Foundation

by Mercedes Lackey

  Dallen was, of course, entirely aware of how oddly the mercenaries had acted this morning, and he was just as eager to talk about it. So after Mags settled onto a bale of straw in his loose box, they both went over how the men had acted in their minds.

  “Ye know,” Mags said, looking up into Dallen’s bright blue eyes. “If I didn’ know better, I’d’a thought they’d seen a ghost, and was still lookin’ for it. You ever heard tell of somethin’ like a haunt around here?”

  Dallen bobbed his head. :The Collegia are not haunted, let me promise you. Believe me, we Companions would know if they were. Neither is the Palace, even though by all rights it should be, if emotional turmoil is what creates a ghost. But you’re right. They did act as if they were expecting something supernatural to manifest at any moment: He bobbed his head thoughtfully. :People can be haunted as well as places, you know.:

  :Ye think mebbe they brung a haunt with ’em?: Mags hazarded, but then shook his head. :Or one followed ’em here? Nah, if they had a haunt followin’ ’em, they’d be used to it, don’ ye think? An’ it’d have to be hauntin’ all of ’em for all of ’em to be so jumpy. How likely is that?:

  Dallen rubbed his nose against his knee. :I don’t know. I am rather out of my experience when it comes to ghosts. All I know is the ghost stories other people tell. I’ve never actually seen one myself, nor has anyone I know.:

  Mags pondered. :Well, ye reckon I ought tfollow ’em?:

  :No. You are too obvious in your Trainee Grays, and you would be even more obvious in civilian garb, since the Palace servants all wear livery. No, you let Marc deal with that end of it. You and I will ask some careful questions, not too many, and not all of the same person. I have some ideas where you might go within the Palace that you might hear things without exciting any suspicion. And above all, you will listen.:

  Mags grinned. :Now that, I c’n do.:

  So he spent the afternoon doing just that. Dallen had excellent ideas, and more than just ideas, he had sound advice that not even Herald Nikolas could better.

  He started in the kitchen, since in his experience, that was where most gossip took place, and Dallen agreed. Even in Cole Pieters’ household, as tightly controlled as it was, the servants in the kitchen and the ones that came into the kitchen shared gossip.

  Now any Trainee could come and go freely from the Collegia kitchen, as the cooks dispensed food to any Trainee or teacher out of mealtime hours with no questions asked. That was where he went first, professing hunger, which was no lie since Marc had eaten all of his sausage rolls and Mags’ share as well. Once fed, he loitered, knowing that as long as he stayed out of the way, no one would chase him out.

  The kitchen that served the three Collegia was rather devoid of anything other than talk about who had done what during the holiday. He moved to the kitchen that served the Guards, but it was empty of everyone but the head cook, who was putting loaves to rise. He left without alerting the cook to his presence, not really disappointed since he honestly had not expected to hear anything about the foreigners there. That left the Palace kitchen. And truth to tell, that was where he expected to get the most information.

  Now, the best way to be unnoticed, Herald Nikolas had said, was to look as if you belonged someplace. And while it was true that most of the Palace servants wore livery, not all of them did. Not the ones that did very menial work; they wore ordinary clothing. That included those who served in the kitchen, for certain. Dallen had absolutely agreed with him on this score, and had some good ideas on how to get into the kitchen without arousing any suspicion. It wasn’t as if he could go loiter there without knowing anyone who worked there, and a Trainee of any sort was going to excite comment showing up to beg a snack.

  So he went back to his room and changed out of his Trainee Grays and into civilian clothing, his oldest and most worn outfit. :All right,: he thought at Dallen. :Where’s the Palace kitchen?:

  Wordlessly, Dallen showed him exactly how to find it while avoiding most people. And having been in two large kitchens within the Palace walls already, Mags had a pretty good notion of how the third was likely to be laid out. So he made his way circuitously to the kitchen—making his way from the stable to the wall, from the wall back to the kitchen gardens, and from the kitchen gardens to the kitchen door. He waited patiently and once there, slipped inside on the heels of someone who was bringing in supplies. For once it was an advantage to be small.

  The heat and the smells of cooking hit him with a kind of shock, though a pleasant one. This kitchen was easily twice the size of the one that served the Collegia, and had three times as many people in it. Which was ideal, since it meant he could probably remain completely unnoticed in all the bustle. It had an entry, a kind of alcove in immensely thick walls, which were thick for a good reason. The baking ovens were built into one side so that the chimney could go straight up the wall, taking the excess heat with it. Rooms above this would be very cozy in winter, and although in summer that could be a bit problematic, one solution might be to use them for storage of things that needed to be kept dry—linens for instance. At any rate, that meant there had to be an alcove about as long as a bed, which made for a good place for him to stand in the shadows and examine everything.

  From his vantage point in the entryway, he could see a line of aprons on pegs across the room. Walking quickly, but without any urgency, he threaded his way directly through the bustling cooks and helpers, got himself one of them, pulled it on over his head, and rolled up his sleeves. He walked as if he belonged here, as if he knew exactly what he was doing and what his job was. He was dressed no differently than the lowest of the servants here, and he was small and unthreatening. No one paid any attention to him.

  Then he headed straight for the pile of dirty pots and the huge double sink they stood beside, also right on the outside wall, but on the opposite side of the entryway. You needed light when you were scrubbing pots and dishes—at least, you did if you wanted to be sure you were getting them clean. Beneath the high windows, covered in oiled parchment that let in light but nothing else, was an arrangement of two huge side-by-side sinks and two hand pumps, where a tow-haired scullion scrubbed manfully away at the dirty pots with a stiff bristle brush and plenty of soap. Just as Mags got there, he let out the dirty water through a drain at the bottom of each sink and began refilling the sinks from a hand pump. Mags took over the one he wasn’t pumping and copied him. When both sinks were mostly full, the scullion added hot water to both from steaming buckets at his feet.

  Now, Mags was no stranger to pot scrubbing. He’d done plenty of it before he was big enough to work in the mine. So he grabbed a second brush and set to, and the scullion didn’t even look up.

  There was a science and a rhythm to doing this sort of work. Nasty, crusted pots with things burned in them, you filled full of water and put to boil, unless they were very bad indeed, in which case you filled them with coals until everything was ash. Pots that had only been used to simmer something gently, you gave a quick scrub and rinse. The rest, you soaked in hot water before you tried scrubbing them—something that the other scullion evidently had not learned. So Mags took the hard ones away from him—filled them full of hot water, of which there was, miraculously enough, a plentiful supply—took the very worst ones and put them to boil, leaving them on the hearth where there was an entire calf and an entire pig roasting, with a clanking mechanism to turn the spit instead of a boy as there had been in Cole Pieters’ kitchen.

  It had to be said that the worst of the pots were nothing like the worst ones in Master Cole’s kitchen. There was not a one he would have consigned to the coals here.

  That might have been due to the huge metal vessel of hot water with a fire under it that stood in one corner of the kitchen—this made cleaning ever so much easier. No burned pot ever got quite clean unless it was filled with coals back at the mine, but when you did that, you ruined the finish on the inside and made it more likely that things would stick. But it was most pr
obable that it was due to the cooks. There could always be accidents—something left a little too long—but there were not that many of those with a good cook about. None of Cole Pieters’ cooks had ever been more than “adequate,” or so Mags realized now. It was very strange; he had gradually come to understand that it was not only that the ingredients of the food here were so much better, it was not only that he was getting good, wholesome food instead of scraps. It was that the cooks themselves were good. They didn’t let things burn—and the kitchen at the mine was always full of the smells of something burning.

  :I can’t ever ’member a loaf of bread without th’ bottom crust burned.

  :Ugh. That is ... well, awful:

  :So were the cooks.:

  Now the scullion watched him from under a thick fringe of straw-colored hair that almost obscured his eyes and looked as if it had been hacked off with a knife. He still said nothing, but as Mags’ remedies loosened the crusts so that most of the nastiness could be washed off rather than scrubbed off, he began to copy what Mags was doing. It was very clear that this boy was no fool. Mags began to wonder if maybe he ought to cultivate him. With another set of ears in the kitchen, he himself would not need to be there.

  Meanwhile, Mags was listening.

  Most of the gossip was ordinary kitchen chatter. A maid sent to fetch food and drink had got a glimpse of someone being in a gentleman’s chamber who shouldn’t have been there, since she had a husband of her own. The kitchen knew who was quarreling with whom in the Court, and how the alliances were shifting. They knew who was going to have a child, often before the lady herself did. They knew what young men the daughters were seeing, often when the parents were unaware.

  And within the kitchen there was plenty of gossip, too. There was always someone romancing someone else in the kitchen staff, and plenty of jibes about that.

  Most of it was harmless. Wasn’t so-and-so the handsomest young lord you ever had seen? And Lady thus-and-such was angling to marry off her daughter to the highest bidder, so to speak, and the poor thing only had eyes for that nice young fellow up from the country with whom she would never be allowed to keep company.

  Mags let all the gossip flow around him, although he very quickly realized that this was going to be very useful stuff to the King’s Own. That made him feel rather cheerful.

  Finally a serving maid came rushing in, all a-flutter, and not in the sort of way that anyone would connect with “being interfered with,” which was kitchen code for a maid who’d been taken advantage of. “Oh!” she exclaimed, as her entrance caused a stir. “If you had just seen what I’ve seen!”

  One of the cooks looked at her indulgently. “Na, missy, if ye’d seen as many things as we hev, ye’d think twice afore ye said that.”

  But when Mags angled himself so that he could get a good look at the girl he saw that she was white as paper—and so, at that moment, did the cook. “Mercy!” the woman exclaimed. “Girl, ye look fear-struck!”

  “And I should be!” The cook pushed a stool toward her and she sat right down on it, groping after a mug of water that was shoved into her hands. “’Tis them terrible furriners, the bodyguards! They’re haunted!”

  Mags started, almost dropping the pot he was scrubbing.

  “Haunted! Never!” By this time the head cook, an enormous man, had taken notice, and reacted to the statement with scorn. “There’s never been a spirit in this Palace, and there never will be! The Companions and Heralds keep us safe from such unholy things, and even if they didn’t, the Bards could sing it away!”

  “I tell you, I seen it! With me own two eyes!” Normally a girl like this maid would have been overawed by the big man, but whatever she had seen had frightened her too much for her to be in awe of anyone. She stared at him with passionate, if terrified, defiance. “I did! And they seen it, too! They’re as scared as I was! I swear it! That’s why they been looking so seedy!”

  “Start from the beginning, girl,” the undercook urged.

  Hands shaking, clutching the mug, the girl ducked her head. “It begun like this. You know. They never eat with staff—get us to bring them their dinner special, so they eat before their masters, an’ then go and stand guard behind the chairs during Court dinner.”

  “Aye, we know that,” the first cook agreed, as the head cook sniffed his contempt.

  “Think they’re too good for the likes of us,” growled the pastry cook. “Think they’re highborn themselves.”

  :Actually they are probably testing their food for poison before they eat it, and they would need to eat before their masters do.: Dallen sounded as if his excuse for their behavior made him embarrassed. Mags didn’t have the heart to be as rude about it as he would have liked. Dallen always did see both sides of a situation. And, more and more, so did Mags.

  “So I brought ’em their dinner on the cart, like I always do,” the girl continued. “But yesterday and the day before they’ve been—different—when I came. Nervous, I would have said, except I’ve never seen them nervous. And today they were even jumpier. Every time there was a squeak or a rattle, they jumped and looked for what might have caused it. I pushed the cart into the room, just like always. And that was when it happened!”

  Her hands were shaking so much that the water sloshed out of her mug and all down the front of her gown.

  “What happened?” the cook asked, dabbing at her uniform gown with a napkin. The girl was so shaken she didn’t even notice.

  “The ax! There was an ax in the room, on the wall in the room! And all of a sudden it just leaped off the wall, and flipped over three times, and split that dress-helm the tallest one likes to wear because he’s going bald!” She shuddered. “It didn’t just fall! It just about flew! Like someone was throwing it!”

  Some of the kitchen staff looked apprehensive, and there was some murmuring back and forth. The maid spoke right over the top of them.

  “I saw it and they saw it and they just went white! And the sly one pushed me out of the room and shut the door, which was a good thing, because I couldn’t possibly have moved otherwise! And I ran here.” She wasn’t as close to hysteria as she had been, but Mags had no doubt that she was very near some sort of breakdown.

  So did the head cook, who snorted again. He, at least, was not at all impressed. Then again, he must have been serving here for—

  :Almost thirty years that I know of.:

  “I’ve seen things move around here many a time, girl. A Herald with the Fetching Gift can move things just by thinking about it.” The head cook shook his head. “You’ve got no call to go bringing ghosts into it, when there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Like as not, it’s one of the Trainees, pulling pranks. They aren’t supposed to do that sort of thing, but boys will be boys, and those mercenaries are a hateful lot. I couldn’t fault the boys for making ’em sweat.”

  “But a Herald has to see what he’s moving, right?” the maid demanded. “He can’t just decide to move things without knowing what they are and where they are, right?”

  “Ah ...” She had caught him off guard, it seemed. He would like to pretend he was an expert in such matters.

  “I believe that is true,” he said finally. “I believe that in order to move something, the Herald has to be able to see it.”

  “And there were no Heralds anywhere about!” she exclaimed. “They couldn’t have seen in the window. Those awful men keep that closed up as tight as tight, and I have never seen anyone in their rooms but them.”

  “And why split a helm?” mused the cook. “I can’t imagine what that was supposed to mean. Truly, this is baffling.”

  “Unless you were a vengeful spirit and were sending a message,” replied another, silent until now. “Well, I wouldn’t care to be in their shoes, I can tell you that. I would not be at all surprised to find out they had some dark secrets, that lot. And a lot to hide. And maybe someone they wronged badly enough to come looking for revenge from the grave.”

  There was more, much mo
re, of the same. Mags didn’t hear all of it, since he finished the pots with a speed that the scullion must have found gratifying, and slipped back out of the kitchen again.

  :Well ... that was interesting.:

  Mags didn’t pause on his way to the stables—he didn’t have time. He’d have to hurry to change back into his Grays and be at the dining hall in time to meet Bear and Lena. But he definitely caught something in Dallen’s mind-voice.

  :You’re thinking on something.:

  :It does sound like someone with Fetching. And the cook is wrong, you don’t have to see what you want to Fetch—if you did, the Gift would not be very useful. You just have to know where it is and what it looks like.:

  :Aye, so?:

  :The thing is what the ax did, not that it moved. It flipped end over end and landed hard enough to split the helm. You would virtually have to be there to see in order to do it. Unless:

  :Oh, get on with it!:

  By now he had reached the stables. Dallen whickered a greeting as he passed. He dived into his room and began frantically wiggling out of his clothing and into his Grays.

  :If someone with the Fetching Gift worked with someone who was a FarSeer, then he wouldn’t have to be in the same room:

  Mags stopped, one boot on, the other in his hand. :But who?:

  :A good question.:

  17

  BEAR seemed to have had no real improvement in his attitude since that afternoon, and he might have thought he was covering it well, but so far as Mags was concerned, he wasn’t. Mags would have given just about anything to have a topic of conversation that would distract his friend from whatever was bothering him, but most of the interesting things he had done over the holiday would only have opened up more questions than he was able to answer.

  “Ever been down into th’ city?” he finally asked, as Bear toyed with his food and they both waited for Lena.

  Bear shook his head.

  “Herald Caelen said t’ go.” He shook his head. “Never seen that many people in m’ life. Never seen that much stuff neither.” After the Midwinter Eve vigil and Midwinter Day celebration, he and Marc and Dia had gone back to the Midwinter Market—and since he now had some money to spend, he’d gotten something for Lena and Bear. He’d brought the presents with him to—he hoped—cheer them up. “Since Jakyr give me coin, got ye somethin’.”