At home Vanyel had always been a full step ahead of his brothers and cousins when it came to scholastics, so he began the hour with a feeling of boredom. History was the proverbial open book to him - or so he had always thought. He began the session with the rather smug feeling that he was going to dazzle his new classmates.
The other three boys looked at him curiously when he came in and sat down with them, but they didn’t say anything. One was mouse-blond, one chestnut, and one dark; all three were dressed nearly the same as Vanyel, in ordinary day-clothing of white raime shirt and tunic and breeches of soft brown or gray fabric. He couldn’t tell if they were Heraldic trainees or Bardic; they wore no uniforms the way their elders did. Not that it mattered, really, except that he would have liked to impress them with his scholarship if they wereBardic students.
The room was hardly bigger than his bedroom in Savil’s suite; but unlike the Heralds’ quarters, this building was old, worn, and a bit shabby. Vanyel had a moment to register disappointment at the scuffed floor, dusty furnishings, and fuded paint before the leonine Bard at the window-end of the room began the class.
After that, all he had a chance to feel was shock.
“Yesterday we discussed the Arvale annexation; today we’re going to cover the negotiations with Rethwellan that followed the annexation.” With those words, Bard Chadran launched into his lecture; a dissertation on the important Arvale-Zalmon negotiations in the time of King Tavist. It was fascinating. There was only one problem.
Vanyel had never even heard of the Arvale-Zalmon negotiations, and all he knew of King Tavist was that he was the son of Queen Terilee and the father of Queen Leshia; Tavist’s reign had been a quiet one, a reign devoted more to studied diplomacy than the kind of deeds that made for ballads. So when the Bard opened the floor to discussion, Vanyel had to sit there and try to look as if he understood it all, without having the faintest idea of what was going on.
He took reams of notes, of course, but without knowing why the negotiations had been so important, much less what they were about, they didn’t make a great deal of sense.
He escaped that class with the feeling that he’d only just escaped being skinned and eaten alive.
Religions was a bitbetter, though not much. He’d thought it was Religion, singular. He found out how wrong he was - again. It was, indeed, Religions in the plural sense. Since the population of Valdemar was a patchwork quilt of a dozen different peoples escaping from various unbearable situations, it was hardly surprising that each one of those peoples had their own religion. As Vanyel heard, over and over again that hour, the law of Valdemar on the subject of worship was “there is no ‘one, true way,’ “ But with a dozen or more “ways” in practice, it would have been terribly easy for a Bard - or Herald - to misstep among people strange to him. Hence this class, which was currently covering the “People of the One” who had settled about Crescent Lake.
It was something of a shock, hearing that what hispriest would have called rankest heresy was presented as just another aspect of the truth. Vanyel spent half his time feeling utterly foolish, and the other half trying to hide his reactions of surprise and disquiet.
But it was Literature - or rather, an event just before the Literature class - which truly deflated and defeated him.
He had been toying with the idea of petitioning one of the Bards to enroll him in their Collegium before he began the afternoon’s classes, but now he was doubtful of being able to survive the lessons.
Gods, I - I’m as pig-ignorant compared to these trainees as my cousins are compared to me,he thought glumly, slumping in the chair nearest the door as he and the other two with him waited for the teacher of Literature to put in her appearance. But- maybe this time. Lord of Light knows I’ve memorized every ballad I could ever get my hands on.
Then he overheard Bard Chadran talking out in the hallway with another Bard; presumably the teacher of this class. But when he heard his own name, and realized that they were talking about him,he stretched his ears without shame or hesitation to catch all that he could.
“ - so Savil wants us to take him if he’s got the makings,” Chadran was saying.
“Well, has he?” asked the second, a dark, sensuously female voice.
“Shanse’s heard him sing; says he’s got the voice and the hands for it, and I trust him on that,” said Chadran, hesitantly.
“But not the Gift?” the second persisted.
Chadran coughed. “I - didn’t hear any sign of it in class. And it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t compose, or we’d have heard about it. Shanse would have said something, or put it in his report, and he didn’t.”
“He has to have two out of three; Gift, Talent, and Creativity - you knowthat, Chadran,” said the woman. “Shanse didn’t see any signs of Gift either, did he?”
Chadran sighed. “No. Breda, when Savil asked me about this boy, I looked up Shanse’s report on the area. He didmention the boy, and he wasflattering enough about the boy’s musicality that we could get him training as a minstrel if - “
“If-”
“If he weren’t his father’s heir. But the truth is, he said the boy has a magnificent ear, and aptitude for mimicry, and the talent. But no creativity, and no Gift. And that’s not enough to enroll someone’s heir as a mere minstrel. Still - Breda, love, youlook for Gift. You’re better at seeing it than any of us. I’d really like to do Savil a favor on this one. She says the boy is set enough on music to defy a fairly formidable father - and we owe her a few.”
“I’ll try him,” said the woman, “But don’t get your hopes up. Shanse may not have the Gift himself, but he knows it when he hears it.”
Vanyel had something less than an instant to wonder what they meant by “Gift” before the woman he’d overheard entered the room. As tall as a man, thin, plain-she still had a presencethat forced Vanyel to pay utmost attention to every word she spoke, every gesture she made.
“Today we’re going to begin the ‘Windrider’ cycle,” she said, pulling a gittern around from where it hung across her back. “I’m going to begin with the very first ‘Windrider’ ballad known, and I’m going to present it the way it should be dealt with. Heard, not read. This ballad was neverdesigned to be read, and I’ll tell you the truth, the flaws present in it mostly vanish when it’s sung.”
She strummed a few chords, then launched into the opening to the “Windrider Unchained” - and he no longer wondered what the “Gift” could be.
Because she didn’t just sing- not like Vanyel would have sung, or even the minstrel (or, as he realized now, the Bard)Shanse would have. No - she made her listeners experienceevery word of the passage; to feel every emotion, to see the scene, to live the event as the originals must have lived it. When she finished, Vanyel knew he would never forget those words again.
And he knew to the depths of his soul that he would never be able to do what she had just done.
Oh, he tried; when she prompted him to sing the next Windrider ballad while she played, he gave it his best. But he could tell from the look in his fellow classmates’ eyes - interest, but notrapt fascination - that he hadn’t even managed a pale imitation.
As he sat down and she gestured to the next to take a ballad, he saw the pity in her eyes and the slight shake of her head - and knew then that sheknew he’d overheard the conversation in the hallway. That this was her way of telling him, gently, and indirectly, that his dream could not be realized.
It was the pity that hurt the most, after the realization that he did not have the proper material to be a Bard. It cut - as cruelly as any blade. All that work - all that fighting to get his hand back the way it had been - and all for nothing. He’d never even had a hope.
Vanyel threw himself onto his bed, his chest aching, his head throbbing -
I thought nothing would ever be worse than home - but at least I still had dreams. Now I don’t even have that.