Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

This girl didn’t go quietly. She kicked, she screamed, she cursed us all as they tied her to the stone. Yet she hadn’t been drugged. She wouldn’t be cleansed unless she felt the flames, the priests said.

I stood by Andaran’s side, wishing I could run. Yet even if I got past the priests and the guards, where would I go? To the north, where demons rode beneath the open sky and creatures worse than human priests called horrors out of the night? There was nowhere to run and no one to pray to. I waited for Andaran to light the fire.

Instead he turned and handed me the torch. I was so startled I took it.

Andaran’s lips curled into a thin smile, and I knew this was a test. “Light the pyre,” he said.

Sweat trickled down my face as I stared into the torch’s flames. Careful, a voice—Cara’s voice—whispered. Be careful, Tamar.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I told myself it was only the memory of her voice, but my hands trembled as they held the wood. There might be time, yet, to keep my oath—not to Vkandis, who had never listened to me, but to Cara, for whom the oath was made.

Be careful. But careful of what—my own life? Or of what I did with it? If Vkandis would not act, that left only me and my own human choices.

For a heartbeat I hesitated, because I was human and I was scared, because I remembered Cara’s screams. But then I stepped back from the pyre, drew the torch to my chest, and called upon its fire.

White-hot flames exploded around me—only me. No one could force me to make others burn. My clothes and skin and hair all caught, yet hot as the fire was, there was time enough for pain.

Through that pain, I saw a vision: a man made of white fire and crowned in white flame. He reached for me, and I knew that when I took his hand, the pain would end.

I didn’t take it. Instead I cried out to Vkandis, Lord of Sun, of Light, of Fire: “What took you so long?”

And my God spoke to me at last. “Have you not read your writ, Tamar? I cannot interfere with the free will of my people, not until the fate of the very world is at stake.”

Why should it take a whole world to move Him? Cara had died. Wasn’t that enough? “Aren’t our lives enough?” I knew that if Vkandis withdrew his hand, I would burn forever, but still I cried out, “What kind of God are you?”

“Indeed,” Vkandis said, and his smile was terribly sad. “So what are you going to do about it? What choice will you make now?”

It is hard to see clearly by a fire’s light. Shapes distort and blur; shadows reach out of the night. The sun lights the world much more clearly.

But it is not always day. And fire is the only means we have to see in the dark.

One day, Cara says, the entire world really will be at stake, and then the Sunlord will act. But that won’t be for hundreds of years.

I did not take Vkandis’s hand. Yet still he took the pain away, though not the fire. He respected my choice, if nothing else.

Not all priests are killers. Priests also heal the sick, and comfort the poor, and overlook signs of power in their village children to try to protect them. Sometimes these priests have visions that speak through a cloud of flame. When they do, sometimes I am the flame. I am the light by which true priests see.

Sometimes, too, I am the fire that is slow to catch, the moment’s hesitation that gives a priest the time to find his courage, to say, No, I will not do this, though it means my life.

But maybe you are not a priest. Maybe you only hear a whispered voice offering advice, or else urging you to do what you already know is right.

That would be Cara then, warning you to be careful with the choices you make.

I still do not understand why Vkandis waits. I still have not forgiven Him, although He is my God. Perhaps he does not need my forgiveness.

But I am no God. I am a farmer’s son. I will do what I can, when I can, until the very world is at stake.

Dreams of Mountain Clover

by Mickey Zucker Reichert

Mickey Zucker Reichert is a pediatrician, parent to multitudes (at least it seems like that many), bird wrangler, goat roper, dog trainer, cat herder, horse rider, and fish feeder who has learned (the hard way) not to let macaws remove contact lenses. Also the author of twenty-two novels (including the Renshai, Nightfall, Barakhai, and Bifrost series), one illustrated novella, and fifty-plus short stories. Mickey’s age is a mathematically guarded secret: the square root of 8649 minus the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle with a side length of 33.941126.