Oliver put his arms around his familiar and astonished himself by bursting into tears.
“I’m fine,” he sobbed to the astonished armadillo. “I’m fine. I’m okay. It’s fine.” Since he was still crying, it was nearly impossible to make the words out, but his familiar got the gist.
“You don’t sound fine,” said the armadillo.
“I’m… fine…” Oliver insisted, bent double with sobs.
His familiar wisely stopped arguing and began licking his face instead.
“Sorry,” croaked the mage a few minutes later. “Just… everything. Sorry.”
“Surprised you didn’t do it before now,” said the armadillo matter-of-factly. “Humans need to let stuff out or they get weird. Better now?”
“I think so,” said Oliver, sitting up. He took a deep breath, which caught a little at the bottom, and concentrated on letting it out slowly. “Yeah. Better. That was the pigs from the farm, wasn’t it?”
The armadillo nodded. “They don’t really understand a favor for a favor, but they understand helping. And after the Bryerlys, I think they wanted some revenge on something shaped like a human.”
Oliver gulped. We have to bury Sid. He didn’t know which one had been Sid, but whoever it was, they were dead. And Oliver was the reason.
He couldn’t very well blame the pigs for saving his life, but some part of him—the part that grew up with farmers—was screaming that he’d let two hogs loose in the woods and got them to kill humans and that was an act as evil as anything the bandits had done.
But it was done. And he wasn’t going to blame the armadillo for it. The armadillo hadn’t been the one stupid enough to get captured and need the help.
“I can still hear you thinking, you know,” said his familiar wearily.
Oliver put his face in his hands. “I hate this,” he said, surprised at how conversational his voice sounded.
“I know.” The armadillo leaned against his leg. After a moment, as if unsure whether this would help or not, he added, “Your mother’s killed people.”
Oliver gave a croaking laugh. “Yeah,” he said, scrubbing at his face. “Yeah, she has.” He’d never really thought about it before. His mother was… well, she was good. She’d been a warrior and even retired, she was fierce and strong and kind. Oliver would have given anything to have her here with him. She could tell him how he was supposed to feel right now, about Sid and Bill and all of it.
But she wasn’t here. And Oliver had gotten free, with help from his friends.
“Are the pigs okay?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” said the armadillo. “We need to check, but I don’t want to go stomping around in the woods in the dark with ghuls and bandits wandering around. Wait until moonrise and we’ll get away from the tower, and then decide what happens next.”
Moonrise took a long time. Oliver actually dozed off, which astonished him when he woke up. (The armadillo was less astonished. Humans, his mother had told him, laugh or cry or rage when they get pushed too far, and then they usually fall asleep. The armadillo’s mother had been a clear-eyed observer of humanity, even if her eyes were only a few inches off the ground.)
When Oliver woke, the armadillo was gone. He would have been worried, but his back and neck and left leg were letting him know that sleeping curled in a ball in a tree stump was a really terrible idea, and by the time he had massaged some feeling back into his foot, the armadillo was back.
“I’ve found the trail,” the armadillo said.
“Of the pigs?”
The armadillo rolled his eyes. “That’s not a trail. That’s practically a road. They’re waiting for us. No, I meant the people who took Trebastion. Are we going to follow or try to get away?”
“Follow, of course,” said Oliver, surprised that his familiar would even ask. “We’ve got to get him away from that man!”
The armadillo nodded. “I thought you’d say that,” he said. “It’s just that the odds are that we’ll be horribly murdered by this Mayor Stern fellow, and then no one will be bringing rain anywhere.”
“Yes, well.” Oliver climbed out of the tree trunk and tried to straighten his back with a hiss of pain. “This trip has been nothing but people wanting to murder us horribly.”
“There’s that.” The armadillo set off through the woods. “Pigs first.”
The armadillo was right. While Oliver had often been astonished by the ability of a pig to simply vanish, the boar and the sow weren’t bothering. They had left a trail of broken trees and churned mud behind them. At one point, they actually had to skirt around a makeshift wallow. The pigs were clearly not worried about pursuit.
Well, when you weigh three or four hundred pounds and you’re made of muscle and bristle, you probably don’t have to worry much.
Oliver had never felt envious of a hog before. It was a strange sensation.
The first glimpse he caught of them was the white patches on the sow’s flanks. They stood out brightly in the moonlight.
“Where’s the boar?” whispered Oliver, suddenly sick with dread. Had the boar been injured helping him?
“About three feet to your left,” said the armadillo.
Oliver let out an undignified squeak. He turned his head and caught the glint of tiny eyes.
The boar huffed.
“He thought that was funny,” translated the armadillo. “Pigs have a fairly… rudimentary… sense of humor.”
“Did they get hurt?”
“The boar’s been cut, but it’s all in the shield fat. He’ll be fine. The sow stinks of blood, but it’s all human.”
Oliver winced. Still, he didn’t get to complain. They’d risked their lives for him, and his mother would have given him an earful about ingratitude.
“Can you thank them for me?” asked Oliver. “For saving me?”
“Not really.” The armadillo considered. “Let me see what I can do, though.”
The armadillo trotted up to the sow. She lowered her head. They breathed at each other, while Oliver tried to inch away from the boar without being too obvious about it.
After a few moments, the armadillo nodded and turned away. “Come on, then.”
“We’re leaving?”
“They’re friendly right now. Let’s not push it. They’re still pigs.”
Oliver lifted a hand. He was pretty sure that the pigs didn’t understand waving goodbye, but it made him feel better about it.
“What did you tell them?” he asked, as they pushed through the forest, up the backtrail left by the hogs.
“Good pigs. Good human. Good armadillo. All good. All together and good.” The armadillo shrugged. “That’s as close as I can get to, Thank you and we’re friends.”
“Better than I could have done,” said Oliver. “Thank you.”
“Oh, well…” His familiar snorted briskly. “Now, let’s find Trebastion and get on with being horribly murdered.”
Oliver grinned. It shouldn’t have made him feel better, but somehow it did. “Where’s the trail?”
“I had to circle around the bandit camp to reach it the first time, but I think we can pick it up farther away so that we don’t get you too close to the bandits… what’s left of the bandits…”
“Lead the way.”
An hour later, the moon had moved in the sky and the armadillo had admitted defeat.
“I’ve lost them,” he said grimly. “Somewhere along the way. I don’t know how, they left a trail like an army, but in these woods… all I know is we should have crossed their track by now. Long before now.” He uttered a small armadillo curse, which sounded like an angry chuff of air.
“Do we have to go back to the bandit camp and try again?” asked Oliver worriedly.
The armadillo scuffled at the ground. “I suppose we don’t have much choice. Gah, at this rate it’ll be dawn by the time we find them again… then again, with ghuls about, maybe that’s a good thing.”
Oliver chewed his lower lip. “I could try to
feel for mages,” he said slowly. “Trebastion’s a mage, even if he’s not very much of one. If I could pick up his aura somehow…”
The armadillo sat back on his haunches. “It’s worth a try,” he said. “The armored ancestors know I don’t have any better ideas, anyway.”
Oliver sat down and wiggled until he was comfortable. He closed his eyes and tried to open his mind up to the forest.
It wasn’t magic, exactly. Magic meant you were doing something. This was just sitting and existing and looking.
“Look with your skin,” the old wizard had told him once or twice. Oliver wasn’t sure if what he was doing was what his master had meant, but it was the closest he’d been able to come. He was never really sure if what he was seeing with his skin was really there or all in his head though.
He also wasn’t entirely sure it mattered. Magic was basically all in your head until it wasn’t.
What his skin saw now was Harkhound Forest. It was huge. It went on and on, far past the limits of what Oliver could hold in his mind. He felt trees and roots and leaf litter and the armadillo in front of him, like a small, cranky star.
Trebastion, he thought. I am looking for Trebastion. He has a little magic and it stands out around him. Just a little.
Harkhound was vast and silent and uninterested. The movement of a fern as an insect climbed it was of greater concern to Harkhound than the whereabouts of a human.
Please? thought Oliver. Please, can you help me?
Silence.
Oliver sagged in disappointment and opened his eyes. “It’s no use—” he started to say, and then he caught a glimpse of something red out of the corner of his eye.
It made no sense. The woods were dark, illuminated only by patches of moonlight. Anything red would have looked black. But this had been a swift glimpse of bright red, as clear as daylight, that vanished before he could focus on it.
“What is it?” asked the armadillo.
Oliver shook his head and climbed to his feet. “Something red,” he said. “Over here.”
“Blood?”
“No…” It hadn’t been blood red, but the crimson of an apple or a ripe tomato, a cheerful color completely out of place in a dark forest at night.
He walked toward the place where he had seen the color.
There was nothing there. That didn’t actually surprise Oliver much. If he had seen a thing that was visually impossible, then probably he hadn’t seen it with his eyes.
Look with your skin.
He closed his eyes again and tried to look with his skin.
Darkness. Leaves. The trunks of trees, older than the oldest living human, slow and deeply unimpressed. The call of night insects, rising up from the ground like fog.
Behind his eyelids, another flash of red. Someone ducking away behind a tree?
In his mind, he could hear Trebastion singing.
In the trees, in the trees,
Her spirit still walks
In her kirtle of red
In the trees, in the trees, in the trees…
“Come on,” said Oliver to his familiar. “I think someone wants us to follow them.”
“To Trebastion, or to our horrible deaths?” asked the armadillo, waddling after him.
Oliver shrugged. “At this point, I don’t know if it matters all that much. We don’t have any other guides.”
The armadillo muttered something but broke into a trot and followed.
9
It was a strange, halting journey through Harkhound. Oliver lost their guide twice and had to backtrack. Whatever it was seemed to be trying to give them some kind of direction but vanished like a will-o-the-wisp if he looked at it directly.
“This is how people end up trapped in a dryad’s tree for eternity,” grumbled the armadillo. “Or… hsst!”
Oliver halted. “What?”
“Something up ahead. I hear—There!”
Light flickered between the trees. Oliver dropped into a crouch, even though realistically he knew that the people at the light were hundreds of yards away and couldn’t possibly see him.
“I’ll go look,” said the armadillo. Oliver nodded.
As soon as the familiar was gone, he closed his eyes and whispered, “Thank you,” to whatever their guide had been.
He felt something then, a whisper so soft that it might have been a fern dreaming or the heartbeat of a vole underground. When he opened his eyes, the moonlight was dappled with apple red.
Oliver was already on his knees, but he bowed his head, feeling complicated things he didn’t know how to deal with. When kindness came from murdered ghosts and lost pigs, and the adults that were supposed to help you were monsters that walked like men… What was he supposed to do? It wasn’t right. He wanted the world to be different.
But I’m only a minor mage and I don’t know how to fix any of this…
The armadillo’s return was heralded by soft huffs of breath. “It’s them,” he said. “Come on. There’s a thicket close enough that you can get near and they won’t hear you because… Well, they won’t hear you.”
Oliver puzzled over that statement until he had crawled within earshot of the camp, and then he didn’t have to puzzle any longer, because he could hear the crack of flesh on flesh himself.
Mayor Stern stood over Trebastion; hands raised. As Oliver watched, teeth gritted, Stern’s hands rose and fell, striking the minstrel over and over, sometimes with a crack, sometimes with the dull smack of bread dough on a table.
Trebastion wasn’t trying to fight back at all. He’d curled into as much a ball as he could manage, shoulders up around his ears, trying to protect his face and his hands.
It took a moment before he could tear his eyes away from the scene. It felt almost like a betrayal. He should be bearing witness somehow, not letting all this pain go by unacknowledged.
No. No, that’s not what will help. I need to scout out guards… defenses… figure out how to get him out…
This was easier said than done. The bandits had been organized. They had a system and a guard rotation and Oliver had been able to figure out when someone would be looking in any given direction.
Stern’s men milled about like a disorganized group of townsmen who didn’t have any orders to be anywhere in particular. They’d put out bedrolls, in no discernible pattern. A few were watching Stern and Trebastion, but most of them seemed to be trying very hard not to watch. Their expressions reminded Oliver again of the villager mob, the growing realization that everything had gone too far, and the equally growing despair that there was no way to stop it.
Crack!
Trebastion’s drawn out groan fell into a silence in the camp. Several men winced. Two began to talk very loudly to each other about dinner.
“Should kill you right now,” Stern said, his breathing thick and heavy. “Not even worth dragging you back home.”
“Boss,” said one of the men, laying a hand on his arm. “It’s not worth it. You want to give that lad a trial, make sure it’s all done right and proper.”
“He dragged my name through the mud,” snapped Stern.
“That he did,” said the man, nodding. “And he’ll pay for that in court. But you can’t go killing him now. Wouldn’t look right.”
“Feh.” Stern shook his arm off. “Look right. I know what I know.” But the man’s words seemed to have calmed him. He cuffed Trebastion one last time, almost perfunctorily, then stalked away to his own bedroll.
Oliver watched the camp for nearly an hour. He couldn’t tell if they were going to set watches or if they were just going to go to sleep. He wasn’t even sure if it mattered. He was probably just as likely to wander into someone looking for a place to piss as he was to wander into a sentry.
Trebastion was on the opposite side of the fire. Oliver wondered if he’d be able to run. It didn’t look promising. He lay there like a dead thing, and if Oliver hadn’t watched closely, he wouldn’t have been able to spot the rise and fall of the minstrel’s ri
b cage.
Unfortunately, Stern was between Trebastion and the forest, and showed no signs of moving. He might have been asleep, but Oliver could see an occasional glint of firelight on open eyes. If he was sleeping, it was not deeply or well.
I hope it’s his conscience, but I doubt it.
Eventually he gave up watching and crept away, timing it when one of the men got up so that his sounds were covered. Stern’s men were as loud as Trebastion in the woods. He slipped between tree trunks until he could stand and moved off out of earshot, waiting for the armadillo to find him.
His familiar turned up a few minutes later, mouth still full of slugs. “Wmmpf?” he said and swallowed.
“Not good.”
The armadillo grunted. Oliver leaned against a tree and tried to think of something… anything… that might help. “If I could turn invisible, I could walk in…” he began.
“And then what?” said the armadillo. “Say, ‘Sorry, don’t mind the invisible person carrying your prisoner away?’”
Oliver scowled. He couldn’t think of a reply to that.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You can’t turn invisible. Probably you’ll never be able to turn invisible, but you definitely won’t be able to in the next hour.”
Oliver glared at the armadillo in the dark. “I wish you’d stop that.”
“Stop what? I’m your familiar, it’s my job to know how much magic you can do.”
“So what? You think I should just stop trying to be better, then?” Oliver felt as if something were cracking open in his chest, something raw and red. Watching Stern hit poor Trebastion had left him feeling helpless and furious and now the armadillo was talking down to him and all that fury was piling up and looking for a chance to get out. “Is that your solution? Just be happy with what I can do and never try to do any better? Be content to spend the rest of my life as a minor mage?”
His voice rose as he talked, and he realized it and clamped down so that the last words came out in a harsh squeak.
The armadillo simply looked at him. Black pebble eyes caught a gleam of stray light from the stars. “How many beatings does Trebastion have to take for your personal growth?” he asked quietly.
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