Valdemar 03 - [Collegium 01] - Foundation by Mercedes Lackey Page B

all his life had he encountered anyone with Dallen’s patience. He felt like such a dolt, but all those things in his head, they all were so strange, so completely divorced from anything he knew. He kept asking questions and often only got more confused. Finally Dallen stopped where he was in the imaginary landscape; the clouds billowed up about them and whited everything out, so that there was only himself and Dallen,
    Over and over, Dallen explained what it was that he was, what it was that Dallen was, and why it was important. “I may be a dolt,” Mags said once, hanging his head. “But it don’t seem real nor possible. How can I do all them grand things? How can you be talking like a human person?”
    And Dallen would begin all over again, explaining it a different way. Always, he was wrapped in that calm, which was a good thing, because it let him listen and try to understand without panicking.
    Slowly he began, if not to understand, at least to accept, though none of it made any sense by his lights. Nobody was getting anything out of this so far as he could see. Everything was about what a body got out of something. But the Companions got nothing out of this, and the Heralds, well, all right, they got to live better than Master Cole, but they had to work three times as hard for it. And all the sorting out of things that Heralds did, well, who got anything out of that? It was bewildering. And that was just looking at things the simple way . . . . When you went at it in a more complicated way, when you started wondering what Companions were, and how they could be as smart as a person, and where they came from and why they were doing all of this, well, it was just plain crazy. And if he had not been enveloped in that calm, he would have been sure he had actually gone mad, and none of this was happening.
    Finally Dallen went silent for a long time. :Chosen, when you gave Burd that piece of bread, why did you do it? You got nothing out of it except his gratitude.:
    That brought all Mags’ questions to a tumbling halt, because even he didn’t know why he’d done it. It wasn’t like the snitched food that might be bad, with everyone sharing it so nobody got too sick. That half slice of bread wasn’t going to make Burd strong enough to do his work and Mags’. And the lack of it wasn’t going to keep him from doing his own work. All right, maybe some time in the future, Burd might recall and do him a turn, but he might not. So why had he done it? It wasn’t the first time he’d shared with one of the others either . . . generally the littlest or weakest. Then, of course, he’d had to go all hard on them so that they wouldn’t think they could depend on him—but he’d felt bad when he did that, too.
    â€œ ’Cause . . .” he began, struggling with his own thoughts. “Because . . . it weren’t fair. They put him in a played-out seam, how’d they expect him t’ find sparklies there? Then they take away his bread ’cause he don’t. They knowed he weren’t shirking. They knowed he weren’t hiding sparklies. It weren’t fair. They was takin’ away what he shoulda had outa pure meanness. An’ there weren’t nothin’ he could do about it neither.”
    :That is why we do all of it, Chosen,: Dallen said with immense pride. :We try to make things fair.:
    Such a strange thought. Such a very strange thought. But it made a kind of equally strange sense.
    Slowly he pieced together what Dallen was trying to tell him. That he had been picked out by Dallen to do this thing, because there was something in him that made him right for a task that was going to last a lifetime. That the something was partly what made him give Burd that bread—and many other kindnesses he had done for the other kiddies. That was the complex matter on which all the rest of it rested. It seemed that what he was trying to do—if