Closer to Home: Book One of Herald Spy

by Mercedes Lackey

  “So you could keep Lelage.” Mags smiled and nodded. “Now if I were in your place, I know the kind of girl I would look for. Someone with no brothers, maybe no sisters either, for that matter, someone who no one thinks will ever get married.” He pressed his point as Brand stared at him in surprise. “Think about it. As long as she has money and will let you do what you want, what do you care?”

  “You have a point,” Brand said, slowly. “I could live here . . . Father would have the estate all to himself, which honestly, is the way he likes it. You know, I might even be able to make some poor old maid very happy as long as she understood that I wasn’t in love with her . . .”

  On the one hand . . . it was a terrible thing, talking about these poor women as if they were nothing but pieces of fruit in a market, some past their prime, some underripe, but all for sale. On the other hand . . . that was how it was. It took a girl with spirit to escape from such a system, and it could be done, but she had to make the decision to do so. No one could do that for her. In the meantime . . . Brand had just said at least one thing that was kind, if not admirable. “I might be able to make some poor old maid very happy as long as she understood I wasn’t in love with her.” Mags decided to encourage him in that. He knew of plenty of old maids who would be thrilled to get out from under a familial thumb to do what they liked, and would consider giving Brand freedom to do as he wished a very small price to pay indeed.

  “You’ll find a lot of those old maids acting as chaperones to younger cousins or siblings,” Mags pointed out. “They’ll be at the parties. All you have to do is start making quiet enquiries.” He shrugged. “Mind you, it doesn’t have to be an old maid. You might find a complacent young thing too, someone bookish, for instance, who would just like to be a scholar and be left alone. Or a girl with ambitions her family doesn’t think suitable. Or even a rich widow—although that’s chancy. A rich widow can do what she wants, and a rich widow might be very demanding.”

  Brand shook his head. “No, I’ll leave the rich widows to my cousins. They wouldn’t at all mind being a rich woman’s lapdog, so long as they were in the lap of luxury.”

  Heh. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. “There’s something to be said for that life,” he pointed out. “As long as both parties know what they’re in for.”

  Brand made a wry face. “Anyway . . . we’ve all been ordered to stay away from Flora’s. . . .” His face acquired an expression of gloom. “. . . I don’t know for how long.”

  Ah, now there was the real explanation for Brand’s sulks. “Pish. It won’t be long. Two or three days at most, until something else gets his attention—and if you manage to find some prospective women, it might be sooner than that. Meanwhile, the old man didn’t forbid you to take in the Midwinter Fair now, did he?” Mags retorted.

  “Well . . . no, actually . . .” Brand looked as if it hadn’t occurred to him that there was a Midwinter Fair.

  “Good. We’ll get horses and ride down. The ride will do you good, and there’s plenty to see and do down there.” Mags had a good idea of where to take Brand. There was not quite the variety of entertainment that there was at the Midsummer Fair, but there was a particular group of traveling players that was performing a bawdy comedy he thought would suit Brand down to the bone.

  :You’d better bring me back pocket pies,: warned Dallen.

  “All right, as long as we’re back in time for me to change for whatever wretched fete the old man has us invited to.” Brand made a face. “Dear gods, these things are boring. Dance and drink weak wine. Dance and nibble bland food. Dance and flirt, but only very politely. Pretend you like the mediocre music. I’ve been to village weddings that were more entertaining.”

  “Get your cloak.” Mags gestured to Brand to precede him. “You forget. These so-called parties aren’t supposed to be entertainment for you. They’re business. They’re horse markets, and you are the young stallion being trotted out for examination. It’s not as if you need to stay there long, just long enough.”

  Since Brand’s cousins had also been ordered to stay away from their usual haunts and apply themselves to the serious business of finding wives, presumably with money, there were plenty of horses in the stables. Mags reckoned most of them were at the afternoon parties today, which all could be walked to. The stablemaster presented him with a horse all tacked up, a cobby little bay who seemed resigned to being taken out of the warm stable and into the cold. It felt odd to be riding a horse instead of Dallen.

  Mags knew all the short cuts through the city by now, and before long he had them both down on the commons, where a second city of tents and other temporary shelters had sprung up to support the Fair. He went right past the section of vendors; Brand was not in the least interested in shopping, for now, anyway. Instead, he brought his charge to the tent of a wine merchant he knew very well, and with a couple of drinks of rich, hot, spiced wine inside him, Brand was looking at life with a little bit more cheer.

  From there, Mags took him straight to the “theater,” a rather cunning construction of wood and canvas that allowed a certain amount of heat to accumulate inside so that the patrons could sit on their wooden benches without feeling any discomfort through the play. They were in luck; it was just about to start.

  “My treat,” said Mags. He paid the entrance fee, and they made their way inside, by luck getting a couple of seats on the end of a bench near the front.

  The play was a farce and a highly bawdy one, with people climbing in and out of beds they didn’t belong in, getting caught, nearly getting caught, betraying their spouses and being betrayed by them. The audience was mostly young men, which was not surprising, since unlike many acting companies, the ladies were actually played by women and not boys—and although they were never naked on stage (they’d have frozen to death, or certainly caught a fever) they were generally in more of a state of undress than you usually saw outside of an establishment like Flora’s. As Mags had thought, Brand was completely thrown out of his gloom, and laughed uproariously at all the antics.

  The play itself was witty and cleverly written, with a lot of very good jokes. Even if most of it was not the sort of thing you wanted to quote in polite company.

  But the important thing was that it cheered Brand up. Mags knew enough about Brand by now to know this meant he would not go looking for trouble just for the sake of having someone to take his ill-temper out on. And it meant he’d go to this evening’s fete in a much better frame of mind, prepared to do what his father wanted.

  Really, Mags considered that the best thing he could possibly do for the situation he was tasked with handling was to get Brand betrothed and his father (if not him) out of the city as quickly as possible. With half the tinder gone, the Chendlar/Raeylen feud could not erupt into a conflagration that might engulf the rest of the Court.

  13

  Amily had to admit that the Chendlar manor looked astonishing, and thanks to the fragrant evergreens everywhere, smelled even better. The girls had done a wonderful job of decorating it, and (as their father said with pride) it had all been done with very little expense. They’d been resourceful and clever, and had found ways to make use of quite a variety of unlikely materials to excellent effect.

  A search for old suits of armor had led to the Guard armory; the Armorer was not at all averse to loaning out as many as the girls wanted—such things were next to useless in his opinion, and only taking up space. According to Aleniel, since Lord Leverance had ordered that the girls could tell their cousins to do whatever they wanted, the first thing they’d ordered was for the young men to polish that armor until it gleamed. The girls had freshened up the look of the suits with surcoats and decorations cut from old curtains and other material found in the attic. There had been plenty of those old tournament banners too, the painted colors faded just enough to make them seem quaint—and disguise how clumsily they had been painted in the first place. />
  So now, there was a pair of armored figures with tournament lances gracing the front entrance, and more pairs wherever they could be showed to advantage. Huge swags of evergreen framed the front door, with tourney-banners hanging on the walls behind the armor.

  Inside, more tourney-banners, now framed in evergreen swags, hung on all the walls of the Great Hall. Every door had a swag of evergreen or of aesthetically faded fabric from the attic above it. The girls had added torches in sconces made from the hands and arms of sets of armor too battered to be salvaged. Ancient braziers, made to warm cold hands outdoors when tourneys had taken place in all weathers, had been repurposed as bowls holding apples. Old helmets graced the center of every refreshment table.

  All of the refreshments had been made in decorative motifs that fit the theme. Small cakes had been cut into the shape of shields, little egg-pies had been made to look like round shields with a boss made of crust in the center. There were even fanciful “boar’s heads,” made of baked bread dough, with currents for eyes, and a baked apple in their mouths. These were laid out on tables placed around the room.

  As the guests entered through the decorated front entrance and then proceeded into the Great Hall, their murmurs of appreciation were putting broad smiles even on Lady Leverance’s face. She and His Lordship stood just inside the entrance to the Great Hall to receive their guests, and if the relaxation of her rigid spine and a smile that was more gracious and less strained were any indication, she was already completely satisfied with this night’s work.

  Amily was pleased that Violetta had been so engrossed in helping her older sisters with all of this—her job had been to decorate those old suits of armor after the cousins got done polishing them and setting them up on stands—that she seemed to have utterly forgotten that her heart was supposed to be broken. Whether or not she was taking Amily’s words to heart, she had certainly taken Lady Dia’s. She hadn’t sat in corners and sighed over her sewing. She hadn’t spent as much time weeping as she did working. She had worked hard and willingly, too; she had sewed her little fingers red, pulling a stubborn needle through heavy canvas not well suited to being made into tabards, then made them look like something planned and not an afterthought by painting fanciful figures on them in the style of old devices. Amily was very proud of her, even though she had yet to show that she had taken any thought about the examples in those books.

  Early days yet. No point in trying to force something like this. The girl was young enough—and, Amily thought, smart enough—to grow beyond what her parents had tried to drum into her. There was time enough for those changes, particularly if she could conspire to keep the girl unbetrothed this year. Perhaps if I suggest that her parents might find themselves missing their brood if they get rid of them too quickly. Or perhaps if I suggest that since Lord Leverance is going to need at least one young man to serve as his heir, he should take more care over the selection of Violetta’s husband-to-be than he does over the other two.

  And if Mags could just get Brand safely tied up, and quickly too, then they’d get House Raeylen out of the city, and Lord Leverance could get down to the business he’d come here for in the first place.

  And I can get back to the business of learning to be a proper King’s Own . . .

  She understood, completely, why the King had asked her to give over her appropriate duties and devote herself to being one half of the effort of keeping this stupid feud from blowing up in everyone’s faces. Far, far too many people in the Court had begun to take sides in the quarrel, and that was never good. While it was unlikely that anyone other than the members of the two Houses would come to blows over it, it was likely that decisions were being made that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with what side someone was on. That was going to make for difficulties down the road, and possibly animosity it might take years to undo.

  The effects were already being felt in Council meetings. Subtle, but there. Actually . . . I’m rather glad Father has taken those over for me for now. I don’t have his level of diplomacy and tact.

  But she wanted to go back to what she was starting to think of as “her proper job,” let Father go back to regaining his strength and building up his own intelligence network outside of Haven, while Mags built his own inside of Haven. This was putting some delay on experience she should have been getting, during a period of relative calm. There was no war, at the moment, only the usual tense border situation with Karse. And Karse seemed to have learned a lesson they didn’t much care for, in dealing with the Sleepgivers. That just left the usual jockeying for power and place in the Court; that was what she needed to learn about first hand, as the King’s Own, and that was exactly what she was not getting to see from the inside.

  This feud should not have turned into such a . . . mess. Nor should it ever have been allowed to get to the point where it could easily turn into more than that. So far we’ve been lucky in that the two sides haven’t managed to recruit too many of our younger hotheads, the kind who think getting into fights is a clever thing to do.

  But now, short of putting the two House Heads under arrest and keeping guards on them at all times, there was no way other than what she and Mags were doing to keep it from degenerating. If the two sides started paying for criminal troublemakers . . . if they actively started to court the younger sons of the highborn . . . if they somehow got notoriety among the common folk so that they started picking sides . . . then there could be fights in the street and blood shed.

  More blood shed, she reminded herself, because there had been a modest amount spilled already, even if the blows had not been fatal.

  Mind on the job, she reminded herself. Although she did not expect any trouble of any kind, she was her father’s daughter, which meant that just because she didn’t expect any trouble, she was well aware that did not preclude trouble cropping up anyway.

  All three of Leverance’s girls looked particularly well tonight, but Violetta was probably the prettiest, not the least because she had gotten some of the color and verve back that Amily had seen in her when they had first met. She would dance tonight, as she had not at the Court fete. Her mother had promised her that, and arranged for a few dances with some of the sons of women she herself had become friends with over the course of taking all their offspring to party after fete after party. It would mean nothing, of course; those women were on the lookout for some catch for their boys that would bring them more than Violetta’s modest little dower, but it would give her the illusion of romance that she craved.

  And it might take her mind off Brand. It was far too soon for her to transfer her affection to someone else, but if she managed to get a little interested in some of these young men, it would help.

  The musicians struck up the first tune of the evening, and heads turned. This wasn’t a dancing tune yet, but it was very clear to all the guests that the ensemble in the minstrel’s gallery above the hall was itself something very special.

  Of course, they would have known that already if they could have seen the players.

  Amily had seen to it that the family had gotten the services of a little ensemble of Bardic Trainees as their musicians. Since she had the King’s permission to do whatever it took to keep House Chendlar occupied with matchmaking, she’d gotten the handful of Trainees who called Haven home to spend a little of their holiday time in rehearsing as a group and taking this job. The fact that they were being paid generously by the Crown hadn’t hurt matters, it was true, but it was very good of them to give up their holiday time. Then again . . . none of them were from wealthy families, and she had seen to it that they were being treated extremely well. Being treated, in fact, like the potentially important Bards they could become.

  As a result, however, the music was astonishingly good when compared to the music that had been played at other comparable fetes. It was certainly turning heads. People were even muting their conversations to listen.
r />   So between the music and the decorations, there was a sense of great excitement in the room that boded well for the reputation of House Chendlar this season. And that just might speed things along for Brigette and Aleniel. After all, the sorts of men that both they and their mother wanted were the sorts of men who valued the ability of a wife to put together a successful entertainment almost as highly as they valued the ability of a wife to produce an heir. After all, once you had an heir-and-a-spare you were substantially done. Since most people of wealth and power were not having children as extra labor, but as inheritors of what they had, they tended to limit their families. But if you were of wealth, rank, or both, you put together entertainments all the time, and the more successful you were at it, the better your fortunes became.

  By demonstrating that they could accomplish this at such a young age—well, Aleniel and Brigette had increased their own value above that of their dower.

  And the sooner we get them betrothed and out of the city, the sooner things can go back to normal. That cannot possibly happen fast enough for me. And if Violetta had not managed to start to turn her life around by that time, well Amily had given her every tool she could to do so later. You can’t save everyone, she reminded herself, a fact which her father repeated to her at least once a day. You save as many as you can, but you can’t save everyone. Particularly if they don’t want to be saved.

  Amily had grown up in and around the Court, and it had occurred to her more than once that the Heralds were incredibly lucky in the relative freedom with which they lived their lives. For all of their responsibilities, their lives were not governed by the tyranny of “manners” and “custom.” Violetta’s letter would have been little more than a cause of teasing at worst if she was a Trainee and it got out. But among her own class . . . Lady Dia had pretty well covered all the ways in which it could ruin her and her family.

  Well, we avoided that.