sometimes a nuisance. Kordas had his own crammed under a hat. Restil had his tied back. Neither effort at control was entirely successful.

Restil’s mount was probably going to be the last pure Valdemar Gold stud. No time for studbooks and careful crosses when most of the people of Valdemar needed the brute-force multiplier of a horse or mule, and the mares needed to be bred as often as was healthy for them, staying mindful of their upkeep.

Another thing we are losing. I’ll miss the Golds. His family had been famous for them: horses bred for a glorious golden coat that looked like the namesake metal in the sunlight, but also for intelligence, good disposition, strength, stamina, and endurance. His family had made their fortune with horses, but their reputation with the Golds—an honest fortune, earned with hard work and care, not stolen from someone else as was all too often the case in the Empire.

Restil tightened the reins to correct his mount, and flicked Stanzia’s neck with the ends, assertively stating an admonishing “No.” The flick wasn’t hard enough to “punish,” certainly less painful than a fly bite, but enough to be a reminder. Stanzia laid his ears back and dropped his head, trying and failing to pull some slack out of the reins so he could get the bit in his teeth and resist being controlled. Restil was familiar with these antics, and held firm. Stanzia brought his head back up, sulking.

“Studs,” muttered Restil.

“Second thoughts?” his father asked mildly.

He shook his head. “No, Father. The exercise of controlling him without harming him is good for me, and the discipline is good for him.”

Kordas nodded and turned his attention back to the great wall around the manor—which, like his son, his people would insist on calling “the Palace”—and the guards on it, who were snapping to attention as he and Restil passed. Kordas raised his left hand to give an open-palmed wave, essentially the laziest salute he had in stock. The place had been without disaster, tragedy, or monster assault long enough that these Midweek Day rides were routine. This was what he did, sun or rain, cold or broiling, although not in one of the freakish downpours this place seemed to have on an irregular basis, nor the equivalent blizzards that locked everyone inside whatever shelter they’d taken until it was over. He sometimes rode alone, often with Restil, sometimes with his youngest son Jon, but at the moment not with his middle child, Hakkon.

Or at least, he would not be riding with his youngest until the duration of Hakkon’s punishment had run out.

The reason for said punishment probably was rooted in youthful energy, but there were a couple of accompanying signs of problematic thinking that everyone wanted to stop before it progressed any further. So the punishment was probably—well, it wasn’t particularly harsh, but it was somewhat in excess of what the boy would have gotten if he hadn’t opened his mouth and said what he had.

Hakkon had gotten into a great deal of mischief trying to “herd” someone else’s sheep. Without permission. With a horse. The horse had been bewildered, the dogs were confused, the sheep had gotten aggressive because they had lambs with them, and the farmer had erupted out of the sheep pen he was building, roaring in rage like Pebble’s mother, and just as incendiary. So that was three infractions: endangering the horse, endangering the sheep, and interfering with someone else’s property.

The farmer had, quite properly, hauled Hakkon down out of his saddle and dragged him straight to the manor by his collar, the poor horse’s reins in his other fist. The first person of authority he’d encountered, suitably enough, had been Kordas’s older cousin, whom young Hakkon had been named for. All three had headed for the Council Chamber, and Kordas had been sent for. After hearing what the boy had been up to, and shutting down every single “But—” that Hakkon-the-younger had tried, the last straw had been the declaration, “But the sheep belong to one of my father’s subjects, so they belong to—” Summoned from his work by a servant, Kordas had arrived at the (fortunately deserted) Council Chamber just in time to hear that outrageous statement and to see the result.

Hakkon-the-elder had taken both the boy’s shoulders in his hands and shook him until his teeth rattled and he was dizzy. “If”—shake—“I”—shake—“ever”—shake—“hear that”—shake—“or anything like that”—shake—“out of your mouth”—shake—“again”—shake—“you’ll find yourself serving as a pig boy for the rest of your unnatural life!” He let the boy go, and the young Hakkon reeled back, face white.

“And I’ll bind you out to the Young Squire myself,” Kordas had said from behind the boy, making his son jump. “We Valdemars serve the people, not the other way around, and don’t you ever forget that. What they own is theirs. They pay us for our service in governing and safeguarding them with tax. A free bargain, freely made, because if they don’t like it, they are free to take everything they own outside the bounds of the Barony, resettle in a place of their liking, and deal with their own defense.” Now he leaned down and stared into young Hakkon’s startled eyes from about a thumb away. “That’s how it will be in Valdemar’s lands. Suggesting otherwise is Imperial talk. We are better than the thugs we once suffered under.”

Somehow young Hakkon blanched even whiter. The word “Imperial” had come to mean the worst of the worst, and he obviously felt that comparison deeply.

“Now, since you don’t seem to have remembered any of that when it mattered, there will be a correction in your education,” Kordas had said, standing up as straight and tall as he could and staring down from his full height at his errant son. Who, thankfully, was still shorter than his father. Unlike Restil, who towered over Kordas by nearly a head. It was very difficult to be an imposing father figure when you had to look up to meet your child’s eyes. “Your new lessons will be concentrating on the latter days of the Empire, and your uncle Hakkon’s and my experiences at the Court. And you will continue those lessons until you can recite them by heart. Then, in addition, in what has been your free time, you will be employed in a manner meant to teach you what an honest man does for an honest day’s work, so that you’ll appreciate what that farmer has to do to feed and clothe the rest of us.”

He had tilted his head at his cousin, who quirked his mouth and said, “I can arrange that.”

So young Hakkon was currently spending his non-educational time alternating between cleaning the stables and cleaning kennels. There was no time for rides with his father; the only parts of a horse that he would see for the next couple of fortnights would be the rump and tail, and what emerged from beneath the latter. No time for socializing and idling in games. No time for mischief. But plenty of time to mull over what he said to his uncle, and why it had made everyone so angry.

Hakkon had never shown that kind of arrogance and dismissal of his “lessers” before, but Kordas was going to nip this first sign of it right in the bud. The reason for assigning him to manual labor was two-fold. One, he was going to get a good idea of just what manual labor meant, so he’d never take it for granted, and would be grateful that other people were doing it for him. And two, he was going to find out that those he had mentally consigned as “lesser” in intelligence as well as status were as interesting or more so than his peers. Kordas preferred intelligent servants to stupid ones; he rewarded thinking and innovation, right down to the sculleries in the kitchen. He himself had learned everything he knew about horses from the servants in the stables and breeding farm. Hakkon would learn more about horses and dogs than he’d ever dreamed existed by the time he was done with his punishment.

Aside from the guards and the gardeners, there weren’t many people about who weren’t working on planting and wrangling. Most of the population were outside the walls, tending their own fields and beasts, and trying to build their own homes. Sadly, once the Heartstone was gone, that mysterious building-creature in the ground had lost the energy to create complicated projects.

But at least it could still do something absolutely vital, and something that had worried Kordas dreadfully until they’d seen the Vale. It had been explained to him that what was below would continue to make that most desirable—at least in his eyes—of all civic projects.

Sewers.

It had already built a network of sewers under the Vale long before he and his people had arrived. It had tied the latrines in the wall and the ones in the manor into that network. And now, all anyone building a house needed to do was to leave a small, enchanted marker the size of the drain they wanted buried below the surface of the soil, where they wanted their own latrine to go, and at some point the thing would find it and make a new extension just for them. The extensions had rubbery valves every arm’s-length as far down as anyone could tell, and effluents went one way only, without foul odors.

Let’s hope that lasts.The closest Kordas could imagine to what the burgeoning city would smell like without the Mother below was a battlefield after a week of decomposition.

There would be no need to worry about sewage in the streets, or horrible cesspits, or any of the other dangers and health risks he had worried about. Imperial history was riddled with disastrous fights against disease, and the Valdemarans had faced over a dozen entirely new afflictions already. And if they lost the value of that excrement as compost, what they gained more than made up for it.