“I take it no one ever taught ye your numbers as well as your letters, boy?” he said. He was the oldest person that Mags had ever seen; his hair was snow white, and his face as full of wrinkles as the bark of a tree. His eyes could scarcely be seen, but there was a bright look to them, like a bird’s eye. And Mags did not “hear” anything at all amiss in the thoughts that ticked away in his head like the regular dripping of water on stone. Numbers—this man thought mostly in numbers. He loved them, loved the patterns they made, loved the pure logic that governed them, loved that three and three always made six, never four, never seven.

Mags shook his head.

“Well then, ’tis time to learn, and as I’ve time meself, I’ll teach ye. Pull up yon stool.” He nodded at a tall stool in the corner. Mags obeyed.

The man pulled open a drawer in his desk and extracted a piece of slate and a square-cut stick of white stuff. “Ye’ll be usin’ this; ’tis slate an chalk. ’Tis easy rubbed out, y’ see?” He made a mark and buffed it away with a sleeve. “Now, ye kin count right enough, aye?”

“To a hunner’ sir,” Mags almost whispered.

“Right enough. Well, there’s marks for them numbers, just as there be marks that make letters that make words. On’y these be a bit more straightforward, belike. This be ‘one’. . . .”

Mags caught on quickly. And although he had not realized it until the man—who he learned was Guard-Clerk Sergeant Taver—showed him, he did know some primitive reckoning. After all, he had to keep track of the sparklies he found. He took to the figuring quickly, learning how to add and subtract double-digit numbers by the end of the afternoon, much to Sergeant Taver’s delight. It was Taver who took him in to supper that night, in fact, and much enjoyed letting the “dunderheads” know that already the “wee boy” could outreckon no few of them.

He shook his finger at one particular young man who had pulled his head so far down into his collar that he looked like a turtle. “An’ the next time, Brion, ye come t’ me an’ tell me thet th’ two dozen socks ye been issued adds up t’ twenty, I’ll have him come an’ count ’em aright for ye!”

Mags was fearful then that the Guard would take it hard, and be angry with him. Yet as the others laughed, he grew crimson but laughed with them, and Mags sensed nothing more in his thoughts than chagrin and a determination to count more carefully next time.

Sheer astonishment left him dumb through the rest of the meal—but since silence on his part was a more common occurrence than speech, no one really noticed.