Intrigues

“You lot remember that incident with the presentation to the King?” she asked.

Pip rolled his eyes. “I thought you ordered us never to talk about that again?” he replied, mockingly.

“I ordered you never to talk about it again,” she said, thumping him lightly on the top of the head. “And if you do, there will be a reckoning.”

“Well, that’s a double standard if ever I heard one,” Pip grumbled.

Gennie turned to Mags. “It’s pretty simple, I was supposed to present a cup of wine to the King when I was a First Year, at a thing where he was supposed to be giving out prizes for students with poor parents that had been sponsored up here by people like Councilor Soren. I got all tongue-tied, then my feet followed my tongue, I tripped and spilled it all over his Whites. Red wine, of course.”

Pip smothered a laugh. She reached out without looking and thumped him again.

“Gor. That must’ a bin—” Mags shook his head. He could just imagine it. “I’d’a gotten sick on ’is boots t’ cap it off.”

“I nearly did. And that is why the King never drinks anything but water and white wine in public, even though he loathes white wine,” she said ruefully.

“And now, here you are, the Captain of the Team South Kirball players!” said Halleck.

“Well yes.” She shrugged. “You muddle through somehow—”

“Well I wish someone would help me muddle through,” said Bear, coming wearily up to the table. “I hope one of you saved me some beef. There’s nothing left on the table but burnt ends.”

Wordlessly, Mags pushed over the heaping plate he’d reserved for Bear. It was cold, but Bear didn’t seem to care; he just slapped it between two bread-ends, smothered it in hot-root sauce and tucked in.

“What happened?” Lena asked.

Bear groaned around a bite. “I am mortal sorry I missed your Contest, but I got called away midmorning and I’ve been at ex-Councilor Chamjey’s house since. He was supposed to answer to the Council about those charges —”

“What charges?” asked Gennie, looking surprised.

“Ma—” began Bear, and cut off as Mags kicked him under the table.

Fortunately Pip was more caught up on Court doings than Gennie was. “He was profiteering, or trying to, because of a bad season and a sheep disease,” Pip replied, looking a little smug that he knew something Gennie didn’t. “He basically cornered the market on mutton, lamb, and especially wool. The way he had it, if you’d wanted wool this year, you’d have been buying it from him or not at all, at his prices. He resigned, but when the Council looked into things and discovered just how much he was going to profit, and how much it was going to hurt some of the other Guilds, they decided to bring him up on charges.”

“Huh.” Gennie shook her head. “Now... that’s something I don’t understand. ’Cause no one would have faulted him for finding all this stuff out and making a reasonable profit. But no. He had to get greedy. What’s the point?”

“So what happened?” Pip asked Bear, who washed down an enormous bite with sweetened tea before replying.

“Well, he got sick. They brought in a good Healer, who couldn’t find anything, other than that he wasn’t faking. He was bad sick too, so they finally brought me in. I dosed him good with all kinds of things, finally got him more or less cleaned out and resting, and I used a lot of those medicines I’ve been making up for that medicine chest I was talking about. But he looked like a beaten rug, and I still hadn’t found anything, because he didn’t have a fever or any other sign of a sickness. Well—”

Bear must have realized how raptly they were all listening to him, because he stopped talking and deliberately took another bite. And another. And another.

“Well?” asked Pip, Lena, and Halleck at the same time.

“Well... looked to me like he’d been poisoned, he had all the same symptoms of someone that’s gotten something like wasp-bitten. By the time I saw him, he was starting to swell up. First thing I thought of was maybe something stung him, but there weren’t any bites on him. I asked the servants, they swore he hadn’t eaten nor drunk anything he didn’t always have. Finally I went down to the kitchen, and I got hold of his tray. There wasn’t anything poisonous on it, they’d tested everything on a mouse on the first Healer’s orders, but thank goodness they had the wit not to wash stuff after that—the cook told me she wasn’t going to wash anything without direct orders.”

He paused again for another couple of bites. Mags got the feeling he was really enjoying this. And Mags didn’t blame him in the least. By this point, the tables on either side of them were full of people leaning their way to eavesdrop.

“So?” said Pip, Gennie, and someone else at the next table.

“So, I asked the cook if there was anything she was supposed to keep away from Chamjey. ‘Oh Kernos love you, duckie,’ she said, ‘Just the hint of chamomile makes him go all over green, and he’s on the chamberpot for a day.’ So I checked the teacup, and the teapot.” He grinned. “Plain old mint in the teapot—but just a scraping of chamomile in the cup along with the mint. Might look like just leaves to anyone else, but not to me. Bugger tried to poison himself to get out of trouble. I went up, told the Healer in charge, who told the Guards, who searched the room and Chamjey and found bits of chamomile flowers in his pocket.”

“Bear!” Gennie exclaimed. “That is excellent ferreting work! A Herald couldn’t have done it better!”

Bear blushed and grinned. He blushed even harder when Lena beamed wordlessly at him.

“I’m mortal sorry I missed yer Contest, Lena,” he concluded apologetically. “It took me a whole lot longer to do all that stuff than to tell about it.”

“I’m glad you missed it!” she exclaimed, her eyes bright. “I’m glad because you just proved you can do things nobody else here can do. You’re a hero!”

“Uh—” Bear said, blushing and tongue-tied. Mags just hid a smile.

Chapter 9

:I CAN’T b’lieve it’s finally spring,: Mags sighed, as the sun baked his shoulders with gentle warmth. :I thought it’d be winter ferever.: Even though he was down in Haven, in the street, there were still hints of growing things in the breeze. And flower-sellers on the street! Everyone seemed just a little bit more cheerful too, and a bit less impatient.

:For a while there so did I,: Dallen replied. Mags got a mental glimpse of Dallen blissfully prone in a bed of young clover, basking in the sun. :Enjoy this while you can. Spring is a treacherous creature. Tomorrow it could be pouring down rain that is near ice. Or we could be graced with a blizzard. Or, well, who knows. We might end up witn a three-day flood.:

:Don’t I jest know it,: he said ruefully. Such reversals of weather were all too familiar to the mine workers, and he never trusted the smiling face of a spring day until summer was within reach. He had spent far too many days working the sluices in rain that was just barely above freezing, or worse, in one of those unexpected snowstorms. Those were times when the only advantage to wearing nothing but a few rags for clothing was that they dried on your body faster when you got out of the wet.

Ah, but today—today was the closest he had been to contented since the Foreseers began spreading their tales. Six days of the week there were classes, but not the seventh. There was no Kirball practice either—not that he would have objected to practicing, but Herald Setham wanted a day off as well. So that meant that, like most of the Trainees, the seventh day was one that was all his to spend as he liked. Lately, that had been holed up in his room, studying. However, today Herald Nikolas had a long round of discreet errands that needed to be run down in Haven—mostly messages to be hand-delivered, but a few items to be fetched from shops—and he had asked Mags to run them.

That had sounded just fine to Mags. A day like this one begged to be enjoyed, and the best way for him to enjoy something was to get as far away from people who recognized him as possible.

The errands took Mags out of the grounds of the Collegia and away from all those people who were still thinking daggers at him. There were a disheartening number who still were, despite everything that his Kirball teammates and even the King had said and done. Down here in the city, no one knew who he was—he would have been just another Trainee, if he had chosen to wear Grays.

Which he hadn’t, actually; Nikolas wanted him to be mostly-invisible, and that had meant not dressing in his