Changes

by Mercedes Lackey

  Th’ harm? Tellin’ ’em ev’thing ’bout how t’ get on up here? Pawel had given those men what they needed most, the intimate knowledge of Palace life. That was how they had been able to come and go at will, and who knew how much they had been able to learn with their own spying?

  “They told me they were from home. I didn’t know . . . I never traveled much beyond Echtsten on the north Border until the black-robes sent me here. They told me they were from the South, so I believed them, even though they didn’t pray to the Sunlord at the proper times or—” Pawel shook his head like a weary beast. “But I told myself that this was all because they were in disguise, as I was, so of course they wouldn’t give themselves away. But then—there was something wrong with them. The magician started seeing demon-eyes everywhere; he said the eyes were watching him.”

  “Magician?” someone said, sounding puzzled. “What—” but whoever it was never completed the thought.

  Pawel’s shoulders shook. “I began to think maybe I was wrong about you, that you were hiding something after all. And when the magician went mad, I was sure of it.”

  “That wasn’t us, Pawel,” said one of the Healers, as the Herald in charge whispered to Nikolas. “We don’t know what that was—”

  “You don’t understand,” he wept. “I realized that when they tried to hurt the boy Bear and then when they tried to kill all the Companions. After all this time, I saw—I finally saw it, I finally believed it, completely, you’re good people. The priests are wrong about you. Oh, sometimes you treated me like I wasn’t there, but . . . wasn’t I trying to act as if I wasn’t there? So you wouldn’t notice me and I could see more? I tried to make myself angry about that, but then one day when I spoke up, because I wanted to help Lady Amily, those youngsters listened to me, respected me, even though all I ever did was clean up their plates.”

  Mags blinked, remembering when Pawel had helped with the solution to Bear’s bone-break modeling problem.

  “They told me that you were demon-summoners, that the Companions were demons, and for a while I was afraid of them. Until I saw the truth. The Companions, they aren’t demons, they’re nothing like the demons that the red-robes command. Lady Amily was always kind to me. The worst that has ever happened to me here was the cook shouting at me when he was out of temper. You’re all good—you do good things.” He shook his head violently. “So when the newest ones came and they told me that once I answered all of their questions and did what they asked of me, I could go home, I thought—I thought, this is why I’m here after all. I’ll finish this and go home, and if I just tell the truth, if I just tell them back home what you’re really like, they’d see that they’re making a mistake. And once I got back home and they made me a priest, I could keep telling our people about you, and there would be peace.”

  He broke down again, weeping. “But then—then they told me I had to get them Guard uniforms. So I did, a piece here, a piece there, out of the laundry. I tried not to think about what they might want uniforms for; I told myself it was just to slip out of Valdemar safely. Then they told me that I had to help them take away Lady Amily and the Magpie Trainee. I told them I wouldn’t—and one of them—he got into my room! A locked room! He got into my locked room in the middle of the night! He told me that he was a red-robe and a demon-summoner, and that if I didn’t help him, he’d bring his demons to eat my soul, and the demon would wear my body and I would never see home again, I would die forever and never walk in the Sun’s Light!”

  He was shaking with grief and fear now. The Herald in charge looked at Nikolas. “Isn’t there a Temple of Vkandis Sunlord somewhere down in the city?” he asked.

  “Yes . . . ah, I see where you’re going. I’ll Mindspeak one of the City Heralds to bring a priest up here.”

  But Mags was shaking Pawel’s shoulder until the man looked up at him again. “Fust thing, thet bastiche ain’t no priest’a nothin’,” he said, sternly, putting all the force of his mind behind his words to make the servant believe him. “Neither of ’em is. Ye know thet, Pawel! Ye seen ’em do stuff no priest ever did! Ye ever heard tell’a priests learnin’ t’ run rooftops like cats? Heard tell’a priests thet’d sneak ’bout like thieves? Heard tell’a priests thet fight as good as Weaponsmaster?”

  Pawel shook his head.

  “Wha’s more, you ever ask ’em fer a blessin’? Bet they wouldn’ do it, right?” Pawel nodded, slowly. Mags snorted. “What kinda priest won’t e’en say a liddle blessin’? E’en th’ wust priest, the falsest priest, he’ll say a blessin’ t’ any that asks! Not them. It’s cause they weren’t no priests, an’ they weren’t no Karsites. They knew they didn’ know ’nuff t’even fake a blessin’, an’ ye’d know thet when ye heard ’em. Mebbe yer people hired ’em. They knowed ye was here and knowed th’ right signs, an’ they got ye t’help ’em, an’ they had t’learn that from some’un, so I reckon they got told when they got hired. But they ain’t Karsites. They ain’t priests. They’re jest . . . fancy killers.”

  Mags turned on his heel and walked back to the wall, leaning against it with his arms crossed. His head burned. He hadn’t much liked using his Gift that way, but neither Nikolas nor the other Herald had stopped him. And it wasn’t as if he’d put anything into Pawel’s head that wasn’t already there. All he’d done, really, was make Pawel see and acknowledge what he already knew.

  Still. It didn’t feel wrong . . . but he wasn’t sure it was entirely right, either.

  ::Well done,:: Dallen said, as the Herald in charge took over the interrogation again, alternately coaxing and stern. ::Well done for handling him, and well done for doubting, Chosen. You must walk a very narrow path, and you know it. Never forget how narrow that path is.::

  Mags acknowledged him wordlessly, and he pondered the man before him. Not a good man . . . not a bad man, either. Just . . . just a man. He didn’t hate Pawel, how could he?

  But he didn’t much like him at the moment, either.

  How could Pawel have been here for so long and fail to see how wrong the people who had sent him were? Had his very faith made him don blinkers of his own free will? And if faith made people do that, then how did you get them to abandon what blinded them without breaking them?

  Right now, Mags wasn’t sure he cared for religion of any sort. Plenty of priests had seen what was going on at the mine and done nothing. Priests had blinded Pawel to what was right in front of him, day in, day out.

  But . . . then there were the priests that Bear worked with . . .

  Eventually they had everything useful they were likely to get out of him, and he was taken away. Mags didn’t know what was going to be done with Pawel—he wasn’t entirely certain he cared. Pawel and the drop-points for his orders were both compromised now, and he would have to be gotten away somewhere in case Ice or Stone decided to make sure he couldn’t reveal any more than he already had.

  “We know why they wanted Amily,” Nikolas said, after Pawel was taken off. “But why did they want Mags? They did want him—the two men that Mags calls Ice and Stone were after Mags themselves.”

  “Maybe to keep Amily quiet?” hazarded the Herald in charge. “If they intended to hold her for any length of time, they would have wanted a significant hold over her; something or someone they could use to coerce her without actually hurting her. They could threaten you, but she would know that was hollow. But if they had Mags, they could do anything they liked to him to make her cooperate.”

  Well, that was an ugly thought. But it did fit in with Stone and Ice’s personalities.

  The problem was . . . that just didn’t feel right to Mags. He had no evidence at all, other than his instincts, but—

  Well, there was one thing. There had been that moment when Amily was safe and he was not, when he was staring into Stone’s face—watching the man calculate and assess—

  Iffen he’d thought he could git away wi’ me, he’d’a grabbed me an left Amily.

  Mags wasn’t sure how he knew this. He only kne
w that he was as certain of the truth of it as he was of his own name.

  And that somehow, this was directly related to the fact that the really crazed assassin, the one that had taken Bear, had recognized him.

  The hell is goin’ on? Had they somehow mistaken him for someone else? It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed his mind. And it drove him frantic that he had no more idea now than he had then.

  There was one useful thing they had gotten out of Pawel. There were two more spies up here . . . he didn’t know who or what the first one was, but he was absolutely certain that one of them was either a Bard or a Bardic Trainee.

  15

  It had taken the better part of a candlemark to relate everything that had happened. “Tha’s it,” Mags finished. He had gotten Amily, Bear, and Lena to all come out to his room after supper; with the Companions standing a watchful presence, he was fairly certain no one was going to be able to overhear anything he told them. Amily had the single comfortable chair, and Mags paced restlessly. Lena and Bear sprawled on his bed. “Tha’s all I know. Amily, yer pa wants ter wait till it’s a mite cooler afore they do yer leg. Nobody wants ye t’ be hurtin’ an’ swelterin’ at th’ same time. An’ there’s other reasons . . . sorry, I weren’t half listenin’ . . .” He shrugged, finally sat down on the floor at her feet, and she reached for his hand.

  “Infections. Easier to get ’em in hot weather. And it’d be easier for you to get heat sickness too.” Bear pondered it all. “Well, I reckon we can get you mostly done before the snow if we do it before Harvest Moon.”

  “If you don’t, well, then I just get to be pampered and lie about like a spoiled child next to the fire all winter and have people fetch and carry for me,” she said with a smile.

  Mags snorted. “Like I kin see ye doin’ that. Not hardly.” He decided to risk getting teased about it later and stole a kiss. Right now, he wanted all the kisses he could get. He was still getting the shakes when he understood just how close their escape had been. If Amily hadn’t been on Dallen . . . he’d have been too busy fighting off Ice and Stone to help her. All those men dressed in real Guard uniforms had looked very convincing. Bear had been right, they’d had the means to knock her unconscious, and they could have carried her off under the guise of getting her help.

  He tried to remind himself that they had all been prepared for something like that. She’d have been swarmed by Hera;ds and Companions. But all he could think about was Amily’s terrified face.

  How close he had come to never seeing her again . . .

  “But the spy in Bardic—” Bear’s brows furrowed. “It has to be Marchand’s pet. It has to. Who else could it be?”

  Mags expected Lena to agree with Bear immediately. So, obviously, did Bear. They were both shocked when she shook her head.

  “It isn’t,” she said decidedly. “It can’t possibly be Farris. For one thing, there isn’t a deceitful bone in his body. For another . . .” She bit her lip. “For another . . . I know why Father picked him, now.”

  Mags had a horrible, vile thought. And something of that must have shown on his face, because Amily took a quick glance at him and paled.

  But Lena was continuing, twisting a bit of her hair around one finger. “This is going to take a long, long explanation.”

  “We got time,” Mags pointed out. “I really wanta hear this.”

  She nodded. “You probably would never have noticed . . . I actually don’t think anyone but me has noticed . . . but Father’s compositions seem to come in lumps. He’ll do a lot of new music, then there won’t be anything new for a while. Then he’ll do a lot more new music. It’s not just that he’s working on something long and complicated. He doesn’t work on anything at all. He’ll do concerts and performances, he’ll go to parties, he’d even come home to visit, and when I was in his rooms, the only music that was there was whatever he was learning. I mean, I’ve known that forever, and even though I don’t know any other Bard who works that way, I never actually thought it meant anything—until a few days ago. You see, I’ve been helping Farris learn composition—”

  Bear gave her a look of incredulous surprise. “You . . . what? But I thought—” He glowered a little at her. “I told you I thought you oughta avoid him altogether.”

  “I was just taking Mags’ advice!” Lena said. “Mags said, if I was nice to him and he was horrid, people would notice, and he would look bad. If I was nice to him and he was nice to my face but horrid behind my back, people would notice that even more. But if I was nice to him and he was nice back, and grateful, then I’d have a friend. So no matter what, I won if I was nice to him.”

  Bear scrunched up his nose, pushed his lenses back up, and thought about that a while. “Remind me never to cross you,” he told Mags finally. “You seem so perfectly ordinary most of the time, then you turn around and come up with something like this that’s—it’s political-level scheming is what it is! Where do you come up with these things? Sometimes I wonder if you’re manipulating me like that!”

  “I wouldn’t call it scheming,” Amily said mildly. “He wasn’t telling Lena to do anything but be nice, which is what she would rather do anyway. He was just giving her the reasons why it was to her advantage.”

  Mags shrugged uncomfortably. What could he reply to that? He wasn’t really trying to be manipulative, but it was so easy now for him to see how people worked, take that apart, and put it back together in a way that made things better. Being such an outsider was turning out to be as much of an advantage as it was a handicap. “I’d ruther hear what Lena has t’say. I really wanta know why she’s so certain-sure th’ spy ain’t Farris.”

  Lena took a deep breath. “I know this is roundabout, but it’s important, and it all has to do why I know it’s not Farris. When I was helping him with beginning composition, I realized right away that he’s good. He definitely has Creative Gift. His melodies are wonderful, and they just flow out of him naturally. And he works the way everyone else I’ve seen works—he always has songs he’s working on. Even when he says he’s finished, something will set him off, and he’ll look for a piece of paper to jot the music down on. He can’t stop and take a rest from it any more than he could take a rest from breathing.”

  “So? That doesn’t mean he can’t be a spy too,” Bear said stubbornly. “In fact, that would make him a better spy. He could write things down in musical notation, and no one would be the wiser. And anyone suspicious of him would see he really was someone who belonged in Bardic and not think any more about it.”

  “That’s true,” Lena agreed. “But—look, you have all been trying to figure out why Father brought him here. You assumed he was a spy and were and thinking it was because he somehow tricked Father into it. But that’s not what happened at all.”

  “What?” Amily asked, skeptically. “He told you what happened?”

  “He didn’t have to, once I figured it all out.” Lena frowned unhappily. “He’s not some kind of scheming adult in a youngster’s body. He didn’t trick Father. It’s the other way around. Father’s tricking him. Father’s using him.”

  “Aight.” Mags scratched his head. “Lena, I cain’t see ary way Bard Marchand could be usin’ a youngling.” Well . . . not true. He coul, but evidently that wasn’t the sort of using that Lena meant.”

  “I’m getting to that,” she replied. “Three days after I helped Farris with one of his own original melodies, I heard Father use that same melody for one of his own new songs! Or what he claimed was his new song.” She looked as if she had swallowed something bitter. “And when I asked Farris about it the next day, he was all, ‘I know! Isn’t it fantastic! It’s such a great honor! My stupid little thing in one of Bard Marchand’s songs!’ ” Lena shook her head. “I tell you, I thought I was going to be sick when he said that.”

  It took Mags a few moments to unravel what it was that Lena was saying. He started to ask a question to make sure he understood her correctly, but Amily beat him to it.

&nb
sp; “You mean . . . your father is stealing his protégé’s work, and claiming it as his own?” Amily asked incredulously.

  “Oh . . . he does change things, rearranges it a bit, and adds a lot to the melody. He puts it into his style. And he is certainly writing all the lyrics,” Lena amended, though she was still looking sour indeed. “But . . . the melodies aren’t his. The hardest part—coming up with the bare music—he’s not doing that. And he’s making Farris think that he’s doing Farris a favor by stealing his music! He’s using Farris! And it isn’t the first time, either.”

  Amily made a shushing motion at Bear. “How would you know?” she asked.

  “Because I did some checking in the archives. Every single one of those bursts of songwriting has been when he’s had a protégé, or he’s been somewhere way off away from Haven amd come back with a whole new book of songs. And his protégés? I checked. They’re always very poor. He carts them off with him when they are about ready to produce their Master work. He says it’s to give them the space and isolation they need to work. They mysteriously get offered a really comfortable permanent position somewhere far off and never come back, and the work they send back as their Master piece is just barely good enough to get them full Scarlets.”