Bastion

luck started to change as soon as they left the town and headed back toward The Bastion.
    It was a glorious morning, if cold. There was a heavy hoarfrost coating everything, which was pretty enough but made Mags more than glad for the fur-lined winter cloak that Princess Lydia had insisted he have as a present from her. The sun beamed down from overhead; they’d wanted to give the others a good head start and had decided to stay long enough to have luncheon. People waved them out of town, and Mags’ spirits at least were high.
    When they were into the forest, Mags happened to glance back at the unusual sound a bird made, and what he saw behind them through the skeletal branches of the trees made a chill go down his spine.
    “Jakyr!” he said urgently, as Dallen whipped his head around to see what had alarmed him. “Behind us! Blizzard!”
    Jakyr swiveled in his saddle and saw what Mags had seen: charcoal-gray clouds on the horizon, looming closer with every moment.
    “Do you carry some sort of blizzard attractor?” Jakyr asked, in mingled irritation and alarm. “I swear, every time you and I go anywhere in winter, there’s a blizzard. Never mind, time to move. It’s a damn good thing the others started so early this morning!”
    As Dallen and Jermayan went from an easy lope into a full-out gallop, Mags had to wonder if Jakyr was right. Blizzards certainly did seem to play a large part in his life—far larger than he liked, to tell the truth.
    There had been the early one that had nearly caught them on the way to Haven when Jakyr had first rescued him, for instance. That blizzard, like this one, had caught them on the road. They’d barely made it to the Guardpost they were aiming for and had been snowed in there for two days. Then, later that same year, there had been the blizzard that lasted three whole days, shut down all of Haven for a solid week, and had kept it under snow for a good long time after that. He’d been caught at the stable and had nearly died trying to get from his stable room to the Collegium in the teeth of it. If it hadn’t been for having Dallen in his head, he probably would have just given up, laid himself down in the snow, and that would have been the end of it.
    On the other hand, that blizzard had been very useful to him. That was when he’d first really used his Mindspeaking Gift and had found out how powerful it was. With people scattered among all the buildings on the Hill, and no way to effectively and quickly communicate with them, there was no way to tell whether everyone had made it into safety. He’d volunteered to “look” for people who might have gotten trapped between buildings up on the Hill, for there was always the possibility that some of them had not realized how powerful and deadly the storm was until it was too late. He’d found five people that way, with Dallen’s help. It had been easy, really, easier than raising shields in the first place had been.
    And that was when the true scope of his power had been uncovered. He, it seemed, could Mindspeak to anyone and Mindhear anyone. That was, so they kept telling him, incredibly rare.
    That was also how he had found Bear when the assassins kidnapped the Healer.
    They hadn’t come there—in disguise as envoys—for that purpose, of course. No one had any idea there was such a thing as an entire clan of killers, killers who wore some sort of talisman that both guarded them from Mind-magic and would murder them if it thought they had been caught.
    All anyone knew was that they came from somewhere no Valdemaran was even remotely familiar with.
    He knew now that they had all taken a contract from Karse to disrupt or even cause the overthrow of the Valdemaran monarchy, but no one had known that at the time. All that was certain was that they had come to spy and perhaps make trouble; but more by accident than design, he and some of the other Trainees had managed to uncover the fact that they were frauds and scare them out.
    He also knew now why the assassins had taken that contract in the first place—it helped them finance their quest to try to find Mags’ parents. Mags’ foreign parents, who had been murdered by the same bandit band that had lived for so long in The Bastion. Mags’ parents, who, it seemed had been members of the assassin clan and had fled so fast and so far that even the best of their kind hadn’t been able to stop them.
    The assassins hadn’t actually been looking for Mags. They