Valdemar 03 - [Collegium 01] - Foundation by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online

kiddies, one of the servants or miners, or a member of the Pieters family.
    And now this stranger was taking him away—somewhere. Where? Why?
    Well, he hadn’t bound Mags to the horse like a criminal so he couldn’t escape, though right now, Mags wouldn’t have minded a few ropes tying him on. . . .
    This was mad. He’d have been certain that he was going mad, except that there was no way he could have been making all this up in his own head.
    His stomach was a tight, cold, little knot of fear, there was another icy knot of fear in his throat, every muscle ached from holding on so tightly, and yet he was too terrified to let go even a little bit. All he could do was hang on and endure and hope it ended soon, and that it didn’t end with him falling off and breaking his neck.
    And then, as suddenly as the ride had begun—it ended. He felt the horse start to slow, then stop, and his eyes flew open.
    But he hadn’t even begun to take in his surroundings when the man grabbed him as Pieters had, by the scruff of the neck, and hauled him off the horse. At least, though, the man caught him before he fell, and lowered him easily enough to the ground, even if it was at arm’s length. But he was wearing white . . . and Mags suddenly realized with an odd sense of shame that he was dirty enough to soil the fellow just by what he shed.
    The man pushed Mags ahead of him into a building three or four times larger than the Big House, and terrifyingly grand looking, all clean and bright and polished, so much so that suddenly Mags realized just how shabby and neglected the Big House was by sheer contrast. It was two stories tall, made of timber-framed stone all rounded and smooth-polished, and not sharp-edged like the stuff chipped out of a mine, showing all the hundreds of colors that existed in the simple word tan. There was glass in all the windows, and Mags knew how ruinously expensive that was, because of the howl that had been sent up when one of the Pieters’ boys had shied a rock at something and hit a window instead.
    Mags was certain they were just going to go around to the stable or some other outbuilding, where the man would hand him over to someone else, and . . .
    But no. The man marched him right in the big front door, all polished wood with shiny brass fittings to it.
    And then they were surrounded by people. Well, maybe not surrounded, but there were five or six of them at least, and they were all big, all muscled, and all . . .
    . . . all in Guard blue.
    Now Mags had never actually seen anyone in a Guard uniform before, but they’d been described to him often enough, and with great relish, as one or another Pieters would tell him exactly how the Guard would come to take him one day, how they would tie him up and throw him in a cart and carry him off to be locked up in a dark dungeon until the black beetles ate him because he was Bad Blood and he was going to prove it, inevitably. Or maybe they would just take him and lock him up on a preemptive basis. Because one day he might do something awful.
    His knees went to water, and his insides, and it was a good thing he hadn’t eaten yet because he would have vomited it all up on their shiny, shiny boots. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even really hear for the hammering of his heartbeat in his ears, and he didn’t resist at all as they half-carried him out of that little room at the front and off away to some other room—he couldn’t tell where, they passed so many rooms, with so many people in uniforms in them, only it was a long way from the front. All he grasped was that the floor was all polished wood and the walls were all whitewashed and the place smelled like leather and soap and the oil you used on metal things to keep them from rusting.
    A door opened to a wave of steam and more odors of the sort that he had only vaguely whiffed on laundry day in the spring when everything was washed, and