Take A Thief

Except —

For three people who were very clearly waiting for him just inside the door. One was an odd, birdlike man, slight and trim, hardly taller than Skif, with a cap of dark gray hair and an intelligent, though worried, expression. The second was taller, with a fairly friendly face which at the moment also bore a distinctly worried expression. Both of them wore the white uniform only a Herald was allowed to wear.

His “welcoming committee,” evidently.

He couldn't see the third one very well, since he was standing carefully back in the shadows. The third person wasn't wearing the white uniform though; his clothing was dark enough to blend in with the shadows.

Could be sommut from the Guard, he thought gloomily. Gonna haul me off t' gaol soon's the other two get done with me.

:He's not, and you're not going to gaol,: said Cymry. But that was all she said. He couldn't find it in himself to feel less than uneasy about the shadowy lurker.

She stopped a few paces away from the two men, and Skif gingerly dismounted, turning to face them with his hands clasped behind his back. A moment later, he dropped his eyes. Whatever was coming, he didn't want to meet their faces and see their disgust.

“So,” said the smaller one, “you seem to be the young person that Companion Cymry has Chosen.”

“Yessir,” Skif replied, gazing at his ill-shod toes.

“And we're given to understand that you — ah — your profession — you — ” The man fumbled for words, and Skif decided to get the agony over with all at once.

“ 'M a thief, sir,” he said, half defiantly. “Tha's what I do.” He thought about adding any number of qualifying statements — that it had been a better choice than working for his uncle, that no one had offered him any other sort of employment and he had to eat; even that if Bazie hadn't been around to take him in and train him, he'd probably be dead now and not Chosen. But he kept all of those things to himself. For some reason, the clever retorts he had didn't seem all that clever at the moment.

The shorter man sighed. “I suppose you're expecting me to give you an ineffective and stuffy lecture about how you are supposed to be a new person and you can't go on doing that sort of thing anymore now that you're a Trainee.”

Skif stopped looking at his toes and instead glanced up, startled, at the speaker. “Uh — you're not?”

“You are not stupid,” the man said, and smiled faintly, though his tone sounded weary. “If you've already played over that particular lecture in your mind, then I will skip it and get to the point. I am Dean Elcarth. I am in charge of Herald's Collegium. The moment you entered the gate here, so far as we are concerned, whatever you were or did before you arrived here became irrelevant. You were Chosen. The Companions don't make mistakes. There must be the makings of a Herald in you. Therefore you are welcome. But when you get in trouble, and you will, because sooner or later at least half of our Trainees get in trouble, please remember that what you do reflects on the rest of us as well, and Heralds are not universally beloved among a certain faction of the highborn. The others will give you the details as they see fit, but the sum of what I have to say is that you are supposed to be part of a solution, not part of a problem, and I hope we can show you why in such a way that you actually feel that in your deepest heart.”

During this rather remarkable speech, Skif had felt his jaw sagging slowly. It was not what he had expected to hear. His shock must have been written clearly on his face, because the Dean smiled a little again. “This is Herald Teren,” he continued, gesturing to the other man, who although friendlier, was looking distinctly worried. “He is, technically, in charge of you, since he is in charge of all of the newly Chosen. You'll be getting your first lessons from him, and he will show you to your new quarters and help get you set up. Under normal circumstances, he would have picked out a mentor for you among the older students — but these are not normal circumstances. So although one of the older students will be assigned as a mentor, in actuality you will have a very different, though altogether unofficial mentor.”

“That,” said a grating voice that put chills up Skif's back, “myself would be.”

He knew that voice, and that accent — though when he'd heard it before, it hadn't been nearly so thick.

And when the third figure stepped out of the shadows, arms folded over his chest, scar-seamed face smiling sardonically, he stepped back a pace without thinking about it. Skif had never seen the hair before — stark black with thick streaks of white running through it — because it had been hidden under a hood or a hat. But there was no mistaking that saturnine face or those cold, agate-gray eyes. This was the sell-sword who'd spoken with (and spied on?) Jass, who had threatened Skif in the cemetery.

“You!” he blurted.

“This is Herald Alberich, the Collegium Weaponsmaster,” said the Dean, “And I will leave you with him and Teren.”

“But you can't b-b-be a Herald — ,” Skif stammered. “Where's yer, yer white — ,”