Changes

by Mercedes Lackey

  ::I believe so,:: Dallen told him. ::There was a building around about there, a big building that held several apartments. There was a fire there four or five years ago. No one could sort out who it belonged to afterward—probably the actual owner didn’t want to come forward, thinking he’d be up on charges for letting it get into that state. So it’s been abandoned, and no one can do anything about it until an owner is found or the city confiscates it. I suppose there are all manner of squatters in it now.::

  They plunged into the warren; he followed only far enough to determine that their “home” was an intact part of a cellar—and that the little girl who had fled was already there. He left them then, as the oldest of the boys sorted out some of the things that were likeliest to sell and hurried off with them to get some money and buy them all the food they had been promised as the reward for—whatever it was they had done for the assassins.

  ::What are you thinking?:: Dallen asked curiously.

  ::Tryin’ t’think how t’get at ’em,:: he said briefly, as he headed back to the Weasel’s shop at a trot. ::Reckon I’ll sleep on’t. I dun’ think they’re gonna go anywhere soon.::

  It had been a very long night, full of exertion, and once he got back to the shop and Nikolas’ congratulations, he was yawning. And starving. He didn’t say anything about the latter to Nikolas; after all, he would be getting food soon enough.

  If he could stay awake for it.

  He managed to have a coherent conversation about the Special Guards with Nikolas, anyway, once they got the Companions and headed back up the hill. It was quite enlightening; evidently there were more suspicious deaths in Haven over the course of a year than he had dreamed.

  “. . . so the rule of thumb is, figure out the motive, and you generally find the killer, if there is one,” Nikolas was saying, as they rode in through the back gate near the Kirball field.

  “Wisht we could figger out the motive of them twa new bastiches,” Mags fretted. “An’ if there’s more’n two. I cain’t b’lieve all they been sent fer was t’clean up t’others’ mess. I reckon they’re s’posed t’ finish what t’others started, an’ we still don’ know whut thet was. I dun’ like it, sir. I dun’ like it one bit.”

  “That makes two of us, Mags,” Nikolas replied, and sighed. “All right. I need to report to—whoever is awake at the moment. It won’t be the King; probably the Lord Marshal. Then I need to write a report that the King will get as soon as he is awake. There’s nothing much that you can do, lad, so get yourself fed and get some sleep. We’ll be on this tomorrow.”

  Dallen paused, in response to Mags’ unspoken command. “Sir? Reckon this’s th’ time fer me t’ take a bit uv leave from classes?”

  Nikolas pondered that for a moment. “It might just be,” he said, slowly. “Your Gift isn’t going to find these men from up here on the hill, not without opening yourself far too much and endangering yourself. You did that once already, and we were lucky you didn’t go mad. The odds are not good that we will be lucky twice. We might have to repeat what you did last time—moving through the city until you can sense them, then narrowing down our search until we find where they are.” He gnawed his lip. “I’ll know better after I report to the King—but yes, be prepared. We might be settling in for a long job.”

  An’ there goes any chance’a seein’ Amily fer a while. He sighed. “Yessir,” he said obediently. This’s too important. Even wi’ her Healin’ thing a-comin’ up. Nikolas knowed it, an’ ’e’s ’er pa. An’ she’ll know it too.

  She’s ’er pa’s daughter, after all.

  10

  Mags woke from a dream of the mine knowing exactly what he needed to do to get to those three children down in Haven. It pained him—but it was absolutely the surest, fastest way. They would never respond quickly enough to kindness—that was what the dream had been about. In the dream he’d outgrown being allowed in the kitchen. He’d been just old enough to have been tossed in with the rest of the kiddies to learn the business of chipping out sparklies, and one of the older boys had immediately latched onto him. He had become the lad’s personal little slavey, which was generally the norm with the very youngest of the children. He’d been bullied and hit, and at the end of the day, half his sparklies went to his “master.” Only later, when the older boy had died of a fever, had he figured out that he had been better off with him than without him. Maybe he’d had his sparklies taken, but he never went without food—the older boy had always seen to it he had his bowl of “soup” and his slice of bread and never let anyone take it from him. He might have been bullied, but he had never had to fight—the older boy had protected him.

  That was how he would approach these kiddies. They likely thought they were safe from discovery in their little cellar; he would ambush them there, give them a good fright, and tell them that they were working for him from now on. A cuff or two would get them in line fast enough. If he’d had time, he would have tried wooing them with kindness; he didn’t have the time. Maybe later he could make it up to them; right now he had to get them cowed, under his thumb, and compliant enough that he could worm their recent activities out of them.

  And in the process, he would be able to protect them and see that they were adequately fed. The combination of care and bullying should do the trick.

  He explained it all to Dallen as he washed and dressed. The Companion listened without interruption until he was done.

  ::I don’t like it,:: Dallen said, slowly. ::Oh, not the plan, the plan is sound enough. I just don’t like that it puts you in the position of hurting those children even a little. I can see why you think you have to—I just don’t like it.::

  ::No more do I,:: he confessed. ::But kin ye see another way?::

  ::No,:: Dallen admitted. ::Not an expedient one.::

  ::Aight. I’ll arsk their f’rgiveness later. Make it up to ’em. Mebbe thet Lord Somethin’ what took care a Selna kin find ’em someplace good t’ go. Now, I gotter find out what they was doin’. Maybe it weren’t nothin’ but runnin’ t’fetch stuff, an’ they don’ even know what ’twas they was fetchin’. But mebbe it were somethin’ important fer us t’know. Either case, I gotter find out.::

  Instead of going straight to lunch, he went to Nikolas’ rooms—and walked straight into a storm of tears.

  Nikolas nearly opened the door to his rooms in Mags’ face; they were both shocked, Nikolas that he was there, and Mags because Nikolas hadn’t sensed him before he opened the door. But Amily was wailing, and Amily never wailed, her voice thick with tears and pitched high with frustration.

  “But why?” she sobbed. “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you, sweetness,” Nikolas said, in a tone of voice that suggested to Mags he had used this very phrase several times now. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  “You can, but you won’t!” she wept. “That’s not good enough! I got myself all ready for this! I can’t bear dragging myself around any more! I want to get it over with, and I want to get it over with now! What if something happens? What if Bear’s parents drag him off? What if the other Healers get tired of waiting about and get assigned somewhere else? What if it never happens?”

  Mags quickly deduced what was going on: for some reason, the complicated procedure to straighten Amily’s leg had been canceled, and she was justifiably upset, the more so because her father wasn’t telling her why. Somehow, something had changed, and changed drastically, between last night and this morning.

  “The King has already issued the order that Bear is to stay here,” Nikolas reminded her, an edge of exasperation in his voice. “And the cancelation has nothing to do with Bear.”

  “They don’t trust him!” she cried. “I trust him! That ought to be good enough!”

  Nikolas pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Amily,” he said sharply, “I have been over this with you a dozen times now. We will fix your leg. I don’t know when, but this is just a temporary delay. You have to stop this; you’re going
to make yourself sick—”

  “As if you care!” she cried, burying her face in her arms.

  Nikolas gave Mags a look of frustration. “See if you can calm her down,” he said, in the tone of someone who was quite at the end of his rope. “I’ll be back.”

  Oh . . . great . . . How was he supposed to do that?

  He closed the door behind himself, quietly, and crossed the room to where Amily wept, draped over the arm of a settle. He sat down beside her. He didn’t know what to say, so he opted to say nothing; he just patted her shoulder now and again, awkwardly.

  Finally she stopped crying and sat up and looked at him with eyes red and swollen. “I don’t understand!” she said blotting her face with a handkerchief. “They just came and told me that they were putting off fixing my leg! They won’t give me a reason, and they won’t tell me when they will allow it! They won’t talk to me about it at all! Don’t they understand how scared I am to do this? Don’t they understand how hard it was to decide to go ahead? Why won’t they just—”

  “I dunno either,” Mags said, feeling utterly helpless. “This’s the fust I heard of ’t. There’s gotta be a reason . . . I dunno, mebbe they wanta give Bear more time t’get ever’body all coordinated like? Mebbe Foreseers figger there’s gonna be a summer plague or somethin’, an’ they’re gonna need alla th’ Healers? Mebbe—” Well, he could think of dozens of good reasons, but not any that meant they wouldn’t tell Amily the reason why. And there was a reason; he’d seen that in Nikolas’s face, in a brief flash of guilt when Amily demanded the reason of him and he’d said he couldn’t tell her.

  Couldn’t. Which meant he was under orders. If he hadn’t known the reason, he would have said something to that effect.

  What on earth could cause him to be under orders like that?

  Amily knew all of this as well as he did.

  And if the answer had been, “It can’t be done now because the Foreseers think it will kill you,” yes, she would be told that too.

  The only thing he could think of was that it had something to do with the new spies—or assassins—that he and Nikolas had uncovered, and that made absolutely no sense at all. As Mags was very well aware, although the King would do so with tremendous regret and a guilt that stayed with him the rest of his life, he would not hesitate to sacrifice anyone, not even the daughter of the King’s Own, for the greater good of Valdemar. And what difference could this procedure make to the safety of the Kingdom anyway? That was like saying the safety of Valdemar depended on whether or not a particular orchard had fruit this year.

  “You can come up with maybe’s until you turn purple, Mags,” she cried passionately. “So can I! I’m not a child; don’t I deserve to know what the real reason is?”

  “Reckon yer pa jest wants t’pertect ye,” he said, for truly, what else could he say?

  “But I don’t want to be protected!” Now she flushed with a little anger, which was good—at least she wasn’t crying anymore. “All right, I am going to be as afraid as anyone else if there is a good reason to be afraid, but I can face whatever it is! I can! I don’t need to be protected!”

  Mags thought about how Nikolas looked whenever he thought Amily was going to be hurt, even a little, and the lengths he went to in order to keep that from happening, and clamped his mouth shut.

  “Look, I’m certain-sure it ain’t ’cause they don’ think they kin trust ye,” he said finally. “An’ I don’ think it’s ’cause they reckon ye’d ever do summat thet’d cause a mort’a trouble. But mebbe they ain’t telling’ ye, ’cause if ye knowed, ye’d do summat that’d bollix things all up, wi’out realizin’ ye was doin’ it?” He shook his head. “I jest dunno—but I’ll try an’ find out.”

  She dried her eyes some more. “I hate not knowing things,” she said fiercely. “Father used to keep all sorts of secrets from me, because he thought I’d be afraid, or I’d fret too much about the danger to him, and I fretted more because I didn’t know what was going on! He knows that! He knows it better than anybody!”

  Mags could see that. “I’ll jest see what I kin find out,” he pledged, which was, after all, all that he could really do.

  “. . . and they won’t tell me!” Bear fumed, his anger underlaid with anxiety. Of course it was. Poor Bear—the first thing he would think was that this delay was because “everyone” had realized that his father was right, and it was the height of madness to have put him in charge of this project, only no one would tell him that because they were all going to be polite about it.

  Then he would be certain that the truth was that they all knew, and they were talking about him in pitying tones behind his back.

  Pitying or scornful.

  Bear had an active imagination. His next leap would be that shortly his father would be sent for, and he would go home and—

  And he would never see Lena again, nor any of his friends. He’d become an animal Healer, dispensing herbs for sick sheep. Maybe his father would allow him to take a human as a patient, so long as it was nothing serious—or was purely mechanical, such as setting a bone or stitching someone up prior to the “real” Healers doing their work.

  “Look—” Mags said, desperate to hold off the inevitable cascade of “and-then-they’ll-do-this.” “Has anybody said anythin’ ’bout this, ’cept ’tis bein’ delayed?”

  “No—but—”

  “How d’ye know it ain’t some Foreseer seein’ a summer plague i’ Haven?” Mags rubbed his temples. Getting Amily calmed down had been hard enough. Getting Bear calmed down was giving him a headache. “Hellfire, iffen there was one’a those, they’d be needin’ alla beds an’ ev’ry hand.”

  Bear gave him a look. “There hasn’t been a plague in Haven for over two hundred years.”

  “Then yer overdue,” Mags retorted. “It don’t have’ta be a plague. Could be a fire.” He thought about what a disaster that fire the assassins had set could have been if there had been a wind. “Hot, dry, big ol’ windstorm, some’un’s lantern goes over, whut happens then? Bad time t’hev some’un laid up i’ middle uv a complisticated Healin’.”

  “That’s not even a word,” Bear said crossly, but he was listening at least. “So why not just tell me that?”

  “Cause Foreseers got caught lookin’ stupid ’bout me?” Mags replied. “Mebbe ’cause—look, yer part’a my crew, so I kin tell ye. They’s a couple new lads from thet merry band’a killers, an’ they are whoa better’n the first lot.”

  Quickly, he told Bear about the situation he and Nikolas had unearthed. As he had hoped, it at least got Bear’s attention and got his mind off his own troubles. “So what’f they seen this new lot doin’ somethin’ that hurt a buncha people? So, aye, they tell head of Heralds and head of Healers, and they find out Nikolas knows ’bout ’em already. But they ain’t a-gonna bandy this ’bout. Iffen it gits out, people’ll panic, start seein’ assassins ev’where, next thing y’know, there’s people beatin’ up people on account’a they got a funny way’a talking, or they look furrin’ or—well, you know people.”

  Bear nodded, slowly, reluctantly. “But wouldn’t Nikolas tell you?”

  “Not iffen ’e was ordered not to. ’E’s kept plenty’uv things from me. Hellfire, I’d wanta go tell Master Soren an’ my other friends down i’ Haven, an’ they’d wanta warn their friends, and sooner or later, some’un’d slip.” By this time, he was half convinced himself. It made perfect logical sense.

  “I mean,” he continued, “Le’s go ahead an’ get real crazy. ’Cause these fellers don’ know what kinda weather we’ll get, mebbe they cain’t count on the right sorta stuff to make a big fire, an’ they know we got the Foreseers what might See somethin’, an’ Heralds that’d get roused up right quick iffen they ran ’round settin a lot of fires. But mebbe they got a new kinda plague where they come from, new t’us, mebbe. An’ mebbe they know what spreads it. So mebbe they come ’ere wi’ thet i’ baggage, an’ are getting’ ready t’turn it loose.”

  Bea
r shuddered, the anger in his expression fading, being replaced y alarm.

  “I ain’t sayin’ ’tis thet,” Mags hastened to add. “I’m jest sayin’, could be. Aight?”

  “All right,” Bear agreed. “But where does that leave me?”

  “Where’d it leave ye afore ye got tapped fer Amily’s fixin’?” Mags countered.

  “Well . . . .” Bear rubbed the back of his head ruefully. “Keeping Lena from feeling bad, as much as I could. And classes. And doing my work with the healing kits. I feel bad for putting some of that aside, but I have the basic kit now, and that part is out of my hands . . .”

  “Aight. So figger ’stead’a runnin’ ’round tryin’ t’be three people, ye got leave t’jest be one fer a change.” Mags punched his shoulder, lightly. “Wish’t I c’d say th’same.”

  ::Mags,:: Dallen interrupted. ::Time to go. Nikolas has arranged that leave.::

  “I gots t’ git,” he said, feeling both a bit of thrill and a lot of apprehension.

  “. . . and not to go to class,” Bear said after a moment, studying his face. “You’re going to be down in Haven all the time now.”

  “Mebbe.” Mags shrugged. “Dunno yet. Mebbe we’ll move inter thet shop fer a while. I dunno. Might could be e’en Nikolas dunno. Jest know I gotta go now, cause we gotta be down there long afore sunset t’day. I gotta start huntin’ fer this new lot.”

  Bear gave him a long and measuring look. “These people almost killed you,” he said, somberly. “Three times, they almost killed you. And the ones that almost killed you, you say weren’t as skilled as these new ones.”

  “Aye, I figgered thet part out,” Mags said dryly. “Might’ve been no bad notion t’have some other Gift, aye? Too bad we don’ get t’pick, I’d’a picked one thet made it so I had t’be treated like King hisself.”

  “And what Gift would that be?” Bear asked.