Bastion

Last night Bear and Lena had probably done some similar things and stayed up later than usual.
    Bear in particular. He probably would have had stories to tell Lena about some of the rare and imported herbs he’d gotten. He always talked to vendors, every chance he got, because one of the things he was always telling Mags was “No knowledge is ever wasted.” Lena might well have garnered some inspiration from those stories. If she did, well, he knew her; she would be up half the night writing down the bones of a new song. And even if she wasn’t inspired right that moment, Bear was constitutionally incapable of telling a brief story.
    Even without the Fair yesterday, it was only even odds that Bear and Lena would be up at the same time he was. Mags was almost always one of the first people in the dining hall in the morning. And when he wasn’t, it was generally because he had kitchen duty that morning, and ate there with the rest of the helpers.
    In his opinion, sleeping late was overrated. He much preferred being the proverbial early bird, because in this case, it wasn’t a nasty worm he got but the first of the breakfast dishes straight out of the kitchen, so fresh that you couldn’t eat bites without blowing on them. It was lovely getting biscuits or bread still hot from the ovens so that the butter melted in them and soaked into them, and the first round of whatever was on the menu was always better than the later ones.
    It was also going to be a good thing for him to be done early. Like him, Dean Caelen was an early riser, and Mags was going to have to find out what classes he was in and how he was going to catch up with them.
    He wasn’t looking forward to that part. The Dean couldn’t have anything but bad news for him.
    Because he was fortnights behind everyone else, thanks to being dragged across two countries drugged and semiconscious. There was going to be a hellish amount of catching up, and there wasn’t going to be a choice.
    He finished his meal, helped himself to some biscuits and bacon and made little tasty sandwiches of them, wrapped them all in a napkin, and took them with him as an incentive to the Dean to be easy with him.
    As he had expected, the Dean was already in his office, which was on the third floor of the Collegium, right next to the library. As he had not expected, the office was . . . clean. There were no stacks of books, no piles of papers. The desk was a little untidy, but there was room to work on it, and there were several places for visitors to sit. He stood in the doorway and stared, open-mouthed, until the Dean looked up and saw him there.
    Dean Caelen, a plain brown-haired, brown-eyed, mild-mannered man, smiled self-consciously. “I was told by Princess Lydia that I was getting an assistant and I was not going to be allowed to say no,” he said wryly. “I resented it at first, but now I don’t know what I would do without the lad. Come in, Mags, I’ve been expecting you.”
    Mags put his wrapped biscuits on a bare spot on the desk and waited.
    The Dean didn’t reach for them, as he normally would have. “I know this is going to sound very odd to you, but . . . I don’t have classes for you yet.”
    “What?” Mags said, startled. “Why not?”
    “The general feeling is that we want you to stay out of classes for now, while we assess you, assess what you have discovered, and decide what to do with you.”
    Before Mags could react to that startling statement, the Dean was continuing. “Nikolas and some of the other senior Heralds basically want you to themselves for a while, several days at least. They are adept at extracting information people didn’t even know they had, and you are, at the moment, a veritable treasure trove of information, not only about the people that took you but also the Karsites. In short, a very valuable source of intelligence. So I wouldn’t be able to put you into classes anyway, not right away.”
    What could he say but “Yes, sir, of course”? Although he normally would not have minded having a day or two when he wasn’t frantically trying to catch up with everyone else, at this point he was so far behind that his first real reaction was resentment. It seemed horribly unfair—here he was, behind everyone in classes, through no fault of his own, and being forced to lag even farther.
    “Mags, I know what you must be thinking,” the Dean said placatingly. “But think a little further. Younglings come in all the time as