Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

He circled the whole of the high pasture, catching her pony on the way and sweeping him in their wake. It was better than any dream she had ever had.

When he stopped, she burst into tears. He waited out the storm and offered no commentary as she wiped her eyes in fierce embarrassment. When she was as composed as she was going to be, he said, :I have to go now, for a while. Be patient; go on about your tasks. Tell no one that I came to you. I promise I will come back.:

All her high joy collapsed into bafflement and something like grief. “You’re going away? How can you do that? I thought—”

:Just for a while,: he said. :That is a promise.:

She tried to argue, but he deposited her neatly on the grass beside her pony, ruffled her hair with his breath, turned and vanished into the dazzle of sunlight and sudden tears.

Kelyn had won this round of her long battle with Nerys, and she was proud of it. But her hair felt odd and tight in its pins and braids, and her long skirts were heavy and made it difficult to stride out. As for riding her blue-eyed pony, that was hardly a womanly thing to do.

A woman had more than enough to occupy her, between keeping the house, overseeing the servants, and making sure that the menfolk were fed, clothed, clean, and content. And, now that she was a woman, Kelyn had to consider her duty to the family and the business: to find a husband who would help them both to prosper.

“It is a pity Margit’s child was a girl,” her mother sighed—as she did almost every day. She never added the other thing, the thing that mattered so much to so many people in the town: that Margit’s child and Alis’ daughter hated each other with such single-minded intensity.

Kelyn felt guilty about it as often as not. But she simply could not stand the girl. Just being near her made Kelyn want to hit something—preferably Nerys.

On that particular day of summer, while her womanhood was still fresh and uncomfortable, like a new pair of shoes, Kelyn finished all her tasks early and won an hour to herself.

In this new life, she was expected to fill it with needle-work or study, or else with dreaming about her future husband—if she had had any candidates, which she did not. The face that came to her when she closed her eyes was long and white, with glassy pale eyes, and it was buried in the grass of its paddock.

Her pony was growing fat already with lack of exercise. He needed to get out—and so did she.

Her old, childish clothes were still in the press, tucked under the stiff new skirts and petticoats. She put them on with a kind of shamed relief. They were so much more familiar than the gowns she wore now, so much softer and more comfortable.

They were freer, too. She could move in them: raid the kitchen for provisions, groom and saddle a pony, mount and slip out through the gate in the back garden and ride up the hill toward Wizard’s Wood.

No one in Emmerdale remembered why the forest of pine and fir was called that. It had the magic that all forests have, of sweet scents and dappled shade and green silences. But no wizard had ever come out of it, and while the Mage Storms raged, none had touched either Emmerdale or the Wood.

Kelyn’s mother, who sometimes startled people with the things she said, had observed once that maybe the Storms passed the town by because of the Wood. No one had paid any mind. Emmerdale was a perfectly ordinary, perfectly unmagical place.

Sometimes Kelyn regretted that. No one from Emmerdale had ever been Chosen, and no Mage had ever come from there. Her dreams of magic and of Companions were only dreams.

As she rode under the trees, following a path that led to the heart of the Wood, she rejected that thought—fiercely, almost angrily. Even if she was a woman now, she was not done with dreams. There was magic in the world. She would see it, feel it, even touch it—someday.

The Wood’s heart was a low hill with a ring of stones on the summit. Whatever or whoever had put them there was long gone, and whatever power the builders had had or meant to raise was gone with them. Grass grew there now, and flowers that the children of Emmerdale plaited into chains and strung from stone to stone.

Why they did it or what purpose it might serve, none of them could have said. It was just what one did if one was in the circle.

No one else was there on this warm, bright afternoon, though there must have been at least one visitor earlier: a string of daisies fluttered in the breeze, wound around and around the tallest stone. The flowers were barely wilted, their yellow centers bright against the pitted grey rock.

Kelyn’s pony snorted, then did the most embarrassing thing she knew how to do: she flipped her tail over her back and squatted. Kelyn slapped her neck hard. “You idiot! There’s no stallion here.”

Kelyn was wrong. As it happened, there was.