Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

Nerys was not running away exactly. She needed to think. There was no chance of doing it in town, with everyone in such an uproar and not just one but two Heralds come to muddle what little sense anyone had left.

The last people she ever wanted to see were Heralds who were truly Chosen, who had not been mocked with a false and bitter Choosing.

:It’s not false,: Coryn said.

She refused to hear him. He might be lurking in the hidden corners of her heart, but she did not want him there or anywhere. If a Companion wanted her, let him choose her—not force her to share with her worst enemy.

She more than half expected him to take issue with that, but he seemed to have gone. She refused to be disappointed, let alone sad. Good, she thought. Good riddance.

The track up to the high pasture seemed unusually long and arduous today. Nerys realized as she rode that she never had given Willa her mother’s message when she was there last. Coryn’s appearance had driven it straight out of her head.

That gave her an excuse. “At least I’ll get some use out of the whole sorry mess,” she said. Her pony slanted an ear at her, bunched his hindquarters and sprang up the last and steepest part of the trail.

He paused on the pasture’s edge, blowing hard. Nerys was breathing a little fast herself. She slid off his sweaty back and led him the rest of the way, taking her time, until his breathing slowed and his body cooled.

She took her time rubbing him down, too, then washed him off and rubbed him again until he was respectably cool. By that time Willa should have come out of the hut, or else come toward her from the edge of the pasture where the sheep were grazing.

But there was no sign of the shepherd. That might not have meant anything—Willa did like to wander on occasion—but she had been gone half a tenday ago, too, and it felt odd.

The hut was cold inside, with an air about its emptiness that said it had been abandoned for days. The hearth was swept clean, and Willa’s few belongings were neatly stowed, except for a half-filled water jar on the table and the last quarter of a loaf of bread gone rock-hard and stale beside it.

Willa never wasted food. If she had left the bread there, she had meant to eat it while it was fresh.

Nerys started off running toward the sheep, but she remembered just in time that neither the sheep nor their guardian dogs would respond well to human panic. She made herself take a deep breath, relax her body as much as she could, and walk slowly and easily toward the cluster of woolly white bodies.

They were all well, and all accounted for as far as Nerys could tell. The dogs did their own hunting; they could survive a whole season on their own if they had to.

But Willa was gone. Nerys told herself it had to be nothing, the shepherd was out hunting or visiting her daughter over the mountain. Except she would never leave the sheep for more than a day, and she would have taken the bread with her to eat.

Nerys knew a little bit about tracking, much of which she had learned from Willa. It was not much good on grass and after half a tenday.

She did not want to think about what that meant. If Willa had had a fall or been attacked or taken ill, she would have been alone and abandoned for days. It was all too likely she had not survived it.

“No,” Nerys said. “I’m not going to think like that. She’s somewhere she can’t get out of, but she’s alive. I’ll find her. I’ll bring her back.”

The sheep ignored her. One of the dogs pricked its ears at the sound of her voice, but she was neither a sheep nor a predator. She did not matter in its world.

She stood still, taking long, calming breaths. Willa could be anywhere on the mountain. But there were hunting runs she favored, and Nerys knew the way to Willa’s daughter’s village; she had gone there with the shepherd more than once.

That might be the easy and therefore the wrong way, but it was a start. If something had happened, with luck Willa’s daughter had been expecting her mother, and when she did not appear, had gone searching herself—and Willa was safe in Highrock, maybe with an ague, or a sprain, or at worst a broken leg.

Nerys paused to fill a waterskin and carve off a wedge of strong sheep’s cheese from the wheel that hung in the hut. She found a net bag of fruit, too, that were soft but still good.

With water and provisions and a firm refusal to panic, Nerys set out on the path to the village. She left her pony behind. He was tired, and the path was narrow and steep. She could search it better and faster on foot.

Under the best conditions, it took most of a morning to climb and scramble and occasionally stroll to Highrock. Usually Willa stayed the day and the night and came back the next morning, though when Nerys had been with her, she had gone both ways in a day.