Redoubt Read Free

of the drugs they had poured
     into her, she would never be able to escape from them on her own. Not a day went by
     that he didn’t berate himself for not being there when she had been kidnapped. Because
     of his Gift, he would have
known
that the carriage sent for her was not the right one. He would never have let her
     get into it.
    Just as bad was the fact that he had been within inches of catching the carriage,
     and he and Dallen had been neatly knocked senseless.
    It had been the worst day of his life.
    “The fewer people who think I’m some kind of hero when I ain’t, the better,” he said
     shortly. “I’m just Mags. Let’s leave it at that. No, the Trainees are havin’ a stable
     party. I thought we’d go there.”
    “Oh!” she exclaimed happily. “I love stable parties!”
    “It’s going to be in the hayloft,” he told her, as people managed to clear away from
     the way they wanted to go, and Dallen turned his head and ambled in that direction.
     It was almost as bright as day up here, but down at the stable, things were a little
     more subdued, at least from this side. It
was
lit up, but it looked no different from any other early evening. “Stablemaster took
     the opportunity to clear the place out down to the bare floor, since we were going
     to have to feed all the visitors’ mounts anyway. Once they’re gone, he’ll bring in
     the first of this year’s cutting.”
    He didn’t ask Amily if she could climb to the loft; he knew she would, or die trying.
     But he had something else in mind for her.
    There were more doors in the stable now—one for every stall, in fact—and all of them
     stood wide open. The ground floor was mostly empty except for a few bales of straw
     and some Trainees and stable hands taking advantage of the quiet places to sit, for
     there were not a lot of those available with so many people on the Palace and Collegia
     grounds. Only the two night lamps, one on each wall, were lit. Mags had a notion that
     in some of the darker corners people were taking advantage of the quiet places to
     do more than just sit, but that wasn’t any of his business. Dallen went around to
     the hoist side of the stables, where four or five young ladies in lovely gowns were
     waiting with varying degrees of impatience and varying degrees of giddiness.
    The hay hoist was made for one man to haul up a pallet of several hay bales at once,
     so the weight of one young lady was hardly likely to strain its capacity. A comfortable
     canvas sling, stolen from one of the tree swings down by the river, had been fitted
     to the hoist. Anyone who wanted to ride up to the loft rather than climb the steep,
     ladder-like stair would be able to take this somewhat more exciting route up. The
     trick, however, was that the man at the top of the hoist would use a hay hook to snag
     the rope and haul the pallet in through the open door at the top. Rather than flailing
     about in the dark with the heavy hay hook, the young ladies were being encouraged
     to
swing
their way to the door and be caught by their escorts. There were a lot of squeals
     and giggles. And every so often, one of the lads appropriated the swing so he could
     show off by swinging and jumping in through the door at the apex of his swing.
    If the teachers and other elders had known about this, Mags reflected, they would
     probably have had a proper fit over it. But they didn’t, and he was pretty sure that
     with all the Gifts scattered among the crowd, no one was going to get seriously hurt.
    His thought was confirmed when he spotted First-Year Trainee Finny standing just inside
     the hayloft door, out of the way of the swingers but well in line-of-sight. This was
     important, because young Finny’s Gift was a particularly powerful one, a kind of Fetching
     that allowed her to lift or catch objects with her mind that could weigh as much as
     a Companion. Finny would not allow anyone to fall.
    “Well,” he said over his shoulder to