He made a mental note of it. Interesting. He knew what Bards were, of course, but he had never seen one, much less heard one. Something more to look into.

He ignored the boy in blue, but once it was clear that Alberich wasn’t going to single him out for attention, the boy watched him with a kind of speculation in his eyes. Alberich wondered if rumor had already begun to spread that the dreaded Karsite Trainee was one and the same with Dethor’s new Weapons Second.

:It has,: Kantor confirmed. :Although I don’t know that he would have heard it yet; the youngsters from your first class are beginning to put two and two together. I suspect that it will be one of the main topics of conversation over dinner. Certainly, by nightfall the whole Collegium will know.:

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t stay there. And once it got out into the Court, the nobles and the rest who hung about here, well, things were likely to get very interesting.

:Things are interesting now,: Kantor said.

If Alberich had been a stag, he’d have thrown up his head and sniffed the breeze at that, trying to find the scent of trouble. The statement boded no good, no matter what language it was spoken in.

:Just what does that mean?: he thought probingly at Kantor.

:I’ll tell you later,: Kantor promised. But that was all that the Companion would say, and eventually Alberich gave up trying to extract something from him.

Easier to pound sense into a foolish Trainee. So Alberich set about doing just that.

But it was going to be a long afternoon.

5

5

The sunset outside the sitting-room window made a fine backdrop for the meal that another servant had brought them. There were not too many different ways that one could roast a pig, nor stew apples in honey, and beans were beans no matter what you did to them, so at least this dinner had not left Alberich with that particularly odd feeling of dislocation when flavors he expected weren’t there.

“A remarkable first day,” Dethor said, with more than a hint of satisfaction. “Hand me those plates, would you?”

Alberich handed over the stack of soiled plates, and Dethor packed them neatly in a straw container like the one that their dinner had come in. The servant that had appeared just after darkness fell waited patiently to take it away; the clean plates it contained, evidently meant for tomorrow (so that was where they came from!), were already stowed in Dethor’s sitting-room cupboard.

Alberich could only shrug. “And I would know this, how?” he asked logically.