Foundation

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Now I’m all alone,” she sobbed into the cloth.

  “Ah, nah, yer a Bardic gel, no?” he responded, before Dallen got a chance to prompt him. “Ye gots lots of friends, surely—”

  “No, I don’t!” she cried. “I don’t have any friends! How could I have, when Tobias Marchand is my father?”

  She said that as if she expected that answered all questions. Mags’ brow crinkled, but Dallen answered him before he could voice the obvious question.

  :Tobias is a very famous Bard,: Dallen told him, sounding suppressed. :I’ve heard he can play almost every instrument there is, and do it brilliantly—and his songs are popular in at least three countries besides Valdemar. And, besides that, he s supposed to be a simply amazing and witty man, able to hold a conversation on just about any subject. I had no idea he had a daughter—:

  “Well, yer Da can make sure yer looked out for, no?” he ventured.

  She looked up, stricken. “Oh, no!” she whispered. “No. No, I couldn’t call on my father. And anyway, I hardly know him He never spent much time with us, he was much too busy. He’s too important for someone like me to bother.”

  Dallen reacted to this with indignation, although it seemed perfectly sensible to Mags. Cole Pieters’ boys knew better than to bother him with anything that did not have to do directly with the running of the mine, for instance ....

  Underneath her words, with his protections down, Mags was getting a running match of her thoughts to her words and he felt more and more at sympathy with her with ever, passing moment, for all that they seemed so dissimilar. For the past several weeks since her arrival, she had been too shy to open her mouth except to sing—and in any event, all of the Bardic Trainees at or near her own age already had established groups of friends. She shrank from the mere thought of trying to penetrate those apparently-closed ranks. And as for her teachers ... she was intimidated, not by them, but by how much they expected of her. She was laboring under the burden of her father’s reputation, and that terrified her.

  In fact, the memory of that first interview was always lurking in the back of her mind.

  “So you are young Lena Marchand.”

  “Yes, sir.” The face of the Dean of Bardic Collegium looked down gravely at her. She bobbed her head awkwardly. Lita Darvalis had a formidable reputation; she had Skill, Creativity, and the Gift, all three. Even her father looked up to her with respect, which didn’t happen often.

  “We expect great things of you, Lena.” She smiled, but the words practically paralyzed Lena. “You have a formidable legacy behind you.”

  Oh, yes. And how could she ever, ever begin to measure up to that legacy? She wanted to fall to the ground and moan in despair. Instead, she shook Lita’s hand, and went to collect her things and be conducted to a room.

  The memories and the desperation behind them flooded over him. Here was someone who was feeling just as out of place as he was, and just as unworthy. Suddenly, he didn’t feel quite so alone.

  Poor kiddie. She scarcely knew her father any more than Mags knew his, and they were expecting her to be some kind of younger copy of him. Mags sensed Dallen all but spluttering with indignation; Mags ignored him. “If ye need a frien’, Lena ...” he said, slowly, the unfamiliar word leaving a strange, but pleasant, sensation behind it, “I c’ud be yer frien’. If ye want.”

  He expected her to look away and politely decline. After all, it wasn’t as if he had anything worth offering to someone like her. So her reaction surprised him.

  “You would? You could?” Two bright pink spots appeared on her tear-blotched cheeks. “You’d really be my friend?”

  “I guess everyone’d be if they knew ye,” he half-mumbled, staring down at his hands. “Uh ... I guess poor ol’ Bumper there—”

  “I wanted to bury him,” she replied, choking down a sob. “But the ground is so hard—”

  He almost laughed. “Might not know much,” he offered, “but I know diggin’. If yer not too partic’lar about where, I’ll get ye a hole.” When she nodded, he went off to the gardener’s shed and came back with a pickax and a shovel. And of course Mags did know digging; after scraping back the snow in several places and examining the ground closely, he found a spot under a bush that was mostly mulch, and softer than the ground around it. With the pick and shovel, he managed to dig a little hole; the girl carefully wrapped her rabbit in her scarf and laid it in the bottom, then looked at him expectantly.

  :You should say something, Mags,: Dallen prompted.

  He gulped. What should he say? He was not good with words at the best of times. Finally, he bit his lip and tried to think of what she might want to hear.

  “He was a good rabbit,” Mags began desperately. “An’ he was a friend when Lena needed one. Reckon that’s how ye knows a friend, they be there when ye need ’em.” He paused. “An’ Lena’ll miss him. Lots.”

  Lena burst into tears again, though it did not seem to be because of anything he said or hadn’t said. He shoveled the mulch back on top of the little body while she sobbed, and patted it flat with the shovel.

  “Best go back inside,” he advised her. “Yer goin’t’ get sick, out here in the cold.”

  She nodded, and with drooping head and sagging shoulders turned to go back to the building. But then she stopped, and looked back at him, tears still slipping down her cheeks.

  “Where can I find you later?”

  “Uh—I got a room. In Companions’ Stable. Uh—I’m Mags.”

  She nodded gravely. “Thank you, Mags. And thank you for being my friend.”

  And with that, she disappeared into the building.

  Mags put his protections back up.

  :Class,: prompted Dallen, just as the bell rang for the change. With a sigh, Mags gathered up his forgotten books and went back on his schedule.

  He really did not expect to see Lena again, despite offering to become her friend. It was one thing for her to have flung herself on the mercy of a strange Trainee when she was so distraught. It was quite another for her to actually seek him out and take him up on that offer.

  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 idle before half the sand had run out. Then it had been Mags’ turn.

  By then, he and Dallen had had more than enough time settle into that peculiar merging of minds
that left them so aware of each other that the rope around Dallen’s hock might is 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 impatient 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 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 parterns 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 were—Beren 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 then sorted out.

  They actually made a little progress by the time the Weaponsmaster dismissed them all—they were at least not smacking each other anymore—and 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

  THE 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 women—and women eager to be pursued. Since the Companion’s Stable was heated when the others were not—the 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 that—whatever 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 it—hands 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.”