“Now,” the Weaponsmaster said, his voice firm, but not quite so hard. “I am most put out that Caelen didn’t tell me about you yesterday. Evidently, it didn’t occur to him that I needed to know you hadn’t set your hand to anything in an offensive capacity in your life. This is not altogether bad; you won’t have to unlearn anything. I trust you are not going to be upset because I set you to work with a singlestick instead of a sword?”

Since Mags only knew what a singlestick was because the image of one obligingly appeared in his mind courtesy of Dallen, he shook his head dumbly.

“Good. I expect you’ll be working with it for some time to come.” The Weaponsmaster drew him farther over to the side of the room, where there was a padded pole, and handed him a thick, straight stick as long as his hand and forearm, picking up another himself. “Now, watch me, and do as I do.”

It was not the most exciting thing Mags had ever done, hitting the pole in places where the padding had been marked with red paint, over and over and over in a series of repetitive patterns. In fact, it was not much worse for boredom than chipping sparklies. But all that careful chipping had given him pretty good control over where and how hard he hit things, and the Weaponsmaster seemed pleased enough with him. Most importantly, to Mags’ mind, he had not been required to do anything that involved raising his hand to another person. A big pole, he could hit, and not have the sense that he was going to be punished for it. Especially when he took care to not think of the pole as anything other than a pole. He was mostly hitting it in the right places when they all broke up to go off for riding lessons.

The riding lessons, however, began with saddling lessons. Mags was altogether shocked to discover that Beren and Lyr were utterly clueless about how to put on any of the tack. Couldn’t their Companions tell them?

:Ah, actually, no,: Dallen replied, at Mags’ mental query. :Not everyone has Mindspeech. Certainly not as clear as you share with me. No, Beren Fetches and Lyr is a FarSeer, which does very little for him being able to put on a saddle. And until their Companions turned up, neither of them had ever seen anything larger than a goat.:

Well . . . that was interesting. Through Dallen, he had a good idea of what a Fetcher and a FarSeer did. It occurred to him that if the kiddies had had such talents among them, they could have lived a great deal better.