Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

Back home it would have been up in the hayloft. The Collegium didn’t exactly have a hayloft (well, it did, but it was the loft over the Companions’ stable, and that wasn’t anything like a haybarn, and it wasn’t very private, either), and any place the Trainees were allowed to be in their free time was fairly public. They could go to the Common Room, or the Library, or down to the stable, or out to the paddock, or to their own rooms, and there were people in all of those but her room, and anybody might poke a head into her room at any moment to see if she was there, what she was doing, how she was feeling. And she thought she might hit the next person she saw.

So since she couldn’t do anything else right today, Aellele figured she’d add trespassing to her list of sins, transgressions, and general total failures and go break in to one of the classrooms. It wasn’t exactly breaking in—since they weren’t locked—but she knew perfectly well that Trainees weren’t supposed to be in them outside of class hours. She blocked Tases out of her mind as well as she could (which wasn’t very, but she didn’t think she could bear his sympathy right now, and he was good about giving her privacy) and went off to find the one that was farthest from ... anywhere.

Her penmanship had always been good (one of the reasons that getting lectured this morning on a paper too messy to turn in had hurt so much), and one of the joys of coming to the Collegium had been having as much fresh paper to use and almost as much time to write as she wanted. Recopying the pages was actually soothing (an essay on the history of the evolution of the Karsite religion, another one on the system of tithes and land taxes in the Jaysong Hills), and once she was done, she could crumple up the oil-spotted pages and toss them into the nearest stove. Then there’d be nothing left to show what had happened today. Oh, except for the fact that she’d broken the hairbrush Saraceth had given her as a special present when she’d left home just because she couldn’t hold onto her temper any better than if she were a two-year-old child.

She looked up in surprise when the door opened, but the man coming in wasn’t anybody she recognized.

It was a long-standing joke around the Collegium that Kailyon had been here so long that they should just give him Whites and have done. Kailyon didn’t mind the teasing. He was never going to wear Whites—no Herald he—but you didn’t need to wear Herald White (nor Healer Green, nor Bard Scarler, nor even Mage Yellow) to serve. And he was proud of the work that he did here, for it was vital.

For every Herald (and Healer and Bard and Mage) and Trainee at the Collegium there were dozens of servants whose only task was to make it possible for those others to concentrate on their work. Some of the tasks were common to the four Schools and invisible (like the laundry), and some were specific to just one (like the small army of grooms who cared for the Companions when their Heralds could not, and in many cases, taught young Trainees who had never seen a horse—much less a Companion—what to do to keep their new friends comfortable), and some were similar in each of the schools but were managed separately (Bard or Mage or Healer or Herald, one must eat, but it was far more efficient to have separate kitchens and staffs for each). It was both an honor and a privilege to be in service at the Collegium, and it was a point of friendly dispute between the Collegium’s servants and the Crown’s servants (one that would never truly be settled) as to which staff held the more honored post. Certainly service to the Crown of Valdemar called for uttermost loyalty and uttermost discretion, but such qualities were required of those who served in the Collegium as well—from the lowliest laundress to the lofty and rarefied Collegium Seneschal, who was in charge of all of who served within the walls of the Collegium.

Such as Kailyon.

Kailyon had come to Haven as a child barely five years of age, gaunt and big-eyed and carried across a Herald’s saddle, brought to Haven along with news of sickness and a failed well. His earliest memories were of blue leather and silver bells, and of the world as it looked from the height of a Companion’s saddle, and the years after that were happy ones spent growing up in the household of one of the Collegium’s grooms. It was no surprise to anyone that he would seek to serve among those who had loved him and cared for him. And so he had, through King Sendar’s reign and into Queen Selenay’s, and if he was fortunate, he would continue to serve for many years yet.