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

he understood correctly—was to make things fair.
    Which made no sense.
    â€œBut life ain’t fair—” he protested, having heard that over and over again, with varying degrees of smugness on the part of the Pieters’ boys.
    :Why not?: Dallen asked, stopping him in his tracks.
    â€œBecause—because it ain’t!” was all he could come up with. It was true. Everyone knew it. Why try and go against what was true?
    :And the more people that say that, the more people there are who use that as their excuse to be cruel, mean, and ugly,:
    Dallen said implacably. :‘Life isn’t fair’ is nothing but an excuse people make to justify bad things they do. But why shouldn’t life be fair? What’s keeping it from being fair? Those same cruel, mean, and evil people. I think you understand that, Mags—maybe not in your head, but in your heart, which is more important. And the more people there are who try to make life fair, the more likely it is that it will become fair. Don’t you want that?:
    He had to admit that he did. And he had to admit that the idea of making life fair had a kind of thrill to it. Even if all he did was share a piece of bread . . .
    But all that was really too much to think about for very long. Even in his dreams, his attention came back to the basics, the simple things. And Dallen was perfectly willing, in his dream, to talk about those, too.
    Dallen chuckled with sympathy—but promised that he was never, ever going to be hungry again, or cold, or ill-clothed, or dirty. Mags could not quite understand how Dallen could be so very sure of this, but the memories that the Companion shared with him seemed to have no room in them for anything but belief. The idea that he could eat whenever he wanted, as much as he wanted . . . it was like one of those paradises that priest kept mouthing about, but which, of course, he did not believe in. But this, this was real. The soup, the bread had been real. The other food on the table had been real. The clothing they had given him, the bed he was sleeping in now, were real.
    And in the dream he came to realize something profound; with Dallen beside him, he would never be alone either. He had not realized how much of an aching hunger that filled until it was filled—it had been like a wound he’d had for so long that the pain no longer registered with him. It was like the time he had been so hungry that finally hunger ceased to have any meaning—and when he finally got food again, it came as a shock to understand how much he’d been starved. And here he had been starved all this time for something else as well. He couldn’t put a name to it, but he had been starved for it.
    As he groped his way to comprehending all this, Dallen promised he would make sure that Mags understood every little thing that puzzled him, no matter how long it took to explain it.
    And Mags began to accept that there was yet another underlying truth to everything that completely went against the way he had thought that the world was—that it was not he who was bad and wrong, it was those who had treated him and the other kiddies as they had. Master Cole and his family had had no justification for doing what they had done; in fact, there could be no justification, ever, for the way they had abused their workers and servants. This was a complete reversal of the world as he knew it. It went against absolutely everything he had taken for granted.
    â€œBut I’m Bad Blood—” he protested over and over, still finding it hard to accept that he had not, somehow, deserved his treatment at the mine. And every time he did, Dallen replied with profound scorn that there was no such thing as Bad Blood. Finally, he began to believe it, at least a little. And what he lacked in belief, Dallen made up for with the calm assurance that lay under everything. Finally, Mags just accepted the assurance without believing, and let Dallen