Chapter Text
Mera swam her way back towards consciousness. It was getting easier to navigate this particular sea, she noticed. Or was it a lake? She was familiar with the shoreline, which was also, more or less, the feeling of the ground against her back. In all, she thought, she preferred the feeling of the ground against her back to the feeling of the ground against her face. Her Companion was getting better at helping her fall. Or at rolling her over. Or at making Jav do it. This was not the important thing about having passed out, but it might be worth mentioning, a gracious sort of princess thing to bring up, to give a quiet air of regal dignity to a situation that involved lying in . . . A field, probably. It was only mildly damp, that was something.
Only mildly damp, and in possession of a creditable approach to dignity were two things. Two things was probably as good as it was going to get. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and . . . Her planned dignified remarks fled in the face of the four sets of stark blue eyes staring down at her. The traitorous deserting words were replaced by unskilled reserves. "Jav, your pet vrondi is really creepy."
"I see you've fallen off the wrong side of your Companion this afternoon. At least you landed on your back this time. Mort kept an eye on you while you were out. He was very helpful."
"I can see that Mort is very good at staring. How, exactly, did this help?"
Kira nuzzled her shoulder, :Mort kept a lookout, while I tried to keep you in the shade. I didn't want you getting a sunburn again. Jav had to deal with a cattle dispute.:
"You left me alone in a field to deal with a cattle dispute?"
"Hard as it is to believe, the war your father's Mages are waging in the east has not put an end to arguments about cows in Gyrefalcon's Marches. Plus, not alone, you had Kira and a highly trained guard-vrondi."
"While I dispute the notion that Mort is highly trained, I do not seem to have been kidnapped by bandits. Thank you, Mort." The vrondi kept staring.
Kira murmured in her ear, :All the bandits were with the cows:
Mera sat up and took a longer look at Jav. His hand was bandaged and his uniform was torn. "Even if I were to disregard your father's orders, and the obvious importance of safeguarding all of Valdemar's heirs in a time of war, you were too busy being unconscious in a field to attempt negotiations with the bandits. And it was a boring battle anyway. Rand and I skulked through the forest, which is remarkably brambly." He waggled his bandaged hand by way of demonstration, "if Valdemar's Mage army falls in battle, our bushes will inflict an admirably indiscriminate revenge. I cast a glamour. The bandits decamped for their northern homeland, and Rand and I drove the cows back home. Do you want to tell me about your vision now, or should we find a place to spend the night first?"
She probably wouldn't have passed out in this field if it wasn't important, but it was definitely one of the least defensible places Mera had ever passed out. It was almost completely lacking in cover. She hauled herself from the ground and on to Kira's back. "We should find a place to spend the night. But not too far away. We need the field."
Mera's FarSight found a cave, and Jav sent Mort to stare at it to make sure it was relatively free of wildlife. Mera could have done that, too, but Mort was going to stare at something and she was pleased for it to not be her.
***
The cave was shockingly clean, and had two chambers. Mera suspected it of being a Tayledras relic. They used the chamber nearest the entrance for a cooking fire and shelter for the Companions, and laid out bedrolls in the second. Mera and Jav fetched water, groomed their Companions, and ate in companionable mostly-silence. Jav played a game of fetch with Mort, throwing tiny sparks for the vrondi to chase and catch, before setting him to guard the cave entrance. Mort seemed equally committed to watching through the cave entrance and to making sure the rock itself didn't move. Mera trusted that Kira and Rand would be supplementing his efforts at guarding their sleep. Jav rummaged through his pack for a needle and thread to mend his shirt. "So," he began tentatively, "how was the field?"
Mera settled herself against a pile of saddlebags. Despite her father's reassurances, Mera saw her ForeSight as an inconvenience. Other ForeSeers saw events that were on the brink of happening, at most only months away. Better yet, most of them had Mage Gifts that allowed them to respond to what they saw with immediate action, sometimes even from a great distance. Unlike her father and her older brothers, Mera had only the little MindGifts. Her father used to scold her for calling them that, in his kind and gentle way, but when he turned to his own Gifts, he used his Mage powers more than all the others put together. In fairness to her father, Mera's ForeSight was more than any Mage could boast.
"The field feels it has a destiny to fulfill," Mera began.
"Is it yearning to be a mine?"
"Not this time." There were some quite nice gem mines in the south that were looking forward to making contributions to Valdemar's tax base. Mera was pleased to have found them some miners. This one might be trickier.
"There's a girl," she explained, running through the vision in her head "and then there's a boy. She's a Mage, but he is not. Someone is trying to kill them."
"How far off?" Jav asked.
"About seven hundred years. Maybe eight?"
Jav nodded, and stabbed another stitch into his shirt. "I'll pack the bags, you saddle up, and we might just get there in time," he joked. "What else?"
Mera frowned, trying to understand everything she had seen. "Someone is trying to kill them young. The girl, because she's a Mage. The boy isn't a Mage." She hesitated, trying to understand the situation and explain it. "He's not a Mage while he's a boy. He's not supposed to be. But he gets hurt; Another Mage hurts him, and then he becomes a Mage."
"Someone finds a way to torture children into Mages?" Jav interjected.
Mera looked at the vision again, "That part bothered me too. But it seems like it's only going to happen once. The boy is the last one."
"The last what?"
"The last Mage."
"For true? The last Mage? Or just no one to spot them and teach them, like Rand and your father did for me?"
Her father had been so pleased when Rand chose Jav. Mera had been a little girl. Rand had carried Jav into the Palace, right into the Audience Chamber, leaving hoof prints on the floors. He was the first Chosen to be born in Valdemar, a sign that her father's plan for the kingdom was working. Her father had clapped him on the shoulder, and called him "Valdemar's Man."
"No one to spot them, I think. I can't see energy fields, even in a vision, but I think there would be signs if all the magic were gone. It's not the end of all the things that magic does. Just no Mages, for a long while. Whatever-it-is is horrible. It kills Mages while they're children. It doesn't see the boy when it goes looking. It sees the girl, but it can't get her, not until she's old. Because of the boy, and her Companion, and the Keep." She paused
She would be dead and dust before she could rush to the rescue of any of the Heralds in her visions. The challenge - the mission her father had set her while he and her brothers rode away to fight Valdemar's battles in the east - was to do what she could to rescue them now. And then to hope that whatever she did would work. Privately, Mera thought Jav was very patient with the mission her father had dreamed up to keep her out of harm's way.
"Jav, the field says it needs a Keep. To guard the girl."
Jav was silent. After a long, and, Mera felt, increasingly awkward, moment, he put down his needle. "I can see a few problems here."
"I know," Mera babbled, "anything we build would be fallen over and gone by seven hundred years from now, and we're not builders anyway." She stopped abruptly, staring down at her hands.
"We can't give the field a Keep, but we need to give it someone who will. Someone whose children and children's children will keep it up and rebuild it if it falls down. Someone who feels responsible for the Keep and the land."
"Someone like the villagers. They would live in the Keep together like they live in their cottages now and hold it and farm the land around."
Mera almost whispered - it was hard to say, "That's not what it looked like in the vision."
"What did it look like?"
"It looked like the Keep had a Lord."
"Valdemar doesn't have Lords."
They didn't. Valdemar had Heralds. There was no need for Lords, nothing for them to do. Why have hereditary nobility when you had Companions sent by all the gods The-King-her-Father had ever heard of to Choose Heralds to keep the peace and hold the borders? Mera herself was only a princess when her father was talking about succession. The rest of the time she was just Mera, which was why she got to spend the war lying in fields in Gyrefalcon's Marches instead of cooped up in the Palace in Haven with her eldest brother and her nieces and nephews. Restil had to rule in her father's place while he led Valdemar's fledgling army. They didn't need Mera in Haven. She'd had all the visions the fields and the walls there wanted her to have. The only place she hadn't fallen down was the middle of the river.
Why couldn't her vision fit her father's plans? Heralds were a good plan. Mera had heard her father's stories about the cruel and corrupt nobility of the Eastern Empire. Why couldn't the villagers hold a Keep?
This was going to take some explaining.
"The Keep is a bribe."
Jav put down his shirt. "I can see how someone would want to be Lord of a Keep. The hard part is going to be telling your father."
Mera felt defensive. "The boy is VERY important, Jav. I can't see how, yet, but somehow he defends the kingdom for centuries. And he needs the girl to teach him" her mind swam a little - her memory of the vision didn't like that explanation. "I mean, to take him to the Tayledras for teaching." The cave seemed to brighten - almost definitely a Tayledras relic, then. Caves could be shockingly sentimental.
"Alright then, what do Valdemar's nobility do? Obviously, they're going to live in Keeps. And protect children."
"And stop cattle raids," Mera added, "it's lucky you were here for that."
"These villagers have their own headman, though. I don't think they want to be the first village in Valdemar to stop having elections."
Mera chewed her lip. "The girl needs walls to keep her safe. She needs a Lord to build the walls. She doesn't need the Lord to rule a village."
"That's what's good for the girl," Jav pointed out, "but what does the Lord need?"
Mera took the question with her to bed. The vision had made lords seem simple. Visions didn't need to explain themselves to their fathers. This was unfair, she thought. She curled deep into her bedroll and let Mort's flickering blue light lull her sleep. Tomorrow would be a long day in the field.