“Seriously, Lena, they are all good pieces, and you do all of them well. Any of them will do, and it might as well be that one,” Bear said, with just an edge of exasperation showing in his voice.
Lena sighed. “All right. You’re right. It might as well.”
“Hey,” Mags offered. “Look at it this-a way. Nobody’s gonna be lobbin’ balls at yer head.”
“I wish they would,” she said, so mournfully that both he and Bear laughed, and then they had to fall all over themselves apologizing for her hurt feelings.
They were still apologizing when Amily arrived, hobbling along on her bad leg with her crutch to assist her. “Now what have you two done?” she asked, looking from their faces to Lena’s, Mags held the door open for her. “Oh never mind. Listen, I just learned something you all need to know!”
Mags helped her to a chair, and they all gathered around her; given the mix of excitement and alarm in her voice, the importance of what she was going to say probably transcended any hurt feelings.
“You know that fuss that was raised late this afternoon?” she asked.
Bear and Lena nodded, Mags only shook his head. “Practice,” he pointed out. “An’ then I come straight here, after dinner.”
“Well, it was trade envoys from Seejay arriving,” Amily said breathlessly.
All of them frowned, since that was where the troublemakers of the winter had—
“And they were shocked to hear that there had been trade envoys from Seejay here this winter!” she continued. “Especially since those envoys didn’t come with a Royal Charter!”
Mags sucked on his lower lip. “Well, we’d already reckoned they wasn’t what they said they was,” he pointed out. “So what was they?”
Amily shook her head. “The new envoys didn’t know. Lady Adetha’s daughter—you know, the one that’s so good at drawing and painting—was even called to bring the sketches she’d made of them while they were here, and the envoys didn’t recognize them. Not at all. And their clothing was nothing like what these new envoys are wearing. By tomorrow, this is going to be all over the place, Mags, and people are going to be asking questions all over again.”
“Of course they are,” Mags sighed. Because there was one big question that no one had been able to answer.
Why had that crazed assassin taken one look at him and exclaimed “You aren’t supposed to be here?”
Sure enough, first thing in the morning, even before breakfast, a page from the Palace was tapping on his door.
He’d been expecting it, of course; Rolan had warned Dallen, who had gotten him up early. He’d put on his best set of ordinary Grays, and followed the page up to the Palace in a state of dread and resignation.
He was ushered into a small room crowded with people; there was a throne there, and the King was on it; he was surrounded by Guardsmen bristling with weapons and resentment, and besides the Guardsmen, Nikolas and the entire Council were there.
And so was a group of dignified looking men and one woman, all in long robe-like garments that at first glance were very unimpressive—
Until you realized, at second glance, that the subdued colors of their garments were woven in patterns so intricate that Mags had never seen anything like them in his life, and the threads that composed the fabric could not possibly have been thicker than a human hair.
One thing was certain. Their costumes looked nothing at all like those of the arrogant “merchant princes” who had so abused the Crown’s hospitality.
They all studied him, as he stood there awkwardly. Everyone studied him. The Guards studied him in a way that suggested that some of them hoped he might try and bolt so that they could bring him down.
“Well, my lords?” the King said, when the uncomfortable silence had stretched on for far, far too long.
“Is beink chust ordinary boy, Highness,” one of the envoys said with a shrug. “Is lookink nossink like anyone ve know uff.”
“Not like some notorious assassin? Infamous thief?” Mags almost cast a sharp glance at the King, for even if his Councilors didn’t detect the edge of sarcasm to his words, Mags certainly did.
“He is not beink look effen like native of our land, nor those around it,” the Envoy said firmly. “He is beink little and dark, and ve are beink large and golden.”
Well that was certainly true.
“He is not beink look like Shin’a’in, either,” the woman observed. “They are beink dark, but tall. Werry tall.”
The King spread his hands and turned to his Councilors. “There, you see?”
“This only proves that the real envoys from Seejay don’t recognize this Trainee as looking like anyone they know, Majesty,” said the Seneschal, with reluctance. “And we still do not know where the false envoys came from.”
“And I prefer to believe that poor Mags is the victim of that old saw, that everyone has a double somewhere,” Nikolas put in.
The King laughed. “The most likely explanation that comes to my mind is that we don’t actually know what the assassin thought he saw. The man was mad, and he might have been hallucinating. For all we know, he looked at Mags and saw his brother, his mother, or his worst enemy.”
“And how likely is that?” the Seneschal asked, pulling on his beard a little.
“Very likely.” The Head of the Healer’s Circle had been mostly hidden by the others until he spoke. “Hallucinations of this sort are a common component of a deep level of insanity. There are even cases of people murdering beloved members of their families, convinced that the people trying to help them are mortal enemies, or demonic entities. I have known of sufficiently mad women who murdered their own infants, certain that the children had been taken away and demons left in the cradle.”
“I’m satisfied,” the King said. “You can go, Trainee Mags. Thank you for coming.”
Mags bowed himself out hastily. So far as he was concerned, he couldn’t get out of that room fast enough.
The team was waiting for him in the corridor, though not looking particularly anxious. Well that was the advantage of being Grays; your Companions kept you abreast of what was going on. Thank goodness. Pip punched him lightly on the arm, and Gennie threw him a smile, but nobody said anything until they all got inside and were seated.
“So?” asked Bear.
He told them what had happened. Or, more precisely, what had not happened.
Gennie raised her eyebrows. “Well, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t prove or disprove anything except that those men were lying, and we already knew that.”
Mags nodded—then thought of something. “Mebbe one thing. They didn’ seem ter recognize me, nor think I looked like summun else.”
“True, true,” said Pip. “Hmm. Well, put this in a logic tree.” Pip, began tracing an invisible diagram on the table with his finger. “The real envoys didn’t recognize Mags. The fakes didn’t recognize Mags, but they did know him after being here a while. The assassin who was working with the fakes, did. Why?”
“Could be we’ve been looking at this all backwards,” Halleck said slowly. “Well, there’s three possibilities. The first is what the Healer said. He was out of his head. That’s the likeliest, and he could have thought Mags was anybody. I mean ‘You’re not supposed to be here—’ that sound more like what someone says when he sees someone who really isn’t supposed to be there, that it’s impossible for the person he thinks he sees to be there.”
“All right, and the other two?” Pip prompted as Mags listened intently.
“It could be the killer was from somewhere else, and actually recognized Mags as looking like someone he knew... but then you have to wonder why he was working for the fakes and how they found him. So the next likeliest is that the fakes told him about Mags, the killer went and had a look at him, did everything he could to keep Mags from finding Bear, and when he did anyway, had that reaction. That’s even more likely if he was expecting the fakes to get rid of Mags. After all, Bear is Mags’ best friend. If there was anyone likely to fight like a wildcat to save him, it would be Mags. So obviously, you wouldn’t want Mags to find him.”
