Bastion

to hear the Herald read the law. And when the child got home, he was quizzed on what he’d heard to be sure he understood it.
    Finally Mags understood why most Heralds enjoyed being on Circuit, if most towns were like this. All the danger, all the discomfort of living in Waystations, all the difficulties were more than made up for when you were treated like this and appreciated for what you did.
    Lita and Lena were spoiled as well; there were three inns in this town, and all three vied to have them. Lita finally decided that Lena and Bear should stay at the smallest of the three, and Lena would entertain on her own there, while the Master Bard would divide her time between the other two. That seemed fair to Mags, and evidently it satisfied all three innkeepers.
    Bear actually found a small House of Healing here and was overjoyed to discover that the Head Healer was one of the people he’d taught the use of his kit to back in Haven. For his part, the Head Healer was just as pleased to have Bear there to give a more intensive set of lessons to everyone in the House—and on the third day, to the apothecary, the farriers, the barber, and every midwife that could be got to the town before they all left.
    For their part, Mags and Jakyr’s duties were lengthy, if not exciting. There were quite a number of discontented people who wanted to appeal law-court judgments. There were a couple of quarrels about land and inherited property that the court had not been able to settle. Amusing, though to Mags’ mind, absurdly trivial, were the number of parents who hauled disobedient children in their teens in to have the Heralds “talk some sense into them”—though the sense that Jakyr talked was not to the parents’ liking, more than once. “No, preferring your own sex to the opposite is not something you can ‘grow out of.’ Be happy you have a healthy child who loves you.” Or, “No matter how hard you try, you’ll never get a pig to sing, and you’ll never get your child to be a blacksmith. He’ll make a very fine clerk and support you handsomely in your old age. Let him and get used to it—and find an apprentice who likes hammering.”
    Most often, though, what he said was a variation on a theme. “You want to get out on your own and have your own life,” he told more than one sullen youngster. “That’s right and proper, how it should be. But you’re not going to be allowed to get out on your own if you don’t stop playing the fool and doing your best to make your parents miserable so that they’ll throw you out. And you,” he would say, turning to the parents. “I understand that you think your child isn’t old enough to know his own mind, but I promise you, he is. He may well be wrong, but he does know his own mind, and he’s got a perfect right to think that way. And you need to stop letting him prove he’s smarter than you are by rising to the bait he throws out to make you angry!”
    No one on either side of those disagreements was entirely happy with the answer, which Mags supposed meant it was probably the right one. But Jakyr was the Herald, and that made the answer stick.
    It kind of surprised him. He hadn’t thought that Jakyr was that . . . clever . . . when it came to quarrels within a family. Especially not when you looked at the way he and Lita sniped and battled with each other.
    But then again, maybe when it was happening to someone else, it was a lot easier to see what needed to be done. When it was happening to you, things got blurrier, the way a picture did when you brought it too close to your eyes.
    What with all the work, they stayed a full seven days. Jakyr seemed to be getting impatient after a while, but Mags thought that he had never learned quite so much about ordinary folk. He knew all about the very poor and the very rich, but about the sorts of people in the middle, not so much. He picked up a lot of useful trivia about various trades, about how a village was run, and about good ways to handle all sorts of problems.
    On the whole, it was a very instructive stop. With Lita off in her own inns, and he and Jakyr able to go and relax in the smaller inn that Lena was playing in before they left for the Waystation, things were quite pleasant in the evenings. Lena seemed to appreciate having them in her audience as well—though, really, with Bear there, giving her adoring and encouraging looks after every song, she didn’t needthem to bolster her spirits.
    But their