Changes v(cc-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  Of course... all the proteges he had stolen work from were “conveniently” so far away that without using a Herald to relay the testimony, no one was going to learn the truth soon. Ah, but Marchand had a hidden card to play. He had young Farris brought in to prove his case.

  This had not done him the good that he had thought it would—though that might have been because another Bard had taken pains to explain that stealing someone else’s work and claiming it as your own was a serious breach of Bardic ethics. So, perhaps with his hero-worship shaken a bit, Farris must have been less than successful at proving Marchand’s innocence. He did go on at some length that he considered having his tune used by Marchand was an honor he didn’t deserve, however. So they got a contradictory answer. Farris wasn’t certain that he’d given Marchand the melody and the permission—but he was certain that it was an honor, and in his confused way, he indicated that if Marchand had asked, he would have offered the tune with both hands.

  Mags would very much like to have heard Lita’s thoughts about that. As Mags understood it, teachers did use student work all the time, but it was always with permission beforehand and with full credit. Not appropriated without, or with ill-informed, consent, and not without credit. But with Farris partially backing Marchand’s claim, there wasn’t a great deal she could do other than rebuke him sternly for his “carelessness” in not giving full credit. Then, according to the sources, the volume of the discourse had been reduced to muttering.

  More than that, he didn’t know, since no one was there except Lita, Lena, Farris, and Marchand himself, Lena wasn’t talking to him, and no one else was talking at all.

  Mags was quite certain that if outright theft could have been proved, Marchand would have been in very serious trouble indeed. He suspected that Lita was going to ask the Heralds for a quiet little investigation into the matter, but until they came back with answers, Marchand had skated by again. As it was, he was ordered to keep away from Farris and not to take on a protege again. Ever.

  Whether or not he would actually do that... Mags was dubious. Marchand spent a lot of time away from Court and the inquisitive eyes of his fellow Bards. It would be quite easy to aquire another Talented youngster out there and just keep him away from the Bardic Collegium entirely. He could teach this unofficial protege himself, even find a position for him in some place that knew nothing of how the Bardic Collegium worked, where if Marchand said the protege was a Bard and he wore Scarlets, well, then, he must be one. Marchand would have someone to steal tunes from, and no one the wiser.

  It just remained to be seen whether getting caught was enough to frighten him into doing his own work again and not resort to what would be fraud.

  So much for Marchand. He was someone Mags would rather not think about.

  Except, of course, it seemed that Lena had finally been goaded into standing up against her father openly, and that could only be a good thing.

  Meanwhile, the search for Ice and Stone went on. Down in Haven, Nikolas was not only hiding from his daughter’s temper, Mags knew he would be extending himself and his resources as far as he could to find the two Karsite agents. But these two were cut from a cloth that no one in Valdemar had any experience with. What had always worked before was not going to work now.

  Some people surrounding the King thought they had probably left already; after all, they had been thwarted in a very public manner, and their identies had been compromised. But Mags wasn’t so sure of that. He’d had a look at some of their thoughts; these weren’t men who would take even that grave a setback as the reason to retreat.

  For one thing, even if they went back to Karse rather than going back to wherever they called home, they wouldn’t find much of a welcome when they got there. They knew enough about Karse to threaten a Karsite native with demons... which meant that they knew very well such things were real and deadly. The Karsites would not tolerate failure from an unbeliever; they barely tolerated it in their own ranks. Mags was damn certain that he wouldn’t risk it.

  For another, the fact that they had executed their predecessors for failure indicated that they knew that were altogether likely to face a similar fate if they returned without fulfilling their contract. And maybe they were the very best of their kind—they were certainly better than the first batch that had gone out—but even the best can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and even the best have been trained by someone. Mags recalled the images he’d caught from Temper’s mind—the harsh environment, the rigid rules of behavior, the unforgiving nature of Temper’s superiors. No, Ice and Stone would find no sympathy there. And it was—at least according to all the history he had been reading—a time-honored tradition for the Master to eliminate the student who failed.

  If Mags had been in their shoes... he would lie low, wait until vigilance was relaxed, and try some other way to at least give the appearance of destabilizing the Crown or harming Valdemar in a significant way. What that could possibly be... he had not a clue. Amily was probably no longer a target; there really was no good reason to make her one. Even with collaborators on the Hill, everyone was looking out for her now. If she so much as stabbed herself with a needle, there would be people checking to make sure it had been an accident and the needle wasn’t poisoned.

  For all he knew, though, these men had some way of unleashing a plague on Haven, and summer was certainly the time to spread disease. A plague could wipe out thousands very quickly, and the highborn would certainly not be immune unless they left Haven. Even if the King and his family didn’t sicken and die, it would lay low many of those also responsible for ruling the country.

  Or—hot as it was, dry as it was—if they spread across the city one night, setting fires, they could engulf the entire city in flames. Would the Hill be spared? Possibly . . .

  But in his nightmares, he could imagine only too well a scenario in which it would not be. Where Ice and Stone set delayed fires of the type they’d tried to set before, using candles—and meanwhile, had brought wild rats up to the Hill and the homes leading up to it. Affix a box full of smoldering tinder to the rat and turn it loose—eventually it will be somewhere that will burn—inside walls, in stables full of hay, in a storage room. Do that fifty, sixty, seventy times—and the manors on the Hill, if not the Palace, will catch and burn. The privileged seldom know how to deal with an emergency themselves. They would be relying on the Guard and the Constabulary Fire Service. But they would already be down in Haven, and stretched thin.

  And then what? Everyone flees to the Palace? And in the confusion, in the crush of panicked people running from their burning homes, it would be easy for Ice and Stone to get inside the walls and start fires there. They might not even need to murder the King or try to manipulate him through the King’s Own at that point. With Haven in ruins, centuries of records destroyed, an entire city homeless, Valdemar would be in chaos for decades, and Karse would have exactly what it wanted.

  He tried not to think about such things. Or rather, he tried not to think about such things after tentatively Mindspeaking Nikolas one night about the time he knew the shop was generally empty, offering with great diffidence that these ideas had occurred to him and then waiting for an aswer as a properly respectful student should.

  ::We’d considered both of those scenarios,:: Nikolas replied. ::But you’re the one who has actually picked up some of their thoughts, which gives you an edge in understanding how they might react to this setback. We’ll put a higher urgency on those possibilities. Thank you, Mags.::

  Mags wasn’t at all sure what “higher urgency” meant, but at least someone would be on guard against those possibilities, which allowed him to sleep a little better at night.

  He did find out what had happened with the Guard Healer Cuburn; that particular spectacle had been very, very public. Bear had stormed down to the barracks and in front of a large group of the Guard (and more who came when they heard the altercation) confronted the man about spying on him for his father. Then he had unleashed a
long tirade on the theme of “Old men who want their sons to be nothing more than copies, but vastly inferior copies, of themselves, so they can preen about having a boy who duitifully follows in his father’s footsteps, yet never have to worry about finding rivals in their own houses.”

  According to Corwin, who had actually been there, Bear’s rant had not only been scathing, it had hit home with no few of the Guard. Evidently Bear’s father was not the only man who wanted to keep his son under his paternal thumb, bound body and soul to whatever the family business or tradition was, regardless of whether the boy was suited to it. Bear had gotten quite a few sympathetic hearers that he probably had not expected.

  Enough that when Bear was done and had stormed back to Healers’ Collegium, the Captain of the Guard had taken Cuburn aside and suggested that his men were going to find it difficult to completely trust in someone who had taken the position with the Guard for the purpose of spying on someone. How could they trust anyone who was “no better than a nosy old gossip?”

  Cuburn had vigorously denied he was doing any such thing and swore that he had taken the job because he wanted to serve the Guard, who were the first defense of Valdemar. He swore he would prove it any way that the Captain wanted.

  He probably hadn’t reckoned on the Captain calling his bluff.

  “In that case,” the Captain had said, “You won’t object to my arranging a transfer.”

  Mags didn’t know if Bear had heard about that part. He also didn’t know if the Captain had actually gone through with asking for that transfer. Corwin had told him that transfers could take several moons, so... well, he supposed they would only know the truth when Cuburn was gone.

  Officially, Bear had been given a stern lecture by his Dean. Unofficially—well, who knew? He was still acting as disgruntled as his namesake after a long winter’s hibernation. Mags was perversely proud of him, actually, as proud as he was of Lena. Bear didn’t have his father in reach, but he did have his father’s spy, and he could be certain that every word he had spoken would get back to the man he really wanted to have words with.

  But he couldn’t tell them that, because he hadn’t seen so much as a thread of Bardic Trainee rust or Healer Trainee pale green since he’d sent them out of his room.

  All Mags could do, really, was concentrate on his studies and on research in the library and the Heralds’ Archives to see if anything like Ice and Stone or the shields they wore had ever come up before, and, if so, had there been any way of finding such things when the ones who were being shielded didn’t want to be found. He frequently found himself looking back with nostalgia on the time when the most urgent reason to be here was to find out who or what his parents had been. Then it had only been to prove that he was not the child of thieves and murderers. Now there was, potentially, an entire city at risk.

  And he prayed for the weather to break. Because just maybe all it was going to need was a good hard rain and cooler weather to clear peoples’ heads. Since he was pretty sure that virtually everyone else in all of Haven was praying for the same thing, it was a wonder that the gods hadn’t answered before this.

  Which, Dallen’d tell me, an’ prolly any good priest, ain’t how gods work. Which don’ seem fair t’me, when all we’re askin’ fer is a liddle rain.

  He was up in the Archives alone when the sound of light footsteps in the corridor warned him that he wasn’t going to be alone much longer. He sighed. He really, truly, did not want to be bothered right now. It was late enough that his daily headache had bloomed nicely behind his forehead and cheekbones, and it was only the fact that it was still too hot to sleep in the Field kept him up here in the Archives.

  And they were female footsteps from the sound of it, unless it was a page. Pages usually didn’t come up here unless they were sent. So either some female was coming here, or a page had been sent here, and in either case it was more likely that the desired object of the person’s search was Mags and not a random volume of Heraldic Reports.

  He abandoned the passage he had been working on and waited, knowing he might as well. If that unknown someone was coming here to do research herself, he could go right back to what he was doing. But if she was looking for him, he wouldn’t be allowed to get back to work without hearing what she wanted and probably coming up with an answer for her. He just hoped it was something trivial—like an answer to part of the classwork.

  But when Lena came in through the door, he was actually shocked. He would have expected to see almost anyone but Lena. “Lena?” he said incredulously.

  She ducked her head a little, diffidently. “I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important . . .” At the moment there wasn’t a trace of the bold little tiger who had faced down her father.

  He closed the book and pushed it aside. “Importat, aye. Urgent... not s’much.”

  “Oh, good. I need advice,” she said, sitting down at the little table across from him.

  Oh, bugger. Here it comes. She’s going to ask me for advice about—

  “It’s my father.” She sighed heavily. “He wants me to talk to you about an invitation for you and Amily.”

  Mags eyed her dubiously. “What sorta invitation? T’what? Why me’n Amily?”

  “He wants you and Amily to come to one of those private concerts,” she said, with decidedly mixed emotions warring in her expression. “It’s in one of the mansion on the Hill. I... just don’t know what to think about him anymore.”

  “Ye think ’bout him th’s same way ye think ’bout any other thief. But why’d ’e ask fer me i’ the furst place?” He looked right into her eyes so she could see the sincerity there.

  “You’re—well, you’re Mags,” she replied, as if that was answer enough. “You stopped that madman from burning the stable, you’re a brilliant Kirball player, and you saved Amily.”

  “Lotsa people saved Amily,” he pointed out with perfect truth. She rolled her eyes.

  “You are either incredibly modest or incredibly dense,” she said crossly. “You act as if you aren’t anyone special, but you saw how those young highborn treated you before you rescued Amily—like a hero. And now? Every single person at that concert is going want to talk to you, flirt with you, ask your opinon on things.” She shook her head slightly. “Anyone who is there is going to lord it over everyone who wasn’t if you turn up there. Which, of course, Father knows. He acts like a spoiled adolescent who just knows no matter how much trouble he gets into, he can charm his way out of it. This is probably part of the ‘charming his way out of it.’ ”

  “Because it gets ’im more people what think ’e’s next thing’ t’ a miracle worker. I’d be sick ’cept it’d take too much energy.” Mags actually did feel a little sick. Did Marchand ever stop trying to manipulate people? Was there ever a moment in his day that he wasn’t scheming and plotting a way to make an already fabulous existence even better? The man had adulation, hordes of followers, he was wealthy, he could have virtually anything he wanted within reason. But it never seemed to be anough for him.

  “He’s asking Amily too, because you are the romantic couple, the hero who risked his life to save her and all of that rot.” She paused. “I think.”

  “Whazzat s’posed t’mean?” he asked.

  “That... I don’t know, because he could actually have taken Lita’s lecture to heart this time, and this could be a demonstration of good intentions. Or he could be even more crafty than I thought, and it’s the appearance of good intentions, designed to throw any sort of suspicions off.” She frowned. “I just don’t know. I can’t tell. And... oh, damn, anyway!” She scrubbed fiercely at her eyes. “He’s being nice to me after I was the one that told Lita what he was doing! He thanked me for ‘bringing him to his senses.’ I don’t know if it’s real, or if it’s because he knows he won’t be able to get to you except through me. I want it to be real. I still want it, even after all I know about him!” She looked up at him, shoulders hunched. “Do you think it’s real?”

  Mags tried
to figure out how to be sympathetic without being overly sympathetic and failed utterly. “Erm . . .” he said.

  “And I am not going to cry!” she said fiercely. “Bear was horrible about it, but he was right. I am not going to cry over this! He doesn’t deserve one bit of my concern, right?”

  “Ah,” was all he could manage. He studied his hands. And thought. “Well,” he said tentatively. “Amily could stand ter get out. I don’ mind bein’ shown ’round like a prize, ’cause I kin git a chance t’ do th’ whole boy ain’t too bright act thet Nikolas wants me ter do. So, hell, Marchand’s motives don’t even come inter what I decide, practically speakin’.”

  “I suppose . . .” she replied. She didn’t sound convinced.

  “An’ ‘nother thing. Git ’im t’invite Lord Wess. Feller has a eye on ’im, an’ ’e’s sharper nor a good knife. I cain’t go sniffin’ ’round Marchand’s head w’out he’s doin’ somethin’ ’gainst th’ law. But Wess? Wess kin watch yer pa, an’ lissen, an’ prolly git ’im t’say thin’s ’e’d ruther not. Iffen yer pa’s fakin’ it, reckon Wess’ll winkle it out.”

  He smiled, rather pleased with himself for thinking of that, and made a mental note to add Wess to his little company of helpers. He didn’t have anyone among the highborn, just the people around Master Soren. Wess would be exceedingly useful, and he’d gotten the impression that Wess would enjoy being exceedingly useful. The young lord had often complained that as the third son, he had about as much utility as a third leg.