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  “We should have just enough time to wash up before dinner,” said Trey just as she finished. “You want to sit at our table?”

  Abi peeked into Dylia’s stall, Brice looked as if his cup of happiness was about to overflow.

  The conversation at their table was dominated by Kirball, since the table itself was dominated tonight by Niko’s friends. Niko had just been made a guard on the Red team and was possibly one of the most enthusiastic players in the Collegia. Trey was utterly indifferent to the sport, but not to giving his sibling a hard time over it. Kat, however, considered herself a connoisseur of the horses and ponies that the non-Heralds on the teams rode, and would happily debate the merits of any beast on any of the four teams currently playing.

  Emmit and Brice fit right into this group, which left Rudi and Abi off to the side. “You were right,” he said to her after a moment. “They’re just people.”

  “Well . . . just people wealthy and important enough that rank and wealth don’t matter to them,” she temporized, but she couldn’t deny that his words made her feel very warm and happy. “There is that. You can’t get around that fact.”

  Rudi thought about that for a while. “That’s true. I’m a blacksmith’s son. My father is the most important man in our village. So he can choose to treat everyone else the same as himself. But with anyone else in the village there’s a hierarchy and people know they had better respect it, pull their caps and say ‘sir.’ That never occurred to me until you said that just now.”

  “And don’t forget that can change in a heartbeat.” Abi warned him. “Not that it’s going to happen with my friends, but when important people treat you as an equal and you actually aren’t, never forget they can change their minds about that in the time it takes you to say or do one wrong thing.”

  Rudi smiled wryly. “Something they don’t include in our rather brief lesson on manners and conducting yourself.”

  She nodded. “The younger they are, the more likely that is to happen, too.”

  “Then hopefully I’ll only get commissions from the Crown or extremely old men. Who hopefully won’t die before I finish their building.”

  At that point the conversation finally veered away from Kirball into Collegium legends and scooped them up again, along with a half dozen other people at the table. Most of the “legends” were ghost stories, which Abi didn’t have an opinion on one way or another. But when it came to the Poltergeist . . .

  “Oi,” she objected. “That’s not what happened at all.”

  “How do you know?” Brice demanded.

  “Because her parents were there and probably involved at the time, idiot,” chided Emmit.

  “They were,” she admitted, and gave them a very edited version. “There was a religious group called the Order of Sethor the Patriarch that moved into Haven and took over a temple in a very underhanded way. This Order was very much against women doing anything but staying at home and minding children. So they started a campaign of harassing and bullying women who weren’t doing that. They smashed up shops down in Haven, and desecrated the Temples of Goddesses that didn’t fit that role, and snuck people onto the hill to persecute female Trainees and female Blues. That’s where the Poltergeist came from.”

  “What happened?” asked a very young Bardic Trainee.

  Abi shrugged. “They got caught. Their leader attempted a murder. King Kyril threw them out of the Kingdom because of all the horrid things they had done. He threw the leader along with anyone who’d actually had a hand in the crimes in gaol, and confiscated their Temple and gave it to the Sisters of Betane of the Ax. That’s why there’s two Temples of the Sisters down there. Among other things, they’d harassed a Blue Trainee into almost killing herself, and the almost-suicide is what got tangled up with the Poltergeist which is why you’ve got the story of the girl who killed herself going after the work of Blues who are doing well and ruining it.”

  “In fact, the girl in question is one of the Sisters of Betane now,” said Kat. “Not all of them are fighters; she’s an historian, chronicler, and scribe for the Order.”

  “That doesn’t make nearly as much fun of a story,” Brice muttered.

  If only you knew the whole truth, Abi thought. Your hair would stand on end.

  When they all dispersed to go back to their rooms for the evening, Kat linked up arms with Abi. “I like our new friends,” she said, as they went up the stairs together. “And not just because they’re willing to help Niko and Trey with their math.”

  Abi grinned, once again feeling warm and happy. Our new friends, hmm? Excellent. You always hope your friends will like each other, but that’s never a certain thing. “They seem to be the best of the lot that I’m in with,” she agreed.

  Completely not to her surprise, her father was waiting in his little workroom when she got back to the suite. “I reckon everythin’ went all right?” he said with a half smile as she paused in his doorway.

  “So far,” she replied. “Kat likes them. They got over being dazzled pretty quickly. I did give Rudi the ‘be careful around highborns, they can turn on you’ advice, though.”

  “Prolly wise. They seem t’ be good lads,” was all he said—which told her his investigations hadn’t uncovered anything to worry about. “You c’n bring ’em up here t’ study whenever you like,” he added, which told her he trusted them, which meant rather more.

  “I was thinking,” she said carefully. “They might be worth cultivating as informants later.”

  “Then start feeling them out ’bout it now,” he advised. “Nothin’ specific, ’f course, an’ as vague as ye like, but yer right, they could be useful.”

  And that told her exactly what she needed to know. Mags was prepared to welcome them into his network. She smiled; that was almost better than that the Royals liked them.

  She listened with one ear to the conversation over the dinner table. Her mother was relaxed and so was her father, and when they spoke of “intrigues,” it was all petty nonsense. The King was a popular man, and thanks to the birth of a fourth son, the Queen had never been held in higher esteem. No, what was going on in the Court now was all maneuvering among the three current “factions,” if you could call them that.

  The first faction was composed of people who had made their money, rather than inheriting it—or who had inherited money and a lucrative trade. Because the Queen herself came from among those of that sort, rather than from the highborn, they alternated between a proprietary pride in her and the feeling that she somehow owed them favors. When she had been younger, Abi had never been able to understand the latter; now she knew it was just human nature. People who were not already divided into factions would make factions given the chance, and they would always want the most important people to belong to their faction, whether the person in question agreed with that or not.

  The second faction was those whose titles stretched generations back, sometimes into the mists of time and the founding of Valdemar. Some of the fortunes of those people had increased with time, some had dwindled until they had little more than a name, a rank, and pride. And the third faction was, of course, the “newly” ennobled—which, so far as the old highborn were concerned, meant people whose titles went back “only” five generations.

  It was the third faction that was the most diverse. Those who were “merely” wealthy tended to concentrate on the making and keeping of more wealth and were interested in the crown only insofar as the crown could facilitate both of those things. The second faction, while there were feuds among them, kept those feuds to polite venom and never brought out the fangs and knives. Abi knew why, of course. Before she was born, there had been a feud that did end in deaths, and the fact that there weren’t more was due only to her father and mother intervening in the nick of time. That had quelled many of the other existing rivalries down to a bare simmer, and nothing had risen above that level to this day.
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  It was the third faction where rivalry was intense enough to threaten to boil over now and again. Every house kept a jealous eye on the preferments of every other house and was prepared to challenge anything that was added that they did not also receive. Alliances and antagonists could change in the blink of an eye. And every new addition to the peerage was met with smiles of welcome and hidden daggers, especially if the title (and possibly lands) had been awarded to a member of the first faction. Even the landed Knights were not an exception to this; it didn’t matter that they had won their titles and property in martial service to the Crown, once they joined the new peers, they found themselves embroiled in a new and altogether silent war.

  “Lord Sentean has taken his family back to their estate and put the manor up for rent,” reported Mama, “And I’d like a little more bread please.”

  “So, there’ll be peace for a while, leastwise, ’til everyone sorts thesselves out on sides again,” Mags observed, passing her the bread. “Wonder who’ll take th’ manor?”

  “Whoever does, it would be a good time to get one of Auntie’s older boys into the household,” said Perry. “It’s likely it’ll be someone with a smaller staff, so they’ll need to hire. Kip or Neddy would be good.”

  “I’ll leave that in yer hands,” her father replied. “Pick one or both, and start ’em up at Lord Jorthun’s. He can have ’em trained as household staff in no time.”

  The rest of the conversation consisted of her father and Perry discussing which boy might be best for what sort of service, so Abi went back to her own thoughts—which now that her friends were all friends together, were concerned with only one thing.

  Would tomorrow’s session with Healer Sanje be more of the same—or would Sanje finally decide it was time for Abi to go to the next stage of using her Gift?

  5

  It only took half a brick for Abi to sense the stress in their makeshift apparatus. She’d been practicing diligently, and not just with the boards and bricks, every single day for some time now. “Good,” said Sanje, thoughtfully. “I think it is time.”

  Abi did her best to contain her excitement. Sanje had explained several times already that what she was going to attempt might not work the first time. In fact, it might not work at all. In the worst case scenario, Sanje might make a mistake and change how Abi sensed strain into some other sense—scent, which would be useless, or sound, which would be horrid. But Abi had confidence in the Healer, and Sanje herself did not seem too worried.

  “Well, I’m more than ready,” Abi told her, steeling herself. “What do I do?”

  Sanje smiled. “You do nothing except close your eyes for a moment.”

  Abi obeyed her and heard Sanje getting to her feet, then felt the faint touch of fingers on either temple. After that, nothing, for a very long time.

  Then she thought she saw a red glow, although that was likely nothing more than the sun through her closed eyelids. Was it? Wasn’t it?

  The glow got stronger . . . and more defined. It wasn’t a vague glow anymore, but more akin to . . . to a spot that had been infected. In the center, it was brightest, then the glow dimmed along a clearly defined area on either side of the central spot. Clearly defined—like the board!

  Her eyes flew open and in the direction her head had been pointing was the board with the half-brick still on it. Sanje tsked.

  “So impatient,” she chided. “Now, do you still feel the strain as well as seeing it?”

  That ever-present sense of more-or-less unease was gone! “No!” she exclaimed, “But—now with my eyes open, I don’t see it either—”

  “Close your eyes again. You must walk before you can run,” Sanje corrected. Abi closed her eyes. Once again, she “saw” the red “light,” fading out to either side. She groped around until her hands fell on another brick, and placed it beside the first. The area lit up, roughly three times the original size and brighter.

  “Healers must often close their eyes to ‘see’ illness and disease when they are first learning to use their powers,” Sanje said. “And I think we will leave yours at this stage. You would not want to see the stresses in buildings all around you all the time. It would be most annoying.”

  “But could I learn how to . . . make it come and go when I wanted?” she asked. “I mean, Healers don’t go around looking at peoples’ insides all the time.”

  “Still wanting to run, are you?” Sanje chuckled. “We will see. In the meantime, it is sufficient that we have steered your Gift into using another sense. Now you must sharpen it further. As you yourself pointed out, everything man builds contains stresses. It will serve you well if you can see them, whether they are balanced or not. This will be very useful to you.”

  Abi opened her eyes again, and looked up at Sanje, feeling a bit chagrined at her own bad manners. Stupid, Abi, and rude, to demand something from someone who has done so much and asked nothing of you. “I’m sorry. You’ve spent all this time with me, learning about my Gift and turning it into something a lot more useful than it was, and I haven’t even said thank you.”

  “And now you have.” Sanje nodded. “Now go and practice. When you can see the stresses in every thing, then send word to me, and we will see if it is possible for you to learn to make it come and go at will, and then to use it at the same time as ordinary vision.”

  She didn’t wait for Abi to thank her again, she merely turned gracefully and glided away, back to Healers’ and the House of Healing, her long black hair waving gently as she moved.

  Abi would have liked to have spent the rest of the day testing this new aspect of her Gift, but Master Leandro was waiting to give her and Perry a workout, and he was not a patient instructor. So she carried off her bricks and board and left them in the waste area and ran off at top speed to Lord Jorthun’s mansion, which stood in the area of the most impressive such buildings, just outside the gates of the Palace.

  Perry and Larral were already there, Master Leandro was not. “How’d the session go?” Perry asked, lying on the grass in Master Leandro’s practice yard in the garden, as usual, using Larral as a backrest. Abi dropped down on the soft grass beside him, reveling in the green scent and the feel of the warm sun on her back.

  “Healer Sanje did something so that instead of just feeling where stress is, I can see it with my eyes closed,” she said excitedly.

  “How can you see it if your eyes are closed?” Perry asked, then shook his head. “Never mind, it’s probably how I can see what animals are seeing. Well, that should make it easier to tell how much stress there is on a thing. Right?”

  “A lot,” she agreed, and that was when Master Leandro stalked into the yard and they both leaped to their feet. He regarded them thoughtfully.

  He was a lean man with a prominent nose and large, intelligent eyes. He was not the first of Lord Jorthun’s Weaponsmasters—that would have made him as old as Lord Jorthun, if not older—but he had studied at the feet of the man who had been from the time he was barely old enough to hold a stick and pretend it was a sword. Since he was older than their parents, that had been a great many years ago indeed. He was not only an expert in many kinds of weapons and none at all, he was also an expert in how to conceal weapons. In that, he had the aid of a very fine craftsman down in Haven, a man whose hands were as clever as his wits were feeble. All Master Leandro had to do was to imagine what he wanted and give detailed instructions as to what it should be like, and the fellow—whose identity their father kept secret even from them—could produce it.

  But it appeared that they were not getting a lesson in one of those today. “It’s been a very long time since I worked you two at stickwork,” he said thoughtfully, as a puff of breeze stirred Abi’s hair. “Abi, what is the likeliest such object that is going to come into your hands on a job?”

  “Probably the stick we keep our chalk-string on,” she said, after a moment. “We use it for measu
ring and laying out straight lines. It’s about so long,” she added, helpfully holding her hands a little farther apart than her hands were long.

  “Yes, that will do. Go and get two each of the right size from the armory and come back here.”

  “We’re going to get bruised knuckles,” Perry said, grimacing, as they both headed for the armory.

  She winced, but she nodded; there was going to be no way around that. They wouldn’t put full force into their blows, of course, but they were still going to get bruises.

  Oh, well.

  She liked working out with Perry; they were nearly the same height and weight, and she could count on him neither to try to bowl her over nor go too easy on her. That wasn’t the case with the others in the weapons-classes up at the Collegia. And the Weaponsmaster for the Collegia didn’t always catch it when a partner was going easy on Abi because she was a girl. Or worse, because she was a girl and he was hoping she might be interested in him. The Blues that took weapons classes were not Artificers; most of them were highborn. The Artificers and the pure scholars were not expected to ever need to defend themselves; and indeed, why should they, any more than anyone studying outside the Collegia who was a scholar or a master of a skilled trade? So the weapons classes at the Collegia mostly held Herald Trainees, some Bardic Trainees, and the highborn Blues. Once in a while, about as often as a rare Artificer Blue with a penchant for exercise, a Healer turned up ready to learn how to fight, but it wasn’t often. The only weapons class that everyone took was archery because no matter who you were—Bard, Healer, or highborn on a journey, Artificer on a job, or scholar being sent to a temple—there was always the chance, once you were outside of Haven, that mischance would overtake you on your journey, and the only thing that would keep you from starving was a bow and your skill with it. Mags’ two older children didn’t even bother with archery classes anymore, just practice. And pretty soon even Tory would no longer need a teacher as well.