At least he could count on Dallen to relay all this, because right now it felt as if he were so rattled he couldn’t move.
And then—he was metaphorically knocked halfway across the room.
The door to the little room next to the one in which Tal was questioning the children opened, but it wasn’t one of the Guard that was standing there.
It was Nikolas.
“Time to go, Mags,” the King’s Own said, tense, but quietly. “We’re leaving.”
“Ye heard?” Mags blurted. “Ye heard, right? Dallen relayed, aye? Ye—”
“I heard. So did the King, and—well, most of the Circle. We all heard. And we all agree. It’s impossible.”
Mags stared at him. Surely Nikolas had not just said—
“We’re going, Mags. This is a dead end. We’ll find another way to track down these Agents. But this isn’t working.” Nikolas’s face was a mask, unreadable. “Maybe you somehow infected those children with some—fantasy of what you thought was happening. Maybe this is coming from some other source than the children. Maybe they are hallucinating. I don’t know, I only know that what they are showing you is impossible, and we’ve been told to pack up and come back. It’s over.”
“But—”
“It’s over.”
He clamped his mouth shut on any further words. He listened silently while Nikolas gave directions about the disposition of the children—being sent off to a home for orphans somewhere outside Haven, he gathered. He hoped they’d be happy. He was laden with sorrow and guilt for what he had done to them—he’d terrified them completely, and they might never get over it—but at least they were still alive. If the Agents had gotten hold of them, they wouldn’t be.
He could scarcely believe that Nikolas, of all people, was dismissing what he had heard from these children. Nikolas knew very well he hadn’t somehow “infected” them! It didn’t work that way!
Dammit, I know it don’t work thet way!
He had not projected so much as a stray food-thought at those children! There was no way that he could have influenced them!
He turned his mind to Nikolas, but was met with an absolute, rock hard barrier.
Finally, he let out his breath in a sigh, as Nikolas stood there with his arms crossed over his chest, waiting.
“Aight,” he said, feeling bitterness so profound he could taste it. “It’s over. Le’s get back.”
He lay on his back in his bed, staring at the ceiling. He hadn’t had anything like an appetite when they got back; he’d had a hot bath and gone straight to bed. Nikolas... he could scarcely describe what Nikolas was being like. It wasn’t as if Nikolas were angry at him, not even for putting those kids through a pretty bad experience. And it wasn’t as if Nikolas were blaming him for anything—
No, it was as if Nikolas wasn’t even... there. As if something had pulled every bit of his mentor’s attention away so completely that there was nothing to spare for Mags.
As if there was nothing that Mags could possibly say or do that would contribute in any meaningful way when Nikolas was being so totally uncommunicative.
Dismissed, that was the word. Mags had been dismissed.
Did I fail? he wondered bleakly. Hev I so messed up thet there ain’t no possible way I kin get back t’ th’ way ever’thin’ was?
But... he hadn’t influenced those children. He knew he hadn’t! Why would he ever even think even in his most fearful fantasy that the Agents had people planted here?
But . . .
But if not, what could the explanation possibly be?
Is’t me? I mean, it was me, list’n t’ their thinkin’. Mebbe it weren’t them thinkin’ it, but me thinkin’ it was them thinkin’ it . . .
Now his head was splitting, trying to second- and third-guess himself.
::I’m not any happier about this,:: Dallen said fretfully, startling him. ::I trained you. I gave you my training, and it is the best. I’ll stand by it. I cannot imagine any way that you could either have misinterpreted the children, or influenced them.::
::Then what?:: he replied in anguish. ::How? How kin it be true an’ not-true?:: He pressed the heels of his hands into his temples and tried to think. It was tempting—so tempting—to just give in on this one. He wasn’t in disgrace. No one blamed him for anything, and certainly no one suspected him of trying to make trouble. And no one was accusing him now of being some foreign agent himself . . .
When he opened himself to the stray thoughts up here, there was none of that suspicion and accusation there had been before... although there was a lot of heavy shielding going on that was new. It was harder to shield emotions, though, and he wasn’t getting any animosity under all the shields.
Think. It ain’t th’ end uv th’ world.
It was like he’d told Bear. What did he have before all this started? He was still a Herald Trainee. He had his classes, he had Lena and Bear and Amily, he had the Kirball team. He had Kirball itself, and he had plenty of things he was good at. He could just let things... be things.
After all, he was only a Trainee, he wasn’t supposed to be able to do the same things as a Herald. He didn’t have the experience, he didn’t have the knowledge... wouldn’t it just be smarter to let it all go and let other people deal with it?
Of course it would... .
He sighed. Problem is, I ain’t very smart... .
. . . and I ain’t gonna let it go.
After a long and restless night, he still found himself with no appetite at all. And since the Dean had not given him his new class schedule—only the third one this quarter—he found himself feeling a little sick, very headachey, still wracked with guilt over what he had put those children through, and with nothing to do.
He stared at the ceiling, as the light in his room grew. He felt the breeze die, and the air become heavier with heat.
Well... he might have nothing to do, but that just meant he could go see someone who could at least do something about the headache.
He got up, washed under the pump—the water was lukewarm—and got dressed in a fresh set of Grays. The headache wasn’t any better. In fact, it was a little bit worse.
He did not expect to see Bear on the path approaching him as he left the stable, however . . .
Bear looked as if he had spent a similarly unhappy night. Mags looked him up and down for a moment, taking note of the dark-circled eyes, the pinched look to his face. “Iffen I look like you—”
“You do,” Bear said abruptly. “Lena’s coming here in a bit. She’s not doing real good either.”
He sighed. He had hoped that at least one of them was managing to get along without problems.
Faint hope, evidently.
“What’s wrong wi’ Lena,?” he asked.
Bear rolled his eyes. “There’s... a rumor. Something someone says someone they know heard someone they know say Marchand said.” He looked as if he had bitten something sour. “I hate gossips. I really, really, hate, loathe, and despise gossips.”
“What this time?” Mags’ irritation with Bard Marchand rose. Sometimes it seemed as if every problem Lena had could just be solved if Bard Marchand would get hit by a runaway cart.
Bear looked away, and flushed a little. “Marchand thinks he may not be Lena’s father.”
Mags felt his mouth dropping open. “ ’E akchully said thet? Wi’ ’is own mouth?”
Bear waved a hand in irritation. “I don’t know! All I know is the rumor started, and Lena is taking it predictably. One moment she’s crying because she’s a bastard, the next she’s sure everyone is looking down on her, and the next, she’s thinking about leaving the Collegium because she’s here under false pretenses.”
Mags shook his head violently. “Now thet is plain stupid! It’d be false pretenses iffen she was pretendin’ she ’ad th’ Gift an’ didn’t—it ain’t yer name that gets ye in, it’s what ye got!”
“I know, I know, and we all managed to make her see sense on that one, but she’s still
all in knot over this.” Bear’s jaw tensed. “And I haven’t heard anything back on the field trials of the first lot of the healing kits. I mean... nothing. It’s summer! People get hurt in summer! People get sick from bad food, people eat the wrong mushrooms, people fall out of trees, chop off their own hands—you’d think by now I’d be getting reports back! But... nothing!” He sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “I keep thinking... I was wrong. M’father was right. People are too stupid to be trusted with something like that. What if the reason I haven’t heard anything is because people are killing themselves with it? What if they’re killing other people with it? What if—”
“What if you share some of that headache medicine you promised to give me if I got out of bed?” Lena asked, coming around the side of the stable and looking every bit as miserable as the two of them. “You are the cruelest person in the entire world, Bear.”
“Maybe,” Bear retorted. “But you aren’t crying, and you’re out in the sun.”
“Which is stinkin’ hot, an’ we all have wuss headaches an’ prolly none of us et,” Mags interrupted. “How ’bout we take thet medicine an’ all go someplace cool an’ play ‘my life is miserabler than yours’?”
“I could do that,” Lena said, snatching one of the potion bottles from Bear and downing it on the spot.
“I know jest th’ place,” said Mags, doing the same. “Le’s go.”
Bear swallowed the last bottleful and left the empties on the side of a stall, as he and Lena followed Mags.
“Miserabler?” Mags heard Bear say to Lena. “Is that even a word?”
Chapter 12
There was no one in the grotto. And it was blessedly, blessedly cool in there. They all flung themselves down on the moss—Lena with a sigh, Bear with a grunt, and Mags utterly silent. It felt good to lie on the cool, soft moss, the three of them forming a sort of triskele with their heads in the middle, not quite touching.
For a while they all just lay there, waiting for the headache potion to take effect. When his headache finally began to ebb, Mags was able to feel all the muscles that had been tensed up, making it worse. One by one, he coaxed them to relax, keeping his mind blank and thinking of nothing else, just staring at the artificially irregular rock of the ceiling. He wondered how this grotto had been made and who had made it. Whoever had—well, Mags was grateful. And he was equally grateful that no one from the Palace was down here when they had arrived.
“Well,” Bear said into the silence. “You first, Mags. What happened?”
“Nothin’ good,” Mags sighed, but slowly, picking his words carefully, he related everything that had happened, from the time that he and Nikolas had taken up residence to the moment when Nikolas told him that they were leaving. He hid nothing: not what he had done to those poor children, nor what Nikolas had said.
“Huh,” Bear said. “Well... you probably should have gone for the long way with those younglings. At least then you wouldn’t be feeling all guilty now, and you’d know that... no, wait, that’s not true either.”
“What’s not true?” Lena asked.
“Even if—in fact, especially if Mags had spent days getting those little’uns to trust him, then bringing them to the Guard for protection, everyone could still say he’d somehow influenced them. And they would have. And Mags, you’d have even less reason to trust your training.” Bear made a rude noise. “Which is stupid, given what Dallen told you. Companions are better Mindspeakers than any human, or almost any. You’re sure you didn’t somehow taint those younglings, Dallen is sure . . .” His voice trailed off, but Mags knew better than to interrupt Bear when he did that. Something had just occurred to Bear, and he had to think it through before he said it out loud. “I have to wonder if Nikolas isn’t just as sure that you didn’t influence the little’uns as you are. And—and everyone else agrees with him, but they don’t dare tell you. That’s why they pulled you out so fast—something is going on that this just fitted into, and they can’t tell you outright, and they hope you never find out. And that’s why all the people in the know are shielded so tightly. They believe you. They don’t want anything to get out while they try to figure out who it is.”
Mags sat up and stared at Bear, who was still on his back with his hands behind his head, looking up at the rock arch of the grotto. “But tha’s impossible!” he objected.
“Nothing’s impossible,” Bear retorted. “Improbable, maybe. But the second you assume something is impossible, you pretty much open a door for it to come in and happen, because you won’t be guarding against it.”
“There’s a lot of people up here, Mags,” Lena pointed out. “A lot. I know everyone is supposed to be vouched for, but what does that mean, really? Just take the courtiers and the Guard, for instance. Somebody’s uncle who knows their family told the people up here he was reliable, and that’s all there is to it. Same for the servants. Certainly most of them are from families that have served the Crown or the highborn for decades if not centuries, but families die out, and someone has to replace them. That’s just the Palace servants. Some of the highborn who have Palace apartments instead of their own manors bring their own servants. The Hill operates on trust; if you shake that, you upset a lot of people. Do you want to put everyone up here through a Truth Spell to prove they are loyal?”
“No!” Mags retorted, revolted at the idea. Lena was right; the Hill did operate on trust.
“Heralds get a pass because of the Companions, but there are two more Collegia, remember. If you want an example of someone who’s up here all the time and would probably fall right into someone’s hands and babble everything he heard to them if he thought it would get him more adulation, you don’t have to look any farther than Bard Marchand,” Bear continued, with more than an edge of bitterness to his voice. “I’m not saying that he’d work hand in hand with these Agents of yours, not if he knew—but if he thinks they’re just incredibly wealthy and could make him more popular or something, and he thought they were just trying to get a little more influence in the Court, he’d tell them anything he heard and probably help them get on the grounds of the Palace as a bonus. Or take that new protege of his. Where’s he from? We don’t know. How old is he, really? We don’t know that, either. He could be like you, Mags, undersized, and be a lot older than he looks.”
“Any Trainee could, except the Heralds,” Lena replied. “And besides the two Collegia and the servants, there’re all the courtiers, who are always bringing in poor relations, trying to get them advantageous marriages or Crown appointments. For that matter, let’s be really afraid and consider that someone might have murdered a new Guard on his way to take a post at the Palace and taken his place! It’s not as impossible as it seems.”
Mags scratched his head and lay back down. “Reckon not,” he said slowly. “An’ thet business ’bout a Guard... not so crazy neither. Iffen I was t’try an’ git in, reckon tha’s a pretty good way. Guard uniform lets ye inter anyplace on th’ Hill.”
“You know what else I think?” Lena said. “I think the reason Nikolas went all rock-faced on you and you both came back is that what you told him ties right into why they canceled the Healing on Amily’s leg. I don’t think he would have reacted so strongly otherwise.”
Mags opened his mouth—and shut it, without saying anything. It was an unlikely theory—but so was the notion that there were enemy Agents or spies somewhere in the Palace or the Collegia.
And it certainly would explain Nikolas’ stiff attitude.
“Huh,” was all he said.
“I am not gonna tell you to leave it alone, Mags,” Bear said, while he thought about that little tidbit. “But I don’t think you’re gonna get anything out of Nikolas or another other Herald.”
::Rolan certainly hasn’t been forthcoming,:: Dallen put in. ::Which, when you think about it, is interesting. It’s very difficult, even for us, to lie mind to mind—which argues that he is refusing to talk about it because I will cert
ainly know there is something not quite right about a denial.::
“I’ve been thinking about other things too,” Lena said, after another long silence. “I think we’re getting nowhere trying to sort out our own problems. You know, proving that Bear is as good or better than any other Healer, proving that my father is wrong about me, and finding your enemy Agents. I think maybe we should trade problems.”
“. . . just how’s that s’posed t’ work?” Mags asked dubiously.
“Well... look, I have a lot of chances to go just about anywhere up here on the Hill that I want to,” Lena pointed out. “Even Trainees are welcome anywhere they want to go. I know you’ve been training in how to be sneaky, but I’ve been training in how to be welcome. I can literally look everywhere up here for those Agents. What’s more . . .” her voice hardened. “What’s more, I can make people trust me.”
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