Mercedes Lackey - Changes

And why one of them thought he recognized me . . .

A trace of that uneasy thought must have crept across to Dallen. ::You do know that this could all have a very, very simple explanation, don’t you?::

He blinked. ::An’ what’d thet be?::

::Mistaken identity. They do say that everyone in the world has a twin somewhere. Perhaps he knew your “twin.”:: Mags sensed Dallen’s mental “shrug.” ::The simplest explanation is generally the correct one.::

::Mebbe... :: But Mags didn’t really believe it. No, there was something more going on there . . .

But worrying at it was not going to solve it right now either. More interesting was that Nikolas was going to set the two of them up together, and that he had openly called him a “partner” in front of the others.

This... this was amazing. Yet, at the same time, it woke old aches. He knew one reason why Nikolas had chosen him for this life—it was because he had no family. If he vanished, there would be no repercussions, as there would be if, say, he were highborn or had other connections that could cause complications. The few people who knew him on sight would not let it slip if they saw him in an unexpected place, or out of uniform—not like someone with a hundred cousins who might bump into him and accost him loudly and publicly. There was no one that he could let things inadvertently slip to who didn’t already know what he was doing.

He had no ties, no loyalties,except to the Heralds, who had saved him from what would have been a very short life of starvation, privation, and pain in the gem mines. He was related to no one in Valdemar, owed no one else anything, and no one owed him. He was the orphan child of two young people who didn’t even speak the language and who had been murdered by bandits. The few things that had been left offered no clues as to their land of origin.

He could not have been more perfect to be trained as a spy if Nikolas had gone out and arranged it all himself.

And that was the ache. Although he made jokes about how he preferred being an orphan, the truth was, when he saw people who were happy in their families—Master Soren and his niece Lydia, Nikolas and Amily—he was raw with envy. Family brought along baggage, but it also gave support of a sort he’d never had . . .

Except for Dallen . . .

Stop whingin’ ’bout what ye cain’t change, he scolded himself. Jest think; yer folks coulda been like Bear’s. Or they coulda hated Heralds.

Oh, his head knew that. But his gut, now... his gut knew what it wanted. Like salt-hunger, meat-hunger, this was family-hunger. In his rare moments of quiet thought, it always came back to him. What had his parents been like? Would they be proud of him now, or horrified by him? Had they been running from something? What? What kind of blood ran in his veins? What would he have been like if he’d had a real family, a mother and a father? Surely he had actual blood relations somewhere... if only he could figure out where they were . . .

Shet it, he told his gut sternly. Mind whut they say. “Be careful what ye ast fer, yer like t’get it, an’ in the wust possible way..”

There was no point in looking for trouble. Trouble was all too inclined to come looking for him.

::Wake up, layabout!::

Mags came awake all at once, the legacy of the years when you woke just before the kick came, so you could roll out of the way and pop up on your feet. ::Wha—hey?:: he replied, sitting straight up in bed and swinging his legs over to the floor before he was able to form a coherent thought. ::Whut’s th’ ’mergency?::

::No emergency. Rolan just told me what you and Nikolas will be doing. He and Nikolas want you to be thinking about what you believe you’ll need, based on when you were playing the blind beggar down in Haven. He’s already got an identity as a fellow who deals openly in second-hand goods, who is secretly something they call a “fence.” That’s someone who takes in stolen goods and gets rid of them where no one knows they’re stolen, or sells them in turn to someone who’ll take them so far away the theft won’t be known. You’ll be his son.::

::Tell ’im I reckin I should be deef,:: he answered promptly. ::I be good at holdin’ m’tongue, an’ I kin make whatever signs an’ Mindspeak whut I’m s’posed t’hev said straight to ’im. An people’ll talk free ’round me, thinkin’ I cain’t hear ’em.::

::I’ll tell them. If you can think of anything else, tell me. Nikolas wants to start tonight. These fence people usually don’t work until after the sun goes down.::

Huh. Takin’ in stolen stuff. Guess thet’ll be whut brings Guards an’ Constables, an’ I reckon we’ll be passin’ ’em whut we learn. Mebbe they’ll be passin’ whut they do. It sounded as if he was going to be doing without sleep for a while. Well, worse things had happened than a little lost sleep.

He washed up and pulled on his uniform. Nikolas hadn’t said anything about skipping classes. ::Heyla, Dallen. ’Mind Nikolas thet I knows sparklies. Thet’d be th’ reason for why ’e keeps me ‘’bout.::

::Oh! Good idea.::

He began mentally calculating what it was going to take to pull this off. Fortunately that exhibition game of Kirball was the last the teams would play this season. It was just too hot to play in that open field in all the armor and padding. Practice and games would resume in the fall, when it was cooler.

::And Herald Caelen wants to see you about your class schedule.::

::Now?:: he asked in surprise.

::After breakfast.::

Well, that was interesting. Perhaps he had better postpone making plans until after he heard what Caelen had in store for him.

Back at the mines, he’d loved and hated summer in equal measure. Hated it, because the longer days meant longer work. Loved it, because at least he wasn’t freezing all the time, when he could snatch a free moment there were things you could eat to be grubbed up out of the woods, fields, and stream, and because even he, miserable creature that he had been, was able to see the breathtaking beauty in a summer morning.

Now he was well fed, healthy, and—yes—happy. And a walk up from Companion’s Stable to the dining hall on a perfect summer morning was enough to make him want to sing. Not that he would. He would never shatter the quiet, full of birdsong and the scent of fresh grass and the flowers up in the gardens, with something that sounded like a mule in pain. There were many things that Mags knew he did well. Singing was definitely not one of them.

The Waking Bell rang as he reached the dining hall, but breakfast began there before the bell sounded. Plenty of people other than the Trainees ate here, and many of them started their day at dawn. He was, as usual, one of the first in the hall; he sat down at an empty table and ate neatly and quickly. Whatever it was that Caelen wanted to tell him, it had to be important, or he would never have had Dallen relay the order to him at a moment when most of the Trainees weren’t even up yet.

He never ate so quickly that he wolfed down his food without tasting it, however. He had gone for so long eating what most of the folk in this building would consider not even fit for pigs that he never missed an opportunity to actually savor what he ate. And give a little silent thanks that he was getting it in the first place.

Just as the first of the Trainees began to trickle in, looking a bit rumpled and still sleepy, he was finished. He took his dishes to the hatch and ran down the hall and up the stairs to Caelan’s office. The door was already standing open, and the Dean was putting away a stack of books. Like Mags, the Dean of Heraldic Collegium began his day early.