Well, he hadn’t bound Mags to the horse like a criminal so he couldn’t escape, though right now, Mags wouldn’t have minded a few ropes tying him on ....
This was mad. He’d have been certain that he was going mad, except that there was no way he could have been making all this up in his own head.
His stomach was a tight, cold, little knot of fear, there was another icy knot of fear in his throat, every muscle ached from holding on so tightly, and yet he was too terrified to let go even a little bit. All he could do was hang on and endure and hope it ended soon, and that it didn’t end with him falling off and breaking his neck.
And then, as suddenly as the ride had begun—it ended. He felt the horse start to slow, then stop, and his eyes flew open.
But he hadn’t even begun to take in his surroundings when the man grabbed him as Pieters had, by the scruff of the neck, and hauled him off the horse. At least, though, the man caught him before he fell, and lowered him easily enough to the ground, even if it was at arm’s length. But he was wearing white ... and Mags suddenly realized with an odd sense of shame that he was dirty enough to soil the fellow just by what he shed.
The man pushed Mags ahead of him into a building three or four times larger than the Big House, and terrifyingly grand looking, all clean and bright and polished, so much so that suddenly Mags realized just how shabby and neglected the Big House was by sheer contrast. It was two stories tall, made of timber-framed stone all rounded and smooth-polished, and not sharp-edged like the stuff chipped out of a mine, showing all the hundreds of colors that existed in the simple word tan. There was glass in all the windows, and Mags knew how ruinously expensive that was, because of the howl that had been sent up when one of the Pieters’ boys had shied a rock at something and hit a window instead.
Mags was certain they were just going to go around to the stable or some other outbuilding, where the man would hand him over to someone else, and ...
But no. The man marched him right in the big front door, all polished wood with shiny brass fittings to it.
And then they were surrounded by people. Well, maybe not surrounded, but there were five or six of them at least, and they were all big, all muscled, and all ...
... all in Guard blue.
Now Mags had never actually seen anyone in a Guard uniform before, but they’d been described to him often enough, and with great relish, as one or another Pieters would tell him exactly how the Guard would come to take him one day, how they would tie him up and throw him in a cart and carry him off to be locked up in a dark dungeon until the black beetles ate him because he was Bad Blood and he was going to prove it, inevitably. Or maybe they would just take him and lock him up on a preemptive basis. Because one day he might do something awful.
His knees went to water, and his insides, and it was a good thing he hadn’t eaten yet because he would have vomited it all up on their shiny, shiny boots. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even really hear for the hammering of his heartbeat in his ears, and he didn’t resist at all as they half-carried him out of that little room at the front and off away to some other room—he couldn’t tell where, they passed so many rooms, with so many people in uniforms in them, only it was a long way from the front. All he grasped was that the floor was all polished wood and the walls were all whitewashed and the place smelled like leather and soap and the oil you used on metal things to keep them from rusting.
A door opened to a wave of steam and more odors of the sort that he had only vaguely whiffed on laundry day in the spring when everything was washed, and it was very hot and very light in there. He could scarcely see for the steam. And the next thing he knew, they had stripped all his rags off him (which wasn’t hard, since they went to pieces at a tug), picked him up, and dumped him in a huge thing like the horse trough full of water. He opened his mouth to yell at the cold, only it wasn’t cold, it was hot, and the yell didn’t come out anyway.
Then two more men, big burly fellows with their sleeves rolled up, took some yellowish soap and a couple of brushes like those he used to use scrubbing the kitchen floor. And then they went to work scrubbing him like the kitchen floor. They tsked over his hair and whacked it all off with a big shears before scrubbing his head.
He was so stunned by this turn of events he didn’t even squeak. Not even when they stood him up and took cloths and scrubbed at his jakko. Not that there was anything like poke-and-tickle, it was like they were scrubbing a sheep or something. It was a good thing he had a tough hide, because they scrubbed at him like they were not going to be happy until they got at least half his skin off. They pulled him out of the water, dumped out the first batch, and left him there shivering for a bit while they filled the big pan again and started all over again.
It took them one more round of water before they were satisfied. By then he was feeling very peculiar, more naked than being without clothes, and tingly all over from the brushes. His skin was a color he’d never seen it before, like one of the Pieters girls, only pinker. His hair, what they’d left of it after shearing most of it off, felt very strange and light. They trimmed off all his nails short, or rather, the fellow that did the hair cutting did. They let him towel himself dry with a piece of cloth big enough to use as a blanket by his standards, and then they shoved clothing at him to put on.
New clothing, near as he could tell. It wasn’t white, nor blue, but seemed a bit of odds and ends, most of it too big. but he rolled up sleeves and trews and shoved his feet first into thick warm stockings so soft he almost cried, and then into soft boots that tied up around the foot and leg like the plaited bags he made for winter, only better fitting and a lot stronger.
And then they marched him out again, out to the man in white, who stood by the back door with one of the white horses beside him. He looked up speechlessly at the man. who did not appear angry now, only somewhat resigned and weary and with a good deal of some emotion Mags couldn’t identify.
“Well,” he said, finally. “Here’s your Companion, boy. You haven’t raised your eyes to look at him yet, so do so now. And I hope for his sake you aren’t as feebleminded as you seem to be.”
And with that, he took Mags’ chin in his thumb and forefinger, shoved his head up and over to the side, and Mags looked into the face of the horse, and into eyes bluer than the bluest sky, the bluest water, the bluest sparkly that Mags had ever seen ...
He fell into those eyes. No, he dove into them. Here was something he’d been starving for, and never knew it. Here was love, warmth, and welcome. Here was everything he had ever wanted.
Here was his Companion. His. For now, and forever.
:Hello, Mags.:. The simple words in his mind gave no indication of the sheer force of welcome behind them. :Oh, my poor Chosen, you are so bewildered!:
And then came a flood of information that poured easily from Dallen’s mind into his, like water into an empty vessel. Or into a dried-up pond after a rain. What a Companion was, and what a Herald was. What they did. Their place in the world, and what the world itself, this Valdemar was all about. What he would be doing for the next several years. He understood, most immediately now, what his “Gift” was—Mindspeech—and that it meant he could speak without words to whoever also had that same Gift, and to some who did not—that he could read the thoughts of others, if he exerted himself, as easily as he read his letters. He knew now that he’d had this thing, this Gift, for the last two years, and it hadn’t been whispering he’d been overhearing from others; it had been that when he tried to hear what they were saying, he heard it straight from their minds. In the mine, when he’d stolen to the mouths of tunnels, in the sleeping hole when someone had muttered in their sleep. Dallen showed him in that moment the rudiments of how to use that Gift, and how to control it, and promised there would be others who would teach him mastery of it. All of this was filling up his empty head until he was quite sure it was going to overflow, and then ... it stopped.