“’M a thief, sir,” he said, half defiantly. “Tha’s what I do.” He thought about adding any number of qualifying statements—that it had been a better choice than working for his uncle, that no one had offered him any other sort of employment and he had to eat; even that if Bazie hadn’t been around to take him in and train him, he’d probably be dead now and not Chosen. But he kept all of those things to himself. For some reason, the clever retorts he had didn’t seem all that clever at the moment.

The shorter man sighed. “I suppose you’re expecting me to give you an ineffective and stuffy lecture about how you are supposed to be a new person and you can’t go on doing that sort of thing anymore now that you’re a Trainee.”

Skif stopped looking at his toes and instead glanced up, startled, at the speaker. “Uh—you’re not?”

“You are not stupid,” the man said, and smiled faintly, though his tone sounded weary. “If you’ve already played over that particular lecture in your mind, then I will skip it and get to the point. I am Dean Elcarth. I am in charge of Herald’s Collegium. The moment you entered the gate here, so far as we are concerned, whatever you were or did before you arrived here became irrelevant. You were Chosen. The Companions don’t make mistakes. There must be the makings of a Herald in you. Therefore you are welcome. But when you get in trouble, and you will, because sooner or later at least half of our Trainees get in trouble, please remember that what you do reflects on the rest of us as well, and Heralds are not universally beloved among a certain faction of the highborn. The others will give you the details as they see fit, but the sum of what I have to say is that you are supposed to be part of a solution, not part of a problem, and I hope we can show you why in such a way that you actually feel that in your deepest heart.”