Foundation

Dallen chuckled with sympathy—but promised that he was never, ever going to be hungry again, or cold, or ill-clothed, or dirty. Mags could not quite understand how Dallen could be so very sure of this, but the memories that the Companion shared with him seemed to have no room in them for anything but belief. The idea that he could eat whenever he wanted, as much as he wanted ... it was like one of those paradises that priest kept mouthing about, but which, of course, he did not believe in. But this, this was real. The soup, the bread had been real. The other food on the table had been real. The clothing they had given him, the bed he was sleeping in now, were real.

And in the dream he came to realize something profound; with Dallen beside him, he would never be alone either. He had not realized how much of an aching hunger that filled until it was filled—it had been like a wound he’d had for so long that the pain no longer registered with him. It was like the time he had been so hungry that finally hunger ceased to have any meaning—and when he finally got food again, it came as a shock to understand how much he’d been starved. And here he had been starved all this time for something else as well. He couldn’t put a name to it, but he had been starved for it.

As he groped his way to comprehending all this, Dallen promised he would make sure that Mags understood even little thing that puzzled him, no matter how long it took to explain it.

And Mags began to accept that there was yet another underlying truth to everything that completely went against the way he had thought that the world was—that it was not he who was bad and wrong, it was those who had treated him and the other kiddies as they had. Master Cole and his family had had no justification for doing what they had done; in fact, there could be no justification, ever, for the way they had abused their workers and servants. This was a complete reversal of the world as he knew it. It went against absolutely everything he had taken for granted.

“But I’m Bad Blood—” he protested over and over, still finding it hard to accept that he had not, somehow, deserved his treatment at the mine. And every time he did, Dallen replied with profound scorn that there was no such thing as Bad Blood. Finally, he began to believe it, at least a little. And what he lacked in belief, Dallen made up for with the calm assurance that lay under everything. Finally, Mags just accepted the assurance without believing, and let Dallen soothe him.

And that was when he woke up, to a room full of empty beds, the sun shining in through the real glass windows. In a bed, under warm blankets. Not cold. Not aching. With a kind of alert lassitude suffusing him, as if his body was saying, At last, now I can let go, stop being alert, stop being afraid. Now I can rest.

A sound at the door made him turn his head in time to see a brown-haired, stooped man in green tunic and trews come into the room and head straight for him. “So, the sleeper awakes, and hungry I hope?” the man said.

Who was this? And what did he want? Mags did his best not to try to hide under the covers. Dallen quickly moved to reassure him, and Mags pushed himself up reluctantly, and nodded. He was so used to awakening hungry he hadn’t even thought about it. Of course he was hungry. He was always hungry.

:This is a Healer. He wants to discover how healthy you are. That is his job.: Mags had never seen a Healer before. When any of the kiddies got hurt or sick, they either got well on their own, or died. When any of the Pieters family got hurt or sick, Cole Pieters sent for one of his fat priest friends.

Mags had gone to sleep fully clothed, and all anyone had done was to cover him up and take his boots off. And for a fraction of a moment, as he pushed the covers back and saw his feet were clad only in socks, he had been afraid the boots had been stolen, until Dallen again washed him with reassurance. While he sat on the edge of the bed and fished for them, the man in green gave him a penetrating look. He was a cheerful sort of fellow, and truth be told, like just about everyone here, he was not the sort of person Mags was used to being around. He must have been about Cole Pieters’ age and, like Pieters, he was balding, but there the resemblance ended. He must have been very fit when he was younger; now there was a bit of fat around his middle, but nothing like Pieters’ enormous belly. His oblong face with its bushy eyebrows looked as if he smiled much more often than he frowned, and his frank brown eyes had a direct gaze to them that wasn’t hard to meet unless you were used to ducking your head and hiding your eyes as Mags was.

“I had the cooks save you some porridge,” the man said, watching him shoving his feet into his boots. “I hope your Companion has explained to you that you are expected to be very cleanly—”

Mags ducked his head. “Yessir,” he said, and left it at that.

“Well, we’ll leave your bath until after you’ve eaten. Best time for you is in the morning for now, that way you won’t conflict with the Guardsmen. Ready?” The man stood up. “I’m Healer Betwick, by the way. I serve the Guard here.”

Whatever a Healer was ... presumably they healed people ... though how they did that was an utter mystery to Mags. Then again, practically everything going on now wasan utter mystery to Mags. “Yessir, Healer Betwick,” Mags replied, as Dallen and the memories poured into him showed him what a Healer was.

And yes, they did heal people, in a bewildering variety of ways. This particular shade of green was accepted as their color, and if you saw someone wearing it, you knew he was a Healer. Just as, if you saw someone in White, you knew he was a Herald, in Scarlet and he was a Bard. Whatever a Bard was—

Before another flood of memories could start, triggered by that word and half-query, Mags followed the man out of the room into a hallway he only vaguely recalled, and from there, not to the big room with all the tables—

—Guards’ mess, memory prompted.

But to a spacious and fragrant kitchen full of very busy people. Or, actually, there were only four of them, but they were so extremely busy it seemed as if there were at least eight of them, and Healer Betwick evidently deemed it prudent to stay out of their way.

He motioned to Mags to go and sit on a stool at a little table off to the side and well away from all the activity, then went over to the hearth and fetched a bowl waiting there, keeping warm.

When he brought it back to Mags, the boy saw it was full of porridge with little dark things scattered over the top of it. “What’s those?” he asked, a bit apprehensively.

“Currants. Dried ones. They’re sweet, you’ll like them, and they are good for you.”

Reassured that they weren’t rabbit droppings or something else that didn’t belong in food, Mags dug in. The Healer was right, he did like the currants, he liked them a very great deal. Half the time the porridge he’d been fed by Master Cole hadn’t even been made with salt; this had been sweetened with honey as well as the berries.

While he ate, the Healer talked in an undertone to the cook, who was a large, balding man with enormous