“Why are they staring at her?” Tylan asked.
“She’s a witch, probably,” Nolan answered softly. “Here, take the cheese. We should go before they start noticing us.”
Kris glanced at him approvingly.
“A witch? Like a mage?” Tylan asked. “But she’s selling plants.”
Nolan started to explain just as a Night God priest approached the woman’s table. He was a blond, fiery-eyed man in his late twenties. His robes billowed around him like great black wings.
“You have enormous nerve, witch, to try to practice your craft here,” he said in ringing tones.
The rest of the square fell silent and still.
The woman raised her chin. “I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve run this stall for ten years.”
“A mistake that will be fixed now.”
Nolan stopped and stared back at the stall, the hairs stiff on the back of his neck. The other people in the marketplace began to fan out in a circle around the stall.
The priest turned to the crowd. “This woman is a known witch. How many of us have seen her practice her magic?”
The crowd called back in disjointed assent.
“What’s going on?” Kris asked.
“The Night God’s feelings on witches are clearly written in the scriptures.”
“As are the Mother’s, and the Sun Lord’s,” the woman cut in. Her face was very pale.
The priest continued to address the crowd, his eyes glinting with righteous fervor. “Magic and other powers are the tools of the gods! Mortals weren’t meant to touch those powers.”
Agreement rippled through the crowd again.
“And yet we have allowed her to live among us! What does this say about us? We knowingly, willfully, allowed a witch to practice magic in our town. Some among us, yes, here right now with us in this square! Even sought this woman out, asking for her magic, embracing a practice the Night God, in his wisdom, never intended for humans.”
“I’m a healer. It’s the Mother’s gift to us! I’ve saved three babies this year!”
“Nolan, what’s happening?” Kris asked again. “What are they saying?”
“I don’t like this. We should go,” Tylan said. But when Nolan glanced away, the exit before them was barred by more people, all edging their way towards the witch’s stall.
The priest’s voice rose to a boom, carrying across the entire market square. “Is it any wonder that the Night God took his gifts from us? When we have shown so little faith in him? We must prove ourselves worthy once again. Are we worthy?”
The crowd cheered back in tones that made Nolan’s heart double its pumping in his chest. The eyes nearest him shone with malicious glee. He began walking back towards the woman’s stall, threading his way through the crowd.
“Will we obey his will?”
The crowd cheered back again. A tomato flew through the air and hit the witch in the shoulder.
“Will we cast this witch away?” The priest grabbed one of the woman’s clay pots and threw it against the ground. The jar shattered, spraying red liquid in all directions.
The crowd roared and surged forward. Nolan ran with them, weaving through arms and shoulders as fast as he could. A head of lettuce sailed past his left ear, catching the man ahead of him in the back. Nolan wrestled through the handful of people ahead of him, catching an elbow to his brow and returning shoves without caring where they landed.
The witch was trying to gather her jars and herbs into her skirt, only to have them snatched away by the men and women around her and dashed to the ground. The man in front of Nolan grabbed the witch’s wrist and twisted it back, making her cry out in pain. Nolan punched the man with all his strength. Bone crunched where his knuckles met the man’s nose. The stranger howled and dropped the witch’s arm. She lunged back for her table, but Nolan grabbed her before him.
“Forget the stall. You need to run,” he hissed into her ear. Without waiting for an answer, he began pulling her away, toward the far side of the square, shielding her as best he could and swinging out with both elbows to clear their path.
“Nolan!” Kris cried.
A fist caught Nolan in the gut, knocking the breath out of his body and making him think for a second that he was about to be sick. He kicked out, pulled the woman free again, and began to run, pushing her in front of him. Fingers clutched at his coat and slipped away. Someone knocked his hat off; he ignored it.
More men closed off the street exit. Nolan and the witch stopped short, turned, and nearly tripped over Kris and Tylan. Sparks were running wildly off of Kris’s hair and around her hands. A crowd now surrounded all of them, but kept ten feet away on all sides. The faces of the people watching them were absolutely cold, twisted into masks of fear and anger. They hardly looked human.
“Another witch!” someone snarled.
“All of them!”
“Look at her!”
For a beat of time, the square fell still, as though the town held its breath. To Nolan it seemed that time slowed for just that instant.
Then the first stone hit Kris in the shoulder, the leader of a hail of wood, broken clay, and bits of cobblestone that rained towards them. Nolan reached for Kris, to shield her. His hand touched her shoulder.
There was a burst of burning pain, a flash of light, and then Nolan knew nothing more but darkness.
The first thing Nolan was aware of when he woke up was pain. He ached all through his skull, eyes, and neck. He was lying flat on his back on the ground, and it was nearly dark. Kris’s face, pale and frowning, hovered above his head.
“Thank the gods,” she breathed. She turned her head away. “Sabine.”
The witch woman’s face now appeared in Nolan’s view. She peered into each of his eyes and nodded.
“Nolan? Is that your name? Can you hear me?”
“Yes.” Speaking hurt, but not as much as nodding.
She asked him a round of questions about the fingers in front of him, the pain in his head, and where he was from. Nolan’s answers must have been satisfactory, because she eventually nodded again.
“Your head will heal quick enough, I think. I’m glad you’re awake. Sign language hasn’t gotten us very far today.”
“Where are we?”
“Few miles outside of Tevesque. Safe enough, for now. I’ve a spell that can hide us through the night. Here, sit up. Drink this.”
Sabine helped Nolan to sit and braced him with professional competence while she pressed a cup of tea to his lips. The pain in Nolan’s head eased considerably, replaced by a flood of memories.
“What happened? How did we get here?”
“Your friend—Kris, is it? Her spell put off that crowd right fast. They were tripping over themselves running away—gave us a chance to carry you off, sling you over my donkey Mel here, and go.”
“Spell?”
“It knocked you out, and blasted half the square away.”
“Kris?” Nolan glanced over at her. “She says you blew apart the town square.”
She shook her head slowly. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “It was an accident. I never meant to hurt you—or any of them.”
Nolan frowned. Something about him felt different, but he couldn’t figure out what—his brain was too sluggish.
“Is Tylan okay?”
Kris nodded. “He’s fine. A bump on his head, but nothing like you. She gave him something to help him sleep.”
“I’ll be all right,” Nolan said automatically.
Kris bit her lip and looked down. Nolan followed her look, and saw that his right hand, now resting in his lap, was bandaged. It was also shiny with some sort of salve. As he looked at it, the ‘differentness’ finally reached his brain as hot, throbbing pain.
“Burns,” Sabine supplied quietly, reading his face. “It’ll heal in time, but you got a bad hit from the spell.”
“What…”
“I’m sorry,” Kris said again.
“It doesn’t hur
t yet?” Sabine asked. “I gave you something for the pain, but…”
“It hurts,” Nolan said, his voice flat in his ears. “That’s good, anyway.”
Sabine nodded soberly, but she didn’t need to. He had learned enough from his mother to know that only the worst injuries couldn’t be felt right away. He peered at his hand, and saw the ridges of the burn marks around the bandages. The whole hand was swollen to uselessness.
“It will heal, in time.”
Nolan nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
Sabine licked her lips and smoothed her hands over her knees. “I want to thank you for what you did—trying to protect me. There’s not many men would have done that.”
“My mother’s a witch,” Nolan said softly. “All I could think of…if it were her, and a crowd like that…someone had to help.”
“There’s not many men would have done it,” Sabine said again.
A very small puff of pride rose in Nolan’s chest, then faded. He didn’t feel brave right now. He felt tired, and scared. And his head still hurt. How would they keep going when he couldn’t use his hand?
“I have to make my own way from tomorrow morning, to my sister’s maybe, but I wanted to get you started off healing right,” Sabine said, returning to brisk professionalism.
“You’re leaving?”
Sabine frowned absently at Nolan’s pack. “Whoever you are, there’s a lot of magic around you.” She held up a hand to stop his answer. “I don’t want to know why. Now magic means trouble. Whatever you’re doing, I need no part of it.”
She hesitated, and dug in a small bag at her feet. “I wasn’t sure how to say so to the girl, but you might have need of this.” She held out a strip of braided leather surrounding a blue stone. “A friend of mine and I made this for an apprentice of mine once. To keep his power in check.” She pursed her lips. “I never thought I’d have another use for this. But the girl might. Magic’s just too dangerous when witches can’t control themselves.”
Nolan fingered the stone with his good hand. It felt cool in his hand, but looked completely ordinary. He half-wondered if Sabine was spinning him a tale to make him feel better, like the cloth bear that his mother used to say would keep goblins away at night.
“It’s real,” she said. “But see for yourself.”
Nolan shrugged with one shoulder and put the stone and leather in his pocket. “Thank you.”
Sabine nodded and reached into her bag again. This time she took out a small jar and a long cloth. “You’ll need to rewrap that hand in clean bandages morning and night. Translate, and I’ll show the girl how.
At daybreak, Sabine was already gone, leaving behind a neat bundle of tea, balm, and clean bandages. Nolan and the Rusamites fumbled through their morning. Sabine’s pain-dulling tea from the night before had worn off, leaving Nolan feeling cranky and helpless. He ate his leftover porridge left-handed, watched Tylan and Kris roll up his bedroll, drank another cup of tea, packed the cook-pot away dirty, and shouldered his pack without saying anything.
The tea helped the pain, but his hand still burned steadily through the day. If not for that, Nolan might almost have enjoyed the morning. The day was beautiful, hot for late summer, but with a fresh breeze that cut the heat. The land under their feet began to roll gently mile by mile, the first symptom of the mountains Nolan could see rising in the distance. For the first time since making his wish and leaving Golden Isle, Nolan remembered why he had wanted so badly to travel. Now, though, the memory of it seemed muted, as if it had been someone else’s.
The day passed with very little said between the three of them. Dinner was awkward, not the least because the mages couldn’t touch the cookware, but the bandages on Nolan’s hand made him clumsy. He had to let the mages cut or peel any of the vegetables with Kris’s wooden knife.
The rest of the meal’s awkwardness came from the fact that Nolan could barely look at Kris, much less talk to her. It wasn’t that he blamed her—not really—for burning his hand. He knew she hadn’t meant to. But she’d done it, and torn apart half the square, from what Sabine said. On purpose or not, that didn’t change her spell’s damage. He couldn’t see any reason she might not do the same thing again.
“We should clean your hand before you sleep tonight,” Kris said gently when they’d finished their soup. It was the first comment since leaving Maliet that she’d directed at Nolan. “You said Sabine told you fresh bandages morning and night for at least three weeks.”
Nolan nodded reluctantly. “I guess we should.”
“Ty, can you get the dishes tonight?” Kris moved so that she was directly in front of Nolan. “Let me see it.”
Wishing suddenly that his mother was there, Nolan extended his right hand forwards. He flinched as she took his hand in hers.
Kris hesitated, then released her breath slowly. “Nolan, I won’t…I meant it when I said I’m sorry that I hurt you.”
“I know.”
She began to unwrap the bandage, her fingers working very gently and slowly as she unwound the cloth pass by pass. “I’m sixteen years old. In less than a year I’ll be a full mage. When I am, when I would have been, I’ll be one of the ten strongest mages in the last century.” After a hesitation that lasted the length of two passes of the bandage, she added. “Six of those ten have been from my family. Flynn.”
“But you can’t control it.”
Kris finished unwinding the bandage and began neatly re-rolling it, her eyes fixed on her task. Nolan looked his hand over unhappily. The swelling still puffed his hand to nearly twice its usual size. His entire palm was an angry shade of red, save for its black spot, and blisters now coursed over his skin.
“You have to understand. We’re not taught spells—not until much later anyways, and only if we’re favorites of the magni. The magni keep most of the spells, they channel our magic and decide how to use it.”
Very gently, Kris dabbed a damp cloth over Nolan’s hand. The pain in his hand doubled, to where he could barely keep himself from wrenching it away. Kris kept talking. Her voice matched the tone Nolan once used with frightened horses.
“What we are taught is how to call the magic to us, and how to control it so it can be used. To keep it burning at one level for hours, if need-be. For me, there was a lot of power to bring under control. But I’m less than a year from my full status. I could call the magic any second, and keep it as long as I wanted. No sputtering, no bursting. I could control it in Rusam. I did control it. The only time I ever slipped…a lot more was at stake than in that square, and I still didn’t lose control like I did yesterday.” Kris’s words grew harder, but her hands remained very gentle as she smoothed Sabine’s balm over his burns.
“So what was different about yesterday?” Nolan gritted out. “Being the fluke doesn’t really make this any better for me.”
“That’s just it. Besides my nearly killing you, nothing was different about yesterday. That’s just the angriest I’ve been since you met me. But before that… My magic grew for two weeks when I first got here. I’d never felt anything like it. It’s five times what it was in Rusam. It started slipping from me—bursting from me when I didn’t expect it. I haven’t done that since I was six.”
“Bursting…you mean the sparks?”
“It’s why I stopped trying to use it altogether. I thought if I didn’t call it, it wouldn’t get away from me.”
“So it’s too strong for you to control here, but you could control it there,” Nolan summarized simply, breathing easier now that Kris was rewrapping his hand. The explanation was helpful, but since they were still on his world, not hers, it was not in the least reassuring. Burning down a shop or farm fields or a house ought to have been the least of his worries. He wondered if the stone Sabine gave them could really work to stop Kris’s powers. He studied her, very aware that she was looking him in the eye for the first time that day.
“You might have told me earlier.”
Kris dropped her eyes and ne
atly tied off the bandage. “It’s done.”
Kris rewrapped Nolan’s hand the next morning without comment. Tylan looked between them and shook his head.
“I hope we’re not going a whole day without speaking again. It’s boring, on top of everything else.”
“Ty, I am happy to talk to you anytime you want. It’s just that Nolan here doesn’t want to talk to us.”
Nolan was taken aback at how powerful the glare of an eleven-year-old half his size could be.
“She can’t help it. And she said she was sorry.”
“You both should have warned me if you can’t control your magic here.”
“Would you have let us travel with you if we had?”
Nolan hesitated.
“We didn’t want you to be scared of us,” Tylan said. “You were the first person who wasn’t.”
“I’m not afraid of you…”
Kris finished tying the bandage. “Time to go.”
Nolan pushed himself awkwardly to his feet. “You said the problem was that you can’t control it as well as you could.”
“Why do you need to repeat it?”
“Sabine said this might help.” Nolan dug out the stone and its braid of leather and held it out to her.
Kris looked at it skeptically. “Help?”
“She said she made it for an apprentice. To help him control his magic.” Nolan took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Will you try it?”
Kris’s face stiffened. Very slowly, she reached for the stone, and gingerly handled it with one hand.
“It doesn’t feel like anything special.”
“Would you rather blow up another village?”
Kris’s face hardened until it resembled the structure of stone. “Tylan, will you help me tie this on?”
The Rusamite boy took the stone and obediently tied the ends of the leather band around Kris’s neck, glaring at Nolan all the while. When he stepped away, Kris fingered the leather nervously. “So what is this supposed to do?”
“She just said it would help.”
Star Thief Page 8