Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

When the snow was gone, and Navar’s labor was no longer needed to help put the first crop into the fields, Captain Arwulf—he who had charge of the scouts now that they numbered a whole company of men and women—summoned Navar and asked him to command an expedition to scout the great forest to the western edge of the lands Valdemar’s people had claimed. “See what we can use there,” Captain Arwulf said, “and if there are any people who have claimed that land. I’ll send a mapmaker with you. We need to know more about our neighbors.”

It was a mark of King Valdemar’s new teachings—for he had chosen as the motto of his kingdom the words “No one way is the true way”—that Navar felt that he might refuse this order did he think it was a task beyond his ability; and true it was that never had he commanded men and women in the field, though he was well liked by his fellow soldiers. Navar’s skills had always been set to tasks where he must only command himself. Yet it was a needful task and one he did not think beyond his ability, and so he asked merely to choose those who would accompany him. And to this request Captain Arwulf made no demur, saying only that there was no better mapmaker than the one he had already chosen.

Almost did Navar reconsider his audacity at accepting such a great undertaking when, on the very day he and his dozen chosen soldiers were to depart, he first met young Doladan. The lad seemed to him hardly older than Prince Restil, and he frankly admitted—after he’d fallen off his mule while attempting to adjust his cloak, greet Navar, and repack his saddlebags all at the same time—that he’d never held sword or bow in his life. In the old Valdemar, he’d been the Master Gardener’s chief assistant, and when several of Navar’s soldiers dared to laugh at this admission, he pointed out hotly that the baronial gardens had covered several hundred acres, and without detailed mappings of what was planted where—and what should be planted where—the gardens would have been a wilderness.

“I wouldn’t be so high and mighty if I were you,” Doladan said fiercely. “If Mistress Karilgrass weren’t here now to tell everyone what plants were safe to eat, you louts would have had a leaner winter than you did.”

“True enough,” Navar said, for the beginning of a journey was no time to set a grudge. “We’ve all become more than we were in the last year and more. And if you’ll oblige me by learning a bit of swordwork, why, Torimund and Felara here will learn a bit of gardening.”

Doladan, Navar realized, was quite beautiful when he laughed.

They followed the river north and west, for rivers were natural roads, and any threat to come to Haven would come more swiftly along the water road. At each stop, Doladan sketched tirelessly, filling page after page with detailed notes, and taking samples of plants and leaves as well.

Navar had hoped to be back in Haven by high summer, but the expedition took longer than he had planned, for the forest proved to be dark and dangerous, full of twisted creatures. When Torimund died, Doladan said angrily that that the name of the forest should be “pelagir,” a word that meant “danger” in one of the Old Tongues, and Pelagiris Forest it became: Forest of Dangers. But if Torimund was the first casualty of the journey, he wasn’t the last: they lost six of their twelve soldiers before they won their way home again with the first frost nipping at their heels.

When he and his company staggered back into Haven with the maps and surveys they had paid for with the lives of half their comrades, Navar was shocked to see that the settlement he’d left—crude wooden huts and houses—had been transformed through equal application of magecraft and sweat to a city that rivaled—

Well, perhaps not High Ashuel, the Eastern Empire’s capital. But certainly one of the smaller cities in the empire they had left behind them.

And, well, King Valdemar and Queen Terilee and Lord Beltran, now King Valdemar’s Chancellor, were all mages, and mages could work miracles overnight where mere men would require moonturns of backbreaking work. But Haven now was larger than Navar had ever thought it could be—and as much stone as wood.

“I am so glad to get home,” Doladan said. He gestured at the young city before them. “And only look, Nav! Walls—and roofs—and floors! And neither of us had to build any of them! We’ll sleep warmer this winter than last, I’ll wager.”

“If we can find our own roofs by first snow,” Senard grumbled from behind them. “I hope they’ve built barracks as well as all these houses.”

“I hope they’ve built a tavern!” Rusama chimed in. She glanced across the stubble of the fields. “Good harvest means good beer.”