Originally Posted: Aug. 7th, 2006
Length/Rating: 234 words, PG, Gen
Pairing/Warnings: none
Summary: Why ‘normal people’ are important too. (set in the Ancor/Hardon war)

“Valdemar” and other related entities are owned, (TM) and © by Mercedes Lackey. All rights reserved. No copyright infringement is intended nor implied.

From the stories you’d think Heralds solved everything.

Keera chewed thoughtfully on a piece of dried meat and eyed the column of Hardon refugees. Fine lot of help they are now.

She finished her snack and nudged her horse back into position with a tired sigh. Heralds swooped in, did the impossible and swooped out again to the next catastrophe-in-progress. Leaving the Guard to play herder and helpmate to the headaches of afterwards. How to feed the wounded; how to guide the newly arrived that spoke no common language; how to solve the everyday problems of the world that were never quite important enough to warrant shiny white horses and shiny white heralds.

But she’d seen the way the refugees had looked at the pairs, and she knew why this was her job and not theirs. She could cradle a tired child in the saddle in front of her, or lend a hand with evening meals, or communicate in mangled foreign phrases to the amusement of the refugees who so dearly needed a friendly face to offset remembered horrors.

Heralds would have terrified them.

So she didn’t mind, as much, when they swooped in and out and spent the war running from one conflict to the next. She might not have a shiny white horse, but at least she could see the difference she was making, one tired person at a time.