At least he could do this. And he could do it well. He could do it without hurting anyone.
And when he started to weep, he could put his head down over the basin, let his hair fall to cover his face, and no one would be the wiser.
So there it was. This, for now, would be what remained of the wreckage of his life.
The days blurred one into another. The days lengthened, and the kitchen grew hotter by day because the weather outside was warmer. He and the boy worked stripped to their trews; the women in shifts and chemises. He threw himself into the scrubbing and anything else that was given to him to do—and seeing that, the cook gave him every task that two hands and no mind to speak of could perform. He was set to scrubbing the soot from all the walls, and bleaching the stone floor with lye. He did it all without complaint, without a word.
He couldn’t hear Dallen at all. He began to think that if Dallen had not actually repudiated him yet, it was only because Dallen was not in any physical shape to. As soon as Dallen was as healed as he could get, the Companion probably would do exactly that. And in the meanwhile the silence meant that Dallen had decided that Choosing Mags had been a terrible mistake, and this was the way to keep him isolated until the Companion could be rid of him.
It hurt, it hurt terribly, but he had to acknowledge that everyone was better off without him.
And all he was waiting for now was for that ghostly, silent presence in the back of his mind to one day become an echoingly empty place.
When that happened... well, then he would decide what to do.
And it occurred to him that once Dallen left him, there was one option he hadn’t considered—a painless, easy way to put an end to everything. One that now, in retrospect, he wished had happened last winter, in that blizzard.
All he had to do was be patient and wait for winter. Whether or not a blizzard came, there would be snow. Then all he needed to do would be to walk out into it, until he started to feel sleepy; he could ignore the cold, he had done so before. Then, when it was too hard to move, too much effort to keep going, he could sit down, close his eyes, and let the snow take him and his misery away forever.
Chapter15
The voice in his mind echoed through the nightmare. He always had nightmares, worse than ever before, far worse than he’d had at the Collegium. The cocoon-like bedding at least kept him from thrashing—not that anything would wake up the boy—but he had them every night. The odd thing was, even though they were horrible, and even though he woke up from them with the top of his bedding soaked with tears and the rest damp with sweat, he welcomed them. He always woke exhausted, which left his mind in a numb fog. And a numb fog was preferable to thinking.
After days of working here—he still didn’t know who he was working for—his body knew when to wake up. Had to be before Cookie came in, since he would kick them awake. Which, oddly enough, seemed kind of fair, to Mags—Cookie didn’t kick Mags hard enough to break anything, and he and the boy did have to clear away from in front of the hearth so that the fires could be built up again, and the big water kettles swung into place on their cranes to heat. Cookie was a strange combination of brutal and fair. He never meted out punishment to anyone who hadn’t earned it, but those who earned it got the receiving end of a beating just short of breaking bones. Cookie was exact in doling out precisely enough punishment that the recipient was still capable of working. The boy had gotten two beatings since Mags had been here, both for shirking. So far, aside from morning kicks, Mags was unscathed.
He woke straight up out of the nightmare; he was just in time to hear Cookie’s heavy footsteps in the passage outside the kitchen. The voice still echoed in his head as he struggled out of his cocoon and rolled it up into the bundle that Cookie preferred, shaking his head a little to clear it and knuckling his eyes to get the fog out of them.
It wasn’t Dallen, of course. Dallen was surely only days away from withdrawing from Mags completely. Maybe that was why he was hearing the memory of Dallen’s mind-voice in his dreams, the few dreams he had that weren’t nightmares, the ones on going to sleep and again on waking.
“Bath,” said Cookie, when he saw Mags waiting beside his bundle. He gestured to the door, and Mags went out into the yard while Cookie kicked the boy awake. Cookie set a great deal of store by cleanliness, and every other day was a bath day for the potboys. “Bath day,” in the sense that they went out into the yard, stripped down to singlets, doused themselves under the pump that stood out there, washed with the same soap they used for the pots, washed their clothing the same way, put it on wet and came back to work. Small wonder they’d actually need a new suit of clothing every six moons. Mere cloth couldn’t stand up to that sort of treatment every other day.
He was already clean by the time the boy came out to the yard with a bruise along one side of his face. Mags wondered what he had done to anger Cookie this time. It didn’t seem that difficult to avoid a beating. All you had to do was work hard, not steal, not be insolent or waste time. Just how stupid was the boy?
When he took his place obediently at his sink, he noticed that Cookie’s eyes were bloodshot, and he held his head as if it hurt him. Last night had been some sort of feast, and a lot of bottles had gone up to the dining hall from the locked cellar. It appeared that Cookie had helped himself to at least one. Well perhaps the boy hadn’t been at fault this time.
It was one of those rare moments these days when he actually thought something, a real thought, instead of just letting fatigue keep his mind numb and as empty as possible.
His hands closed convulsively on the pot and pumice-stone, and powerful emotions he couldn’t name washed over him and drowned him for a while. Meanwhile, as he had schooled it to do, his body kept mechanically on with his task.
No, it wasn’t possible. Dallen wasn’t trying to speak to him.
No—wait. Dallen was going to repudiate him. That was it—he’d finally come to his senses, and in order to repudiate Mags, it had to be that Dallen had to actually say as much to him. And although the deepest part of Mags was screaming “No!” most of him was bracing itself and acknowledging that it had to be done. He cautiously opened himself to Dallen a little. Just enough so that Dallen could say what he had to and get it all over with.
Dallen probably had a lot to say, too, now that he had spent so long in so much pain. That was it—Dallen was only calling him so that the Companion could tell him how worthless he was before casting him aside.
If he had not long ago trained his body to keep doing whatever task it was he had been set while his mind either dropped into a stupor of its own, or ran in frantic circles, he would have earned a bruised face himself at that moment. His thoughts reeled. This wasn’t possible; Dallen could not possibly want him back. And even if somehow, his Companion was too insane, too stupid, or too softhearted to repudiate him, the rest of the Companions would properly never permit him to return to the Collegium. Not ever. He was a danger to every Companion and Chosen in Valdemar. And Bear was right, he just plain didn’t deserve to be up there.
Well, there was only one thing for it. If Dallen would not do what he should, Mags would continue to force the issue on him. Someone had to do what was smart, what was right. He was on fire with the need to protect Dallen from himself, protect the Collegia, the Heralds, everyone up there on the hill from him.
As he scrubbed and rinsed, he carefully, painstakingly, built up a wall in his mind, layering it over what he already had in place, closing Dallen out completely. Normally he would not have had the energy for this, but with all that welter of emotion behind him, for the moment, he could do just about anything.
Let Dallen wear himself out against that wall, and give the other Companions time to convince him what he must do to save himself. Whatever selfish, poisonous thing was inside Mags, whether it was some parasitic, strange other personality, that had attached himself to him, whether it was his real self and the “Mags” he thought
