Magic's Price Read Online Free PDF Page B

and she swallowed and sketched a kind of salute as they passed by her. Van didn’t notice, but Medren did; he winked at her and returned it.
    Medren had gotten Stef as a roommate before this, back when he was an apprentice. That was surely an experience! I’m not sure which was stranger for me; Stef as he arrived, or Stef once he figured out what he was. Medren mentally shook his head. What a country-bred innocent I was!
    Stef had arrived at the Collegium in the care of Bard Lynnell; barely ten, and frightened half to death. He had no idea what was going on, or why this strange woman had plucked him off his street corner and carried him off. Lynnell wasn’t terribly good with children, and she hadn’t bothered to explain much to young Stefen. That had been left to Medren, the only apprentice at the time who had no roommate.
    And first I had to explain that this wasn’t a bordello. He’d thought Lynn was a procurer.
    Lynnell had heard the boy singing on the street corner, attracting good crowds despite being accompanied only by an unskilled hag with a bodhran. While the Bard had no talent for taking care of children, she was both skilled and graced with the Bardic Gift herself. She had recognized Stefen’s Gift with the first notes she heard. And she knew what would happen if that child was left unprotected much longer—some accident would befall him, he could be sold to a whoremaster, some illness left untreated could ruin his voice for life—there were a thousand endings to this child’s story, and few of them happy.
    Until Lynnell had entered it, anyway. One thing about Lynn; she goes straight for what she wants so fast that most people are left gaping after her as she rides out of sight.
    She’d made enough inquiries to ascertain that the crude old woman playing the drum and collecting the coins was not Stef’s mother, nor any kind of relative. That was all it took for her to be on the sunny side of legality; once that was established, she had invoked Bardic Immunity and kidnapped him.
    Then dumped him on me. Medren smiled. Glad she did. He may have gotten me into trouble, but it was generally fun trouble.
    There were some who opined that Stefen’s preference for his own sex stemmed from some experience with that nasty old harridan that was so appalling he’d totally repressed the memory. Privately Medren thought that was unlikely. So far as he was able to determine, she’d never laid a finger on Stefen except for an occasional hard shaking, or a slap now and then.
    From everything Stef said, when she was sober, she knew where her money was coming from. She wasn’t cruel, just crude, and not too bright. So long as her little songbird kept singing, she wasn’t going to do anything to upset him.
    He held the door to the Bardic Collegium open for his uncle, and followed closely on his heels.
    All that Stef had suffered from was neglect, physical and emotional. The emotional neglect was quickly remedied by every adult female in the Collegium, who found the half-starved, big-eyed child irresistible.
    Stef’s spirits certainly revived quickly enough once he discovered the attention was genuine—and also learned he was to share the (relative) luxuries of the Bardic Collegium.
    Like a roof over his head every night, a real bed, all he could eat whenever he wanted it, Medren thought, following Vanyel up the narrow staircase to the second floor. Poor little lad. Whatever his keeper had been spending the money on, it certainly wasn’t high living. Drugs, maybe. The gods know Stefs death on anybody he catches playing with them.
    Bard Breda’s rooms were right by the staircase; Collegium lore had it that she’d picked that suite just so she could humiliate apprentices she caught sneaking in late at night.
    The fact was that she had chosen those rooms because she was something of an Empath and something of a chiru geon; she’d gotten early