Minor Mage

by T. Kingfisher

  He almost didn’t want to stop. Sleeping on the ground was nearly as exhausting as walking. Maybe if he walked all night, he’d actually be less tired in the morning.

  Oliver suspected that the armadillo would tell him what a stupid idea that was, so he didn’t say it out loud.

  He was plodding along the line of a fence—one of an endless series of identical split-log fences, edging more or less identical fields—when he heard a bang.

  He looked up, startled, and realized that it was the door on a farmhouse near the road. He’d been concentrating on his feet and not paying attention and hadn’t even noticed the house. Hurrying down the wagon-track from the house was a tall, stoop-shouldered man.

  The man didn’t speak until he was at the road, and then he stood there and waited until Oliver had drawn closer.

  “Boy,” he said, which might have been a greeting or an observation. He had a very deep voice, and the hand on the fencepost nearest Oliver was enormous, with dark red knuckles.

  Oliver decided to treat it as a greeting. He didn’t recognize the farmer, but country hospitality, even in these times, meant that he might get a spot in the hayloft and a bite of dinner. “Hello, sir.”

  There was a long silence. Oliver waited politely, and then, when that didn’t seem to be working, he said, “May I beg your hospitality for the night, sir?”

  “Hospitality,” said the farmer.

  Oliver began to wonder if the man was touched in the head. Simple, maybe. Maybe he could only repeat what people said to him. He had dreadfully bad skin, not just pocked but with a strange, stretched look between the marks, and dark, deep-set eyes.

  Has he had the pox, maybe? I know it comes with fever sometimes, and a fever can damage the brain… Learning herb-lore meant you picked up a little bit of medicine, even though Oliver wasn’t a healer and would never pretend to be one.

  The armadillo gave an odd little shake, settling his armored hide. The farmer looked down as if seeing him for the first time.

  Most people would probably comment on the fact that someone had a pet armadillo, even if they didn’t recognize a familiar when they saw one. The old farmer said nothing.

  Oliver began to despair that there might be any dinner, but he held out hope that the hayloft might still be open. Hay was terrible on his allergies—the spell only worked on armadillo dander—but the ground was terrible on his back, so maybe if he alternated between the two, he’d survive long enough to get to the Rainblades.

  “Might I sleep in your barn for the night, sir? I promise, I will disturb nothing.”

  “Barn,” said the farmer again. “The barn. Oh, aye.” He shook himself, rather like the armadillo, and his gaze seemed to sharpen. “And come to the house for thy supper.”

  Thy? Oliver thought. Who says thy anymore? It’s a writing word, not a speaking word…

  It’s supper, said a rather more practical voice, and that decided him.

  The farmer’s wife was named Mrs. Bryerly, which presumably made the farmer Mr. Bryerly, but Oliver was too busy eating to ask.

  Well… trying to eat.

  It was a strange meal. Nothing had been cooked. It was a sort of odd hodge-podge of preserves and ancient, crusty bread and a raw onion and half a wheel of cheese with moldy edges.

  It wasn’t the worst meal he’d ever had, but it was… well, an odd thing to set out for a visitor. Oliver supposed that they’d eaten earlier in the day and Mrs. Bryerly hadn’t wanted to cook a whole meal for a passing stranger, but it did resemble a bunch of things dragged at random out of the pantry without much thought as to how they went together. Cheese and bread and onion you could just about see, but blueberry preserves? And he had no idea what was supposed to be in the other jar at all, except that it was brown and gritty-looking.

  A bit of the cheese wrapped in a bit of the onion and plastered on a hunk of the bread was edible, if awfully dry. Oliver had to ask for water, and there was a long pause and then Mrs. Bryerly jumped up and said, “How silly of me! Of course!” and shooed Mr. Bryerly off to the pump to fetch some.

  Even if his throat hadn’t been dry from the bread, Oliver doubted he could get a word in edgewise. Mrs. Bryerly was as tall as her husband and much wider, but she still managed to flutter somehow, in a manner that might have been girlish once but now resembled an injured goose trying to escape the farmer. And she talked non-stop. Oliver had barely managed to tell his story, and only in the vaguest terms before she ran over the top of it with boundless sympathy.

  “So hard!” she said, for the third or fourth time. “To send a boy all that way!” She dabbed at her eyes. “So cruel! So inhuman of them!”

  Oliver stared at the cheese, feeling strange.

  Here was somebody ready to agree with him on every count, and instead he had a strong desire to defend the villagers, because… well… they weren’t inhuman. Not at all. Vezzo was a good man and always brought around a cut of beef after slaughter, and Matty had lost two children and had a fragile sweetness that would shiver into tears if you said an unkind word to her.

  “Such unfeeling brutes! Oh, you poor boy!”

  Sure, they’d done a pretty mean thing, putting him on the road like that, Harold had certainly been awful about it, but… well… he was the wizard. Somebody had to bring rain. And they’d been scared. Scared people did cruel and stupid things, sometimes, but Vezzo and Matty had still done their best for him.

  “Oh, if I could only give them a piece of my mind! I would!”

  Oliver found himself missing his mother. Not that you could admit that, not if you were a twelve-year-old boy—you might as well just give up completely at that point. But her no-nonsense briskness would have been a welcome counterpoint to Mrs. Brylery’s fluttering. He poked at the brown preserves with a knife, wondering what they were and how they would taste on bread.

  “Still thy tongue, wife,” rumbled the old farmer.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, ignoring her husband, “oh, dear. It seems so hard! If only he could stay with us!”

  Oliver opened his mouth to say that it was fine, he was the wizard and this was his job, but closed it again instead.

  The farmer was watching him, and something—his archaic speech or the deep hollows under his eyes or something else Oliver couldn’t quite put a name to—made the young wizard feel desperately uncomfortable.

  It wasn’t a rational thing, it was certainly rude, but he suddenly wanted nothing so much as to bolt from the room, away from the fluttering of Mrs. Bryerly and the strange, glittering eyes of her husband.

  “If—if I could just stay in your hayloft tonight—” he stammered. It seemed this dreadful dinner could not be over soon enough. He bit into the preserve-covered bread. Fig. He hated figs. He tried to swallow, nearly choked, and had to take several large gulps of water.

  “Oh, no! Oh, poor boy, you must stay here with us. We’ll make you up a bed by the fire, all nice and snug.” She beamed at him, ignoring the fact that there was no fire, that the hearth was cold and cobwebbed and clearly had not held a fire for a long time. The only light came from the windows, which had faded until he was very nearly eating in the dark.

  “No! Err—” Oliver didn’t question why or how, but he knew he didn’t want to stay in the house. “Ah—I can’t. It’s my familiar. He—err—he’s not very well housebroken.”

  He expected a tail smack for that, but the armadillo was sitting bolt upright at his feet and didn’t so much as flick his ears.

  Mrs. Bryerly’s nose wrinkled. “Oh,” she said, in a rather less fluttery voice. “Oh, I see.”

  There was an awkward silence. Mrs. Bryerly’s hands flexed, twisting the edges of her apron. She also had enormous knuckles, like red walnuts.

  “I’ll see thee to the barn, then,” said Mr. Bryerly, and rose. Oliver jumped up and followed.

  The farmyard’s shadows lay deep and indistinct in the twilight. Oliver followed the stoop-shouldered form of the farmer across the yard. The ground had been churned
to muck by years of hooves, and then dried into an irregular, treacherous landscape. Shrubs shielded the house in leafy darkness.

  “Mind thee don’t scare the cows,” said the farmer, lifting the heavy wooden bar from the barn door. He held the door open. “Hayloft’s down at the end.”

  “Er. Thank you,” said Oliver, stepping into the barn. He glanced around. It was very dark, except for a few chinks where a little light slipped in. “Ah, is there a—”

  Creeaaaaaak.

  The door shut behind him. Darkness slapped him across the face.

  “Err—”

  He heard the thump as the bar was ground into place.

  Oliver did not like this at all.

  “Armadillo, can you—”

  The tail smacked across his shins. He fell silent.

  A minute or two dragged by. Oliver heard the grunt of something alive from farther down the barn.

  “Arma—”

  The armadillo gave him another warning tail flick.

  Oliver waited. Something big was breathing in the dark.

  Then he heard it, without quite realizing what he’d been listening for—the sound of the farmer’s footsteps, going away.

  Mr. Bryerly had stood outside the barn for several minutes, not moving.

  That was… well, it was awfully creepy, anyway.

  “He’s gone,” said the armadillo quietly, after the footsteps had faded. “We’re locked in, though.”

  “Well,” said Oliver doubtfully, “I suppose you still have to lock the barn so the cows don’t get out…”

  “There are no cows,” said the armadillo grimly. “There’s two pigs, and they’re scared to death.”

  “We’re strangers.”

  “They’re not scared of us.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence fell. Oliver waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He could hear the armadillo scuffling around.

  “Why would he lie about the cows?”

  He half expected the armadillo to snap at him, but instead, he came over, and Oliver felt the small, scaled weight lean against his legs. “That’s an interesting question,” said the armadillo. “I don’t think he meant to, actually. I think he either forgot there were no more cows, or it was something he thought he was supposed to say, without quite knowing what it meant.”

  “What kind of farmer forgets about his cows?” asked Oliver, baffled.

  “One that isn’t really a farmer, I expect.”

  This was not comforting.

  “Do you think they’re imposters?”

  “I think they smell sweet,” said the armadillo unexpectedly.

  “Huh?”

  “Sweet.” The armadillo’s tail flicked like a nervous cat. “Like maple syrup and ant eggs, both of them.”

  Oliver considered asking when the armadillo had sampled maple syrup and ant eggs and decided that perhaps he didn’t want to know.

  “Not a normal smell, anyway,” the familiar continued. “Maybe not a human smell.”

  This was even less comforting.

  “You think they’re not human?”

  “Does it matter?” The armadillo shrugged, making a kind of armored ripple. “Either they’re inhuman monsters pretending to be a sweet old couple, or they’re a sweet old couple that’s planning to kill you and bury you under the barn.”

  “Good lord!”

  Buried under the barn? he thought, and then, exasperated at himself, Does it really matter where they intend to bury you?

  A grunt came from the darkness. Oliver saw a snout push into a patch of moonlight, and a gleam of small black eyes.

  “Can you—err—talk to the pigs? Maybe they know what the Bryerlys are.”

  “Hmm. Maybe. Pigs are pretty smart. There are some excellent pig familiars.”

  “Eww. Who’d want a pig for a familiar?”

  It was too dark to see the armadillo’s expression, but the outline of his ears had a wry tilt. “I don’t know… if you were, oh, just hypothetically, say, locked in a barn by a couple of murderers, would you rather have a ten-pound armadillo or our four-hundred-pound friend with the tusks over there?”

  “Oh.” Oliver considered this. “I think I’d still rather have you.”

  “Hmph.” Despite the circumstances, he could tell the armadillo was pleased. The familiar pressed briefly against his shins, then stumped over to the pig pen.

  Watching animals communicate was not particularly interesting. They mostly stood around, shifting on their feet, and breathing. Now and then one of the pigs would grunt. If there was anything more exciting going on, it was lost in the shadows.

  Oliver sat down on a crate and concentrated on listening to the sounds outside. He thought he might be able to keep the doors shut with the pushme pullme spell, if Mr. Bryerly came back, but probably not for very long. And of course, the doors opened out, so he couldn’t brace them shut from this side.

  Eventually, one of the pigs stamped its foot and squealed. They both looked in the direction of the farmhouse. The armadillo sighed and also looked towards the farmhouse.

  This seemed to end the conversation. The pigs retreated to the far corner, standing tightly packed together, and the armadillo drifted back over to where Oliver was sitting.

  “I hate talking to pigs,” he muttered. “It takes weeks to get the kinks out of my tail…”

  “What did they say?”

  “They didn’t say anything,” grumbled the armadillo. “They’re not people in pig suits. They don’t have a language like ‘Swinese’ or something. They’re pigs.”

  Oliver waited patiently. The armadillo tended to rant when he was nervous.

  “They’re scared. It smells like they’ve been scared for a while. There used to be more pigs, and I think something bad happened to them.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know! They can’t tell me. They can’t really describe things, okay? Pig vocabulary is basically ‘yes/no, food, fear, happy, this-pig/not this-pig.’ There’s not a lot to work with.” The armadillo sighed. “But whatever happened, it was bad, and it scared them, and I get the feeling it wasn’t just like a pig being slaughtered. It seems like it must have been something weird.”

  “Do they have names?” Oliver asked, rather interested. Communication with another species, even a pig, was something none of his books covered, and the armadillo didn’t quite count.

  “Do they have—yes, they’re called Bacon and Pork Chop.” The armadillo hopped in frustration. “Of course they don’t have names! They’re pigs!”

  “Oh.”

  After a minute the armadillo relented. “They know who they are,” he said. “They know the difference between this-pig and that-pig. But they don’t have names like you and me. They don’t need them.”

  This was fascinating and Oliver stored it away for later, but it was not particularly helpful at the moment.

  “We have to get out of here,” he said. “I mean, obviously. I’d say we should wait until the Bryerlys are asleep, but they might be waiting until we’re asleep.”

  “Mmm. Yes.” The armadillo considered for a moment. “We have to take the pigs.”

  “What? With us?”

  “No, no, but we have to let them out.”

  “Where will they go?”

  A shrug rippled against his leg. “I don’t know. The woods, probably. Anywhere. We can’t leave them here.”

  “But—feral pigs—” Oliver had seen dogs torn up by pigs gone feral, and he didn’t want to see it ever again. A wild pig was as dangerous an animal as they ever saw around Loosestrife, worse than bears or mountain lions.

  Still, the armadillo was right. They really couldn’t just leave them with the Bryerlys.

  “Can you get them to promise not to hurt anybody?”

  The armadillo scoffed. “No more than you could. It’s not that they wouldn’t, it’s that there’s no real way to communicate the concept. Pigs don’t make promises.”

  “Oh.” Oliver sighed
. It wasn’t much of a choice, really. “Well, I guess there’s no help for it. We can’t just leave them here. So, let’s get out, then.”

  This was easier said than done.

  “How do we get out?” he asked. The enormity of the situation clutched at him. “I’m only a minor mage,” he said, mostly to the pigs, feeling the need to apologize even though they couldn’t understand him. “I can’t call down lightning or make an earthquake or call up spirits to go after the Brylerlys.”

  He paused as the idea hit him. “Well, I suppose I could try to call up an elemental—”

  “We’re in enough trouble without you bleeding from the nose,” said the armadillo.

  “I’m sorry—”

  The tail that smacked his ankles felt like a whip. “Ow!”

  “Quit apologizing! It’s not going to help!”

  “Sor—oh, hell.” He tried to work out a way to apologize for apologizing and gave up.

  “When you’re done,” said the armadillo, “you can get over here and see if that spell of yours will lift the bar.”

  “Oh. Oh!”

  Having something useful he could do, even if it wasn’t calling down lightning, made Oliver feel a lot better. He crouched by the barn door. Warping over the years had left a small gap between the doors—not enough to fit a finger through, but just enough to see the plank barring the door.

  It was a very large, very heavy plank. Knots twisted through the grain like rippling muscles.

  “I’ve never moved anything this size before,” he confessed. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Only one way to find out,” said the armadillo, plopping himself down on Oliver’s feet.

  Oliver nodded. He fixed his gaze on the plank, murmured “Pushme, pullme…” and concentrated.

  The plank rattled against the fastenings, but didn’t move.

  Oliver gritted his teeth and pushed harder. He could feel his blood pounding inside his head. He had to lift at least one end of the plank up and over the metal hook holding it.

  It was a lot heavier than anything he’d ever tried to move before. It felt like the plank was inside his head, a big, immovable object between his eyes. The bar jumped in its fastenings and landed again with a thump.