Intrigues v(cc-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  :It’s only been three days,: Dallen reminded him.

  “Three days is a long time to sulk,” he said out loud, and Bear looked at him oddly.

  “Lena?” he said finally.

  Mags flushed. “Aye. Sorry. Talkin’ t’ Dallen.”

  Bear shoved a bit of meat pie into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “She wants to impress her da,” he said, after swallowing. “I mean, really impress him. Make him sit up and take notice. Been working at that all year. Hardly ever does anything but work on being a Bard. And then he shows up and doesn’t even know who she is, which, when she’s thinking he’s at least seeing the reports on her and maybe seeing she’s living up to him—”

  Mags blinked, finally understanding what Lita meant. Trust Bear to put it into simple language even a dunderhead like him could understand.

  “Oh... ” he replied.

  “So, likely she thinks she hasn’t done enough. Or hasn’t done the right things. Or, you know, she’s done all the right stuff, but she’s just not good enough to impress him.” Bear gulped his tea, a glum look on his face.

  “That ain’t fair,” Mags said slowly.

  “It isn’t fair and it isn’t true, but that’s what she thinks.” Bear put his mug down. “I guess I know something about not being able to impress your folks,” he added bitterly.

  Belatedly, Mags remembered that Bear came from a family of Healers, of which he was the only member that did NOT have a Healing Gift. He licked his lips awkwardly.

  “Well, she’s here, not at home, and maybe the Bards can sort her out,” Bear concluded. “Probably. I mean, after half Bardic Collegium listened to her pa getting the skin pulled off him, maybe she’ll figure out that not everybody is as impressed with him as he is with himself.”

  Mags decided that a little duplicity was in order. “Bard Marchand? Getting’ the skin pulled off him? What?”

  Bear cheered up a little and proceeded to describe in detail the dressing-down that Lena’s father had gotten. It was a lot more accurate than Mags had expected—but then, Bards were supposed to be able to memorize things that happened on the spot, so they could repeat them back accurately in song or story form later, so maybe that wasn’t altogether shocking. That was cheering, too. It meant that, really, Marchand had no one to blame but himself for the tale getting around. Mind you, with someone like him, he’d probably look for any scapegoat rather than accept responsibility for his own stupid behavior.

  Well at least this meant that Bard Marchand would not be looking for a single Heraldic Trainee to blame for word of this getting out. More like Trainees in his very own Collegium.

  “I hope that cheers ’er up,” Mags said, when Bear was done.

  Bear just shrugged. “You never know what people are going to think when something like this happens to kin. Sometimes there’s this, ‘serves you right, I’m glad you got what was coming to you’ feeling, sometimes there’s this ‘glad it was you and not me’ and sometimes there’s this ‘how dare they say that about my pa’ thing. Just no telling. Doesn’t change that he didn’t know her, either.”

  “No.” Mags sighed. “Wish she wasn’t so... easy t’ hurt.”

  “That’s Bards, I reckon, at least at the beginning.” Bear shoved away from the table. “But they need to get a thick skin before they get into Scarlets, or they’re gonna spend all their time maundering about feeling hurt by people what don’t like their work or Bards that are better’n they are, or how their family don’t understand ’em, and not getting the job done.”

  Mags couldn’t have put it better himself. He nodded. “Well I hope she stops feelin’ so poorly. I miss ’er.”

  “Me too,” Bear said shortly. “See you later.”

  Mags sat there wondering what had made Bear so out of sorts. Maybe the same not-quite-spring crankiness that seemed to be affecting so many of the others. He stared at the remains of his pie and wondered if he ought to try and get to Lena and talk her around to a good humor.

  In the end, though, the thought of the mound of study waiting for him back in his room decided him. He couldn’t make anything better for Lena than he already had; sending her somewhat misspelled notes affirming that he (and Dallen) would like to take her out for a ride or a walk or just have a game of draughts or something. Not saying anything about needing her help with classes, because that would seem as if he only valued her for that help. What else was there to do?

  Bah.

  But when he got back to his quarters, there was a piece of folded paper waiting on the top of his books that he had not left there. He hoped it was from Lena—

  But it was from Herald Nikolas.

  Please come to my quarters after dinner. I need you to report what you overheard Chamjey saying for the King’s ears.

  Nikolas wanted him to report to the King.

  To the King.

  He was flooded with panic.

  No, no, no—how kin I—I cain’t—th’ King—I nivver—

  Suddenly, in the middle of the muddle, he felt Dallen in his head, coming in and firmly just squashing all that panic down for a moment, as if the Companion had actually sat on it, physically.

  :He’s just another Herald.:

  “But he’s the King!” Mags said aloud, his voice breaking at the end.

  :Only in the Throne Room. That is why Nikolas asked you to come to his rooms. There, Kiril will just be another Herald.:

  “But I dunno how to talk t’ him!”

  :You just talk to him. With respect, but that’s all. Now hurry up, he’s probably already there, and you don’t want to keep the King waiting.:

  That sent another spurt of panic over him, but it was panic that got him moving. Hastily, he made sure he was clean and hadn’t accidentally dropped any food or sauce on himself at dinner, snatched up his cloak, and ran all the way back up to the Collegium. He arrived at Nikolas’ door all out of breath, and before he could tap on it, Nikolas himself opened it.

  “Ah good, Mags. You got my note.” Nikolas put one hand in the center of his back and firmly propelled him into the room.

  The Herald had three rooms, so far as Mags was aware. One was Amily’s bedroom, although his daughter was apt to sleep overnight at the home of one friend or another, including Master Soren’s niece. One was his own bedroom, and one was a “public” sort of room, with comfortable seating and a desk as well as a fireplace.

  This was where Mags occasionally met with him, although usually the King’s Own came down to Mags’ rooms at the stable. Today there was a stranger sitting in the chair nearest the hearth, feet propped up to the fire. Sprawled, actually, rather than sitting, and looking just a little untidy.

  “This is Mags, Kiril,” said Nikolas, continuing to propel Mags into the room, since Mags’ own legs seemed to have lost the ability to take steps forward on their own.

  The man turned, and Mags blinked and did his best not to gawk. He knew this man. This was the Herald he had encountered three days ago at the stable. No wonder he had looked familiar! That profile was on at least half of the coins that Mags had handled since he arrived here.

  The King grinned at Mags. “You were right. Dallen did try to take my fingers.”

  :Did not.:

  “Um,” said Mags, intelligently.

  Nikolas got him seated across from the King by the simple expedient of positioning him in front of a chair and pushing down on his shoulders. He plopped down gracelessly then leapt to his feet and started to kneel.

  Nikolas grabbed the back of his collar and hauled him back into the chair.

  The King was laughing so hard he was bent over.

  “Mags, Mags, please,” he choked out around laughter. “No kneeling, no bowing, just the two of us having a conversation.”

  Mags gulped and sat gingerly on the edge of the chair. “Yessir, yer Majesty Highness sir,” he gabbled.

  “Calm down,” said the King, making soothing motions with his hands. “Now, I want you to put your mind back to this afternoon when
you first found where Chamjey was going. What did you do?”

  “Tried t’ figger out how t’ get where I could hear ’im, yer Greatness,” Mags said. “Dallen, he said t’ get inside an’ lookit th’fireplace. Twas fulla ash. Dallen, he tookit us t’ the nearest soapmaker t’ find out who got th’ ash from thet Inn. Happen it was that soapmaker. Dallen said, ask if they’d collected. She said no. Dallen said, askit if I could. She—” He stopped and thought for a moment. “She askit me an’ Dallen if this was prankin’, we said no, t’ wasn’t. She askit Dallen if there was a Herald knew what we was about, an’ Dallen, he nodded aye. So’s she give me th’ apron an’ all an’ tol’ me how t’ collect an’ I went back t’ Inn.”

  Nikolas and the King exchanged a significant glance. “They’re starting to ask Companions questions,” the King said.

  “That’s no bad thing,” Nikolas replied. “Intelligent questions, not just ‘hey boy, want an apple?’ ”

  “Then what?” the King asked.

  Mags closed his eyes, the better to remember, and slowly recited everything that he had heard, with Dallen prompting him. When he was done, he opened his eyes to see the King nodding thoughtfully.

  “We’ve got a quandary,” Nikolas said to the King, and Mags suddenly felt as if he was not even there, the two of them were concentrating so hard on each other.

  The King nodded. “Two, actually. What Chamjey is doing is not technically illegal. Just immoral, but we don’t regulate morals—or at least, not that sort of morality . . .”

  “It... ain’t ethical, your Majestic,” Mags put in timidly. “Don’t we got laws ’bout ethics?”

  Two pairs of eyes suddenly made him the target of the same intense stare, and Mags felt utterly unnerved.

  “We do,” the King said, finally. “And members of the Council swear an oath when they accept a seat on it that they will behave with the interests of the Kingdom as a whole superseding their own. At the very least, Chamjey has violated that oath.”

  Nikolas drummed his fingers on the wooden arm of his chair as the fire crackled in the fireplace. “Chamjey is shrewd. And we don’t have any actual proof of all of this. We have one Trainee who listened in on a conversation, but could not actually see the speakers.”

  “Ah! But we can get corroborating evidence!” the King replied after a moment. “We can canvass the herders, find out who invested in their wool and meat-sheep, and follow those leads up the line. It will take time—”

  “Soon’s ye get t’ the fust guilty man, he’ll get all nervous-like,” said Mags, thinking of how that sort of thing had gone back at the mine. “Th’ other feller, he said they went through lotsa people t’ do this, but an’ ye get the fust feller t’ talk, it’ll go up chain pretty quick, I bet.”

  They both nodded, and the King sighed. “I wanted to get this settled quickly, but I suppose I shall have to resign myself to getting it settled thoroughly.” He stood up. “Mags, I’m getting some tutors arranged for you Trainees. There are a number of intelligent young people in Haven that are being interviewed, fine scholars, but poor, who would certainly benefit from this idea. In fact, the only reason we haven’t got some tutors yet is because we are making sure that they are good at teaching.”

  Mags felt his eyes widening. “Twas a good idear then?” he said.

  “Very much so. And I am looking forward to seeing you and Dallen trying for a Kirball team. I’d like to see if Dallen can run with the same eagerness that he eats pocket pies.” The King’s face split with a grin.

  :Hey!:

  Mags smothered a laugh.

  “Now, I’ve taken up enough of your time . . .” the King hesitated.

  Mags supplied what he thought the King was looking for. “Eh? I wuz never here, never talked t’ yer Royalness ’bout nothin’, an’ I don’ know nothin’ ’bout sheepses and wool. Herald Nikolas, he jest wanted t’ ast me ’bout what Bard Marchand said, ’xactly, when he sent me on that there errand he shouldn’t of.”

  The King nodded. “Exactly so. Good night, Mags. It was good to meet you formally, so to speak.”

  Mags got to his feet, managing to control his knees, which still felt a bit weak, bowed, and let himself out. As he left, he sensed that the King and the King’s Own had only begun an evening of intense conversation and decision-making.

  He was very, very glad that he was never going to be in Nikolas’s shoes.

  :And between you and me, I am just as glad not to be Rolan. Now come on back and let’s talk about this Kirball business. I’ve made some inquiries.:

  Bear and Lena seemed to have forgotten the project that had taken them all into the Guard Archives this past winter—but Mags had not. Although his opportunities to go back and search had gotten a lot rarer, he still presented himself at the door of the Archives from time to time for a candlemark or two of research.

  And the next day gave him one of those rare opportunities, as he finished an exam unexpectedly early and was dismissed with a smile. He headed for the Guard Archives at a trot, feeling as if he was getting very close to what he was looking for. The last time he had been through the reports, there had been mention of an unusually large bandit group, one that the Guard felt probably had a substantial encampment. “It would not be difficult here,” the Guard Captain had written. “There are many caves and abandoned mines, and it would be possible to hide as many as fifty or sixty fighting men and their hangers-on in some of them. The raids we are seeing are growing bolder and more pernicious, and suggest that these miscreants have organized under a clever leader.”

  That sounded like what he was looking for, and Mags had already had enough disappointments that by now he was well over the dread of finding out who his parents had been. He just wanted some answers, any kind of answers.

  Besides, if anything had shown him lately that just because your parents were something, it didn’t follow that you were the same, it would have been encountering Bard Marchand. There could not possibly be a person less arrogant and self-assured than poor Lena, and there could not be a person more arrogant and self-centered than her father. So if his parents had been bandits—well—

  So what.

  Maybe he would at least find out why they had become bandits. Lena had spun all sorts of fanciful tales for him. His mother had fallen in love with one of them who was noble at heart, and had followed him to the encampment. His mother had been a captive who had lost her heart to one of the bandits. His mother had been an unwilling captive. His mother had been the bandit, and his father a poor shepherd she had seduced. He thought it was a lot simpler than that. Likely that his parents had been—something—shepherds, farmers, even traders—and had a bad run of luck. Turned to robbing and fell in with the bigger group. It was a common enough story, and he was living proof that you’d do almost anything when you were starving.

  He nodded at the archivist at the front desk, who knew him so well by now that the man just waved him inside, and he went up the three stairs into the Archives themselves.

  It was a huge barn of a building, not just a room, with floor-to-ceiling shelves packed very closely together. There were ladders at intervals along the shelves, for there was no other way to reach the upper shelves. On the shelves were identical wooden boxes. Shelf upon shelf, row upon row, up and down the entire room. There was nowhere to sit and study, since the Archives were rarely visited by more than one person. Instead, there was a single table with several chairs around it at the door end of the room. The place was heated the same way that Bear’s indoor herbarium was heated, from beneath the floor. The room was a little stuffy, very warm, and very dry, and the air was scented with the smell of old paper, but not of dust. Now he knew this was because one of the duties of the Archivists was to keep everything dust free. The lighting was good too thanks to the narrow windows up near the roof all the way around, windows with real glass in them.

  He went to the shelf where the boxes of records he had last gotten into were stored, and took down the one with his rib
bon marker on it.

  He was three reports further along when he began to feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. This was definitely looking like the right year. There was no doubt in the Guard Captain’s mind—or in his reports—that he had a substantial and well-organized brigand group on his hands. They knew what they were doing; they weren’t raiding randomly. They hit wealthy traders but ignored caravans of items that were bulky and hard to find a market for, they overran entire farms and looted the places, but only at intervals that suggested that these were re-supply raids.

  He asked for help; his little Guardpost didn’t have the manpower to take down a group that big.

  He got the help he requested, in the form of an entire Guard troop, mounted and foot.

  And then, there it was. In the middle of the reports, a fatter packet. Lists, lots of them. The roster of the Guard company that had come to augment his troops. The list of the townsfolk that had volunteered. Loot captured. Casualties. The list of the dead on both sides.

  And the all-important after-action report. Mags hands shook a little as he opened the folder and read the first page.

  From the beginning, we made our real plans in secret. The Fourteenth did not make a camp; they entered the town singly and in pairs, and were quartered among the townsfolk. Their scouts scoured the hills for a full moon, looking for the signs of the passage of men. They were clever, as I knew they were—the scouts found nothing, which told me that the hiding place was probably deep in the caves. Finally I sent out the sacrificial caravan, one with the rich prize of weapons and wine, and one I knew that the brigands could not resist. Of course, these were flawed; the swords weakened to break at the quillons, axes with handles drilled, bows that would snap at the first draw, arrows with heads that would shatter on armor. I was not minded that we give them that which they could turn against us. Furthermore, the wine was triple strength, but sweetened with honey, so that the taste would not betray the strength.