Page 1 of Valdemar

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!