Eye Spy

by Mercedes Lackey

  But in the interval while she had been talking with her father, the entire set of four Royal children had invaded the main room of the suite again. Because of course they had; no one who didn’t have to be there wanted to be with the Queen right now. “I am so glad there are thick walls between here and home,” were the first words Kat greeted her with. “I might actually get some sleep tonight.” She plopped down onto the floor in the main room and grabbed one of the cushions the youngest boys had been using.

  Abi dropped down beside her friend and jabbed her in the ribs with an elbow. “Anyone would think you didn’t care about your mother,” she chided.

  “Of course I care! But everything is going fine, there are four Healers there, and it isn’t as if she hadn’t done this four times already. But the yelling!” Kat shook her head. “Meanwhile the four children she has now need sleep if they’re going to be able to pay any attention to their classes tomorrow.”

  “And food,” Trey pointed out helpfully. “We also need food. Kee talked someone into bringing him and Tory snacks, but the rest of us haven’t eaten since lunch.”

  Neither have I, she realized, and the thought awoke a ravening beast in her stomach. “Feel like coming with me to the kitchen?” she asked Kat, knowing that having one of the Royals with her was going to make scrounging food much, much easier. “Because I’ll bet Mama is with the Queen, and that is going to leave all of us and Papa to starve unless we do something about it.”

  Kat’s stomach chose to growl at that moment, and she laughed. “Obviously yes. Trey, you’re coming too. Niko, you make sure Tory and Kee don’t get up to mischief. No one is going to refuse the Heir. Particularly if you look wan and pathetic.”

  “Like this?” Trey asked, and put on a mournful face.

  “That’s too much. You’ll start rumors that Mama is dying.” Kat shook her head at him. “Just think about how hungry you are.”

  “That’s not hard.” Trey got up and joined them, and the three of them slipped down the servants’ stair to the ground floor, which was where everything that kept the Palace going actually got done. Two corridors later, and they presented themselves at the side door of the Palace kitchen, well out of the way of the servers who were taking food up to the Great Hall where all the courtiers were dining. The King would probably be there as well, actually; it would start rumors that there was something wrong if he didn’t go about his normal business. In the minds of the members of the Court, the only interest that a man should have in a birth was in the begetting of it.

  As usual during a meal, the kitchen was a bedlam. Dirty dishes going to the sinks, scullery maids and boys scrubbing them, pots getting put down next to the sinks to soak, cooks shouting orders, servers rushing in with stacks of used dishes and plates of leftovers and more servers streaming out with laden plates of the next course. They waited politely to be noticed, and the moment finally came when the final dessert course went out and the cooks’ jobs were over.

  “Lady have mercy!” exclaimed the head cook loudly, startling everyone. “How long have you lot been standing there?”

  “Not long,” Trey said, and licked his lips with a longing expression on his face as he stared at half a ham. “Everyone’s busy with the Queen and we kind of got—”

  “How is the Queen?” asked a dozen voices at once.

  “Yelling like she’s on a battlefield,” Kat said crisply. “And half of Healers’ is taking care of her. But nobody’s taking care of us.” She gazed meaningfully at a partly dismembered chicken sitting with the other leftovers on the worktables.

  That was all it took. In very little time, the three of them were going back up the stairs, laden with big platters of leftovers. By this point it was all cold, of course, but they’d made sure to pick out things that were just fine eaten cold.

  There was more than enough for all of them and Mags too. Rather than bother with setting the table, Mags declared a picnic, and they all ate with their hands, sitting together on the rug. And when the now empty platters were sitting outside the door to be collected by the servants, Kat and Abi went to her room. Abi had intended to study, but Kat had other plans.

  “Tell me about the Healer!” she exclaimed, flopping down on Abi’s bed, when Abi had taken out the firebird feather her brother Perry had given her, and stuck it in its holder to light up her little room.

  “There’s not much to tell,” she protested, but she told it all anyway. Kat listened without interrupting until she was finished.

  “I guess your Gift really is something no one knows what to do with,” she said. “Trey and Niko and I all have very set lessons and exercises, and they even have Kee doing Shielding practice so he keeps his Shields up. A good thing too, or he’d probably be going crazy right now, what with Mama in labor.”

  Kee had demonstrated he had Empathy—usually a Healer’s Gift—remarkably early. Fortunately, thanks to Perry among others, people had noticed before the Gift had developed enough to become a trouble for him.

  “I really wish it was a normal Gift, or none at all,” Abi replied, restlessly running the hem of her tunic through her fingers. “I like things to be . . . orderly.”

  “Which is why you’re going to make a great Artificer,” Kat teased. “All math and tidy numbers, where everything always works the same way every time.”

  “It’s not like that,” Abi protested, except she knew it actually was like that, and that this was the reason why she was beginning to enjoy the classes she had been a bit dubious about not that long ago. If you knew the way a problem worked, then working the problem always gave you the same answer. Math was reliable.

  “You can’t fool me, I’m your best friend and I’ve known you forever,” Kat reminded her.

  “I wouldn’t want to fool you, except if it was a joke,” she replied. “You might order my head chopped off.”

  “They won’t let me do that,” Kat giggled. “Or I swear, I’d have had Trey’s head off a long time ago. Here, read something besides musty math books,” she added, shoving something with a cover Abi didn’t recognize at her. “This just came into the Royal library, and I swiped it before anyone else could.”

  But Abi pushed it back toward her, much to her surprise. “Believe it or not, I’d rather read those musty math books.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Abi turned up at the refectory in Heralds’ Collegium in the middle of the lunch mob all alone. She looked around, but she didn’t see anyone obvious to eat with. Trey and Kat must have had an earlier lunch. Niko was in the middle of a huddle of his friends at a single table, and Abi didn’t want to intrude on what was clearly a Very Male discussion.

  About girls, she guessed with amusement, catching their covert glances at some of the more attractive girls among the Trainees. All the eyes moved to a particular target at once and then quickly away, and none of those targets were boys, so she was pretty sure she had read the group correctly.

  Her presence would certainly end that discussion, considering that she tended to make fun of Niko’s butterfly memory when it came to a girl he crushed on. It was a good thing that so far he’d never let the object of his desires know he was crushing on her, since he would have left a long string of broken hearts—or at least really annoyed girls—in his wake.

  So she settled in a corner favored by Blues where her uniform wouldn’t be conspicuous, helped herself to the bowls of food as they were passed around and proceeded to methodically work her way through her lunch. As always, she kept her ear open for bits of gossip that might be useful to her father, but today, there wasn’t really anything of interest.

  That wasn’t such a bad thing, since it meant she could eat her lunch in peace; but she’d barely begun when she caught sight of three of the boys from her class moving through the crowd and working their way in her direction. There was no mistaking it after a few moments; they couldn’t have any g
oal but her, because they passed several good seating opportunities. So the question was, was this a group of Dudley Remp’s allies, or of his former victims?

  She put down her fork and watched them with as neutral an expression as possible, making sure that they knew that she knew that they were making for her.

  Their expressions as they neared were anxious, a little like a group of puppies who wanted to please but weren’t sure of their reception. She relaxed and smiled. Unless they were the best actors in Haven, this was what she had been waiting for. Finally some of her fellow Artificer Trainees were ready to make friends.

  When they finally got to her table, they stood there for a moment, shuffling their feet, uncertain of how to begin, and it occurred to her that they were acting—socially—much younger than their real ages. They seemed to have no idea about how to open a conversation with a stranger, especially a girl. So she made the first move.

  “There’s plenty of room, sit down,” she said, in her friendliest tones. “I always like company over meals.” All three of them looked a little startled, then enormously pleased, and took seats around her, two on her left and one on her right.

  “I’m Emmit, he’s Rudi, and this is Brice,” said the boy on her right. “Uh, hello!”

  “Brice—you’re the boy Remp punched in the stomach!” she said to the third, who had probably incurred Dudley’s wrath because he was a good deal handsomer than the bully, if a lot smaller. Brice started.

  “How—”

  “Dudley confessed under Truth Spell,” she said, trying not to sound smug although “smug” was certainly how she felt. “It’s one of the reasons he got expelled.”

  This, of course, was an immediate icebreaker, and she cheerfully detailed the entire experience. After all, no one had sworn her to secrecy. Unfortunately for their curiosity, once they got over gloating over Dudley’s downfall, she couldn’t actually answer a lot of their questions, which were about “how the Truth Spell works.” She could describe the mechanics—the blue glow that hung about the person being questioned, the Coercive and non-Coercive spells, and why some Heralds could set one and not the other, and she could describe what it felt like to try and lie under the Coercive version, but that was all. They wanted to know what made it work, and why, and all she could do was say, “My Gift doesn’t work like that, so I don’t know.”

  “Pity,” Brice sighed at last. “If you could just construct a mechanical apparatus to set it, you could have one in every village and not need to wait for a Herald.”

  “But even innocent people don’t care for having it set on them,” Abi pointed out. “Coercive makes you blurt out all kinds of things that are related to what you’re guilty of, but maybe not directly. That can be awkward. I mean, look how Dudley blabbed about Brice, and about how he likes to grab girls and get away with it.”

  “And people like my village headman would use it just because he could,” said Emmit. “At least in the Heralds’ hands we know people aren’t going to abuse it.”

  “Not on purpose anyway,” Abi pointed out. “But embarrassing things do slip out without anyone intending them to.”

  “Which is why the threat is as effective as the Spell itself, I guess,” Rudi pointed out. “But that’s not what we came here for.” He poked Brice in the ribs with an elbow.

  “Oh! Aye,” said Brice. “We brought you copies of the notes from the lectures in the materials class that you missed. We each took a section, so it wasn’t a lot of work, really.” All three of them reached inside their tunics and pulled out a folded packet of reused parchment. When she opened Rudi’s, the scraped page was covered in carefully written notes in a very precise hand in ink. Brice’s section was a lot smaller than the other two, and a bit oddly spelled. The other two were identical except for the handwriting and the fact that they were correctly spelled and much longer. She beamed at them, and they turned suddenly bashful. “This is exactly what I need!” she exclaimed. “I was going to ask to borrow someone’s notes so I could copy them—thank you so much for doing the copying for me!”

  “Oh, well,” Brice said, blushing. “It’s the least we can do for you getting rid of Dudley for us.”

  “What I don’t understand was why he was in the Blues in the first place,” Rudi said, as she tucked all three sets of notes into the front of her own tunic. “He didn’t want to be there. He cheated all the time. And his father’s rich, so it’s not as if he isn’t going to inherit a fortune.”

  “From what I saw, it was his father who wanted him there,” Abi observed. “Really, really wanted him there.”

  “Too skinflint to hire tutors I guess,” said Brice, dismissively, and the conversation moved on to other things.

  But as the conversation flowed around her, she kept coming back to that question. Why had the elder Remp wanted his son in the Artificers so very badly?

  4

  With the Royals, her sibs, and her three new Artificer friends, Abi felt perfectly contented. None of her other fellow students had warmed up to Abi, but it wasn’t as if she needed to feel that she was the most popular person in the class. Emmit, Brice, and Rudi were not unlike her: serious, not inclined to pranking or gossip, and genuinely interested in what they were all doing. “Dull,” Perry called them, teasing her, but she didn’t find them dull at all.

  They generally worked together on the extra problems their teachers set to be done when lessons were over in an empty classroom or the dining hall. Today it was the dining hall.

  “Well,” Rudi said ruefully, as they checked the solutions they had gotten to a geometry problem, and they saw they had each gotten a different answer, “we’ll never be brilliant.”

  “I don’t want to be brilliant, I want to be reliable,” Brice retorted, rubbing the back of his neck. “Well, Abi’s the most likely of us to be right, so—”

  Abi laughed. “I think the answer lies in the notes we all took. I think Master Ketnar spent a little too much time at the tavern last night--he sounded like he had a hangover. Let’s compare those first.”

  Sure enough, they’d all misrecorded something in Master Ketnar’s lecture; by comparing all four sets and applying some logic, they figured out where they’d each gone wrong, and finally all arrived at the same answer when they applied the corrected notes to the problem.

  “All right, we’ve done this forward, now let’s do it backward,” Rudi said, in that tone that told Abi that he was going to do the problem that way even if they didn’t. Of the four of them, he was the most thorough. She sighed inwardly; Rudi had a way of making you feel guilty if you sat there slacking while he worked. So they all put their heads down and joined him.

  The refectory, or dining hall, was always a good place to get together to work between meals, and it wasn’t that bad during them as long as you picked a table well out of the way. Abi would have liked to suggest that they all work outside, but it wasn’t practical. Too many sheets of notes to blow away, too much scribbling on slates, and sitting crosslegged on the hard ground, with your head bent over your slate wasn’t nearly as comfortable as sitting at a table. Of course, they could have brought pillows and rugs, but pillows and rugs suggested lounging, and if they did that they’d never get the assigned problems done.

  Brice was the last to finish, laying his chalk aside with a sigh—no need to compare answers this time, they were all working toward the information they’d been given, and they already had that written down. “And that’s the last,” he said. “Now can we go sit in the warm grass while Abi reads history to us?”

  “Meet you by our tree,” Abi said, gathering up her notes, her sheet of written answers, and her slate and chalk to take them up to her room for safekeeping. None of them ever left anything behind to be picked up later. No one did. Although the “Collegium Prankster” incident had happened years ago, before Abi was born, even, no one ever left so much as a scrap or a book behind where it could
be stolen or defaced. The details had faded in most peoples’ minds by now, but not some of the lessons learned from the incident.

  In fact, Abi was pretty sure that of all of the students at the Collegia, she was the only one who knew the truth about the tale, since her father and mother had been neck-deep in it.

  Unfortunately, some people didn’t learn the most important lesson, Abi reflected, as she came back down the stairs, now laden only with her history book and a small rug to sit on. Women and girls are not the property of men and boys, to do with as they please. Dudley’s behavior was evidence of that much.

  She’d taken to reading the history lesson aloud at Brice’s request. He was not a good reader and labored through words she leaped over, and now she understood why his copy of the set of notes the friends had given her was smaller than the other two. He’d worked twice as hard to achieve half as much. He understood words when spoken; he just had trouble reading and writing them.

  Well, the Artificers weren’t here to learn how to read, she reasoned. So she had volunteered. History was the only nonmath class her group was required to take this quarter anyway. It wasn’t as if she was doing all their work for them.

  Rudi and Brice had also brought small rugs. Emmit, however, turned up a few moments after the rest laden down with so many cushions it was a wonder he didn’t lose any.

  “What did I say about lounging?” Abi demanded, eyeing the pile.

  “I knew you were going to say that!” Emmit protested. “I just brought cushions for all of us, because I knew you were going to say that!” He dropped his pile and tossed pillows to Brice, Rudi and Abi, who caught them. “Look, we’re none of us going to be Heralds. We’re none of us going to have to get used to roughing it, because all of us are going to be working in nice, civilized places where it’s not hard to find a pillow for your bum. And besides, the last time I gave in to your ridiculous demand that we martyr ourselves by sitting on the hard ground, I got ants.”