Free Storm Rising by Mercedes Lackey

Karal was as comfortable as he would have been in his own room.
    “All right,” Karal said, rubbing his tired eyes. “Explain to me how the followers of all these religions manage not to slaughter each other over their differences one more time.”
    That warm fire behind the iron door of the stove at his back crackled cheerfully, and the relative gloom of the stable was actually rather restful to his aching eyes.It was too bad Florian wouldn’t fit into his suite at the Palace, though. A hot cup of tea would have been very nice right now.
    Of course, a hot cup of tea might have put him to sleep, which was not a good idea at the moment.
    His adviser shook his white head until his mane danced.
:It’s really very simple, Karal. The single rule that each of them must obey if they wish to continue practicing in Valdemar is “live and let live.” You can proselytize as much as you wish, but you may not persecute, harass, intimidate, or otherwise make a nuisance of yourself. The secular laws of Valdemar take precedence over the dictates of every religion. No matter how deeply your religious feeling is offended by something allowed according to the religious practices of your neighbor, you have no right to force him to live by your rules, and no right to try to. If you can’t live by that, then you are escorted to the border and left there.:
    Karal tried to imagine something like that being effective in Karse and failed utterly.
His
people would simply ignore the law and revel in their holy and God-given right to persecute, harass, intimidate, or even murder those who did not agree with them. If
their
God, in their own narrow interpretation of His Writ and Rules, said that something was wrong, then it was wrong for
everyone
, whether or not anyone else agreed even with that particular interpretation. Karsites had been cheerfully slaughtering each other over interpretations of the Writ and Rules almost as long as they had been killing those outside their borders and religion. Things had been different once, as he had found from his reading, but the current state had been holding for generations. Since Vanyel’s time, in fact. Or, as Ulrich would have pointed out—since the time that the Son of the Sun had been elected by the Sun-priests and not by Vkandis Himself. “It seems too simple to work,” he replied wearily.
    Florian scraped a hoof on the floor, which Karal had learned was the equivalent of a shrug.
:I suppose it works largely because it was established as a law backwhen there were fewer people in Valdemar and all of them were of the same religion. At that point, of course, no one saw any reason why such a law shouldn’t be in effect. If you plant a tree early so that it has time to grow, the roots are too deep for a later storm to tear it up.:
    A cat from the stables strolled by—a perfectly ordinary black-and-white, and not one that bore the vivid markings of a Firecat. Karal held out his fingers to the mouser, but his majesty had other things on his mind.
    “That sounds like another Shin’a’ in proverb,” Karal observed, turning a little so that his right side could benefit from the warmth of the stove. Was it his imagination, or was it too early in the autumn for it to be so cold? “You’ve been tromping around An’desha too long.”
    Florian “chuckled”—more of a whicker. The fact that Karal was talking to a blue-eyed white horse might seem very odd to anyone from beyond the borders of Valdemar. The fact that he was talking to a Companion—or, as he would have said a year ago, a “cursed Valdemar Hellhorse”—would have been sheer blasphemy to many still in his own land of Karse. But Karal had learned more about Heralds and their Companions in that last year than he had ever dreamed possible, and now he relied on Florian’s advice in the ways of Valdemar as surely as he relied on his friend An’desha’s advice in the ways of magic. Both were equally opaque to him although he was familiar