Changes

::An’ how I handle Bear an’ Lena an’ Amily. I could—::

::Not yet. You have the raw talent, the reasoning ability, you just don’t have the experience. You will, and when that day comes—::

He waited. Finally Dallen finished the thought. ::When that day comes, I will be both proud, and terribly, terribly sad.::

He let that roll over in his mind a moment. ::Sad ’cause... when I know how the baddest of bad people think... when I kin think like they do... I ain’t ever gonna be completely happy or... comfortable... or... ::

::Secure,:: said Dallen, sadly.

::That. Not ever again.::

::Yes,:: said the creature closest to him in the whole world. ::And you can decide you don’t want that—::

::Why would I?:: he said, somberly. ::Some’un’s gotta. Hellfires. Might’s well be me. I got you t’keep me from goin’ crazy, eh?:: He blinked, as a moment of epiphany came upon him. ::Hell... fires. Thet is the kinda Herald I’m a-gonna be. Not th’ runnin’ about country. Not th’ tellin’a laws. Not—all the rest of’t. This. This is gonna be m’job.::

::And that, O my Chosen, is why I Chose you.::

Chapter 11

Mags lurked outside the abandoned building and waited for his quarry to return. He had already scouted his way in and had already trapped all their clever little exits. Well, they were clever if you were a little child; not so clever if you were an adult and a predator. He wished he had more time; he didn’t want to do things this way, but in the long run, he’d have done them a favor. Tal and the other men in that special unit of the Guard agreed. The first adult that wanted to put any effort into taking them would have them, just as he would have them. The bunnies would not be escaping this warren.

He even knew where they were: at a rag-and-bone seller, someone who would accept the clothing that had been unceremoniously ripped apart by the Guard. He knew what they planned to do—sell enough to buy a meal and eat it on the spot, because it wasn’t safe to have food here now that it was summer. More gleaning of their surface thoughts proved that they had learned summer could be as perilous a time as winter. They’d learned that they couldn’t hoard food in warm weather the hard way twice, once by getting sick on food that had spoiled and once by being swarmed in the night by mice and rats.

It was safe to store what they’d gleaned from the Agents’ house—and although they had gleaned what they had thought was the best, the boys had gone back to the house again and again until they and the rest of the neighborhood looters had picked it clean.

In one way, they were right to feel relatively safe. The part of the cellar they’d claimed as their own was very difficult to get into if you were adult-sized, and it was hard to work your way through the half-collapsed walls to get there. You had to know exactly where you were going, or you ran into dead ends. An adult determined to trap them would probably do one of two things: either catch them as they went in or came out, or set fire to the whole cellar, clearing the way. They weren’t thinking of that, of course. To their minds, it would be impossible for anyone to know they were in there in the first place.

Of course, they had not come up against someone like Mags: small, agile, trained. He would have been able to pull this off even without Mindspeech. With it? This was not so much a challenge as a chore to be gotten over with. He was not looking forward to what he was about to do to them.

These children weren’t good—but they weren’t bad, either. They would steal anything they thought they could take, but they were also living on the edge of survival, and what they stole meant the difference between living and dying. They had no love and no loyalty to anyone or anything outside their own little family, but they had no hatred for anyone else, either, except the brief, bright hatred that burned when someone cheated them or robbed them—because being cheated or robbed meant an empty belly. He certainly understood them. They differed from the Mags of the mine in only one way. Up until last winter, they’d had a mother.

She might not have been a good mother, but she fed them before she fed herself, and she gave as many kisses as cuffs. That counted for a great deal down here.

As he had learned when he was here as a blind beggar, Haven wasn’t perfect, even as Valdemar wasn’t perfect. There were places these children could have gone for help, but they either didn’t know about them or didn’t trust them. That was true of a lot of the sad stories down here.

And... if everyone who needed help came for it, would the help run out? The places that distributed food as charity often did. Shelters frequently had to shut their doors in bad weather, because there literally was no longer room inside to move. How would—how had—three small children who could not even hold their places in line fare?

When your options were steal or starve... you couldn’t exactly call those “options.”

But right now, Mags needed to focus.

There were plenty of hiding places around the remains of the basement that gave him a clear view of where the children would come in. It was dark, but not completely, and the children would probably have a rushlight with them. Even they couldn’t thread their maze at night without some kind of light. So Mags crouched in a space where two tottering wall fragments had met, a space where it was unlikely he’d be seen in the dim illumination of a rushlight.

Mags waited, hunched down and resting, patient, every so often allowing his shields to drop a little so he could look for those Agents. That was what Dallen had decided to call them, and it was just as good as any other name to Mags.

He got no brushes of that now-familiar feeling of the shield-surrogate they wore, but as the moments became candlemarks, he finally did sense the children approaching.

He froze in place. They didn’t seem particularly sensitive, but there was no point in taking chances. If they guessed he was going to ambush them, they’d bolt, and it would take days for him to track them down again.

They weren’t talking today, but he sensed the sleepy content in all three of them that came from a full belly. Good. That was exactly what he wanted. He needed them to be off guard and unready. If there had been a real predator hunting them now, they’d be tied up in sacks before they even reached the entrance to their maze.