Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  The more he thought about it, the more discontented he became. This was no life for anyone with any courage or ideas! This was no place for anyone who wanted something besides a place to sleep and steady meals and - predictability! Errold’s Grove was dying, or dead, and no one had noticed it but him. And he had to escape before he died, too.

  Nandy and another woman were talking inside, but he didn’t pay any heed to them until the tag-end of a sentence caught his attention. “ - that old fraud who calls himself a wizard.”

  “I don’t know why we give over anything to support him,” the other woman replied querulously. “It’s not as if he was like Kyle, and useful.”

  “I’ve said as much to my husband,” Nandy replied with an air of triumph. “I’ve said to him that there’s nothing that man could do that one of the girls couldn’t learn. Take Ida’s Saffy - “ she chuckled cruelly, “ - and the gods know there isn’t a boy in Errold’s Grove who would.”

  “Nandy!” her visitor exclaimed in mock shock. “Now how could you say a thing like that?”

  “Twenty years old and not married, a face like a horse and a body like a washboard? It’s only plain speaking,” Nandy retorted, with obvious pleasure. “Now look, my man could take her up when he next goes off to the city and leave her at the Healer there. He’ll train her for nothing, we’ve already asked. In a year she comes back, and we can send that good-for-nothing fraud off to swindle some other village. Saffy could go back to living with her parents, just like before, but then she’d go from being a burden to a blessing. The rest of us could pay for her services as we need them, not before, and there won’t be that drain on everyone, which is purely cruel. And now there’s two to feed, him and that useless, feckless, bit of bad blood that he calls an apprentice.”

  “Well, it isn’t fair,” the other agreed. “If you’re never sick, it doesn’t seem fair to have to keep giving over food and clothing and all. Of course, he does do Finding, and Weather-watching - “

  “And a careful person don’t need a Finder, and as for Weather-watching, we got along well enough without it before.” Nandy pronounced that as the end of the argument. “As for the boy, well, I don’t doubt that if he doesn’t manage to bring the Forest down on us all as his rootless parents tried to do, he certainly won’t amount to anything. He hasn’t the intelligence of Kyle and he’s as shiftless as Lilly, and the sooner we’re rid of both of them, the better off this village will be.”

  Nandy and her customer moved away from the window at that point, and Darian couldn’t hear anything but the murmur of voices.

  He sat where he was, not out of shock, but suddenly struck by a sense of hopelessness so deep he couldn’t have moved if his life had depended on it. Now they grudged even the scant food they provided him - they were going to turn him out to fend for himself as soon as they could get away with it. And they were going to do the same to Justyn, too - but of course, Justyn would have a year or so to try to find a new place to go, because they couldn’t do without him until Saffy was trained. It sounded as if - supposing Nandy had her way - they were going to just throw Darian out as soon as Nandy could get enough people to agree with her. And Justyn at least had some skills he could barter for a new place somewhere. Darian had nothing except the clothing he’d brought with him, the ability to shoot a bow, and whatever he could convince folks he could do.

  So what am I supposed to do? Go live off the Forest, with no supplies and no weapons but my bow and few arrows? It was one thing to plan to become a great hunter and trapper when he was older, and had built up all the things he needed to properly live in the wilds - it was quite another to know that he was going to be cast out to make shift for himself with nothing whatsoever to help him. No point in asking Justyn for help either - the old wizard would have a hard enough time finding a new place for himself.

  Maybe I should just run away now, and get it over with. If I go now, maybe I could steal enough to keep me alive until I get to the next town. That’s Kelmskeep, I think. Isn’t it?

  Assuming he could find the next town; he’d never been there, and he didn’t know how far it was, or if he could get there afoot. People said it was downriver, but how far was it? Could he get there on his own? And if he could, would anyone want him when he got there? Assuming he didn’t run into something else first, like maybe Hawkbrothers. It used to be that you wouldn’t run into them unless you trespassed in their territory, but that wasn’t the case anymore, or so their yearly Herald had said. Now they could be anywhere in the Forest according to the Herald; they were supposed to be much better at doing the new kinds of magic than anyone else was, and the Herald had been rather vague about just what these bands of roaming Hawkbrothers were supposed to be doing. Nor had he been able to tell the villagers how the Hawkbrothers would react to any strangers they met in the Forest.

  Of course, as long as he stayed on the road, he would probably be all right, but what if he couldn’t? He’d have to eat and drink, and that would mean going into the Forest to hunt for food and water.

  Well, he had warning now. If a trader came by before Nandy got enough people together to agree to throw him out, maybe he could get the man to take him along. Or maybe the Herald would come soon, and he could beg help there - and hopefully, the Herald wouldn’t decide that the best “help” would be to persuade the villagers to give Darian “one more chance.” That “chance” would last only as long as it took for them to get rid of Justyn, and then he’d be out on his ear, too.

  Now so thoroughly depressed that the filched sweet lay like a leaden lump in his stomach, seeing no future now but a choice between uncertainty and endless drudgery, Darian crawled out of his hiding place and slunk like a beaten dog back to the dubious protection of his Master.

  The short distance to the other end of the village seemed shorter than usual - and Justyn was waiting for him outside the cottage when he came into view of the building.

  Darian knew by the set of Justyn’s chin and the look in his eye that it would do him no good to tell his Master what he had overheard. At best, Justyn would dismiss it all as idle gossip, betray his hiding place to Nandy, and hand him over to her for punishment. At worst, Justyn would assume he was making it all up in an effort to avoid punishment.

  In either case, nothing would happen until it was too late for Darian.

  Justyn had evidently pondered Darian’s punishment for some time, and had come up with something both appropriate and suitably quelling.

  “It’s about time you decided to show yourself,” he said, his face set in a fearsome scowl. “I used the last of my mycofoetida oh Kyle, as you would know, if you had been here, as you ought to have been. I had to clean up his mess, and then clean up the dishes from last night that you were supposed to have attended to.”

  Darian just hung his head and looked at his feet, saying nothing. There was nothing much he could say, after all. Justyn was right; he should have been there. If he had been there, Nandy would have less ammunition to use against him. There was little doubt that he had caused all of his misfortunes all by himself.

  “So, since you happen to like roaming around in the Forest so much, you can just go out there and collect enough mycofoetida to fill this basket.” Justyn dropped the basket contemptuously at his feet, without waiting for him to reach for it.

  Darian winced, and picked the basket up without a word. Mycofoetida was a fungus, a particularly noxious shelf-fungus with a perfectly nauseating aroma when fresh-picked. The aroma faded to nothing within a few candlemarks of being gathered, and when dried and packed in a wound, it was a powerful preventive against infection. But for those few hours, it was best that both fungi and picker stayed away from anyone else. It grew best on live tree trunks where there was a fair amount of indirect light, which meant that you didn’t have to go far into the Forest to find it. Only Justyn knew how to dry it, prepare it, and use it properly, so only Justyn ever went after it.

  It was not a choice task, to say the least. Justyn
knew how to gather it without losing the contents of his stomach, but Darian didn’t, and he doubted that Justyn was going to impart that information in his current mood.

  He was right. Justyn also dropped his bow and quiver of arrows at his feet. “Since you’re going to be out there for some time,” the wizard continued, “you might as well hunt. Bring back something for our dinner tomorrow. If I have to look at another turnip, I may start breaking plates.”

  Darian stooped again, gathered up the bow and arrows, and turned, still without saying anything. As he slouched away, he thought he heard Justyn mutter under his breath, “And it would serve you right if the Hawkbrothers got you.”

  That last almost made Darian break into hysterical laughter, it was so incongruous after the things he’d just overheard, for it was a threat that was always being given to naughty children: “You’d better be good, or the Hawkbrothers will get you!” Even Darian’s Mum had said it playfully, now and again, when he’d been into harmless mischief. Of all the things to tell him now!

  As he trudged openly between the rows of corn, heading for the Forest, he sighed and slung his quiver over his shoulder. People always talked about Hawkbrothers, as if they were all male, and no one had ever said anything about seeing a woman of fheir kind. Was that why mothers said that Hawkbrothers would get a naughty child? Were there no women, and did they kidnap children to replace their numbers?

  No, that didn’t make any sense - they were supposed to be allies of Valdemar, and your allies didn’t go about snatching toddlers. Maybe they might ask the Heralds for orphans to adopt; that would be perfectly all right, since the Hawkbrothers were certainly capable of protecting children and caring for them, but it wouldn’t make sense for them to out-and-out kidnap little ones. Not that you could convince anyone here of that. After all, the Hawkbrothers were foreign, and as everyone here knew, you couldn’t trust foreigners.

  Still, given how no one here wanted him, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the Hawkbrothers did carry him off. At least it would be an adventure. Maybe they would know something about what had happened to his Mum and Dad - or they would be willing to help him try and find out. After all, they were supposed to know everything there was to know about the Pelagiris, and they actually lived in and off of the Forest itself, never needing any kind of supplies or help from outside. Not even his Mum and Dad had been able to do that. Maybe his best bet would be to try and find Hawkbrothers, instead of trying to avoid them.

  But given the way my luck has been running, if I run away and try to find them, there won’t be any of them for leagues around, he thought dispiritedly while he shuffled toward a copse of trees. Everything I touch falls apart. Even Justyn would have been better off if he’d never seen me. Hellfires, I bet he really doesn’t want me around anymore. He’d probably be grateful if I just disappeared.

  He hunted for the fungus in a rather halfhearted fashion as he tried to formulate plans that didn’t fall apart the moment he considered what opposition to them he might encounter. One thing he knew; even if nobody in the village wanted him around, the moment he tried to run off, they’d go after him. It wasn’t logical, but it was the way they did things. It didn’t matter if the outcome was what they wanted, whatever happened had to be accomplished under their control.

  Take the case of Ananda’s rooster, for instance. Ananda Pellard had an old rooster that was the most evil-minded, aggressive bird Darian had ever seen. She couldn’t catch it to trim off its spurs, and it would attack anything, even grown people, inflicting some painful punctures on children. Ananda always said that she ought to put it down, but it was obvious she was afraid to try and catch it to kill it. One night something plucked it out of the tree it roosted in - Ananda said she heard it squawk, and in the morning there was only a pile of loose feathers with blood on them. Probably it had been an owl, and you would have thought that everyone would be glad that the nasty old bird had been taken care of.

  But no. Nothing would do but that the men sat up for the next several nights to try and kill whatever had come in to get the rooster. Darian wouldn’t have been surprised if it had only been Ananda who was upset - after all, it was her bird, and even a tough old rooster made perfectly good soup - but it seemed as if half the village was annoyed, and all because what had happened hadn’t been under their control.

  So if he ran away, even though none of them wanted him there anymore, they would be angry and upset and sure to send someone after him to catch him and bring him back. So whatever course he took, he had to be somehow certain of being able to elude pursuit.

  None of this made any sense, of course, but nothing was making any sense anymore.

  He honestly, truly, tried to keep from going too far away, but he couldn’t find any of the shelf-fungus growing near at hand, and he really hadn’t expected to. The last time he’d hunted for the stuff, he’d had to climb so far up tree trunks that Justyn had been alarmed, and he knew that it wouldn’t grow farther up than he’d gone, since there was too much light. So, since it needed a great deal of indirect light, and that meant the edge of the Forest, he finally decided to work his way along the riverbank.

  It was a slow process; he hunted tree by tree, looking for fungus at ground level, then peering up along the trunk to see if there was any higher growth, then finally climbing to see if what he had spotted was the kind of fungus he wanted, or something else. And that was probably exactly as Justyn had planned, too, for Justyn knew more about where things grew on the edge of the Forest than Darian did. He must have climbed twenty trees before he found a single growth.

  By that time, at least, he had worked out something to try to keep the fetid-smelling juice off his hands when he broke the piece off. He wrapped several layers of leaves over the place where he held the fungus to break it off, and immediately discarded them once the fungus was safely in the basket. Although it still smelled terrible, he managed not to get any of the smell on himself.

  He was up a third tree, when he gradually became aware of a great deal of noise and shouting from the direction of the village. He craned his head as far as he could around the tree trunk, and nearly fell off the limb he was sitting on.

  There was smoke rising from the village, and from the road beyond it - he saw people, made small by the distance, trying frantically to catch loose horses, or heading toward the river with bundles on their backs and children stumbling along behind, moving as quickly as they could.

  A moment more, and he saw the red of flame flickering on the other side of the river, light glancing off something very bright and metallic, and the shouts turned to screams.

  A single thought formed through the shock. Something was happening. The village of Errold’s Grove - somehow, for some reason - was under attack!

  What am I going to do with this boy? Justyn thought, as he watched Darian slouch his way through the corn, heading to the edge of the woods. The boy vanished from sight within moments - and he wasn’t trying to hide, this time. No wonder he could evade virtually any watcher! Why, he didn’t even make the stalks move as he passed through them - if you didn’t know he was in the field, you’d think it was empty.

  Justyn sighed heavily, went back into the cottage, shut the door firmly behind him to discourage visitors, and sank into his chair. He didn’t want to see anyone else today, unless it was a tearing emergency. All morning he had been receiving visitors eager to give him their own idea of what he should do about Darian’s latest infraction, and some of the speakers had voiced something stronger than mere opinion. It was clear that if he couldn’t get Darian turned around, there were those who would take care of the situation for him.

  Most of them wanted him to dismiss the boy, and didn’t really care what happened to him after he was dismissed. He wouldn’t be allowed to stay here, that was certain. The villagers didn’t like the way their children were reacting to his presence - or, more specifically, his actions. “He’s a disruptive influence,” was how Derrel Lutter, the shopkeeper, put it. “He
doesn’t fit, an’ evejy part of a village has to fit.”

  Widow Clay had dropped by on the pretext of having her bad knee looked at, and had been more to the point. “The other children think he’s some kind of hero. Or at least, they think he’s somebody to look up to. If he’s allowed to sass his elders and get away with it, every young’un in Errold’s Grove is gonna start doin’ the same,” she’d pointed out. “So unless you want to be the reason for a lot of spanked bottoms and soapy mouths, you’d better get that boy to act like something other than a savage. Folks have given him a certain amount of room, on account of losing his parents and all, but they’re out of patience.”

  And the woman was perfectly right. Although he held himself aloof from the other children in the village, Darian was a profound influence on them and even Justyn had noticed it. They envied his freedom, freedom to run off and do what he wanted, and freedom to speak his mind even to an adult. They all wished that their parents had been as adventurous as his, and when he was willing to talk about it (which was not often) they hung on every word of his stories about living in the Forest. Any one of them would happily have traded places with him, even though life with Justyn was hardly one of exalted status. And when they could get away with it, they flat-out imitated him. The most coveted item among the village children at the moment was a tooled leather vest like Darian wore; that was what virtually all of them, of both sexes, had requested as birthing-day presents. Justyn had actually considered that attitude a healthy one, and he had secretly hoped some of it might rub off on the parents. It had been something of a half daydream of his. If their elders got some spine back, and decided to stop fearing the Forest and go back out to do what had brought prosperity to the village in the first place, then the place would stop stagnating. It might even prosper again, and they would discover that there was nothing so terrible in the Pelagiris after all. They would stop denigrating Darian’s parents, and might even stoop to consulting him about the Forest, which would raise both his status and Justyn’s in the eyes of the village.