Closer to the Chest by Mercedes Lackey Page A

there long enough for a good stiff drink to take the edge off the pain of his ribs and wait for Dallen to spirit his way into the stables, then leave as if he’d been there all along.
    :As if you couldn’t find out those names if you wanted to from Flora,:
Dallen snickered.
    :How far away are you?:
Mags asked.
    :I’m already there. There are pears, and a very nice stableboy who is feeding them to me. Take your time.:
    :Reckon I’ll have dinner, then,:
he decided.
:Amily’s eatin’ with the Court, an’ I don’t fancy fightin’ my way through the younglings and then tryin’ t’ get myself sittin’ on a bench at the Collegium.:
Sitting in a quiet corner of the comfortable inn room, being brought his food by the smiling serving maid, his Whites getting him immediate attention, was much more attractive than fighting his way through a lot of rambunctious Trainees who would pay as much attention to his presence as they would a bench. Less; they could sit on the bench.
    :Good idea,:
Dallen replied.
:Send me out some pocket pies.:
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Amily saw the lights burning in the sitting room from a good distance, and smiled as she hurried her steps along the gardenpath. She had been hoping this wouldn’t be one of the nights “Harkon” spent down at the pawn shop until nearly midnight. She wanted badly to talk to Mags about Lord Semel and his family—and about that disturbing priest of “Sethor the Patriach”—and to find out if he had heard anything about the Sisters of Ardana. While the former Temple of Ardana hadn’t been precisely
in
Harkon’s neighborhood, it had been only a few streets away. If there was any gossip about them, he’d have picked it up by now.
    â€œYou’re back!” she heard from the sitting room as soon as she entered the door. “Good, I hope you didn’t have to foil any assassinations tonight.”
    â€œOnly one near-one, but not of the King,” she said, coming in to find him sprawled in a slightly odd, stiff position in the most heavily padded of the chairs.
Did he have to go roof-running today or tonight? I wonder if he sprained a shoulder. Well, he’ll tell me.
“There is a new young beauty at the Court, and if evil looks had been daggers tonight, she’d have been slashed to ribbons.”
    She filled him in on Lord Semel (“Yes, he’s one of Kyril’s unofficial field agents, Nikolas has shown me some of his reports” she confirmed when he looked alert and inquisitive at the name) and the entire brood. “Helane is the one causing all the clucking in the henhouse at the moment,” she continued. “I’ve put Lady Dia on to her; we need some notion of her brains and personality. If she’s the kind to meddle just for the mischief of it, we’ll having young highborn lads meeting each other for dawn duels over the right to escort her in to supper. But if she’s clever . . . and willing . . . we might be able to make use of those brains so she doesn’t get into mischief out of pure boredom. She doesn’t fit the Queen’s Handmaidens, since with a title
and
property
and
the King’s favor on her family, she doesn’t need the organization to help her along. But she could still be useful in the same ways that Lydia’s friends were.”
    â€œI’ll have to introduce myself to Hawken then,” Mags replied with a sigh. “If he was just anyone, we could probably afford to let him sink or swim on his own, but as the son of someone who’s got Kyril’s ear, I need to make sure he doesn’t get in with the wrong crowd.
You
know what I mean.”
    Amily nodded; it wasn’t that the young men of the Court were treacherous or dangerous, at least not the ones here now, it was that they were
young men.
And in every group of young men there were always those who were