Intrigues v(cc-2 Read online

He thumped the wall, frustrated. Here he was, stuck between two duties, torn between going after his friend and taking the note in his hand to Herald Nikolas.

  Or, a rebellious part of him said, hang the note and go have dinner, and take the note when you’re done... Bards be damned. He sighed at that thought. But this was supposed to be about something for the king. And if he didn’t deliver it in a timely manner, that just would show that he was too stupid to be trusted with more important matters. Definitely more trouble than he needed to have hounding him.

  With a second sigh to match the first, he turned away from Lena’s direction and considered where Herald Nikolas could be found. He eyed the entrance to the dining hall, listened to his stomach growl at the wonderful smells coming from it, and then almost kicked himself for missing the obvious.

  :Dallen? Could yer fin’ out from Rolan where Nikolas is?: and then a moment later, for politeness’ sake, he added, :Please?:

  A wry chuckle came back. :And bother his high and mightiness? Since he seems to be just fine with talking to you as well, why don’t you just ask him yourself, hmm?:

  Mags was rapidly feeling irritated enough by this entire mess to do just that, but he mentally counted to three and tried again. :Dallen, I can’ do games reet now. I got a note from a Bard t’ take, an’ Lena says yon Bard’s her pa, an’ he didn’t recognize ’er an’ she’s mortal upset an’ ran off. An’ it’s beef night. So you know that’s upset.:

  :Ah. In that case... : There was a pause. :He’s coming to you. Stay where you are.:

  Well that was easy enough; Mags relaxed a little. Perhaps Nikolas would be able to explain what was going on. At any rate, it meant he wasn’t going to have to run all over half the Palace and Collegia to try and find the man.

  The King’s Own Herald appeared at the end of the hallway shortly, recognizable by his silver-trimmed Whites, and Mags trotted down the long polished expanse to meet him, holding out the note. There was a look of faint annoyance on Nikolas’ face, and once again, Mags felt himself shrinking back in guilt. Ah bother. I went an’ interrupted him in something’, an’ now—

  “Wretched Bards,” Nikolas muttered, taking the note. “Think that they stand in one place and the sun rises and sets just to illuminate them properly. Thank you, Mags, you should never have been bothered with this.” He read it quickly, after flashing Mags a hint of an apologetic smile. And as he read, his brow furrowed again with exasperation. “Just as I thought. There is nothing here that I needed to be bothered about. He could just as well—and more appropriately—have gone to the Steward with this nonsense.”

  Nikolas looked as if he very much wanted to crumple up the note and throw it away. He wasn’t angry, at least not that Mags could see, but he was clearly very much annoyed.

  “I dun understand, sir,” Mags said, humbly.

  Nikolas shook his head, and grimaced. “It’s a kind of status game Marchand plays every time he turns up at Court. He just wants an excuse to make the King’s Own jump through his ornamental hoops. Conceited popinjay that he is—he wouldn’t get away with this kind of behavior if he were less Gifted, I can tell you that.”

  Mags was still puzzled. “Does havin’ a lotta Gifts make that much on a difference in how folks’re treated?” he asked.

  “It shouldn’t, but it does.” Nikolas rolled up the note with exaggerated care and slid it back and forth between his fingers. “Then there is the ‘artistic temperament’ that Bards are supposed to have that Marchand milks like a prize heifer and which has thus far spared him from censure. Lita has been much too indulgent with him. And I am strongly considering seeing to it that steps are taken to give him a reprimand.”

  “ ’E ain’t Gifted ’nough to tell when his own youngling’s standin’ in front of him,” Mags replied, feeling much relieved that Nikolas wasn’t annoyed at him. “ ’E looked at Lena like she was a stranger. Didn’t e’en notice how upset she was.”

  “Of course he didn’t notice. He’d have to remove some of his attention from himself for a moment,” Nikolas replied crossly. “Never mind. I’ll get this dealt with, and I will make sure it is the last time Marchand does anything like this again, one way or another. Mags, you properly did exactly what you were told to do. Now I want you to get some dinner, then go to the kitchen on my authority and have someone make up a dinner basket for Lena. You take it to her room; if she won’t let you in, and she might not, find the proctor for her floor and tell her what happened and leave it with her. Meanwhile I’ll send a servant with a message for Lita, and she’ll deal with Bard Tobias Marchand and Lena too.”

  Mags sighed with relief. Good. He wasn’t in trouble, and Lena was going to get sorted out. And he was going to get some dinner after all, and maybe a chance to get into that new book he’d found, if Lena was still too upset to come out of her room. She probably would be. Over the course of the past several moons, there was one thing he had noticed. Though girls at the mine had mostly been indistinguishable from the boys so far as how they behaved was concerned, girls here had a whole different set of behaviors from boys. One of them was to go lock themselves in their rooms for candlemarks or even days when sufficiently upset. When they did that, only other girls could get near them.

  Nikolas wasn’t done, though. “Also, when you’re done with Lena, I want you to come up to my rooms. I have a little task for you.”

  Well, so much for the book. Oh well. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be trivial. Strange as it seemed, Mags was the King’s Own’s private information source, and even sometimes a sort of spy. Books could wait. “Yessir,” he said, and waited to see if there was anything else Nikolas wanted him for.

  “Well, don’t dawdle or you won’t get anything but the crusty ends of the beef!” Nikolas said, tapping him on the top of the head with the rolled-up message. “Get!”

  The kitchen was buzzing with gossip when he went to get the dinner basket. From the sound of things, the arrival of Bard Marchand was going to be a nine days wonder. Everyone was agog at his presence back in Haven, and all that anyone could talk about was how brilliant and how handsome he was. Mags sat on a stool out of the way and waited for one of the undercooks to put that meal basket together and listened.

  Notice no one’s talkin’ ’bout how nice he is, Mags thought sourly. To his right, serving maids helped collect the leftovers and sort them into what was going back into the larder, and what was going out to charity. Nothing was wasted in the King’s kitchens.

  “Do ye think we’ll get a chance t’ hear him, like?” one of the serving maids sighed, her eyes all dreamy-sparkly as she deftly combined the remains of three pies into one pan.

  One of the undercooks rapped her on the top of the head with a spoon. “He’s not for the likes of you, gu-url,” she growled. “So you can pull that little thought right out of your head. The most you be like to hear is a snatch of song while you be servin’ the wine, an’ if you go all moony and spill the wine, it’ll be the pots an’ pans for you for the rest of the year.”

  “Well put, Una,” the head cook rumbled, from where he was supervising the making of porridge for breakfast on the morrow, and he cast a dark look around the kitchen. “That goes for all of you. If I hear of one incident that happened because you were gawking at the Bard, the gawker will find herself demoted to scullery maid if she’s lucky!”

  That didn’t stop the gossip, but at least it went to whispers behind hands, as the head cook shoved the finished dinner basket at Mags.

  So across the lawns and gardens he went—the gardens still slumbering under their layers of carefully raked leaves and compost. Like Herald’s Collegium, Bardic had separate sections for the girls’ and boys’ rooms. But the moment he turned up at the door to the girls’ rooms at Bardic Collegium and asked to see Lena he was told to “wait right there.”

  He sat down on a bench in the little entryway, thinking that it was a very good thing that there was an extra hot plate in the bottom of the basket keeping everything warm. He had been
here before, now and again; people were allowed to have other people in their rooms. He knew that the Dean of the Collegium had her office quite nearby, and shrewdly reckoned it was to keep any mischief from happening in the girls’ section. Bards were not known for keeping regular hours and the head of Bardic was no exception to this rule. If you didn’t know for sure whether or not the Dean was in her office you would probably think twice about getting up to something.

  And that was when he heard it... Master Bard Lita Darvalis, Dean of Bardic Collegium, and head of the Bardic Circle... sounding off in full voice. And she was not singing. Oh no.

  “I am appalled! Appalled, Tobias! If you were a Trainee, you’d be in the kitchen peeling roots at this very moment, with an assignment to analyze all three hundred verses of ‘Maddy Graves’ to follow! How dare you order Trainees about as if they were your personal pages? Not even Bardic, but a Herald Trainee, over whom you have precisely no authority!”

  There was a moment of silence, which Mags, his ears burning, assumed wasn’t silence at all, but the Bard attempting to answer.

  “Well if you are going to act the fool in the middle of a crowded hallway at dinnertime, you had better anticipate that the gossip is going to be all over all three Collegia before the pie is served!” Mags let out his breath. Oh good. He wasn’t going to be the one Bard Marchand was going to blame for being hauled before Bard Lita. “And above all else, how dare you try and turn the King’s Own into your personal flunky? I have children in this Collegium that were raised in barns and fostered by sheep that have better manners than you displayed—in public no less! And you a Master Bard!”

  There was another moment of silence. Whatever it was that Marchand said, it only made Lita angrier. “You are a disgrace, Tobias! Dear gods above and below, did every single bit of what you learned in Courtly Graces fly out of your head the moment you left the Collegium? No one, no one, sends the King’s Own a note about a performance unless it’s about a suspected assassin in the audience! If I could do it, I swear I would break you down to Journeyman at this very moment! What in the name of the Seven Hells were you thinking?” Lita didn’t give him a chance to reply this time. “Never mind. I would rather assume that you weren’t actually thinking at all. It’s far preferable to knowing that this was some twisted little trick of yours to prove your inherent superiority to mere Heralds.”

  Mags was very, very glad that he was sitting politely in the entryway and right where he was supposed to be, because he really did not want anyone to think he had placed himself deliberately where he could overhear this. Mind, Nikolas would probably be interested to know exactly what had been said . . .

  Then again, the entire Collegium was probably hearing this. Lita was making no effort at all to keep her voice down. Now that he thought about it, she might well be projecting it on purpose.

  “You are damned lucky that the King specifically requested your presence tonight, or by all that is unholy, I would send in a trained dog to take your place and tell Kiril that I had found a better performer! And you are damned lucky that Nikolas is not the sort to react in kind to such a piece of petty behavior, or this little incident would be all over the Palace by tonight, and what do you think that would that do to your fine reputation, hmm? How many of your noble patrons would welcome you if they thought they’d be treated to a display of such insolence in their own homes?”

  If the Bard replied to this, as before, it was inaudible. And Mags was saved further discomfort by the proctor of Lena’s floor arriving to come take the basket from him. It was a girl he knew vaguely, a hearty blond who seemed concerned enough. “Lena’s upset, but I’ll see that she eats,” the girl told him, in a not unkindly tone.

  “Thankee,” he replied, and quickly made his escape before he could overhear anything else. It had been uncomfortable enough to overhear a grown man being dressed down like a misbehaving youngling, and he just didn’t want to hear any more at this point.

  It could have been a trick of acoustics, something that made what was said in Lita’s office clearly audible in that entryway and nowhere else. It could have been... but he doubted it. Lita was a Master Bard, and he would be very much surprised if she wasn’t aware of the acoustic properties of every inch of Bardic Collegium. No, she wanted people to hear what she was saying, and he was just—accidentally—the only non-Bard to do so.

  :Of course she wants them to overhear,: said Dallen, as he made his escape down a path swiftly darkening in the twilight. :Marchand’s behavior really was appallingly rude with even the best possible interpretation. With the worst interpretation—well, you heard Nikolas. Bards are supposed to be examples of deportment and they are supposed to be extremely good at protocol. Lita wants everyone in Bardic Collegium to know that not even being extraordinarily Gifted nor extremely famous and popular is going to save you if you act badly, because your bad behavior will reflect on the Bardic Circle as a whole. By the way, I was passing all that on to Rolan directly. I thought that would be more discreet.:

  Ah, another relief; Mags hadn’t been looking forward to a question-and-answer session that was likely to be as embarrassing for Nikolas as it would be for him. He shook his head as he ducked into the closest door, a chill breeze chasing him inside. :Well then, is he stupid, or what? I mean, he had to know this was gonna get ’round and he was gonna get told on.:

  :Well, it’s not stupidity,: Dallen replied ruefully as Mags paused long enough to take off his cloak and drape it over his arm. :If I were going to guess—and it has to be a guess, because I don’t know his thoughts—he’s been out of Haven for quite a long time, and he’s been very much made the pet of by several houses of the highborn. They are flattered that he comes to their homes, they fawn over him, and quite frankly, he has gotten used to being treated as if he was practically royalty, so much so that now he thinks he is the equivalent of the King’s Own. You know, I think I have even heard of him being called the ‘King of Bards.’ So perhaps in his own mind, he is a sort of King.:

  :Ye kin paint a crow white, but that ain’t gonna make it a dove,: Mags replied shrewdly, nodding at one of the other Trainees as they passed each other in the hall.

  :I must remember that one. Well, there is a bit more to it than that. Besides his Gifts and talents, it is true that he has Projective Empathy, and he has used it in several crisis situations, making him something of a hero at the time.:

  :Huh,: Mags said. :Still—:

  :Indeed. Still. He did stop riots three times. And he did manage to save an innocent man from a mob. And he did hold an entire troupe of brigands spellbound until help could come, twice. But. The thing about Projective Empathy is that it is a very good tool to ensure that the wielder is safe.: Dallen’s mind-voice was more than a bit sarcastic. :If things start to go badly, you can just narrow your focus down to convincing your opponents that you are their new best friend.:

  :So it ain’t like throwin’ yerself inta harm’s way, then.:

  Mags could feel Dallen’s snort. :The average Guardsman sees more danger in a single incident than Marchand did in all six of his encounters together. Oh, I am not going to say he wasn’t brave, but it is easier to be brave when you know you have a gigantic shield to hide behind if you have to.:

  Mags plodded down the hallway and pushed open the door at the end that led into the Palace proper. :So people think he’s a big damn hero, an’ he’s an amazin’ Bard with a lotta Gifts. An’ he reckons now he’s back at the Palace, ’twere time ev’body realizes he’s the Second Comin’ of Stefan, an’ acts like ’tis a privilege t’ breathe th’ same air as him?:

  :In a nutshell. And again, I must be fair, part of this is a desire to see Bardic Collegium regarded with the same respect and value as Herald’s and Healer’s,: Dallen said reluctantly. :You’ve heard Lita on that subject.:

  It was Mags’ turn to snort. :But most on it is there ain’t ’nough space for him an’ his ego t’ be in th’ same room at th’ same time.:

  There was an astonished p
ause, then a flood of mental laughter. :Oh my. Oh my. I’m relaying that to the others. Mags, every once in a while you do have a way with words!:

  :Tell that t’me language teacher,: he replied ruefully, then he was at the door of Herald Nikolas’ small suite, and there was no time for chat.

  Chapter 3

  MAGS was a little nonplussed. Although he had known he was going to escape a sort of interrogation about what he had heard, he had fully expected Nikolas to say something about the Bard, if only to assure his protege that Marchand was not going to come looking for Mags in reprisal. And he had been morally certain that Nikolas was going to ask for Mags’ own thoughts on the matter, and correct them if Mags had come to the wrong conclusion. But aside from asking how Lena was, Nikolas appeared to have dismissed Bard Marchand from his mind entirely. It was odd. It seemed as if the Bard was obsessed with proving he was every bit the King’s Own’s equal, but the Herald was utterly indifferent to the supposed rivalry.

  Back at the mine, rivalries like this generally ended badly, when they weren’t dealt with firmly by a superior authority.

  Take the Pieters siblings, just as an example. The boys all seemed to have been born quarreling with each other and jockeying for position. They were always at each others’ throats, trying to gain ascendancy in their father’s eyes, and it was only the knowledge that their father would have the hide of anyone who interfered in what made the mine profitable that kept them confined to informing on each other or trying to make sure that the blame for anything that went wrong fell squarely on shoulders other than their own.

  Well, things were different here, and he was always reminding himself of that. Maybe—probably—the Bard would confine himself to petty annoyances that Nikolas could just shrug off.

  “I will say this much, that man does not deserve to have a child,” Nikolas said darkly. “It is heinous enough that he clearly spends so little time with his family that he cannot even recognize his own daughter on sight—but the fact that she is one of the more promising Trainees and he isn’t even aware of it is just—” Nikolas shook his head. “I have no words.”