Well, that put an interesting complexion on things. Mags felt his thoughts disengage from the problem of find the foreigners to concentrate on Lena. And he snagged a few baby carrots to munch on himself while he thought.
No use in my tellin’ ’er nothin’, he thought. She b’lieves me when I’m with ’er an’ then fergets ev’thin’ I tol’ ’er when I’m agone.
::Exactly so,:: Dallen replied. ::Erm—not exactly. She would listen to you, as you said, but doubts always set it as soon as she is alone. But remember what you are trying to do about her and Bear.::
::Right.:: So, what he should do is put in Bear’s mind the direction things should take, and let Bear do the telling, and comforting, and so on. “Ye haven’ been all that around yersel’,” he told Bear, with just the tiniest bit of reproach in his voice. “Ye ken? So wha’s she gonna do, wi’ me runnin’ about after Nikolas, an’ you off doin’, too. She gots nobody she talks to but us.”
“Yes, but—” Bear faltered. “Damn it, why do you have to be right all the time? And the only time I can get her out of class is—”
“When I’m agone, aye.” He nodded. “Nay, look, Bear, ye kin afford t’take a liddle time off Amily. Ye gots th’ Herald what draws stuff she sees i’ other peoples’ heads, aye?”
Bear nodded and crunched a carrot. “She said she’d do it when I asked her this morning. Just have to get her an’ Amily an’ the right Healer together. Dean’s finding me the Healer, an’ Dean’s gonna set it up. She says the best way is for her to make a bunch of drawings, then we use those to rough-saw the cow bones in the right places, then we all get back together again with her and the Healer and Amily and we make adjustments on the cow bones and pin ’em together exactly the right way. Then—I dunno, we’re gonna have to figure out how t’ do something more permanent than cement pins—we’re gonna have a bunch of Healers handling the bones and turning them and studying them. I just can’t figure out how to make ’em stand up to that much abuse.“
“So who’d know how t’do stuff like stickin’ bones t’gether?” Mags asked patiently. It was beginning to dawn on him what his job was in all of this. It wasn’t necessarily to find answers. His job was to ask the right questions. Then even if neither he nor Bear nor Lena knew the answers, at least knowing the question would mean that they had a direction to go to find someone who did know the answers.
“Who sticks things together? ’Twouldn’t be a Healer, the bones would have to be living. I dunno . . .” Bear ran his hand through his hair, making it stand on end.
Gennie noticed and smacked his hand lightly. “Quit that, you look like a hammerbird. Stick what together now?”
“Bones—bone pieces, I mean,” Bear said, and explained. Now, anything that Gennie was interested in was bound to get the interest of the rest of the team, and they all leaned over to hear what Bear was up to. They were all gratifyingly encouraging in their enthusiasm, and not one of them expressed any thought that Bear wasn’t up to the job; Bear began to brighten visibly.
And all of them began tossing ideas back and forth about how the bone-model could be made, until people at other tables started to notice. Ideas were tossed out and discarded. Glue obviously wasn’t going to hold past rough examination. You couldn’t nail the pieces together, the bone would split, and screws had the same problem. Pins by themselves were too unstable—
Finally one of the oldest people listening spoke up—not a teacher, but one of the servers. “Why does’t have to be one thing?” he asked.
They all stopped talking and looked at him. He flushed, obviously unused to that much attention. “Oh—don’t mind me—” he stammered.
“No, no, go on,” Bear said, encouragingly. “Please. What did you mean by that?”
“Well... look, my ma is a seamstress for real special stuff for the Guard. Say she’s got something that has got to hold up. Life or death. Uh—like the seams on the carry-bags they use to get sick or hurt people down off mountains, where you can’t even get a stretcher. Well, she don’t use just one thing to put that seam together. First, she sews it loose, so she can adjust curves and all. Then she sews three seams close together. Then she sews something to protect the seam on the outside. Then she glues the seam, then glues a layer of leather down, then she gets a saddler to stitch the leather down. So it’s not just one thing... the loose stitches would pull out if that were all there was. One line of stitches might break. Three might get cut. The glue might give. The leather might get torn off if it was only glued. The saddle stitches might pop. But with all of that there, even if part of it goes, the rest is gonna hold it together . . .” The man flushed again. “Sorry. I—I shouldn’t have—”
“Yes, you should have!” Bear exclaimed. “All right then... so, he’s right. The pins only have to hold so we can do what?”
At this point there were three tablesworth of Trainees and other students involved in this.
“Well . . .” someone who wasn’t in any of the three Collegia, who was up here taking classes so he could learn how to plan things like bridges and buildings, tentatively put his oar in. “What you need after you position the bones is something to hold them in place, temporary, aye? Well... look, is there any reason why your model has to be made of bone at all? Can’t you just make a model directly?”
Bear frowned a little. “Sort of. I mean, I dunno of anyone who can mold the way the bone is out of clay, if that’s what you’re asking. The Herald that’s making the drawings doesn’t make sculptures, she told me so when I asked her to help.”
“Right, that clarifies things. I’m Myca, by the way.” He stuck out a hand, and Bear shook it. He tapped the server on the arm; the server jumped. “Introduce yourself, man. It’s only polite.”
“Pawel,” the server said, diffidently.
They all nodded a friendly greeting. “Look, sit down—” Bear said, but Pawel shook his head. “I’m on duty, and if I don’t work, the cook will have my hide and I might get my wages cut. Thank you, but I really need to get back to work—” He picked up some empty bowls and headed for the hatch to return them to the kitchen.
“Huh.” Bear stared after him a moment. “Well, all right. So, Myca, I guess we could use something other than bone once we have the sketches, but there’s no way that I know of to make a model that’ll be accurate other than by pinning bits of bone together.”
“Fair enough. Then Pawel was right. First pin. But then, go ahead and use carpentry glue, but glue the pins in first. Then glue the two surfaces. Then start working on something more permanent. I guess this is going to get a lot of handling, so it is going to have to be sturdy. I’d say to make a carpentry join, a dovetail or something like that, but that would be difficult to get right, and you’re only going to waste time if you spoil it and have to start over. So—I’d use metal staples out of soft wire so you can set them in rather than hammering them in.”
“Staples?” Bear wasn’t the only one that looked puzzled, but this time it was a first-year Bardic student who suddenly popped his head up.
“Like a jeweler!” the boy exclaimed. He scrabbled in his belt pouch for a writing stick and began to sketch on the tabletop. “My cousin’s a jeweler. Sometimes you have to join stone or metal together, and you don’t dare put heat to it. So this is what you do. You drill a hole. You cement in one end of your wire. You bend that like so, and so, make it flat to the surface, you drill another hole, and you cement the other end of the wire in, make sure it’s flat to the surface, and you can even burnish it into place, like inlay—”
Nods all around the table. “Oh, and you know what else I would do, once you have your staples in place all around the bone?” said Pip. “I’d get pliver-suede and fish-skin glue and sinew—”
“Or maybe horsehair, or gut, or harpstring wire—” put in one of the Bardic students.
“Aye, any of those. And I’d glue the pliver down, all the way around the break, then I’d glue the string and wrap the break. Just like fitting an arrowhead to the
shaft. That’ll hold the staples in place, the staples will hold the bone from shifting and the pins and the glue will keep the pieces from falling apart.”
“I think that’ll work,” Bear said slowly, then grinned. “I think that’ll work!”
“Might want to make two, and call on one of those fellows that makes the fancy colored-glass windows.” It was Lord Wess, who had popped over from the Palace to have the noon meal with the team as he often did. “He might be able to do something with that copper foil and lead they use. Try that on the second model instead of the glue and leather and sinew.”
“No reason why not,” Bear agreed. “Then, if we can get one that’ll hold through being used to make a mold from, we can make as many plaster copies as we like!” He looked around at the small mob that had gathered. “You’re terrific!” he burst out, beaming like the sun. “You’re all terrific!”
Mags smiled quietly to himself. ’Tis all askin’ th’ right questions. Then makin’ sure when ye ask ’em, there’s plenty of people about.
::These are people used to thinking, Mags. You need people who are used to thinking. Otherwise you might as well go down to the kennel and ask the dogs, you’ll get about as much help.::
::Eh, I ’spose thet’s true.:: Only partly true though. He reckoned you could get about anybody to think if you just coaxed at them long enough.
He finished his lunch quietly as the chattering died down. Someone brought some paper so the one lad could copy his rough drawings of stapling onto something more portable than the top of the table, and Bear could put everything else into coherent notes, and things generally got back to normal. “So,” he said, once Bear had tucked his precious notes into one of his books. “Now, ’bout Lena.”
Bear sighed and shook his head. “What about her? Mags, I—I don’t know what to tell her, really. And she cries, and I feel like breaking something because I don’t have anything good to say, or anything at all really, and—”
Bollocks. Ev’body knows how they feels ’bout each other but them.
“Whoa-up,” Mags stopped him. “Goin’ at this all wrong, like. Ye oughter ask yersel’—what the hell is goin’ on here? This’s Marchand we’re lookin’ at. If th’ attention ain’t on ’im, ’e finds th’ center of attention an’ sits on’t. If there’s a more self-centered feller i’ th’ whole damn Kingdom, I never heerd of ’im. So now ’e goes and picks up this raggedy tad-bit what’s got a lot of what makes a Bard an’ brings ’im ’ere, an’ why? Goodness uv ’is heart?”
Bear stared at him. “Put that way—”
“There’s somethin’ in’t fer Marchand,” Mags said firmly. “I know it. I jest don’ know what ’tis. All I know is, gotta be somethin’ ’e can’t git from Lena, so—” he made a dust-off motion with his hands. “ ’E knows ’ow she feels. Ain’t like ’e’s gonna lose ’er no matter ‘ow ’e treats ’er. So ’e gits whut ’e wants from this pet, an’ then Lena gets a crumb or so when ’e reckons ’e wants somethin’ from ’er.”
Bear looked at him in mingled admiration and despair. “You’re right. That feels right, it matches the man perfectly. But I can’t tell Lena that!”
Mags tilted his head to the side. “So? I thin’ I know what yer thinkin’. Sure, tell ’er, she likely won’t b’lieve it. So what’ll make ’er believe?”
“I don’t know,” Bear said slowly. “But I can think about it.”
“Good.” Mags smiled. “An’ i’ th’meantime, ’stead uv tryin’ t’ think uv some daft thing t’say, which you ain’t good at, ye know, jest tell ’er—no, show ’er, thet she’s as good a Bard as anybody else up ’ere, an’ then get all stern wi’ ’er and tell ’er that it ain’t ’er pa she needs t’please, it’s ’er teachers. ’Er pa ain’t gonna grade ’er—they wouldn’ let ’im, even if ’e’d teach, which ’e’s too bone-lazy t’do.”
“Amen to that,” Bear sighed, then managed one of his old grins. “All right then, I’ll take all this to the Dean. He’s made it clear that once I find solutions to things, he’ll see to it that they’re implemented. He told me he wasn’t going to give me an excuse to skip class and go larking about Palace, Collegia, and Haven.”
“As if ye would!” Mags laughed.
Bear reddened a little. “Well . . .” he admitted. “Maybe a little . . .”
Mags smacked him in the shoulder and left him to finish his meal. He headed for the kitchen. If Lena hadn’t eaten, and he was pretty sure she hadn’t, bringing her a basket was a good excuse to work his wiles on her.
Mags did not go to Lena’s room himself; for a start, that would have been improper, and for another, he wanted a little bit of backing before he tackled his friend. So, counting on the fact that she encouraged people to come to her, he presented himself with not one, but two baskets of nuncheon at the door of the office of Master Bard Lita Darvalis, Dean of Bardic Collegium and head of the Bardic Circle. The door, as he had been told was usual, was open. The Dean liked her students and teachers to know that she would ever shut them out or refuse to see anyone, regardless of rank and status. Lita was oblivious to the quiet cacophony of her Collegium—people practicing anything and everything in their rooms, in the practice rooms, with their teachers, alone or in groups,voices lecturing in classes, people just talking. A lot. Bards seemed to do that.
The very air of Bardic hummed. He had the slightly confused impression that if all the people were suddenly snatched away, Bardic Collegium would still murmur quietly to itself, like a bell that hums on and on after it has been struck.
He tapped politely on the doorpost, and the Dean looked up. Her brows creased. “Mags?” she said. “What brings you here? Shouldn’t you be—”
“Got a candlemark,” he assured her. “I brung ye nuncheon, Dean Lita.” He held up a basket with a sprig of rosemary tucked under the lid. “Cook put in whut was on offer ’e knowed was yer favorites.”
“Knew,” she corrected automatically. “And brought. Thank you Mags... now what’s your real reason for being here?”
Lita did not look all that imposing sitting behind her cluttered desk, with an open window framing tree branches behind her. She just looked like an ordinary middle-aged woman, handsome rather than beautiful, dark-eyed, with dark, graying hair. Her Bardic Scarlet outfit was no uniform—unlike the Heralds and Healers, the only thing “uniform” about what Bards wore was the color—and it was not particularly fancy. She generally favored a split skirt, a belted tunic and shirt tailored like those that the Heralds wore, and at the moment, both were made of very lightweight, breezy material, so she looked just a bit gypsylike. There were ink stains on her writing hand, and the only sign that she was the Head of the Bardic Circle was the Seal of her office in the form of a ring on that hand.
But Mags had seen her perform, and he knew that the moment she put her hand to the strings of one of her favored instruments, you would forget everything about her, and be caught up completely in whatever story she was telling you. Afterward, if someone were to ask you what she looked like, you would probably use words like “goddess,” and “regal” and “queenly.”
Mags chuckled, not taking offense in the least, and put the Dean’s basket on the least cluttered corner of her desk. “Lena,” he said, simply.
The Dean rolled her eyes. “That girl... how Marchand threw such a child, I will never know. He lives to please himself, she lives to please everyone but. On the other hand, I could wish all my students gave me the sorts of problems she does. I tell you, it is far from comfortable presiding over a Collegium where by rights we should count double enrollment.”
Mags had been about to say something about Lena, but the comment caught him off guard. “Ah, what, ma’am? Double enrollment?”
“My Trainees and their egos,” she said, making a face. “All right, what can I do to help you?”
“Twa thin’s,” he said. “Fust one, git some’un t’drag ’er outa ’er room so’s I kin feed ’er and talk to ’er.”
Lena nodded. “And?�
��
“Second one, I dunno whut ’tis, but ye gotta hev some way uv showin’ ’er ye figger she’s as good nor better’n Marchand’s new pet,” he pointed out. “Ye know Lena. Ye know thet boy is gonna make ’er feel like ’er pa’s wrote ’er off as a failure. Tellin’ ’er ain’t gonna talk to ’er gut. Ye gotta show ’er.”
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