“He’s always managed before,” Joki said, still looking away guiltily.
“And then one day he won’t. Where are you stores?”
“I told you, I don’t have any horsefeed.”
“But you must have human feed.” I went over to the cart and started rummaging through it, turning up, as I suspected, oats for porridge and barley for stew. There was a short sharp argument between me and Joki over feeding that to Tähti, which I won by walking off with the sacks in my arms. Joki called after me that we would be hungry and it would be my fault, but didn’t dare come and wrest the grain from me by main force.
When I returned from feeding Tähti, though, he had something clutched in his hands, and a strange light in his eyes.
“I’ve been debating within myself whether to start this on the road, or wait till we arrive,” he told me. “But since you’re so bursting with health and strength, we can start now. You’ll probably survive it. And it will help you pass the tests when we get there.”
“What is it?” I demanded.
He uncupped his hands, showing me the little glass vial of red liquid. Red lit our faces, and the whole campsite. Sunset, I told myself. A few drops of liquid could never make that much of a glow.
“You should drink more,” he told me. “A drop every day, to give you strength and to speed the change.”
“Change?”
He wriggled his shoulders uncomfortably. “You are not simply born a dragon, Laela. Well, you are, or rather, you are born with the blood and the gift, but that is not enough. You have to undergo the training. You have to undergo the change.”
“What change?” He didn’t look very changed to me, but perhaps I was missing something. Perhaps it was one of those things where fancy people used fancy words to dress up things that weren’t very fancy or exciting or interesting at all.
“You...the training...you have to change...”
“Change in what way?”
“It will make you stronger,” he said, not looking me in the eye. “That’s all. It will make you stronger.”
“But it will make me weaker first?” I guessed.
“A bit. Sometimes. It can make you...sometimes you don’t feel so good...but you will be fine. I’m sure of it. You will be fine, and you’ll have it over with by the time we arrive, and that will make the training easier, and you’ll be ahead of everyone else. Come here, Laela.” He raised his eyes and looked me straight in the face. “Come here, Laela, and take it. It won’t be so bad, you’ll see.”
I walked over to him, why I couldn’t say. My feet no longer seemed like my feet.
“Only a drop,” he cautioned, holding the vial up to my lips. “One drop, no more.” He tilted the vial.
FIRE!
I was clutching onto the cart to keep from falling. Joki was watching me with dispassionate concern.
“Why does it do that?” I asked. “It was like...being suddenly squeezed all over...or struck by lightning...”
“It just does,” he told me.
“Will it get better?”
“It will. Once you stop taking it. Now come. Let’s see if you’ve left any food for us.”
I tried to get Joki to tell me more about the red liquid and its effects as he made supper—despite his dire words there was no shortage of food for the humans as well as for Tähti—but he put me off with stories that seemed to twist me around more and more as I felt odder and odder, till I accused him of poisoning me.
“No,” he said. “Not like what you mean. It’s the change, working on you. It makes you feel a bit sick at times, is all. But a strong girl like you, I’m sure you’ll survive. Now go to bed, and you’ll feel better in the morning.”
I wanted to argue with him, demand more answers from him, insist on promises that he wouldn’t harm me in the night, but none of the words would come out right, so I crawled over to the cart and made up my bed underneath it, where I lay for a long time, both sleeping and waking, dreaming and seeing, until the stars came out and the moon rose and set, dragging me down into darkness with it.
I EXPECTED TO FEEL too sick to walk the next morning, but when I crawled out from under the cart into the early-morning chill, I felt lighter, lighter than I had ever felt before. I thought of the dragonbone wand and how light it had felt in my hands.
Nonsense! I told myself firmly. This is always how you feel after an illness! You won’t take any more of that nasty red stuff, no matter what Joki says or does, and that will be the end of it. I looked over to where Joki was sleeping in the cart. He hadn’t bothered to take off his boots, and an empty bottle of wine was lying beside him. I could just start walking back down the mountain, and by the time he came to and realized what had happened, I would be long gone. He probably wouldn’t even bother to try to come after me.
Tähti came over to me, pulling on his tether and whickering hopefully into my hands, looking for more grain.
“If I leave, what will happen to you?” I asked him, and set about starting up a fire for breakfast.
By the time Joki had roused himself and stumbled out of the cart, I had made a steaming porridge, most of which I gave to Tähti. Joki looked at what I gave him and made a disgusted face before feeding his portion to Tähti as well.
“If you didn’t drink so much each night, you wouldn’t feel so ill in the morning,” I told him sternly.
“I only accept that kind of nagging from my wife,” he said.
“So you do have a wife, then?” I asked, hoping he would say “Yes.” Somehow I felt that men with wives were more trustworthy, even though I knew they could be just as untrustworthy as any other man.
“No. Are you offering to take up the office? Because you already nag like one.”
“I’m not a wife. I’m a healer. I nag everybody.”
“True enough.” He took the tea I gave him, sniffed at it, and poured the last of last night’s wine into the mug. I bit my lips and deliberately said nothing. He smiled a little into the steam.
“Truth be told, it’s nice to have someone around who cares enough to nag,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” I wanted to ask about the strange lightness, but I didn’t like the way he was looking at me, which was sad and tender, like a father and a husband all at once, and I didn’t want to make the lightness real by talking about it. So I just said “Fine” again and busied myself with washing up and putting out the fire and getting the camp ready for us to set off, while Joki sat there and sipped his wine and tea in silent sadness. Then I was mad at myself for doing all the work when he didn’t deserve it, but by the time that thought had come to me, I was already done and we were ready to go.
Joki tried to get me to ride in the cart with him, but I said no, I could walk better than Tähti could pull me, and so we started up the road again, heading into the morning shadows as the sun slowly climbed its way up the other side of the mountains, waiting until midday to burst free and greet us.
When we stopped to rest, we were overtaken by two men in a cart even shabbier than ours, pulled by a horse even skinnier and sadder-looking than poor Tähti. The men themselves were no better, with scraggly gray beards that appeared to be the result of laziness rather than planning, and clothes that must not have been washed for a month.
“That’s a pretty one you’ve got there, Joki,” one of them called to us. “What’d you do: tell her she had the gift to get her to come with you?”
“That’s your trick, Heikki,” said Joki. He turned away from the men, showing no interest in talking to them as they plodded past, even though he clearly knew them.
“So she does have the gift, then?” called Heikki, who seemed unable to take the hint.
“More than you, that’s for sure,” Joki shouted back. “But then, so does my horse.”
Heikki’s lips thinned. I wanted to tell Joki not to rile him, not to make them mad or draw any attention to me, but he shouted several things of that ilk after Heikki’s back as it retreated down the road away from us.
“They’re dangerous,” I said once they were out of sight. “We shouldn’t make them mad.”
“Dangerous they are,” Joki agreed. “But only for the weak.”
“How do you know them?”
Joki said nothing as we gathered up our things, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, but he said abruptly, once we had started walking, “We started the training together. But only I finished.”
“Oh,” I said. “So...what happens to those who fail? I thought...I thought they...died.”
“Sometimes they do. And sometimes they just fail, and have to make their way in the world with that burden on their shoulders. Some would say that’s worse than death.”
“That’s just silly.”
The look that Joki gave me had all of the father in it, and little of the wistful would-be lover. “You only think that because you’ve never failed at anything, Laela,” he said. “Nothing worth dying for.”
“The training isn’t worth dying for! None of this is!”
“And yet you were willing to come with me, even though you thought the price of failure was death.”
“That was just...”
“Yes?”
“Curiosity,” I said awkwardly. “I don’t really mean to die for it. I’d never do something like that.”
“If you say so,” said Joki, and urged Tähti onwards.
It was another clear, chill fall afternoon, with the wind blowing off the snowy caps of the mountains and down our spines, just cold enough to be pleasantly unpleasant. I strode along ahead of Joki and Tähti, still feeling strangely light but not bad. When we stopped for the night, I wasn’t tired at all.
“Come,” said Joki, when we had set up for the evening. “It’s time for your next dose.”
I came over to him with less reluctance than the night before, although with funny pangs in my stomach, that I had heard described before, normally by young women in love, but never truly felt.
“Can I take more?” I asked, when he took out the vial of red liquid. “Will it work faster if I take more? Will I become stronger?”
“So eager already?”
“I think you’re right. It is making me stronger. And I want to be stronger for...for when we arrive.”
The look he gave me was almost as sad as the one he had given me when he had told me what I really was. “No,” he said. “Or rather, yes. You could take more. But you would not enjoy what it would do to you. Better, safer, to go slowly. And besides, I don’t have much.”
“Will I be given more when...when I arrive?”
“If you pass the tests, yes.”
“How much more?”
He shrugged. “A bit. Not much. There isn’t”—the words were coming out more and more slowly—“there isn’t much left.”
“What do you mean, ‘not much left’?”
“Exactly what I just said. Not much left. So we can’t afford to waste any, or use too much. Now come here and take your dose.”
I obediently took the last steps up to him, and let him tilt the vial back into mouth, releasing a single precious, delicious drop onto my tongue.
When the first effects had passed and I returned to myself, holding onto a tree in order to keep from collapsing onto the ground, I found Joki’s eyes on me. His pupils were as large as if he had been given belladonna, and the expression on his face was strange.
“It is true,” he said, not taking his eyes off mine. “What they told me. There is nothing like it. Giving a beautiful woman the blood.”
I didn’t like those words at all, and wanted to say something to counter them, but my tongue would not obey me, and neither would the rest of me, so I only laughed feverishly as he made supper for the both of us and then sent me to my bed under the cart.
THIS MORNING WAS THE same as the last, except that I was greeted with a chill autumn drizzle when I crawled, feeling light and alive, out from under the cart in the early-morning grayness. Joki was once again sprawled half-covered in the cart, an empty bottle of wine next to him, dead to the world despite the rain that was dampening his face, half-threatening to drown him.
He remained asleep when I wiped off his face and covered him from the rain, and as I went to check on Tähti, and when I went off to gather firewood in order to stoke the fire for breakfast. He remained asleep when the two men from yesterday came upon me suddenly as I was bent over trying to pick up a larger stick without dropping any of the kindling I had already gathered. He remained asleep when they crept up on me from behind and knocked me to the ground, throwing themselves on top of me before I could grasp what was happening. He didn’t wake as Heikki held a drug-soaked rag over my nose and mouth while the other man sat on my legs and pinned down my hands. When he awoke I don’t know, but it was after sight and sound had faded away, and the two men had dragged me off into the woods.
THE SMELL OF WET WOOD and dirty cloth filled my nose. There was a strange moaning sound in my ears. I tried to open my eyes and turn my head to find the source of the moaning. My eyes wouldn’t open. Something was in my mouth, which was what was making the moaning sound so strange. The moaning was coming from me. I tried to clench my teeth in order to make it stop. My teeth wouldn’t clench because there was a dirty cloth between them, but the moaning went silent.
I tried once again to open my eyes. They still saw nothing but blackness, but now I could see that was because there was a cloth tied over them. My head ached fiercely, and I could taste vomit rising up the back of my throat. I swallowed it back down. If I threw up now, it would get caught in the gag and I could choke and die. I didn’t want to die. For the first time in my life I was acutely aware of just how fragile and helpless I was. A rock could fall on me, or the cart could overturn and land on top of me, or someone could come up and attack me, and there would be nothing I could do. My body would be smashed to pieces, and I would be able to do nothing but lie there and watch it happen. Only I wouldn’t just be watching it. I would be feeling it too, because it would be happening to me and no one else.
A scream tried to claw its way out of my throat just like the vomit had a moment earlier. I swallowed it down too. Then I swallowed down the next one. I wanted to scream and scream and scream in rage, despair, terror, and the hopeless hope that someone would come and save me, someone would come and rescue me from this terrible thing that had happened to me. Just like an animal trussed for slaughter. But no one ever came and saved them. Including me. So it was wrong of me to hope that someone else would come and save me. If anyone was going to save me, it would have to be myself. How many lambs had told themselves exactly that, a moment before the knife met their throat?
I concentrated on lying as still and as calmly as I could, gleaning what I could of my situation from my nose and ears. I was lying on the bed of a cart—judging by the smell, an old wooden cart. And judging by the creaking I heard and the jolting I felt, a rickety, poorly maintained cart. I could hear the “one-two, one-two” rhythm of shod hooves trotting on a stony road.
“How much longer to the turn-off?” said a voice I recognized as Heikki’s.
“Should be coming up just around the corner,” said the voice of the other man. And indeed, I felt the cart swing around a corner and then swing in the other direction as we turned off the road and started down a rougher, softer road that ran steeply downhill.
I heard one of the men move, and then I was poked roughly in the shoulder.
“Hey,” said Heikki. “I know you’re awake. Sit up.”
I debated ignoring him and pretending to still be unconscious, but he grabbed me by the shoulders and hauled me upright. When he tore the cloth from my eyes, they opened of their own accord, and blinked foolishly in the light.
“Don’t try to scream or do anything stupid,” Heikki told me. “Just sit there like a good little dragon, and we won’t hurt you. Well, not anything they wouldn’t do to you anyway.” He grinned a not very nice grin. “You’ll be grateful when it’s over,” he told me. “Now si
t there and don’t move.
The not moving proved to be more and more difficult as we jolted along, as along with the nausea I felt an increasingly pressing need to empty my bladder. I considered telling Heikki and asking him to stop. It might make him think of me more kindly, and thus treat me more kindly, and not do whatever terrible thing he was planning to do to me. Or it might make him despise me even more. No, I should ask. Getting him to like me was the best thing I could do. Because although I knew many things, one thing I had never learned how to do was fight off determined attacks by ruthless and desperate people. I knew how to heal others after such attacks. But when they had come for me, I had been unable to do anything, not even scream for help. I told myself that they had taken me so easily because they had crept up on me without warning. Which they had done with no trouble at all. So I had to get them to like me and pity me as my only hope. But despite all my clever thoughts, my body remained proudly immobile, refusing to bow down and humble myself by confiding in Heikki and asking for his help.
The road got narrower and narrower, and the sky above darker and darker. My healer’s knowledge reminded me of all the bad things that could happen from failing to void a full bladder. And the pain was remarkable. I had never deliberately deprived myself like this before, and it was shocking how unpleasant it was, how much just sitting still was like torture. A torture I could, perhaps, stop simply by catching Heikki’s attention and asking him nicely for help. But I still couldn’t make myself do it.
We wound down out of the trees and into a little valley in the foothills, with a small stone keep at the head of it, its back to the mountain and its front commanding a view of the little valley and its entrance from the plains.
“Lord Hei’s keep,” Heikki told me. “He’ll be glad to get you. He’s been looking for something like you for a long time. And he’ll be even gladder that you’re black-haired like him. Be good to him, don’t argue, and he might even take you as his wife.”
We were met by guards as we approached the keep. All of them were dark-haired and slanting-eyed like me, and unlike Heikki and the other man—or Joki, for that matter—but shorter. And when Lord Hei came out, his hair was as black and straight as mine, and when he smiled at the sight of me, his eyes disappeared into his cheekbones just as my father’s did. If he had been taller, and had the gentle air of a small-town scholar instead of the feral eyes of a small-time lord, he would have looked just like any of the men in my family.
The Magical Book of Wands Page 14