“Here! Euston!” the Herald had called. “This lad has the patterns down, so come show him how the patterns become fighting!”

A young man with bright red hair, dressed in the Bardic Trainee rust, disengaged from his current practice partner and came straight over to Mags. Without saying a single word, he simply saluted Mags with the “blade,” and launched straight into an attack.

Mags reacted without thinking, getting his guard up in time and deflecting the blows. Before he knew it, he was bouting with the Bardic Trainee, a boy who gave no quarter, nor asked for any, and he was too busy defending himself to think about how it was all wrong to be holding, and using, a weapon.

Maybe the fact that he himself had never been punished for using anything weaponlike was the reason why this fear broke down so quickly. After all, he had never even given the Pieters boys so much as a threatening look. But as he got used to the feel of the thing in his hand, those fears and inhibitions melted away. Having a weapon made him feel as powerful as being on Dallen’s back. Being able to use it made him feel more confident that no one would be able to treat him as Master Cole had, ever again.

And his aptitude for weapons work was no more of an illusion than his aptitude for riding. His body seemed to have a better memory for things than his mind; he only had to be shown something once to be able to do it himself. It felt like a kind of magic, but the Weaponsmaster said that it was just a natural thing that some people had. It certainly explained why he had been so skilled at harvesting sparklies.

Today the Weaponsmaster took him aside and actually put him to drilling some of the others at his old friend, the padded pole, which he now knew was called a “pells.” And the two he was asked to help were—Beren and Lyr. The poor fellows were as clumsy with their wooden batons as a pair of puppies. Mags felt horribly sorry for them, for they were clearly feeling terribly humiliated, and he did his earnest best to get them sorted out.

They actually made a little progress by the time the Weaponsmaster dismissed them all—they were at least not smacking each other anymore—and as usual, Mags did his best to fade into insignificance in the rush to get to the bathing rooms and then to the eating hall. He generally slipped off to his own room to get a change of clothing and set the place to rights before getting his bath. Such precautions meant he had the bathing room to himself and after the drubbing he had gotten at the unskilled hands of Beren and Lyr he needed the soak in hot water to ease his bruises.