Myste took one of the chairs in front of the window; Alberich sat opposite her. "We need to think," he told her. "We need to find a way to make the things you can do into weapons. Running, for instance." He pondered that for a while. "I'll trade you saying for saying—in the hills in Karse there's a proverb, 'The hound that chases two hares catches neither.' If you are going to run—we need to contrive a way that you can create more than one thing for your pursuers to go after."
"Dropping my packs—" she began.
"But what if there is something in your packs that you've been entrusted with?" he countered. "What if it's in the winter, with no Waystations near? If you drop your packs, you won't have what you need to survive. It won't do you much good to escape from bandits only to freeze to death in a blizzard." He brooded over the idea for a moment, then the answer came to him. "I think we should add a bit of extra equipment specifically for you—packs and belt pouches that you're meant to throw away."
"What?" she asked, "Stuffed with straw or the like?"
He shook his head. "No, not that, actually. If you drop worthless decoys, it won't be long before bandits and brigands all know that the packs you drop are worthless, and they'll ignore them and go for you again. No, that hare won't run—there will be just enough in the decoys to satisfy an ambusher without making it look as if you're an especially juicy target, and to make certain that attackers chase the packs, and not you. And the same for belt pouches; from now on, you'll be carrying at least two small extras, both full of coppers, and if someone attacks you, you'll throw them in opposite directions, one to either side of your line of flight."
She was happy enough about the planning, but visibly unhappy when he brought her back outside and put her in front of the obstacle course. "Run the course, then run it again," he told her mercilessly. "And keep running it until I tell you to stop. Running away isn't going to do you any good if you can't actually run any better than Dethor on a bad day."
And he left her to it, with a faint feeling of having—for once—gotten the better of her. Irritating woman. Not that he didn't like her; she not only had the advantage of being one of the few people he could converse easily with in his own tongue, she was an interesting and lively conversationalist. And besides not being afraid of him or intimidated by him, he got the feeling that she respected him in a way that was quite flattering, when she wasn't trying to get the better of him. Why was it that she entered every conversation with the goal of somehow trying to win?
Well, she could just work some of that out over the hurdles. Meanwhile, he had a class of young archers to put through their paces.
«»
When he told Dethor of his solution to the problem of Myste over dinner, the Weaponsmaster chuckled. "Good solution," Dethor replied. "A very good solution. But I hope it isn't one we need to use. I'd much rather that the Heraldic Circle can find a position for her that makes the best use of her talents here in the city. Whatever those talents are."
"At the moment," Alberich replied, with just a tinge of sourness, having had to find reasons why every single obstacle in the course was one she needed to learn to negotiate, "Arguing and writing. Little enough of anything else, have I seen."
"Heh. I've seen those little notebooks of hers—" Dethor blinked. "Now, why didn't I think of this before? Herald-Chronicler, of course! Elcarth's doing it now, but we want him for Dean of the Collegium, and we need to start training him in that—" His voice faded off as he got that faraway look in his eyes that meant he was thinking, and probably Mindspeaking with his Companion. Alberich now knew that look very, very well.
And Dethor was right, of course; with all of his own reading of the Chronicles, he could see how being the Herald-Chronicler would easily be a full-time job. It wasn't just the doings of the Heralds that the Chronicler covered, it was everything; anything that had any impact on any part of the Kingdom larger than a small village.
:What do you think?: he asked Kantor.
:That it's probably the reason she was Chosen,: Kantor replied. :She gets onto a story like a rat-terrier and won't let go of it until she's shaken it free of all the facts.:
Annoying little dogs, rat-terriers. All yap and idiotic courage—or was that "stubbornness?" Still. Come to think of it, that described Myste rather well.... Or, perhaps, she was more like a cat, one of those mouthy ones that wouldn't stop caterwauling, came when you didn't want them, and wouldn't come when you did.
:We're in nasty times. Someone has to be willing to put down nasty facts without editing them,: Kantor continued. :And you like cats. You like rat-terriers, too.:
He ignored that last. :Hmm. Nasty facts like my little exercise tonight?: he replied.
:It ought to be written down somewhere,: Kantor countered. :Maybe not for common consumption, but if someone doesn't record everything, no matter how unflattering to the Heralds it is, the next generation is going to get the idea that we're all plaster saints. Then when someone has to do something underhanded far a good reason, nobody will be willing to do it....:
He sighed. There was that. And plenty of Chroniclers in the past had created "auxiliary Chronicles" that not everyone was allowed to read, Chronicles that recorded mistakes, blunders, errors in judgment, and jobs undertaken that were somewhat less than the letter of the law, all in unflinching detail. Not the sort of thing one gave the children, of course, but these Chronicles, and not just the standard texts, were what Alberich was studying as history. Just now he was in the middle of the very brief Chronicle of Lavan Firestorm; some of the soul-baring on the part of Herald Pol and King Theran was enough to make the heart ache. He could relate all too easily to the litany of "should haves" and "could haves."
Well, if Trainee Myste—who was certainly being allowed to read and study the unexpurgated versions of the Chronicles—was able to combine the qualities of detachment and tough-mindedness that the job required, especially now, well done to her. Elcarth probably wasn't; he was too tenderhearted to be unflattering to people he liked, even when it wasn't possible to get to the truth without being unflattering.
Mind, only a handful of people would know that for certain within Myste's or Elcarth's lifetime, because the Chronicles weren't written for the present generations, they were written for the future, and very few Heralds other than the King and the King's Own were allowed to see what their current Chronicler wrote. And then it was in terms of editing by similarly tough-minded Heralds, and only to ensure accuracy.
As he knew very well, the Chronicles could be extremely caustic at times, and no one really wanted to see himself, his presumed or even actual motivations, and his failures, stripped bare and put down in uncompromising writing.
In his opinion, a young person didn't have the perspective nor the experience to write what needed to be written. So there, again, Myste was fully qualified. Appointing her as Chronicler Second would solve the problem of what to do with her very neatly indeed.