Closer to the Heart

by Mercedes Lackey

  Did he actually know we were doing all that? Mags thought, startled, and suddenly feeling the chill of fear. He probed deeper, and what he found did not reassure him. No, Thallan had not been told this by an insider to the plot. He had deduced it from their actions. That was what had brought him up here, away from his men. He knew he needed to stop the wedding in order for his plan to continue working. He really was that clever. That made him horribly dangerous.

  “Ye think?” Mags responded coolly. “Well, I reckon there’s people who got ’nother say in that, most ’specially th’ Heralds.” Don’t give anything away. Let him be th’ one doin’ the talkin’. Don’t let him guess that Amily’s already taken Rethwellan outa the picture.

  “And if there are no Heralds in all of Valdemar who are able to oppose all this?” The man’s voice took on tones of menace. “If the Heralds are paralyzed and unable to act, including the King and the Prince? You forget, boy, all you white-clad do-gooders have hostages to fortune, and even your lives, in the form of very large, easily targeted Companions. And we know where every one of them that matters is. Eliminate the Companions, and you eliminate the Heralds. Eliminate the Heralds, and the King will grasp at anything in the way of a lifeline that is offered.”

  Mags went cold. Then in the next moment, :I heard!: Dallen exclaimed. :Rolan is shouting it now to all the others.:

  And in the moment after that, :We are going into hiding, Chosen. In half a candlemark, neither we, nor many of our Heralds, will be able to be found.:

  :Don’t you get caught!: he urged.

  “Reckon ye must’a learned that particular lesson from th’ lad wut tried t’burn down Companion’s stable,” he drawled. “Should’a figgered ye couldn’ come up wi’ an original plot t’save yer soul.”

  The man spluttered with anger for a moment, but then got control over himself. “It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that even if the Regency Council elects not to attack Valdemar, I have another plan. I have enough men willing to cross the border in support of the rebels to help them win the day, good, loyal Guardsmen who know what an opportunity for our Kingdom this is. The result will be the same. Valdemar will be drawn into war, the rebels will be supported, King Astanifandal will have his crown and he will know that to keep it, he will have to petition Valdemar to become a client-state. You’re a fool, boy. You think you are serving Valdemar! I am the one serving Valdemar here! I am making it possible for Valdemar to annex Menmellith! I am making it possible for you little white law-givers to bring peace and prosperity to a lot of barbarians! I am assuring Valdemar’s future by giving us a flanking border on Karse, so Karse cannot slip their agents into Valdemar through Menmellith ever again! I am the patriot here, you puling little infant, with your ridiculous games and your misplaced pride! Me! I will make Valdemar great, while all you can do is bat a ball around a field!”

  His voice rose with every word until he was shouting. And he finally realized he was shouting as he came to the end of his speech, and stood there, clutching the bars of the door, and panting with rage.

  :That’s . . . a very cunning plan. And he can pull it off. All he needs is for the King and Prince to be getting no information from the Border, and he can do that if the Heralds are out of play. By the time the King discovers what has happened, it will be too late. Or if he is truly maniacal, all he needs is to have as many of the Companions as he can killed, and that will throw such confusion into the country he can do as he pleases for quite some time. Even merely threatening us has done exactly what he wanted. Now we’re in hiding. Now our Heralds are out of play. Now the King has to come up with a counter plan, and meanwhile he does as he pleases.: Dallen seemed stunned, and Mags wasn’t feeling much better.

  I gotta keep ’im off-balance. I gotta make ’im rethink ever’thin’. I gotta make ’im think we got somethin’ right now as can stop ’im an’ make ’im waste ’is time tryin’ t’figger out wut it is.

  “Fer a great patriot, ye sure do seem pretty set on doin’ shit thet risks th’ whole damn country,” Mags replied coldly. “Fer a great patriot, ye sure don’ seem all that innerested in followin’ laws. I reckon ye figger laws don’ apply t’ye. Happens there’s been other lads as thought th’same. Happens they all end up th’ same place.” He shrugged again. “Think wut ye want, big man. Jest make sure some’un brings me an’ Amily sommat t’eat.”

  For a moment, as the bars of the door rattled as the man shook with rage, Mags thought he might just come in there and beat Mags to a pulp. But instead, he tore himself away, and his angry footsteps pounded off into the distance and faded away.

  “Well . . . now he’s angry,” Amily said carefully. And then she shut up. Mags had an idea that she was trying to talk to him mind-to-mind, and he reached out to her and listened, very carefully, to her thoughts.

  Now we know his plan, she was thinking, over and over.

  :Yes we do,: he replied, placing his words into her mind. He sensed that she had heard him.

  And now the Companions are safe.

  :Yes, they are.: But this wasn’t something that would hold for very long. Valdemar could not be without its Heralds. For them to just vanish would eventually cause a panic. And meanwhile. . . . “General Thallan” would be carrying out his alternate plan. Or plans. No good strategist ever relied on just one plan; there was no telling if the man was good or not, but it would be folly to assume he wasn’t. After all, he’d gotten away with illegally smuggling arms to the Menmellith rebels all this time. There was no reason to think that the discovery and subsequent reaction of the Menmellith Regency Council hadn’t also been in his plan.

  All right, so he hadn’t directly eliminated the Heralds or the Companions, and now that the Companions were all going into hiding, he was not going to be able to blackmail the King into doing what he wanted by threatening the Companions but . . .

  He still held all the high cards at the moment. He had Amily and Mags. He might believe that he still might be able to get something out of the King by threatening his hostages, once he realized the Companions were no longer in play. And he surely knew that the Companions could not vanish for very long.

  :Now that I made ’im mad, I think mebbe ’e’s gonna leave us be,: Mags explained carefully, even though placing each word in Amily’s mind made his own head ache with the effort. :That’ll mebbe give us a chance t’get outa ’ere. I’ll look fer guards an’ all down ’ere that might be close.:

  There was a long pause, and he “watched” as she thought quickly and hard, her mind whirling a bit too fast for him to read. Then came the concrete thoughts again. I will try and find a rat or a cat or something that can show me the way out of this area. There must be something living that prowls the halls.

  :Brilliant,: he thought warmly, then went about his own task. Bracing his back against the wall, he calmed his anxieties and opened his mind to everything immediately around him.

  It was excruciatingly hard. His head throbbed with pain, and his neck muscles cramped. He had to fight the urge to lie down and sleep. He had to fight off the last effects of the drug. But it was no harder than it had been to fight against the Sleepgiver potion and remain himself.

  One by one, he identified those guards that he had known must be there. There were not as many of them as he had thought. But there were still too many to overcome easily. He and Amily were the only prisoners down here, so he and Amily were the only people the guards needed to pay any attention to.

  When you added it all up . . . their odds for escape were not very good.

  His spirits sank right down to the bottom of his toes. And that moment was when he heard footsteps again. Two sets of footsteps.

  This . . . cain’t be good. . . .

  He recognized the heavy, angry footsteps. Thallan was back.

  And with him—

  A timid face looked in at the door. It was the Healer that had been responsible for so
much grief and pain to Bear back when they were both Trainees, who had been sent into virtual exile on the Border for his role in providing information to what Mags now knew were Sleepgiver assassins assigned to destroy Valdemar.

  Healer Cuburn.

  Mags felt his heart doing double-time. Cuburn was no friend. If it hadn’t been for Mags, he never would have been caught.

  “This Healer has something for your headache, boy,” Thallan said, in an oily tone of voice that told Mags that what Cuburn had was nothing like that. “He’s a good Healer, even if he did irritate everyone so much at his last posting that they couldn’t be rid of him fast enough.” He laughed. “Our good luck. He learned manners quickly enough with us.”

  Thallan unlocked the cell, and gave Cuburn a little shove when he didn’t move. The Healer had a bottle in his hands. Thallan’s surface thoughts told Mags everything he had been dreading. Without a doubt, it contained one or more of those potions that dulled or blocked Mindspeech.

  The Healer stumbled into the room, his eyes on Mags. He looked terrified. Did he think Mags was going to attack him? And what was in that potion? Was it whatever he’d been given while he was unconscious? How long would it take to wear off? Cuburn was very, very good at holding barriers against having his thoughts read, but then, Healers generally were. They had to keep up Empathic barriers so the pain and turmoil of their patient didn’t overwhelm them, and Empathic barriers acted very nicely as thought-barriers, too.

  What to do? There was absolutely no way that he could avoid drinking whatever that was. If he refused, Thallan would call guards, hold him down, and pour it down him. If he knocked it out of Cuburn’s hands, Thallan would only order the Healer to make more. There would be no chance in this bare cell for him to use the sort of sleight of hand Lord Jorthun had taught him, and appear to drink the stuff but actually pour it away . . . not wearing white clothing, he couldn’t.

  :Dallen, I—:

  :I know. You can weather this. We’ve been through worse and come out the other side. Whatever it is, it will wear off. You can make it wear off faster by working at it. If all we have is half a candlemark between doses, we’ll work with that. I’ll find you, Mags, I swear I will!.:

  And Thallan clearly intended to keep them alive, so the situation for him and Amily was not that dire. . . .

  But Thallan could do a lot of damage, and it could take decades to make it all right again, if it ever could be . . . black despair flooded up over him, and in that moment, if the bottle had held poison, he would gladly have drunk it. He’d tried to do everything right, and yet he’d been out-maneuvered and now there was nothing he could do to stop the avalanche.

  Cuburn leaned over him and handed him the bottle. “This will fix your headache right up,” the man said. There was something in the way he said it that made Mags look up into his face, sharply.

  Cuburn had his back to Thallan. Just drink it, the Healer thought, so strongly it was practically a shout in Mags’ mind. Then pretend to sleep. It’s all I can do. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I’m so very sorry I can’t do more. You must stop this fiend. He’ll destroy this land for the sake of his own pride. He’s a madman. I wish I had never seen him.

  Mags did not show his surprise. He took the bottle from Cuburn with a little sneer. “Ye might’a brought me summat t’eat. Potions go down poor on’a empty stomach.”

  “Just drink the damned stuff, boy,” Thallan snarled. Mags started to down it and nearly choked on the bitter, burning taste, as Cuburn scuttled back out the door, and then out of sight. His Sleepgiver memories automatically cataloged some of what he tasted. Raw alcohol, but not enough to make him drunk. A lot of bitter willow. Some yellowflower. Bristlehead, lanceleaf, and corris-root. Nothing poisonous, and nothing that would render him unconscious . . . but would any of it wipe out his Mindspeech? He just didn’t know; he wasn’t like Bear, with the knowledge of thousands of herbs and their interactions at his fingertips.

  Thallan locked the cell again, and loomed behind the bars of the door. He could not have been said to stand, since he was deliberately being as menacing as possible. Mags just put his back to the wall, glared back and waited for his sense of Dallen to fade away. The fear in him ran deep and cold as a mountain river at flood. Not so much fear for himself, as for everything else.

  But the only thing that began to fade was his headache.

  It didn’t actually go away, not entirely, but . . . whatever Cuburn had given him was taking the edge off. His Mindspeech was just as sharp as ever, maybe more, since it wasn’t troubled by headache pain.

  And taking that as his cue that he should probably begin pretending to pass out, Mags began nodding . . . and jerking his head up to glare at Thallan . . . and nodding . . . he had seen enough people who’d drunk themselves into a stupor that he knew what it should look like.

  Finally he let his chin sink to his chest, then slowly toppled over sideways. Thallan uttered a satisfied chuckle and Mags heard his footsteps retreating.

  :Scummy bastard. Not you, Dallen.:

  :You could call me anything you liked, I am so grateful to still be able to hear you.: Dallen heaved a long, mental sigh.

  :We’re still right where we was,: Mags objected. :Amily an’ me are still stuck in ’ere, this crazy lunatic kin do wut he pleases an—:

  :I’m working on that. Right now, please talk to Amily, she thinks you’re dead or headblind or worse.:

  He turned his attention to Amily; he quickly discovered she was not anxious, she was furious. The things she wanted to do to Thallan would have shocked him, had he not been sharing the same sentiments.

  :When ye git done fixin’ t’ take ’is skin off an’ boil ’im alive, kin ye tell me iffen ye found a cat’r somethin’?:

  Relief nearly made her incoherent for a moment. Not yet. I’m working on it.

  With some of his pain gone, he could think—it did gall him to feel even the least little bit of gratitude to that snake, Cuburn, but he had to admit the Healer had done him not one, but two enormous favors.

  :Dallen . . . is there any way we kin cut Thallan off from ’is men? I mean, he ain’t given th’ word t’attack yet. Whatever Guard Post ’e managed t’take over, has t’be on the Border, an’ somehow ’e’ed haveta reach ’em with a message. We’re still pretty much where we were afore, right? An’ if ’e don’t git back an’ take over whatever Guard Post ’e managed t’ gull, ain’t nobody gonna step up an’ do it, right?:

  :That might work, Mags. That just might work. All we need to do is figure out where you are. And by extension, where he is. There are only a limited number of ways he could send a message . . . but my feeling is he would want to command in person.: There was silence for a long while. Mags used it to rest and let Cuburn’s potion do its work on his splitting head. And think.

  As long as we’re ’ere, we kin be used as hostages. So we still need t’get out. There’s gotta be a way.

  There’s just got to.

  Amily was disassembling her wedding finery, quietly, so as not to arouse any attention. She already had triggered the hidden latch on the soles of both boots that let the soles swivel at the toe and release the thin daggers hidden in each. She’d pulled the bones out of her corset that turned into a tiny bow and half-sized arrows, and gotten the sinew-bowstring from beneath the embroidery on her bodice. She’d removed the really nasty little weapon from the hem of her tunic, that was a chain with weights on each end. That one could kill a man with one blow if she struck him in the temple, and at the moment she was visualizing doing just that to their captor. Thallan hadn’t really paid any attention to her so far; he had stopped just long enough at the door to her cell to sneer. She had just stared back at him, stone-faced. She would let him read into that whatever he chose.

  Probably that I’m too terrified to move. Someone like that would be sure that a woman in a pretty dress was useless, helpless,
and petrified.

  Her head hurt, but whoever had hit her had been very good at knocking people out; it had been just a little tap, that had left a bit of a bump, and a bit of a sore place. She thought, from the taste in her mouth, that she must have been given some sort of drug, but now it was completely worn off.

  She wished she knew how to pick locks. I’d hide out of sight until he came back, then get him as soon as he stepped into the cell to look for me. The thought of thwacking him in the temple with that lead weight was infinitely satisfying.

  The sight of that toad, Cuburn, scuttling past had made her gorge rise. Now more than ever she regretted the fact that the King hadn’t locked him up in a gaol in Haven and thrown away the key. Or locked him up in the gaol for the worst sort of prisoners and made him act as their Healer. Or . . . well she could think of a lot of fates she’d like to consign him to right now.

  Then again . . . he hadn’t done what he’d been told to do. He hadn’t drugged Mags. She wasn’t feeling charitable enough to give him the benefit of the doubt however. She didn’t think any sort of altruism had inspired that gesture. It was more likely that he was hoping that when Mags and Amily were rescued, or got themselves out, he’d get clemency. I guess he discovered someone he’s completely terrified by. Good. I hope Thallan gives him nightmares. I hope Thallan keeps him chained to a dog kennel.

  Once she had her weapons out, and either hidden on her person or under her skirts, she closed her eyes and began searching once more for animals. A cat would be best. Maybe she could induce it down into the dungeon with a suggestion there were mice down here. She had discovered that, although she could not command animals to do anything, she could make them think there was something they wanted where she wanted them to be. She had also discovered that, within limits, there were things she could suggest they might want to do.

  She found the pigeons before she found a cat.

  At first, she didn’t know what she had found; just a mass of sleeping birds; not sparrows, not chickens, not crows—nothing she’d ever had much to do with. Then some of them woke up a little and cooed in their sleep, and she realized with a start what they must be. Not just a lot of pigeons roosting in a roof, but messenger birds, in their closed-up dovecot. Well, that answered the question of how Thallan was communicating with the rest of his men so far away on the border.