Intrigues: Book Two of the Collegium Chronicles (a Valdemar Novel) Read online

  “. . . I can’t believe you came out in the middle!” Pip was exclaiming indignantly. “You were so much better than that Bard that sang at my sister’s wedding!”

  “Well, it’s a really common song,” Lena said, shyly, and went on to explain everything that Mags had already figured—given how often she had told over the scoring method to him and Bear.

  “I still don’t think they scored you fairly,” Pip grumbled, and spotted Mags. “Heyla! Let’s get in there, those sausage rolls are wearing thin, and it’s beef night!”

  The room was full of Bardic Trainees, all of them ravenous. Mags had a feeling that Lena was not the only one who’d had an uncertain stomach before the Contest. Several of them still looked a bit green. Some looked triumphant or smug, some looked depressed.

  Lena excused herself for a moment and went over to console several of the depressed ones, who had tucked themselves together around an out-of-the-way table. After a moment, Gennie joined her, and soon had them laughing.

  When they both returned, and the group took the usual table, Mags gave the girls a look that invited explanation.

  Gennie grinned broadly.

  “You lot remember that incident with the presentation to the King?” she asked.

  Pip rolled his eyes. “I thought you ordered us never to talk about that again?” he replied, mockingly.

  “I ordered you never to talk about it again,” she said, thumping him lightly on the top of the head. “And if you do, there will be a reckoning.”

  “Well, that’s a double standard if ever I heard one,” Pip grumbled.

  Gennie turned to Mags. “It’s pretty simple, I was supposed to present a cup of wine to the King when I was a First Year, at a thing where he was supposed to be giving out prizes for students with poor parents that had been sponsored up here by people like Councilor Soren. I got all tongue-tied, then my feet followed my tongue, I tripped and spilled it all over his Whites. Red wine, of course.”

  Pip smothered a laugh. She reached out without looking and thumped him again.

  “Gor. That must’ a bin—” Mags shook his head. He could just imagine it. “I’d’a gotten sick on ’is boots t’ cap it off.”

  “I nearly did. And that is why the King never drinks anything but water and white wine in public, even though he loathes white wine,” she said ruefully.

  “And now, here you are, the Captain of the Team South Kirball players!” said Halleck.

  “Well yes.” She shrugged. “You muddle through somehow—”

  “Well I wish someone would help me muddle through,” said Bear, coming wearily up to the table. “I hope one of you saved me some beef. There’s nothing left on the table but burnt ends.”

  Wordlessly, Mags pushed over the heaping plate he’d reserved for Bear. It was cold, but Bear didn’t seem to care; he just slapped it between two bread-ends, smothered it in hot-root sauce and tucked in.

  “What happened?” Lena asked.

  Bear groaned around a bite. “I am mortal sorry I missed your Contest, but I got called away midmorning and I’ve been at ex-Councilor Chamjey’s house since. He was supposed to answer to the Council about those charges—”

  “What charges?” asked Gennie, looking surprised.

  “Ma—” began Bear, and cut off as Mags kicked him under the table.

  Fortunately Pip was more caught up on Court doings than Gennie was. “He was profiteering, or trying to, because of a bad season and a sheep disease,” Pip replied, looking a little smug that he knew something Gennie didn’t. “He basically cornered the market on mutton, lamb, and especially wool. The way he had it, if you’d wanted wool this year, you’d have been buying it from him or not at all, at his prices. He resigned, but when the Council looked into things and discovered just how much he was going to profit, and how much it was going to hurt some of the other Guilds, they decided to bring him up on charges.”

  “Huh.” Gennie shook her head. “Now . . . that’s something I don’t understand. ’Cause no one would have faulted him for finding all this stuff out and making a reasonable profit. But no. He had to get greedy. What’s the point?”

  “So what happened?” Pip asked Bear, who washed down an enormous bite with sweetened tea before replying.

  “Well, he got sick. They brought in a good Healer, who couldn’t find anything, other than that he wasn’t faking. He was bad sick too, so they finally brought me in. I dosed him good with all kinds of things, finally got him more or less cleaned out and resting, and I used a lot of those medicines I’ve been making up for that medicine chest I was talking about. But he looked like a beaten rug, and I still hadn’t found anything, because he didn’t have a fever or any other sign of a sickness. Well—”

  Bear must have realized how raptly they were all listening to him, because he stopped talking and deliberately took another bite. And another. And another.

  “Well?” asked Pip, Lena, and Halleck at the same time.

  “Well . . . looked to me like he’d been poisoned, he had all the same symptoms of someone that’s gotten something like wasp-bitten. By the time I saw him, he was starting to swell up. First thing I thought of was maybe something stung him, but there weren’t any bites on him. I asked the servants, they swore he hadn’t eaten nor drunk anything he didn’t always have. Finally I went down to the kitchen, and I got hold of his tray. There wasn’t anything poisonous on it, they’d tested everything on a mouse on the first Healer’s orders, but thank goodness they had the wit not to wash stuff after that—the cook told me she wasn’t going to wash anything without direct orders.”

  He paused again for another couple of bites. Mags got the feeling he was really enjoying this. And Mags didn’t blame him in the least. By this point, the tables on either side of them were full of people leaning their way to eavesdrop.

  “So?” said Pip, Gennie, and someone else at the next table.

  “So, I asked the cook if there was anything she was supposed to keep away from Chamjey. ‘Oh Kernos love you, duckie,’ she said, ‘Just the hint of chamomile makes him go all over green, and he’s on the chamberpot for a day.’ So I checked the teacup, and the teapot.” He grinned. “Plain old mint in the teapot—but just a scraping of chamomile in the cup along with the mint. Might look like just leaves to anyone else, but not to me. Bugger tried to poison himself to get out of trouble. I went up, told the Healer in charge, who told the Guards, who searched the room and Chamjey and found bits of chamomile flowers in his pocket.”

  “Bear!” Gennie exclaimed. “That is excellent ferreting work! A Herald couldn’t have done it better!”

  Bear blushed and grinned. He blushed even harder when Lena beamed wordlessly at him.

  “I’m mortal sorry I missed yer Contest, Lena,” he concluded apologetically. “It took me a whole lot longer to do all that stuff than to tell about it.”

  “I’m glad you missed it!” she exclaimed, her eyes bright. “I’m glad because you just proved you can do things nobody else here can do. You’re a hero!”

  “Uh—” Bear said, blushing and tongue-tied. Mags just hid a smile.

  9

  :I CAIN’T b’lieve it’s finally spring,: Mags sighed, as the sun baked his shoulders with gentle warmth. :I thought it’d be winter ferever.: Even though he was down in Haven, in the street, there were still hints of growing things in the breeze. And flower-sellers on the street! Everyone seemed just a little bit more cheerful too, and a bit less impatient.

  :For a while there so did I,: Dallen replied. Mags got a mental glimpse of Dallen blissfully prone in a bed of young clover, basking in the sun. :Enjoy this while you can. Spring is a treacherous creature. Tomorrow it could be pouring down rain that is near ice. Or we could be graced with a blizzard. Or, well, who knows. We might end up witn a three-day flood.:

  :Don’t I jest know it,: he said ruefully. Such reversals of weather were all too familiar to the mine workers, and he never trusted the smiling face of a spring day until summer was within reach. H
e had spent far too many days working the sluices in rain that was just barely above freezing, or worse, in one of those unexpected snowstorms. Those were times when the only advantage to wearing nothing but a few rags for clothing was that they dried on your body faster when you got out of the wet.

  Ah, but today—today was the closest he had been to contented since the Foreseers began spreading their tales. Six days of the week there were classes, but not the seventh. There was no Kirball practice either—not that he would have objected to practicing, but Herald Setham wanted a day off as well. So that meant that, like most of the Trainees, the seventh day was one that was all his to spend as he liked. Lately, that had been holed up in his room, studying. However, today Herald Nikolas had a long round of discreet errands that needed to be run down in Haven—mostly messages to be hand-delivered, but a few items to be fetched from shops—and he had asked Mags to run them.

  That had sounded just fine to Mags. A day like this one begged to be enjoyed, and the best way for him to enjoy something was to get as far away from people who recognized him as possible.

  The errands took Mags out of the grounds of the Collegia and away from all those people who were still thinking daggers at him. There were a disheartening number who still were, despite everything that his Kirball teammates and even the King had said and done. Down here in the city, no one knew who he was—he would have been just another Trainee, if he had chosen to wear Grays.

  Which he hadn’t, actually; Nikolas wanted him to be mostly-invisible, and that had meant not dressing in his Grays. He’d left Dallen behind and dressed in a set of clothing he’d gotten a couple weeks ago as a hand-me-down from Marc; very good quality clothing, though a bit worn, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing that marked him as out of the ordinary, all in various shades of brown. He blended in so perfectly with the folk in the street that he was practically impossible to pick out from the rest of the crowd. Exactly the way he and Nikolas wanted it.

  Nikolas had not given him a time-frame for these errands, which meant that he was free to spend the entire day in the city if he chose. He was running some errands for Amily as well, which gave him even more of an excuse to stay down here among minds that were not wishing him elsewhere for the better part of the day. Later he could catch up with Bear and Lena, maybe . . .

  Assuming Bear and Lena were not . . . “together.” That was another reason for running the errands. He could take a hint. Even when they thought nobody knew how much they liked each other but they themselves, well, it was pretty obvious to everyone else. Today would be a perfect day for a picnic, and before they could hem and haw about whether or not to invite him, he had disinvited himself, and nearly gave the game away by laughing at the guilty relief on both of their faces. That was another small bright spot; he was very, very glad that they were “getting on” so well.

  He had spent the morning on the errands that required he pick up things; for Nikolas, this meant getting a number of small, mysterious, wrapped packages at various merchants around the city. “I’m here for Master White’s parcel,” he would say, having practiced the phrase over and over and carefully enunciating each word so as not to give himself away with his crude way of speaking and his dreadful accent. Instead, he sounded a bit slow, which was quite all right. There was nothing wrong with being “a bit slow” when it came to impersonating a servant.

  A parcel would be produced, he would put it in his carry-bag, and go on to the next item to be picked up. He’d more or less mapped all of these things out in advance, interspersing Amily’s requests with those of her father. That way, if against all odds someone actually was watching him, the pattern of errands would make no sense.

  Amily’s errands were much more straightforward, and not at all mysterious. He picked up more wool for her knitting; brought a bit of wool to match, and stood by while the shop-owner and her two assistants combed over all the skeins to find the closest. He got some scented candles at a chandler she specified, a quire of paper, a pot of a particular sort of black ink, and another of red, book-binding glue, and a cone of spiced nuts only found at one particular confectioner in the entire city. That last had amused him; now he would know what to get her if he wanted to buy her a little present!

  And—she wanted soap.

  She didn’t specify where, or what, so the first thing he thought was the soapmaker who had been so helpful in the matter of listening in on Councilor Chamjey. It was a long walk and a good bit out of the way of the other errands—but that didn’t matter, in the least. Not for Amily. He was not exactly an expert on soap, but he had liked the scents there, the shop had looked very good, and the soapmaker had asked he remember her up to the Collegia, which argued that she thought her goods were of high enough standard.

  Besides, he wanted to see if he could be really inconspicuous without Dallen. Would the soapmaker recognize him? He was considerably less ragged than the last time she had seen him; then he had been dressed in a suitable fashion for an ash-boy, now he was dressed in a suitable fashion for a middle-class fellow running errands for a sister, or for the servant of someone really well off.

  He considered what sort of soap he should get as he made his way through the increasingly crowded streets—for everyone else seemed to want to be out in the fine weather as well today. If he were a servant or a brother, he would surely have been sent with exact orders on what to buy—

  He eeled his way between two carts that were blocking a lane and decided to go the easiest route. :Dallen, what sort’a soap does Amily want?: Rolan would probably know. Or maybe Dallen could tell, somehow, without asking Rolan.

  :She always smells of lily,: the answer came back promptly. :And Nikolas seems to favor juniper. Since she didn’t say whether to get soap for her or her father, I would say get soap for both.:

  Trust his Companion’s sharp nose! And it was true, she hadn’t said whom she wanted the soap for; if he got it for both of them, that would make him look quite considerate. That was no bad thing, since, well . . . he rather wanted to “get on” with Amily himself.

  He made his way in a leisurely fashion to the soapmaker, drifting with the crowd rather than trying to push through it, and absorbing the sights, sounds and smells. You could easily tell where you were in Haven by your nose. It wasn’t just places like the tanners and dyers, which had very strong smells indeed. You could tell where sausages and smoked meats were made or sold, where laundries were, where inns were, and what kind and class of inn it happened to be. You could tell a lot of things, if you paid attention.

  His soapmaker was in the middle of a number of small shops that mostly dealt in household goods. It was on a side street, and since the doors and windows were open, the mingled scents of the soap drifted to the end of the block.

  Spring meant cleaning, which meant scrubbing floors and a lot of laundry in the form of hangings and curtains, which meant that the soapmaker was very crowded indeed. She was mostly selling plain, brown, unscented laundry soap of the lowest quality, harsh stuff full of lye that made your hands dry out and the skin crack if you kept you hands in the water for too long. Mags remembered that very well. Spring at the mine had meant the little housemaids going about with sore and bleeding hands, since Master Cole was not minded to “waste” lotions and salves on the servants and slaveys. But this was the stuff that bleached the best, and so it was in great demand even in the best households.

  The queue of shoppers stretched right out the door, which argued that this soapmaker was quite good indeed.

  He stood in line with the rest of those waiting to be served, and when his turn came, asked carefully and quietly for a half a pound each of juniper and lily. The woman gave him an odd look, as if she almost recognized him, but the press of customers was far more urgent than her need to chase down that nagging memory. As it happened, lily and juniper were not so common that she was sold out of soap already cut and wrapped, and she fetched two cakes from the appropriate niches in the wall behind her. He paid her, she gave him
the soap in neatly wrapped packages, and he made way for the next customer without any further flashes of recognition.

  There were two more little packages to get for Nikolas, and then the fetching part of his errand-round was over. One he got at a blacksmith, the other at a maker of extremely delicate carving tools. Strange. Very strange. He couldn’t imagine what it was that Nikolas would need at either of those places.

  But if Nikolas had wanted him to know what he was getting, he would have been told.

  :Are you still basking?: he asked Dallen.

  The only answer he got was a sort of drowsy murmur, which pretty much told him that the answer was “yes.”

  With a laugh, he began the long trudge back up to the Palace on foot. :Don’ ferget I’m gonna need you to get i’ the gates, right?:

  Dallen woke up enough to come for him just as he got within eyesight of the Palace walls, which was a good thing, since Dallen’s presence said “he belongs here” without having to produce any sort of verification. The Guards didn’t even look at him twice. On the first pleasant free day since winter descended, Trainees were riding into and out of the grounds all day and not necessarily in their Grays, so he blended in just fine.

  He left the satchel of packages in Nikolas’ quarters, and thought about stopping for luncheon at the dining hall, rather than spend one of his rare coins down in the city . . .

  Then thought better of the idea. He wouldn’t have his team with him today; they had scattered to the four winds. Which meant there were good odds of unfriendly faces and minds in the hall—and seeing him without his group around him, they’d probably take advantage of the situation. No, getting something from a street-cart seemed like a better idea today . . .

  :Are you going to need me?: Dallen asked, as he came out of the building that housed the Herald’s Wing.

  :Didja wanta come with me or lollygag ’round the Field some more?: he countered.