Mags would very much like to have heard Lita’s thoughts about that. As Mags understood it, teachers did use student work all the time, but it was always with permission beforehand and with full credit. Not appropriated without, or with ill-informed, consent, and not without credit. But with Farris partially backing Marchand’s claim, there wasn’t a great deal she could do other than rebuke him sternly for his “carelessness” in not giving full credit. Then, according to the sources, the volume of the discourse had been reduced to muttering.
More than that, he didn’t know, since no one was there except Lita, Lena, Farris, and Marchand himself, Lena wasn’t talking to him, and no one else was talking at all.
Mags was quite certain that if outright theft could have been proved, Marchand would have been in very serious trouble indeed. He suspected that Lita was going to ask the Heralds for a quiet little investigation into the matter, but until they came back with answers, Marchand had skated by again. As it was, he was ordered to keep away from Farris and not to take on a protege again. Ever.
Whether or not he would actually do that... Mags was dubious. Marchand spent a lot of time away from Court and the inquisitive eyes of his fellow Bards. It would be quite easy to aquire another Talented youngster out there and just keep him away from the Bardic Collegium entirely. He could teach this unofficial protege himself, even find a position for him in some place that knew nothing of how the Bardic Collegium worked, where if Marchand said the protege was a Bard and he wore Scarlets, well, then, he must be one. Marchand would have someone to steal tunes from, and no one the wiser.
It just remained to be seen whether getting caught was enough to frighten him into doing his own work again and not resort to what would be fraud.
So much for Marchand. He was someone Mags would rather not think about.
Except, of course, it seemed that Lena had finally been goaded into standing up against her father openly, and that could only be a good thing.
Meanwhile, the search for Ice and Stone went on. Down in Haven, Nikolas was not only hiding from his daughter’s temper, Mags knew he would be extending himself and his resources as far as he could to find the two Karsite agents. But these two were cut from a cloth that no one in Valdemar had any experience with. What had always worked before was not going to work now.
Some people surrounding the King thought they had probably left already; after all, they had been thwarted in a very public manner, and their identies had been compromised. But Mags wasn’t so sure of that. He’d had a look at some of their thoughts; these weren’t men who would take even that grave a setback as the reason to retreat.
For one thing, even if they went back to Karse rather than going back to wherever they called home, they wouldn’t find much of a welcome when they got there. They knew enough about Karse to threaten a Karsite native with demons... which meant that they knew very well such things were real and deadly. The Karsites would not tolerate failure from an unbeliever; they barely tolerated it in their own ranks. Mags was damn certain that he wouldn’t risk it.
For another, the fact that they had executed their predecessors for failure indicated that they knew that were altogether likely to face a similar fate if they returned without fulfilling their contract. And maybe they were the very best of their kind—they were certainly better than the first batch that had gone out—but even the best can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and even the best have been trained by someone. Mags recalled the images he’d caught from Temper’s mind—the harsh environment, the rigid rules of behavior, the unforgiving nature of Temper’s superiors. No, Ice and Stone would find no sympathy there. And it was—at least according to all the history he had been reading—a time-honored tradition for the Master to eliminate the student who failed.
If Mags had been in their shoes... he would lie low, wait until vigilance was relaxed, and try some other way to at least give the appearance of destabilizing the Crown or harming Valdemar in a significant way. What that could possibly be... he had not a clue. Amily was probably no longer a target; there really was no good reason to make her one. Even with collaborators on the Hill, everyone was looking out for her now. If she so much as stabbed herself with a needle, there would be people checking to make sure it had been an accident and the needle wasn’t poisoned.
For all he knew, though, these men had some way of unleashing a plague on Haven, and summer was certainly the time to spread disease. A plague could wipe out thousands very quickly, and the highborn would certainly not be immune unless they left Haven. Even if the King and his family didn’t sicken and die, it would lay low many of those also responsible for ruling the country.
Or—hot as it was, dry as it was—if they spread across the city one night, setting fires, they could engulf the entire city in flames. Would the Hill be spared? Possibly . . .
But in his nightmares, he could imagine only too well a scenario in which it would not be. Where Ice and Stone set delayed fires of the type they’d tried to set before, using candles—and meanwhile, had brought wild rats up to the Hill and the homes leading up to it. Affix a box full of smoldering tinder to the rat and turn it loose—eventually it will be somewhere that will burn—inside walls, in stables full of hay, in a storage room. Do that fifty, sixty, seventy times—and the manors on the Hill, if not the Palace, will catch and burn. The privileged seldom know how to deal with an emergency themselves. They would be relying on the Guard and the Constabulary Fire Service. But they would already be down in Haven, and stretched thin.
And then what? Everyone flees to the Palace? And in the confusion, in the crush of panicked people running from their burning homes, it would be easy for Ice and Stone to get inside the walls and start fires there. They might not even need to murder the King or try to manipulate him through the King’s Own at that point. With Haven in ruins, centuries of records destroyed, an entire city homeless, Valdemar would be in chaos for decades, and Karse would have exactly what it wanted.
He tried not to think about such things. Or rather, he tried not to think about such things after tentatively Mindspeaking Nikolas one night about the time he knew the shop was generally empty, offering with great diffidence that these ideas had occurred to him and then waiting for an aswer as a properly respectful student should.
::We’d considered both of those scenarios,:: Nikolas replied. ::But you’re the one who has actually picked up some of their thoughts, which gives you an edge in understanding how they might react to this setback. We’ll put a higher urgency on those possibilities. Thank you, Mags.::
Mags wasn’t at all sure what “higher urgency” meant, but at least someone would be on guard against those possibilities, which allowed him to sleep a little better at night.
He did find out what had happened with the Guard Healer Cuburn; that particular spectacle had been very, very public. Bear had stormed down to the barracks and in front of a large group of the Guard (and more who came when they heard the altercation) confronted the man about spying on him for his father. Then he had unleashed a long tirade on the theme of “Old men who want their sons to be nothing more than copies, but vastly inferior copies, of themselves, so they can preen about having a boy who duitifully follows in his father’s footsteps, yet never have to worry about finding rivals in their own houses.”