Closer to the Heart (2 page)

“You 'spect us to hear anything, Master Harkon?” Berk asked curiously.

“Honestly? Not really, no,” Mags told them. “At least not 'til yer well settled inter your jobs, and they'll give you leave t' take an hour or two for yourselves now an' again, an' a regular day off. But I druther have a plan in place where you kin let me know we need t' talk, than have you learn somethin' then ruin all thet hard work I went to in order t' git you in place by having t' run off straight to me.” He clapped both boys on the shoulders. “So concentrate on settlin' in, keepin' yer minds on yer jobs an' not on pretty chambermaids and handsome footmen, an' not getting sacked!”

All three of the youngsters grinned at him, but promised that they would do just that. For his part, Mags felt perfect
confidence in them; they'd already shown they were sharp and clever. They were ready for this . . . and Minda was right. The little refuge was beginning to get a bit crowded. It was time for the first of the lot to move on.

And he already had some ideas in mind for the next batch, after these six were safely in place.

He took his leave of all of them, since it was about time for Minda to gather them for supper, and he didn't want to cut into their last hours with their friends. Wrapping his cloak tightly about himself, he left the converted shop and headed back to the inn where he had left Dallen. With the wind at his back, he wasn't quite so cold, and it gave him an excuse to walk briskly rather than sauntering as Harkon would have done in better weather.

Anyone with any sense was inside. This was no weather to linger on the street. Even if you didn't have much fuel and your walls whistled like a flock of birds with leaks, you were still better being inside than out.
:Think they'll do all right?:
he asked his Companion, as he let the wind push him back up the way he had come.

:Barring accident, they'll do splendidly,:
Dallen replied.
:And all three of them are quick; even if there
is
some sort of mishap, they're clever enough to think their way out of it again.:

• • •

Council meetings, Amily had decided, must have been specifically designed to occupy as much time as possible for people who had a great deal of free time to spend. The participants seemed to delight in arguing over minutiae. Maybe things would change once better weather started, but right now the members of the King's Greater Council seemed disinclined to leave their comfortable chairs and the warm Council chamber.

On the other hand, the fact that they
could
spend entire candlemarks arguing over tiny things like whether the wool from
chirras
should be taxed at the same rate as wool from sheep or from lambs meant that things were . . . safe. Or relatively so.
So. Small blessings.
There was no war, not even rumors of war. Banditry was at a level where the local Guard garrisons could handle it.

After the near-riots at Midwinter, caused by the feud between the noble Houses of Raeylen and Chendlar, even perpetually disputing highborn families were keeping their quarrels confined to vicious gossip and cutting remarks. Street-brawls and threats of exile by the King had made their due impression on other feuding families, but what had
really
sent shock rippling through the Court was that the son of Lord Kaltar of House Raeylen had very nearly carried out a plot to murder all but one of the members of
both
Houses, marry the Chendlar girl, and inherit the lot. With all that to occupy them, most people were still chewing over the gossip-fodder.

And there were no more mysterious assassins sent by Karse scattered about the city.
Large blessings.

“Perhaps,” she said gently, although she got their immediate attention when she spoke, “We should be looking at how rare this wool is, compared with mature sheep's wool or lambswool, and tax it accordingly.”

She looked around at the circular table—circular, so that every member of the Greater Council could easily look into the faces of every other member, and no one could claim he or she had anything but an equal seat. All the faces that met hers wore relatively contented expressions, cementing her notion that the Councilors were mostly “arguing” for the sake of argument, and being in not-unpleasant company while being served the King's best wine and manchet breads flavored with rose water. Not a bad way to spend a bitter afternoon.

“But what if the market becomes depressed by an
excessive tax?” someone demanded, and they were off and running again, but this time at least the argument was getting somewhere instead of being an endless circle.

She was more than a bit gratified—who wouldn't be—that now she was taken seriously in the Council meetings. Or seriously enough that when she spoke up, what she said was given due consideration. She'd been afraid that it would take years before she got even a fraction of the respect the Council had given her father.

Maybe the office of King's Own Herald by itself brought along a basic level of respect.

:Or perhaps,:
Rolan said gently into her mind,
:They've been paying attention on the rare occasions when you speak up, and have learned that when you do say something, it's worth listening to.:

:Or both,:
she replied, successfully keeping herself from blushing. She wondered if her father had gotten this sort of encouragement from Rolan when
he
first became King's Own.

It had been a long day, and she was just as glad that there was not an official Court dinner tonight. Kyril had made it quite plain that he intended to dine in his quarters with his family, which meant that only about half the members of the Court who were in residence would take dinner in the Great Hall. Those would be the members of the Court who had no residences of their own. The rest would return to their own fine town-houses here on the Hill for dinner, and possibly to entertain or be entertained. There could be music, informal dancing, and gaming. That meant she was free to have dinner with Mags, and they would probably do so with the instructors at the Collegium. The King only had Court dinners about once a week, although the Crown Prince and Princess, Sedric and Lydia, presided at Court dinners roughly three times as often. Lydia had told Amily that they did so in order to take the burden off Kyril, who frankly loathed the long dinners
even more than he disliked tedious Council sessions. She couldn't blame him. The Great Hall was huge, people had to talk so loudly in order to be heard that everything was a babble, and even with the best will in the world, not every dish arrived at the tables better than lukewarm. It had occurred to her, more than once lately, that Kyril was looking . . . older. Not
old,
but older. The office was wearing on him.

While Father is actually looking younger.
No longer having to juggle the dual duties of King's Spy and King's Own, now that he had completely recovered from what could only be described as “returning from the dead,” Amily's father Herald Nikolas seemed to her to be reveling in the chance to get away from the Court and
do
things.

I certainly can't blame him.

On the other hand, these Council sessions were a unique opportunity for her to learn a great deal about the individual members of the Council. As long as she remained quiet, they tended to treat her as part of the furniture. It wasn't that they
ignored
her, it was more that they were used to her father, who had a very powerful Gift of Mindspeech, and could tender his advice to Kyril silently. They probably assumed she was doing the same, and it suited both her and the King to allow them to continue with that impression. Thus far she hadn't uttered so much as a single word during Council sessions that would make any of the members think she was challenging them, or even observing them with any attitude other than respect for their age and experience.

Which, of course, she
was . . .
but she was also weighing everything they said against what she knew were their own personal agendas and interests. Cynical perhaps, but Amily was a realist, and she had been observing these selfsame personages for years at the behest of her father, back when she was nothing more than quiet, unremarkable Amily, Herald Nikolas's crippled daughter, of no consequence whatsoever.
Yes, they were all experienced. But they were also seasoned politicians and courtiers, and all of them had left defeated rivals in their wake. Now, they wouldn't be on the Council if the King and the Heralds didn't think they would keep the welfare of the Kingdom foremost in their minds. But there was no doubt that the continued accumulation of wealth and power lurked in the background whenever they came to a decision. As long as there was no conflict between these two motivations, Amily held her tongue. But she was always on the watch for a moment when the latter edged out the former.

Today had been one of those days. They all had commercial interests, whether it be mercantile or agricultural, or a combination of both, and edging the taxes one way or another could shift the balance of wealth and power around this table and around the Kingdom. It had been like watching people playing a card game for very high stakes.

The Crown Prince and Princess had sat in on this meeting as well, although they had not contributed anything to the discussion. She could tell from their expressions, however, that neither of them missed a thing—and it was very likely that tonight, at dinner in the Royal Suite, this entire meeting would be hashed out again between the soup and the dessert.

She was just as glad not to be a part of that. Going through it once was enough. Prince Sedric seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in this game of politics, though, and for that she was grateful. When—as she fully expected—the King stepped aside to allow his son to become the reigning Monarch, she was not going to have to educate him in a thing.

Nor Lydia, either.
Like Amily, Lydia had been playing the quiet, unassuming observer at the behest of her elders—in this case, her Uncle—for many years. If Sedric knew the highborn players in this game intimately, then it was Lydia who knew the merchant “princes.” Together they were going to make a formidable team.

And thank the gods for the greater favors. That barring a tragedy, we're going to get a pair like Lydia and Sedric as our monarchs when the time comes, and not a child.

That was the current situation in Menmellith, a Kingdom near Valdemar's southern border. The situation had been
so
precarious, in fact, that Menmellith had not sent an ambassador to Sedric and Lydia's wedding.

This, among other reasons, was why Kyril was pressing Amily and Mags to have
their
wedding soon. He wanted to make a state occasion of it, so that those foreign lands who had not sent a representative to the Crown Prince's wedding would have a second chance with a lot less international political pressure attached to the ceremony.

Politics. We can't even escape them when it comes to our personal lives.
She sighed internally.
Evidently, once one is King's Own, one doesn't actually have a personal life. No wonder father seems younger. I think I'm taking on all the years he shed.

• • •

Mags and Amily both ended up at the Collegium dining hall late—so late that they missed all their friends and the instructors, and there weren't more than a handful of Trainees still there. He glanced over at her, thinking how serene and simply pretty she looked in her Formal Whites, and how deceptively unthreatening. She could have been any highborn girl; brown hair neatly braided and pinned around her head, big, soft brown eyes, delicate face—

—and he had seen her kill men, taking carefully placed, precise arrow shots. Not that he hadn't killed his share, and more, but he didn't
look
harmless, the way she did. He wondered if any of the Councilors ever thought of that, when they faced her across the table.

“Well, at least there ain't a crowd,” he said, watching the few Trainees desperately trying to combine eating and studying, and the Trainees on kitchen duty bustling about cleaning up. “We can always beg at the kitchen hatch for some crumbs.”

But they hadn't even picked a spot to sit before the Cook sent someone out with loaded trays for both of them.

Mags grinned and thanked the Trainee who handed them their dinners. “Bless you and Cook, and tell him I said so,” Amily added, and they took their food and found an out-of-the-way spot to enjoy their dinner in peace. One near the fireplace, and away from the windows. The ruddy light of sunset was
not
improving the bleak lawns and gardens outside.

“This weren't—wasn't—ever Collegium dinner,” Mags remarked, looking at the succulent roast pork, baked apples, and fancy-cut mixed vegetables. Not to mention the little pastries shaped like swans and filled with whipped cream with dollops of jam on top. The food looked and smelled heavenly.

“No, tonight was supposed to be stew,” Amily told him.
“This
is what went on the plates over at the Great Hall.” Then she considered the plates.
“Part
of what went on plates at the Great Hall,” she amended, and shook her head. “I should be used to it by now, but I still find it difficult to contemplate dinners that consist of a dozen courses or more. Our people make sure that nothing goes to waste, but the sort of excess that the highborn expect to see as a meal still bothers me.”

“I spent most've my life half-starved,” Mags reminded her. “I try not t'think on it too much or it'll make me mad. What goes back t'the kitchen after one Court meal'd feed all the mine-kids fer a month.” He shook his head, and dug in. “I expect the Cook sent over for a couple of plates and kept them warm for us.”

“Sometimes I suspect Cook of having a Foresight Gift.” The two of them ate silently for a bit; it had been a long day for both of them, Mags suspected, although his had at least been
spent in doing constructive things rather than sitting around a table and listening to Councilors argue.