Mercedes Lackey - Changes

They all looked at each other. “In that case, Marchand is our Bardic informant, and this Healer is the other plant they said they had,” Bear said. “We’ve filled in all the blank spaces. So... if that’s true, then who’s missing from the Hill, Healer-side?”

“I’ll go interrupt the King and his emergency council,” Gennie said, standing up. “You lot see if you can figure out a way to find where Amily is, if they haven’t already.”

Mags nodded, and they set aside the notes about Amily and her captor and picked up the ones about “the irritations.”

Mags closed his eyes for a moment as the letters began to swim in front of them. Webs and vibrations and... it was all so complicated... .he wanted to sleep, but no, he couldn’t, he needed to . . .

The images that the stone had put in his mind swirled there again. Vibrations. Irritations. Vibrations. Interference. Irrita—

His eyes flew open just before he nodded off. ::What if thet stone was bein’ literal again?::

::That’s more likely than not,:: Dallen said after a moment.

::Then—all that fightin’ and squabblin’—thet wasn’t jest ’cause of th’ heat. It was ’cause them shields really are irritations!::

He turned his mind to Gennie and gently “poked” her.

::Still talking. What?::

::Marchand there?::

He sensed her bitter amusement. ::Being grilled like a fish. Why?::

::I need t’ know iffen them rats he was talkin’ to was meetin’ him real close t’ Palace.:: He remembered now something that the stone had said—or that he thought it had said—when he had fallen asleep in its room. That Ice and Stone were “irritations” because they were “near.”

He waited impatiently for the answer, but he didn’t push things. It was one thing to be impatient, quite another to impose that impatience on someone else who was doing you a favor.

::He says he met with them almost every day. Lord Lascal and his family close up their manor in the summer and move to their estate. There’s only a skeleton staff and everyone around here knows their gardens are pretty free to roam in. That’s where they met.:: There was a pause. ::He says he thinks they were actually living in a guest-house on the grounds. Why?::

Well... that figgers.

Quickly, he explained what the stone had told him and his idea that whatever the stone did worked against the shields that the Karsite agents wore to act as an irritant to everyone’s temper.

::So we look for places where the worst fights are happening, and that’s probably where they are?:: she said. ::Right, I’ll pass that on. Good job, Mags. They just sent out pages to find out if there are any Healers missing from up here.::

Ah, now there was another reason to be impatient. He got up to pace. “Iffen they thin’ we got a chance at findin’ Amily... might could be they kill this Healer an’ ’er t’gether,” he muttered, choking down his anguish at the mere thought. “So we gotta find ’em. Then we gotta get ’em away from ’er afore they figger out we ac’tually know they’re there. There’s gotta be somethin’ that’ll lure ’em out . . .”

“Hell,” said Bear, looking extremely disgruntled. “There goes my plan. Well, it wasn’t a very good plan . . .”

Mags looked over at him. “So? Mebbe we kin use part’f it.”

::Mags. Tell Bear that there is a Healer missing. Cuburn.::

::Oh thet’ll sit well.:: But after Bear got mad, this bit of information would probably give him some satisfaction. He told his friends what Gennie had said.

Bear blistered the air with oaths for a good long time. When he finally calmed down, Mags gave him a level look.

“Ye done?” he asked. “Cause iffen ye ain’t—”

“I’m done,” Bear told him in utter disgust. “I should have guessed it would be him. There never was a more venal—”

“Aye,” Mags interrupted. “Ye said thet. A couple’a times. What I wanter know is, what was yer plan?”

Bear blinked at him, as the question took him by surprise, then shrugged.

“Oh... it’s stupid. And if we did it, there’d be more carnage . . .” Bear sighed. “You know, how when a little one goes missing, you go around to all the neighbors and ask if they’ve seen her and could they help look? I was thinking if we sent out some of the Guard and all the Trainees with drawings of these bastards, or of Amily, or both, maybe somebody might have seen . . .”

Mags stared at him as a plan, fully formed, exploded in his head.

“. . . Why are you looking at me like that?”

“ ’Cause Lena’d get mad at me if I kissed ye. Lissen—”

He explained the whole thing. Lena and Bear listened, skeptically at first, then their eyes got bigger and bigger until he finished.

“Now,” he demanded. “Poke holes in’t. Tell me what ain’t gonna work.”

The two of them looked at each other. “I... can’t think of anything,” Bear said, finally. “Well, other than the fact you might get killed... that’s certainly a drawback.”

“I’m countin’ on thet they seem t’ want me kickin’,” he pointed out. “So ’less they figger out what I’m doin’—or they change their minds—”

“Or you misread them entirely,” Lena put in, her eyes round and a little tearful. “And they’ll just kill you!”

He shrugged, with an indifference he didn’t feel. “They had a chance and didn’—”

“That was once,” Lena pointed out. “The second time, they threw a huge great piece of wood at you when you were going at a full gallop! If you hadn’t been a Heraldic Trainee, and on Dallen, and had all that training, the weapons work and the Kirball stuff—”

“Gotta chance it.” That pretty much summed it up.

Bear took a long, deep breath. “All right then, do we split up, go gather all the Trainees, find that cousin, explain this to everyone, and—”

Mags snorted. “ ’Ell we do. I may be crazy, but I ain’t thet crazy.” He squared his shoulders. “No. Now I go talk t’King an’ Nikolas an’ th’ Heir an who-the-’ell else is there an let them poke holes innit. Then iffen they like it, it’ll hev more’n a ghost of a chance.”

::Gennie, tell ’em I’m comin’,:: he said, gesturing to Lena and Bear and pulling open the door to the little Palace room where they’d been left to think. ::I gotta ideer.::

They’d narrowed the spot where the Karsite agents had to be hiding down to a block—and it was pretty clear that there was something drastically wrong the closer they got. It was a middling sort of area, with a mix of cheap shops and houses on the outskirts of Haven. Not the sort of bad neighborhood like the one where Nikolas kept his shop, but shabby and populated by common laborers, the sort of place where you could have a pig or some chickens or even a cow in the yard and the neighbors wouldn’t complain because they had the same. You wouldn’t notice noise here, not even screaming, because the children were shrieking and babies crying all the time. But there were signs of trouble all the way there: broken shutters, a cart with a wheel off and people fighting over putting the wheel on, arguments everywhere you looked;. And the closer you got to that designated block, the more often the arguments had escalated into fistfights. Even the children weren’t playing; they were chasing each other with mayhem in mind or rolling in the street, squalling and tearing each other’s hair. Mags got a wide berth, though, because he was wearing Whites. Whites, and not Grays, for two reasons. The first, that the full Heraldic uniform gave him a little more protection from the altercations around him,and would give him a little more respect as he worked his way around the block. The second—