Founding of Valdemar - Valdemar E-Book

Mercedes Lackey

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 745

Beschreibung

The long-awaited story of the founding of Valdemar concludes in the final book of a trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author and beloved fantasist. The refugees from the Empire have established a thriving city called Haven with the help of the Tayledras and their allies. But the Tayledras have begun a slow withdrawal to the dangerous lands known as the Pelagirs, leaving the humans of Haven to find their own way. But even with Haven settled, the lands around Haven are not without danger. Most of the danger comes in the form of magicians: magicians taking advantage of the abundant magical energy in the lands the Tayledras have cleansed; magicians who have no compunction about allying themselves with dark powers and enslaving magical beasts and the Elementals themselves. Kordas, his family, and his people will need all the help they can get. But when a prayer to every god he has ever heard of brings Kordas a very specific and unexpected form of help, the new kingdom of Valdemar is set on a path like nothing else the world has ever seen.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

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2

3

4

5

6

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10

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12

13

14

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About the Author

Also by Mercedes Lackey and available from Titan Books

FAMILY SPIES

THE HERALD SPY

The Hills Have Spies

Closer to Home

Eye Spy

Closer to the Heart

Spy, Spy Again

Closer to the Chest

THE COLLEGIUM CHRONICLES

Foundation

Redoubt

Intrigues

Bastion

Changes

VALDEMAR OMNIBUSES

The Heralds of Valdemar

The Last Herald Mage

The Mage Winds

Vows & Honor

The Mage Storms

Exiles of Valdemar

The Mage Wars

THE ELEMENTAL MASTERS

The Serpent’s Shadow

Blood Red

The Gates of Sleep

From a High Tower

Phoenix and Ashes

A Study in Sable

The Wizard of London

A Scandal in Battersea

Reserved for the Cat

The Bartered Brides

Unnatural Issue

The Case of the Spellbound Child

Home from the Sea

Jolene

Steadfast

The Silver Bullets of Annie Oakley

THE FOUNDING OF VALDEMAR

BeyondInto the West

KELVREN’S SAGA

Gryphon in LightGryphon’s Valor (coming soon)

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Valdemar

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781789099201

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789099218

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: December 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Mercedes Lackey 2023

Mercedes Lackey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Dedication:

To Matthew and Maree Pavletich

You know why

When one is accustomed to constant work, anything but work feels strange. Is it unhealthy if one finds the work itself pleasurable? What does one’s work take the place of? Kordas’s perpetually active mind followed the branching paths of thought. If it does take the place of anything. Done well enough, a labor can be a pleasure. I’ve always found my work enjoyable, except, obviously, for the lethality, danger, horror, and pain. And to be fair, those weren’t part of the work, just the results of the work. Stray musings like this cropped up any time he had a minute of peace. It was very hard for him to keep his mind from racing these days, and this torrent of thoughts was a slow one for him. Being a leader makes me feel alive. Averting crises, creating quick plans, and guiding the lost is its own kind of recreation. Even when it is uneventful. Blessedly uneventful. We have lost so much, but discovered what we’re made of. In crisis we display our truest mettle, but it is in routine that we exhibit our patience and willpower. Well, I have the willpower part, at least. In my youth I was raised into a position I couldn’t leave, one of constant work—so, ultimately, I became the work. Leading the Valdemarans isn’t something I do. It’s who I am.

So, as pleasant as the moment was, it still felt odd for him not to be at desks and map tables, hearing testimonies, and making notes (that would become orders) for the benefit of generations to come. It hadn’t been by accident that his weekly routine was engineered to include today’s “work.” Of all the days of the week that Baron Kordas Lord Valdemar performed his scheduled duties, it was this one he looked forward to: Midweek Day, when his morning tasks were few and he made rounds of his peoples’ projects from horseback.

Midweek Day! The closest I get to freedom!

Above him a blue sky, below him grass studded with tiny, cheerful fuchsia, yellow, and blue flowers his gardener grumbled about and called “weeds.” Around him, the grounds of his manor bore no boastful ornate topiaries or ponderous state statuary, but rather, hubs of material goods and their shelters, sturdy crops, livestock, and the two-by-twos of masters and apprentices at lessons.

Take this, the lawn in front of the manor, stretching out until it reached the wall and the main gate. Back in the Duchy, this would have been a manicured green swath. Here it was not only studded with “weeds,” but with sheep and chickens, both watched over by a very young shepherd and two old and wise herding dogs. And in back and to the sides, what would have been flower gardens and more lawn were instead very practical vegetable and herb gardens that fed and medicated the entire population of the manor.

The new-looking wall that protected it all hosted scores of people and their animals inside its perimeter and out, carrying on their affairs at the brisk walking pace the whole settlement had adopted. Kordas rubbed his palms together, prepared to be in the place he best loved—a saddle. He closed his eyes for a count of ten, savoring the moment. He might have acclaim, power, a decent throne, and twin desks, but in his heart, a well-worn saddle with one of his Golds was what he longed for.

On horseback, he was complete.

Love every good day you get. Enjoy the peace. Accept that, for the moment, things around you are not exploding.

Even the weather conspired to make him happy today: exactly the right temperature, just a bit of a breeze, and a nearly cloudless sky. An inky wave of little black songbirds flowed with that breeze, and alighted along a roofline by the hundreds, unhurriedly chirping their songbird conversations with each other like flautists practicing flutter-tongue. And if the scents here were not always those of flowers, well, that was the hazard of being an agrarian leader, the vast majority of whose wealth lay in the horses inside and outside this wall, and a good thousand head of livestock. He’d definitely smelled worse. He’d escaped worse.

Midweek Day—the Imperial military form of marking time was brutal in its simplicity. The Emperor’s scribes had been burdened with writing out flowery, elaborate calendar dates to please their nobles, but the military worked quickly. Short commands, ranks visible, flags distinctive—and days? First Day, Second Day, Third Day, Midweek, Fourth Day, and so on. Kordas’s policies left the months’ names alone, but adopted the simple military shorthand for all Valdemarans to employ. They were busy people here—nobody had the spare time to write out “Sixteenth Day of Sunrise Celebration, in the Height of His Imperial Majesty’s Spring Rise of Fertility, as recognized by His Majesty’s Loyal and Mighty Appointed Governor of the Fecund Vastness of the Realm” on a document. Day, Week, Month, Year, and done—and the year, of course, began at one, the year they had all escaped.

He had read the cardinal dispatches—summaries of notable issues divided by the compass points around the Court—over a relaxed breakfast. His true Midweek Day always began here, at the stables. It was a wonder they even had stables, but that was because Kordas, by virtue of having the largest household in the Barony, had the most available manpower to build them. And the only reason they had that manpower to use to build stables was because something other than humans had built the enormous manor that he and most of his highborn nobles lived in. That something had been a mysterious Thing that lived half in the plane where magic was more abundant than in the Material Plane, and half in the soil of the former Hawkbrother Vale. The Hawkbrothers called it “a Mother,” and not even they knew what its actual overall shape was. He would keep that a secret from his people, who would be unsettled by knowing that their city was built upon a vast creature that consumed whatever was fed to it.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the manor, which was not impressive by Imperial standards, but was far more than he thought they’d have been able to manage on their own. Four stories tall aboveground, with the same amenities of sanitation and water, heating and cooling, he had been accustomed to back home. And all grown straight out of the soil. He’d watched it grow, and marveled.

Now, it was true he could have had an Imperial manor. It would “just” take the efforts of a dozen mages working together for about six months. Powerful ones, at that. But he could not, in good conscience—even though he’d saved the mages under his protection from being dragooned into service to the Empire—have asked them to do that. Not when there were upward of fifteen thousand people who had followed him out of the Empire. They trusted and believed in his wisdom, enough to leave ancestral lands to go into the wilderness, and through dangers that had literally been unimaginable to them. They needed homes, clean water, sanitation, vermin control, food, and farms and—well, everything they had known in their lives until then that had been a matter of paying some money and receiving finished goods. Including shelter, and the mages could help with that instead of giving Kordas and the Court a fancier dwelling! In fact, the now-revered mages were hard at work every day, wielding their power to coax back some of the civilized improvements his people had left behind.

“Still can’t believe that it’s real. The Palace, I mean,” said his eldest son, Restil, beside him.

“Manor, son,” he corrected absently, as he always did. “I think the bastion walls are a lot more impressive when you think about it. They probably cover the same distance as the boundary of our old estate. That’s the equivalent of a whole lot of manors.”

“Do you miss it much?” Restil asked, passing a daypack to his father.

“The old manor and grounds? Oh, of course I miss it. It was a place of my youth, where all things were simpler than now. That’s how memory is. The way you remember things is not always accurate to what it actually was, but you know the way it felt. I remember the feel of the banisters, as if I’d just come off the stairs. I’d skip the first step to show I was a young man of action. Some things just stick in your head. I remember the crazing of the lichen and moss on the walls as if I’d touched them yesterday, and how the turret steps had worn-down smooth divots in their middles from so many years of use. That’s what’s real to me.” Restil watched Kordas’s face while he spoke. “And the old manor will still be utilized, and looked after. That helps me feel better, even knowing I’ll never see it again. Now we have this, a place that never was before we came. This manor is where we’ll prosper now. Our old home is a fond memory, but now is now. A memory is no place to live. It doesn’t hurt to visit, though.” He smiled at his son.

Restil smiled back, briefly, then said, “It’s weird. Thinking back, I feel like I miss places I’ve never actually been to.”

Kordas replied, “It’s all right, son. I know that feeling, too. I think it comes from some trait you value coming to mind, and you want to experience it like a memory. You feel like you were ‘there.’ Real or not.” He gestured with his left hand. “And now, this is real. I think I love it even more than the home in my memories. If you are self-assured, anywhere you are is home.”

They both glanced at the bastion wall nearest them, following two birds chasing each other. The same entity below had built the wall—initially a single wall for protection, but within the first year it had become more than that.

No, this was not exactly the same wall that had sheltered them from the attack of that semi-sentient, deeply lethal walking forest. It was much broader now. A second wall had been built inside the first one by the Tayledras-whatever-it-was that lived under their feet. Roofed and floored, two stories tall, the space between the two walls had been turned into housing, and the roof had become the walkway holding the guards, with parapets and embrasures to protect the fighters up there. It was a kind of village, although now that people were finally getting their own homes erected, it was emptying out a bit. “It’s lovely to have it, but it’s not a proper house,” was the general consensus, and it was true, it was a challenge to make a home out of a string of long, narrow rooms about twice as wide as a big farmhouse table was long. The rooms were subdivided into four-room partitions with a shared latrine and bathing room with a rainwater cistern above. Each room in the manor side of the wall had a single window facing toward the manor; each partition had a door exiting to the manor grounds. Part of it was barracks for the unmarried folk of his Guard, but the living quarters for people who were not in the household had been spaced out near the four gates that led to the land beyond, so people didn’t have to travel too far to get to their work. But the space was intended to be more than that. Even with a growing population, between the tunnels the hertasi had left behind, and the interior of the wall, the entire Barony’s human population could have shelter in the event of a serious attack or other emergency—although that shelter was going to be wall-to-wall bedrolls. And long lines for the latrines. Still. Even if something like the Red Forest turned up again, the people would be protected.

Restil looked back at his father and replied philosophically, “I suppose any place can be a home, if you need it to be.”

Clever lad.

“Let’s get on our way, shall we?” Kordas said, mounting and settling himself into the saddle. Restil did the same.

Within the wall, well, no one would ever think, “Here lives a mighty Baron.” Not when two thirds of the acreage was given over to herds of cattle, sheep, and the all-important horses. The rest was food gardens, with scarcely a purposely planted flower in sight. Flower gardens would come in time. Food for his people had priority for now, despite the constant battle against native insects, blights, and wildlife.

All of this land had once been what the Hawkbrothers called their “Vale,” which had had magical shields rather than physical walls. And Kordas very much missed the enchanting place it had been under their care. He had apologized to them during one of the negotiations, lamenting that the beauty the Tayledras left to the Valdemarans could only decline in their care—and he meant it. He had been reassured that for centuries, Vales were just abandoned to be reclaimed by the wild, since the Hawkbrothers thought of Vales as places to work, not lasting homes—even though they might work in one for generations. As long as there was benevolent custodianship and joy in whatever the Valdemarans did with this Vale, the Hawkbrothers would be content. But nearly all of the soaring buildings, decks, decorative vines, and gardens could not exist without constant magical protection and magical tending, and none of that could exist without the stupendously powerful node they called a Heartstone providing power that was only limited by the magician’s strength and ability to manipulate it. With the Hawkbrothers gone, and their Heartstone shrunk to a more normal (if still powerful) node, the huge trees that hosted their homes, the lush growth that had required year-round warmth, the marvelous hot springs and pools, and the invisible protective Veil that allowed midsummer temperatures all year round were gone with them.

The last of the Hawkbrothers to leave had helped to bring down those forest giants, “giving them a calm death,” as they put it, because these trees simply could not, structurally, have survived a winter. They had never experienced a winter freeze, and the Valdemarans were warned that if these Vale trees were not felled before frost, they would explode from the expansion pressure of their own sap. And so, systematically, down they came. He missed them—but they had supplied so much lumber that no one had needed to cut any for some time after that.

He shivered. That thought triggered a stressful memory of incoming sawblades on a sinking barge, because what man could just forget that?

He forced his thoughts back to happier places.

If it weren’t for the hertasi’s aid, stripping the leaves and bark while everyone else slept, two-thirds of the lumber would not even be ready for dry curing by now. And the leavings provided the fuel for the baking, using kilns made from former tunnels!

The trees that remained were hardy, and handled winter just fine. But it was sad to him that no one born after they’d come down would ever see those towering beauties whose tops seemed to brush the very clouds. It made the glimmers of sun through the leaves all the more poignant, as father and son rode in no particular hurry at all.

“Good day for this,” Restil observed, happily. Like his father, he looked his best in a saddle, and Kordas smiled to see it.

Aura, his current Valdemar Gold mount, pranced a little and shook her mane, as if she had read his mind. He patted her neck and winked at Restil, who was mounted on his own Gold, Stanzia. At nineteen, Restil was still young enough to think that to be truly impressive on horseback he needed to be riding a stallion, and Stanzia responded to Aura’s playfulness by sidling over to her with that look in his eye. Aura tolerated his behavior until he was within the exact distance it took her to snake out her head and snap her teeth at, but not into, his neck, her formidable incisors just grazing his hide.

With an affronted snort, Stanzia somehow leapt sideways, bucking a little, and surely rattled Restil’s bones. A true son of his father, the young man was too good of a horseman to be unseated, or even unsettled, but he winced, so his father knew he’d felt it.

He looks like his mother at that age. The only thing he got from me was my hair. That meant a slight build, an angular face that was attractive without being conventional, stormy gray eyes, and his father’s black, curly hair.

Hair so abundant and so enthusiastic about growing that it was sometimes a nuisance. Kordas had his own crammed under a hat. Restil had his tied back. Neither effort at control was entirely successful.

Restil’s mount was probably going to be the last pure Valdemar Gold stud. No time for studbooks and careful crosses when most of the people of Valdemar needed the brute-force multiplier of a horse or mule, and the mares needed to be bred as often as was healthy for them, staying mindful of their upkeep.

Another thing we are losing. I’ll miss the Golds. His family had been famous for them: horses bred for a glorious golden coat that looked like the namesake metal in the sunlight, but also for intelligence, good disposition, strength, stamina, and endurance. His family had made their fortune with horses, but their reputation with the Golds—an honest fortune, earned with hard work and care, not stolen from someone else as was all too often the case in the Empire.

Restil tightened the reins to correct his mount, and flicked Stanzia’s neck with the ends, assertively stating an admonishing “No.” The flick wasn’t hard enough to “punish,” certainly less painful than a fly bite, but enough to be a reminder. Stanzia laid his ears back and dropped his head, trying and failing to pull some slack out of the reins so he could get the bit in his teeth and resist being controlled. Restil was familiar with these antics, and held firm. Stanzia brought his head back up, sulking.

“Studs,” muttered Restil.

“Second thoughts?” his father asked mildly.

He shook his head. “No, Father. The exercise of controlling him without harming him is good for me, and the discipline is good for him.”

Kordas nodded and turned his attention back to the great wall around the manor—which, like his son, his people would insist on calling “the Palace”—and the guards on it, who were snapping to attention as he and Restil passed. Kordas raised his left hand to give an open-palmed wave, essentially the laziest salute he had in stock. The place had been without disaster, tragedy, or monster assault long enough that these Midweek Day rides were routine. This was what he did, sun or rain, cold or broiling, although not in one of the freakish downpours this place seemed to have on an irregular basis, nor the equivalent blizzards that locked everyone inside whatever shelter they’d taken until it was over. He sometimes rode alone, often with Restil, sometimes with his youngest son Jon, but at the moment not with his middle child, Hakkon.

Or at least, he would not be riding with his youngest until the duration of Hakkon’s punishment had run out.

The reason for said punishment probably was rooted in youthful energy, but there were a couple of accompanying signs of problematic thinking that everyone wanted to stop before it progressed any further. So the punishment was probably—well, it wasn’t particularly harsh, but it was somewhat in excess of what the boy would have gotten if he hadn’t opened his mouth and said what he had.

Hakkon had gotten into a great deal of mischief trying to “herd” someone else’s sheep. Without permission. With a horse. The horse had been bewildered, the dogs were confused, the sheep had gotten aggressive because they had lambs with them, and the farmer had erupted out of the sheep pen he was building, roaring in rage like Pebble’s mother, and just as incendiary. So that was three infractions: endangering the horse, endangering the sheep, and interfering with someone else’s property.

The farmer had, quite properly, hauled Hakkon down out of his saddle and dragged him straight to the manor by his collar, the poor horse’s reins in his other fist. The first person of authority he’d encountered, suitably enough, had been Kordas’s older cousin, whom young Hakkon had been named for. All three had headed for the Council Chamber, and Kordas had been sent for. After hearing what the boy had been up to, and shutting down every single “But—” that Hakkon-the-younger had tried, the last straw had been the declaration, “But the sheep belong to one of my father’s subjects, so they belong to—” Summoned from his work by a servant, Kordas had arrived at the (fortunately deserted) Council Chamber just in time to hear that outrageous statement and to see the result.

Hakkon-the-elder had taken both the boy’s shoulders in his hands and shook him until his teeth rattled and he was dizzy. “If”—shake—“I”—shake—“ever”—shake—“hear that”—shake—“or anything like that”—shake—“out of your mouth”—shake—“again”—shake—“you’ll find yourself serving as a pig boy for the rest of your unnatural life!” He let the boy go, and the young Hakkon reeled back, face white.

“And I’ll bind you out to the Young Squire myself,” Kordas had said from behind the boy, making his son jump. “We Valdemars serve the people, not the other way around, and don’t you ever forget that. What they own is theirs. They pay us for our service in governing and safeguarding them with tax. A free bargain, freely made, because if they don’t like it, they are free to take everything they own outside the bounds of the Barony, resettle in a place of their liking, and deal with their own defense.” Now he leaned down and stared into young Hakkon’s startled eyes from about a thumb away. “That’s how it will be in Valdemar’s lands. Suggesting otherwise is Imperial talk. We are better than the thugs we once suffered under.”

Somehow young Hakkon blanched even whiter. The word “Imperial” had come to mean the worst of the worst, and he obviously felt that comparison deeply.

“Now, since you don’t seem to have remembered any of that when it mattered, there will be a correction in your education,” Kordas had said, standing up as straight and tall as he could and staring down from his full height at his errant son. Who, thankfully, was still shorter than his father. Unlike Restil, who towered over Kordas by nearly a head. It was very difficult to be an imposing father figure when you had to look up to meet your child’s eyes. “Your new lessons will be concentrating on the latter days of the Empire, and your uncle Hakkon’s and my experiences at the Court. And you will continue those lessons until you can recite them by heart. Then, in addition, in what has been your free time, you will be employed in a manner meant to teach you what an honest man does for an honest day’s work, so that you’ll appreciate what that farmer has to do to feed and clothe the rest of us.”

He had tilted his head at his cousin, who quirked his mouth and said, “I can arrange that.”

So young Hakkon was currently spending his non-educational time alternating between cleaning the stables and cleaning kennels. There was no time for rides with his father; the only parts of a horse that he would see for the next couple of fortnights would be the rump and tail, and what emerged from beneath the latter. No time for socializing and idling in games. No time for mischief. But plenty of time to mull over what he said to his uncle, and why it had made everyone so angry.

Hakkon had never shown that kind of arrogance and dismissal of his “lessers” before, but Kordas was going to nip this first sign of it right in the bud. The reason for assigning him to manual labor was two-fold. One, he was going to get a good idea of just what manual labor meant, so he’d never take it for granted, and would be grateful that other people were doing it for him. And two, he was going to find out that those he had mentally consigned as “lesser” in intelligence as well as status were as interesting or more so than his peers. Kordas preferred intelligent servants to stupid ones; he rewarded thinking and innovation, right down to the sculleries in the kitchen. He himself had learned everything he knew about horses from the servants in the stables and breeding farm. Hakkon would learn more about horses and dogs than he’d ever dreamed existed by the time he was done with his punishment.

Aside from the guards and the gardeners, there weren’t many people about who weren’t working on planting and wrangling. Most of the population were outside the walls, tending their own fields and beasts, and trying to build their own homes. Sadly, once the Heartstone was gone, that mysterious building-creature in the ground had lost the energy to create complicated projects.

But at least it could still do something absolutely vital, and something that had worried Kordas dreadfully until they’d seen the Vale. It had been explained to him that what was below would continue to make that most desirable—at least in his eyes—of all civic projects.

Sewers.

It had already built a network of sewers under the Vale long before he and his people had arrived. It had tied the latrines in the wall and the ones in the manor into that network. And now, all anyone building a house needed to do was to leave a small, enchanted marker the size of the drain they wanted buried below the surface of the soil, where they wanted their own latrine to go, and at some point the thing would find it and make a new extension just for them. The extensions had rubbery valves every arm’s-length as far down as anyone could tell, and effluents went one way only, without foul odors.

Let’s hope that lasts. The closest Kordas could imagine to what the burgeoning city would smell like without the Mother below was a battlefield after a week of decomposition.

There would be no need to worry about sewage in the streets, or horrible cesspits, or any of the other dangers and health risks he had worried about. Imperial history was riddled with disastrous fights against disease, and the Valdemarans had faced over a dozen entirely new afflictions already. And if they lost the value of that excrement as compost, what they gained more than made up for it.

History books seldom mention what any event smelled like, and so people come to expect no smell at all. The fact is, cities stink, as a side effect of functioning. A wise leader thinks ahead about abating the intensity of repugnances to improve the morale and health of his charges. One of his grandfather’s precepts.

The unstressed wave to the fighters on the wall was a signal that they could go back to standing guard. Or, if they were on simple watch duty instead of patrol, sitting on tall swivel stools instead of standing. Imperial military doctrine required standing on duty, but Kordas didn’t think that was necessary here. They weren’t on a war footing, and he figured it was better to have the momentary delay of standing up if action was needed than a guard complement with aching backs, ankles, and knees for years to come. As he’d reasoned it, that too had a reassuring effect: if you had plans for people’s long-term health, it told the people that they had a future.

“I rode out to check on the tree nursery yesterday as you asked,” Restil said into the silence. “Healers managed to find a cure for that rust disease, and walked it back. There’s no sign of it on any of the saplings now.”

“Well, that’s an arrow dodged.” The Hawkbrothers had been very, very adamant about one thing: Do not disrespect the land. It is your host. Let it breathe. Nurture it. Kordas had decreed leaving numerous trees around and between buildings, and planting a tree for every tree that was cut down. And not just any trees; no single type planted in rows like a sort of tree farm. It had to be mixed trees, just as in a natural forest. Fortunately, no one had argued with this. He’d half expected a battle with farmers who were impatient about wasting planting time on something that couldn’t be eaten, but no.

The discovery of native nut and fruit trees helped with that. The Hawkbrothers had passed along lessons in understanding local animal behavior early on, to learn about the land’s health by its subtle signs. Where raptors gathered meant vermin infestations; where lavender or mints grew, beetles and larvae would avoid; and so on. The brightest farmers diversified all they could.

Kordas deeply appreciated how reasonable people had been once things settled down to the point where life wasn’t a distressing struggle every day, and people had enough leisure to start to complain about the things they missed from back home. And he couldn’t blame them. There were things he missed every day, and he was relatively sheltered and very privileged, and was well aware of it. Sometimes he wondered how people coped with good humor, because the changes and adaptations they’d had to make included everyone, from the highest to the lowest, right down to the sculleries and pot-boys.

That sent his thoughts drifting off to the very interesting breakfast he’d had this morning: egg pie, but with seasoning that was only now becoming familiar. Gods know everyone in the kitchen has had to learn a hundred new things since we got here, at least. Old herbs and spices unavailable, new ones to adapt to the recipes, new woods to learn for a quick and hot or slow and steady fire . . . and it’s the same for every other trade. Adapting what Was to what Is.

Which just brought his thoughts back to the erring Hakkon.

“Where do you think Hakkon got his inflated notions of self-importance?” he asked his eldest, who could generally be counted on to know exactly what his siblings were up to.

Restil snorted. “That’s an easy one. He’s been spending time with some of the highborn younglings I don’t care for, a lot of sycophants that fluffed up his ego. He got snarky with me the day before the stunt with the sheep, and I warned him if he didn’t make a course correction, he’d run aground.”

“I see you’ve been spending time yourself with the shipbuilders from the Duchy of Olinian,” Kordas replied.

Under the original plan, they would never have had builders of proper sea-going ships among them. Canal boats and the small vessels that plied lakes were the closest to real ships that the Duchy of Valdemar made; the Duchy had no more than repair docks since several other baronies and duchies nearby boasted experts in naval architecture, with excellent shipyards. But the emergency evacuation of the Capital by every means possible, including the entire Gate network, had meant that their private Gate, the one to what they had initially thought would be their new home, had experienced what mage Jonaton had blithely called “little glitches.”

In other words, we got plenty of uninvited guests. I love Jonaton dearly, but sometimes he can be aggravating. A glitch is a fly in fresh paint, not being re-routed across the world!

A number of people who were not Kordas’s subjects had flung themselves into Gates without a destination key, and ended up coming out to safety through Valdemar’s secret Gate back on Crescent Lake. In most cases, they had come through by ones and twos, but the civilian shipbuilders outside the Capital had crammed themselves, their pets, their Dolls, and their families into light craft at once, and left through a supply Gate at the commercial shipyard. That Gate had interpreted this as being a “single party” like a shipment of several barges, and that was why Kordas now had a small population of shipbuilders from the coast—people who built sturdy boats with crafted wood, not fungal paste. They had liked the Empire even less than Kordas, and were happy to stay with the Valdemarans rather than taking the Crescent Lake Gate back to their home.

Of course, their shipyard home had a strong chance of being incinerated after they’d left. No one had done any scrying to see what was left of the Capital once Pebble’s mother had finished with it. That was partly because not too many people actually cared, and there were enough eyewitnesses and accounts of the annihilation that it was well-understood that there was nothing left to look at. The final decision against scrying was mostly so that, if there were mages left in what remained of the Empire with the capability of detecting a remote scrying spell, they wouldn’t be alerted to the escapees.

Having people who built boats with wood had turned out to be a very, very good thing, since Kordas’s live fungus had not taken to its new home. It had turned itself into a gray powder and blew away in the first year. The Healers thought it might have been infected by a local disease, like a couple of their food crops had. Some of those crops had produced twisted or inedible yields, but weren’t completely lost. Others were.

No purple beans, no softbeets, no catbells anymore. There’s a chance they could be reintroduced if we sent agents to Imperial destinations, but . . . I’d rather do without old familiar flavors than risk discovery. Thank the gods the Tayledras had their own analogs to what edible flora we completely lost. Some of them are better, actually. We’ve lost a lot of people, sad to say, but it hasn’t been to famine.

The river, on either side of the rapids, had basins teeming with edible life. The rapids seemed to be virtually unsurvivable to anything, which made them like a wall for species diversification. As a precaution, Kordas ordered the debris from the Red Forest thrown into the river upstream of the rapids, for fear it might give rise to a new Forest or poison the ground—and down to the twig, none was seen again after entering the rapids. Downstream, water from the rapids was as clear as air, no matter how deep the riverbed. There were drastically different versions of the same species north and south of the rapids. To the north, the horrific underwater spiders had become something essentially like deepwater crabs, and just as delicious. Sunfish the size of pie plates, eels that tasted like beefsteak, and catfish from the southern side—the Valdemarans would need dedicated fishing boats before long, when barge- and bridge-fishing weren’t enough. Right now, the shipbuilders applied their woodworking skills to building houses, barns, and sheds, but their real love was ships. Anyone unwary asking for tales could find themselves drowning in stories about real ships and the beauty of them, with only the slightest provocation.

Restil shrugged. “I like boats. I like how they look, and how they move. I like how they feel under my feet. For all we know, someday we’re going to discover a big enough body of water that actual ships are required. So I’ve been talking to the shipmen, writing everything down, and getting them to make drawings for me about how to make those big seagoing ships, so we can have records in the Archive when that day comes.”

“Well, if that’s what you’re doing, you have leave to recruit a helper or two, and let it be known I’ve said that’s your permanent assignment when you’re not with me. And you might want to think about any other trade that we don’t need now, but might need later, and get those recorded as well. We won’t live forever. Mastery dies with the master, unless their knowledge is recorded.” They approached one of the three smaller side gates in the wall now, which would lead them out into the half-built city they were calling Haven. A tunnel led through the wall, dark and unexpectedly chill, with stout iron portcullises at either end, heavy iron-bound doors, droppable spike chains, and murder holes in the ceiling.

Those had been added by human builders, not grown. Without the full Heartstone, only a node, it was better to rely on physical protections than magical. Spells could fail, but gravity was reliable.

The horses picked up their pace through the tunnel. They either didn’t like the darkness and close walls, or were eager to get out of their usual pastures and into something less familiar. Horses got bored, too.

Right outside the gatehouse was what would eventually be the most imposing structure in the city besides the manor itself. They stopped long enough to observe the work. “I see Lord Hedron found something else in his hoard to entice another half-dozen carpenters to come work for him,” Restil observed, after some silent tallying. “I wonder what it was?”

“Who knows?” Kordas replied, mentally comparing the building in front of him with the plans his Lord Chancellor had shown him. “When we all made those jokes about Lord Hedron and his crazy collecting—and how it was even crazier that he managed to bring it all with him—who would have guessed he’d be just about the only one of the highborn with goods that actual workers wanted! What was it the last time?”

“Needles and pins. There was almost a riot over them,” Restil supplied.

His father nodded. The “really good” steel that they had brought with them was all that they would have for quite a while, until there was time to use the mine and the smelter—a gift from the

Hawkbrothers—to make refined metal for things that were not strictly necessary. And until the steelworkers managed to hone their crafting techniques to create delicate, specialized objects like pins and needles, if you lost or broke something like that, you’d be doing your sewing with a clumsier bone needle, and pinning with thorns. So every lost pin and every broken needle was a notable upset in most people’s households.

All the things we took for granted that we’d never thought of, even with the decades of planning that went into our escape. Things like, certainly, every village blacksmith was a fine metal craftsman, but they couldn’t make precision items like needles and pins. The same theme arose all the time, like discovering that the clay here was like nothing the potters had ever seen before, and there were actually a few moons where some folks were eating off turned wooden platters, or on washed leaves, and drinking out of horns and wooden cups because their crockery had succumbed to wear, and the potters hadn’t yet mastered how to reliably work and fire this new clay.

The question of currency arose after only a few months. The Council had agreed early to disdain Imperial coinage, so it was only worth its melt value regardless of denomination. Practicality ruled the day, and the value of currency was ultimately based upon what could be made with it. If a cup cost twenty copper, it was because making the cup required twenty copper pieces to be its raw materials. Craftsmanship fees came after. Paper notes wouldn’t make anything, but royal clerks could keep tallies of values for later days. Copper was the most versatile metal they had, followed by brass and tin, and it was in short supply compared to the demand. Claiming a copper deposit was proposed, but that would have meant an armed expedition going into land that was only just cleansed—an expedition of fighters, plus some miners and metalworkers who were needed doing things here, not wandering around fighting off who-knew-what sort of perils. “Cleansed” only meant the rapidly mutating, actively murderous conditions of an area were eliminated, not that lethal monsters were gone.

The dilemma had been solved not by the highborn and Guildmasters on the Council, but by the people themselves. They had come to the Council in the form of one of the master smiths and one of the master potters with their idea. A trade, in which Kordas would pay the smiths and potters with foodstuffs or beasts from his herds to make exclusive goods for that trade, and would in return get back all the copper that came in. “Copper for crocks,” they called it, although those who turned in copper cooking utensils got cast iron in return rather than more fragile pottery. With the copper under Baronial control, pricing standards were established, there was no waste, and there was no arguing. Kordas had been touched deeply when he realized how much they all trusted him to be absolutely fair.

Kordas realized his mind had been wandering when Restil flicked him with the end of a rein and said, “For the third time, Father, what route are we taking?”

“East to Inglenook Hall, then onward,” Kordas replied. “We haven’t seen the Young Squire in far too long.”

They rode along the windowless side of the wall until they came to the road going eastward. A proper road, this was, and all thanks to Pebble, the young Earth Elemental, who would somehow lay down a resilient yet impervious surface anywhere you put a line of the sorts of things he liked to eat. Fortunately, two of those things were manure and iron tailings from the nearby iron mine. Sometimes Kordas felt terrible about taking advantage of the Elemental, but Pebble seemed to enjoy it-her-himself, and certainly Pebble could leave at any time and absolutely no one would be able to stop them.

There was something like a city spreading all around them, but one in which every single part was still under construction. Roads were there. Wells everywhere, and aqueducts bringing water from the river. Houses—not so much. Quite a lot of people were still living in their barges on the plots they had staked out as their homes, if they weren’t living in the wall. Not the highborn—they were living in the manor. And when they complain about the lack of space, I point out that there is plenty of room in the tunnels and in the wall. But everyone from tradesmen on down to hired farm laborers was still making use of the barges. For the farm laborer, first came work for their master. Then shelter for their own chickens and other small personal stock and storage for their garden harvest, then a “proper cottage.” For the trades and craft folk, the priority was on the workshop, then the place to hold and sell what was being made. And with an entire population competing for labor with a limited labor pool and limited supplies, most people were forced to build their own homes in their spare time.

So spread out before them was a strange sight indeed: plots of land along the roads with barges lined up jammed together, next to (in this part of the city) workshops from which came the sound of hammers on anvils, large and small.

At least we planned this much properly by centering the escape around the barges, Kordas thought with a sigh. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the barges as dwellings—there had been cottages on his estate that were smaller, and people seemed happy enough in them. And there was the wall. But living in the wall might mean a long walk to the workshop, since the highborn had staked out their plots nearest the manor. And it would mean a very long walk to a farm, far too long to make it worth a farm laborer’s while.

Expansion could be aided by employing wagoneers to travel in a circuit, in light-duty, single-animal setups, giving rides to and from the hard-walk destinations. They could stop for anyone who would join them. It would also be a good source for monitoring rumors and domestic issues, since the passengers would talk. Also a good way to spread news, if the wagoneers carried briefings with them.

If only I’d thought of that years ago, I could have had passenger wagons made in the old country, and stacked on a barge.

“You have that look on your face again, Father,” Restil said, interrupting his thoughts.

“What look is that?” he asked, fairly certain that years of dicing with the Empire had given him a highly inscrutable face, and not one his son could easily read.

“The one that means you’re feeling guilty because you couldn’t somehow manage to transport an entire city here, ready-made, and pick the one spot that has metals and minerals all within easy reach,” his son replied, startling him so much that Aura felt it and kicked up her heels. “Instead, you should be congratulating yourself on getting as much here as you did.”

“How did you—” Kordas paused, and narrowed his eyes. “Has your mother—”

“Of course she has,” Restil replied with amusement. “And you aren’t as hard to read as you think.”

“Then I’m slipping,” he muttered, chagrined, as people paused in their work to bow to him. Gah. I hate that. I wish they’d stop doing it. There had been altogether too much bowing and scraping in his life in the Empire, and damned if he liked seeing other people doing it to him. They meant well . . . but it made him squirm inside.

“You don’t need to hide things anymore,” his son pointed out. “Not from your family, anyway.” He nudged Stanzia with his heels, and the stallion moved off. “Come on. It’s a bit of a ride to the Young Squire’s, and I know we both want to get there in time to have a good chat.”

Aura didn’t like that Stanzia was getting ahead of her, and picked up her feet to move before he could urge her. Restil was right, of course. He didn’t need to hide anything from his family.

And now it’s come to this, getting good advice from my child. He found himself smiling. Not a bad sign, actually.

Now that Restil and his father were into the “half-finished town” part of Haven, the sights, sounds, and smells were reflective of the trades and building going on. Lots of fresh-cut wood. The forge fires were much too hot to smoke, but they did give off their own distinct aroma. Hammering assaulted them on all sides. Adolescents from the farms drove pony carts laden with foodstuffs for sale up and down the streets, and building or work got interrupted when someone needed to buy from them. From everything Restil had heard, those carts seldom returned to the farms with anything but traded goods in them. Right now the big currency was nails and those oh-so-desirable pins and needles.

Restil was highly amused by his father’s discomfort with all the greetings as they trotted their horses down the beautifully finished streets between the decidedly unfinished house-shop-whatever plots. Instead of waving hands and calling something along the lines of “Mornin’, Baron,” which was mostly how people had greeted him on the barge convoy, it was a brief bow—sometimes abbreviated into a mere nod—and a “Well met, your Majesty.” And every time the word “Majesty” came out of a mouth, Kordas winced.

He’s going to have to get used to it. They want a King and they want the King to be him.

Oh, Restil knew very well why his father was not in the least interested in the title of “King,” but the reaction was, well, rather silly, considering that he wasn’t declaring himself a monarch, he was being elevated into the position by even the least of his people. In Restil’s opinion, his father should just relax and go along with it all. If anyone had any objection to him in the role, they hadn’t voiced it in Restil’s hearing, nor in the hearing of all the little birds he had out in the populace that reported back to him of problems, unease, or unrest.

Well . . . not entirely true, but the people who would have objected already packed up and left. About a thousand people, all told; unlike those who had stayed behind at Crescent Lake, who were entirely farmers, most of these folk were the families and retainers of a handful of nobles, who didn’t want a “new” life, they wanted the old life, but with them in charge. Kordas had let them go. In fact, he had allowed them to take almost everything they wanted to take with them. Which, in Restil’s estimation, was the smartest thing he could have done. Restil’s “little birds” had welcomed their departure. A few folks had even thrown an impromptu celebration.

Kordas had his own network of information, of course, but Restil and Beltran felt that a second, less formal network had a great many benefits and no real drawbacks, so Restil had made use of the highly varied friends he’d made to create what he called “gossip gatherers.” There were mostly servants in this network, people he’d worked with as a page and more or less an equal, not a highborn; people he first knew before anyone found out he was Kordas’s son. The ones he knew introduced him to others, and they, in turn, to more, so at this point, while he didn’t have an ear in every household, he at least had one in every nascent neighborhood.

That network was why he was less concerned about Hakkon’s misdeeds than the Baron was. Hakkon was basically a good egg that hadn’t yet learned the three most important things about “friends.” First, that not everyone who called themselves your friend actually was, second, that anyone could act nice but not all are sincere, so pleasantness was not enough basis for friendship, and thirdly, that until you sorted out who liked you for who you were, not for what you were or what you could do for them, it was a lot smarter to take your cues from the adults you respected than from any other source. Restil had learned those lessons because he’d spent a good part of his childhood with everyone assuming he was Uncle Hakkon’s bastard child. And while Hakkon had been living under the same presumption, he hadn’t been old enough for it to really affect him and how he viewed others.

Right now Restil was pretty satisfied with his circle of friends. The pages he used to serve alongside? Rock solid. Didn’t matter if now they were squires (otherwise known as knights-in-training), the falconer’s apprentice, or highborn heirs. A very few of the other highborn offspring his age, though? The ones who had never had to work at all, and even still had parents sheltering them from dirtying their hands? Wouldn’t trust their opinion on the color of the sky, much less anything important. Maybe when they matured a bit—if they ever did.

Stanzia gave him a quick backward look, prelude to shenanigans. Rather than wait for the stallion to act out, Restil gave him a stern glare and said aloud, “Don’t even think about it, Stanzia.” Correction before the behavior was always more effective than after, and Golds were smart enough to understand when he used certain phrases and intonations.

And as he expected, Stanzia snorted, as if in surprise that Restil had figured out what he was about to try, then went back to sulking.

Not unlike Hakkon, really. This morning his little brother had been just as sulky, playing with his porridge until their mother reminded him it was going to be unpleasant to eat cold, and slouching out to his lessons with Beltran like a condemned man on the way to the gallows.

Just wait until he starts work in the stables.

Restil himself had done his stints in the stables, and would again, but not as punishment. It was because there had been several times when they were short of hands, and while he admittedly wasn’t up to the kind of all-day manual labor that a seasoned stablehand was, at least he could muck out and groom his own little herd of horses—and, besides that, he could clean tack while sitting down to rest from the mucking-out. He rather liked working in the stable. Horses and horsemen were fine company. Horse shit wasn’t all that bad, not like pig. Or human, that was the worst. I think I like horses better than people, to be honest.

They left the spiderweb of streets, then passed through a passage in what was going to be an actual city wall when the Mother Below got done growing it—“Mother Below” was what the Hawkbrothers called the thing that grew walls and sewers. He’d taken to the name; Kordas had not. Right now the wall was just about chin high on him when he was standing, so the passage was just a gap where the road went through. This wall was growing a lot slower than the wall around the Palace had; there was a lot more of this wall, for one thing, and for another, the magic that had been so abundant when the Heartstone was active was slowly dropping back to the level they’d had back in the Duchy. Eventually, so the Hawkbrothers said, the magic would drop down to a point where the Mother would go dormant, and they’d be on their own so far as public works went, so it was best to ask the Mother to make things that benefited everyone, like walls and sewers. Not houses. Certainly not the highborn manors the nobles all wanted to get back into.

There had been some grumbling about that among the highborn, and some pointed remarks about the Palace, but Father had provided quite a number of salient points in a full Court Assembly speech. First, that the Palace (he called it the Baronial manor, of course), was the size it was in order to shelter the largest number of people, and that quite a few of the highborns complaining were, in fact, currently taking advantage of that. He also made the argument that the manors they wanted built weren’t going to do anyone a lot of good if the cellars filled with shit every time it rained because they’d wasted the Mother on building homes instead of a sewage removal system. Then he followed it up by reminding them all that having proper city walls meant that minor threats that a simple wall could deter would mean that the still-frequent alarms didn’t send half the population or more to be crammed inside the Palace—err, manor—walls until the threat had been dealt with. Logic and clear heads prevailed. Especially when people with rank and wealth figured out that getting common laborers—or mages, as there were a couple of manors being put up in the Imperial fashion—to work for them meant that those people had to actually like them. Because those with labor to sell were far fewer than those who were putting in labor on their own homes and farms, and they could pick and choose whom to work for.

This was a new experience for many of the highborn and wealthy. They were quite used to ordering what they wanted, and dealing with any complaints or problems with silver.

It wasn’t nearly the disaster some people made it out to be. It really wasn’t even an inconvenience. The highborn might be cramped in the Palace, but they had the best place to live in the entire Barony. And they weren’t starving either, anything but. The highborn had brought their personal flocks and herds and stores of seed and supplies, and they had their own personal farms out here past the city wall, staffed by the same servants who had tended their manor farms back home, so they weren’t without resources. In fact, they were in a better position to offer something valuable like food or materials in return for the labor on their new manors than, say, a candlemaker or shopkeeper, so their manors were going up in a conventional fashion . . . but of course it was never going to be fast enough to suit them.

Nothing was happening fast enough to suit people, truth to tell. He had the feeling that people had had this vague idea that “once we’re settled, we’ll get buildings and all up in no time, and everything will be back to the lives we knew in a year.”

No.

There was an astonishing number of things that the Valdemarans had been forced to do without once the initial supply ran out. Well, for one thing, they’d had to learn how to do joinery with pegs and dovetails and whatnot, not just on furniture, but on the houses