Foundation

she need help in skinning and gutting it. Not that long ago, a dead rabbit would have been cause for the nearest thing he and the rest of the kiddies knew as a feast. He would have welcomed a dead rabbit with all his heart, but the only ones he had ever seen were going into the Pieters’ kitchen.

As for himself, Mags had eaten dead crows, dead sparrows—even a dead cat, once ... it was almost second nature to think of any beast only as a potential meal.

Which, he knew in the next moment, would have been a terrible, and very hurtful thing to say. You didn’t stroke the fur of your dinner the way this girl was petting the dead rabbit. And you certainly didn’t weep over it the way she was doing. And now, here, he found himself thinking of one of the other kiddies, a creature of indeterminate gender that had attached itself to one of the barn cats, and the cat to it. The Pieterses did not have “pets” as such—every animal in their lives was either food or a beast of some use. But the child and the cat had been almost inseparable until the child took ill the past winter and died. And the cat had vanished.

He coughed slightly to alert her to his presence. She looked up, huge brown eyes bloodshot, tears pouring down her delicate face, and that was when he noticed that she was wearing the rust-red uniform of a Bardic Trainee, and he felt some of Dallen’s anxiety ease. “Hey,” he said awkwardly. “I heard ye. Ye maybe should go inside. Yer gonna get cold out here like this—”

She stared at him blankly, then sobbed. “He’s dead! went back to my room to feed him, and he’s dead!” Anything more she might have said was lost in the torrent of sobs that followed.

Awkwardly, Mags sat down on a garden seat opposite her.

“They don’ live very long,” he suggested. “Mebbe ’twas his time—” Not the most tactful of things to say, perhaps, but at least it didn’t cause her to cry harder.

“He wasn’t very old!” she sobbed, stroking the rabbit’s brown fur. “He was only four!” Mags grimaced. He really didn’t think rabbits lived much longer than that; certainly that seemed to be about the average life for a cat around the Pieterses’ mine, and cats were about the same size as rabbits. But the young girl wasn’t done. “M-m-my best friend Kaley gave him to me; she found a nest a-a-and gave Bumper to me to k-k-keep me c-c-company.”

Mags furrowed his brows. “Keep ye company? Why?”

“Everyone at h-home is always so b-busy,” she replied, head down, voice muffled. “Kaley had to go to w- work at the inn, s-so she didn’t have t-time anymore.” The girl looked up at him for just a moment, then back down again, flushing, and broke into sobs again.

Mags was freezing, but gamely remained. “I don’t know anyone here,” the girl said forlornly. “And I—I—I am not really good at meeting people.”

Mags contemplated the irony of that statement, given that he was so bad at meeting people he could just as well have been invisible.

“S-so when I asked if I c-could bring Bumper, they said yes.” She paused for another spate of tears, and pulled a square of white cloth from her sleeve to dry them with.

Outwardly, he probably seemed calm. Inwardly, he was beginning to panic. :What do I do now?: he begged Dallen. He felt himself floundering. Now that he had gotten himself involved in this girl’s grief, he didn’t feel as if he should extricate himself, but he also didn’t know how to react to it. Some mostly- smothered instinct said comfort her, but how did you do that? He’d never felt that much attachment for another human being as to weep over him, so how was he to sympathize with such an outpouring of grief over what to anyone else would have been a feature at dinner?

“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.”