Valdemar 07 - Take a Thief Read online

  And under all of that, slowly and implacably filling in places he hadn’t known were empty, was a feeling he couldn’t even put a name to. It was big, that feeling, and it had been the thing that had broken through his barriers back there, when Cymry reaffirmed her bond with him. It was compounded of a lot of things; release, relief, those were certainly in there. But with the release came a sense that he was now irrevocably bound to something—something good. And accepted by that “something.” A feeling that he belonged, at last, to something he’d been searching for without ever realizing that he’d been looking. And there was an emotion connected with Cymry in there that, if he had to put a name to it, he might have said (with some embarrassment) was love. It was scary, having something that big sweep him up in itself. And if he had to think about it, he knew he’d be absolutely paralyzed—

  So he didn’t think about it. He just let it do whatever it was going to do, turning a blind eye to it. But he couldn’t help but feel a little more cheerful, a little more at ease here, with every heartbeat that passed.

  And there was plenty to keep him distracted from anything going on inside him, anyway.

  Teren led him away from the stable and toward a building that absolutely dwarfed every other structure he had ever seen. And if he was impressed, he hated to think how all those farmboys and fisherfolk Cymry had talked about must have felt when they first saw it.

  The building was huge, three-and-a-half stories of gray stone with a four-story double tower at the joining of two of the walls just ahead of them. “This is Herald’s Collegium and the Palace,” Teren said, waving his hand in an arc that took in everything. “You can’t actually see the New Palace part of the structure from here; it’s blocked by this wing next to us, which is where all the Kingdom’s Heralds have rooms.”

  “But most uv ’em don’t live here, at least, not most of th’ time,” Skif stated, on a little firmer ground. “Right?”

  Teren nodded. “That’s right. The only Heralds in permanent residence are the teachers at the Collegium and the Lord Marshal’s Herald, the Seneschal’s Herald, and the Queen’s Own Herald. Have you any idea who they are?”

  Skif shook his head, not particularly caring that he didn’t know. This new feeling, whatever it was, had a very slightly intoxicating effect. “Not a clue,” he said. “I figger ye’ll tell me in them lessons. Right?”

  “Right, we’ll leave that to Basic Orientation; it isn’t something you need to understand this moment.” Teren seemed relieved at his answer. “Now, straight ahead of us is Herald’s Collegium, which is attached to the residence wing, both for the convenience of the teachers and—” he cast a jaundiced eye on Skif “—to try and keep the Trainees out of mischief.”

  Skif laughed; it was very clear from Teren’s tone and body language that he meant all Trainees, not just Skif. He couldn’t help but cast an envious glance at the wing beside them, though; he couldn’t help but think that as a Trainee, he’d probably be packed in among all the other Trainees with very little privacy.

  “Healer’s Collegium and Bardic are also on the grounds, on the other side of Heralds,”’ Teren continued, waving his hand at the three-and-a-half story wing ahead of them. “You’ll share some of your classes with students from there. Healer Trainees wear pale green, Bardic Trainees wear a rust red rather than a true red. There will also be students who wear a pale blue which is similar to, but darker than, the pages’ uniforms. Those are a mixed bag. Some of them are highborn whose parents choose to have them tutored here rather than have private teachers, but most are talented commoners who are going to be Artificers.”

  “What’s an Artificer?” Skif wanted to know.

  “People who build things. Bridges, buildings, contrivances that do work like mills, pumps,” Teren said absently. “People who dig mines and come up with the things that crush the ore, people who make machines, like clocks, printing presses, looms. It takes a lot of knowing how things work and mathematics, which is why they are here.”

  “Keep that away from me!” Skif said with a shudder. “Sums! I had just about enough of sums!”

  “Well, if you don’t come up to a particular standard, you’ll be getting more of them, I’m afraid,” Teren said, and smiled at Skif’s crestfallen face. “Don’t worry, you won’t be the only one who’s less than thrilled about undertaking more lessons in reckoning. You’ll need it; some day, you may have to figure out how to rig a broken bridge or fix a wall.”

  They entered in at a door right in the tower that stood at the angle where the Herald’s Wing met the Collegium. There was a spiraling staircase paneled in dark wood there, lit by windows at each landing. Skif expected them to go up, but instead, they went down.

  “First, Housekeeping and Stores,” Teren informed him. “The kitchen is down here, too. Now, besides taking lessons, you’ll be assigned chores here in the Collegium. All three Collegia do this with their Trainees. The only thing that the Trainees don’t do for themselves is the actual cooking and building repair work.”

  Skif made a face, but then something occurred to him. “Highborn, too?” he asked.

  “Highborn, too,” Teren confirmed. “It makes everyone equal—and we never want a Herald in the field to be anything other than self-sufficient. That means knowing how to clean and mend and cook, if need be. That way you don’t owe anyone anything—because we don’t want you to have anything going on that might be an outside influence on your judgment.”

  “Huh.” By now, they had reached the lowest landing and the half cellar—which wasn’t really a cellar as Skif would have recognized one, since it wasn’t at all damp, and just a little cooler than the staircase. Teren went straight through the door at the bottom of the staircase, and Skif followed.

  They entered a narrow, whitewashed room containing only a desk and a middle-aged woman who didn’t look much different from any ordinary craftsman’s wife that Skif had ever seen. She had pale-brown hair neatly braided and wrapped around her head, and wore a sober, dark-blue gown with a spotless white apron. “New one, Gaytha,” said Teren, as she looked up.

  She gave him a different sort of penetrating look than Alberich had; this one looked at everything on the surface, and nothing underneath. “You’ll be a ten, I think,” she said, and stood up, pushing away from her desk. Exiting through a side doorway, she returned a moment later with a pile of neatly folded clothing, all in a silver-gray color, and a lumpy bag. “Here’s your uniforms—now let me see your shoes.”

  When Skif didn’t move, she gestured impatiently. “Go ahead, put your foot on the edge of the desk, there’s a lad,” she said. With a shrug, Skif did as he was told, and she tsked at his shoes.

  “Well, those won’t do. Teren, measure him for boots, there’s a dear, while I get some temporaries.” She whisked back out again while Teren had Skif pull off his shoes, made tracings of his feet, then measured each leg at ankle, calf and knee, noting the measurements in the middle of the tracing of left or right. By the time he was finished, the Housekeeper was back with a pair of boots and a pair of soft shoes. Both had laces and straps to turn an approximate fit into a slightly better one.

  “These will do until I get boots made that are fitted to you,” she said briskly. “Now, my lad, I want you to know that there are very strict rules about washing around here.” This time the look she gave him was the daggerlike glare of a woman who has seen too many pairs of “washed hands and arms” that were dirty down to the wristbone. “A full bath every night, and a thorough washup before meals—or before you help with the meal, if you’re a server or a Cook’s helper. If you don’t measure up, it’s back to the bathing room until you do, even if all that’s left to eat when you’re done is dry crusts and water. Do you understand?”

  “Yes’m,” Skif replied. He wasn’t going to point out to this woman that a dirty thief is very soon a thief in the gaol. That was just something she didn’t need to know.

  “Good.” She took him at his word—for now. He had no doubt
he’d be inspected at every meal until they figured out he knew what “clean” meant. “Now, I don’t suppose you have any experience at household chores—”

  “Laundry an’ mendin’ is what I’d druther do; dishes, floor washin’, an’ scrubbin’ is what I can do, but druther have laundry an’ mendin’,” he said immediately. “Can boil an egg, an’ cut bread’n’butter, but nought else worth eatin’.”

  “Laundry and mending?” The Housekeeper ’s eyebrows rose. “Well, if that’s what you’re good at—we have more boys here than girls, so we tend not to have as many hands as I’d like that are actually good at those chores.”

  Her expression said quite clearly that she would very much like to know how it was that he was apt at those tasks. But she didn’t ask, and Skif was hardly likely to tell her.

  “This boy is Skif, Chosen by Cymry,” Teren said, as Gaytha got out a big piece of paper divided up into large squares, each square with several names in it.

  “I’ve got you down for laundry and mending for the next five days,” Gaytha said. “Teren will schedule that around your classes and meals. We’ll see how you do.”

  “Off we go, then.” Teren said, and loaded Skif’s arms with his new possessions.

  Back up the steps they went, pausing just long enough at the first floor for Teren to open the door and Skif to look through it. “This is where the classrooms are,” Teren told him, and he took a quick glance down the long hall lined with doors. “We’re on Midsummer holiday right now, so all but two of the Trainees are gone on visits home. It’s just as well; with this heat, no one would be able to study.”

  “Do what they’s does in th’ City,” Skif advised, voice muffled behind the pile of clothing. “They ain’t gettin’ no holidays. Work from dawn till it gets too hot, then go back to’t when it’s cooled off a bit.”

  “We’re ahead of you there,” Teren told him. “It’s already arranged. Follow me up to the second floor.”

  Teren went on ahead, and Skif found him holding open the door on the next landing. He stepped into another corridor, this one lined with still more doors. But it ended in a wall, and seemed less than half the length of the one on the first floor. It was a bit difficult to tell, because the light here was very dim. There were openings above each door that presumably let the light from the room beyond pass through, and that was it for illumination.

  “You won’t be living on this side of the common room,” Teren told him. “This is the girls’ side. The common room where you take all meals is between the boys’ and girls’ side. Come along, and you’ll see.”

  He led the way down the corridor, opened a door, and Skif preceded him into the common room. There were windows and fireplaces on both sides, and the place was full of long tables and benches, rather like an inn. Skif made a quick reckoning, and guessed it could hold seventy-five people at a time—a hundred, if they squeezed in together. “How many of them Trainees you got?” he asked, as Teren held the door in the opposite wall open for him.

  “Forty-one. Twenty-six boys, fifteen girls.” Teren turned to catch his grimace. “That does make for some stiff competition among the ladies—or are you not interested in girls yet?”

  “Never thought ’bout it,” he said truthfully. “Where I come from—”

  Where I come from, you don’ get no girl ‘less you pays for ’er, an’ I got better things t’spend m’ glim on, he thought. But no point in shocking this man. He’d probably go white at the thought.

  “And this is your room,” Teren said, interrupting his thoughts, opening one of the doors. Eager now to put down his burdens, Skif hurried through the door.

  He was very pleasantly surprised. There was a good bed, a desk and chair, a bookcase, and a wardrobe. It had its own little fireplace—no hoping to get warmth from the back of someone else’s chimney!—and a window that stood open to whatever breeze might come in. All of it, from the wooden floor to the furniture to the walls, was clean and polished and in good condition, though obviously much-used. When Skif set his clothing down on the bed, he was startled to realize that it was a real mattress, properly made and stuffed with wool and goose down, not the canvas-covered straw he’d taken as a matter of course.

  He had never, not once, slept on a real mattress. He’d only seen such things in the homes of the wealthy that he’d robbed.

  “Grab a uniform and I’ll take you to the bathing room,” Teren told him, before he could do more than marvel. “You need to get cleaned up and I’ll take you down to the kitchen for something to eat. Then I’ll take you to Dean Elcarth, and he can determine what classes you’ll need to take.”

  It didn’t seem that Herald Teren had any intention of leaving Skif alone.

  With a stifled sigh, Skif picked out smallclothes, a shirt, tunic, trews, and stockings, debated between the boots and the shoes and finally decided on the latter as probably being more comfortable, With an eye long used to assessing fabric, he decided that the trews and tunic must be a linen canvas, the shirt was of a finer linen, the boots of a heavier canvas with leather soles and wooden heels. Interesting that the temporary boots were of canvas rather than leather—they’d be quicker to make up, and a lot more forgiving to feet that weren’t used to boots. Or even shoes—some of the farmboys who came in to the markets went barefoot even in the city, right up until the snow fell.

  Trailing behind the Herald, wondering if the man considered himself to be guide or guard, Skif left his room.

  The bathing room was a shock. Copper boilers to heat the water, one with a fire under it already, pumps to fill them, pipes carrying cold and hot water to enormous tubs and commodious basins, boxes of soft, sage-scented soap and piles of towels everywhere—

  Skif forgot Teren’s presence entirely. No matter how hot it was, he reveled in a bath like no one he knew had ever enjoyed. He soaked and soaked until the aches of that horrible ride with Cymry were considerably eased and he felt cleaner than he ever had in his whole life.

  In fact, it was only after he’d dried off (using a towel softer than any blanket he’d ever owned) and was half dressed in the new clothing that Teren spoke, waking him to the Herald’s presence.

  “Mop up your drips with the towel you used, and wipe out the tub, then drop the towel down that chute over there. Send your old clothing after it.” Teren nodded toward a square opening in the wall between two basins, and Skif finished dressing, then obeyed him. How long had he been there? Had he left while Skif was filling the tub? It bothered him that he couldn’t remember.

  I always know where people are. Am I losing my edge?

  Teren waited for him by the door, but held out a hand to stop him before he went back through it. “Hold still a moment, would you?” he asked, and put a single finger under Skif’s chin, turning his face back into the light from the windows. “I thought most of that was dirt,” he said contritely. “I beg your pardon, Skif. Before I take you to Elcarth, I’d like you to see a Healer for that nose and eye.”

  Another moment of mixed reaction—a little resentment that the man would think he was so slovenly that he’d have that much dirt on his face, and small wonder that the Housekeeper had been so abrupt! But that was mingled with more astonishment. A Healer? For a broken nose?

  But within moments, he found himself sitting across from a green-clad Healer, a fairly nondescript fellow, who examined him briskly, said “This will only hurt for a moment,” and grabbed his nose and pulled.

  It certainly did hurt, quite as much as when he’d hit Cymry’s neck in the first place. It hurt badly enough he couldn’t even gasp. But the Healer had spoken the truth; it only hurt for a moment, and in the very next moment, it not only stopped hurting, it stopped hurting.

  He opened his eyes—and both of them opened properly now—and stared into the Healer’s grin. “You’ll still look like a masked ferret,” the fellow said cheerfully, “but you should be fine now.”

  “How did you do that anyway?” Teren asked, as they made their way back to Hera
ld’s Collegium and Skif’s interview with Herald Elcarth.

  “Cymry jumped a wagon, an’ I hit ’er neck with my face,” he replied ruefully, and found himself describing the entire wild ride in some detail as they walked.

  “She made you think you’d stolen her?” Teren said at last, smothering laughter. “Forgive me, but—”

  “Oh, it’s pretty funny—now,” Skif admitted. “An’ I s’ppose it’ll be funnier in a moon, or a season, or a year. Last night, I c’n tell you, it weren’t funny at all.”

  “I can well imagine—” By this time, they were back down the stairs into the half basement in the Collegium again. “It’ll be funnier still when you’ve got yourself on the outside of some lunch. Here’s the kitchen—” Teren opened a door identical to the one that led to the Housekeeper’s room, but this one opened onto an enormous kitchen, silent and empty. “I haven’t had anything since breakfast either.” He gave Skif a conspiratorial wink. “Let’s raid the pantry.”

  15

  “USUALLY, our cook, Mero, is down in the kitchen,” Teren told him as they cleaned up what little mess they’d made. “Now listen, I am not telling you this because I think you’re going to filch food, I’m telling you this because all boys your age are always hungry, and after the last couple of centuries running the Collegium, we’ve figured that out. When Mero is here, you can ask him for whatever you want to eat and if he isn’t knee-deep in chaos, he’ll be delighted to get it for you. When he’s not here—and I know very well from my own experience how badly you can need a midnight snack—only take food from the pantry we just used. The reason for that is that Mero plans his meals very carefully—he has to, with so many inexpert hands working with him—and if you take something he needs, it’ll make difficulties for him.”