But one of the young men spotted him, no doubt because in his ordinary, if over-large clothing, he stood out among the blue uniforms like a rock on a snowdrift. The fellow steered him over to a table, and consulted with someone who was bringing platters of food around.
And
that
man returned with another big bowl of soup and a half a loaf of bread. “Healer's orders, Trainee,” the man said, putting both in front of him. “Soup fer you, he sez, till ye be used ta eaten regular. Mebbe some cheese an' fruit. An' no beer for ye. I'll bring the tea, foreby.”
Mags hardly cared. This time the soup had chunks of chicken meat in it as well as the thick rafts of vegetables, and round white things he couldn't identify, but which tasted glorious. There was more wonderful cheese, and another apple. More herb tea, this time sweetened with honey that somehow blended with the flavors of the herbs and made them stand out more. Part of him still wanted to be wary, afraid that someone would decide to take all this away from him, but Dallen kept up a steady flow of certainty, and eventually he just gave himself over to the food.
He ate until he couldn't eat any more, and he
intended
to go back to his book again. But somehow he found himself in that room full of beds again, and thought he would lie down for just a little bit.
And that decision was the last thing he remembered before sleep claimed him.
It seemed only a moment later that he woke to Dallen's prodding and the sound of a bell again. Outside the windows, the sun was setting. Inside, the sounds from down the hall made him realize that the Guardsmen were heading in the direction of the mess hall. And once again, his stomach growled, telling him in no uncertain terms that it was empty, it had gotten used to being full, and it wanted to be that way again, now.
He spent the next several days in the same way; getting fed, sleeping a very great deal, slowly becoming more and more facile at reading books, absorbing what was in the books that Dallen selected for him.
If he didn't speak much, it was because he spent most of his time watching everything. From time to time, with a vaguely worried look on his face, Herald Jakyr would seek him out in the book room or at meals and ask him some pointed question or other. Mags' answers must have satisfied him, for the Herald would get a relieved look on his face and go off about his business.
That business took him away from the Guard Post more often than not. Mags didn't mind; while he was gone, the Guardsmen generally let him poke around as much as he cared to as long as he was not underfoot.
By watching, he learned how to groom a horseâand by extension, Dallen. He learned how to saddle and bridle one, too, and what to feed it. He learned all manner of useful things, in fact, although the one thing he didn't learn, because he never could bring himself to pick up a weapon, was how to
use
a weapon. He watched the Guardsmen at their practice, and every time he even thought about picking up a knife or a bow, he wanted to crawl away and hide. It made his skin crawl and his stomach tie up in knots in a way that nothing Dallen could do would soothe. He kept thinking about the time when he was still in the kitchen and someone had raised a mining hammer as a weapon to Master Cole.
Master Cole had gathered everyone outside to watch.
“I be judge and jury here,” the Master had said harshly. “Ye dared t' raise yer filthy hand t' me, dared t' try an' strike me dead, and me boys as witness to it.”
He had glanced around at all of his sons, who had nodded and mumbled “ayes.”
“Then I gives ye the sentence ye'd hev served me, if ye could.” And he had then taken the massive, stone-headed mallet at his side, and brutally beaten the poor wretch to death, and beyond, into a pulp, while every other person on the property was forced to watch.
Then the mine kiddies had been ordered to take up what was left and leave it in a played-out seam. The supports were pulled out, the seam collapsed. Everyone understood that this meant if and when someone came looking for the boy, there had been a terrible “accident.”
Mags had not been one of the mine kiddies then, so he had been able to scuttle back to the kitchen, where he shivered through his work. Even the kitchen drudges, usually starving, had little appetite for their scraps that day.
Which, of course, was exactly what the Master intended. The lesson was clear. Take up a weapon and die.
So it was small wonder Mags had difficulty even contemplating setting a hand to a hilt.
Fortunately, no one seemed to think he needed to.
Slowly, he began poking his nose into other places around the Guard Post. He found the office of the fellow who did all the reckoning for this post, and watched in fascination as he made marks that looked like letters, but weren't. The man seemed amused and, after a while, motioned him over.
“I take it no one ever taught ye your numbers as well as your letters, boy?” he said. He was the oldest person that Mags had ever seen; his hair was snow white, and his face as full of wrinkles as the bark of a tree. His eyes could scarcely be seen, but there was a bright look to them, like a bird's eye. And Mags did not “hear” anything at all amiss in the thoughts that ticked away in his head like the regular dripping of water on stone. Numbersâthis man thought mostly in numbers. He loved them, loved the patterns they made, loved the pure logic that governed them, loved that three and three always made six, never four, never seven.
Mags shook his head.
“Well then, 'tis time to learn, and as I've time meself, I'll teach ye. Pull up yon stool.” He nodded at a tall stool in the corner. Mags obeyed.
The man pulled open a drawer in his desk and extracted a piece of slate and a square-cut stick of white stuff. “Ye'll be usin' this; 'tis slate an chalk. 'Tis easy rubbed out, y' see?” He made a mark and buffed it away with a sleeve. “Now, ye kin count right enough, aye?”
“To a hunner' sir,” Mags almost whispered.
“Right enough. Well, there's marks for them numbers, just as there be marks that make letters that make words. On'y these be a bit more straightforward, belike. This be âone'. . . .”
Mags caught on quickly. And although he had not realized it until the manâwho he learned was Guard-Clerk Sergeant Taverâshowed him, he
did
know some primitive reckoning. After all, he had to keep track of the sparklies he found. He took to the figuring quickly, learning how to add and subtract double-digit numbers by the end of the afternoon, much to Sergeant Taver's delight. It was Taver who took him in to supper that night, in fact, and much enjoyed letting the “dunderheads” know that already the “wee boy” could outreckon no few of them.
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 mealâbut 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
I
N 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. “Butâwhat '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 angryâthough 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 wasâ
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.