Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

So, he’d been at it from the moment he’d left her. Oh, she should have known better. Really, she should have known better all along. He was years younger than she was. What handsome young man would ever have been truly interested in a dried up old spinster like her, anyway? It had seemed too good to be true, and so it was.

And that was when the final humiliating thing occurred to her.

Until either he had seduced one too many women, or the wrong woman, or someone was starting to make noise about missing items, he probably had intended to marry her. After all, she was making fine money. And she would have demanded very little of him. He could have gone right on sleeping with anyone he cared to, and she wouldn’t have noticed. Or if she had, a few sweet words of contrition from him and she would have forgiven him. Over and over and over.

And meanwhile, he would have been living better than anyone in the village while continuing to do as little actual work as possible. As good as he had been at pulling the wool over her eyes, she’d have probably considered it her privilege to support him.

She went hot, then cold, then hot again with shame. Especially when she thought about how often she had daydreamed of the long winter nights they would spend together, cuddled up in each others’ arms by the fire . . .

That was when it occurred to her that there was one thing she knew about him that they probably did not.

“If you can find his trail, it will end at a place where he intends to spend the winter,” she said. “He won’t travel in winter. He hates the cold, the rain, and the snow worse than a cat. That’s all I know. You can get out of here now.”

Reluctantly, they left.

Unfortunately, they did not take what they’d put into her head with them.

If it had been daylight, she could have lost herself in her weaving. Instead, she picked up her knitting; the needles flew at a furious pace, but they could not still her thoughts.

It had been bad enough when she had thought he had just gotten tired of her. When she had been left to wonder if she really was that dull, that stupid, truly unable to comprehend what being a Herald was all about.

It was worse now. She really had been stupid, but in an entirely different way. She’d been manipulated. Made a fool of. Now she knew the reason for the pitying glances she sometimes caught from some women in the village. All this time she’d thought it was pity for having been jilted.

Oh, no.

It was pity for being such a fatuous fool as to believe a handsome young man could ever want her. All those women that Danet Stens had slept with had felt the superior sort of pity that you do for someone who doesn’t know she’s living in a fool’s dream.

Well, I got the last laugh, she thought bitterly. Now all of them know they were played for fools too. It didn’t help.

Mother probably guessed. Or at least she guessed that Danet was only interested in the money I made.

That would be about right.

Finally, as the fire burned down, and the thoughts in her head would not stop buzzing about like angry hornets, she realized that she was not going to get any sleep, any sleep at all, without help.

She went to the cupboard and got out the little bottle the Healer had given her for her mother, to help her through the bad nights. She carefully measured out the right number of drops into a cup of lukewarm tea and drank it down. She had expected it to be bitter, but it had a kind of blossomy taste. Strange but pleasant. She went back to her chair and put away her knitting, noting sardonically that anger was good for one thing, at least. She’d finished the panel. She’d bind it off in the daylight and start another. Firelight was no good for binding off; you were asking for dropped stitches.

As she did every night, she carefully hung her clothing on the chair next to the bed, the bed that her grandparents, and then her mother, had slept in—though the mattress had been made new for her mother in her last year. She got into a flannel nightrail. The nights were turning cold now. Fall was not far off. If those damned Heralds did their job properly, they’d find the wretch soon.

She got into the warm goosedown bed and wondered what he was doing right now. Probably getting into an equally warm goosedown bed with a pretty, plump woman who was someone else’s wife. Not a thin, ugly stick like her.

She fell into strange confused dreams in which the Heralds and Danet chased each other around and around a copse of trees, until the snow fell and a trio of beautiful women came and carried him off on a flying sheep. All three of the women laughed and pointed at her as they flew away. She woke up feeling entirely out of sorts. For the first time that she could recall, ever, she was so very out of sorts that she didn’t want to work on her tapestry.