“Throw your lot in with me. I won't deceive you with pretty fictions. You'll obey me because I am strong and smart and powerful. You'll learn from me to be the same. And maybe some day you'll be good enough to take what I've got away from me. Until then, we'll have a deal, and it will be because we know where we stand with each other, not because of some artificial conceit that we like each other.” He laughed. “The smart man guards his own back, boy,” the insidious voice went on. “The wise man knows there is no one that you can trust, you take and hold whatever you can and share it with no one, because no one will ever share what he has with you. Hate is for the strong; love is for the weak. No one has friends; friend is just a pretty name for a leech. Or a user. What do you think Bazie was? A user. He used you boys and lived off of your work, kept you as personal servants, and pretended to love you so you would be as faithful to him as a pack of whipped puppies.”
And that was where the Guildmaster went too far.
Bazie, thought Skif, jarred free of the spell that insidiously logical voice had placed on him. Bazie had shared whatever he had, and had trusted to his boys to do the same. Bazie had taken him in, with no reason to, and every reason to turn him into the street, knowing that Londer would be looking for him to silence him.
And Beel — Beel had protected him, Beel could have reported a hundred times over that Skif had fulfilled his education, but he didn't. And when Beel could have told his own father where Skif was, he'd kept his mouth shut.
And the Heralds —
Oh, the Heralds. Weak, were they? Foolish?
Skif felt warmth coming back into him, felt his heart uncurling, as he thought back along the past weeks and all of the little kindnesses, all unasked for, that he'd gotten. Kris and Coroc keeping the highborn Blues from tormenting him until Skif had established that he was more amusing if he wasn't taunted. Jeri helping him out with swordwork. The teachers taking extra time to explain things he simply had never seen before. Housekeeper Gaytha being so patient with his rough speech that sometimes he couldn't believe she'd spend all this time over one Trainee. The girls teasing and laughing with him in the sewing room. The simple way that he had been accepted by every Trainee, and with no other recommendation but that he'd been Chosen —
Cymry.
Cymry, who had rilled his heart — who still was there, he sensed her again, now that he wasn't listening to the poison that bastard was pouring into his ears. Cymry, who cared enough for him to wait while he listened — to make his own decisions, without any pressure from her.
No love, was there? Self-delusion, was it?
Then I'll be deluded.
Did the Guildmaster see his thoughts flicker across his face? Perhaps —
“Kash, now!”; he shouted. The wounded bodyguard lunged, arms outstretched to grab him —
But Skif was already moving before the bodyguard, clumsy with his wounds and pain, had gotten a single step. He jumped aside, his hands flicking to each side as he evaded those outstretched arms.
And between one breath and the next —
The bodyguard continued his lunge, and sprawled facedown on the floor, gurgling in agony, one of Skif's knives in his throat.
The Guildmaster made a strangled noise — and so did Alberich.
The arm around Alberich's throat tightened as the Guildmaster slid down the wall.
Skif's other knife was lodged to the hilt in his eye.
But Skif's dodge had been deliberately aimed to take him to Alberich's side. The Guildmaster had been a stationary target. And at that range, he couldn't miss.
In the next heartbeat he had pried the dead arm away from the Weaponsmaster's throat, and Alberich was gasping in great, huge gulps of air, his color returning to normal.
Skif helped him to his feet. “You all right?” he asked awkwardly.
Alberich nodded. “Talk — may be hard,” he rasped.
Skif laughed giddily, feeling as if he had drunk two whole bottles of that fabulous wine all by himself. “Like that's gonna make the Trainees unhappy,” he taunted. “You, not bein' able to lecture ‘em!”
The wry expression on Alberich's face only made him laugh harder. “Come on,” he said, draping his teacher's arm over his shoulders. “We better get you outside an' get back to where th' good Healers are afore your Kantor decides he's gonna put horseshoe marks on my bum.”
They got as far as the door when Skif thought of something else. “I don' suppose you did arrange for help, did you?”
“Well,” Alberich admitted, in a croak. “It comes now.”
:Cymry?:
:Half the Collegium, my love.:
Skif just shook his head. “Figgers. Us Heralds, we just keep thinkin' we gotta do everything by ourselves, don't we? We can't do the smart thing an' get help fixed up beforehand. Even you. An' you should know better.”
“Yes,” Alberich agreed. “I should. We do.”
We. It was a lovely word.
One that Skif was coming to enjoy a very great deal
* * * * * * * * * *
A Herald he didn't recognize brought Skif his knives, meticulously cleaned, as the Healer fussed over Alberich right there in the street, which was so full of torches and lanterns it might have been a festival. Well, a very grim sort of festival.
It actually looked more like something out of a fever dream; the street full of Heralds and Guards, more Guardsmen swarming in and out of the warehouse, a half-dozen Heralds and their Companions surrounding Alberich — who flatly refused to lie down on a stretcher as the Healer wanted — while the Weaponsmaster sat on an upturned barrel and the Healer stitched up his wounds. Four bodies were laid out on the street under sheets; one semiconscious bullyboy had been taken off for questioning as soon as he recovered. Not that anyone expected to get much out of him. It wasn't very likely that a mere bodyguard would know the details of his master's operations.
No one had sent Skif back to the Collegium, and he waited beside Alberich, between Kantor and Cymry, listening with all his might to the grim-voiced conversations around him. Most of the Heralds here he didn't know; that was all right, he didn't have to know who they were to understand that they were important. He did recognize Talamir, though, who seemed considerably less otherworldly at the moment and quite entirely focused on the here and now.
“This is going to have an interesting effect on the Council,” he observed, his voice heavy with irony.
Alberich snorted. “Interesting? Boil up like a nest of ants, when stirred with sticks, it will! Sunlord! Guildmaster Vatean! Suspect him, even I did not!”
“Gartheser is going to have a fit of apoplexy,” someone else observed. “Vatean was here was here at his behest in the first place.”
Hadn't they noticed he was here? This was high political stuff he was listening to!
:They know,: Cymry told him. :But you're a Herald, even if you aren't in Whites yet. You proved yourself tonight. No one is ever going to withhold any thing from you that you really want or need to know.: