Closer to the Chest Read Online Free PDF Page B

unruffled confidence that was very soothing to harried or troubled young Trainees.
    â€œWe’ll talk that over later, when we’ve had a chance to review all your reports,” the Dean told him. “Meanwhile, enjoy your leisure. If we get someone injured out in the Field that needs replacing, your holiday may not last long.”
    â€œSo how is the latest crop?” Pip asked, raising his eyes from his food long enough to cast a skeptical eye across the dining hall. “They look a bit grubby.”
    As those discouraging words met the ears of the nearest young ladies, they looked flustered and crestfallen, and quickly turned their attention to their food.
    â€œI expect we looked a bit grubby at that age,” Amily pointed out, and chuckled. “I wager every new crop of Trainees looks grubby and unfinished to the ones that were here before them.”
    â€œThat’s because they
are
unfinished,” the Dean observed with a smile. “It would be rather astonishing if they were not. We wouldn’t need the Collegia, and we wouldn’t be calling them Trainees now, would we, if they came to us ready to be put into Whites and on to the job?”
    â€œYou have a point,” Pip chuckled. “Although, I have been lending half an ear to the grubby lot behind us, and take it from me, they have a
lot
to learn about Kirball. I hope they are farther along in their Trainee studies than they are in game strategy. Unless their opponents are just as bad, they’re going to fall flat on their noses.”
    But Mags had heard something more than faulty Kirball strategy as he had been listening to those young (
so
young!)Trainees. He’d heard a kind of careless freedom, freedom that gave them the ability to see a game as the most important thing in their lives at that moment. “Innocence” probably wasn’t the right term for it . . . but he couldn’t think of a good word. Not “ignorance,” either, unless you subscribed to the notion that “ignorance is bliss,” which he did not. Ignorance was dangerous. This . . . was more like the carefree certainty that right now, they would be so safe in the hands of their elders that they could concentrate on what they pleased.
    â€œDidja ever wish you could go back?” he asked, wistfully.
    Pip gave him an odd look, as if he had said something incomprehensible. “Go back? To what?”
    â€œBein’ a Trainee again,” Mags elaborated. “When things was simpler. When the worst thing that happened was failin’ a test, or losin’ a game.”
    The Dean chuckled. “Only if I could do so from the perspective of my older self, so I could
enjoy
the contrast,” he replied. “Because, remember, when you say ‘the worst thing that happened’ it literally
is
the worst thing that can happen to these younglings, and it can seem devastating. They haven’t had experience of anything worse, a lot of them. And, trust me, that makes them feel just as miserable as if what had just befallen them was an adult-sized disaster.”
    â€œAn’ hell, Mags, maybe that’s how it’d be for me, but
you
had some pretty adult-sized disasters when you were a Trainee,” Pip observed, as Amily nodded and passed him the bowl of chicken and dumplings again. “And what you came from? Three-quarters starved, near beaten to death, and a slave in the mines? You sure you’d want to go through all that again?”
    â€œYou got a point. I wouldn’t,” Mags admitted. “Still, I’d kinda like to know what it was like t’have been a normal Trainee, though. Like you, say, or Gennie.”
    â€œDefine
normal
,” the Dean replied dryly. “From my point of view, the entire Collegium is composed of people with issues,anxieties, and quirks. Some of our Trainees might come from homes of wealth and status, but that doesn’t mean they’ve