Valdemar 03 - [Collegium 01] - Foundation (20 page)

The stable was very quiet at this time of night, with most of the Companions drowsing in their stalls, warmly covered against any hint of chill with their thick blue blankets. The carefully shielded lanterns glowed golden, so it wasn't at all hard to see, and the air smelled of nothing worse than hay and horse. The atmosphere was strangely cozy for so large a building, and very peaceful. But Dallen was wide awake and alert, having been warned by Mags that they were coming, and looking for them. They could see his head from the doorway, the glow of a lamp gilding it as he peered through the shadows at them.

Lena stopped dead in her tracks at the first sight of him. Her mouth opened in a soundless “o” and her eyes grew very big. Mags found himself smiling; always something that surprised him when it happened. He thought that he had probably smiled more in the few weeks he had been here than in his entire life before Dallen.

:I do believe she has never seen a Companion up close, Mags,:
Dallen said thoughtfully.
:Interesting!:

“Well, go on, he don't bite,” Mags urged. “He says hullo.”

“Can I—can I touch him?” she asked, her eyes shining, and her fingers twitching with the unspoken urge to stroke that silver coat.

“Of course ye can touch him!” Mags patted her shoulder encouragingly. “I wouldn' have brought ye here t' meet him if ye couldn'.”

:Tell her I quite like being touched.:
Dallen's eyes sparkled with amusement, and he lowered his nose to Lena's tentative hand.

“He's a one for bein' made much of,” Mags paraphrased, with a waggle of his eyebrow. “Don't reckon he ever turned down bein' scratched.”

Lena giggled, and stroked Dallen's nose, then gently scratched his eye ridges. Dallen sighed and closed his eyes in bliss.
:Tell her she can stop in a year or so—but she can take more time if she needs to.:

Mags chuckled—it sounded odd in his own ears, and it had rather well been surprised out of him. But he liked the sound, and he liked the way it made him feel even more. He told Lena what Dallen had said, and this time she laughed aloud. But she made no move to stop.

“I've never been near to a Companion before,” she said quietly, confirming Dallen's guess. “Heralds never came near our house, I mean, there wasn't any reason for them to, you know. Our home is rather off the road, and we never had any reason for one to come, I suppose. And until I came here, I never really left our land . . .” Her voice trailed off a moment, and she put her cheek against Dallen's. “He's so beautiful.”

Mags blinked. If there was a truism about Companions, it was that they
never
let anyone ride them except their Chosen, unless it was a dire emergency. But, dutifully, he repeated what Dallen had said.

Lena gasped, and the stable practically lit up with her smile. “I can?” she squeaked.

“He says so,” Mags shrugged. “I 'spect you had better find somethin' good to ride in by then.”

He was not altogether certain that her feet touched the ground when she finally left to go back to her own room.

M
AGS woke a few days later to the sound of irritated voices in the stable; he was taking a nap because he had been studying late with Lena the night before, and was taking advantage of another class canceled because of a sick instructor to get some much needed sleep. After a moment, he had to smile, because of what the Trainees were complaining about.

“. . . and I ask you, is it so very hard to find gray thread instead of blue? I've got blue darns on my elbows and knees!”

“Well I've got a big blue seam running up my bum where I tore the trews on a nail,” someone else complained.

You could mend 'em yerself,
Mags thought quietly. That was what he had done from the moment he got the uniforms. He'd thought everyone was supposed to. Goodness knew he'd had plenty of practice piecing rags together into something like a garment; the difficulty had always been finding anything to take the place of needle and thread. Grass wasn't strong enough; generally he'd used hair pulled from the tails of the long-suffering horses. When he'd first gotten here, he'd asked for needle and thread from one of the servants; he'd gotten a puzzled look, but several hanks of gray thread and a packet of pins and needles had been found for him. And thanks to Dallen, he understood that his dirty uniforms were to go straight to the laundry, and he had dutifully delivered them down the chute in the Guards' quarters, but only after he had fixed whatever was amiss with them.

It seemed, however, that he was the only one doing so. And the servants who took care of such things, now severely overworked with the heavy influx of new trainees, were encountering some difficulties. Like finding enough gray thread to fix all the abuses Trainees wrought on their uniforms. Trainees did not stop sending clothing down to be washed and mended just because there was a shortage of materials, so clearly the servants had done what they could with what was on hand.

“Look at this!” said a new, equally indignant voice. “Just look at it! Do these look like Grays to you?”

“More like Pale Blues,” someone snickered. “Looks like a Guard tunic got into the wash.”

“How am I going to pass inspection like this?” the speaker demanded, in despair. “It's not
my
fault I look like a Guardsman that's been lying out in the sun too long!”

“I don't know why you are worrying about your uniform when your room looks like a magpie's nest,” came the laconic reply. “You haven't cleaned it in a week. You're going to fail that inspection, so a blue uniform isn't going to matter.”

Mags could only shake his head, then pull a pillow over it and try and drift back to sleep. It was impossible for him to take these “difficulties” seriously. Really, it was hard for him to believe that he, Mags, was actually here and not dreaming. It seemed utterly impossible, and not for the first time he wondered if he was actually dead and this was that heavenly afterlife that the priests had said that good people would get.

For the first time ever, he could eat as much as he wanted, of food that nearly made him delirious with how good it tasted. In fact, based on how thin he still was, he often got more food urged on him than he could actually eat. He'd overheard some of the other Trainees complaining about the meals—that things were plain, boring, coarse food—and he could only shake his head in wonder. They complained because the cook was formerly with the Guard, and made the same rations the Guard ate. Clearly, they had never gone hungry a day in their lives.

For the first time ever, he knew what it was to be clean. He knew now why he'd been practically scrubbed raw at the Guard Post; not only had he been filthy and probably stank, he'd also been flea-ridden. The soap that the Guards had used on him was meant to kill vermin on horses and dogs, and it did a good job on the “passengers” he'd had along. He had been scratching and itching for so long that when the irritation healed, it was like having a vague headache suddenly stop. He had never realized how miserable that had made him feel because it had been swallowed up in all the other miseries. When your belly aches from hunger, you don't notice you've scratched your arms half raw . . . some of the other Trainees complained because they had to carry the hot water for their baths from the big coppers where it was heated. Mags reckoned they would sing a different tune if they'd had fleas infesting every straw of their beds and every stitch of their clothing.

For the first time ever, he had clean clothing that covered every bit of him and kept him warm in the worst cold. He could march out fearlessly into the snow knowing that he was
not
going to get chilblains all over his feet, that he was
not
going to be aching in every limb, and that he was
not
going to have to hope he could get into shelter while he could still feel his fingers. There were plenty of complaints about the uniforms. Mags could scarcely imagine why. Maybe they didn't fit like the sleek clothing he had glimpsed on some of the highborn of the Court, but for his part, he could see nothing wrong with them.

For the first time ever, he slept in a real bed. A warm bed, in a warm room that was all his own. He slept long and soundly, didn't wake shivering, didn't have to decide what part of him he was going to leave out to be chilled. And if he had to clean his own room, so what? At least he had a room to clean, and if it was a mess, he had only himself to blame.

And what did he have to do to earn all this? Merely learn. So if this
wasn't
a heavenly afterlife, he didn't much care what befell him after he was dead, because the here and now was just fine. And that brought him to
what
he was to learn, which was not just the school lessons, but the other things. He could hardly believe he had been asked to help some of the other Trainees who were struggling with riding—or that the Weaponsmaster wanted him to help those who were still trying to get beyond hitting the pells with sticks.

From the sounds of things, the complainers were saddling up to go out on riding practice themselves. Which is what Mags should be doing soon . . . could have been doing now, except on the whole he preferred to practice alone, and the instructor was inclined to let him now. The instructor was really there for those who had never been on a horse in their lives. Once you got past being afraid to fall off with every step, unless your
Companion
needed instruction in war maneuvers, if you wanted, you were left alone to practice at your own pace. That suited Mags. He sensed that some of the others wondered why he was so slow to make friends, but there was no way he could explain it to them, and he didn't want to try. They would never understand.

Truly, he still didn't know quite why he and Lena got on so well. It made no sense at all, really. There could not possibly be two people in this world as different as he and the little Bardic Trainee, and yet here they were, inexplicably friends.

Friends . . . that was another thing he had never, in his whole life, had before. Not a real friend.

The sounds of hoofbeats leaving the stable let him know that the others were leaving. And he might as well give up trying to sleep anymore. Besides, he needed to get Dallen saddled; Lena was coming for a ride.

He wondered what it was that thrilled her so much about riding Dallen. Without the kind of mindlink that he and Dallen had, it was really not much different from riding a superbly trained horse, and he
knew
she must have had plenty of opportunity to do that. From everything she had told him about her family, they were at least as well-off as the Pieters were. So what was it? Was it just the mystique of the Companions? Or despite not having Mindspeech, could she still sense something about him that was out of the ordinary?

Mags had to chuckle at that.
:I don't have to ask you,:
he replied.
:You'll be sure and tell me every chance you get.:

He was wide awake at this point, and there was no use in trying to drowse anymore. He got up, expecting to find the stable empty of anything but Companions, and nearly ran right into a Herald.

The man scowled at him. He had the tightest shields Mags had ever seen; to Mags' extra senses he wasn't even there. Mags stammered an apology, feeling the blood draining from his face.

“What are you doing here, Trainee?” the man barked.

“I . . . I live here, sir,” Mags faltered.

“Here? In the
stable?
” The man stared at him as if he suspected Mags of lying.

“Aye, sir.” Mags waved in the direction of the open door. “There, sir.”

The Herald glanced briefly inside. “Who told you that you could live out here alone?” he replied, not at all mollified by Mags' answer.

“Herald Caelen, sir.” He tried to will himself smaller. Maybe if he looked insignificant enough, the man would leave him alone.

“And he sent you out here to live alone.” The man was getting red in the face. When Master Cole got red in the face, someone ended up beaten. “Why?”

“There wasn't enough room in the Collegium, sir.” Dallen stirred restlessly in his loose-box and snorted.

“Without adult supervision.” Now the tone of voice was a growl.

“I gots me Companion, sir,” Mags whispered. “ 'S Dallen, sir. He's growed.”

The man sneered. “Oh, surely. Who is your mentor?”

“I don't . . . got one. Sir.” Mags was having a hard time breathing now. “Herald Jakyr, he brung me, but he's off—”

“Doing something important, no doubt.” Still a growl, but one full of contempt. Mags did not look up to try and read the man's face. He stared as hard as he could at his toes. “Leaving you here to frolic about without discipline. No doubt you've got stolen spirits in there, and you are carrying on with serving wenches all night long!”

Dallen's hooves drummed angrily on the dirt of the stall floor.

“No, sir,” Mags choked out. “I don't got no drink in there. An' nothin' else neither. I dunno any servin' wenches.”

But by now, the Herald had warmed to his subject. He reached out and grabbed both Mags' shoulders and shook them until Mags' teeth rattled. “Tell me the truth, curse you! I'll have it out of you if—”

Before the man could finish the sentence, he was suddenly pushed aside abruptly, shouldered into the wall by Dallen, who shoved in between them.

:Go back into your room until I say to come out, Chosen,:
Dallen said calmly.
:I will deal with this.: