Bastion

over the work. In theory, anyway. There would always be Trainees like Lena who never stopped fretting over the work, and would probably still be fretting over the work when she got her full Bardic Scarlets.
    This probably wouldn’t be the first day most of them had gone down to the Fair. You were allowed to go to any of the Fairs anyway, if you didn’t have classes and had leave to go, but this was one day you could be sure of being able to go down with all of your friends.
    And fortunately, the same kind soul who had made sure he was going to be properly clothed had also made sure there were a few coins to spend in his purse—as he had discovered when he had put everything on.
    :Of course she did. I want pocket pies, and she hopes you’ll get her a little something,: Dallen snickered.
    That answered the question of who had made sure everything in his room was put to rights and waiting. He grinned. Trust Amily!
    :She wanted to be sure you wouldn’t feel that people had forgotten about you.:
    Well, he was fairly sure that someone would have seen to it that his room was ready and he’d had something to wear, even if all they had done was see to it that the uniforms already here had been laundered, and the bed freshly made up. But no one would have made sure the job was done as thoroughly as Amily. It made him feel very good.
    The dining hall had been one of the first places that had meant anything to him, and he stood in the doorway, feeling more of his tension ease away. As a completely starved mine-slavey, who rarely saw anything more nourishing than thin soup made with cabbage and bones, the good food so freely available to the Trainees had loomed very large in his life. The guard posts on the way here and the Collegium dining hall had been the first places, ever, where he had been allowed to eat what he pleased and as much as he pleased. And despite a few bad moments here, when people had doubted him and he had picked up on their thoughts, most of his memories of this place were good ones.
    It was a simple room, entirely of wood, with wooden pillars down the center. Banners bearing the crest of Valdemar along the walls and hanging from the rafters baffled some of the noise that so many young people eating together were bound to produce. There were counters at one end that served as tables for the serving dishes, and the rest of the room was filled with long tables with backless benches. Each table had a stack of plates and cups and cutlery at one end, which were replenished by the servers as they ran low.
    He scanned the dining hall to see if his friends were already at one of the tables and quickly spotted Bear, Lena, and Amily clearly holding a spot for him. The dining hall had two sorts of service, depending on whether it was a general holiday or something large and important was being held on the Palace grounds. Most days, like today, you took a seat at one of the long tables, got passed a cup and plates, bowls and cutlery from the end of the table, and then got passed serving dishes of whatever was going at that meal (or waited for one of the Trainees on serving duty to bring more dishes around if your table had run out). On days when everyone was busy—or when there was a holiday and there just weren’t that many Trainees here because they were visiting with their families—you helped yourself from the buffet counter at the end nearest the kitchen.
    It was a hotcake day, which made his mouth water as the aroma hit his nose. And when he discovered that today the cooks had fried apple slices into the hotcakes, he could not have been happier. The cakes had already been buttered before being served; he had only to lift them onto his plate and drizzle them with honey.
    “I love hotcake days,” Bear said, around a mouthful. Mags nodded happily. Before he had come here, he had never tasted hotcakes, not even burned ones meant for the pigs. He thought that whoever had invented them must have been a genius. They’d been one of the first things he had begged Nikolas to show him how to cook. Nikolas’s version had involved frying bacon first, then frying the cakes in the bacon fat. This was because there obviously would be no butter if you were cooking in a Waystation, and there probably wouldn’t be any honey, either. But that didn’t matter because everything tasted good when cooked in bacon fat.
    “I love the fact that you know how to cook them, because I don’t,” said Lena, nudging Bear with her