Valdemar Anthology - [Tales of Valdemar 02] - Sun in Glory and Other Tales of Valdemar by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page A

purr. The crown on his head should have weighed enough to bend his neck, but he felt nothing heavier than the touch of a gentle hand.
    He stared at the crowd that stood in a circle around him. No one moved or spoke. He turned slowly, looking from person to person. And his heart quivered in his chest at what he saw.
    Behind those who faced him stretched their shadows, as if he were a lamp lit in the darkness and they had turned toward his light.
    Khar butted his head against Reulan’s leg again. He glanced down at the Firecat, seeing true affection dancing in those very blue eyes.
    :Well, Reulan. We’re here at last. Now can I have my fish?:

Winter Death
    by Michelle West
    Michelle West is the author of numerous novels, including the Sacred Hunter duology and the Sun Sword series, which will be concluded with the publication of The Sun Sword in January 2004. She reviews books for the online column First Contacts, and less frequently for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Other short fiction by her has appeared in dozens of anthologies, most recently in The Sorcerer’s Academy, Apprentice Fantastic, Once Upon A Galaxy, Familiars and Vengeance Fantastic.
    Kayla was born in the harsh winter of life in the mining town of Riverend. Her father had been born there, and her mother had come from the flats of Valdemar’s most fertile lands. An outsider, she had learned to face the winter with the same respect, and the same dread, that the rest of the villagers showed. She had come to be accepted by the villagers in the same way, slowly and grudgingly at first, but with a healthy respect that in the end outlasted all of their earlier superstitious fear of the different.
    Margaret Merton, called Magda for reasons that Kayla never quite understood, was different. She could walk into a room and it would grow warmer; she could smile and her smile would spread like fire; her joy could dim the sharpest and bitterest of winter tempers, when cabin fever ran high. How could they not learn to love her?
    Even in her absence, that memory remained, and when her daughter showed some of the same strange life, she was loved for it. More, for the fact that she was born to the village.
    Â 
    The Heralds came through the village of Riverend in the spring, when the snows had receded and the passes, in the steep roads and treacherous flats of the mountains, were opened. Heralds seldom stopped in the village, although they rode through it from time to time.
    When they did, Kayla took the little ones from the hold and made her way down to the village center to watch them ride through. She would bundle them one at a time in the sweaters and shawls that kept the bite of spring air at bay, and gently remind them of foreign things—manners, behavior, the language children should use in the presence of their elders.
    She would remind them of the purpose of Heralds, and promise them a story or two if they behaved themselves, and then she would pick up the children whose toddling led them to cracks in the dirt, sprigs of new green, sodden puddles—in fact, anything that caught their eye from the moment the hold’s great doors were opened—and hurry them along; in that way, she managed to keep them from missing the Heralds altogether.
    This spring was the same, but it was also different; every gesture was muted, and if she smiled at all, it was so slight an expression that the children could be forgiven for missing it. It had been a harsh winter.
    A terrible winter.
    And the winter had taken the joy out of Kayla so completely the villagers mourned its passing and wondered if it was buried with those who had passed away in the cold.
    On this spring day, the Heralds stopped as the children gathered in as orderly a group as children could who had been cooped up all winter.
    There were two, a man and the woman who rode astride the Companions that set them apart from any other riders in the kingdom of Valdemar.
    â€œWell