“We know why they wanted Amily,” Nikolas said, after Pawel was taken off. “But why did they want Mags? They did want him—the two men that Mags calls Ice and Stone were after Mags themselves.”
“Maybe to keep Amily quiet?” hazarded the Herald in charge. “If they intended to hold her for any length of time, they would have wanted a significant hold over her; something or someone they could use to coerce her without actually hurting her. They could threaten you, but she would know that was hollow. But if they had Mags, they could do anything they liked to him to make her cooperate.”
Well, that was an ugly thought. But it did fit in with Stone and Ice’s personalities.
The problem was... that just didn’t feel right to Mags. He had no evidence at all, other than his instincts, but—
Well, there was one thing. There had been that moment when Amily was safe and he was not, when he was staring into Stone’s face—watching the man calculate and assess—
Iffen he’d thought he could git away wi’ me, he’d’a grabbed me an left Amily.
Mags wasn’t sure how he knew this. He only knew that he was as certain of the truth of it as he was of his own name.
And that somehow, this was directly related to the fact that the really crazed assassin, the one that had taken Bear, had recognized him.
The hell is goin’ on? Had they somehow mistaken him for someone else? It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed his mind. And it drove him frantic that he had no more idea now than he had then.
There was one useful thing they had gotten out of Pawel. There were two more spies up here... he didn’t know who or what the first one was, but he was absolutely certain that one of them was either a Bard or a Bardic Trainee.
Chapter 15
It had taken the better part of a candlemark to relate everything that had happened. “Tha’s it,” Mags finished. He had gotten Amily, Bear, and Lena to all come out to his room after supper; with the Companions standing a watchful presence, he was fairly certain no one was going to be able to overhear anything he told them. Amily had the single comfortable chair, and Mags paced restlessly. Lena and Bear sprawled on his bed. “Tha’s all I know. Amily, yer pa wants ter wait till it’s a mite cooler afore they do yer leg. Nobody wants ye t’ be hurtin’ an’ swelterin’ at th’ same time. An’ there’s other reasons... sorry, I weren’t half listenin’ . . .” He shrugged, finally sat down on the floor at her feet, and she reached for his hand.
“Infections. Easier to get ’em in hot weather. And it’d be easier for you to get heat sickness too.” Bear pondered it all. “Well, I reckon we can get you mostly done before the snow if we do it before Harvest Moon.”
“If you don’t, well, then I just get to be pampered and lie about like a spoiled child next to the fire all winter and have people fetch and carry for me,” she said with a smile.
Mags snorted. “Like I kin see ye doin’ that. Not hardly.” He decided to risk getting teased about it later and stole a kiss. Right now, he wanted all the kisses he could get. He was still getting the shakes when he understood just how close their escape had been. If Amily hadn’t been on Dallen... he’d have been too busy fighting off Ice and Stone to help her. All those men dressed in real Guard uniforms had looked very convincing. Bear had been right, they’d had the means to knock her unconscious, and they could have carried her off under the guise of getting her help.
He tried to remind himself that they had all been prepared for something like that. She’d have been swarmed by Hera;ds and Companions. But all he could think about was Amily’s terrified face.
How close he had come to never seeing her again . . .
“But the spy in Bardic—” Bear’s brows furrowed. “It has to be Marchand’s pet. It has to. Who else could it be?”
Mags expected Lena to agree with Bear immediately. So, obviously, did Bear. They were both shocked when she shook her head.
“It isn’t,” she said decidedly. “It can’t possibly be Farris. For one thing, there isn’t a deceitful bone in his body. For another . . .” She bit her lip. “For another... I know why Father picked him, now.”
Mags had a horrible, vile thought. And something of that must have shown on his face, because Amily took a quick glance at him and paled.
But Lena was continuing, twisting a bit of her hair around one finger. “This is going to take a long, long explanation.”
“We got time,” Mags pointed out. “I really wanta hear this.”
She nodded. “You probably would never have noticed... I actually don’t think anyone but me has noticed... but Father’s compositions seem to come in lumps. He’ll do a lot of new music, then there won’t be anything new for a while. Then he’ll do a lot more new music. It’s not just that he’s working on something long and complicated. He doesn’t work on anything at all. He’ll do concerts and performances, he’ll go to parties, he’d even come home to visit, and when I was in his rooms, the only music that was there was whatever he was learning. I mean, I’ve known that forever, and even though I don’t know any other Bard who works that way, I never actually thought it meant anything—until a few days ago. You see, I’ve been helping Farris learn composition—”
Bear gave her a look of incredulous surprise. “You... what? But I thought—” He glowered a little at her. “I told you I thought you oughta avoid him altogether.”
“I was just taking Mags’ advice!” Lena said. “Mags said, if I was nice to him and he was horrid, people would notice, and he would look bad. If I was nice to him and he was nice to my face but horrid behind my back, people would notice that even more. But if I was nice to him and he was nice back, and grateful, then I’d have a friend. So no matter what, I won if I was nice to him.”
Bear scrunched up his nose, pushed his lenses back up, and thought about that a while. “Remind me never to cross you,” he told Mags finally. “You seem so perfectly ordinary most of the time, then you turn around and come up with something like this that’s—it’s political-level scheming is what it is! Where do you come up with these things? Sometimes I wonder if you’re manipulating me like that!”
“I wouldn’t call it scheming,” Amily said mildly. “He wasn’t telling Lena to do anything but be nice, which is what she would rather do anyway. He was just giving her the reasons why it was to her advantage.”
Mags shrugged uncomfortably. What could he reply to that? He wasn’t really trying to be manipulative, but it was so easy now for him to see how people worked, take that apart, and put it back together in a way that made things better. Being such an outsider was turning out to be as much of an advantage as it was a handicap. “I’d ruther hear what Lena has t’say. I really wanta know why she’s so certain-sure th’ spy ain’t Farris.”
Lena took a deep breath. “I know this is roundabout, but it’s important, and it all has to do why I know it’s not Farris. When I was helping him with beginning composition, I realized right away that he’s good. He definitely has Creative Gift. His melodies are wonderful, and they just flow out of him naturally. And he works the way everyone else I’ve seen works—he always has songs he’s working on. Even when he says he’s finished, something will set him off, and he’ll look for a piece of paper to jot the music down on. He can’t stop and take a rest from it any more than he could take a rest from breathing.”