:I will help you with the others,: Dallen promised. :Now don’t be afraid of the pages. They will withstand being turned, they are are tougher than they look. Go ahead.:

He took a seat on one of the benches, with the weak, but warm sunlight pouring over his back and licked his lips, then plunged in.

Slowly, sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word, Mags began to read his first book.

It was harder work than he thought, but it was also engrossing, once he realized that this book was telling a story. Of course, he didn’t understand a lot of it, because it talked about things that were so foreign to his life, but Dallen helped by giving him mental images of what was going on. It was . . . magical. That was the only possible word for it. Here he was, puzzling out a story that someone else had told, someone who probably lived a very long way away from here, and every person that picked up this book would get to learn the same story.

He got so involved in it that when a bell sounded through the building, he jumped. He didn’t yelp. Yelping got you hit. But he was genuinely startled, and he sat there for a moment with his heart racing, wondering if he had somehow done something wrong and triggered an alarm.

:That is the bell for noon meal,: Dallen informed him merrily, taking no notice of his panic. And his stomach rumbled. He was so used to being hungry that it hadn’t registered with him. But his stomach had gotten two good, big meals so far, and it wanted another.

He could find his way around a mine, so it was not hard now to remember his way back to the mess hall. But even if he had not known how to get there, the stream of Guards all going in one direction would have given him the clue. This time the room was full of men, and he wondered what it was he should do and where he should go.

But one of the young men spotted him, no doubt because in his ordinary, if over-large clothing, he stood out among the blue uniforms like a rock on a snowdrift. The fellow steered him over to a table, and consulted with someone who was bringing platters of food around.

And that man returned with another big bowl of soup and a half a loaf of bread. “Healer’s orders, Trainee,” the man said, putting both in front of him. “Soup fer you, he sez, till ye be used ta eaten regular. Mebbe some cheese an’ fruit. An’ no beer for ye. I’ll bring the tea, foreby.”