Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

Like most of the servants at the Collegium, Kailyon was an invisible presence to the Trainees. Some of them had grown up in houses filled with servants. Others had been servants, or been destined to be servants, before they had come here. It didn’t matter, since once they donned their Grays, all were equal within these walls. Though many of his fellow servants often grumbled—and loudly—about how completely they were ignored by the students (“They treat us as if we were furniture!” was a complaint he often heard), Kailyon never thought so. The business of turning a citizen of Valdemar into a Herald was a demanding task, and it left the young students little time to focus on anything else, and if they did not (for the most part) precisely notice the servants who made sure that their lives were comfortable and well organized, neither did any of them—from highest-born noble to orphan child of the streets—ever abuse the Collegium servants. That would be grounds for correction swift and stern, from teachers, senior students, and their Companions alike.

As for a greater recognition, well, over the years, some of those who had begun simply as anonymous bodies in Trainee Gray ricocheting in-and-out of Kailyon’s orbit (for if he and his fellow servants were anonymous to them, well, the young Trainees were just as anonymous to the Collegium servants, really) had gone on to become friends, and Kailyon had followed the news of their lives as they exchanged Trainee’s Grays for Herald’s Whites, had greeted them with pleasure when they sought him out upon their returns to Haven—for the Collegium was home to the Heralds as well as school for the Trainees—and on a few sad occasions had heard it whispered that someone’s Companion had returned—alone—to seek rest and healing within the Grove, and hearing the name of the Companion, knew that he had lost a friend.

In his youth (decades gone now) Kailyon had fetched and carried heavy loads, rebuilt toppled walls, and dealt with every matter that a strong back and a strong arm could serve. If those feats were beyond his grasp now, he was not quite useless (as he had told Master Seneschal not two years past), nor was he ready for his pipe and his pension and his mug of beer in one of the rest houses that the Collegium kept for those of its servants who had no families to go to. Not yet. Dust fell as surely as rain, and boots left scuff marks, and woodwork needed polishing, and that was work a man could do and be proud of the doing. If it was not so fine and grand as serving as a groom in the Companion’s stables, nor a thing where the absence of his labor would be noted instantly (as it would did he toil in kitchen or the pantry), it was still honest, necessary work, and Kailyon had lived and worked among Heralds long enough to know that there was no need to be noticed or praised or thanked for doing what needed to be done.

It wasn’t arduous work by any means. A wing of classrooms to keep clean, and the Library as well, and while the Library was a full night’s task that couldn’t fairly be started until after the students were out of it, old bones kept late hours, and Kailyon did not mind laboring through the long, quiet hours when others were abed. Truth be told, he liked the solitude, the time to spend with his own thoughts. Each new Trainee who came to the Heralds’ Collegium was both a puzzle for the present and a promise to the future. Some of them were children barely older than Kailyon had been when he had come, some of them were verging on adulthood. All uncertain, in one way or another, about what the future might hold and what their place in it would be. Over the years, he’d seen so many of them—from skittish, wide-eyed arrivals to equally skittish, young Heralds departing on their first Circuits—and they all had one thing in common: the fierce determination to be worthy of the trust being placed in them.

As soon as he opened the door to the next room on his cleaning schedule this night, he saw the glow of the lantern at the back of the room (heard the faint mortified squeak and the rustle of papers, too) and knew he wasn’t alone. No point to asking, “Who’s there?” as if he were a panicky grandmam hearing imaginary housebreakers in the night. If nothing else, the Companions would stop someone who shouldn’t be here before they even got onto the grounds, and though these days, the younger servants entertained themselves by scaring themselves sick with tales about what the Mages might do if one had a mind to, what Kailyon was pretty sure of was that what the Mages did do was make the Collegium safer. So he merely took his large lantern off the cart and hung it up on the hook by the door and opened its doors.