Closer to the Chest

by Mercedes Lackey

  Slowly, over the course of a candlemark, the guests presented themselves, until the last of them had arrived and the serving of wine and refreshments could begin. At least the room was not over-full; it could easily hold three times as many people as it did now. And at least there was nothing, other than the candles, creating more heat. She remained by the window, enjoying the breeze wafting through her light clothing, waiting while the guests sorted themselves into groups. The various ecclesiastical dignitaries actually created quite a festive air, in their embroidered robes and sacred accessories.

  Many of these religious leaders were elderly. Beyond merely “elderly” . . . to put it kindly many were aged long past the time when a secular person would have stepped down from an important office and enjoyed a well-earned rest. Some of them were a bit feeble in the wits. Hence, the Senior Healers, keeping an eye on things and making sure none of them over-exerted themselves, although for one or two, “over-exertion” could have been a bout of coughing that wasn’t stopped quickly enough. Quite a few of these worthies were entirely unaware of anything that had been happening up here on the Hill since—well, since Mags came as a Trainee. So they were all serenely certain that her father, and not she, was King’s Own, which was why he, and not she, was at the King’s side. “Let’s not confuse any of them,” her father had said. “Or rather, let’s not add confusion to any befuddlement they are already living with. They know me as King’s Own, so let’s give them that point of familiarity.”

  And tonight, truth to be told she was perfectly willing to let them think that. Especially since, once all the formalities were concluded, it was pretty obvious by the anxious attendants some of these poor old dears had at their elbows, that her father had been right. It wouldn’t have been at all fair to them to upset the pattern they already knew. Just give them a pleasant night out, the knowledge that the King knows and values their service to their gods.

  A little quartet of Bards was playing unobjectionable music in the corner—and, she was quite sure, exerting their Bardic Gifts to keep everyone cheerful and disinclined to argue. She began to breathe a little easier. This just might come off without a slip. But she crossed her fingers for luck as she thought that.

  It certainly helped that the refreshments were all light, delicious, and nothing that might overtax old stomachs. And the wine had been chosen very carefully; there was nothing about it to say that it was not one of the finest vintages that the Palace cellars boasted—which it was—but the alcohol content was so low it probably could have been given safely to a toddler.

  Time for me to make my rounds, and find a group to settle in with until someone tells me to move on. That was the plan, anyway. In theory, tonight she was no one of importance—so she should, if she could, stick close the Prioress of Betane and the Abbess of Ardana, just in case something erupted that was meant to disgrace them.

  Circulating among the (mostly seated) guests, she was pleased to see, off in the northern corner near one of the open windows, were people she would be perfectly happy to sit with and talk to as well as her two targets. The Abbess of the Sisters of Ardana, the Prioress of Betane of the Ax, Lady Dia, Lord Jorthun, one of those senior Healers, one of the Bardic instructors, and, leaning casually a little way away from them all with his back to the wall, Mags. He was obviously not part of the group, and obviously did not want to be included in the conversation.

  :I’ll move on once you’ve settled,: she heard in her head, and nodded just enough for him to see.

  Now she was perfectly free to sit down with the others, and she did. There was literally nothing she could do using her Gift here. There were no pet animals around as the King had specifically asked that muff-dogs be left behind, and the Palace cats were vigilant and aggressive when it came to rodents. So the best thing she could do was converse and keep an eye on the Abbess and the Prioress.

  And . . . feel out Lady Tyria about her daughter, young Lirelle. More than ever, Amily was determined to recruit her. Violetta was a help, but nowhere near as steady and intelligent as Lirelle had already proven herself to be.

  “. . . and we are anxious, since these are the first Novices we have had in a very long time, and they are quite young, to ensure they get the best education possible,” Abbess Reed was saying as Amily nodded to everyone in the group before taking her seat and accepting a glass of white wine.

  :That’s the damned thing ’bout bein’ a Herald,: she heard. :Not a drop of red wine for us, ’less we’re alone in our rooms.:

  She smothered a nervous giggle, but the joke made her feel a little more relaxed.

  “Even if that causes them to leave the Sisterhood?” asked Lady Tyria, curiously. “Because education might do that. Broadening a youngster’s mind often enough makes him want to broaden his experience. Or hers.”

  “Oh certainly! We don’t want anyone in the Sisterhood who is not completely sure that this is where she wants to be!” No one could have doubted the Abbess’s sincerity, and the Prioress of Betane of the Ax nodded hearty agreement.

  “We do something of the same, but in the direction of physical training,” the Prioress said. “We want to make sure our younger Novices know damned good and well that serving Betane is not all parading about in handsome armor. That’s why we take them rough camping several times a year, and make sure everyone takes a turn at chopping firewood and scrubbing floors.”

  “Abbess, if I might recommend something? You might consider creating an actual school,” the Bard suggested. “Not for the very young, but for those who have shown talents along the line of the ones the Sisters already use. There are always places for good copyists, and many might prefer girls to boys.”

  “Oh, that sounds like a quite good idea, thank you!” the Abbess beamed. “I’ll take it up with the Sisters, but I think Thistle might welcome the chance to teach willing pupils, and it would give the new Novices some company. I always worry about the young being taught alone. Isolation is all very well when you’re our age but the young need the company of others.” She blushed a little. “And if anything is likely to sway their determination to join a chaste and celibate order, it will be hearing other young women chattering about their swains. I would rather they found it out that way than provide the fodder for a tragic Bardic ballad.”

  The Bard chuckled. “Except that I cannot picture you, Abbess Reed, holding a girl to her vows against her will.”

  “Well, of course we wouldn’t, but you never know what is going to flit through the minds of some of these girls, and I’d rather have things done tidily, and not with attendant scandal.” Her cheeks flushed a little pinker. “If anything is far, far worse than providing fodder for a tragic Bardic ballad, it is providing fodder for a farce, and worse than that, is providing fodder for a naughty joke.”

  Everyone laughed gently at this, and Mags moved away under the cover of the laughter.

  “If Lirelle were not so happy here in the Blues, I’d consider sending her to you,” Lady Tyria said, with a twinkle in her eyes, that suggested she was about to make a joke of her own. “I might anyway. Her handwriting is atrocious.”

  “Her handwriting is not that bad,” the Bard objected. “She’s in one of my classes and her copying is quite competent, thoroughly legible. You must have been looking at her notes. She’s always trying to take down every little thing we say, and not the gist. I should get one of the older girls to show her tricks of note-taking.”

  “I will take your word for it, Bard,” Lady Tyria replied, with a gracious nod. “You certainly have far more experience in teaching than I.”

  “I suppose you’re wanting her to take all the usual sorts of things,” Amily put in, deciding now was as good a time as any to see if Lady Tyria was determined that her younger daughter follow the usual path of the highborn daughter. “Penmanship, the art of letter writing, courtly graces, dancing—”

  But Lady Tyria laughed. “Oh good graciou
s, not at all! No, Lirelle is taking whatever she wants to take, which seems to be heavily weighted toward history at the moment. She has a good mind, and Semel and I are disinclined to thwart it. Not—” she added, making an amused face “—that she’d let us. She’d find a way around us, somehow.”

  Hmm, like she did when you first got here, I’ll wager. But Amily was not about to let on that she knew that story. It was, after all, potentially embarrassing for Lady Tyria, and Amily wanted to keep on the Lady’s good side.

  “Oh yes, the big, pleading eyes, trembling lower lip, and the oh please, please Mother dear, Father dear,” said Lady Dia, doing a stellar imitation of just that, while everyone laughed. “I know I got my way with my father often enough with that ploy. Mother, however, required a very good reason before she would give in. She knew me far too well by my way of thinking. Then, of course, I grew up, and realized she’d been wise, not a tyrant.”

  Lady Tyria shook her head. “Oh yes. Not Lirelle, though. That was Helane. ‘Oh please, mother, may I have the same dancing tutor as Arielle Enton?’ and ‘Oh mother, I must have Master Bretan, he’s the only one who knows the proper etiquette for the Court at Haven.’ Mind you, the governess we have for the younger ones was not up to teaching her, but nothing would do for her but the most fashionable of tutors.”

  “Expensive,” the Abbess said, shrewdly.

  “Fortunately we could bear the expense, and she certainly applied herself with a vengeance. But I am happy she is here, and if there is anything she feels she needs to learn, she can take it in a proper class, with others around her.” There was something a little—off—about the way Lady Tyria was speaking. Amily didn’t allow her face to slip into a frown, but . . . there was something that was dark lurking just under the surface.

  “All those tutors, running in and out of your house,” said the Prioress of Betane, dryly. “It must have been like a farce. The second act would be one of them trying to woo your eldest, while a second drinks all the wine and a third one gets a dairy-maid in the family way.”

  Lady Tyria’s expression darkened, and she lowered her voice, after a swift glance around to see that none of the other ecclesiastics was near. “I would not speak of this to anyone but all of you—Abbess, and Prioress, you have had your own set of troubles, I know from Semel, and I feel I can trust you. There . . . was a situation. Or a potential situation, at any rate. And it was not at all farce-like. We were just lucky that Helane was too young to really understand what was going on at the time.”

  “Well, that sounds serious,” the Prioress said, tilting her head to the side. “I gather it involved one of those tutors?”

  “It did,” Lady Tyria nodded. “Helane was only ten at the time and we had engaged a particular music tutor she was especially enamored of—all her friends, it seemed, were taking lessons from him. He did come highly recommended, and I had no hesitation in offering him a position tutoring Helane, even though he was a good deal younger than most of the gentlemen we had hired to teach her. A music tutor—not a Bard, I hasten to add,” she said with a glance at the Bard. “I will admit he was a competent musician, and he must have been a very good teacher as well, since both Helane and Lirelle learned enough from him to proceed on the lute on their own. But he was relatively young—in his twenties or so—and quite handsome. The little girls loved him because he treated them all as if he was a Court Musician and they were the ladies of the manor, complete with love-songs composed in their honor. I thought it was quite clever of him as it certainly got their attention, and I didn’t have a second thought about it. Until, that is, Lirelle and Helane both came to me—Lirelle dragging her older sister by the hand.”

  She paused, and cast another look around to be sure that there was no one else within hearing distance. All of Amily’s instincts for trouble rose up, and warned her. This was going to be important. She didn’t know why, but it was. “I am very fortunate that my children are not afraid to tell me things. Helane was only reluctant at first because she was terribly embarrassed, but Lirelle convinced her to come speak to me in private. And . . . I won’t go into details, but there was some potentially inappropriate behavior going on. It had not proceeded very far, but at the very least, this young man was exhibiting very poor judgment when it came to how he acted with Helane. I spoke to some of the other mothers immediately, and they confronted their own girls, and from that we knew that this was not a momentary lapse, this was a pattern. And what is a farce, with a young lady old enough to be married, and quick-witted enough to turn inappropriate behavior back on the young man in such a way that he never attempts it again, is something else entirely when used on a child, who does not know better, and does not know how to extract herself from a situation that is . . . uncomfortable.”

  While Lady Tyria was speaking, Amily felt herself growing more and more horrified by what she was hinting at. And looking around the group, it was clear that they were just as horrified—except for the Prioress of Betane, whose stormy brow suggested that the young man in question would have been teaching lessons in singing soprano if she had gotten hold of him. This is definitely important. And it explains a lot about Lirelle.

  The worst of the story now out, Lady Tyria relaxed a trifle, and her expression cleared. “Nothing had happened to Helane—yet—that could not be soothed away, fortunately. And of course we dismissed him immediately. When he called on me to ask why we would no longer require his services, and I told him in the bluntest of language why, he attempted to make excuses, but quite frankly, they rang false. And I didn’t like the sly look in his eyes when he made them, as if he fully expected to pull the wool over my eyes because he was a charming, intelligent man, and I was just a stupid woman.” She shrugged. “He probably came to me because I was the one that started the investigation, and he thought if he talked me around, he’d get a reprieve and we’d all take him back.”

  “Well, I must play advocate for the demon in all fairness,” said the Abbess. “It is possible that his intentions were innocent. And you could have called a Herald to invoke the Truth Spell on him. Why didn’t you do that? Then there would have been no doubt.”

  “Ah!” Lady Tyria raised a finger. “There, we are ahead of you, because some of the families who had engaged him did indeed wonder about that. So one of the other parents did suggest that, as a condition of being taken back into service. It wouldn’t even have been difficult, we knew there was a Herald due within a few days, and it would have given him the opportunity to clear his name. Rather than face the Truth Spell, he vanished. Completely disappeared. There was not a trace of him, in the town or outside it, and he left no clue as to where he intended to go.”

  “Hrm,” the Abbess said, then nodded. “That’s almost a confession in and of itself.”

  “Well,” Amily felt forced to say, as they all turned to look at her. “If you had called in a Herald, and he’d admitted he had . . . improper intentions toward the girls under it, you do realize that the Herald would have to have him arrested and brought up on charges, don’t you? That sort of thing is very much against the law. The fact that he vanished the way he did also suggests he knew, not only that it was improper, but that it was illegal.”

  One of the Healer-teachers looked at her with a bit of surprise. “Is it? But what about people like the Holderkin, who marry off their girls at about that age?”

  Amily didn’t have to answer that one. Herald Lora, who had been part of this group, but silent, answered for her. “If I had my way, they wouldn’t be allowed to,” she growled. “But that’s their religion and their custom, the parents are agreed, and the girls aren’t unwilling, so—” she shrugged, “—but molesting an innocent child against her will and the will of her parents, that’s lawbreaking.” Her eyes gleamed. “And if it was me that found it out, he’d be slapped into a gaol so fast he’d have thought he’d been Fetched there.”

  “A man like that is dangerous,” the Prioress sna
rled, looking every inch the aroused warrior. “He might do anything.”

  “So he might,” the Bard agreed. “Anyone that preys on children is not to be trusted in any capacity whatsoever.”

  “Some people would hold that women and girl-children are men’s to do what they like with,” said the Prioress of Betane, her eyes smoldering with anger. “And even that the girls were at fault in the first place.”

  That was too much; never mind that she was supposed to be a Herald, and be as impartial as possible. She couldn’t be impartial on this. “So they might,” Amily snapped. “And those people are not fit to live.”

  The Bard nodded, followed by the others. “I agree, Herald Amily. However, that is not up to us. All we can do is place them where they cannot threaten the wellbeing of children, if they are caught meddling in that way with children. We cannot rule someone’s thoughts. If they leave children alone, we cannot do anything about what they think or say. That is what the law allows us. We may not agree with that, but it is the law, and we are law abiding people.”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” she grumbled. “So we are. But in this case, I don’t have to like it.”

  “True enough. Of course,” he added, “Given the circumstances, there is nothing in the law that says we cannot mock them unmercifully for their opinions.” His eyes twinkled. “In as public and comedic a manner as possible, which will make others think twice about holding that opinion, lest they, too, find themselves the subject of mockery. There it is, you see. Sometimes the most effective weapon is words.”

  Amily gave him a little bow, which he returned. “I acknowledge the wisdom of someone who is obviously better at thinking clearly in an emotional situation than I am,” she said, and he returned her bow, and then asked Lady Tyria what her daughter Helane was currently interested in studying—if anything.