Intrigues v(cc-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Did ’e even recognize ye when ’e sent me off on that errant?” Mags added softly. “Not thet I noticed. In fact, you was pretty upset ’bout it at th’ time, an fer a goodly while after. I’ fact, you was upset ’bout it right up till he started payin’ ’tention to ye. Aye?”

  Bear took Lena gently by the shoulders and shook her a little. “Lena, think. Think about it. Haven’t you felt him using the Gift on you a little, and using his personality on you a lot, to get you to forget all that? Haven’t you felt him pressing you to worship him the way Amily worships her pa?” He didn’t let her answer; he looked at Mags instead.

  :Tell her I have,: Dallen said sadly. :Of course, that is unethical, but he used his Gift so little that he could always claim he didn’t realize he was doing it because he wanted his daughter’s regard back. And he would probably be believed.:

  “Dallen says he has,” Mags told her. “ ’Cept, of course, Amily’s pa deserves thet sorta worship, aye? Ye jest have’ta see ’im with her, how much he takes care’a her, how he makes sure she’s all right afore he goes an’ does things. Mebbe he gotta think’a Valdemar an’ th’ King first, but he makes sure someone is lookin’ out fer Amily. Like Master Soren an’ Lydia. Yer pa? He ever make sure ye got so much as a spare harpstring? He ain’t done nothin’ t’ deserve nothin’ from ye, if ye was t’ ask me. He never done nothin’ t’ get ye here, an’ aside of that one concert, never done nothing for ye when ye got here. Never made sure you was all right. Never made sure there was someone t’ watch out fer ye.”

  “You have the Gift too, Lena,” Bear urged. “Use it! Shake off what he did to you and see him!”

  A hundred emotions, all negative ones, chased themselves across Lena’s face—and then her face crumpled, she buried it in her hands, and sobbed.

  “I thought he loved me!” she wept into her hands. “I thought he finally loved me.”

  Both Bear and Mags made a move to hold her; Mags pulled back and gestured to Bear to comfort her. Pushing his lenses up on his nose, he pulled her into his shoulder and let her sob.

  “One day someone is going to not get charmed and beat the stuffing out of him,” Bear said, in a growl. “And the sooner that day comes, the better. But let me tell you something, Lena. One day, when people say ‘Bard Marchand,’ it will be you they are thinking about and not him. And one day, when someone says ‘Tobias Marchand,’ others will wrinkle their foreheads and say, ‘Don’t you mean Lena?’ and they’ll have to be reminded that Tobias happened to be the father of the really, truly famous Bard Marchand.”

  Mags nodded in silent agreement.

  “Families,” Bear added, in tones that indicated that something more had shortened his temper than just having to work with difficult patients.

  “Wha’s got ye riled?” Mags asked.

  Bear sighed. Lena sobbed on, oblivious to what they were saying. Well, Mags couldn’t blame her. This was a horrible blow to her. Here she thought her father had finally noticed her, was impressed by her, and had come to love her. The fact that all these emotions had been created in her by her father in order to manipulate her was probably unbearable right now.

  “Got a letter from my family,” he growled. “My brother’s turning up. Head of the Sweetwater House of Healing, if you please, and he’s going to demand that I do my duty to the family, come home, and get married on Midsummer and start spawning babies. They still haven’t given up on that.”

  Lena’s sobs were easing off. She sniffed wetly and Bear offered her a scrap of clean cloth. She took it, pulled away from him, and he reluctantly let her go.

  “M-maybe you just ought to go along with that for a l-little,” she said, with a faint stammer. “At least your family cares about you, and if you just give them what they want for a moon or two, you can come back here—”

  “I don’t want that girl,” Bear snarled, sounding startlingly like his namesake. “I don’t love her! I am not going to get shackled up to some girl I hardly know just so my parents can be grandparents, and it’s not as if they aren’t already, because they are. If I marry anyone, it’s going to be someone I love and would do anything for, not someone my parents picked out because they’re neighbors! Someone like—” he paused. “Never mind. It just won’t be her.”

  Lena stared at him, startled by his vehemence. He looked down at his hands. “Sorry. That kind of just jumped out.”

  “Nothin’ t’ be sorry fer,” Mags offered. He shook his head. “Sometimes it seems like we all oughta just run away from here, an’—an’ that’s when I run out, cause I dunno what we’d do t’ keep ourselves fed an’ housed up.”

  “I could always be an animal Healer,” Bear said sourly. “At least animals are always grateful to you. Nobody thinks you’re second-rate because you treat them with medicine instead of a Gift. Animal Healers are always in demand.”

  “I could be a traveling minstrel,” Lena answered, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose. “I’m good enough for that right now. Maybe we should do that. Run away and do that. Show them all.”

  Mags shrugged. “I got nothin’. All I know’s mine work. Jest end up i’ the same situation, jest wi’ a better master. Mebbe. I misdoubt Master Cole was th’ on’y mine owner t’ treat ’is miners thet way.”

  And Lena sighed. “Traveling minstrels starve a lot,” she said forlornly. “And my father still wouldn’t notice or care.”

  “Well then,” Bear said stolidly. “No running away.”

  They all sighed, and looked at one another.

  As Mags made his way back to his room in the stable that night, he resolved one thing. He was going to at least ask King’s Own Nikolas if he could help Bear.

  If, of course, he could ever see the man.

  He decided to take the bull by the horns—or at least, the heifer. He was going to help Amily that evening, since Nikolas hadn’t shown up at his room or even given any indication that he was ever going to continue the lessons again, so he would ask the one person who surely knew where her father was.

  “Lissen,” he said, before they got down to work. “Gotta ast ye somethin’.”

  She raised her eyes to look at him. “Of course,” she replied.

  “I need t’ see yer Pa. Nikolas,” he said, looking her in the eyes.

  She looked away, but laughed, though it wasn’t exactly the laughter of someone who was hearing a joke. “We all need to see him,” she told him, still not looking at him. “He has become a phantom. I know he’s still here in Haven, because dirty plates and filthy uniforms appear in our rooms and have to be taken away, but I haven’t actually seen him personally in the last few days.”

  Ever since th’ new set’ a visions, Mags thought bleakly. Aye, that figgers. Bet he reckons it’s me after all an’ he’s tryin’ t’ find a way t’ stop me.

  “Well, when ye do, tell ’im I need t’ see ’im?” he pleaded. “It’s pretty important.”

  “If I see him I will,” Amily replied, looking uneasy, and maybe a little guilty. “But sometimes he does this and I don’t see him for—well, once it was for three moons.”

  Well that would be a bit too late . . .

  But it would be ungracious to act like a boor about it. Amily couldn’t help what her father thought or did. “All right,” he replied. “Thenkee. Now, hand me my share, aye?”

  She did so, and he couldn’t help but note that her hand was shaking a little as she did it.

  Bear’s place at lunch was empty.

  For a moment, Mags had the crazy thought that Bear’s brother had arrived and essentially kidnapped his sibling—but no, that wouldn’t be possible, would it? Surely no one here would allow that.

  :Dallen?: he asked first, before voicing the question aloud.

  :No clue,: the Companion replied. :Let me ask some of the others—though, mind you, we usually don’t know what’s going on up at Healers’ Collegium. They have good shields and don’t leak much.:

  “Anybody know where Bear is?” he asked aloud. His only r
esponse was headshakes.

  Well, there was no point in worrying about it. Bear was often called away; this was probably just another one of those times.

  They were almost done with the meal when Bear turned up, finally, looking bad. Ragged. He dropped down into his seat and stared dully at his empty plate, a plate which Gennie and Mags took, filled with the leftovers and shoved in front of him.

  “Eat!” said Gennie.

  “He’s dead,” Bear said, mechanically picking up a fork and getting a mouthful. “I don’t understand it. He just... died. He shouldn’t have died. I was crazy-careful about dosages and combinations. I tested everything on myself first—”

  He stopped, as if he had said too much. No one else seemed to notice the gaff, they were all staring at him in puzzlement.

  “Who died?” Halleck asked.

  “Lunatic,” Bear said dully. “The crazy foreigner. I just don’t understand it. I thought I had his fear and his heart rate under control. He was fine last night. I made sure he took everything. The new stuff I gave him was working, at least I think it was, there were moments when he was even coming out of that fear-fit he was in . . .”

  “Oh, him.” Halleck shrugged. “Bear, I know he was your patient, and you have to feel bad about that, and I know that the senior Healers trusted him to you to treat, but face it, they only did that because they couldn’t do anything with him. They’d already given up on getting him sane, and everyone else had given up on getting any information out of him. So it’s not as if it’s a tragic loss . . .”

  Halleck trailed off, seeing that he wasn’t getting through to Bear.

  Mags knew why. Entirely apart from the fact that Bear took the care of every patient he had very seriously, there was the implication that his skills were nowhere near as sharp as he and everyone else had thought. Failure put him one step closer to being hauled home, and his brother was due here any day.

  And Mags hadn’t exactly done anything about getting Nikolas to intercede for him.

  Of course, that was because Nikolas wasn’t anywhere to be found, but that was beside the point. He hunched over a little with guilt, and finished his lunch in a hurry. “ ’M sorry, Bear,” he mumbled as he got up to leave. “I don’ think ’twas yer fault, if thet means anythin’.”

  Bear didn’t even look up.

  Mags heard the shouting long before he got to Healers’ Collegium. One voice was Bear’s; the other was very like Bear’s, just deeper. The accent was even the same, which pretty much identified who it was.

  Bear’s brother was here.

  “. . . and now you see what happens when you think you can muck around with midwife potions and try to do what only a skilled and Gifted Healer can!” shouted the deeper voice. “You are in way over your head, Bear! We should never have allowed you to come here; you let a few early successes go to your head and they made you think you could actually do what only a real Healer can, and now you see the result! You managed to kill a valuable asset to the Crown!”

  Mags hesitated. Should he leave? He had no right to listen to this.

  But he couldn’t seem to make his feet move.

  “I didn’t—”

  “Bah, don’t tell me that, I know you, I can read you like a Mindspeaker. Even you think you killed him!” There was steel in that voice, the steel of someone who was absolutely certain he was in the right, and no one was going to tell him any differently. “It’s time you stopped mucking about with potions and accepted your responsibility to the family. You are coming home and getting married. If you want to spend your time dosing animals when you get there, fine. But no more of this ‘herbs can replace a Healer’ idiocy. Good gods, that medicine chest notion—that is appalling! How many more people do you want to kill with that?”

  “They’d die anyway,” Bear shouted back. “At least this way they have a chance!”

  “You don’t know that! In fact, it’s far more likely that they wouldn’t die without all those leaves and roots, because they would be wise and send for a Healer right away, instead of mucking about with beans and flowers until it’s too late for a real Healer to save them!”

  “The Circle—”

  “The Circle will see it my way after this,” the brother said, scornfully. “Killing a patient tends to make them wake up and take the blinkers off. So you just resign yourself to doing what you are told for a change. And start packing. There’s going to be a wedding at Midsummer if I have to drag you to the altar tied up.”

  Silence, the slamming of a door, then the sound of something breaking.

  Slowly, carefully, Mags approached the door to Bear’s conservatory. He tapped gingerly on the window.

  Bear opened the door, and glared at him. “I suppose you overheard all that,” he snapped. The young Healer Trainee was disheveled and red-faced with anger. His hair looked like a bird had made a nest in it.

  “I gotta think yer whole Collegium overheard thet,” Mags said tentatively.

  Bear snorted.

  “I—” Mags hesitated. “I dunno what I kin do t’ help—”

  Bear exploded. “Well you should have thought of that when I first told you about it. You should have gone to Herald Nikolas and gotten him to help me! But no, you selfish pig, all you could think about was being a Kirball hero and how persecuted you are, and making everyone feel sorry for you.”

  That was so unjust it took Mags’ breath away.

  Bear had clearly worked himself up into a towering temper. “It’s all about you, isn’t it? It’s always all about you, the incredible savage mine-orphan who now gets invited to private Bardic concerts and hobnobs with the King’s Own! The big champion of some stupid game that somehow makes him a hero!” Bear’s eyes were dark and furious. “And now here you are, all so hurt and persecuted because a couple of idiots have a bad dream, and a couple more idiots believe it, and now everyone feels sorry for you and tries to make you feel better and they don’t give a hang about what’s happened to the rest of us while you mope around feeling so sorry for yourself!”

  Mags could only stand there, stunned, his chest getting tight, and his throat getting choked.

  “Meanwhile, people who are actually running themselves ragged doing things to try and help people are told they’re useless and fools, and they’re going to kill people, and they just have to come home and stop mucking about with mud-pies and take care of sheep and goats, because no one cares if a sheep or a goat dies!”

  Mags opened his mouth, but nothing came out. His words felt cut off in his throat. Bear glared at him, and the look in Bear’s eyes was very like hatred.

  “The hell with you!” Bear shouted. “You can’t even be bothered to help a friend! I hope—I hope—oh bah!”

  He slammed the door in Mags’ face.

  Mags blinked, feeling a welter of emotion rising in him. Anger, because nothing about that was true or justified. Indignation.

  But mostly grief. Now even Bear had abandoned him. How alone did that make him?

  He wanted to wrench the door open and give Bear back as good as he’d gotten—but he couldn’t think of anything to counter what Bear said. You don’t know what I’ve been trying to do for you—well, yes, but there was only his word for that, and it was pretty clear that Bear would just think he was lying. I never wanted any attention—well, Bear clearly didn’t believe that now, and saying so wouldn’t change anything.

  How long had this been festering inside his friend? Or... not friend anymore.

  He wanted to turn to Dallen for comfort, but what if Bear was right? It didn’t feel to him like Bear was right, but how would he know? And would Dallen actually tell him, or just make soothing noises?

  Amily wouldn’t talk to him now, except about commonplaces. His teachers were avoiding anything but their subjects with him. The team never talked about anything but Kirball around him. Now Bear—

  And Nikolas. Had Nikolas really vanished? Or was he only “invisible” to Mags?

  He had to think the latter.<
br />
  That meant the only real friend he had left, apart from Dallen, was Lena, and now that Lena knew her father had only used her to get to Mags, how could she ever want to stay friends with him? Worse still, once Bear told her that Mags hadn’t lifted a finger to help him stay, why would she want to stay friends with him?

  She wouldn’t, of course.

  Who would?

  :I would.: The depression in Dallen’s mind-voice took him aback. :Mags, you are not a bad person. I believe that there is a good explanation for what the Foreseers saw. I do not believe that you would ever harm the King, or anyone that didn’t try to hurt you or your friends first. I believe that you have done all that was in your power to help Lena and Bear, and all your friends. I believe that.:

  :You’re ’bout the only one, then,: Mags couldn’t help but respond.

  There was a long pause. :Unfortunately... you may be right.:

  Chapter13

  THERE was no practice today, and the members of the team had scattered to the four winds to enjoy their free day in picnics and trips to the market in Haven and other enjoyable pursuits.

  Bear was not speaking to him. At all. Last Mags had heard, the Healers’ Circle had not bent to the will of Bear’s brother nearly as readily as that worthy had assumed they would, but there were certainly some questions about Bear’s dosages and skill with herbs and willingness to call in help. And a thorough investigation was underway concerning the Lunatic’s death. Of course, none of this satisfied Bear in the least, or did anything to keep his brother from insisting that he was going back home.

  Amily was nowhere to be found. She had not shown up in the Archives for three days running, and when Mags had dared to try the quarters that she and her father shared, the servants said she had been gone for that long. She often went to stay with Lydia when her father was absent, so they told him. But at this point he was not at all certain of any sort of welcome at Master Soren’s house either, so he didn’t even try to find her there.