Valdemar 03 - [Collegium 01] - Foundation (17 page)

He hadn't penetrated very far past the boundaries when he heard something. For a moment, he stood quite still, trying to identify it. After a moment, he realized what it was.

Muffled sobs. Someone—a girl by the high voice—was crying.

More strongly than ever before, he was torn between his old self and the new one—the person he used to be might have turned his back on whoever was weeping and pretended he knew nothing about it. After all, this was some stranger. Right? It was no one he had any obligation to. He would not get in trouble if he ignored her. Why should he care if some strange girl was crying? How could it possibly matter if he walked away?

But the “new” Mags—that boy could not walk away. Not with those heartbroken sobs in his ears.

On the other hand, if this girl, whoever she was, was not alone, then him barging in there would not be good. She might be with a girl friend. Worse, she might be with a boy friend.

The boy might be the one who was making her cry. Or he might be trying to comfort her.

So he carefully let his protections thin a little. Then a little more. Finally, when he could dimly sense her thoughts, although it was like hearing a voice so far in the distance that he could not make out the words, only the anguished tone, he allowed his senses to check the area around her.

Nothing. Not even the “alive-but-blank” feeling he got from someone who was shielding his thoughts too.

:What are you doing, Mags?:
Dallen must have sensed enough to pull his attention away from the rest of his friends.

:I'm going to find out if I can help,:
he replied, feeling even more awkward, if possible.

There was silence in his head for a moment.
:It isn't a Heraldic Trainee,:
Dallen said cautiously.
:I would be very careful if I were you. It could be the daughter of someone highborn in the Court. She'd not appreciate your help. Especially not if she is lovelorn or something of the sort. She won't appreciate you coming in and wanting to know her private affairs.:

He gave a mental shrug, but Dallen wasn't finished.
:She might even be insulted. Some of the highborn are rather . . . touchy about being approached by someone who is not of their rank and class.:
Dallen's tone conveyed a certain resignation.
:Much as I would prefer otherwise, there are those who believe that their blood entitles them to look down on the rest of humanity.:

:Even a Herald?:
he asked.

Another moment of silence.
:In some cases,
especially
a Herald.:

In a way, that statement came as a relief rather than otherwise. So the Heralds didn't get along with everyone. Or rather, not everyone saw them as an unalloyed blessing from the gods. That, to Mags' mind, was far more realistic than the “everyone adores the Heralds” image he had been getting from Dallen and everyone else in Whites or Grays. Instinctively, he had been certain that could not be the case. In his experience, life was not just an apple with a worm in it, it was an apple that was mostly worm, and one could only hope to pick free bits of apple. So here was the worm, or perhaps, many worms, revealed at last.

:But such people are few!:
Dallen all but bleated.

:The more reason to know they're there, and who they are.:
He began working his way into the gardens, guided by the sound of sobbing.
:You don't have to tell me now who they are, just warn me when there's one about.:
He might have added more, except at that moment he rounded a clump of three evergreens to find himself practically face-to-face with a young girl, dark-haired, thin, and smaller even than Mags, with a dead rabbit in her lap.

:Don't!:
Dallen shouted in his mind, before he could say anything. And rightly so, because Mags' impulse on being presented with a dead rabbit was to ask when she was going to cook it and did she need help in skinning and gutting it. Not that long ago, a dead rabbit would have been cause for the nearest thing he and the rest of the kiddies knew as a feast. He would have welcomed a dead rabbit with all his heart, but the only ones he had ever seen were going into the Pieters' kitchen.

As for himself, Mags had eaten dead crows, dead sparrows—even a dead cat, once . . . it was almost second nature to think of any beast only as a potential meal.

Which, he knew in the next moment, would have been a terrible, and very hurtful thing to say. You didn't stroke the fur of your dinner the way this girl was petting the dead rabbit. And you certainly didn't weep over it the way she was doing. And now, here, he found himself thinking of one of the other kiddies, a creature of indeterminate gender that had attached itself to one of the barn cats, and the cat to it. The Pieterses did not have “pets” as such—every animal in their lives was either food or a beast of some use. But the child and the cat had been almost inseparable until the child took ill the past winter and died. And the cat had vanished.

He coughed slightly to alert her to his presence. She looked up, huge brown eyes bloodshot, tears pouring down her delicate face, and that was when he noticed that she was wearing the rust-red uniform of a Bardic Trainee, and he felt some of Dallen's anxiety ease. “Hey,” he said awkwardly. “I heard ye. Ye maybe should go inside. Yer gonna get cold out here like this—”

She stared at him blankly, then sobbed. “He's dead! I went back to my room to feed him, and he's dead!” Anything more she might have said was lost in the torrent of sobs that followed.

Awkwardly, Mags sat down on a garden seat opposite her. “They don' live very long,” he suggested. “Mebbe 'twas his time—” Not the most tactful of things to say, perhaps, but at least it didn't cause her to cry harder.

“He wasn't very old!” she sobbed, stroking the rabbit's brown fur. “He was only four!” Mags grimaced. He really didn't think rabbits lived much longer than that; certainly that seemed to be about the average life for a cat around the Pieterses' mine, and cats were about the same size as rabbits. But the young girl wasn't done. “M-m-my best friend Kaley gave him to me; she found a nest a-a-and gave Bumper to me to k-k-keep me c-c-company.”

Mags furrowed his brows. “Keep ye company? Why?”

“Everyone at h-home is always so b-busy,” she replied, head down, voice muffled. “Kaley had to go to w-work at the inn, s-so she didn't have t-time anymore.” The girl looked up at him for just a moment, then back down again, flushing, and broke into sobs again.

Mags was freezing, but gamely remained. “I don't know anyone here,” the girl said forlornly. “And I-I-I am not really good at meeting people.”

Mags contemplated the irony of that statement, given that he was so bad at meeting people he could just as well have been invisible.

“S-so when I asked if I c-could bring Bumper, they said yes.” She paused for another spate of tears, and pulled a square of white cloth from her sleeve to dry them with.

Outwardly, he probably seemed calm. Inwardly, he was beginning to panic.
:What do I do now?:
he begged Dallen. He felt himself floundering. Now that he had gotten himself involved in this girl's grief, he didn't feel as if he should extricate himself, but he also didn't know how to react to it. Some mostly-smothered instinct said
comfort her,
but how did you do that? He'd never felt that much attachment for another human being as to weep over him, so how was he to sympathize with such an outpouring of grief over what to anyone else would have been a feature at dinner?

“Now I'm all alone,” she sobbed into the cloth.

“Ah, nah, yer a Bardic gel, no?” he responded, before Dallen got a chance to prompt him. “Ye gots lots of friends, surely—”

“No, I don't!” she cried. “I don't have
any
friends! How could I have, when Tobias Marchand is my father?”

She said that as if she expected that answered all questions. Mags' brow crinkled, but Dallen answered him before he could voice the obvious question.

:Tobias is a very famous Bard,:
Dallen told him, sounding surprised.
:I've heard he can play almost every instrument there is, and do it brilliantly—and his songs are popular in at least three countries besides Valdemar. And, besides that, he's supposed to be a simply amazing and witty man, able to hold a conversation on just about any subject. I had no idea he had a daughter—:

“Well, yer Da can make sure yer looked out for, no?” he ventured.

She looked up, stricken. “Oh, no!” she whispered. “No. No, I couldn't call on my father. And anyway, I hardly know him. He never spent much time with us, he was
much
too busy. He's too important for someone like me to bother.”

Dallen reacted to this with indignation, although it seemed perfectly sensible to Mags. Cole Pieters' boys knew better than to bother him with anything that did not have to do directly with the running of the mine, for instance. . . .

Underneath her words, with his protections down, Mags was getting a running match of her thoughts to her words, and he felt more and more at sympathy with her with every passing moment, for all that they seemed so dissimilar. For the past several weeks since her arrival, she had been too shy to open her mouth except to sing—and in any event, all of the Bardic Trainees at or near her own age already had established groups of friends. She shrank from the mere thought of trying to penetrate those apparently-closed ranks. And as for her teachers . . . she was intimidated, not by them, but by how much they expected of her. She was laboring under the burden of her father's reputation, and that terrified her.

In fact, the memory of that first interview was always lurking in the back of her mind.

The memories and the desperation behind them flooded over him. Here was someone who was feeling just as out of place as he was, and just as unworthy. Suddenly, he didn't feel quite so alone.

Poor kiddie. She scarcely knew her father any more than Mags knew his, and they were expecting her to be some kind of younger copy of him. Mags sensed Dallen all but spluttering with indignation; Mags ignored him. “If ye need a frien', Lena . . .” he said, slowly, the unfamiliar word leaving a strange, but pleasant, sensation behind it, “I c'ud be yer frien'. If ye want.”

He expected her to look away and politely decline. After all, it wasn't as if he had anything worth offering to someone like her. So her reaction surprised him.

“You would? You could?” Two bright pink spots appeared on her tear-blotched cheeks. “You'd really be my friend?”

“I guess everyone'd be if they knew ye,” he half-mumbled, staring down at his hands. “Uh . . . I guess poor ol' Bumper there—”

“I wanted to bury him,” she replied, choking down a sob. “But the ground is so hard—”

He almost laughed. “Might not know much,” he offered, “But I know diggin'. If yer not too partic'lar about where, I'll get ye a hole.” When she nodded, he went off to the gardener's shed and came back with a pickax and a shovel. And of course Mags did know digging; after scraping back the snow in several places and examining the ground closely, he found a spot under a bush that was mostly mulch, and softer than the ground around it. With the pick and shovel, he managed to dig a little hole; the girl carefully wrapped her rabbit in her scarf and laid it in the bottom, then looked at him expectantly.

:You should say something, Mags,:
Dallen prompted.

He gulped. What should he say? He was not good with words at the best of times. Finally, he bit his lip and tried to think of what she might want to hear.

“He was a good rabbit,” Mags began desperately. “An he was a friend when Lena needed one. Reckon that's how ye knows a friend, they be there when ye need 'em.” He paused. “An' Lena'll miss him. Lots.”

Lena burst into tears again, though it did not seem to be because of anything he said or hadn't said. He shoveled the mulch back on top of the little body while she sobbed, and patted it flat with the shovel.

“Best go back inside,” he advised her. “Yer goin' t' get sick, out here in the cold.”

She nodded, and with drooping head and sagging shoulders turned to go back to the building. But then she stopped, and looked back at him, tears still slipping down her cheeks. “Where can I find you later?”

“Uh—I got a room. In Companions' Stable. Uh—I'm Mags.”

She nodded gravely. “Thank you, Mags. And thank you for being my friend.”

And with that, she disappeared into the building.

Mags put his protections back up.

:Class,:
prompted Dallen, just as the bell rang for the change. With a sigh, Mags gathered up his forgotten books, and went back on his schedule.

He really did not expect to see Lena again, despite offering to become her friend. It was one thing for her to have flung herself on the mercy of a strange Trainee when she was so distraught. It was quite another for her to actually seek him out and take him up on that offer.