I had felt each moment of her struggle to live.
I had heard her dying scream.
I would not again fail to save a life.
Not here, and not tonight.
I willed Moonwoman to hear me, as I stepped into her path and shouted with all my might, both in Mindspeech and with my voice. To stop what she was doing was our only chance; the people she had englamoured could not be reasoned with, nor would they feel they were acting in anything but self-defense.
Someone threw a rock.
It struck me in the shoulder, too small and flung from too far off to do more than sting, but in that moment I knew despair and felt Death step near.
Yet I would not surrender nor flee, for I was a Herald still, in my heart, even though no one could see.
I had never ceased to be a Herald.
“Stop!” I shouted again, and this time I felt Shavanne add her strength to mine.
Power roared through my veins like the waters of that long-ago flooded river. This was the Mindspeech such as I had never wielded it, strong enough to match Moonwoman’s own gift, enough for all about me to hear.
She flung back her head as if I had struck her with a hand of flesh. The gittern fell from her hands, and she swayed, falling at last to her knees and burying her face in her hands, weeping.
All around me the hill folk roused, coming out of the trance into which she had Sung them. They gazed from Moonwoman to me with looks of awe, though I knew how quickly that would change to both fear and anger. The “sorceress’s” power over them was broken at last—and they would quickly hate what they had lately feared—but they had no idea how.
I did.
The night wind brought me the sound of phantom silver bells.
:Now at last I leave you, Beloved. Be well.:
I knew now how I had lived through my terrible bereavement, and why I had never been Chosen again. Why should a Herald with one Companion have another? In all the years I had walked the roads of Valdemar, Shavanne had never left my side, and in the one moment when I truly needed her, she was there.
Perhaps it is not possible. Perhaps her presence in my mind was no more than an illusion, nurtured by longdelayed grief. Perhaps my Mindspeech was so powerful for lying dormant all those years.
But I know what I believe.
I did not wait for the folk of the Armor Hills to know their own minds, but took Moonwoman away with me while they still wondered and argued among themselves. I stayed only to gather up my pack and to borrow Meramay’s hooded cloak from her. The goods I had gotten in trade here would be a fair bargain for it, and I knew that Moonwoman would not be able to stand the light of the sun upon her skin. And we would be traveling many days beneath the light of the sun.
I would be returning to Haven for the first time in many years, for I needed to give my charge personally into the hands of Healers and Bards—and there was certainly no safety for her in the Armor Hills now, even if she had wished to stay.
Along the way, she learned to trust me, and told me her story.
Her true name was Liah. She had been born in these hills nineteen summers ago, in a remote cabin similar to many I had stopped at during my visit here. Her parents, Andren and Colmye, were simple folk who knew little of the world beyond their hills and believed less. They had thought their daughter’s milk-white skin and hair must be some sort of judgment upon them, and when the sickly child was painfully burned by the sun, they became certain she was a curse, for what else would take injury from the sun, source of all good?
Andren blamed his wife, of course, denying that the child was his.
I well knew the madness of grief. Even though his fear and anger had led to suffering for so many others, I could understand why Andren had acted as he had done, even though I could not excuse it.
Andren put it about at the next Midsummer Meeting that Colmye’s child had died; no one doubted his tale. Colmye never attended another Meeting—whether she would have endorsed his story to her own mother, even Liah does not know. Andren never ceased to reproach his wife for giving birth to a Moon-child, though he never raised a hand to her or to Liah.
Liah grew toward maturity seeing no one but her parents. Her father hated and feared her, her mother, shattered in spirit, retreated into a world of music. It was her mother’s gittern Liah had been playing that night.
Her Gift manifested violently, as the Great Gifts often do. One night the smoldering anger she felt against Andren boiled over. She Sang him all her hatred and despair with the life she led until he fled the cabin into the night; in the morning her mother’s screams awoke her.
She helped her mother cut her father down from the branch on which he’d hanged himself.
After that, I think Liah lost all hope. She knew she had caused her father’s death; therefore all that he said of her must be true. She knew that she had the power to impose her will upon those around her with a song, and she had used her power to kill.
Her mother followed her father into death a scant few years later, wasted away with madness and grief. Though I do not think Liah caused that death, save indirectly, she blamed herself for it as well—and she blamed the hill people who had not come to her mother’s aid, though by the time Liah had eighteen summers behind her, I do not know if many of them remembered Andren and Colmye at all, and none knew that there was a child.
In loss, in fear, in rage, Liah tried to become all that her father had thought she was. She found that people would believe anything that she Sang to them, and had used that single power to create a fantastic monster of herself. The men that she lured from their wives she compelled to forget their families, and even their own names, and sent them wandering through the hills; even she was not sure why.
Perhaps Garin and the others could be Healed, and their memories restored. Healers would have to go to the hills to try to undo the damage Liah had done. Healers, and Heralds, and teachers as well. Life in the Armor Hills would change, perhaps for the better.
Liah would need Healing as well, and Training.
She must accept what she had done, and move beyond it.
Sometimes Healing takes a very long time. I am not too proud to say that I am proof of that, for anger and grief take strange forms, and can be stubborn enough to defeat the strongest Healer.
Yet if the heart is strong, Time heals all, in the end.
In Trevale, I will buy a horse for us to ride, now that Shavanne is gone.
A Change Of Heart
by Sarah A. Hoyt and Kate Paulk
Kate Paulk was born in Australia where, unable to decide what she’d be when she grew up, she took no less than three degrees. When bored with that, she married an American. She’s now residing in Texas with her husband and two bossy felines. One of her stories will come out soon in an Illuminated Manuscripts anthology and she’s working on a novel.
Sarah A. Hoyt was born in Portugal, a mishap she hastened to correct as soon as she came of age. She lives in Colorado with her husband, her two sons and a varying horde of cats. She has published a Shakespearean fantasy trilogy, as well as any number of short stories in magazines ranging from
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
to
Dreams of Decadence
. She’s currently working on an adventure/ time travel novel with Eric Flint. Her Three Musketeer Mysteries are upcoming under the name Sarah D’Almeida.