Page 70 of Valdemar

Jonaton’s recitation to the King of what he had been up to regarding his partner was just a little short of smug. A little. Kordas was more amused than anything else. While Jonaton might be more than a little erratic, the one thing Kordas could always count on would be that he was brilliant at coming up with solutions to problems most people didn’t even realize were problems.

“I’ve been working on subtle, self-powered scrying charms off and on, for about a year. Something ‘quiet’ enough magically to go unnoticed by anyone seeking such things, because they work at low power over only a short distance. But what they show is relayed through a second, larger object nearby, with more power. From that comes the link for the remote scry. Should someone feel like spying on someone else’s business, their agent could wear an innocuous mirrored pin or a badge, a quarter mile from the larger item. I made Hakkon wear a mirror-backed badge on his helmet that is linked to a new saddlehorn I gave him. The saddlehorn has an adjustable magelight inside the cap, with a pretty mirrored compass underneath,” Jonaton explained to Kordas, as they both gazed into a mirror on the table between them that showed a slowly changing landscape with an occasional glimpse of a Fairweather. “That way there’s a chance that someone detecting it will assume the energy signature is just from the magelight, but the item is attached to a saddle, so no one will just pocket it. I didn’t tell him what the badge was for, but he probably guessed. He’s seen me fiddle with it.”

“Does that badge work both ways?” the King asked.

Jonaton sat back in his chair, and sniffed. “What do you think? I’d make something that shows me views of him getting into trouble, but doesn’t let me help him?”

“Help get him out of trouble, or help get him into trouble?” Kordas joked back.

“You know by now, I do as I must,” Jonaton chuckled. Gods and Powers it’s good to see him laugh again. Whatever had broken him out of his grief, whether it be having to keep track of Hakkon, listening to Rothas’s songs about Sydney, or—well, it was possible that the black cat that had met Kordas at the door of Jonaton’s quarters was there because of Lythe. And if that was the case, he owed the girl another debt. She had more than paid off all the effort they were putting in on her behalf.

The mage looked a great deal different than the Jonaton that had arrived here. It had been with great regret that Jonaton had put away all of his elaborate clothing in favor of the plainer stuff they were all wearing. The k’Vesla hertasi had adored him, because he was always wildly enthusiastic about anything they made him—especially outfits with pockets and pouches. But once they, and their superb laundering services, were gone, he had to resign himself to dressing “quietly.”

Jonaton loved to collect small things, habitually in fact. If something especially memorable happened, he was certain to filch a stray smoking-pipe, little figurine, spoon, or the like. Jonaton had finally told Kordas why years ago, when his psychometry study bore fruit, because he explained that objects carry impressions enough to seek out specific times. His trinket collecting was a habit he had gotten into in his youth, with predictable reprisals. Learning about psychometry had become an obsession for the boy, especially when his elders fought each other so much. He thought it would let him look back in time and see who was really right or wrong, so he could navigate his youth better. It gave him hope for a future when he finally could be sure of things. Touching and taking things was his way of “sticking a flag” on events, to make them easier to search for later when he’d mastered psychometry. He stole little objects as a way of preserving his memories.

So the more pockets, the better. But alas, none of that Tayledras finery was going to hold up to being laundered with the basic laundry they had now—nor did the laundry workers have the time to devote to cleaning fancy stuffs the way they had back in the Duchy. So now, just like everyone else, Jonaton wore a plain brown linen gown in summer and a wool one with linen underneath in the winter, which he had painstakingly trimmed himself with strips of fancier material, brocaded, beaded, or embroidered, cut from clothing he’d ruined before he realized his favorite outfits weren’t going to survive until there were more people and better facilities at the Palace.

The Six Old Men lived in the Palace, but the rest of the mages, Jonaton included, had their own section of the wall. Jonaton had one of those four-room setups for himself and Hakkon, except that they’d taken down the upstairs partition to make one big bedroom. Downstairs was his workroom in the place of a third bedroom, and the partition between it and the kitchen was solid stone with a very stout wooden door, backed with iron plates. That was where he and Kordas were now. It was windowless, and even with the door standing open, Kordas still smelled faint hints of past experiments, a very strange aroma with touches of herbs, bitter, sour, and metal.

Jonaton hadn’t outwardly changed much since they first arrived here, other than his clothing, but Kordas knew that under that clothing he was a great deal fitter than he had been. The general lack of servants had meant that they all were doing work that would have been “beneath them” in the Empire, and most of that was physical labor. They pumped their own water in the bathing rooms, and heated it themselves if necessary, even if that meant heating it in a wood-fired boiler and painstakingly carrying buckets of hot water across the bathing room and decanting them in the tub. They delivered their clothing themselves to the laundry and picked up clean clothing from the same place. They swept and tidied their own rooms, leaving only heavier cleaning for servants. They laid their own fires in winter (although the servants cleaned out the ashes), and brought their own wood up from a common stack kept at each outside door. When they wanted food outside of mealtimes, they fetched it from the kitchen themselves. Between that, and a great deal more walking than they had done before, every person quartered in the Palace was in better shape, even those who had been in good trim before the journey.

One of the things that the defectors had most objected to was the “servant work.” Kordas had to wonder how they were faring now, since a lot of their servants had slipped away and come back to Valdemar to join the Palace staff or set up some enterprise on their own.

Jonaton had never allowed a servant to do anything in his workroom, however, so it looked much the same as his workroom back in the manor. It looked disorganized, but it wasn’t. Jonaton could put his hands on anything he wanted or needed without any hesitation. So there must be a system there, though Kordas couldn’t see it. The walls were lined with shelves crammed with things Kordas couldn’t recognize. There were chests under the shelves. There were books on bookshelves set at angles to the wall. And a table and four chairs dead square in the middle. Kordas could not help but note the scorch marks liberally decorating the tabletop.

“So far, they’ve been fine. Didn’t even need me.” Jonaton sounded just a bit . . . put out with that. “But I haven’t taken my eyes off them. Sai is watching the Adept’s city. Have you had a look at it yet?”

“No, actually,” Kordas admitted.

Jonaton frowned. “It doesn’t look like it started as a city,” Jonaton said, calling up a teaching spell, which drew glowing lines in midair to match what Jonaton had in his memory. “There’s some kind of big building in the center that looks more like a temple or a monastery than a manor or a palace. Then everything outside of that is kind of randomly built, haphazard, not laid out the way Haven is. Then there’s a wall around the main part of the city, then more structures built outside of the wall. Outside of the wall is where they settled our defectors, and that’s where all the training is going on. Such as it is.” He shrugged. “I’m leaving that assessment to people who know about training fighters. The weaponsmaster has been in there watching a couple of times, and the Lord Martial. The Adept definitely has something like a Hawkbrother Veil or shield over the whole thing, and I did consider that she might have created some sort of illusion over the top of that, but no. It’s just a huge shield that does what the Veil did: keeps the temperature inside it at early summer, and immediately hardens into a very strong defense when attacked.” He frowned again. “And that’s kind of odd. It’s big, it’s powerful, but it’s nowhere near as refined as the Hawkbrothers’ Veil. It burns a lot of energy that it doesn’t need to burn. Or maybe I’m just overthinking this. If she is an actual Adept, she doesn’t need to worry about wasting power, because she can tap into plenty to waste. There’s probably a big ley-line running right under that city, so she can just squander power without thinking about it, like a drunkard that just came into a big inheritance.”

“Well, that does seem to suggest she’s a genuine Adept,” Kordas replied thoughtfully. “It would match what Silvermoon speculates—that she was merely an apprentice before. That would mean she never learned anything complicated, or how to finesse things. I wonder if everything she does is like that?”

“You mean crude, but powerful?” Jonaton nodded. “I think that might be the case. Of course, it doesn’t much matter to the fly if it’s smashed by a hammer or a beautifully crafted, jewel-handled swatter. It’s still smashed.”

“Point taken. But it does suggest gaps in her knowledge we might be able to exploit.” He pondered that. “Gaps in knowledge and experience—as I understand it, she would have somehow skipped the journeyman years completely. Something to talk with the Old Farts about, if they haven’t—”

“They have,” Jonaton laughed. “They’re trying to figure out what else she might have done around there so they can examine it. If the Hawkbrothers weren’t so damn secretive about their magic—well, we asked Silvermoon to weigh in, and he just made a face and said that he had no idea how she got that kind of knowledge when she was only an apprentice when she left.”

Kordas grimaced. “I can’t blame him, but it wouldn’t hurt him to have a look and say ‘Yes, she’s doing crude work that has a lot of holes in it that we can exploit’ or ‘No, it might be crude, but it’s solid.’”

“I know, right?” Jonaton dispelled the teaching diagram, although he left the scrying mirror active. “Another thing I’m trying with this scrying method is that the objects are sensitive to whatever the wearer is interested in. So the view follows.” Right now, the mirror showed a huge hare, sitting up on its haunches. A moment later it showed the hare toppling over, an arrow through its neck. “Well, there’s dinner for them,” he remarked, showing that, even as they spoke, he was still keeping an eye on his partner.

Kordas rose. “I’ll have a word with Silvermoon,” he told the mage. “Maybe I can shake something out of him.”

“Good luck to you. He’s as slippery as an eel when it comes to magic. Doesn’t give anything away, but with you he might barter. I need him to see some simulations I started, too. Sooner is better.” Jonaton went back to watching the scrying mirror as Kordas took himself out, stepping around the big black cat aloofly guarding the doorway.

:Ardatha, do you know where Silvermoon is?:he asked as he hesitated just outside Jonaton’s door.

:In fact, he and Starbird are here in the pasture. I think you might want to be here too,:the Companion told him.

Well, that wasn’t alarming at all! :What’s going on?: he demanded.

:We don’t know yet,:came the cautious reply. :Maybe nothing. It’s going to depend on a number of factors. This was not anticipated. We are, as you might say, “making it up as we go along.”:

He groaned silently, and suppressed the urge to run.

But when he arrived at the meadow, he saw Starbird and Silvermoon leaning over the fence, facing a small herd of not less than seven Companions.