The Valdemar Companion Read online

  Contents

  Girl Meets Horse (Sort of)

  Mercedes Lackey

  A Herald’s Journey

  Mercedes Lackey

  i. A Journey Begins

  ii. On the Road

  iii. Directions

  iv. Trying the Paces

  v. Journey's End, and New Beginnings

  An Interview with Mercedes Lackey

  Denise Little

  A Travelers’ Guide to Valdemar and the Surrounding Kingdoms

  Kerrie Hughes

  The Music of Valdemar: Balladeers, Buskers, and Bards

  Michael Longcor

  Born in Song

  Teri Lee

  A Discography of the Songs of Valdemar

  John Helfers

  A Conversation with Betsy Wollheim

  Denise Little

  The Valdemar Novels

  Kristin Schwengel & Denise Little

  Virtual Valdemar

  Russell Davis

  Maps of Valdemar

  Larry Dixon with Daniel Green

  The Valdemar Concordance

  Teri Lee, Juanita Coulson, & Kerrie Hughes

  A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L

  M - N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - Y - Z

  Copyright © 2001 by Mercedes R. Lackey and Tekno Books,

  All rights reserved.

  Jacket art by Jody A. Lee

  Maps by Larry Dixon

  Time Line by Pat Tobin

  DAW Books Collectors No. 1205

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Book designed by Stanley S. Drate/Folio Graphics Co., Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  Girl Meets Horse (Sort of) © 2001 by Mercedes Lackey.

  A Herald’s Journey © 2001 by Mercedes Lackey.

  An Interview with Mercedes Lackey © 2001 by Mercedes Lackey and Denise Little.

  A Traveler’s Guide to Valdemar and the Surrounding Kingdoms © 2001 by Kerrie Hughes.

  Balladeers, Buskers, and Bards © 2001 by Michael Longcor.

  Born in Song © 2001 by Teri Lee.

  A Discography of the Songs of Valdemar © 2001 by John Helfers.

  Virtual Valdemar © 2001 by Russell Davis.

  A Conversation with Betsy Woliheim © 2001 by Betsy Wollheim and Denise Little.

  The Novels of Valdemar © 2001 by Kristin Schwengel and Denise Little.

  The Valdemar Concordance © 2001 by Firebird Arts and Music, Inc.

  Parts of this work have previously appeared in The Arrows of the Queen Concordance copyright © 1994 by Firebird Arts and Music, Inc., and The Last Herald-Mage Concordance copyright © 1998 by Firebird Arts and Music, Inc. and have been incorporated here by permission of the copyrightholder.

  Maps of Valdemar are copyright © 2001 by Larry Dixon.

  NOVELS BY MERCEDES LACKEY

  available from DAW Books:

  THE HERALDS OF VALDEMAR BRIGHTLY BURNING

  ARROWS OF THE QUEEN TAKE A THIEF

  ARROW’S FLIGHT EXILE’S HONOR

  ARROW’S FALL

  DARKOVER NOVEL

  THE LAST HERALD-MAGE (with Marion Zimmer Bradley)

  MAGIC’S PAWN REDISCOVERY

  MAGIC’S PROMISE

  MAGIC’S PRICE THE BLACK SWAN

  THE MAGE WINDS THE SERPENT’S SHADOW

  WINDS OF FATE THE GATES OF SLEEP*

  WINDS OF CHANGE PHOENIX AND ASHES*

  WINDS OF FURY

  Written with LARRY DIXON:

  THE MAGE WINDS THE SERPENT’S SHADOW

  STORM WARNING THE MAGE WARS

  STORM RISING THE BLACK GRYPHON

  STORM BREAKING THE WHITE GRYPHON

  THE SILVER GRYPHON

  KEROWYN’S TALE

  BY THE SWORD OWLFLIGHT

  OWLSIGHT

  VOWS AND HONOR OWLKNIGHT

  THE OATHBOUND

  OATHBREAKERS

  OATHBLOOD

  *Forthcoming in hardcover from DAW Books

  Dedicated to Mercedes Lackey, for creating such a

  wonderful world for people of all ages to wander

  through and lose themselves in.

  * * *

  And to the fans of Valdemar, for embracing this

  world and taking it with them on their own journeys.

  The Editors would like to thank the following people:

  Betsy Wollheim and Debra Euler for their inspired and invaluable editorial assistance, and to them, Sheila Gilbert, and Martin H. Greenberg, many thanks for believing in this book.

  Teri Lee at Firebird Arts & Music for her many contacts and her assistance.

  Larry Dixon and Daniel Greene, for their incredible artistic achievement.

  Kerrie Hughes, without whom this book could not have been completed.

  This is the worst cliché in the world: Valdemar started with a dream. Really.

  In the dream, I was Talia; it began at the point in Arrows of the Queen where Talia runs away from the prospect of marrying at the ripe age of thirteen, and continued to the point where Selenay explains what she is and what she will be, and in some osmotic way I picked up the arrow-code at the same time. Then I woke up.

  All things considered, that’s not a lot to base an entire series on—and if I had a nickel for everyone who has come up to me with a mystical expression on his/her face and began to tell me about this wonderful dream they had that they were (someday) going to write a book about, I would be able to buy Stephen King, John Grisham, and J.K. Rowling and still have change left over. But there was something about the atmosphere of that dream that felt very compelling and very inviting, and I had been writing short stories for some time, without ever having a solid base to use for a novel, The projects I had started were, frankly, way too ambitious for someone at my (then) current state of development as a writer; I just didn’t have the tools yet.

  This was a simpler story; no great world-shaking conflicts, no cast of thousands, just one girl with powers that one day would be extraordinary, with a helper who already was extraordinary, and a difficult, but not impossible, task ahead of her. This was something that I could handle.

  I had already begun the Tarma and Kethry short story series, and it seemed to me that on the whole they were more suited to that venue—like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, their adventures were by their nature episodic. Mind, there is nothing wrong with an episodic novel, but Tarma and Kethry were also mature women, and I was just starting to figure them out. You can handle characters like that easily enough in short stories, but not in a novel.

  So Talia was the perfect character to begin a book with; she wasn’t “finished” yet. And I could develop her character over the course of the book.

  However, there was one tiny little problem. I am the world’s worst typist.

  But I really wanted to start on a novel, and I didn’t want to try and write it longhand in a notebook like all my other previous novel attempts, because if anything, my handwriting is worse than my spelling. Although I had a job where I worked on a computer, I didn’t want to take a chance on getting in trouble by using “company resources” even after-hours. So I gritted my teeth, took out a loan and bought a PC. And this should prove that I’m older than dirt—it was one of the very first non-IBM PC5, it had a whopping 16K—that’s “K,” not “megs”—of memory, and it had two single sided single density 5¼ inch floppy drives. And let me tell you, it was state-of-the-art. Whatever program you were running went in one floppy drive, and the disk you were saving to went in the other. I didn’t even have a word-counter or a spell-checker; I had to do both by hand until a f
riend wrote me a program that counted the words for me. I still had to spell-check with a dictionary in one hand and the prose on the screen. But at least now I could work without interference from my lousy typing.

  And work I did. I ate, drank, and slept Valdemar; I was working things out in the back of my head all the time. I rewrote that first book—which covered the territory of what became all three books of the trilogy—at least three times by myself, all the while continuing to work on short stories.

  But I knew it needed more before it was ready to be seen by a book editor. And about this time, as luck would have it, I met C.J. Cherryh, who at that time lived in Oklahoma, at a convention. She admired my song lyrics, asked if I was working on a book, and offered to look at it. I thanked her, but said no— because I wanted to make sure she wasn’t just being polite.

  Well, she wasn’t; she meant it, and she helped me through seventeen rewrites of what became a trilogy. In fact, she was the one who said, “commit trilogy.” The number of times stuff went back and forth in the mail was phenomenal, and the number of times I spent the weekend at her house was equally so.

  During the course of all of this, I had to figure out exactly what was a Companion, why were they in Valdemar, what was Valdemar all about anyway, and why did it have Heralds? And what were the Heralds all about, anyway? The role of the Monarch’s Own seemed pretty obvious and necessary to me, quite frankly. Every leader should have someone around that he can trust, who will also keep him honest. But what was the job of a Herald going to be besides being the Monarch’s messenger and mouthpiece?

  Once that was figured out, I had to lay out Valdemar in my mind—and let me tell you, that was no great joy, because I hate, loathe, and despise maps. Rather than take a single semester of World Geography in high school, I took World History instead for two semesters. For no other reason than because it was nifty, I made Lake Evendim round—I decided I could figure out why it was round later. I also came up with the Pelagiris Forest full of weirdness, because every country needs some weirdness on its border. Every country needs an age-old enemy too, so I came up with Karse. And at that point I figured that I might as well shoehorn the Tarma and Kethry stories into the same world, so I brought up Rethwellan.

  Then there were the whys—I didn’t want Valdemar to have “real” magic, or at least not yet. I wanted to concentrate on psionics instead. However, after the book was sold, my editor, Elizabeth “Betsy” Woliheim insisted on having real magic, and a lot of it, right at the beginning of the book. So I put it in the story that Talia is reading and made it very clear that the soon-to-be-dead Herald Vanyel was the last Herald-Mage. That gave me the chance to put real magic in later, when I was ready to juggle a few more balls.

  I hope at this point you can see that I was deliberately creating a very “open” world, with lots of ways to move and lots of directions to go in. I was hoping that this would turn into a long, long running series—each piece of the series standing alone, of course—and I didn’t want to find myself boxed in by some limitation I’d set early on. That just made no sense to me. So I built in a great deal of vagueness, and to be honest, I still do. I know that some readers get frustrated that all of their questions aren’t answered in a given book, but more often than not it’s because I haven’t figured out the answers myself yet.

  Eventually the first book of the trilogy was ready to be seen and I sent it to C.J.’s publisher, DAW Books. Betsy Woliheim liked it, but pointed out that it still needed work, and that she wanted a series, not just one book. I was so happy about the second part of this that I put my nose back on the grindstone, and now there were manuscript copies and versions of the trilogy going back and forth between DAW and me. Betsy is a suberb editor, and I learned a lot from her. When that first book came out, with that wonderful cover by Jody Lee, I was just about ready to burst with excitement. Alas, it did not make any best-seller lists, but it got nice reviews and it did well enough to be encouraging and to prompt questions from DAW about what I was going to do for an encore. Well, what I was going to do—was the Tarma and Kethry stuff. By now, I knew them, and I had enough material from the short stories that I had sold to Fantasy Book Magazine that L had a good start on a novel. Best of all, I knew how I could work them into the same world as Valdemar, precisely because I had left myself so much maneuvering room.

  It’s a good thing to do that, if you’re going to have a long series. Unanswered questions create some wonderful plots. Sometimes I’ve let other people answer some of those questions, especially if they’re minor points. Ten Lee and Juanita Coulson would call me up and ask about things like food or what fabrics there are during the course of creating this volume, and I’d tell them, “Make it up and I’ll retrofit it.” In the volumes of short stories, I’ve let people come up with entirely new sets of characters and situations that sometimes added to the “canon.” But a couple of times some of the other contributors have wanted to do this or that, and I’ve had to say, “No, please don’t do that, I haven’t decided myself what I want to do there and I don’t want to get boxed into an awkward position later down the road.”

  I tend to think of Valdemar/Velgarth as an actual world somewhere, a world that I’m only writing the history of. It had a long and detailed history “before” Talia, and hopefully will continue to have a long and detailed history. Although I am not sure yet what I’ll do after the next two books—Take A Thief the book about Skif before he met Talia, is just out, and Exile’s Honor, the book about Alberich, Selenay, and the Tedrel Wars, will be out in Fall of 2002—it will probably have something to do with Valdemar’s “past.” Larry and I would like to do more Owl books as well. But there are also all the intriguing possibilik’s of Valdemar’s present—what’s going on with Hardorn, for instance, and just what is it about Iftel? All of those Change Circles and other uncontrolled magics have mucked things up all over the place, including within Valdemar itself, so it isn’t the safe and cozy kingdom it once was; there are perils in the heartland now, and people (and Heralds) are going to have to deal with them. The Artificers will be plunging Valdemar straight along into a Steam Age if they have anything to say about it, but Is that altogether a good thing? And there is still an Eastern Empire out there, with a very ruthless man on its throne…

  I haven’t figured any of this out yet. It’s all sitting in the back of my mind, simmering. At some point, something will emerge; I’m just not sure what it will be.

  It might not be earthshaking. It might just be a simple story about one person who has a lot of problems to take care of—but a lot of friends to help. It will probably be about a Herald, but it just might be about a Healer, or a Bard. At one point I was going to alternate stories, doing an equal number of books about members of all three Circles, but the Heralds seemed to be more versatile as characters.

  In the meantime, while I’m pondering the next installments in the Valdemar series, I hope you will enjoy this book, which probably won‘t answer all your questions and probably will just raise more in your minds. And I hope you enjoy the story of Tafri, who is, unlike Talia or Vanyel, Elspeth or Lavan, Skif or Alberich, a perfectly ordinary Herald (if there can be such a thing). Perhaps I should say, a typical Herald. He doesn’t have any great MindMagic, he doesn’t have any real magic at all, but he has that special something that makes a Companion Choose someone, and he manages to solve problems which, if they aren’t exactly earthshaking, are important to the people he serves, He and his kind are the glue that holds the Kingdom of Valdemar together, and I, for one, am deeply appreciative of them.

  One

  A Journey Begins

  Twelve-year-old Tafri Tallyman tightened his knitted muffler around his neck and carefully tucked his brown woolen breeches into his worn boot-tops. Snow had been falling on the village of Delcare since last night, and by now it was deep enough to be a considerable nuisance.

  Tafri had already been out once this morning, in a pair of old, threadbare, colorless breeches of his father’s
, discarded as too worn for patching. It had been his task to shovel the path that led from the door of his cottage to the village street, getting soaked to the skin in the process, for his father had to leave at dawn for his job. No fool Tafri, with only two pairs of winter breeches of his own, he didn’t want to have to spend the rest of the morning shivering in wet clothing when there was a pair of discards in the ragbag that would do as work clothing. Nobody was going to be looking at his breeches while he shoveled, after all! And if they were far too big for him, well, that was all right; it meant that the worn places were not anywhere that it would count!

  Now changed and dry again, with a bowl of hot bread-and milk inside him, he was ready for his day to begin—lessons at the village temple of Kernos. He dressed for the weather. A heavy knitted sweater over his tunic, his muffler, a pair of mittens and a knitted hat pulled down over his ears would get him from the cottage to the temple without freezing to death. These articles were so multicolored that he could have been a jester, although his mother had done her best to try and make sonic semblance of patterning in them; she knitted them out of the odds and ends she bought from other women who had already finished more uniform projects.

  He had no coat this year. The only coat the family could afford was reserved for his father, who worked out-of-doors as a carter all day—Tafri had completely outgrown his coat last year, and there was no money to spare for the woolen fabric for a new one this year. Perhaps next year—or perhaps someone at the inn would spoil a blanket that his mother could bring home and piece into a new coat or cloak for him.

  His mother had a cloak cleverly made of tiny pieces of whatever woolen fabric came into her hands pieced together with embroidery stitches. She was so clever in her handiwork that it was, in Tafri’s opinion and that of his father, a veritable work of art. She had just finished it, fortunately, before this latest snowstorm. She had offered to make another for Tafri, but—he wasn’t interested. That cloak was too feminine a garment for a boy; he would rather shiver than wear something that fussy and girlish.