:Tell her that tomorrow she can ride me.:
Mags blinked. If there was a truism about Companions, it was that they never let anyone ride them except their Chosen, unless it was a dire emergency. But, dutifully, he repeated what Dallen had said.
Lena gasped, and the stable practically lit up with her smile. “I can?” she squeaked.
“He says so,” Mags shrugged. “I ’spect you had better find somethin’ good to ride in by then.”
He was not altogether certain that her feet touched the ground when she finally left to go back to her own room.
Chapter 10
Mags woke a few days later to the sound of irritated voices in the stable; he was taking a nap because he had been studying late with Lena the night before, and was taking advantage of another class canceled because of a sick instructor to get some much needed sleep. After a moment, he had to smile, because of what the Trainees were complaining about.
“... and I ask you, is it so very hard to find gray thread instead of blue? I’ve got blue darns on my elbows and knees!”
“Well I’ve got a big blue seam running up my bum where I tore the trews on a nail,” someone else complained.
You could mend ’em yerself, Mags thought quietly. That was what he had done from the moment he got the uniforms. He’d thought everyone was supposed to. Goodness knew he’d had plenty of practice piecing rags together into something like a garment; the difficulty had always been finding anything to take the place of needle and thread. Grass wasn’t strong enough; generally he’d used hair pulled from the tails of the long-suffering horses. When he’d first gotten here, he’d asked for needle and thread from one of the servants; he’d gotten a puzzled look, but several hanks of gray thread and a packet of pins and needles had been found for him. And thanks to Dallen, he understood that his dirty uniforms were to go straight to the laundry, and he had dutifully delivered them down the chute in the Guards’ quarters, but only after he had fixed whatever was amiss with them.
It seemed, however, that he was the only one doing so. And the servants who took care of such things, now severely overworked with the heavy influx of new trainees, were encountering some difficulties. Like finding enough gray thread to fix all the abuses Trainees wrought on their uniforms. Trainees did not stop sending clothing down to be washed and mended just because there was a shortage of materials, so clearly the servants had done what they could with what was on hand.
“Look at this!” said a new, equally indignant voice. “Just look at it! Do these look like Grays to you?”
“More like Pale Blues,” someone snickered. “Looks like a Guard tunic got into the wash.”
“How am I going to pass inspection like this?” the speaker demanded, in despair. “It’s not my fault I look like a Guardsman that’s been lying out in the sun too long!”
“I don’t know why you are worrying about your uniform when your room looks like a magpie’s nest,” came the laconic reply. “You haven’t cleaned it in a week. You’re going to fail that inspection, so a blue uniform isn’t going to matter.”
Mags could only shake his head, then pull a pillow over it and try and drift back to sleep. It was impossible for him to take these “difficulties” seriously. Really, it was hard for him to believe that he, Mags, was actually here and not dreaming. It seemed utterly impossible, and not for the first time he wondered if he was actually dead and this was that heavenly afterlife that the priests had said that good people would get.
For the first time ever, he could eat as much as he wanted, of food that nearly made him delirious with how good it tasted. In fact, based on how thin he still was, he often got more food urged on him than he could actually eat. He’d overheard some of the other Trainees complaining about the meals—that things were plain, boring, coarse food—and he could only shake his head in wonder. They complained because the cook was formerly with the Guard, and made the same rations the Guard ate. Clearly, they had never gone hungry a day in their lives.
For the first time ever, he knew what it was to be clean. He knew now why he’d been practically scrubbed raw at the Guard Post; not only had he been filthy and probably stank, he’d also been flea-ridden. The soap that the Guards had used on him was meant to kill vermin on horses and dogs, and it did a good job on the “passengers” he’d had along. He had been scratching and itching for so long that when the irritation healed, it was like having a vague headache suddenly stop. He had never realized how miserable that had made him feel because it had been swallowed up in all the other miseries. When your belly aches from hunger, you don’t notice you’ve scratched your arms half raw ... some of the other Trainees complained because they had to carry the hot water for their baths from the big coppers where it was heated. Mags reckoned they would sing a different tune if they’d had fleas infesting every straw of their beds and every stitch of their clothing.
For the first time ever, he had clean clothing that covered every bit of him and kept him warm in the worst cold. He could march out fearlessly into the snow knowing that he was not going to get chilblains all over his feet, that he was not going to be aching in every limb, and that he was not going to have to hope he could get into shelter while he could still feel his fingers. There were plenty of complaints about the uniforms. Mags could scarcely imagine why. Maybe they didn’t fit like the sleek clothing he had glimpsed on some of the highborn of the Court, but for his part, he could see nothing wrong with them.
For the first time ever, he slept in a real bed. A warm bed, in a warm room that was all his own. He slept long and soundly, didn’t wake shivering, didn’t have to decide what part of him he was going to leave out to be chilled. And if he had to clean his own room, so what? At least he had a room to clean, and if it was a mess, he had only himself to blame.
And what did he have to do to earn all this? Merely learn. So if this wasn’t a heavenly afterlife, he didn’t much care what befell him after he was dead, because the here and now was just fine. And that brought him to what he was to learn, which was not just the school lessons, but the other things. He could hardly believe he had been asked to help some of the other Trainees who were struggling with riding—or that the Weaponsmaster wanted him to help those who were still trying to get beyond hitting the pells with sticks.
From the sounds of things, the complainers were saddling up to go out on riding practice themselves. Which is what Mags should be doing soon ... could have been doing now, except on the whole he preferred to practice alone, and the instructor was inclined to let him now. The instructor was really there for those who had never been on a horse in their lives. Once you got past being afraid to fall off with every step, unless your Companion needed instruction in war maneuvers, if you wanted, you were left alone to practice at your own pace. That suited Mags. He sensed that some of the others wondered why he was so slow to make friends, but there was no way he could explain it to them, and he didn’t want to try. They would never understand.
Truly, he still didn’t know quite why he and Lena got on so well. It made no sense at all, really. There could not possibly be two people in this world as different as he and the little Bardic Trainee, and yet here they were, inexplicably friends.