Trainee Grays!
And with those two words, everything he had not been able to remember, everything he was, came flooding back.
He knew now that his dream of a devil was just made up out of fear and old nightmares. What the “devil” really was, in that conversation that he had recalled correctly, the thing that had been frightening the life out of the Pieters boys, hadn’t been a bad thing at all. It had been Dallen, a Companion, and they had been frightened, not because Dallen was evil, but because the coming of a Companion meant that their entire mining operation, based as it was on slavery, cruelty, exploitation, and murder, was going to be exposed. They had known that there was no way that the Companion had come for one of them. Every single one of them was complicit in how the mine-kiddies were mistreated and abused, and no Companion would come for someone who would sit back and allow that sort of thing to happen. That meant that Dallen had to be there for one of the mine-kiddies . . . and eventually, no matter what threats held him silent before, as soon as the kid knew he was safe, the truth would come out. Or else, if he remained silent and terrified, they would work a Truth Spell on him, or have a Healer look into his mind and find out.
When that happened—as, indeed, it had, when the truth had come out of Mags—they would be in more trouble than they could possibly imagine.
No wonder they had been petrified. No wonder they had tried to shoot Dallen . . .
Not that they’d ever had any chance of actually hurting the Companion. All things considered, it was unlikely that any of the boys would have been able to hit a barn, much less a Companion as agile and clever as Dallen. None of them were marksmen, though they liked to think that they were. They were never given the leisure to practice, for one thing. Cole Pieters made sure his boys were no good with anything that might be used as a weapon, other than the crudest implements of club and ax. The mine-kiddies were better marksmen with rocks than the Pieters boys were with any weapon.
But despite their father’s orders, probably they hadn’t been shooting to hurt—because the penalty for harming a Companion was life in penal servitude, and not even their father’s threats would convince them to risk that—but to drive Dallen away. A stupid idea, since a Companion on Search couldn’t be driven away from his Chosen with a drakken, but the Pieters boys were all very stupid. Sly, but stupid.
And then, when Herald Jakyr had turned up, summoned by Dallen’s frantic demands to his Companion, it was too late. Not even Cole Pieters would dare harm a Herald. Jakyr—that was probably where his mind had gotten the name Jak from. He’d never known a “Jak” in the mine that was near to his own age, near enough to have haunted him.
Oh, it all came back to him now.
And so did the memories connected with that rooftop. Or at least he thought he knew what had happened, because whatever had occurred, it had been very fast indeed, and he didn’t have any actual memory of when he’d been taken down, much less what had done it.
But he remembered going up on the roof, as always. He’d been minding the shop alone. Dallen was at the inn. Everything had been completely normal, other than the fact that the sky was overcast and there was fog coming up off the river. He’d felt that “watching” sensation, just like always. He had paused to take his bearings before a lightning run across the rooftops to get away from it as quickly as he could, because it was still giving him the crawlies to feel those unseen eyes on him.
And then, out of nowhere, he felt . . . something. Whether it was that the watcher had alerted these two men, or that the watcher had, itself, somehow moved to strike him unconscious, he didn’t know. There had just been that flash of knowledge, the certainty that something changed, and then nothing.
Dallen! Dallen must be frantic by now!
He dropped all his shields—because Dallen must be pretty far away at this point, and he was going to need all the reach he could get—
That is, he tried to drop all his shields. But it was as if he didn’t have shields to drop. Or the shields weren’t his.
Or his Mindspeech had somehow been cut away.
It felt like a blow to the gut. It left him gasping, literally gasping, as if someone had ripped out his innards, and he was in too much shock to feel pain. And he must have made enough sound that the men at the front of the wagon heard him. The wagon stopped again, and as Mags felt rising panic, he heard the footsteps coming around, felt the man get into the wagon, felt the hand in his hair.
Then it was as he remembered from his nightmares, and the waterskin was forced into his mouth, and all he could manage to do was keep his eyes shut and to drink as little as possible. He was afraid to let too much of the liquid dribble out of his mouth. It was broad daylight, and his captors would see and force more down his throat. Obviously they wanted him for something, but without Mindspeech, he hadn’t a clue as to what that would be. Or could be.
He only knew for sure that he had to stay lucid, somehow. Had to keep his awareness of who and what he was.
The man finally let him back down into his cavity, and wave after wave of vertigo swept over him, until finally feverish delirium took him.
But now, he knew what that was. And he clung on tightly to his knowledge of himself. My name is Mags. I’m a Herald Trainee. My Companion is Dallen . . .
He wouldn’t think about what not having Mindspeech would mean. He did know, at least, that there were Heralds with very little, very weak Gifts. It was the Companion that made the Herald, and surely he could keep right on doing what Nikolas was training him for even if his Mindspeech was gone forever. He’d just have to be cleverer than before.
And all right, even if he couldn’t do that, the main job of a Herald was to see that the Kingdom’s laws were known and obeyed, and you didn’t need a Gift to do that. All you needed, when it came right down to it, was for people to think you had a Gift. He could do that.
In his feverish state he saw himself tricking people with some of the sharpster moves he had been learning from Nikolas and some of Nikolas’ slightly disreputable friends. “Cold reading,” was what one of the actors had called it, a fellow who had eked out his small pay from small parts by telling fortunes. If you threw enough hints out, people would tell you with their reactions if you were close to the truth, and you could soon have them convinced you could read their minds or were talking to spirits or could see the future. He claimed you didn’t actually need the Truth Spell if you were good enough at cold reading. He could do cold reading. He’d been doing some of it on the shop customers. He could imagine himself somewhere on Circuit, in the field, being persuasive, coaxing, being . . .
He found that he was surrounded by a small group of people in rustic garments. They were angry, very angry . . .
This is a drug dream. Now he knew what that other voice inside him was. It was the part of him that still hung on to reality. Even if this felt, looked, sounded, even smelled like reality.
“. . . stole it, I tell ye!” growled one old man, who seemed to be the leader of one side. “Stole it right out o’ my pasture, she did!”
They were all crowded into what looked like the common room of a tavern. Dark, smoky wooden walls. Smells of food and beer. He was sitting at a table, the others clustered around him.
The be-aproned woman who led the opposite group snarled at him. “I no more stole it than I’m the Queen of Valdemar! He let it stray, it ate half my cabbages, and I’m keeping it in payment for my loss!”
She turned to the man next to her, as Mags concentrated on trying to catch all the tells Sieran had shown him. “Haber! You be my witness! Tell the Herald!”
The man turned to Mags, a hangdog expression on his face. “Gabble gabble,” he said, and waved his hands apologetically. “Gabble, gabble gabble gabble. Gabble.”
The angry man stamped his foot and snarled. “Gabble!” he spat.
It’s them . . . Mags managed to think through the fog and the confusion, and through the intensely real feeling that all this had. It’s them. The ones
driving the wagon. They’re talking.
He couldn’t quite break free of the hallucination, but part of him, at least, now knew it was a fever dream and nothing real. So when it all started to go wrong, and the crowd turned on him, he made it all stop, made it all go back to the beginning. He’d learned how to do that with his nightmares, thanks to the Healers. He still had the nightmares, but at least now he could control them.
“. . . stole it, I tell ye!” growled the old man, who was complaining to Mags about a disputed goat. “Stole it right out o’ my pasture, she did!”
He paid more attention to the old man this time, a wizened old goat in linen shirt and breeches and a leather apron. The old man was afraid, underneath all that bluster he was afraid of the woman. In fact, everyone was at least a little afraid of the woman. Why were they afraid?
He interrupted her when she began her response. “You’re lying,” he said flatly, and that was when her face stretched out and grew a set of terrible jaws, bat-wings burst out of the back of her shirt, and she reached for him with awful claws.
But again, he managed to remember, this is drugs. This is a fever dream. He managed to wrest control away, and send it all back to the beginning again.
“. . . stole it, I tell ye!” growled the old man, whose eyes were bleak and blank. “Stole it right out o’ my pasture, she did!” Mags knew what was in his mind without needing Mindspeech. He didn’t expect to win, but he wasn’t going to give up without a fight. He couldn’t afford to. He was going to starve without that goat.
But Mags was ready this time, and the moment the woman began to change, the knife was in his hand one moment and in her throat the next, and she fell over, black blood pouring out of her throat, face caught halfway between woman and monster, as all of her neighbors stared.
Then Mags wasn’t looking down at a dead woman. He was looking up at a live one. She smiled at him, and he felt transfixed with utter delight, his entire being suffused with a golden glow of happiness and well being. “Gabble gabble gooo,” she crooned at him. “Gabble Meric good boy gabble.” She picked him up, and he giggled giddily. She was half his world, and he adored her so much, the source of food and warmth and comfort! “Gabble goo goo goo,” she whispered in his ear as she cuddled him against her breast. Her breast! The source of all things wonderful!
But he wasn’t hungry right now, so he stuck his thumb in his mouth and sucked on that until she pulled it out and gave him his bappy to suck instead. He loved his bappy, a cool stone with a hole in it, just exactly the right size to pop in his mouth and ease his gums when they hurt. It sometimes annoyed him that he couldn’t swallow it, it was so smooth and nice, but it was fastened quite thoroughly to a big piece of cloth that prevented him from doing so. He nestled against the Breast, the wonderful, bountiful Breast, and sucked his bappy, and fell asleep, listening to Her whisper to him. “Gabble gabble Meric gabble . . .”
He slept then, both in the drugged dream and probably in reality, because when he next was aware of anything at all, it was that the wagon was swaying quite a lot, it was dark, too dark to see, and he was cramping again. But he clamped his mouth shut on his moans. He didn’t want his captors to realize he was awake. Eventually, he knew, they would decide it was time to drug him, and then it would be back to the hallucinations again—
Can I make them think I’m getting weaker, so the drug has more of a hold over me?
He thought maybe he could. When they got him out to take care of his bladder, he could be a little rubber-kneed. There might be other things he could do. Now that he knew what was going on, maybe he could—
The wagon stopped. He tried not to brace himself. Stay quiet, stay limp, he repeated to himself, over and over, just as in the mine he had repeated over and over to the ghosts to leave him alone.
And that made him think of something else entirely. What if that watching thing was somehow with them now? How would he know? Without Mindspeech he couldn’t sense the thing! He felt panic churning in his gut, although enough of the drug held him still that muscles that should have been rigid with fear were just cramped and painful. It was just adding insult to injury that the drug that kept him paralyzed did nothing about the pain or the cramps. He was so caught in his tangle of fear and hurt that he didn’t even realize the men were in the wagon with him until they hauled him up and out.
He didn’t have to fake being weak-kneed; his muscles really were so cramped that they were not cooperating with his captors. He kept his eyes shut this time until they were done with him.
But they must have realized what being curled up was doing to him—finally. Instead of putting him back, they hauled him with his arms draped over their shoulders some distance from where they had taken him, and laid him down, stretched out, on a blanket that was now spread out over something softish. Leaves, or pine needles, maybe. They extended all his limbs as he feigned unconsciousness. He didn’t have to pretend that he couldn’t move. He still couldn’t, and he fought down another round of panic as he wondered if he really was paralyzed as well as without Mindspeech.
But . . . no. He remembered bits from Bear’s chattering. People who were paralyzed couldn’t feel their limbs, either, and he certainly felt his. It was just the drug. In fact, one of his hands and both of his feet were practically on fire now . . . they’d been “asleep” from pressure and now were “waking up.” And his right ankle just ached from having been bent at a bad angle for so long.
He heard the sound of a fire being started with flint and tinder. After a while, he cracked one of his eyes open, just a little.
It was sunset. He couldn’t see exactly where he was, but it looked like a forest, a thicker forest than the last time they’d stopped. More pines, fewer trees with leaves.
He cracked the other eye and edged his head over by the tiniest possible increments.
Both men were engrossed in doing something over the fire, with their backs to him. Cooking, he thought. Well, that made sense, soup would go bad pretty quickly; they were obviously taking great care with him for some reason, and they wouldn’t want to poison him with bad soup, so they would have to stop to make fresh fairly often.
They were talking quietly, so quietly he couldn’t hear anything but a murmur.
He still couldn’t imagine what they wanted with him.
One of the men got up, moving with smooth grace, then came over and stared down at him, and he tried to keep his breathing even and quiet. After a moment, the man went away, then came back again, and threw the horse-smelling blanket over him, then went back to the fire.
Disorienting waves of vertigo engulfed him as the pain and cramps eased and his limbs relaxed under the warmth of the blanket. Obviously the drug wasn’t done with him yet.
Mags closed his eyes, fought off the dizziness the only way he knew how, by concentrating on everything else around him.
Sound first, that was easiest. Near at hand, the fire crackling, the two men muttering occasionally. The sound of muffled metal on metal in a regular, slow pattern. Someone was stirring food in a pot. Someone who actually knew how to cook. Mags remembered dimly, from when he worked in the Pieters’ kitchen, how the cooks would end up with pots full of half-burned and ruined food because they didn’t bother to set someone to stir it. Fat sizzling in the fire and the flare-ups that followed.
Farther away, the sounds of tearing and chewing. He knew those sounds, it was a horse eating grass. A horse? More than one? The stamp of a hoof. Another. Then two snorts, just slightly apart in time. Two horses, then. No harness jingling. So, they were definitely here for the night.
Under the cover of the blanket and between waves of dizziness he tried wiggling fingers or curling toes, but nothing happened. Back to listening, then.
Leaves moving in a slight breeze, and a moment later, that same breeze cooled his forehead. The sound of something small moving through the underbrush. A couple of birds he couldn’t identify in the middle distance, and far, far off, the faint honks of a flock of gees
e.
No sounds whatsoever that were man-made except those of his captors.
That disposed of sound. Smell?
Nearest, the stink of his own sweat. No surprise, given how he’d sweated his clothing until it was soaked. Under that, the faint smell of crushed pine needles. The fire gave off a slightly different aroma than he was used to. Meat cooking, both the sharp scent of meat cooking directly over the fire and the more mellow aroma of meat cooking in water. So they were making their own dinner as well as his soup. And there was a baking-bread smell, although, again, it wasn’t the sweet scent he was used to. From the direction of the horses came the smell of torn grass. All around, the faint and bitter smell of leaves turning.
Finally, the last of his aches melted under the warmth of the blanket. He couldn’t help it; his body felt comfortable for the first time since he’d been put in the wagon, and even though he tried to fight it, between the remains of the drug and his relaxing body, he dozed. But it wasn’t restful, because there was a great and terrible gulf of loss between him and any real rest.
He couldn’t hear Dallen. He couldn’t hear Dallen. He was all alone in his head for the first time since he’d been Chosen, and only once in all his life had he felt so completely alone, abandoned, and in despair. That was when he had decided that he didn’t deserve Dallen and had tried to give up being Chosen.
It hadn’t worked, of course. But now—
It felt like a bitter betrayal. Not by Dallen! By his own body, perhaps. But he’d been promised, faithfully, that he would never be alone again. And now he was. And it was horrible.
He wept, silently, until he was so exhausted all there was left was sleep.
When he woke again, it was to snores; his eyes were sore, and his face itched from the tears dried on it. He itched all over, from the dried sweat. They hadn’t drugged him—he cautiously cracked an eye and turned his head a little to look toward the fire.
Redoubt: Book Four of the Collegium Chronicles (A Valdemar Novel) Page 19