and not leave it until the water was cool and his skin looked like a withered apple’s!
Chapter 6
FOR days, all that anyone could talk about were the Kirball teams—who was on, who was
He was a little surprised to discover that Herald Nikolas was heartily in favor of his being on one of the Kirball teams. The King’s Own made one of those stealthy visits to him the evening after the trial, right after Setham had confirmed that he had been selected.
Mags immediately started to apologize for getting involved in yet another time-consuming activity.
Nikolas laughed and silenced him with a gesture. “No, no, Mags, this is a very good thing. I’m quite pleased.”
Mags blinked. “But—I thought th’ ideer was fer me to mostly be not noticed . . .”
“Not... exactly.” Nikolas steepled his fingers together. “The idea is for you to appear innocuous. Someone that can be safely ignored,” he explained further, at Mags’ bewildered look. “Now no one ever anticipates great intelligence out of a games player or a fine warrior. This is just how things go—people assume that anyone who is quite physical does not have as much going on in his mind. This is good for us. We can use this to our advantage.”
“Then I should stop tryin’ so hard in classes?” he asked, bewildered all over again now.
“No, no!” Nikolas laughed, his eyes crinkling up in the corners. “No one but your teachers will know how well or poorly you are doing in class, so just act as you have been. People will hear you talk and assume that you are not very bright; let them continue to think that way. In that way you become someone it is safe to ignore.”
Well, this was all a little confusing, but Mags was willing to accept it.
Meanwhile, the teams were taking shape. He wasn’t sure about the others, but their team got organized within a day. As Setham had suggested, Gennie was quickly made Team Captain; she set about ruthlessly finding out the weaknesses of her teammates, and structuring her strategy to minimize them.
It was a sound approach, and one Setham approved of. Their coach did not say what the other teams were doing, but Mags got the definite impression that at least one of the other teams was taking the opposite approach.
The hardest part was coordinating things with the foot-players and riders. Or rather, it would have been hard except—for the second reason Mags was on the team.
His Mindspeech was powerful enough that he could be “heard” and understood by the unGifted. That meant Gennie could give him orders, and he could tell them instantly to the rest of the team. No one would have to think of codes for movements, or shout them across the playing field. As Captain, Gennie was going to stay where she could see everything, and prepare to dash in at need.
Or so the plan was. Mags had the notion that once games started, Gennie was going to be dashing in a lot.
It was too bad that without him reading the minds of his teammates, he couldn’t tell Gennie what they were going to do. That was just out of the question; this was hardly any sort of emergency situation, this was a game and not a skirmish in a war, and it would be entirely unethical for him to violate the privacy of their thoughts this way—
Although if he could train them to—more or less—mentally shout what they were doing, that didn’t count as “reading.” So maybe he would suggest that, once things settled into place more.
Setham and the other coaches had decided that the teams needed names, and that the most innocuous would be the four cardinal directions, although they debated everything from colors to mythical creatures. Gennie had been very taken with the idea of calling their team Gennie’s Gryphons; once the other three Captains had gotten wind of that idea there were almost fights breaking out over the best names. Dragons of any color, Firebirds, and so on were very popular. The coaches put their collective feet down over the ruckus, and that was the end of that.
“First of all, we are not having anyone’s personal name being part of the team name, as if you were all some sort of mercenary company,” Setham had told them all, quite sternly. “The team will, I hope, last long past when Gennie is in her Whites and out on circuit. Secondly, there is too much concentration on the name and its emblem and not on actually building the team itself. Your name is going to be one of the four directions, your team color will be the one usually associated with that direction, and there will be no totemic mascot. Now, let’s not hear any more about this.”
So Mags was on the South Team, and the color was red, and it was all settled. Even if from time to time he could hear Gennie muttering under her breath “they’re still Gennie’s Gryphons.”
Somehow he was managing to stay relatively in the shadow of his other teammates. It did help that Gennie was outspoken, gregarious, and popular; she managed to eclipse anyone that did not have as powerful a personality as she did, and Mags was grateful for that. He basically portrayed himself as the quiet games-player, he carefully filtered all his ideas through Gennie, and if she thought that was odd, she said nothing about it. Maybe she thought he was shy, or had no self confidence. If so, that was fine, too.
The trials were over pretty quickly, and the teams set; with one or two exceptions—mostly when two of the coaches had tried to recruit the same person—people passed the trials and there were enough players and alternates that a second round wasn’t needed. Once the trials were done with, some of the excitement drained away and life went relatively back to normal—except, of course, that Mags now had team practice every day along with everything else.
With four teams using the same practice ground some creative juggling of Trainee classes had to be done, because not everyone was free when his or her team was scheduled for practice. And there were some transfers, especially among the Grays. Mags found himself, to his profound relief, in a Language class that was composed mostly of the youngest of the Trainees from all three Collegia, and which, as a consequence, was not nearly so demanding as the one he had been taking. After some consultation, and a session in which he sweated over a stack of maths problems, it was deemed that he was proficient enough in geometry to get by, and excelled in everything else, so he was permitted to stop that class. He got switched to a different history class as well, one that was covering an entirely different time period than the one he’d been in, but that was all right; he knew he would catch up pretty quickly. And that freed his early afternoon.
His afternoons were going to be exhausting, though. All of his weaponry classes were held in late afternoon, which meant he would be going from Kirball practice to weapons work.
Well, if this was a wartime situation, it wasn’t as if he would be able to take a break from the fighting.
Besides, as he told himself, so far nothing he had done had been as physically demanding as a day of mining on too little food.
There was one little problem, however. The first full day of team practice, he learned that the South team would have their session right after the noon meal, which was not such a good thing on a full stomach.
After thinking about it, he decided that what he would do would be to get himself a packet of things that would keep, eat very lightly, then have a second meal after the practice, dividing his lunch into two small meals.
So for the first day of practice, he sat down and warmed himself with a quite small bowl of soup, which he ate slowly, with a bit of bread. He was halfway through it, intently thinking over what Gennie might demand of them today, and what Setham might want them to do, when a tap on his back startled him.
Old habits died very hard, so when startled, he froze rather than yelping or jumping. While he sat there, Bear sat down on the bench next to him and eyed his lunch critically.
“I wouldn’t say you needed to lose weight.”
Mags grinned a little and shrugged. “Kirball fer m’team is right after noon.”
“Ah!” Bear nodded back. “In that case, you’re doing the right thing. You could get really sick if you ate like you usually do, then went out to practice. I don’t think you’d impress anyone by losing your lunch suddenly.”
Mags shrugged. “Happen ye learn a mite or two ’bout eatin’ when ye ain’t got a lot t’ eat.” He turned his attention fully on Bear, for something about his friend did not seem quite right. “Happen I ain’t been payin’ much heed t’ friends lately... Bear, ye seem a bit fashet. Ye been frettin’ bout somethin’?”
