He felt certain of it as he slipped through the last tangle of willow. He stood in a small bright space, a pocket meadow made when an ancient oak toppled, its body flattening the tender ash saplings around it. He couldn’t help noticing the fire scars on its aged trunk. It was older even than he.
The girl lay at the edge of the clearing in a snarl of the oak tree’s exposed roots. She had stopped shrieking. Instead, she was silent, and still.
“Girl?”
It came out in a whisper. He cleared his throat, surprised to find it so dry. “Girl?”
She moaned.
He dropped to his knees beside her. “What happened?”
She moaned again, and he let his eyes answer the question. Where the earth had been lifted by the upturned oak’s roots were dozens of small holes. Some had torn open, revealing tunnels the right size for burrowers, and when he looked at her hands, they were dark with soil. The right was particularly dirty and dark purple, with two red marks staring up at him like angry eyes. Or like the impressions made by a snake’s fangs.
He touched the girl’s face and was startled by how cold it was.
“Girl? Can you speak?” He tapped her shoulder with no response. He tapped again. “Rachel?”
“I saw a bunny,” she whispered. “But something bit me.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. She could have called that rabbit if she knew the trick. If he’d taught it to her. When he opened them again, the red bite mark stared back at him, reproachful.
Rugel knew a great deal about surviving in the woods. He knew lungwort for cuts and he knew clay mud for bee stings. He had once set his own broken leg with a yew stave and deer sinews. But snakebites were beyond his medical skills. He knew nothing beyond binding the bitten limb and prayer. He ripped a strip from the bottom of his tunic and knotted it just above her wrist, remembering those healings he had helped work as a child. Magic beat prayer when the gods he knew were as dead as his people.
He hesitated, his throat tight. He could not imagine using magic so close to the village. He would be trapped here. His spirit would blend with the spirit of the stones and soil and he would never get the stink of mandrake out of his nose.
No. He couldn’t do that.
The girl whimpered. He stared at her pale face, where the freckles stood out like flecks of dirt on white stone. She was dying. If he did nothing and just left her here, the snake’s poison would work its way through her body, turning it silent and swollen. She might die even if he managed to get her to the witch. Snakebites were beyond most witches’ power.
He imagined what would happen if he took her to her village. He was small and gnarled and ugly, as bad as a hobgoblin to people afraid of ill-luck creatures. She was just a little girl, gray and still and close to death. The humans would think the worst. He could still smell the mandrake-scent on the breeze. She might die anyway, he reminded himself. He didn’t need to face all of that. He could just run away.
Her eyes fluttered and she saw him. “Little man,” she said. It was almost a croak. Something in his gut twisted in response. She already looked worse than when he had burst into the clearing, the purple swelling moving up her arm.
A witch who could cure a brother with a paralyzed leg might be able to cure a snake bite, Rugel thought.
He squatted beside the girl and lifted her into his arms. Her feet hung close to the ground as he held her. He shifted his grip, and something quivered inside his chest, a phantom hand trembling against his heart.
He took a step into the forest, in the direction of Rachel’s village, and behind them he heard a rabbit drum an “all clear” on the side of the oak. Rugel broke into a run.
Despite the weight in his arms, it felt just like the run he had made from the creek to the village two hundred years ago. His feet still knew the trail, the little ridges of rock beneath the soil speaking in their same old tongue. For a moment he was running through charred tree trunks and drifts of ash, his body a lad’s again, running toward his village with screams reverberating in his ears.
No one had seen him when he reached the village, he remembered. He had crouched in the shadow of a boulder—maybe even the rabbit-snare boulder—and watched them cut down the women. His young power, still small and fragile inside him, flared with the force of his rage. He reached into the land to raise a wall of fire against the Bigs, and felt the sick earth shudder. There was no strength in its scorched soil. His power, overspent, unfueled, sputtered out. His vision grayed, but he could still see his sister, running with her shift pulled up over her grass-stained knees. Darkness still hadn’t taken him when he saw the scythe rip through her belly in an explosion of blood.
Tears welled up as Rugel remembered it all, obscuring his vision as he ran. His hands were full of the girl, and he could not wipe his eyes clear. He stumbled on, remembering.When the elders tried to speak, the Big men screamed over the words. They struck down the old men even as the Elders struggled to draw power from the deep bones of the earth.
“They thought we were stealing their luck,” he whispered to the little girl, whose head only rattled against his chest. “They wouldn’t listen. They were sure we were evil.”
He almost dropped Rachel then, as he crossed the invisible boundary he’d set for himself since his arrival in the forest. He’d never come this close to her village before. For a second, he wondered if he should drop her and just keep running as long as he could.
The scent of mandrake was so strong now . . . too strong for him to think clearly.
He thought of the first time he had smelled it, sitting on the fresh graves of his mother and father and all the rest, the brilliant green of new mandrake shoots pushing up through the ash-stained soil. He had watched them grow far faster than any ordinary mandrake, sending out leaves to stretch for the sun. Little buds revealed white flowers like tiny eyes in the thickets of green leaves. Such a strange and horrible smell and now so strong he almost choked on the air.
Rugel passed the wattle fence of the first cottage. He had arrived at the village.
The girl’s breathing was very slight; her skin almost gray. He felt a pang. If only he could have prayed for her. If only he had taught her the secret for calling rabbits. But it was too late for that. Already, as he lowered her to the ground, he could hear voices coming from the cottage behind him.
He might have a few seconds. He could still run, like he’d run the last long years of his life. He would run. He’d run far away from this place, maybe as far as Ireland. But not until he made things right. She wouldn’t be here, almost dead, if it hadn’t been for him.
He owed her.
Rugel pressed his creased brown lips close to the little girl’s ear, and he whispered: “This is the secret of calling rabbits, girl.”
Her eyelids trembled. He couldn’t be certain she had heard him. He added anyway: “Call to them while you think rabbit thoughts. You’ve got the magic. All you need is the knowledge. Like calling to like.”
He wished she knew his name.
Then it was suddenly too late to run. Great hands closed on his arms and pulled him away from her, lifting him as easily as a child even as he kicked and screamed.
On the ground, Rachel went rigid, her back bending like a bow and foam spraying from her lips. Time slowed for Rugel as he felt a fist connect with his face, felt the skin above his eyebrow split, but he saw only the little girl’s face as it went red, then purple, then dark.
She was dying. It was too late for the witch’s cure.
And Rugel knew. The time for running was over. He reached down inside himself for the little spark of magic he’d kept banked all these years. The only way to feed it was to reach out to the earth, the stones and soil of this village. There would be no leaving once he touched that energy. He felt his body becoming hotter with the strength of his growing power.
“Rachel,” he whispered. He could barely see her beyond the crowd, jerking and twitching on the pale grass. He had forgotten how to break down the
venom in her blood, but he could give her air, could shield her heart from the poison’s progress. He could buy time for the witch. Rugel stretched his magical grasp wider, drawing energy from the soil beneath the village, the boulder by the rabbit warren, the banks of the stream.
And then his heat was too much for his captors. There were shouts, and Rugel was flying through the air, his body launched from furious hands. He struck the edge of the mandrake patch with a horrible jolt.
He lay there for a second, feeling the magic catch hold of Rachel’s lungs, sensing her heart beating normally again, and then he forced himself to get up. He pushed deeper into the mandrake patch, knowing he ran over graves he’d dug himself. He might not be able to flee this place, but there was a still a chance he could escape the angry mass of villagers if he could just make it through this field.
He’d just spurred himself into a full run when he felt the first of the rocks strike his back.
He ran on and felt a bigger stone, as large as a man’s two fists joined, smash into his back and send him sprawling. In his memory, he saw his father, face down in the thin young soil with the fletching of an arrow between his shoulder blades.
Rugel lay on his belly in the soft loam, his arms and legs still pumping, still running, a reflex after two hundred years. The rocks kept coming, big and small, some thrown with greater accuracy than others. The back of his skull leaked hot trickles down into his collar, and when a stone smashed his shoulder blade he gasped with agony, sucking in humus and leaf bits. But his legs kept running.
The soil churned away under the motion of his legs and he felt himself burrowing down into the earth. After all that running, he’d forgotten. Dwarves were creatures of the earth, expert diggers, and safety to a dwarf always meant underground. It was so easy to forget, alone. After he’d buried his dead, all forty-eight men and women and children and elders, he had begun to run. He’d gotten good at running away.
He put effort into it now, concentrating power into his treading arms, and while he could still feel the rocks, he moved away from them; they were glancing off the muscle of his buttocks, hardly painful at all. The cool softness of soil pressed against his face. The cut above his eye no longer stung. He hoped the witch could take away Rachel’s pain the way the soil took away his.
Laughter bubbled up, exhilarated laughter—he was escaping, he was getting away, and he breathed in grit and loam with the ease of breathing air. It felt good, sliding into his lungs. Even the wriggle of the earthworms in his throat was no more irritating than the passage of air bubbles inside the intestines.
His arms slowed now, pressing up against stone immovable and massive, attenuating into slender coils that worked themselves into the stone’s crannies. There was shelter there, shelter and something tangy and mineral he found himself craving. His legs trembled as a soil creature, a nematode or wood louse, brushed bristles against sensitive skin.
Movement ground into such slowness it became near immobility, and Rugel felt his thoughts slow with it. His mind constricted to a single point of focus, so intense it was like a ray of brilliant green light, and stones, pain, villagers, and yes, even the little girl child, were forgotten entirely. There was only green and the peace of settling into the soil and the sense that up above there was something warm and vital he would someday reach up to touch with new green leaves.
Rachel sat with her knees clasped, staring at the spray of stones surrounding a pushed-up mound of soil. The little man had gone down in there. The villagers left, but he didn’t come out, not even later that night when Rachel snuck out of the witch’s hut to search for him. She watched the mound, intent for any movement. Some of the stones around it were stained blood-brown.
Someone patted her shoulder. It was Eva, the witch, and she squeezed the shoulder kindly before crossing to the mound and dropping to her knees. Her gnarled old hands seized a rock and tucked it quickly into the pocket of her apron.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
The little girl shook her head. She didn’t understand the woman’s impatient tone or the brisk movements of her hands collecting stones.
The old woman waved her hand, indicating the field full of plants with white flowers. “The stones will slow the growth of new seedlings. They’re not as bad as weeds, but they’ll make the roots grow in crooked.”
The girl reached out for one of the rocks, her movements slow and uncertain. Eva smiled broadly.
“That’s my girl. Got to take good care of the mandrake plants. They’re precious rare, and there aren’t many villages with a patch like ours.” Eva smoothed the soil over the mound, tamping it down like a farmer planting garlic.
The light of memory fired in Rachel’s eyes. “You used tincture of mandrake root when you helped my brother.”
“I did. It saved his life. And I used it to cure your snakebite.”
Rachel closed her fingers over a stone and felt its weight in her hand. In her mind’s eye, she saw the dwarf’s wrinkled face, coarse as a carved turnip a week after Samhain, his body as small and twisted as a mandrake root.
“The roots look like little men, don’t they?” Rachel asked, and she looked over the field, as big as her father’s field of peas and every foot lush with the green foliage of mandrake plants.
“Yes. Strange, isn’t it? How one of the best plants for curing a man looks like one? That’s the way things work, though. Like will call to like.” The old woman eased herself to her feet and gave Rachel’s shoulder another pat. “You come see me any time now, little Rachel. I’ve got plenty to teach you.”
The little girl sat alone on the edge of the mandrake field, the red-stained stone folded in her fist, finally certain that the little man was gone. She closed her eyes, and tears soaked her eyelashes until they traced courses like rivers, like questing roots, down the soft slopes of her cheeks.
Rachel let the tears dry on her face before she opened her eyes again. When she pried her salt-crusted lids apart, she was surprised to see a hare browsing between the mandrake tops. It looked nervous at her presence, but it merely munched with one eye on her, momentarily content.
She watched it for a few minutes, its awkward hops more endearing than any other rabbit she had ever seen. And somehow, she knew what to do, just as if someone whispered the instructions in her ear.
“Come,” she called. She focused her mind on rabbit thoughts, soft and welcoming as fresh-turned soil. Inside her, she could feel a strange flickering, as warm and welcome as a candle flame. She focused her mind and felt the flickering steady and grow even warmer.
The rabbit hopped right to her.
Rachel laughed as she stroked its soft, humped back. Its fur beneath her fingertips felt luxuriant and warm, softer than anything she’d ever touched. She scooped the little creature up and rested her cheek on its side.
Around her, the flowers of the mandrakes nodded on their stalks like tiny sleepy eyes. Beneath the soil, a new root began to reach toward the sun—nameless but not alone.
Kelly Link is a short fiction specialist whose stories have been collected in three volumes: Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Conjunctions, and in anthologies such as The Dark, The Faery Reel, and Best American Short Stories. With her husband, Gavin J. Grant, Link runs Small Beer Press and edits the ’zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Her fiction has earned her an NEA Literature Fellowship and won a variety of awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Stoker, Tiptree, and Locus awards.
A common issue that comes up when discussing wizard stories is this: Why don’t wizards rule the world? After all, wizards supposedly wield immense magical powers, and yet most fantasy kingdoms still seem to be governed by kings and dukes and lords, whereas the wizards are relegated to being merely advisors, or else they’re off skulking in some humble tower or hovel or cave. Why don’t any of these so-called wiza
rds aim a little higher? Where’s their ambition? Couldn’t they just march into town, toss around a few fireballs, and declare themselves boss?
Of course, many of them are probably happier contemplating arcane mysteries, but surely some must take an interest in local affairs? Can’t they use their powers for good? In Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, Molly Grue admonishes Schmendrick the Magician, “Then what is magic for? What is the use of wizardry, if it cannot even save a unicorn?” Answer: “That’s what heroes are for.”
But why? Our next story, which originally appeared in the young adult anthology Firebirds Rising, is built around this basic conundrum: Why don’t those darn wizards ever get off their butts and actually do something for a change?
The Wizards of Perfil
Kelly Link
The woman who sold leech grass baskets and pickled beets in the Perfil market took pity on Onion’s aunt. “On your own, my love?”
Onion’s aunt nodded. She was still holding out the earrings which she’d hoped someone would buy. There was a train leaving in the morning for Qual, but the tickets were dear. Her daughter Halsa, Onion’s cousin, was sulking. She’d wanted the earrings for herself. The twins held hands and stared about the market.
Onion thought the beets were more beautiful than the earrings, which had belonged to his mother. The beets were rich and velvety and mysterious as pickled stars in shining jars. Onion had had nothing to eat all day. His stomach was empty, and his head was full of the thoughts of the people in the market: Halsa thinking of the earrings, the market woman’s disinterested kindness, his aunt’s dull worry. There was a man at another stall whose wife was sick. She was coughing up blood. A girl went by. She was thinking about a man who had gone to the war. The man wouldn’t come back. Onion went back to thinking about the beets.
“Just you to look after all these children,” the market woman said. “These are bad times. Where’s your lot from?”
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