Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

She thought a long moment more, while the truth of her words penetrated to them. “It makes me wonder now if he didn’t plan this all along. Maybe he even had a horse ready for him when he ran off.” That thought didn’t help her at all; if anything, it made the deception even more bitter, because he clearly had never intended any of the things he’d promised her, and she’d had the wool pulled right over her eyes. But she wasn’t one to lie to herself.

“If he planned that far ahead,” Callan said, slowly, “Then he has surely planned for the moment when real Heralds confront him.”

“He’ll brazen it out long enough to buy himself some time, then bolt while you’re dealing with all the people that think he is the real one and you are the imposters,” she pointed out. “He doesn’t need long.”

There was silence. “This is why we asked you to come along,” Callan said, ruefully. “You know how he might think, and you point out things that we would not consider—”

“Like trained horses?” She shrugged. “I hope you can work out some sort of plan to deal with this. I’m just a weaver.” And with that, she took herself up the stairs to that extremely comfortable little room.

When she came back down in the morning to enjoy a truly fine breakfast, they still hadn’t come up with much of a plan other than, “We are going to have to scout this out without him finding out we are Heralds.”

“And what are you going to pose as?” she asked.

They both blinked. “We hadn’t gotten that far,” Sendar said.

She sighed and dug into a really outstanding slice of egg-and-bacon pie. “He won’t have set up in a town. When he settles in for winter, he needs a small village so he can charm everyone in it. And the one or two who are suspicious will keep their mouths shut for fear of antagonizing their neighbors. That means everyone will know everyone else, and you cannot impersonate someone local.”

“We could be peddlers—” Sendar began.

She laughed. “Where is your cart? Your packhorse? Do you know anything about the sorts of things that a peddler who visits a small village is likely to carry? Do you know the right prices? What a fair trade would be? I doubt that either of you knows the first thing about mending a pot, so posing as tinkers is not going to work either.”

As they began to look nonplused and flustered, she helped herself to biscuits and butter. Finally she took pity on them. “Instead of trying to do something you don’t know anything about, what can you do?”

They exchanged looks again. “We’ve never thought about it,” Callan finally replied.

She bit back the reply of “Well, then start thinking about it!” and just left them to it.

They discussed it for far too long in her opinion, coming up with all sorts of things that were likely to fall apart the moment someone in the village asked a few questions. She was actually learning a lot about them, although they were probably utterly unaware of the fact. It became clear to her that neither of them had ever done what she would consider “work” in their lives. Which meant they were both from some highborn family or other, the sort of people who commissioned her tapestries.

Usually they managed to knock the legs out from under each others’ schemes, which at least showed a modicum of good sense in her opinion. Once in a while she had to remind them of what life in a small village was like, how everyone knew everyone else, and how Danet, once he had ingratiated himself, would have the upper hand.

But finally it was Sendar who came up with something even she had to approve of.

“We make up a religion and become monks or priests of it,” he said, finally. “Something humble, inoffensive. Vows of poverty, nonviolence, all that. We can crib things from any religion we care to, and it won’t matter—no one can say we got it wrong because no one will recognize it, and we can exclaim about how wonderful it is that our god says the same as the other god if anyone notices the cribbing.”

“Why would you be traveling?” she asked. “People will want to know.”

“We’re going from one remote chapter house in Valdemar to another in Rethwellan,” Callan said with confidence. “I’m from up near the Iftel border, and I doubt your Danet will know anything about that area. We’ll say we’re from up there, and just make up another village in Rethwellan.”