Hakal closed his mouth with a snap. “I—guess so?”
Sira laughed, and her father punched her shoulder—or rather, punched where her shoulder had been until she moved it just out of reach. He nodded a little in approval.
“Your mother and I decided that we were going to reverse this ‘tradition,’” Bey continued. “And believe it or not, there were those who put up a fight, until we pointed out that the Talismans had essentially created slaves.”
Sira and Hakal both nodded; slavery was a hot subject within the Nation. No one approved of slavery; this was a pragmatic as well as an emotional issue. The Nation had no problem with adopting foundlings into their midst, and not infrequently those foundlings came out of slave trains that were injudicious enough to attempt to evade Ruvan authority by passing through Nation lands. The enslavement of children infuriated the people of the Nation, great and small. It infuriated them even more that children had been torn from the arms of dead or living parents to be made into slaves. Such foundlings were always brought into the Nation when there was no chance they could be returned to their own families, which was almost always.
Not the adults, though. Children adapted easily; the adult slaves, raised in slavery, did not, and were generally almost more trouble than their grudging labor was worth. Being slaves had taught them that only doing just enough to avoid being punished was the way to survive, and their understandable greed when presented with food freely available, meant they cost more in food than they produced in labor. Adults were usually freed with whatever food and water had been with the slave train once they were guided to the vicinity of some town outside the Nation. Then they were told to make their way on their own.
“We compromised; we went through the stores of Talismans and found the old ones, the ones that were just memories, and offered to exchange them with the Talismans of a dozen volunteers.” Bey grinned again. “When those volunteers felt the results, they did all the work of persuading the rest of the Sleepgivers for us.”
The horror and unease on Hakal’s face had finally faded, and Sira was pleased to see that he had regained his curiosity. “Then why was that Sleepgiver still wearing a bad one when I saw him?” he asked.
“Because there were not enough of the old Talismans that we trusted to replace all the bad ones,” his father told him. “Some were too old and the memories had faded and needed to be renewed with someone else’s. And, it seems,” he glanced at Sira, “some we could not recognize what was in them at all. In the old records it is suggested that there were experiments with the earliest Talismans, and it didn’t seem worth the risk to give one of those to someone who was already damaged by having been enslaved by those spirit-fragments. The Talismans with just memories actually proved to be healing in spirit to the ones who had been under the thrall of the bad sort.”
“Satisfied?” Sira asked her little brother. He nodded. “How long did it take that accursed priest to succumb?” he asked her, his mind already turning back to his own work, and hers.
“About as long as it took him to slap at the place twice, thinking he’d been stung by an insect,” she told him. He considered this, then smiled with satisfaction.
“I don’t think it’s worth going for anything faster,” he said to his father. “There’s a limit to how much I can concentrate the toad toxin. So, it’s ready for the Sleepgivers’ general use.”
The three of them spoke about trivialities then for a little until Hakal drifted off to his workroom to clean the dart, and Sira was left alone with her father as the sun began to set spectacularly, painting the landscape with fire. Huge shadows wafted over them as the lammergeyers headed for their nightly roost in their aerie.
“Routine?” asked Bey, and he didn’t have to say anything more for Sira to know that he meant her mission.
“Routine. I delivered your message, but I honestly could not tell if he was being mind-ridden or not. Hakal’s toad toxin is very effective. What are these Talismans that the Mages have found?”
Bey shrugged. “I have no idea. I’m not half a Mage the way you are. I gather they are something they found while you were gone, something very different from anything they’ve seen before. They’re actually afraid to meddle with them, which is something I don’t ever recall one of our Mages saying.”
Mages, so Sira was given to understand, were even rarer among the Nation than they were in the lands around the Mountain. She often wondered whether it was because her people were so intent on uncovering potential Sleepgivers and Healers that they overlooked Mage-potential in favor of any sign that a child could fit into Sleepgiver or Healer ranks. Certainly no one had been more surprised than she and her parents when, in the middle of her Sleepgiver training, she had jokingly tried to ignite the kitchen fire with a fire spell—and succeeded. After that, she had divided her time between the training halls and the little Mage-enclave down in the safest part of the caverns, where everything not in immediate use was kept, and where all those old Talismans had been found.
Just as no one ever wasted anything, the Nation as a whole never threw away anything.
And because she was half a Mage and half a Sleepgiver, she was the one the Mages had asked to start destroying the bad Talismans, on her father’s order.
“I never got a chance to tell you before I left what occurred to me about those Talismans I’m clearing,” she said abruptly. “I think . . . I think they were more than merely spirit reflections. I think some of them, the most powerful, were actually haunted. I think that’s why a kind of stupid and powerful half-personality took over their wearers and dulled their own minds.”
Her father cast her a quizzical look. “What do you mean, haunted?” he asked. “As in a spirit or a ghost?”
“Spirit, no. Ghost . . . maybe,” she temporized. “You know that the Mages all say that at least some ghosts are not actually spirits bound to a place or object. Instead, they are the full image of someone’s spirit at the moment of trauma and death. A kind of reflection that persists over time. More than just memories, less than a person or a person’s spirit. Dimly aware that they exist, stubbornly determined to continue what they were doing when they died. Desperately determined to persist, in fact—after all, the Talismans were imprinted at the moment of a Sleepgiver’s death, when they were desperate to keep living.” She paused. “Am I making sense?”
“Quite a lot of it.” Her father crossed his arms thoughtfully over his chest. “Much as I hate to bring this up . . . could these Talismans actually be the fractured spirits of the dead Sleepgiver?”
“I don’t think I would be able to answer that definitively unless I had all the Talismans imprinted at once from a particular dying Sleepgiver and broke them at the same time,” she told him honestly. “I don’t think they are chained, fractured spirits . . . but I don’t know for certain.”
“All the more reason to keep breaking them, then.” Bey’s mouth narrowed into a tight line. “I cannot think of anything worse than that--fractured spirits in slavery to a Talisman . . . our people, and we have done that to them!”
“It’s not a certainty, Father, it’s only a possibility, and I’m inclined to think that it is unlikely.” She actually didn’t think that, but she wanted her father to feel better. It wasn’t his fault, not any of it, and he was making it right.
Finally Bey sighed, uncrossed his arms, and turned and leaned on the battlement, looking out over the valley. By this time the sun was down, and the stars had started to fill the sky. “Be glad you are not the Heir, Sira. The responsibilities to our people weigh as heavily as the Mountain.”
“And you are strong enough to carry them,” she said confidently. He reached out and patted her shoulder.
“I am glad you think so, my daughter,” he replied. “And well done on your mission.”
And with that, he went inside. She stayed out for a while before retiring to the long hall that held the bed ni
ches, and her own soft featherbed.
It was certainly far superior to the hollow in the rock she’d slept in last night.
4
Harvest Fair at night was very different from Midsummer Fair at night. For one thing, dense fog tended to form on the big open commons where the Fair took place. The weather changed every night a couple of candlemarks after sundown, bringing a fog so dense it even penetrated into the lanes behind the tents. For another, sundown came a lot earlier; that alone meant that younglings had to leave around suppertime or before, shooed out by the fair wardens. Haven younglings that is; plenty of younglings who had come with their farming or trading parents remained here in the fairgrounds. But they were usually eating, getting ready to sleep, standing first watch on their livestock, or taking a turn behind the counter of their stall at sunset so their parents could eat. They weren’t roaming the aisles either; if they had to go anywhere, they used the lanes behind the tents.
So any younglings out in the aisles between the stalls would be questioned by the fair wardens, and they’d better have a good reason for being there. Night was for adults, and a whole different crowd than you found at night at Midsummer Fair.
Midsummer Fair evenings brought lots of people from Haven down to enjoy a balmy night full of entertainment and excitement. Harvest Fair . . . not so much. It was colder, and there were fewer entertainers out in the open, in no small part because the sorts of flimsy costumes that attracted the most money were ill-suited to the damp chill and fog. As for “free” entertainment that relied on coins dropped in a hat . . . there was none of that. Musicians would work only in tents. Instruments went out of tune quickly, and cold, stiff fingers fumbled to create the right notes. There were a few fire-eaters and jugglers, but not many, and they only performed a trick or two before going back into their tents. Tents were warmer—and if you were performing in a tent, and there was an audience, you knew you’d already gotten your pay.
Night at Harvest Fair meant crowded cooktents, surprisingly so given that the majority of people who were at the fair were farmers. One would assume they’d cook for themselves, but although on paper it would be cheaper to cook for yourself over a fire, in actuality there were many reasons why it wasn’t, in practice. The cost of firewood was artificially inflated at the Fair, you would have to take up precious cargo space in your wagon with food for the entire week, and you would have been up since sunrise, so by the time suppertime rolled around, you generally didn’t have the energy to cook.
And the cooktents knew their clientele well after so many centuries of Harvest Fairs. Suppertime meant huge kettles full of hearty soups that had been cooking all day, good beer that looked dark and was not too strong, and trays of heavy, equally hearty breads. This was what a farmer was used to; his biggest meal of the day was breakfast, not supper, and what he wanted before he went to bed was something warm and filling, but not so filling he’d get indigestion in the middle of the night. In the morning, the cooktents would be ready with pocket pies—meat pies, fruit pies, vegetable pies, egg pies. And to help fill in the corners there would more bread with plenty of butter or drippings, barrels of apples, and several kinds of cheese.
As soon as the farmers and their younglings cleared out, the cooktents prepared for a slower crowd, and one that wanted only two things: strong beer or wine and salty snacks, preferably hot.
That would be when Tory, Kee, Kat, and Perry would make the rounds of the cooktents. Anyone in there now was most probably a farmer—or a fair warden or Constable, keeping a sharp eye out for pickpockets and sharpsters. With rare exceptions, pickpockets were not the concern of their little intelligence network. Right now, their job was to idle around the aisles, becoming invisible as possible.
For Perry and Kat, that meant blending in with the thin crowds, figuring out what parts of their outfits to change to look absolutely inconspicuous. They were the visible parts of the team. Larral the kyree and Kee and Tory were the invisible part. And Herald Mags was set up in the rear of the Guard tent, shared with the Constables, coordinating all of them.
Kee was somewhere over on the east side of the Fair; Tory had a vague sense of where he was and probably could have found the Prince within a quarter-candlemark if he’d had to, even without his father’s help. He and Kee were putting into practice all those Sleepgiver tricks they’d been learning from Mags over the summer.
Well, to be fair, the learning part was the easiest. Thanks to Mags’ extremely powerful Gift of Mindspeaking, Mags could just plant “memories” of those tricks into their heads over the course of an evening. The memories came complete with exactly how it felt to do them right, too. So most of the learning was actually practice to get those moves so ingrained into their bodies that they were second nature and required no thought at all.
They certainly hadn’t been bored this summer, that was certain. As soon as Mags reckoned they’d mastered a trick or a move, he started them on a new one. And it was a little daunting to realize they’d been at this all summer and well into fall, and he still hadn’t taught them everything that was in his head.
It helped that Perry had learned a lot of these same things years ago, so when he came back to Haven between jobs, he helped them train.
Right now Tory had fitted himself in between two darkened tent stalls; one was, by the scent that permeated even the canvas of the tent, a spice-and-herb seller, the other a seller of herb seeds. Neither of them were going to get any customers by night; farmers who wanted such things would get away for a candlemark or so and come by daylight, so they could see what they were purchasing.
Tory crouched low between the two tents so that a casual glance by a passerby had little chance of finding him, and he had fitted himself exactly into the darkest part of the shadows between the tents. He was so quiet and so still that not even the proprietors sleeping at the back of the tents were aware that he was there.
He was waiting for a particular tent stall across the way to open up again.
One of the things he had learned from Mags’ memories was the concept of being quiet. Not just “quiet,” but quiet; silent even inside your own head, which was a real trick indeed. His father said that if it had not been for the fact that his own Gift was so very strong, when he and Kee and Perry went quiet, even he wouldn’t be able to tell they were there. It was curiously restful to do this. He was just a relaxed body holding a pair of eyes and ears that observed everything that passed him without actually thinking about any of those things.
The spice seller always tossed restlessly, probably wishing he were back in his own bed at home, until he found a comfortable position and dropped off, breathing slowly and deeply. The seed seller snored. Gently, almost musically, and nothing anyone would notice unless they were right next to him. Both sounds told him he was doing his job right, which was to remain unnoticed.
There was enough traffic in the aisle to keep the air moving and the fog dispersed, though not so much that Tory’s view of the stall was in any way impeded. Behind him, though . . . the fog crept in and deepened in the lanes behind the tents, chilling everything and giving that peculiar quality to sound that only comes in a fog. Sounds seemed simultaneously muffled and echoing, and his back and shoulders felt clammy as the damp penetrated his clothing.
That was fine; there was nothing back there that he needed other than an avenue to travel noiselessly and without anyone spotting him, and a little cold and damp was not going to harm him.
He did feel sorry for people trying to sleep tonight without adequate coverings or a little charcoal heater or a banked fire. Ideally, their beds should be a canvas cloth over a nice bed of hay, then a feather-stuffed canvas blanket, or pure wool. That damp chill would penetrate nearly anything else, making waking up pure misery for anyone old enough to get an aching joint.
As that wisp of a thought drifted across the back of his mind, he alerted like a guard dog and tensed all over. Movement across
the aisle.
The stall lit up from within as the proprietor lit lanterns; then the front of the stall slowly rolled up as he raised the canvas flap.
There it was, in all its peculiar glory, slanting display racks of the oddest mix of wares in the entire Fair.
Rutolf, owner and sole proprietor, sold what he referred to as “curiosities.” They could be anything from the fang of some unidentifiable (but undoubtedly large) creature drilled to be suspended, perhaps as part of a barbaric necklace, to tiny mother-of-pearl figures carved in a strange and sinuous style that looked nothing like the trinkets produced on the shores of Lake Evendim. He had piles of small, white, silken-furred skins of some sort of weasel. He had dyes from the plants in the Pelagir Hills that could produce colors you couldn’t get any other way. He had horns alleged to be the cure for an aging gentleman’s fading sexual prowess.
And Mags was fairly certain the man was a go-between for several known agents working in Valdemar. The problem was, so Tory’s father had told him, the merchant had one of the most effective natural Mindspeech blocks Mags had ever seen.
Because of course he does. That would be the first thing that was wanted if you were sending spies into a country full of Mindspeakers.
Tory was here tonight to confirm that and to discover how the agents were identifying themselves. Mags had planted the images of all of the known agents in Haven in Tory’s mind, so recognizing them was not going to be a problem as long as they didn’t try to disguise themselves too heavily.
Of course, it might have been asked—and Tory was sure that more than one of the King’s Councilors had—why Mags didn’t simply have these agents rounded up, if they were known to be spying for other countries.
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