And in the dream he came to realize something profound; with Dallen beside him, he would never be alone either. He had not realized how much of an aching hunger that filled until it was filled—it had been like a wound he’d had for so long that the pain no longer registered with him. It was like the time he had been so hungry that finally hunger ceased to have any meaning—and when he finally got food again, it came as a shock to understand how much he’d been starved. And here he had been starved all this time for something else as well. He couldn’t put a name to it, but he had been starved for it.

As he groped his way to comprehending all this, Dallen promised he would make sure that Mags understood every little thing that puzzled him, no matter how long it took to explain it.

And Mags began to accept that there was yet another underlying truth to everything that completely went against the way he had thought that the world was—that it was not he who was bad and wrong, it was those who had treated him and the other kiddies as they had. Master Cole and his family had had no justification for doing what they had done; in fact, there could be no justification, ever, for the way they had abused their workers and servants. This was a complete reversal of the world as he knew it. It went against absolutely everything he had taken for granted.

“But I’m Bad Blood—” he protested over and over, still finding it hard to accept that he had not, somehow, deserved his treatment at the mine. And every time he did, Dallen replied with profound scorn that there was no such thing as Bad Blood. Finally, he began to believe it, at least a little. And what he lacked in belief, Dallen made up for with the calm assurance that lay under everything. Finally, Mags just accepted the assurance without believing, and let Dallen soothe him.

And that was when he woke up, to a room full of empty beds, the sun shining in through the real glass windows. In a bed, under warm blankets. Not cold. Not aching. With a kind of alert lassitude suffusing him, as if his body was saying, At last, now I can let go, stop being alert, stop being afraid. Now I can rest.

A sound at the door made him turn his head in time to see a brown-haired, stooped man in green tunic and trews come into the room and head straight for him. “So, the sleeper awakes, and hungry I hope?” the man said.