: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.

He blinked, coming back to himself, and feeling a strange . . . calm . . . overlying everything. He had never felt quite like this before. Underneath it was still the terror, but right now it was the calm that was in control. That calm came straight from Dallen, who was a stick to lean on, a shoulder, a support until he could deal with all of this by himself.

He didn’t understand more than a fraction of what had been poured into him; it was all so foreign to what he knew life was supposed to be like that he might have been standing among moon-creatures. But he also knew that, eventually, he would understand. That, too, was part of the calm.

:Time to pay attention to the rest of the world, Chosen,: Dallen said with an overtone of amusement. :Otherwise they are going to think that I have stolen your mind away.:

He blinked, and fell out of the entrancement as easily as he had fallen in, staggering a little at the abrupt transition, and looked around to find that he and Dallen were surrounded by a ring of people, all watching them closely.