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  He shook his finger at one particular young man who had pulled his head so far down into his collar that he looked like a turtle. “An’ the next time, Brion, ye come t’ me an’ tell me thet th’ two dozen socks ye been issued adds up t’ twenty, I’ll have him come an’ count ’em aright for ye!”

  Mags was fearful then that the Guard would take it hard, and be angry with him. Yet as the others laughed, he grew crimson but laughed with them, and Mags sensed nothing more in his thoughts than chagrin and a determination to count more carefully next time.

  Sheer astonishment left him dumb through the rest of the meal—but since silence on his part was a more common occurrence than speech, no one really noticed.

  He went to bed feeling something he had never experienced before in his life; the warmth of accomplishment. Sergeant Taver had said he was clever! No one had ever said that before to him! He felt Dallen’s glow of approval, and decided on his own that if Sergeant Taver would continue to show him the mysteries of numbers, he would continue to pursue them.

  But, as it fell out, the next day brought a rather different task for him.

  5

  IN the morning, Herald Jakyr was waiting for him as soon as he had finished his breakfast. He sensed Jakyr waiting outside the room and was surprised to feel a certain happiness when he also sensed the Herald was waiting for him. It was an unfamiliar feeling, taking pleasure from knowing someone wanted to see him. In the past, well, the only time anyone wanted to see him was to question him, usually before punishing him. It came to him with a feeling of shock that he actually had not seen anyone punished as such since he had come to this place. Oh, he had overheard men being berated by trainers, or even assigned to some undesirable duty because of some infraction or other, but he actually had not seen anyone punished as he understood the term.

  But his pleasure in seeing Jakyr was short-lived. With him was a stranger, a sober-faced man in a dark tunic and trews, who carried a leather case with him and who regarded him with a measuring eye. Mags shrank from the stranger, instinctively trying to hide from that searching look. Jakyr brought both of them to the library, shut the door, and shot the latch across it. The only time he had ever been in a room with a locked door was when something truly terrible was about to happen, and Mags looked at the Herald with alarm until Dallen soothed him. :Just do what Jakyr tells you, Chosen,: came the calm voice in his head. :This is needful: Visions of horrible beatings passed across Mags’ mind as Dallen assured him that nothing of the sort was going to happen. :.He is only going to ask you questions. That is all:

  Questions! Questions could lead to bad things, too! What if he got the answers wrong? What if the answers made the man angry?

  It was with difficulty that Dallen finally persuaded Mags that it would be all right. Both Jakyr and the stranger must have found out in some way that Mags was afraid, and that Dallen was calming him down, because both of them stayed quiet until Mags was finally ready to talk. And even then he was shaking inside and regretting he’d had any breakfast at all.

  “This is going to be difficult for you, Mags, I understand that,” Jakyr said carefully, as the other man took pens, a pot of ink, and a sheaf of clean paper from his case and set them up on a table. “Your condition, and that of the other children I saw at Cole Pieters’ mine is fairly convincing testimony of neglect, if not outright abuse. But I need more than that if I am to be able to take a company of the Guard there and close the place down. I need testimony from you, and as much as you can tell me about the place.”

  Mags scarcely heard the last sentence, since the one before it was so astonishing. “Close the mine?” he whispered. “But—what ’bout the rest of th’ kiddies? If ye close th’ mine, Master Cole belike won’ feed ’em!”

  “Master Cole won’t be in charge of them,” Jakyr replied, with a certain grim satisfaction. “And Master Cole will have other things to think about. Now, let’s start with something simple. Tell me about your day, just an ordinary day from the time you would wake up. Where did you sleep?”

  Slowly, haltingly, still trying to comprehend what it was that Jakyr was about to do concerning Cole Pieters, Mags obeyed, beginning with the description of the sleep-hole and moving on.

  And that was where things got ... odd. It hadn’t really occurred to him before that there was anything out of the ordinary about how Pieters treated his workers. That is to say, he understood vaguely that Master Cole was not treating them well, especially in contrast to how the Guards were treated, but it had not occurred to him that there was anything that other people would see as wrong about it. It was, after all, Cole Pieters’ mine, and they were his workers, and there were all those priests in the place, and how could anyone prevent him from doing what he wanted with them? Well, short of killing people. Would that ever be found out? Would anyone believe the word of the kiddies over that of the Pieterses? He didn’t think so.

  When it came to how the workers were treated, well, there just didn’t seem any reason why Master Cole couldn’t do exactly as he pleased with the workers in his mine. But from the moment Mags began talking, it was obvious that both Jakyr and this stranger were caught off guard by what he was telling them. Not only that, but they both were angry—though not at him. He caught sight of a vein throbbing in the strange man’s temple almost at once, and sensed thoughts full of outrage as Mags carefully detailed what life was like at Cole Pieters’ mine. That astonished Mags, astonished him so much that he actually forgot his own apprehension. That this stranger would actually care that the kiddies went cold, starved, and bare was the most amazing thing he had ever encountered in his entire life. It came near to making no sense at all. Because all he could think of was—why? Why should he care? What difference did it make to him? And wasn’t that how things were everywhere for the kiddies nobody wanted? If all those priests hadn’t been outraged, then why was this stranger?

  When he had finished with telling about a typical day, with Jakyr questioning him minutely about the meals, and how one earned or lost those precious slices of bread, Jakyr took him back over a day again, this time in the dead of winter. He asked how they protected their feet from the snow, and how long they had to work at the icy water in the sluices, then what kind of bedding they had once the winter set in. As he questioned Mags ever more closely, Mags described how many of the kiddies would get chilblains and how they had to be careful not to lose fingers or toes to the cold, and he thought the stranger was going to burst. Except that anger was all on the inside. On the outside, he looked just as calm as calm, and never once faltered in his writing down of things. He could have been writing down what everyone here had for breakfast, for all that he showed. It was strange, listening to the silence in the room broken only by his voice and the steady scratching of a pen. Very strange, as it occurred to him that he probably had not spoken so much in an entire year.

  Then Jakyr asked about the injuries to the mine workers. And the dangerous question, “How did people die?”

  That was when Mags got frightened all over again. This was dangerous, dangerous stuff. Everyone knew what would happen if you told such things, and Pieters found out about it. You’d end up in a “cave-in” yourself. And Mags had suspected more than once that the Pieters boys had a very special punishment for those who really transgressed. He had the feeling that the ones that woke their worst ire were sealed into those played-out shafts—broken, scarcely able to move, but still alive. Though of course, they didn’t stay that way, not for long. The question would be whether they ran out of air first or whether they died of their injuries before then.

  He could see it in his mind’s eye. He could see himself in the absolute dark, gasping out his last breaths. Pieters would find a way. He knew it. His insides went cold and knotted up, his hands began to shake, and he wanted to go and curl up in a corner behind something and hide.

  “I cain’t—” he whispered, tears starting into his eyes, his voice choked off into nothing by the fear. “I cain’t. When Master
Cole finds out who ’twas told—”

  “Master Cole cannot reach you, Mags.” It was the stranger who spoke, voice tight with rage and mind so full of the same anger that his thoughts were lost under a red wash. “Master Cole can never touch you again. Now don’t you want to make sure the rest of the children get that same protection?”

  :Mags, this is not a premonition you see, it is only your fear. Don’t let Pieters keep you a prisoner!: Dallen’s voice rang with conviction in Mags’ mind. Mags quivered with fear, but deep in his heart, he knew the stranger was right, and so was Dallen.

  The stranger’s reaction had told him so. He knew now that no one should have been treated as he and the others had been. He knew that Cole Pieters deserved to be punished. He oouldn’t leave the others there, not now that he knew Master Cole was an evil, bad man. And what he had said so far might not be enough to win them free.

  But it was hard, hard, hard. He had to fight past the fear of Master Cole that made his throat close up, fight past the knotting of his gut and the hunching of his shoulders against the blows he knew must come for breaching the silence.

  And then, in a whisper, he told everything he knew.

  To the best of his ability, he drew a map of the mine and showed where the bodies were. As far as he could, he detailed what they had really died of. And when it was over, he was shaking, his clothing was soaked with nervous sweat, and he felt as weak and drained as if he had run for days.

  When they let him go, he had barely enough energy left to drag himself to the bathing room and pour himself a bath. He stank of fear and sweat and—suddenly he was feeling fastidious, being around all these cleanly people. He didn’t want anyone to think he didn’t know better. Not now. And besides, he was so wet through, and so drained, that he was shivering with chill as well as reaction. His stomach was still in knots, and he still kept wanting to hide. It took forever to fill the bath, his hands were shaking so that the buckets sloshed.

  So he stripped and soaked in the hot bath, trying not to think of anything, until his shivering, internal and external, stopped. He lay back against the rear of the tub, his mind emptying, steam rising in his face.

  :You mustn’t be afraid, Mags.:

  Now, until this moment, Mags had accepted whatever Dallen told him unquestioningly. But this was too much to swallow. He knew very well he should be afraid. What was he? Nothing. Now, he was not very smart, and it was clear to him from everything that Dallen had been pouring into him that the way he and the other kiddies had been treated was not the way things were usually done. Yet Master Cole had gone on doing it. Mags was not very smart, and he was not at all wise in the ways that the world worked, but there was one thing he did know, and that was all about power. You either had it, or you didn’t, or you had some, but not as much as someone else might. The Pieters boys had some, over the kiddies and the other mine workers, and they did whatever they wanted to the people below them. But Master Cole had power over them and did what he wanted to all of them.

  Now this was a fact: Master Cole had treated the kiddies very badly indeed. Yet he had been able to do so for years and years and years, stretching far back beyond where Mags’ memory started. So it stood to reason that somehow Master Cole had plenty of power that extended far beyond his own mine. Or, if he didn’t, there was someone with a lot more power who was protecting him.

  Now what Mags was telling Herald Jakyr and the stranger was going to turn Master Cole’s mine upside down, maybe even shut it. That was going to make Cole Pieters very angry, certainly angry enough to kill. And if there was someone even bigger than Cole Pieters involved, it would surely make that person angry, too.

  So what reason was there for Mags to not be afraid?

  Dallen read all that swiftly from Mags’ mind, as quickly as he reasoned it out himself. And for the first time, Dallen was silent.

  Finally, he spoke.

  :You are right, Chosen. You have reason to be afraid. But you have no reason to keep being afraid. No matter what happens, you can be sure that Herald Jakyr will not allow anyone to know who gave him this information. To be absolutely honest ... Herald Jakyr can do some of the same things that you can, and many, many more that you cannot. He has the means to get this information by himself, once he gets back to the mine. I will warn him to be sure that Cole Pieters thinks he got it all by magic.: There was a pause. :There. He and Scribe Myrden are conferring now. The only people that will ever know where it all came from are the people in that room and the King himself.:

  Mags thought about that for a moment. :I s’pose ...: he thought, still dubious.

  :If you ever trusted me, you should trust me now.: Mags got the impression of a sigh. Mags, there will be many things that you should be afraid of. I am not telling you to never be afraid. But you must not let fear rule you. It should guide you, not govern you. And you should never allow it to stop you from doing what is right:

  He thought about that for a much longer moment. :Helpin’ the rest ... that was right:

  :Yes, it was. Just as sharing your bread with the weaker was right. And giving up your extra blanket to the littlest was right. You did not let hunger stop you, nor cold. Do not allow fear to stop you either. If you do that, you do half of the work of evil men for them.:

  He swallowed. This was all very well, but ...

  :We will protect you, too, Mags. We may not be able to protect you from everything, but we can from most things. That is why we are here. You see?:

  And at the moment, Dallen ... did something. It was like opening a door in his mind. Except it was a door onto something enormous. Like stepping through the mouth of a cave and finding himself at the top of a very high place. For that moment, he saw, or sensed, rather, a vast web like the enormous web of a spider, except that all of the points in the web were people, and all of the strands connecting them were their Companions. And what one knew, sooner or later, the others knew. And what happened to one of them happened to all of them.

  That was when he understood. Understood that, even though he would not always get along with some of the people who wore this white uniform, they would always protect him, as he, when he was older and stronger, would always fight to defend them. Understood that this was a bond that went deeper than blood and bone. He even understood now, what it was that had made Dallen pick him.

  That door in his mind shut again, for it was rather too much for anyone to bear for long. But the sense of it stayed with him. That was when, elated and humbled all at the same time, he began to cry quietly. He had always known he was a very small and insignificant thing; he had been called “maggot” so often by the Pieters boys that he had come to think of himself as exactly that—a thing that was not even an insect. But now ... now he had seen that he wasn’t so insignificant, that he was a part of something huge, and that he would always be part of it, no matter that he would never feel quite worthy of it all.

  This time Dallen did not soothe him, since this was not something anyone should be soothed out of. The tears were one part happiness, one part awe, and one part release, and he let them fall.

  Finally, he found words at the end of his tears and the end of his wordlessness; he ducked his head under the hot water to wash the tears away and considered what still left his guts in a cold knot. There was still a fear in him, a new fear, and not of Cole Pieters nor what the man might do to him. Mags had made so many mistakes in his few years. And he was tracing a path through a wilderness he didn’t understand. What if he made the most terrible mistake of all?

  :What if I do something that makes you hate me?: he ought fearfully.

  :You won’t,: Dallen replied firmly. :You can’t, so long as you never close your mind to mine, so long as we make decisions together. Together we will find solutions. They may not be the best, but they won’t be the worst, and if we make mistakes, we will make them together. Is that a bargain?:

  He splashed more lukewarm water on his face to wash away way the last of his tears. :Sounds right to me.:r />
  :Good. Now, I have an idea. You’ve not ridden me, not really. Come out to the stable. I think it’s time you learned to ride, and ride well. The books can wait for a few candlemarks. Come cut into the sun, and let’s see what we can make of you.:

  He was climbing out of the tub when Dallen hit him with that idea, and it left him stuck for a moment, half in and half out. :But ... but ... but ... :

  :I have my own tack, a Companion almost never goes out to fetch his Chosen without it. It’s made to be secure for even a rider that is hurt or dozing. And you should know by now I will never let you fall. Come out. Borrow a warm coat. Come and be in the snow when it is a pleasure for once.:

  Swiftly he dried himself off and put on his clothing, then went in search of one of the Guards who seemed able to get him the few things he had tentatively asked for.

  “A coat for you, and harness up your Companion? Shouldna be a problem. I thought we give you a coat already—” The man looked at him quizzically. When Mags shook his head, he shrugged. “Well, that’s easy remedied. If there’s naught in stores—” He got up from the stool he had been sitting on to polish his boots, set his task aside, and steered Mags toward a part of the building where he’d not yet been. This, it turned out, was “stores,” which was where everything not in immediate use was tucked away. Unfortunately, there were no coats or cloaks in storage that were not so big they completely enveloped Mags and pooled on the floor.

  Fortunately, there was a tailor.

  In a remarkably short time, Mags was headed to the stable in a coat that was still too big for him, but which had had the sleeves and hem shortened by the simple expedient of cutting them off so he didn’t fall over them, and which was held in with a belt improvised from a bridle strap. The tailor was doing a “proper job” of shortening another coat while Mags “made do” with this one, which, so the tailor averred, “Wasn’t fit for anything but the ragbag.” Mags couldn’t see what he was talking about to be honest. There seemed nothing whatsoever wrong with the coat to him. But then, it was the first time he’d ever had a coat, and certainly no one else seemec to be wearing one with as many patches on it as this one He didn’t see where they made a difference; certainly he was toasty warm in this thing.