So they all kept their heads down and got across the yard as quick as they could, heading for the colorless daughter waiting in the shed for them, and the equally colorless cook ladling out bowls of soup nervously. And it was a sign of how bad things were that there was no one to take the little sacks from them, the sacks that held their sparklies.
Mags caught Davey looking sly then, and he knew that Davey was thinking up some deviltry to be sure. And right enough, Davey was just about to snatch Burd’s little sack from him, when up comes Jarrik and takes it from him, then takes Davey’s with a dirty look. Mags was quick to hand his over before Jarrik could even put his hand out for it. He couldn’t be rid of it soon enough. Then he headed off across the yard as Jarrik headed for his brothers and the standoff at the gate.
But at that moment, everything changed again.
“That’s the one!” the man shouted imperiously, every trace of lazy drawl gone. “Him! You there! Boy!”
Startled, Mags looked to see who the man was shouting at and, to his bewilderment, saw the finger pointing straight at him. And one of the horses began rearing and prancing and carrying on like it had a burr under its saddle, tossing its mane and flagging its tail.
Bewilderment turned to panic as all the rest turned to stare at him. Mags looked from side to side for a place to get into hiding, but there wasn’t anything. He was caught like a mouse in the middle of a kitchen floor, with hungry cats on every side of him.
“I didn’ do nothin’!” he squeaked. “I bin workin’! I bin workin’, I tell ya! It ain’t me!”
Truly, he had never seen this man or anyone like him in all his life, so how could the fellow be so sure it was him he wanted?
“I will be damned if ye take my best worker!” Pieters roared. “Ye kin take yer damned horses and be off with ye, or so help me—”
But the man had an even louder voice than Pieters, and the boys were all looking very alarmed now. “You will turn over that boy to me, or I’ll bring the Guard here and turn over every stone in the place and find every last lie and every last penny you’ve cheated the Crown out of and every last mistreatment of your servants you’ve done since you were in swaddling clothes!” he shouted, as Endal plucked at his father’s sleeve and begged, “The Guard, Pa! He’s gonna call the Guard on us! We cain’t hold off the Guard! Be reasonable!”
And that was when things got very strange indeed.
Jarrik pulled Endal away from their father, and shoved him toward Mags. “Get him! Bring him here!” Jarrik growled, and then motioned to two of his brothers, who surrounded their father and bodily shoved him off to the side, arguing with him in harsh whispers.
Meanwhile Endal had crossed the yard, seized Mags by the ear, and was dragging him toward the man, with Mags hissing in pain the entire way.
Endal only let go of his ear when they were within touching distance of the man and the horses, if the barricade hadn’t been in the way. Mags had never been this close to a horse before. Not a real horse. The mining carts and machinery were all pulled by donkeys, and he had never been allowed near the stables, nor the Pieters boys when they were mounted.
These horses were big. Very big, They smelled sweetly of cut grass and clover, with overtones of leather. Truth to tell, now that he was this close to them, they scared him. Something that big could mash his foot flat with a silver hoof and never notice, knock him down and trample him and move along without even noticing.
He stared down at the ground, unable to move, while the men shouted over his head. What could this fellow, this Herald, want anyway? He hadn’t done anything! He never left the mine!
This . . . couldn’t be about his parents, could it? But what did he have to do with what they’d done? He’d only been a baby. . . .
“This boy is coming with me.” The man was not shouting now, but he didn’t have to, the anger in his voice was like a bludgeon. “You try to stop me, and so help me, I will do exactly what I said I would. The Guard will be here. They will tear this place apart. If you have done one thing wrong, we will find it. And then you will be for it, Master Cole.”
There was some urgent whispering as Mags stared and stared at his own two feet, until he had memorized every dirt-encrusted line, could have measured out his clawlike toenails in his sleep, knew he would be seeing them perfectly even if he closed his eyes. He couldn’t make out what the whispering was about, but it sounded as if the boys were getting their way with the old man. Finally Cole growled, “Then you’ll be paying me for him.”
The man barked a not-laugh. “Pay you for him? Slavery is illegal in Valdemar, Cole Pieters. You can be thrown in gaol for owning slaves, or selling them.”
“I’ve spent a fortune feeding and clothing this boy!” Cole sputtered. “Eating his head off, taking my charity, giving back naught—”
“A fortune is it?” The angry drawl was back. “What kind of a fool do you take me for? I’m neither blind nor ignorant. I can see from here what kind of slop you feed these children. A good farmer wouldn’t give it to a pig. And if there is a rag on their backs that isn’t threadbare and decades old, I will eat it. As for shelter, where are you having them sleep? I don’t see a house big enough for them. Are you keeping them in the barn? In a cellar?” His tone got very dangerous, and Mags shivered to hear it. “Exactly what have you been spending all the money given to you for the keep of orphans on?”
What money? Mags thought, dazedly. But Cole was right on top of that one.
“What money?” he sneered. “Nobbut one person wanted these brats. No fambly wanted ’em, no priest wanted ’em. And their villages couldn ’ford another mouth to feed. Charity! It was my own charity that took ’em in, useless, feckless things that they be! My charity that feeds ’em, and me own kids going short—”
“Oh, that’s a bit much even for you, Cole Pieters.” There was a growl under the drawl. “If you are going to claim all that, then I think perhaps a visit from the Guard and Lord Astley’s Clerk of Office would be a very, very good thing.”
There was a great deal more of that sort of thing, most of it so far over Mags’ head that it might as well have been in a foreign tongue. But the man was winning.
Mags only wished he could tell if that was a good thing, or a bad one. Usually he would immediately have said that anything Cole Pieters was against was going to be good for him, but now, he wasn’t so sure.
Finally, Pieters literally picked Mags up by the scruff of the neck, hauled him off the ground like a scrawny puppy, and shoved him over the barrier at the man, shouting “Take him, then! Take him and be damned to you!”
Without a word, the man mounted one of the two horses, reached down and grabbed Mags’ arm and picked him up like so much dirty laundry, and dumped him on top of the other horse.
Mags froze stiff with fear, his hands going instinctively around the knobby part of the thing he was sitting on, his legs clamping as hard as they could to the horse’s sides. But—but—but—
“I dunno howta ride . . .” he tried to gasp out, but it didn’t come out any louder than a whisper, and anyway it was already too late. The man was off, the other horse right behind him, and Mags squeezed his eyes and hands shut, and his legs hard, and clamped down his teeth on the chattering they were doing.
I’m gonna fall off. I’m gonna fall off and die.
• • •
As the memory flashed through Mags’ mind some of it must have shown on his face, for Jakyr grinned. “If I were to stand you and that scrawny, filthy little mine-slave side by side, I’d never know the two of you were the same person. The years have improved you out of all expectation, Mags.”
“They’d kinda have had to,” Mags pointed out. “There wasn’t all that much of me to begin with. Anything would’a been an improvement.”
Jakyr laughed. “This will be a first for both of us. I’ve never mentored anyone before.”
“Well,” Mags said, and grinned back, “I
been
mentored, so when you mess up, I’ll be sure’n let ye know.”
“Insolent brat!” Jakyr aimed a blow at Mags, but of course, he never connected. Or, rather, he turned the blow into a rough tousle of Mags’ hair. “Introduce me to the rest of your fellow sufferers, then.”
“Everyone, this is Herald Jakyr,” he said obediently. “I ’spect you know Amily, Jakyr.”
“By reputation, your father’s stories, and from afar, and I’m very pleased to see you looking fit and healed, milady,” Jakyr replied, and sketched a bit of a bow. “Also pleased to hear of your martial progress from our Weaponsmaster. I am completely confident in your ability to hold your own.”
Amily flushed with pleasure and bowed a little herself.
“This is Bear and Lena. They’re giving Bear his Greens afore they leave, and Lena’s gonna be on her Journeyman’s travels. They’re married,” he added hastily.
Jakyr eyed the two of them with interest. “So you two are the cause of that near-incident last year. I’m surprised you haven’t made a comic song of
that,
Trainee.”
“Call me Lena, and what makes you think I haven’t?” Lena asked, tilting her head to one side. Jakyr broke out into laughter.
“Well done. Just picking your time to debut it?” he asked.
“Some things are like wine and cheese: They need to age properly before you bring them out in public,” Lena replied archly.
“Well said. Now, if you don’t mind my joining you?” Jakyr waved a hand at the bed, which at the moment was the only place to sit.
As an answer, Mags and Amily moved over on the bed, making room for him. Jakyr took a seat.
“Here’s the rough plan. Mags and I, Amily’s escort, and you and Nikolas will be the only people knowing your route. You will be avoiding inns, buying supplies as you need them, and overnighting in the caravan at Waystations. Bear, you and Lena will take the caravan. You were probably told that, but I have made a change, and Nikolas approved it. You’ll have a third party hidden in the caravan the entire time. Amily and her escort will leave once you’re gone and will catch up with you at a Waystation; the only people who will know
which
Waystation it is will be the person with you and Amily’s escort. At that point, the person with you will take Amily’s place, and Amily will go into hiding in the caravan. Meanwhile, Mags and I will leave going in another direction, double back, and pick you up on the road somewhere between here and the start of our Circuit. We’ll know your route, so it will be trivial to find you. And at that point, we’ll all become a team. This district has a reputation for being a particularly thorny one. The bandits that holed up in The Bastion were only the most obvious of the problems. This is no sinecure; it will be a real job, even a difficult job. We’ll have our work cut out for us.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Bear, I am counting on you to win people over with your skills and willingness to share them. Lena, these folk don’t see Bards all that often; they are more likely to talk to you than to me and Mags. You’ll be very valuable to us.”
“What about me?” Amily asked, sounding just a touch forlorn.
“You,
my dear, will be your father’s daughter, possibly the most valuable of all,” Jakyr said with conviction. “I’ve been told of how you have mastered the art of seeming invisible, quietly observing and listening. Healers often have assistants. I know you’ve helped Bear out in the past, so you will be Bear’s assistant. You will be the one that goes to the locals and the markets for supplies, which will allow you to talk to them without anyone official-looking about. The more you can act like a common servant, the better. People will take you for being at their social rank, as opposed to the rest of us, and they’ll put down anything elevated in your speech as simply a matter of coming from the capitol. What Lena doesn’t uncover by coaxing it out, you likely will by gossip and eavesdropping.”
Amily nodded happily. “I’ve watched Bear and Mags bargain enough, I think I can do it too.”
“Don’t bargain too sharply,” Jakyr chuckled. “We want them to think they’ve been more clever than the city girl. That will put them off their guard with you. We can certainly afford to be a little bit cheated in return for getting a lot of information.”
This was a side of Jakyr that Mags had never seen, one of the network of Nikolas’s intelligence agents as well as a Herald. Clearly, he knew his job and how to do it well.
“All right then, I’ll leave the four of you to plan. I don’t think I need to emphasize that we keep this just among us, right?”
“Everyone else gets told Lena and I are going out on her Journeyman’s round, and I’m going with her to teach,” Bear agreed. “And we got lucky to get offered the caravan, so I can carry a lot of supplies with me.”
“And I’m going to visit unspecified relatives,” Amily added. “I’m going to be quite unhappy at being separated from Mags for at least a year and maybe more, but, then, I would be just as separated from him if I were here, which is something I’ll tearfully tell people over and over so they can comfort me.”
“Excellent,” Jakyr said. “I’ll leave you to it then.”
He let himself out, and the four of them put their heads together.
6
“I
think we should go look at this caravan,” Bear said. “We need to figure out how much room there is for each of us.”
:The caravan is stored in the wagon shed. It should be obvious. It’s the white one with faint flowers and vines bleeding through the paint.:
Dallen sounded highly amused for some reason.
:Six coats of paint, and the designs are still bleeding through. If we could ever figure out who made that paint in the first place, we’d never need to paint anything with more than one coat again. Oh, and there are people around there who can tell you exactly how much space there is for personal gear and supplies for Bear and Lena. So multiply that by three for the supplies you think you will need for two of you, and divide the remaining storage by three for the personal gear and you’ll be able to figure out what you’ll get.: