To put on clean clothing that wasn’t rags, eat good food that filled you up—it was, by the standards he had grown up with, the stuff of which dreams were made. No, not even dreams. When he’d been a slave, he hadn’t even known that such things were possible, so how could he have dreamed about them?
Dallen was the reason all this had happened to him. Dallen had Chosen him, Dallen had come for him, and when the Companion couldn’t get him away from the man that had kept him and the others in terrible slavery, Dallen had fetched help in the form of another Herald—Jakyr.
Of course, at the time, Mags had been as terrified of the Herald as he was of his master, though in a way that had been good, because his fear had kept him too paralyzed to move or run until Dallen got him sorted out.
Then, oh how his life had changed!
Becoming a Trainee had changed his life so dramatically that he sometimes thought he had become an entirely different person.
Take the food. No more thin cabbage soup and bread that was mostly chaff, or even sawdust. No more digging into garbage pits and the pig-slop for food that was too spoiled for the people living in the “big house.” As a mine-slavey, his highest ambition had been to hit a richer vein of “sparklies” to earn himself one more tiny piece of bread than anyone else had.
And the living conditions. No more sleeping in a pit on rotting straw in a heap of other dirty children. Or trying to keep warm with only a thin blanket and the body heat of the rest. Or wrapping his feet in straw and rags because you hadn’t ever put a pair of shoes on your feet. No more chilblains. The Trainees here, at least so far, didn’t even know what a chilblain was!
And no more spending virtually every waking hour on his belly in a mine shaft, chipping out gemstones by hand, penalized by having some of his food withheld when the “take” wasn’t good enough—as if he had any control over what the rock yielded to him!
That was the biggest change of all, at least, on the inside of him. Now he was using his head for thinking and learning all the time. His world had gone from the confines of the mine and yard to—well—a whole world. His days were spent doing things that were difficult but rewarding, and there was no punishment meted out if he wasn’t good at them. Instead of punishment, he got help.
Unbelievable.
No, the others had no idea how good they had things here.
And to be honest, he didn’t want them to know, the way he knew. No one should have to live like that.
But the differences between his life and theirs still made the adjustment hard for him in ways he suspected no one really understood. He didn’t even understand it, except that he was always in a state of vague discomfort except when he was alone with Dallen. He felt like a kitten being raised by chickens. It was obvious that no one here reacted the way he did to things, and everyone here knew from their own experience how people were supposed to treat each other.
He hadn’t been raised like a human being, he’d been raised like—no, worse than—an animal. He knew how to read and write, because it was the law, and the owners of the mine he’d worked at grudgingly made sure the children learned that much, but he didn’t really know how to conduct himself among people who had what he now knew were “normal” lives.
He stumbled and fell in so many situations that required an understanding of how people were supposed to be. That got him in trouble—or at least, garnered him odd looks—so many times in a day that he didn’t bother to keep track. He was never quite sure of exactly what it was he had done or said when he violated some code or guideline for behavior that others just took for granted. At least, not until after the fact when Dallen would explain it to him.
And no matter what he did, how much he learned about behaving like other people did, simply because he was so grateful for the smallest of things—and so completely unused to them—he often had the feeling he was never going to fit in.
He’d been a Trainee for months now, and he still felt as if he was running in a race in which he would never catch up. That no matter how hard he tried, everyone else was always going to be smarter, faster, stronger than he ever would be. It went without saying that everyone, from the lowest servant to the highest in the land, was used to simply having more things than he did. The most that one of the mine children could claim was a ragged scrap of a blanket, and then only if someone bigger didn’t take it. The idea that he actually owned things was sometimes preposterous to him. Under it all was a fear he could never quite shake, that someone would find him out and it would all be taken away from him. That fear had faded over the months, but it was still there, an undercurrent to everything.
Mags sighed, and patted Dallen’s neck. Even Dallen didn’t quite understand it. He couldn’t help it. This was the way he had lived forever and ever, and... maybe the rock was just too hard to wear away.
And then there was... well, his position here. Most of the people around him, his fellow Trainees in particular, were used to a lot of deference from those of lesser rank, and of course, most folk outside the Collegium were of lesser rank. They were self-assured, they expected that people would speak to them respectfully. He was in the habit of expecting as many blows as words, and no one, ever, had spoken to him with respect until he had put on Grays.
The Trainees were used to treating each other with a casualness that came hard to him, while he had to battle to keep from giving them the same deference the servants gave them. That, of course, was viewed as “sucking up.”
And last of all, he truly admired the Heralds, and many of the older Trainees. He really wanted them to know that. They had earned his admiration. Hellfires, the Heralds had saved him and all the younglings at that mine! Life was short there at the best of times... at the worst, well “accidents” had happened to the youngsters who got the least little bit rebellious. There were always more unwanted orphans to replace them.
Manners, deference, knowing how to act around other people, all these things were absolutely alien to your thinking when you had grown up fighting over kitchen scraps, and sucking up was a way to keep from getting beaten. There had been plenty of times at the mine when he would happily have done almost any degrading thing in order to get just a little more food, or a blanket that was a tiny bit larger. Anything. So how could he relate to people who thought he was trying to curry favor when he was only thinking how much he appreciated being here?
But there was one thing he could always count on. Somehow Dallen always managed to make him feel better, no matter what happened, no matter what faux pas he managed to commit.
And the moments when he was sure he would never, ever go into Whites were getting fewer. Most of the time he thought he was actually getting close to acting like everyone else, even if he didn’t actually feel like everyone else.
He grinned a little, and gently ran the bristles of the brush along his Companion’s chin. Having Dallen as a comforting and persistent presence in the back of his mind kept him steady. It was only when the invisible pressure got too much that he needed to physically come to Dallen for relief.
Just now, the trigger that had sent him here had been a brush of a resentful thought that he was somehow trying to become the teacher’s pet, when in fact all he was doing was trying to stay even with everyone else in class. He couldn’t help it. He was grateful to the teacher for taking the extra time to explain. Why was saying so wrong?
“You allus make me feel good,” he murmured to Dallen’s shoulder. “I dunno why you don’ get tired of me.”
Happy to have something to take him away from thoughts that were always uncomfortable, Mags reached
