Bastion

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Oh!” said Lena in surprise, her eyes going round with delight. Mags could understand why. He’d heard a lot of instruments up at Bardic Collegium, but never one like this.

  Nor had he ever seen an animal act like this. It began with a pack of little mongrel dogs, who did everything he had ever seen a trick dog perform and more besides, without ever seeming to get any direction from the player, except, perhaps, musical cues. They jumped over each other, danced on their hind paws, then balanced on their forepaws, they performed tumbling tricks, jumping and rolling as human tumblers did. The smallest jumped onto the backs of the largest and rode them like horses. They dragged hoops onto stands, leaped through them, and dragged the hoops off again. They ran and jumped off ramps. It was amazing to behold.

  They ran off, and three birds with long tails flew down out of the roof of the tent, where they had perched unseen, and flew in acrobatic formations along with the music. They retreated into perches up in the roof, and the dogs returned, arranging themselves around the circular area and then holding perfectly still. A moment later, a quartet of ferrets bounced in and began a race around and around the ring, jumping over and scooting under the patient dogs. That ended with them each jumping onto a dog’s back and balancing there, first on their hind legs, then on their forelegs, and then the entire pack of dogs, ferret riders and all, trotted out of the ring again.

  Last came a sextet of the smallest horses Mags had ever seen, much smaller than the mine ponies. Without any direction, they began the same sort of pacing “dance” that the Companions had done for the wedding of the Prince and Princess. Bells on their bridles and harnesses chimed in time with their dancing. They wove in and out around each other, making patterns, breaking them, and making new patterns. And just when that was barely starting to lose its novelty, they began executing the fighting-moves that Companions and warhorses were trained in: rearing on their hind legs and pawing the air in front of them, leaping into the air and kicking out, rearing up and hopping forward. Then they went back into their dance, this time joined by the birds.

  Then they were joined by the dogs and, finally, by the ferrets, with the horses forming an outer circle, the dogs dancing in a circle rotating counter to theirs inside that, and the ferrets one going the same direction as the horses inside that, and the birds swooping and diving over their heads. Then, as the player created a final series of chords, they all stopped, pivoted outward to face their audience, and bowed.

  As one, the entire small audience leaped to their feet with applause.

  The animals filed out, with only the birds going back to their perches. The—trainer? keeper?—opened the door of the tent and stood there, bowing slightly, and waving his audience out. Mags felt dazzled with enchantment and admiration.

  “Please!” Lena said, as they reached the door. “What sort of instrument is that? I’ve never heard anything like it! And you play it like a Master!”

  “Mistress,” the person corrected her gently, with a smile, thus at least solving one question for Mags. “It is called a hammered dulcimer, young Bard, and I thank you for your high praise. My people seldom venture out of our home, but I was overtaken by wanderlust once I attained . . . my proficiency. Originally I had only my horses and my birds, but the others came to join me over time. Now I cannot imagine life without them all.”

  “Animal Mindspeech?” Mags ventured. The smile broadened. He noticed that the Beastmistress had curiously pale eyes, like a wintery overcast sky.

  “Even so. It is our hope that we can show people what love and good will can accomplish and make them lose their taste for beast shows that are created with fear and punishment.” The Show Mistress bowed slightly.

  “I hope it works,” Mags replied sincerely. It had certainly worked on him. Having watched this, he couldn’t imagine taking pleasure in any other sort of beast show. And the dancing bears he had seen, so cruelly shackled and goaded, made him shudder with revulsion.

  Once outside the tent, they realized they had been in there longer than they had thought; Bear’s stomach actually growled, and they all laughed as Bear blushed.

  “Well, that says what we’ll be doing next,” Amily declared.

  3

  The quartet caught a wagon back up the Hill that left well after sunset, but also well before the Fair closed for the night. It had been a wonderful day; they had eaten odd and tasty things, seen a trained-horse exhibition put on by genuine Shin’a’in horse traders, enjoyed one of the multiact shows with acrobats, rope dancers, and people who had climbed and disported themselves on poles held up by handlers, and one who had done amazing things on silk scarves hung from the top of the tent. They were pleasantly tired, but before too long, Mags knew, they would start to feel unpleasantly weary and begin to be quarrelsome. There would be a huge rush for the last wagons, and almost certainly some people were going to wind up walking back. He put that to the others, and they all agreed that they might as well make their way back to the Collegia.

  It was a good decision; the wagon was almost empty, and they were tired enough by the time they reached the pickup point that their purchases were beginning to feel very heavy.

  Someone had finally taken pity on the Trainees and put a layer of fresh hay in the bottom of this wagon, so the ride back up was much more comfortable than the ride down.

  Mags had been able to lose himself in all the activities of the day, but now that it was all over, he found his mind going over and over the conundrum of his origin—and the worries over what it meant. Now that he knew part of it . . . it was almost more frustrating—and worrying—than when he had known nothing.

  And yet, he could not help thinking that until he knew completely who he had been, he would never be sure what was driving his decisions. And if he didn’t know what was driving them, how could he be sure they were good decisions?

  The other three chattered away for almost half the journey before they finally noticed he hadn’t said anything. “You’re very quiet,” said Amily, and squeezed his arm affectionately. “It’s all right. If we’re bothering you, just say so.”

  “Not bothering me,” he replied, and after a moment he decided to say more. “But . . . I’m kind of in a quandary, here. It’s like I’m on a map, but I only generally know where I’ve been, so I’m not sure where to go next. I’ve got no direction. You all, you know exactly who you are and what you come from. Now, I kind of know, but it’s all fragments. It’s not helping much.”

  “Well, you know what they say,” Lena said, after a long silence. “I mean, it’s even in a song. ‘Lost and Found,’ I know you’ve heard me sing it before.”

  He nodded.

  “Nothing’s ever really lost; it can always be found again if you look hard enough. You can find all about your whole past if you decide you want to. Look what you’ve already found out! And I think you already know the worst at this point, and it’s not so bad, really. So what? You come from some sort of clan of assassins, which doesn’t make you an assassin, or a traitor, but when you think about it, all the things that make a good assassin are the same things that will make you really useful to the King and Nikolas. Right?” She patted his knee. “The rest of what’s lost is just details. Details you really ought to find out but still, details. And you actually do have a direction. You know exactly what my father is training you for.”

  Well, that was true, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t agree with it. It would be interesting work, and certainly needful work. But by the same token, this made him profoundly uneasy. Perhaps an assassin’s skills would make him a good spy. But they would also make him a good assassin. What if things started to blur? What if he found himself murdering someone and justifying it to himself and others?

  :Nonsense. You have me,: Dallen said firmly, before he could get himself wrought up. :Whatever gave you the idea that I’d let you do something like that?:

  He felt rather stupid for a moment. Dallen was his moral compass, just as every Companion was every Herald’s mo
ral compass. As long as he had Dallen, he would be all right—and if for some reason he no longer had Dallen, there would be a lot more wrongfulness going on than he really even wanted to consider.

  :We learned our lesson with Tylendel,: Dallen said soberly. :If I have to knock you down and sit on you to prevent you from doing something stupid, I will. Not that I expect to ever have to. If anything, you overthink things. ’Lendel was many things, but thinking wasn’t his strong suit.:

  It was extremely odd to hear someone talking about an historical, tragic figure as if he were a—

  :Emotional, overwrought, impulsive manchild who made a habit of blundering about regardless of consequences and paid the price, and I would rather not go into it any further.:

  Mags blinked a little at Dallen’s vehemence. It almost sounded as if Dallen had been . . . present at the time of the tragedy! Could that even be possible?

  But Dallen had made it quite clear that he was not interested in discussing the situation, and Mags knew better than to press. In fact, Dallen had sounded as if the situation had caused him pain as well as the irritation he was voicing.

  Maybe someday he’d find out, but clearly, that day would not be today.

  Still . . . there were more to his concerns than that, of course.

  One of the large ones was personal, insofar as anything that affected a Trainee or a Herald could be personal. He had not extracted a promise from those people to leave him alone—only to drop the contract with Karse. He was pretty sure that they were going to keep coming for him until they got him, one way or another. For some reason, he was important to them, and he needed to find out why. He needed to find out who it was they kept mistaking him for.

  It had to be someone important in their circle. That was the only explanation for why they wanted him so badly. If he looked so very like this person, it would probably be extremely useful to them. He could be used as a decoy. This person could appear to be in two places at once, which would certainly impress people.

  He needed to figure out how to get them off his trail.

  :You know, if it is only your appearance that has them so set on having you, that can be altered. Although scarring yourself that badly would make you more recognizable in Nikolas’s service, since if the scars were easy to hide, they would think of that, too.:

  Mags shuddered to think of what it would take to get that scarred up. :You are not making me feel any better, horse,: he replied crossly.

  This was . . . a puzzle. So far, he hadn’t found the way to crack it.

  There was no doubt whatsoever that the answer was somewhere in his personal past, not in the generalized “clan memories” that had been fed to him. If he resembled someone that closely, he had to be closely related to that person. A brother he didn’t know about? That seemed unlikely, since both his mother and father were dead—unless, perhaps, they had been forced to leave a child behind when they left their home?

  :I agree we need to discover all this. It might be extremely useful, too. We might be able to turn it around to use on your pursuers.:

  He wondered if there was a Gift for that—finding things out in the past. If somewhere there were people who could look into your past, the way the Farseers could look into the distance and Foreseers could see the future.

  Again, his thoughts returned to that stone in the table in the lower level of the Palace. Could it do that? Given the clues he had now? Or could it recognize those memories and give him something more to go on? It was like the Archives: extremely useful, full of unexpected knowledge, but you had to know where to look.

  Amily put her head on his shoulder and drove all of his thoughts into the distance. “I was sure you would be back, but I was horribly afraid when Dallen couldn’t sense you,” she said softly. “I guess, what I mean, is that I had faith you’d come home again. But faith didn’t stop the fear. I never want to be separated from you again.”

  There it was, another thing that had been in the back of his mind. He knew now that he didn’t want to be separated from her, either. “Do you think you could—” he began. She interrupted him.

  “Weaponsmaster is giving me special lessons.” She chuckled. “He calls them How Not To Get Killed lessons. It will take a while before I am as good as any of you Trainees, and since you are really good at fighting, I probably will never catch up with you. But I don’t have to. I only have to keep myself out of trouble, stay alive, and maybe help you a little if I can. I have to be sneaky, mostly. I have to learn how to spot trouble ahead of time. I have to learn how to find ways to escape or get to spots where I can’t be reached. I have to think a lot about that. But I can do that, I know I can. More important, Weaponsmaster says I can. And that means if you go somewhere, I can go with you. You won’t have to worry about me, because I’m learning to take care of myself. If someone is after you, the way they are now, I won’t be a hostage or a victim again.” Then her voice faltered a little. “I thought—”

  “You thought right,” he said warmly, so proud of her he could scarcely stand it. “You thought absolutely right. And aye. I want you with me, too.” He’d worry a lot less, a whole lot less, if they were together. And if she got good enough to actually help guard his back, that would be best of all. Even if she didn’t, two sets of eyes watching for trouble were four times as good as one.

  “Let’s count on that,” he said, as those thoughts ran through his head. “Your Pa probably won’t like it much, but he’d like it even less if we was separated and both of us were frettin’ about t’other, and maybe not bein’ quite as careful as we could be, ’cause of it.”

  “I knew you’d have a good argument,” she said happily, and snuggled down into the arm he put around her, then craned her face up for a kiss, which he was more than willing to give her. After all, Bear and Lena were not paying the least little bit of attention to them.

  And despite all his worries, a little warm glow bloomed inside him. The rest of the trip back up went by far too quickly.

  • • •

  No matter how disoriented he had gotten during his abduction, so long as he wasn’t drugged completely insensible, he had always awakened at the crack of dawn, and that hadn’t changed. He’d parted reluctantly from Amily, thinking again with envy of Lena and Bear. One thing that they hadn’t been forced to deal with during their courtship was other people . . . “keeping an eye on them.” He and Amily must have a hundred “eyes” on them at all times. Amily, after all, was the daughter of the King’s Own. Practically every Companion on the Hill was “keeping an eye on her.” Literally nothing they did was really private, and if he and Amily got beyond a little kissing and cuddling, it was absolutely guaranteed that within a candlemark her father would know about it.

  Mags wasn’t entirely sure what Nikolas’s reaction to that would be. He had shown himself to be a reasonable man. His objections to Bear and Lena getting married on the sly had all been rational ones that had everything to do with political situations. Everyone knew that Mags and Amily were a couple. No one objected to that. There would be no political repercussions. . . .

  But the difference was that Nikolas was not dealing with a couple of younglings in the abstract, he was dealing with his “apprentice” and his daughter.

  From what Mags could tell, based on what his friends here said, things he’d read, and things Dallen had dropped, a man could be perfectly rational about a pair of younglings coupling, even give tacit approval (at least to the young man) right up until that coupling involved his daughter. Then rational thought went flying right out the window.

  So . . . for now, kissing and cuddling was all he was going to get.

  And, oh, how he envied Bear.

  It was, truly, a distinct advantage to get the entire bathing room to yourself of a morning—especially when certain parts of you were not at all pleased about the situation with your girl.

  Mind, of all of the many, many things that he loved about being a Trainee, the ability to have a hot bath whenever he chose
was very high on the list. For a simple, uncomplicated pleasure, a hot bath was very difficult to beat.

  He was far too early for Bear and Lena to join him for breakfast. Unlike him, they were anything but early risers, and they had preferred staying up as late as possible even before they had gone from friendship to love. They both had bought treasures at the Fair they would have to show each other, and then . . . well, he knew the sorts of things that he and Amily would have been doing if there hadn’t been a hundred busybodies watching them while trying not to look as if they were dong so, and not all of those things involved being undressed and in bed together. Last night Bear and Lena had probably done some similar things and stayed up later than usual.

  Bear in particular. He probably would have had stories to tell Lena about some of the rare and imported herbs he’d gotten. He always talked to vendors, every chance he got, because one of the things he was always telling Mags was “No knowledge is ever wasted.” Lena might well have garnered some inspiration from those stories. If she did, well, he knew her; she would be up half the night writing down the bones of a new song. And even if she wasn’t inspired right that moment, Bear was constitutionally incapable of telling a brief story.

  Even without the Fair yesterday, it was only even odds that Bear and Lena would be up at the same time he was. Mags was almost always one of the first people in the dining hall in the morning. And when he wasn’t, it was generally because he had kitchen duty that morning, and ate there with the rest of the helpers.

  In his opinion, sleeping late was overrated. He much preferred being the proverbial early bird, because in this case, it wasn’t a nasty worm he got but the first of the breakfast dishes straight out of the kitchen, so fresh that you couldn’t eat bites without blowing on them. It was lovely getting biscuits or bread still hot from the ovens so that the butter melted in them and soaked into them, and the first round of whatever was on the menu was always better than the later ones.