Changes

Still. It didn’t feel wrong... but he wasn’t sure it was entirely right, either.

::Well done,:: Dallen said, as the Herald in charge took over the interrogation again, alternately coaxing and stern. ::Well done for handling him, and well done for doubting, Chosen. You must walk a very narrow path, and you know it. Never forget how narrow that path is.::

Mags acknowledged him wordlessly, and he pondered the man before him. Not a good man... not a bad man, either. Just... just a man. He didn’t hate Pawel, how could he?

But he didn’t much like him at the moment, either.

How could Pawel have been here for so long and fail to see how wrong the people who had sent him were? Had his very faith made him don blinkers of his own free will? And if faith made people do that, then how did you get them to abandon what blinded them without breaking them?

Right now, Mags wasn’t sure he cared for religion of any sort. Plenty of priests had seen what was going on at the mine and done nothing. Priests had blinded Pawel to what was right in front of him, day in, day out.

But... then there were the priests that Bear worked with . . .

Eventually they had everything useful they were likely to get out of him, and he was taken away. Mags didn’t know what was going to be done with Pawel—he wasn’t entirely certain he cared. Pawel and the drop-points for his orders were both compromised now, and he would have to be gotten away somewhere in case Ice or Stone decided to make sure he couldn’t reveal any more than he already had.

“We know why they wanted Amily,” Nikolas said, after Pawel was taken off. “But why did they want Mags? They did want him—the two men that Mags calls Ice and Stone were after Mags themselves.”

“Maybe to keep Amily quiet?” hazarded the Herald in charge. “If they intended to hold her for any length of time, they would have wanted a significant hold over her; something or someone they could use to coerce her without actually hurting her. They could threaten you, but she would know that was hollow. But if they had Mags, they could do anything they liked to him to make her cooperate.”

Well, that was an ugly thought. But it did fit in with Stone and Ice’s personalities.

The problem was... that just didn’t feel right to Mags. He had no evidence at all, other than his instincts, but—

Well, there was one thing. There had been that moment when Amily was safe and he was not, when he was staring into Stone’s face—watching the man calculate and assess—

Iffen he’d thought he could git away wi’ me, he’d’a grabbed me an left Amily.

Mags wasn’t sure how he knew this. He only knew that he was as certain of the truth of it as he was of his own name.

And that somehow, this was directly related to the fact that the really crazed assassin, the one that had taken Bear, had recognized him.

The hell is goin’ on? Had they somehow mistaken him for someone else? It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed his mind. And it drove him frantic that he had no more idea now than he had then.

There was one useful thing they had gotten out of Pawel. There were two more spies up here... he didn’t know who or what the first one was, but he was absolutely certain that one of them was either a Bard or a Bardic Trainee.

Chapter 15

It had taken the better part of a candlemark to relate everything that had happened. “Tha’s it,” Mags finished. He had gotten Amily, Bear, and Lena to all come out to his room after supper; with the Companions standing a watchful presence, he was fairly certain no one was going to be able to overhear anything he told them. Amily had the single comfortable chair, and Mags paced restlessly. Lena and Bear sprawled on his bed. “Tha’s all I know. Amily, yer pa wants ter wait till it’s a mite cooler afore they do yer leg. Nobody wants ye t’ be hurtin’ an’ swelterin’ at th’ same time. An’ there’s other reasons... sorry, I weren’t half listenin’ . . .” He shrugged, finally sat down on the floor at her feet, and she reached for his hand.

“Infections. Easier to get ’em in hot weather. And it’d be easier for you to get heat sickness too.” Bear pondered it all. “Well, I reckon we can get you mostly done before the snow if we do it before Harvest Moon.”

“If you don’t, well, then I just get to be pampered and lie about like a spoiled child next to the fire all winter and have people fetch and carry for me,” she said with a smile.

Mags snorted. “Like I kin see ye doin’ that. Not hardly.” He decided to risk getting teased about it later and stole a kiss. Right now, he wanted all the kisses he could get. He was still getting the shakes when he understood just how close their escape had been. If Amily hadn’t been on Dallen... he’d have been too busy fighting off Ice and Stone to help her. All those men dressed in real Guard uniforms had looked very convincing. Bear had been right, they’d had the means to knock her unconscious, and they could have carried her off under the guise of getting her help.

He tried to remind himself that they had all been prepared for something like that. She’d have been swarmed by Hera;ds and Companions. But all he could think about was Amily’s terrified face.

How close he had come to never seeing her again . . .

“But the spy in Bardic—” Bear’s brows furrowed. “It has to be Marchand’s pet. It has to. Who else could it be?”

Mags expected Lena to agree with Bear immediately. So, obviously, did Bear. They were both shocked when she shook her head.

“It isn’t,” she said decidedly. “It can’t possibly be Farris. For one thing, there isn’t a deceitful bone in his body. For another . . .” She bit her lip. “For another... I know why Father picked him, now.”

Mags had a horrible, vile thought. And something of that must have shown on his face, because Amily took a quick glance at him and paled.

But Lena was continuing, twisting a bit of her hair around one finger. “This is going to take a long, long