Closer to the Chest (9 page)

I hope we don't have any small-minded tattletales among the new Trainees. Surely someone in the Court would use old palimpsest for sending an anonymous bleat . . .

“Message?” Mags asked.

“I'll find out in a moment. Someone must have left it here when we were gone, or shoved it under the door.” She opened it.

You can't even do the job you're supposed to, your father has to keep picking up after you. Why don't you just die so he can do it properly?

It was “written” in careful block letters, inscribed between three sets of three ruled lines, so there wasn't even “handwriting” to tell who could have written it. She swore and started to throw it into the fire, but Mags got it away from her before she could.

He read it and his face flushed with anger. She took it out of his hands. “It's just anonymous dirt. Put it where it belongs.” She tossed it on the fire.

He gave her an odd look. “Have you gotten more of these things?” he asked.

“About a half a dozen all told. I showed the first one to Father, who said if that was the worst I got, I should count myself lucky.” She grimaced. “I hate to think of the sort of things
he
got over the years, if that's true.”

“It probably is.” Mags glowered at where the orange and black ghost of the paper was dancing on top of the logs.

“Well, that was another thing I never knew, and if he didn't let it bother him, I see no reason to let it bother me,” she said stoutly. “I just didn't see any reason to take up your time with this . . . infantile bullying.”

“You'd'a rather he'd told you, at least when you was old enough to take it all right, wouldn't you?” he asked, with one hand on her shoulder.

“. . . I suppose so,” she admitted.

“And I'd rather you'd told me. And now you have. An' maybe 'tween the two of us, we can figger out where they're comin' from.” A small, tight smile crossed his face. “Chances are, it's a coward with plenty t'hide. They don't take bein' exposed well.”

“All right,” she agreed with spirit. “I have, and we'll try. And if we can't figure out who it is?”

“Hm?” he replied.

“We'll make him
insane
with frustration by being stubbornly happy.”

T
he next day, although there was usually a lesser Council meeting scheduled, there was so little to discuss that the King postponed it in favor of a meeting with the Exchequer, the Seneschal, and the Master of the Treasury. “Just building plans,” he told Amily at their usual breakfast meeting. “We're going to spend the entire morning trying to change each others' minds. If you have something to do, go and do it.”

Mags was in his persona of himself, Herald Mags, attending courtroom cases down in Haven, so she had the morning to herself.

As if that is even possible for a Herald,
she thought in the next moment. Because when it came right down to it, “having the morning to herself” didn't mean she could go curl up with a book, it meant she could go take care of other tasks that did not involve attending on the King. After intercepting Lady Dia before she went to her kennels and filling her in on the newcomers—Helane, in particular—it occurred to her that this was
the ideal time to discover if she could track down where the Sisters of Ardana were now living.

Of course, she
could
run all over the Collegia and the various places where Records were kept in the Palace . . .

Or she could go straight to the one creature that probably knew who would know.

:Rolan, who would know where the Sisters moved?:
She waited, while Rolan thought about that.

:The Exchequer, the Seneschal, and the Master of the Treasury, who are all in that meeting. You could also try down in Haven, and the Lord Mayor's various record offices, or even one of the messenger services, like Mags' little lot of runners. But since they might either
need
a Healer or
have
a Healer, I would try the Chronicler of Healer's before I went trudging all over the city. The Healers have to keep careful track of where people live, if they are sent for in an emergency.:

She grinned. Rolan had come through for her yet again. She trotted over to Healers' Collegium and took the stairs two at a time, hoping to find the Chronicler in the little office just inside the Archives. Fortunately the Archives were over the Trainees' rooms, rather than the part of Healers that housed the Infirmary and patients' rooms. The scents over there were not always pleasant.

The Chronicler was not a Healer herself since there was no need to have someone who was a Healer merely in charge of records. So the thin, earnest-looking woman who looked up at Amily as she tapped on the doorframe was wearing a plain, practical gown of brown linen. Her office was almost painfully neat; Amily repressed a sigh, wishing
she
was that organized.

“Can I help you, Herald?” the woman said, looking oddly hopeful.

“I think you can, Chronicler,” Amily replied, giving the woman her proper title, which made her eyes light up a little. “Would you by any chance have a record of where the Sisters of Ardana were moved to?”

The woman blinked at her thoughtfully for a moment. “Why yes,” she said, finally. “I believe we do. We just finished updating the Haven maps a fortnight ago.”

Actually
finding
the location in question required leaving the office and having a look through a ponderous volume kept near the door. This proved to be an insanely detailed map of Haven and the Hill, with every building noted. “Ah, here we are,” the woman proclaimed after a moment. She tilted the book so that Amily could see the page, which turned out to be a map of a small area of houses with as much as an acre of land attached. The Chronicler tapped her finger at a spot on the page, where whatever had been written there had been scraped off, and
Sis. Ardan.
written in its place. It appeared to be outside the city walls, which, if it
had
been a farm, made sense.

Amily memorized the location, thanked the Chronicler profusely (which made her go pink with pleasure), and headed to the stable to get Rolan.

:I don't imagine that she gets to interact with Heralds all that much, and far less does she get thanked by one,:
Rolan observed, as she saddled and bridled him.

:Probably not. And that explains the blush.:
Strange to think that someone who worked, and presumably lived, not all that far from Herald's Collegium saw so little of Heralds.

This was going to be a very different set of neighborhoods than she usually rode through; this was not one of the main thoroughfares. Once she was down off the Hill, she and Rolan took a side street, and from the Hill to the city walls they passed along quiet, narrow streets paved in cobblestones, with neighborhoods with few craftsmen of the sort that had to maintain a large shop or works. Instead, most of the buildings were residences, with the occasional small shop on the ground floor that served the neighborhood, the occasional small craftsman or woman who only needed a single room to ply his or her trade.

:Didn't this area burn about fifty years ago?:
she asked Rolan, as it dawned on her that the buildings here were both oddly new for anything inside the walls, and made of fire-resistant brick and stone, with slate roofs.

:It did; in fact, the fire that spread through here was the reason for the ban on thatched roofs. Many of the wealthy and highborn hoped to annex this area to the Hill, but the King decreed that those who had lived here had first priority on rebuilding here.:
Rolan tossed his head.
:There had been rumors that the fire had been started by someone who wanted to do just that. The King quelled those rumors nicely.:

I wouldn't mind living here,
she thought,
If I weren't a Herald, that is.
Although there were people about, the streets were mostly empty, curtains fluttering in the light breeze at open windows in the upper stories. The only cart on the street was the milk-wagon, making morning deliveries before it got too warm.

The city walls—walls that had once enclosed all of Haven, not just a third of it—loomed up at the end of the street. She passed through a very small gate in the walls, which took her out into another residential district, this one with houses boasting plots of land large enough to garden. The houses here were mixed in age; you could tell which one was the original farmhouse that had stood here, until its lands were divided up to allow for more houses to be built. Prosperous people lived here—not
rich,
but with a good enough income to have a house all to themselves, and three or four servants. Clerks and craftsmen who made things for those who
were
rich, men who were no longer farmers, but landowners, who paid other men to do their farming for them.

Gradually these plots became large enough to supply vegetables for a market-garden; the houses were smaller, more modest—except for the occasional old farmstead, like a hen among chicks. And that was where she found the new Temple of the Sisters of Ardana.

It was obvious that this had once been the house of an ample farm; this was no mere cottage, it was a three-story structure of whitewashed plaster and black beams, at least three hundred years old, roofed with thatch—thatch which would never have been allowed inside the city because of the risk of fire. At the rear was a second building too grand to be called a mere “barn;” it was identical to the house, save only that the windows in it had clearly been recently converted into glass windows from the sort of half-doors horses or milk-cows could use to observe the outside world from the comfort of their stalls. Then there were some sheds, and a third building that looked like a minature of the bigger one. A guesthouse, perhaps, but when this had been a farm, it had probably served to house the farmhands.

There was not an ell of ground wasted on mere grass; herbs filled the beds where flowers might have been at one of the prosperous craftman's houses, and the rest of the land was occupied with a pen for goats with long silky hair, a henhouse, several beehives, and vegetable gardens.

As she and Rolan rode up to the front door of the house, the double doors of the former barn opened, and five or six elderly people filed out, escorted by two equally elderly women in gray robes.
The Sisters of Ardana, I presume,
she thought, as they all caught sight of her, and stopped, waiting for her to come to them. She looped the reins over the pommel of the saddle and dismounted, making her way toward them with Rolan coming along behind.

The eldest, and most erect of the two women stepped forward as she reached the group. “I am Mother Yllana of the Sisters of Ardana,” she said, in an authoritative, but not unfriendly, tone. “How may we help you, Herald?”

“It's the other way around,” Amily replied cheerfully. “I found out that you'd been moved, and I came to find out if you had settled in satisfactorily, and if there was anything you needed.”

Mother Yllana looked as if she wanted to think about what she was going to say, but one of her congregants was not nearly so restrained.

“It's not satisfactory, Herald, it's not satisfactory at all,” said a little bird of a woman in a black gown, with a tilt of her head and a look in her eye that said she meant to put her two coppers-worth in before anyone had a chance to stop her. “We have to come
all
the way down from above Tanner's, and it's
not
satisfactory at all, what with my knees, and Neldie's hip, and Thoma's back and all. It's a long,
long
way to come for them as don't have horses or carts to ride. But we do it once a fortnight, that we do, because we don't feel
comfortable,
don't feel
welcome
in what that stiff backed old crathur made of our old home, and just who
is
this Sethor, when it comes down to cases, anyway? Some god from outlandish parts none of
us
ever heard of! So we come here, and
very inconvenient it is,
too.” Then she stood there looking at Amily, as if to say,
And what do you intend to do about it?

“I see,” Amily replied gravely, making no other statement. Rolan held his peace, while she considered the implications. Clearly this woman felt that the Crown was responsible for rectifying her grievance. And to a certain extent, the Crown might very well be. There were several things Amily would like to promise, but she wasn't going to commit or even comment until she knew whether they actually
could
be done. The bird-like woman stared at her unblinking for a few more moments, waiting to see if she was going to get an immediate answer, before accepting defeat.
“Very
inconvenient,” she repeated, and then she and the other members of the Temple congregation made their way down to the road.

“I hope you won't mind Klera Coppersmith, Herald,” said Mother Yllana, without any indication that she disapproved of the old woman's forthrightness.

“Not at all, she only spoke the truth. It
is
very inconvenient for them, I can see that, and very unfair to make them come
all this way.” Amily cast her eyes over the house and former barn again. “Still, this does seem to be a better situation for the Sisters. From what I was given to understand, your former Temple was in poor repair, uncomfortable, and unsuited to you and the Sisters, given your age and lack of income.”

There. Let's see what she has to say about that.

“Well, it is a better situation for us here,” Mother Yllana admitted, reluctantly. “We have room for a goat herd, and beehives, and our own garden, and a flock of chickens. We haven't had to spend a copper on food. There's space for each of us to have her own little room, all together, and it doesn't feel at night as if we're a dozen little lost souls at the bottom of a great cavern. We even have income now, yarn from our goats, and cheese, and honey. We're thinking of brewing mead. This place is easier for us to keep clean, and now we can afford a man to come and do repairs. . . .”

“But?” Amily prompted.

“But it's not convenient for the Temple to be set apart from the Chapter House; setting the Watches of the Night means one of us has to make her way in the dark—and in the winter, that is through the snow as well. And it's very hard on our congregants. And—” Her voice took on the tone of one who feels very much aggrieved. “—this is
not
what we agreed to in the first place!”

Aha—
“Oh?” she replied. “What did you agree to?”

“I am quite certain in my mind that our agreement with those Priests of
Sethor
”—her tone said, though she did not,
whoever or whatever this “Sethor” is
—“was that they were to repair our home and make it possible for us to live comfortably in it until the last of us died. And only
then
were they to take it over. But that is
not
what happened.”

“What exactly did happen?” Amily asked mildly, not allowing her expression to reveal that this was exactly what she had suspected all along.

“Well, we signed the papers, and expected workmen to turn
up and begin the repairs. The workmen turned up all right, but with them were men with carts, who told us they had orders to move us.” Mother Yllana clenched her hands in front of her, her chin set with what looked suspiciously like anger. “I objected of course, but the workmen said it was for our own good, because the damage to the roof was extensive, and they couldn't be responsible for our safety if we stayed. And
just
as the chief workman said that, a great piece of stone came dropping right down near us!”