Changes

entire city in flames. Would the Hill be spared? Possibly . . .

But in his nightmares, he could imagine only too well a scenario in which it would not be. Where Ice and Stone set delayed fires of the type they’d tried to set before, using candles—and meanwhile, had brought wild rats up to the Hill and the homes leading up to it. Affix a box full of smoldering tinder to the rat and turn it loose— eventually it will be somewhere that will burn—inside walls, in stables full of hay, in a storage room. Do that fifty, sixty, seventy times—and the manors on the Hill, if not the Palace, will catch and burn. The privileged seldom know how to deal with an emergency themselves. They would be relying on the Guard and the Constabulary Fire Service. But they would already be down in Haven, and stretched thin.

And then what? Everyone flees to the Palace? And in the confusion, in the crush of panicked people running from their burning homes, it would be easy for Ice and Stone to get inside the walls and start fires there. They might not even need to murder the King or try to manipulate him through the King’s Own at that point. With Haven in ruins, centuries of records destroyed, an entire city homeless, Valdemar would be in chaos for decades, and Karse would have exactly what it wanted.

He tried not to think about such things. Or rather, he tried not to think about such things after tentatively Mindspeaking Nikolas one night about the time he knew the shop was generally empty, offering with great diffidence that these ideas had occurred to him and then waiting for an aswer as a properly respectful student should.

::We’d considered both of those scenarios,:: Nikolas replied. ::But you’re the one who has actually picked up some of their thoughts, which gives you an edge in understanding how they might react to this setback. We’ll put a higher urgency on those possibilities. Thank you, Mags.::

Mags wasn’t at all sure what “higher urgency” meant, but at least someone would be on guard against those possibilities, which allowed him to sleep a little better at night.

He did find out what had happened with the Guard Healer Cuburn; that particular spectacle had been very, very public. Bear had stormed down to the barracks and in front of a large group of the Guard (and more who came when they heard the altercation) confronted the man about spying on him for his father. Then he had unleashed a long tirade on the theme of “Old men who want their sons to be nothing more than copies, but vastly inferior copies, of themselves, so they can preen about having a boy who duitifully follows in his father’s footsteps, yet never have to worry about finding rivals in their own houses.”

According to Corwin, who had actually been there, Bear’s rant had not only been scathing, it had hit home with no few of the Guard. Evidently Bear’s father was not the only man who wanted to keep his son under his paternal thumb, bound body and soul to whatever the family business or tradition was, regardless of whether the boy was suited to it. Bear had gotten quite a few sympathetic hearers that he probably had not expected.

Enough that when Bear was done and had stormed back to Healers’ Collegium, the Captain of the Guard had taken Cuburn aside and suggested that his men were going to find it difficult to completely trust in someone who had taken the position with the Guard for the purpose of spying on someone. How could they trust anyone who was “no better than a nosy old gossip?”

Cuburn had vigorously denied he was doing any such thing and swore that he had taken the job because he wanted to serve the Guard, who were the first defense of Valdemar. He swore he would prove it any way that the Captain wanted.

He probably hadn’t reckoned on the Captain calling his bluff.

“In that case,” the Captain had said, “You won’t object to my arranging a transfer.”

Mags didn’t know if Bear had heard about that part. He also didn’t know if the Captain had actually gone through with asking for that transfer. Corwin had told him that transfers could take several moons, so... well, he supposed they would only know the truth when Cuburn was gone.

Officially, Bear had been given a stern lecture by his Dean. Unofficially—well, who knew? He was still acting as disgruntled as his namesake after a long winter’s hibernation. Mags was perversely proud of him, actually, as proud as he was of Lena. Bear didn’t have his father in reach, but he did have his father’s spy, and he could be certain that every word he had spoken would get back to the man he really wanted to have words with.

But he couldn’t tell them that, because he hadn’t seen so much as a thread of Bardic Trainee rust or Healer Trainee pale green since he’d sent them out of his room.

All Mags could do, really, was concentrate on his studies and on research in the library and the Heralds’ Archives to see if anything like Ice and Stone or the shields they wore had ever come up before, and, if so, had there been any way of finding such things when the ones who were being shielded didn’t want to be found. He frequently found himself looking back with nostalgia on the time when the most urgent reason to be here was to find out who or what his parents had been. Then it had only been to prove that he was not the child of thieves and murderers. Now there was, potentially, an entire city at risk.

And he prayed for the weather to break. Because just maybe all it was going to need was a good hard rain and cooler weather to clear peoples’ heads. Since he was pretty sure that virtually everyone else in all of Haven was praying for the same thing, it was a wonder that the gods hadn’t answered before this.

Which, Dallen’d tell me, an’ prolly any good priest, ain’t how gods work. Which don’ seem fair t’me, when all we’re askin’ fer is a liddle rain.

He was up in the Archives alone when the sound of light footsteps in the corridor warned him that he wasn’t going to be alone much longer. He sighed. He really, truly, did not want to be bothered right now. It was late enough that his daily headache had bloomed nicely behind his forehead and cheekbones, and it was only the fact that it was still too hot to sleep in the Field kept him up here in the Archives.

And they were female footsteps from the sound of it, unless it was a page. Pages usually didn’t come up here unless they were sent. So either some female was coming here, or a page had been sent here, and in either case it was more likely that the desired object of the person’s search was Mags and not a random volume of Heraldic Reports.

He abandoned the passage he had been working on and waited, knowing he might as well. If that unknown someone was coming here to do research herself, he could go right back to what he was doing. But if she was looking for him, he wouldn’t be allowed to get back to work without hearing what she wanted and probably coming up with an answer for her. He just hoped it was something trivial—like an answer to part of the classwork.

But when Lena came in through the door, he was actually shocked. He would have expected to see almost anyone but Lena. “Lena?” he said incredulously.