“Ty, please. Grandmother had nothing to do with it. I was thinking of you.”
Tylan buried himself in his bedroll without responding.
Kris brushed a tear off her cheek. Her shoulders began to twitch and shake alarmingly, her breath coming in tight gasps. Nolan reached out until his hand hovered over her shoulder. Instinct stopped him. He let the hand fall slowly back to his side.
“Why don’t we leave him alone for a little while,” he suggested softly. “Do you want to take a walk?”
“We can’t leave him—”
“Not far. Just…a little ways. Let you both calm down a bit.”
Kris snorted bitterly. “Afraid I’m going to burn you?”
“That’s not what I meant…”
But Kris was already getting to her feet and walking away, leaving Nolan to follow a few steps behind with the star-jar. After a few minutes of walking she halted and put her hands up to her cheeks, gulping hard.
“I’d never…It’s not what he thinks, Nolan, I swear. I’d never be ashamed of Ty.”
“I know.”
“My grandmother, my aunts and uncles…I’m not like them. They were always so proud of the Flynn family, the reputation, they were…afraid…he might be a mundane. The latest start at eleven.” Kris sniffed and dropped her hands back to her sides. “They loved him, but.... even my parents would whisper.”
“I never cared. I used to hope that he would never show magic. I used to hope for it more than anything.” She shook her head, staring into the darkness. “I wanted to see the magni’s faces when they found out one of their precious Flynns would never work for them. I thought…I hoped…that if Tylan were a mundane he would be able to do anything, work for someone else. And thinking of him away from the magni made me so happy…”
“So…why didn’t you tell Tylan that? He must have guessed, like the rest, right?”
Kris nodded resignedly. “I think he did. But he didn’t want to believe it—his marks from the schoolroom were always the best, he never argued with my parents…but I know…he always felt like it wasn’t enough. The family never let it be enough,” she amended sourly. “No matter what I did or didn’t do, everything was always about me. I must have heard ‘Karisa will be such an asset for Rusam’ or ‘Karisa will hold up the Flynn honor’ every other day. No one ever talked about Tylan.”
“Is that why you left?” Nolan asked gently. “You didn’t want to serve?”
Kris turned her head to stare at him quizzically. “You think I’m that selfish?” she whispered. “You don’t know me at all. I would have given my magic to the magni every day when I turned seventeen, just as everyone does. For Rusam. Every mage serves Rusam.”
She closed her eyes and turned away again. “Every mage family is allowed two children—two mages—to serve. To keep the population and the energy levels steady.”
“And people like Tylan change that balance,” Nolan finished. His mind began to absorb what she was saying.
Kris nodded. “Mundane children are possible in mage families, but…very rare. It was only a few months ago when I realized…when I thought of…how I never heard of the adult mundanes of mage families. I’d just never asked. Then I didn’t know how to ask without drawing attention to Ty. I just let it go. I should have thought…I should have known. After everything else…” she began shaking her head in a slow, steady rhythm that Nolan doubted she was even aware of.
“I heard the magni talking one day, about Ty. How they had to do something about him. How dangerous mageborn mundanes can be. How they can’t stay at the Academy because they’re ‘useless’. How they couldn’t let him leave because what if he bred and then had mage children? ‘How could they control them?’ So they wanted—they said, to ‘get rid’, to Ty—they wanted to…”
Dawning horror settled coolly over Nolan’s skin. His stomach twisted. “So you saved him before they could,” he finished softly.
Kris nodded, tears now streaming freely down her face. “I thought, if I could get him away, they might not care enough to chase him. They’d come after me, track my bracelet… I never expected to get away for good…” she wiped her face and sniffed.
“Don’t tell him. Please. I didn’t want him to think, to know…I don’t give a damn what the magni think about him. He’s fine.”
“No, I won’t tell.”
Kris continued sniffing and scrubbing her sleeve over her face. The light from the star-jar glimmered off the tears on her cheeks.
Nolan wished he had a handkerchief. His father had told him to never try to talk to a girl without having one nearby, and now he knew why. He could have at least done something useful with his hands. He finally settled on stuffing his good hand in his pocket.
“I’m sorry.” The words felt hollow even as they left Nolan’s mouth. He didn’t think he’d ever really understood what the magni were to Kris and the other mages until that moment; how powerful the magni were in their lives, and how dangerous. He’d never realized how trapped they had been. Nolan couldn’t imagine having his life measured so coldly.
Kris, her face now puffy but dry, tucked her hands back into her sleeves and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “We should go back. I shouldn’t leave him.”
“When you’re ready.”
Neither of them moved. No breath of air stirred the night. Time slowed. Seconds, minutes or hours might well have passed while Nolan waited with Kris in that valley. Neither of them spoke a word until breakfast the next morning.
The nights began to grow cooler, the first touch of true autumn. Nolan noticed the season’s shift uneasily. At some point in the last week or so, he thought he must have passed his sixteenth birthday without realizing it. Much more troubling, they hadn’t even passed through Marayne yet, and Ostmonton and a small strip of Ustengard still lay between them and the Twilight Mountains. The money Nut supplied in Port Prosper was all but gone, and now the Rusamites needed coats. What could have sent Nolan halfway through Ostmonton had not lasted nearly as well for three people. Though it worried him to have to waste any more time while his doubts about the star-jar’s health mounted, he offered a day’s labor to the next farmer they passed.
The man scanned the three of them suspiciously while Nolan explained himself, barring the doorway to the house with a well-muscled arm. When he caught sight of Nolan’s hand, he shook his head and shut the door. The next house, a few miles down the road, didn’t even let Nolan get that far. The farmwife who answered the door shook her head before he so much as opened his mouth.
“No. No work, no food, whatever you are wanting, no. Leave, before I call my husband.” She backed away, pushing a small boy behind her skirts, and slammed the door in their faces. Nolan heard the thud of her barring the door a second later.
Disgruntled and not a little worried, Nolan left the farmyard without saying a word.
“Maybe we should put Tylan in front of you next time,” Kris suggested. “They might want to help him more than us, since he’s younger.”
Nolan shrugged. “They’ll still see my hand and your eyes soon enough.”
“A child is a child.”
“I don’t want to be your bait.”
“Tylan, this is for all of us,” Kris answered. “If it works, it works.”
They compromised and had Tylan stand beside Nolan at the next door. Whether because the woman who answered the door saw Tylan or she and the man starting his dinner at the table were simply feeling generous, they heard Nolan out.
“Well enough,” the farmer, Laurent, said when Nolan finished his offer of work. “A farm needs work before winter, and we’ve no sons to help—yet,” he added with a brief smile for his wife.
“Sleep in the barn tonight, the three of you. You work tomorrow as well as you can with that hand and have those two, whoever they are, help you. And you’ll each get three meals. Tomorrow night, we will see, yes?” He looked them over, and softened his gaze still more. He and his wife exchanged a significant look
. She rose from the table and began cutting into a fresh loaf of bread. “My wife will give you food to eat tonight,” Laurent said gruffly.
With bread and chunks of cheese in hand, they followed Laurent to the barn that stood adjacent to his house. It was hardly comfortable between the hay’s itchiness and the strong, earthy smell of the animals behind the wall, but the roof over their heads was a welcome comfort. All three of them thanked Laurent in his own language, then crawled into their bedrolls without another word spoken between them.
They spent the next morning forking potatoes out of the ground. Nolan was sweating within an hour, but weeks of carrying his pack had built more muscle through his back and shoulders than he’d had before. He nearly kept pace with Laurent.
At midday they feasted on rabbit, turnips, beans and bread. Laurent then turned them to gathering the unearthed potatoes in sacks. In the late afternoon, he asked Nolan help him to mend some fencing for his cows.
“Those two are not used to this work,” Laurent commented at the end of it all.
Nolan wiped the sweat from his face. “No. But they are trying.”
“You are all honest workers,” the farmer agreed, nodding, “But that boy has no muscle. Their hands are soft, but they’re no sort of gentleman or lady.”
Nolan said nothing.
“They are not from here,” Laurent explained.
“Neither am I,” Nolan replied evenly. “We travel together.”
“But you do not look like the others I have seen in town. You are Surian, yes?”
Nolan stopped working and stared at the farmer. “What others?”
“One day we are only ourselves, the next day I heard one story, the next all of my neighbors are talking, how they have seen these others wandering the roads, stealing from our fields. And you’re the only one that’s different—not so pale, with normal eyes, and with brown hair, not black. You are Surian, but not them. And they are not from Ostmonton, either. So where do they come from?”
Kris stared at Nolan in something between shock and horror when he passed on this information at the water pump. Laurent’s wife had barred them from entering the house until after they’d washed up, and Nolan took this first excuse to share Laurent’s questions with Kris and Tylan.
“He’s seen other Rusamites? Here?”
Tylan, on the other hand, looked hopeful. It was the first positive expression that had crossed his face since the night of his discovery as a mundane. He pushed his dripping hair back out of his face. “This is good, isn’t it? It means they’re all right.”
“We don’t know who we might run into though.”
“It could be Mother. Or Uncle Balen. Or Rhea—you’d want to see her, wouldn’t you?”
“Almost anyone from Rusam would be a loyalist, Ty. Do you know what they’d do with us if they found us out?”
Tylan’s face fell, resuming its new gloomy expression.
Nolan ran his left arm and his head under the pump, carefully holding his right hand away. “We’ll just have to be careful,” he said when he was upright again, slicking water off of his face. “They’ll have more to think about than runaways, right? So they might not recognize you right away. But I think we should keep the star-jar even quieter than before.”
Kris nodded. “More people are more dangerous. And if we run into the wrong person, they might even try to break it.”
Alice stuffed them again that night. They readily agreed to work another day in exchange for more supplies, and the evening passed amicably enough and ended early. Nolan crawled back into the barn with his stomach as full and contented as he could remember it being in months, and his skin freshly washed from a proper bath. He breathed easily and waited for sleep to come.
Tylan’s voice broke through the darkness. “If there’s a way here, for more than just us, than there must be a way back.”
Nolan stifled a groan.
“That’s what we’re doing, Ty,” Kris answered with marginally more patience. “Trying to get a wish from a witch here or from the mountain Nolan told us about.”
“No, I mean now.”
“Nut said everybody there’s just in a kind of in-between place right now,” Nolan yawned. “There’s nothing to go back to.” He regretted his words on the instant, but there was no undoing them.
“Thank you, Nolan. Very helpful,” Kris whispered harshly.
Nolan forced his sluggish brain to move faster. “I mean, I’m sure everyone is all right. They’re just…once we send you back everything will be just as you left it. Don’t worry.”
Tylan didn’t answer.
“I’m sure Mother’s fine, Ty,” Kris murmured. “If she’s not here, nothing can happen to her until we set things right again. She’s safer, really.”
Nolan heard Tylan roll away. Feeling a mixture of guilt and irritation that Tylan had so completely spoiled his peaceful mood, Nolan did his best to fall asleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The town of Nanair felt odd from the moment Nolan set foot in it. The people, from the farmwife opening her stall to the men carting flour down the street to the thatcher, seemed too quiet in their work. Nolan saw a village at work, but felt none of the hustle that he associated with towns, nor the peaceful, easy rhythm of the smaller villages they’d passed through farther to the south. If possible, the mood felt worse than when they’d passed through Tevesque. The harvest time should have been a day of hard work and celebrations, but there was no trace of festivity in the mood of Nanair.
They attracted stares from the time they passed the first town buildings. Mothers herded their children away from Nolan and the Rusamites, shooting dark glances over their shoulders. Other people began to mutter amongst themselves. Their stares made the hairs rise on the back of Nolan’s neck. Nanair felt far too much like Tevesque for comfort. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kris and Tylan bunch closer together.
A woman in front of a basket weaver’s shop put her hand on her husband’s forearm, murmuring to him while she glared at the three of them. He nodded grimly and strode towards Nolan, his brown eyes flinty. Nolan looked him over uneasily. Even beneath his loose shirt the man’s muscles bulged across his chest, through his shoulders and down to his large, callused hands.
“Go! Go back wherever you come from!” he growled as he drew up in front of Nolan, casting one arm in a sweeping, violent gesture. “All of you, go! You are not welcome here.”
Two people passing by turned from their paths to stand behind the man, forming a wall that blocked Nolan, Kris and Tylan’s path.
“Wherever you come from, take yourself back.”
Nolan squared his shoulders and spoke as calmly as he could. “We just want to buy supplies. We don’t mean any harm.”
The front-most man spat contemptuously. “There is nothing for you here. Be gone.”
A few people began to scurry away, or duck back in their shops. Others began to melt from both sides of the street, circling the trio and muttering angrily.
“Nolan, what do they want?” Kris whispered.
“Liars,” one man hissed.
“Liars!”
“Where are you really from? Tell us that!”
Nolan backed into Kris and Tylan. “I’m from Suria,” he answered, still doing his best to stay calm. He held up his empty hands in goodwill.
“They are not Surian!”
“You all see their eyes, yes?”
“Witches!”
“No witches here!”
“Get them out!”
“What do you want from us anyway?”
“We just wanted to earn a little money, if we could, and to buy supplies for travel,” Nolan insisted, scanning the crowd futilely for an exit. The circle was now two and three people deep. “We will go if you want.”
“Nolan!” Kris hissed. “What do they want? What are you telling them?” A stray spark flickered from her shoulder to her fingertips. Nolan swore. She’d taken the blue stone off two hours before.
�
��Did you see that?!” Someone called.
“Witchery!”
“Shut her up! She is…!”
“Teach them a lesson.”
“Nolan…”
“Don’t—”
The crowd began to jostle forwards, and Nolan lost all track of what was being said around them. Someone shoved into him, almost knocking him off of his feet. He heard a snap from Kris’s direction, and more shouting. Hands grabbed at Nolan’s shoulders and his shirt. He pushed away on instinct, trying to turn towards the others, but more hands held him too tightly. Nolan could hear Tylan yelling to be let go. Another snap, followed by swearing, a thump, and a cry, came from Kris’s direction. The crowd began to drag Nolan away. He kicked out, clutching his injured hand to his stomach to protect it from the bodies surrounding him. Pain blossomed over his cheek as someone backhanded him. He felt other hands grab his feet and lift them.
“Hey, hey, hey!” a newer voice, male lightly accented, called over the throng.
“What is going on here? What have these people done?”
“Put them down, Serge,” a more authoritative voice ordered. He sounded tired. “Have they broken a law? Stolen something?”
The hands gripping Nolan put him down somewhat reluctantly. He shoved away from the crowd, shouldering forward to the head of the group, where two men were looking at the crowd disapprovingly. The one on Nolan’s left looked like a common vagabond, though older than most wanderers by at least a decade. He looked older even than Nolan’s parents, with pure white hair, a sun-wrinkled face and bushy eyebrows. The man on the right, however, wore a gentleman’s suit, and was looking at the crowd much like a father chastising a group of rambunctious children. The men and women behind Nolan shifted uneasily before him. One or two of the women bobbed curtsies.
Nolan saw Kris and Tylan worm their way out of the crowd, looking roughed but walking steadily. He could see Kris forcibly controlling her breathing, her lips moving rapidly in an undertone to herself. There were sparks in her hair, but nowhere else. With each inhale of her breath, sparks disappeared. Nolan edged towards her and her brother cautiously. He dug the blue stone from his pack and offered it to her. Kris sucked in her breath, but tied it on. The last of her sparks died a moment later.
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