Changes

by Mercedes Lackey

  Mags looked at her askance, his mind full of nefarious things that Marchand could be doing. “Ye don’t thin’—‘e ain’t murderin’ ’em—is ’e?”

  Lena looked at him, shocked, and shook her head. “No! Uh . . .” Then she blinked. “Actually . . . in a way he is murdering them . . . not physically but . . .” She bit her lip. “He takes someone who adores and admires him. He takes the best of their work. I bet the closer it gets to them getting their Scarlets, the more horror stories he tells about how hard life is on the road. They were poor, for the first time in their lives they’ve been living in plenty, and now he’s telling them, ‘Oh, and by the way, once you get your Scarlets, you’ll probably be poor again.’ But then he takes them on one last trip with him; he probably tells them that he’s doing them this huge favor, taking them somewhere quiet and luxurious so they can put all their energy into their Master piece. But that’s not why he’s taking them. He’s found a wealthy household off back of beyond of nowhere that desperately wants a Bard of their own, like a sort of prestige pet. And he’s already been priming them with his visits. So this last time, he brings his protégé with him and says, ‘Look, see how much I esteem your regard for me, I am bringing you my very own student! Offer him the position!’ ”

  Amily’s eyes flashed anger. “Oh, that . . . snake! So of course they do! And of course after all of Marchand’s terror tales, the poor thing can’t believe his luck and takes it!”

  “And Father ‘helps’ him with his Master piece. Which is, of course, just barely good enough to pass. And everyone says, my goodness, poor fellow just never lived up to his promise, so sad, but at least he has a position! And he settles into to that position never realizing Father used him all those years and now has just dumped him in a backwater to become someone’s fat little house Bard, happy to sit by the fire and be a trophy and write songs about horses and cows!” Lena was clearly very angry by this point. Mags wasn’t entirely certain why she was so angry—though he could certainly understand that it was extremely unethical for Marchand to be stealing his protégé’s work and claiming it as his own—but he had the feeling that Amily understood perfectly, and he figured eventually she could help him figure it out.

  That wasn’t what was important at the moment.

  “Aight, I know ye know Bard business,” he said. “An’ I’m purty certain-sure thet iffen ye say Marchand’s doin’ this, ’e is. What I don’ unnerstand is why this means ’e ain’t a spy.”

  “Oh . . .” Lena deflated a little. “Well . . . I suppose it doesn’t. It’s just . . . this is why I know he’s not using my father, my father is using him. Farris isn’t the conniving one, it’s Father. You see?”

  “Aight. So . . . gimme ’nother reason.” This wasn’t just baiting her. Mags trusted Lena’s instincts. And he knew that if there was another reason . . . she’d articulate it, once she thought about it.

  “I . . . hmm.” She sat there with her brows furrowed with thought, while Bear held her hand. “Well . . . he never leaves Bardic, much less the grounds, except to eat. If you think I work hard, you should see him! All he ever thinks about is music. I just don’t think he’d have any time to pass people messages. He’s very naïve. He desperately wants to think the best of everyone. His people may be poor, but they are awfully kind, and he’s very good-hearted.” She sighed. “I don’t know how to say this, Mags, but him being kind is something you just can’t fake.”

  “Aight.” Mags nodded. “I ’spect some’un’s gonna find a way t’ get Truth Spell on ’im t’make sure’a thet, but . . . I ’spect yer right. So . . . whatcher gonna do ’bout what yer pa’s doin’?”

  A thin little smile crossed Lena’s lips. “I already have done something about it,” she said. “You know that a copy of everything a Bard does is supposed to go in the Archives here, right?”

  “No, but I’ll take yer word fer it,” Mags replied.

  “Well, I took the copy of that new song, and I took the copy I’d made of the composition work—” She paused a moment. “Well . . . blast. I need to explain something else now. Whenever we work on composition, we take it to the teacher that same day, and he or she dates and initials it. This isn’t just to prevent someone from stealing your work, it’s to prevent anyone from claiming you stole his work. So Father’s song had the date he left it in the Archive, and Fariss’ work was dated, and it was pretty clear what came first. I put them in a folder, and I left them on Bard Lita’s desk.” Lena looked like a very satisfied kitten . . . one with a mousetail sticking out of the corner of her mouth and a smudge of cream on her nose.

  Mags blinked, then turned to Bear. “An’ you said I was bein’ all poltical-connivin’ an’ manipulational!”

  “Oh, hush. And that’s not a word.” Bear kissed Lena’s hand, and she blushed. “That was fearfully clever! It could have been anyone who left that on the desk! It’s not like Marchand hasn’t irritated a lot of people around here.”

  “I’m half tempted to tell Bard Lita it was me,” Amily said thoughtfully. “But she won’t ask. All she needs is the evidence, it speaks for itself.”

  “Tha’s a fact,” Mags agreed. “But . . . ye had that other prollem . . . didn’ ye?”

  This time it wasn’t a blush that reddened Lena’s cheeks, it was a painful flush. “All I ever heard was the rumor,” she said. “No one would ever tell me directly they’d heard him say that. And . . . now that I know what I know about his composition . . .”

  “Look,” Bear interrupted, “let me just ask this outright. Do you want him to be your pa? Cause I’ll tell you right now, if my pa claimed I wasn’t his, I’d send the old blowhard a smoked ham and a thank you letter!”

  “Bear!” Lena exclaimed, shocked, as Mags and Amily laughed.

  “Well, look, what’s he done for me? Nothing but give me gray hair before my time! Look!” Bear pulled a lock of very dark hair away from his head. “See? And what’s Marchand done for you? He didn’t even get you into Bardic! Your grandpa did that!”

  Lena wavered. “That’s true—but it’s not me that I’m worried about. Mama would . . . if the rumor got home, Mama would never dare go out in public again. It would be horrible for her. Everyone would be trying to figure out who my real father was. Grandpapa would be mortified, and he’d blame Mama . . .” Tears sprang up in her eyes at the mere thought.

  Bear hastily put his arm around her. “Hey, there, it hasn’t happened yet. It’s just been a couple of whispers. Your friends are pretty good at squashing ’em. Lord Wess has been real good at that. He says he just looks down his nose and drawls that—no, wait, let me see if I can do this right.”

  Bear took his arm from around Lena and stood up. He slouched indolently against the wall and looked down his nose at all of them “My dear old creature, of course Marchand would say something like that. The fellow cannot bear the idea of anyone having more talent and adulation that he does when it’s a stranger; can you imagine what he’s thinking about being eclipsed by his own offspring? And a girl at that? He’s already done what he can to keep her out of the public eye, but that won’t hold for much longer. He’s probably writhing in agony on his pillow at night at the mere thought that the words ‘The great Bard Marchand’ would be applied to anyone but him. Since he can’t do anything about the poor girl’s brilliance, he probably decided to see if he couldn’t separate her from the name, and damn the consequences.”

  Bear gave one of those odd laughs that Wess did . . . a sort of wheezing snigger. “Of course, the man is so wrapped up in his own consequence that he hasn’t thought things through very well. Because if Lena wasn’t his, then for all of his claims about how irresistible he is to women and how clever he is, his own wife found him quite inferior to someone else altogether, and he’s been played the fool! It’s something right out of one of those tavern songs where a woman bids goodbye to her husband at the front door and brings the lover in the back, and when the husband asks about strange boots under the bed, she tells him somethin
g ridiculous.”

  Bear wheezed again. “Just wait. As soon as it dawns on him that he’s set himself up to look like the doddering old man in a farce, he’ll deny ever having said that.”

  Mags applauded slowly as Bear bowed and sat down—both for the performance and for Lord Wess’s cleverness.

  “I imagine that got around pretty quick to Marchand, because according to Lord Wess he hasn’t let out a peep about you not being his since,” Bear continued. “Backed himself into a bad corner with that one.”

  Lena nodded slowly. “I just—I—” She let out her breath in a huge sigh of mingled frustration and unhappiness. “I think about him using all those other Bardic Trainees, and I just want to—I don’t know. But he is immensely talented. He’s also immensely self-absorbed. For so long, all I wanted was for him to take notice and be proud of me and now . . . now I just don’t really know what I want . . .”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Bear said with confidence. “You can do anything you put your mind to. I’ve seen it.”

  “Not everything . . .” She shook her head. “But . . . Amily, Mags, are you safe now? Is it over?”

  “Gotta be,” Mags said. “They’d be insane t’ try t’ get Amily after thet. Completely bonkers. Oh, I don’ thin’ they’re gone, they took on th’ job uv doin’ fer th’ Karsites what th’ Karsites ain’t been able t’do wi’ armies. Ev’thin’ I read offen ’em tells me once they git a job, they stick on’t till thet job’s done, ’less they kin figger out how t’break t’contract. But they gotta be smart ’nough to know that snatchin’ Amily ain’t gonna git ’em what they wants.” He tried to imagine himself into Stone or Ice’s head and failed utterly. “I dunno what they’re gonna do next. They ain’t like thet crazy one, nor th’ feller what tried t’burn t’stable. They . . . think. Tha’s all they do, actually. They be thinkin’, calculatin’, alla time. They gotta be thinkin’ what they kin do, an’ I cain’t reckon like they kin.”

  “Well, good. Does this mean you’re going to go back down into Haven to spy with Nikolas?” The light from the lone candle that was all Mags was willing to have for light in this heat flickered across her face.

  “Dunno. Well, I know Nikolas’ keepin’ the shop goin’, ’tis one uv ’is main ways t’get ’is own spyin’ done. But I dunno iffen I’m gonna go back down there soon. Things are kinda all of a muddle right now.” He frowned. “We still don’ know who t’other two plants are up ’ere on th’ Hill. We gotta figger thet out quick, an’ I don’ think makin’ ev’body take a fealty oath unner Truth Spell’s the best ideer for fndin’ out.”

  “Someone’s suggesting that?” Bear said, surprised.

  “ ’Course. It’s purt well guaranteed thet if there’s a right bad idea, some’un on t’ Council is gonna suggest it.” Mags grimaced. Interacting with the Court and the Council was one part of being the King’s Own that he was just as glad he didn’t have to do. He might well envy Nikolas the attendance at those fabulous High Feasts he had heard about, and wish he could see some of the fabled entertainments—but dealing with anyone highborn except those he knew were his friends and allies?

  No. At least, not for a lot of years.

  “Mags . . . I’m not so sure about that,” Amily said into the silence. “You said yourself, these aren’t the sort of people that give up, and the one thing they know they can use to get to Papa is me . . .”

  He frowned a little with irritation, but frowned more when Bear gave an exaggerated sigh. “Amily, that doesn’t make any sense,” Bear began, and Amily got a stubbon look on her face and started to talk over him in a higher and slighty whiny voice. And the more she talked, the more he began to feel . . .

  Well, he wasn’t sure what he felt. Very irritated, as she started out from the reasonable assumption that Ice and Stone were frighteningly clever, appallingly inventive, and terrifyingly well trained, and spun that into a wild fantasy of strange, unstoppable killers with one foot in the spirit world who had, like some weird Pelagirs creature, gotten her “scent” and would not rest until they carried her off. Her tone grated on him and set up a headache just behind his cheekbones. He began to harbor the exceedingly uncharitable notion that—well, although she had not liked all the restrictions, she had liked being the center of attention and the praise she’d gotten for being willing to play bait—and now that attention was going to be taken away, and she didn’t want that to happen. The attention she would get for having her leg worked on was passive . . . and it was centered on a defect. The attention she had gotten for being essential to laying the trap was active and centered on her bravery. Oh, he could see that all too well.

  And he didn’t want to listen to the convoluted, paranoid fantasy of someone who had turned into an attention addict. Not when it was distracting him from real danger and obscuring how he was supposed to solve it.

  The room seemed way too hot. He wanted to lie down or get a drink, but most of all, he wanted to be alone.

  And suddenly, as Lena added her voice, much more shrill than usual, the gathering turned from supportive and friendly to argumentive and confrontational. And Mags had no idea how it had gotten that way.

  Or why.

  Wait—

  Yes, he did know. He just couldn’t do anything about any of it. Because despite having survived the kidnapping, nothing had changed. Well, nothing, except that right now the bare thought of how narrow their escape had been was making him feel sick; paradoxically, as more time passed, he was getting more obsessive and anxious about that narrow escape. In the short term—he would stand by what he said; there was no way that Ice and Stone would make a second kidnapping attempt, not this soon, not when the whole Hill was on alert.

  But for the long-term, paranoid fantasies aside, Amily probably was still in danger, and she still could not defend herself or even run away with her leg the way it was.

  Now, on the one hand, if the “short-term” could just extend to getting her leg fixed, she would at least not be a literal sitting target. But that bizarre story she was spinning around herself was the equivalent of the tale of the little boy who yelled for help in the woods once too often . . . the more she talked, the less anyone would even pretend to listen. The less they listened, the wilder her story would become. Eventually no one would take her or the danger she was in seriously. And that would be when she was in the most danger of all.

  He couldn’t think . . . he just could not think of a way to tell her this without making her angry.

  Everything else was, oh, gods, the same old problems. Nothing had actually been done about them. Bear and Lena still were unable to grow spines and just deal with their parents.

  And he still hadn’t done anything remotely useful about these killers except to uncover that they were (probably) in the pay of the Karsites, and that had been by purest accident.

  Nothing had changed. They were all circling the same stagnant problems, accomplishing nothing. And from the way things looked, they would keep circling the same stagnant problems forever.

  At that moment, Lena’s voice hit a particularly piercing note, at least to his ears, and a lance of pain stabbed through his temple. He clapped one hand to his head and swore.

  At least that shut them up.

  “Mags?” Amily said. “Are you all right?”

  No, I ain’t all right, an’ anybody not completely balled up i’ ’er own liddle center uf ’er own little universe ’d see thet!

  “Headache,” he said, between clenched teeth. And when Bear started to get up and come over to look at him, he confronted Bear with a snarl, making him back up a pace. “Don’ touch me, Bear! I ain’t some whinging li’l soft thing whut’s never had wuss’n a broke nail, all right? It’s jest a headache.”

  Bear fidgeted with his glasses. “Sometimes headaches come from something worse—you might have—”

  “I been looked over,” he snapped. “I been looked over good. Nobuddy found nothin’.” He squinted at all of them. “I jest need somethin’ right no
w that ain’t squallin’ an’ whingin’ an’ argufyin’. Like mebbe some peace.”

  Bear frowned. “That’s not a—”

  “Don’ say it,” he growled. Bear backed up another pace.

  “I think we should go,” Lena whispered. She looked—scared. Did he look that ferocious?

  Evidently he did. Amily looked as if there was something about him she was suddenly unsure of.

  So unsure that she picked up her crutches from beside the chair by herself and struggled to her feet without any help from him. “I think we should go and let Mags get some rest,” she said, but she did it with a look at Lena that somehow managed to imply that it was Lena who was at fault.

  Or at least, that was the way that Lena reacted.

  But mercifully, before they could get into it again, Bear got them all out the door.

  Mags started to throw himself down on the now vacant bed, when he realized that Amily—

  ::I’ve got it,:: Dallen informed him. ::I’m not letting them past me till Bear boosts Amily up on my—there we go.::

  For one moment, Mags was even feeling a surge of resentment against Dallen for interfering, but he throttled it down and cursed himself for letting pain get to him that badly.

  But this was, without a doubt, the worst headache he had ever had in his life. For a moment he was tempted to call Bear back and beg him to have a look—

  But he’d been looked at. Four—five—six Healers? He’d lost count. They’d all gone over him to make sure he hadn’t been poisoned secretly or cracked over the head or something else. And they’d all said he was fine.

  Gotta be the heat. This was the worst summer he could remember.