So he went on to his riding practice and weapons practice without giving much thought to her.
He had found over the last couple of days, somewhat to his own amazement, that he liked both. More than that, he was getting
good
at both.
Riding, well, that was all because, for the first time in his life, he felt in control of something. And powerful. Up there on Dallen's back, he wasn't puny little Mags anymore. And there was the whole sense of freedom he got when Dallen really cut loose and ran or jumped. Their mental link was so strong that he was able to anticipate Dallen's every move and move with the Companion to the point where it sometimes felt to him as if they were one creature. He could scarcely remember now how frightened he'd been, perched uneasily on Dallen's back a few sennights ago. Now, well, he might as well have been sewn to Dallen's saddle, and Dallen had taken to more than just simple running and jumping the past couple of sessions. The Companion called these acrobatic exercises “battlefield moves,” and Mags could see where they would come in handy if a lot of people with sharp things in their hands came at you to do you wrong.
Today was like that. Half a dozen of the Guards had been borrowed from the barracks (and Mags suspected, bribed with the promise of drink) and were standing in for enemy fighters. Each of them in turn was set upon by fellows with blunt wooden swords, with ropes, with spear-poles with heavy wads of rag and wool tied to the end, and one man with a very long pole with a padded hook on the end. The object was for Companion and Chosen to hold them off for one turn of a very small glass. This was not as easy as it sounded.
These men knew Companions and warhorses both, and knew what they could do. The first three Trainees that were set upon lost their seats and were dragged down out of the saddle before half the sand had run out. Then it had been Mags' turn.
By then, he and Dallen had had more than enough time to settle into that peculiar merging of minds that left them so aware of each other that the rope around Dallen's hock might as well have been around Mags' ankle. When the six Guardsmen popped up out of “ambush” to take them, the two of them were ready to show what real riding was all about.
Dallen leaped almost straight up into the air, lashing out with his hind hooves as he did so. The men behind them threw themselves to the ground to avoid those hooves, even though Dallen was in no danger of hurting them.
Landing on all four hooves, Dallen spun in a circle, pivoting on his hind feet, snapping at the Guards as Mags flailed the air above their heads with his own wooden sword.
As they scrambled out of the way, Dallen caught sight of the man with the hook. Rearing up on his hind legs, he “hopped” forward, lashing out with his forehooves viciously, aiming for that man alone of the dozen. Unnerved, he dropped the hook and dropped to the ground. Since that was exactly what Mags and Dallen had been waiting for, the two of them soared over his body in a huge jump, whirled again, then bolted for the open spaces of Companion's Field. They didn't return until they were well and truly sure the sands had run out.
As they ambled back, finally, they could see the Guardsmen making short work of another Trainee. The Herald who was in charge of the instruction gave them a brief glance, and an approving nod, then waited for the unseated Trainee to pick himself up out of the snowbank he'd been tossed into.
“People,” the Herald said, with just a hint of impatience in his voice, “Show some sense. This is not an exercise in fighting back, it's an exercise in escaping. Stop trying to prove you can out-fight any six attackers, and do what those two did.” His eyebrow rose. “So far they're the only ones of the lot of you that beat the turn of the glass.”
Mags felt a flush of accomplishment, and Dallen tossed his head and arched his neck a little. Then the Herald sent them to do the jumping course before they could bask in the envy of the others, and at that point they became much too busy to think about anything else.
Mags gave Dallen a good rubdown and turned him loose when the time for weapons training came around. Dallen trotted off with his tail flagged proudly, presumably to take in the congratulations of the others, while Mags shouldered the burden of his practice arms and armor and trudged off to the salle.
His growing expertise with weapons was more of a shock than his aptitude for riding. The revelation that he had a knack for such things literally came out of the blue. When he had been beating on that padded pole for a few days, the instructor had looked him over, then, without any warning at all, had picked up a stick of his own and come after him. Startled, Mags had held onto his stick and scrambled out of the way. And somehow, blocked the teacher's blows. He had been graced with a grim smile and a nod of approval, and suddenly the stick was taken from him, a hilt shoved at him, and before he knew it, he had found himself with a practice sword in hand.
He had frozen then, every memory of every person who had ever been punished at the mine for daring to even raise a hand in self-defense flooding to the fore.
But the instructor had no intention of letting him stay that way.
“Here! Euston!” the Herald had called. “This lad has the patterns down, so come show him how the patterns become fighting!”
A young man with bright red hair, dressed in the Bardic Trainee rust, disengaged from his current practice partner and came straight over to Mags. Without saying a single word, he simply saluted Mags with the “blade,” and launched straight into an attack.
Mags reacted without thinking, getting his guard up in time and deflecting the blows. Before he knew it, he was bouting with the Bardic Trainee, a boy who gave no quarter, nor asked for any, and he was too busy defending himself to think about how it was all wrong to be holding, and using, a weapon.
Maybe the fact that he himself had never been punished for using anything weaponlike was the reason why this fear broke down so quickly. After all, he had never even given the Pieters boys so much as a threatening look. But as he got used to the feel of the thing in his hand, those fears and inhibitions melted away. Having a weapon made him feel as powerful as being on Dallen's back. Being able to use it made him feel more confident that no one would be able to treat him as Master Cole had, ever again.
And his aptitude for weapons work was no more of an illusion than his aptitude for riding. His body seemed to have a better memory for things than his mind; he only had to be shown something once to be able to do it himself. It felt like a kind of magic, but the Weaponsmaster said that it was just a natural thing that some people had. It certainly explained why he had been so skilled at harvesting sparklies.
Today the Weaponsmaster took him aside and actually put
him
to drilling some of the others at his old friend, the padded pole, which he now knew was called a “pells.” And the two he was asked to help wereâBeren and Lyr. The poor fellows were as clumsy with their wooden batons as a pair of puppies. Mags felt horribly sorry for them, for they were clearly feeling terribly humiliated, and he did his earnest best to get them sorted out.
They actually made a little progress by the time the Weaponsmaster dismissed them allâthey were at least not smacking each other anymoreâand as usual, Mags did his best to fade into insignificance in the rush to get to the bathing rooms and then to the eating hall. He generally slipped off to his own room to get a change of clothing and set the place to rights before getting his bath. Such precautions meant he had the bathing room to himself and after the drubbing he had gotten at the unskilled hands of Beren and Lyr he needed the soak in hot water to ease his bruises.
And after all, there was no need to hurry to get to dinner. He never ate with anyone in particular, mostly choosing his isolated seat where he could keep a wary eye on all the company. So it was with a start of surprise that he felt his elbow seized as soon as he came in the door.
“I've been waiting for you forever, Mags,” said Lena, looking up at him with eyes still red-rimmed from weeping. “Come on. I've saved you a place.”
9
T
HE thing about having a room in the stable, Mags was discovering, was that people, Heralds included, tended to forget that there was someone here besides Companions. And because he would sequester himself in his room long before most of the other Trainees were in theirs, he was the unintended witness to a lot of conversations he was pretty sure shouldn't have been overheard. Or at the very least, conversations that no one wanted overheard.
Most of those conversations were merely embarrassing; most were stablehands in eager pursuit of womenâand women eager to be pursued. Since the Companion's Stable was heated when the others were notâthe stable proper was not as warm as the couple of rooms that were here, but with the exception of Mags', those rooms were shared. So when privacy was wanted, maybe a stall was the best choice these fellows had. He and Dallen often shared a sardonic word or three about some of what they overheard.
Mags got to hear an awful lot of lies, to put things bluntly.
“Of course I love you,”
was the one he heard most often, along with
“You're the only woman in my life,”
coming a close second. Though to be fair, the women lied almost as often.
“You're all I think about,”
and
“Never change.”
It was interesting. He'd heard that Heralds could do something that let them know when someone was lying, but it was getting so that he could tell without thatâwhatever it was. “Truth Spell.” Dallen seemed to think this was remarkable, but very useful.
Mostly, when he heard voices on the other side of his door, he just tried to ignore them. He had a great deal of practice at ignoring things, once he was able to decide that what was being talked about didn't matter to him. Back at the mine, there were times when your life, or at least your health, depended on “not hearing” things. He'd “not heard” the boys messing about with the kitchen- and housemaids, for instance, plenty of times. He'd “not heard” the boys saying ugly things about their father. And here and now, he was careful about all those careless, feckless lovers, and careful about Trainees blurting out things they probably shouldn't have. It harmed no one to forget all about those little secrets. But there were some conversations he couldn't just put aside and forget. And one of them started one evening with two mature voices coming into audible range as he was doing sums.
“. . . Holden, I'm telling you, this Collegium idea is criminally stupid.”
The man had been speaking too quietly for Mags to make out what he was saying for some time now, though it had been obvious from his tone that he was arguing. But this was a rather startling statement for a Herald to make. He assumed it was Heralds, and Dallen confirmed it.
“That's a bit of a leap,” came the reply. Evidently the fellow he was arguing with agreed with Mags.
“No? Have you
seen
how these younglings are being taught? In classrooms! Out of books!” Incredulity warred with indignation in the man's voice. Mags wondered what was wrong with learning things out of books. Surely when you did things that way, you didn't stand nearly as much risk of making the same mistakes as someone else. “A Herald doesn't need books to show him what to do, he needs another Herald! You don't learn that sort of thing out of
books!
You learn this sort of thing by seeing it, doing itâhands on, Holden! We've always been hands on!”
“What they're learning out of books are things I wish I had known,” the other replied mildly. “I scanted my History, and not to mention that I knew nothing about anyone's religion but my own. Besides that, it's a plain fact that we're getting younglings who are functionally, if not actually, illiterate. Younglings that can barely read simple words and write their own names. You can't teach someone something that basic without tying up an enormous amount of your own time. Our Chosen aren't all coming from the educated folk anymore. I know, I know!” he added, when the other seemed to be about to protest. “I know it's the law that all younglings are to get a basic education! But we've nearly doubled the size of the Kingdom in last few years, what with petty princelings deciding they'd rather have Valdemar's protection than a foreign army on their door, and plenty of those petty princelings thought that pig-ignorance was the proper lot of the peasant.”
“Gods, I hate it when you're right,” the first man grumbled. “I just got off riding one of those circuits.”
“Well, we are getting Chosen
from
those very places. Which is a good and proper thing, since a Herald from the borderlands is going to be able to tell us how to keep from offending.”
“Holderkin!” the first man groaned. “Oh, blessed gods, may I never have to ride that circuit again. Even with that briefingâthey are as touchy as a hive of hornets, and you would think that
I
was the enemy, not the Karsites!”
“You see my point. We have young Chosen coming in now that need elementary education, and we need to make sure they have the tools to do their jobs before we turn them out on an unsuspecting public.”
“Bosh! We did well enough before!” the first man said savagely. “We had Chosen who were as ignorant as butterflies! They got education over at Bardic, but they were under the eyes of their mentors every waking moment. Now what? Now what have we got? No mentors until they go into Whites! Using the Bardic model! They're going to be all shoved together in their Collegium without a single adult present most of the time!”
“It works for the Bards,” the second man said mildly.
“Works? Works? Good gods, those Bardic students get into more mischief than a basket of ferrets! And now you want us to do the same with
our
Trainees? Who's going to serve as the check on their antics? Who's going to serve as an example? We've
always
run things this wayâa couple of Trainees and a mentor, proper chaperoning, and instruction every waking hour. But this! The gods only know how these youngsters are going to turn out!”