by Ray, M. A.
Vandis only had to wait a few more moments before Dingus got the shutters open. Sunshine spilled in, making him blink, illuminating piles of dusty junk and a cracking oilcloth hiding something large and round, and turning Dingus’s hair into a crown of flame.
“Sure is a lot up here,” the boy said. He picked up an old wand from one of the piles next to him and brandished it like a sword. “It feels weird. Kind of warm, like it might could do something if I tried hard enough.”
“Well, don’t point it at me, then.” Vandis dodged more piles on his way across.
Blushing, Dingus set the wand down where he’d gotten it. “Sorry.”
“I think the message dome is under that oilcloth,” Vandis said, knocking over a precarious muddle of scroll tubes. They bounced away in all directions. “Careful pulling it off.”
Dingus started to ease the cover away, pausing once for a thunderous sneeze. By the time Vandis extricated himself from the scroll tubes and made it over to join his Squire, the dome stood exposed to the mote-clogged light that streamed through the window. Glass crunched under his boots.
“It’s broken.” Dingus crouched so his eye was level with the top of the table.
“That’s too bad.” There was a shattered hole in the side of the paper-thin glass dome. It covered nearly the whole table, and still had a faintly opalescent sheen over its surface, like an aging soap bubble. “It’s pretty delicate, though. I guess it was unavoidable.”
“How’d they ever blow something this big and perfect?” Dingus wondered softly, probably to himself, as he stroked broad, flat fingertips with chewed-off nails over the curve of the inlay around the dome: ebony, with mysterious sigils picked out in platinum and gold.
“I wouldn’t know. I’m not a glazier. They probably used magic.”
“It’ll never be the same.”
“No,” Vandis said quietly, caught in the moment, watching a roughed-up peasant boy make contact with a relic of days gone by. Dust motes still swirled and sparkled in the air around them, turning the light into streaks. After a few minutes, Dingus turned clear hazel eyes on him: big, beautiful hitul eyes.
“What was it like? Back then, I mean.”
“I don’t really remember,” Vandis admitted, and the boy frowned.
“You don’t?”
“Of course not. How old do you think I am?”
“If you were a tulon, I’d say you’re in your nines. I mean, my grandparents are in their sevens and they don’t have no gray hairs. But you gotta be a hundred at least.”
He didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. “Cut it in half. I’m forty-nine; I couldn’t have been three when it happened. I don’t even remember my parents. They died pretty quickly after. The plagues, you know.”
Dingus stopped in the middle of examining the underside of the table. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Like I said, I don’t remember them.”
“That don’t mean you didn’t miss ’em.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t.”
Dingus straightened and walked around the table, stepping gingerly around the glass on the floor. “How old are those other guys, the Squires that were here? Tony and, uh, Arkady?”
“Probably about your age. Sixteen, seventeen.”
“They look like men.”
“Yeah, they do.” Vandis remembered when they were little kids. It hadn’t been that long ago.
“Wonder how long it’ll be ’til I look like that.”
He looked at Dingus’s gangly proportions and thought about the deepening voice. “Probably not very long.”
Dingus crouched, laying a hand on either side of the dome and looking at him through it. “Think I’ll grow a beard?”
“I don’t know, Dingus. It might be better if you put some of these questions to another half-blood.”
“If I can find one older than me, I will. Usually we—don’t make it this far. Naked on a hillside,” he explained, at the question that must’ve been on Vandis’s face. “Drowned in a tub. I’m one of the lucky ones. Or unlucky. Depends how you look at it.” He shook his head. “So you don’t remember anything?”
“I caught a fairy once,” Vandis offered, eager to change the subject. “I remember that, because it bit me.” He showed Dingus the tiny white scar on his thumb. “They looked like tiny people, about this tall—” He held his thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “—except that they were all different colors, with sparkly bugs’ wings. It was a purple one that bit me. They used to sing, I remember that, too. There was a creek out behind our house…ah, but you don’t want to hear all this.”
“Sure I do.”
Were Squires always this ridiculously flattering? “They’d come to the creek and sing together. It was beautiful. High and sweet, like tiny bells.”
“Why’d they have to die?”
Vandis shrugged. “I don’t think anyone knows. If you want to hear what I think…”
His Squire looked at him expectantly.
“I think someone got greedy. It’s always that way, with power.”
“Huh. That’s one of the better theories I heard.”
“Wait—what?”
Dingus grinned. “Think I didn’t ask my grandparents? Told you I ain’t as dumb as I look. You believe me now?”
“What did they say?”
“Grandma said it was their time.” A roll of the eyes told Vandis what he thought of that. “Grandpa said he didn’t know, and Ma said it was the humans’ fault. But my, uh—my friend—” Here, Dingus blushed collar to hairline. “She said the magic got sucked away, and the fairies went with it.”
“Hmm.” Vandis rubbed his chin, absorbing the thought—and the idea of Dingus’s having a girl. “Your friend?”
“Yeah.” The blush deepened.
“You didn’t mention a girl.”
“Well, she doesn’t really count for a girl, I don’t think anyways.”
Vandis raised his eyebrows, and Dingus rubbed the back of his neck.
“You know that oak? The one at the top of the hill?”
“I remember.”
“Her name’s Moira.”
“The tree told you this,” Vandis said. “Trees talk to you.”
“Just the one.”
What have You gotten me into? He’s out of his mind, he thought, not really expecting an answer.
No, he isn’t.
Trees talk to him.
It really is just the one, My own—and She’s a Lady of discerning taste, if I do say so Myself. Besides, what’s making you think you have room to talk?
“You think I’m crazy,” Dingus said, reminding him that his new Squire was, after all, a lonely kid who needed all the friends he could get, and never mind if some of them happened to be arboreal.
“Not so much.” She had a point. “Come on, let’s see what else there is. Up at HQ, there’s a huge enamel globe. Hieronymus—he was Head before me—told me it used to light up, one light for every leaf.” He tapped a finger on his tattoo. “It showed where everyone was.”
“Wow, that’s neat,” Dingus said, with genuine enthusiasm for the idea.
Vandis thought he was starting to see why, exactly, most Knights took Squires, and why they valued their charges so highly. He grinned and waved Dingus after him into the depths of the attic. Dingus started to follow, but a moment later: “Ow, shit!”
Vandis spun. “What happened?”
“I cut myself is all.” Dingus lifted three fingers that dripped blood.
“Let me see.” The broken glass of the dome had sliced clean down to the bone. Vandis tied his handkerchief around the cuts. “This is deep. You need stitches.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“It’s a big deal if I say it is. Let’s go have Kirsten see to this.”
“We were looking,” Dingus protested.
“Right now. I want to hear ‘Yes, Vandis,’ and nothing more. Clear?”
He sighed. “Yes, Vandis.” Th
ey left the attic for the hospital, so nobody was there to see the slow, red tracing of blood as it slid down the curve of the message dome. The instant Dingus’s blood touched the inlaid ebony circle, a light brighter and purer than the sun’s crept around the golden sigils until they all, briefly, burned.
When Vandis came up later to close the shutters, there was no sign of the light, only a dried-on fleck of blood. He grunted, licked his thumb, and scrubbed at the spot, but it wouldn’t come away. Annoyed, he made a mental note to send someone up later to clean it, and also to sweep the broken glass off the floor, but then he went down to eat supper with Dingus and enjoyed himself so much that it completely slipped his mind.
A Bite in Peace
Fort Rule
Krakus doggedly sliced at one of his steaks and refused to let Vandis spoil an excellent supper at the end of a fine day. Lech had a bug up his butt again, ranting in a low, vicious snarl about the Knights of the Air in general and Sir Vandis Vail in particular: seditionists every one of them, and Vail the worst of the lot. Actually, Krakus rather liked Vandis Vail. Lech’s distaste for the man probably had more to do with the last Conclave of Pontiffs, when Vandis had called Lech a constipated vulture and suggested his time might best be spent in the privy dealing with his blockage, than it did with any matter of religious conviction. That Krakus had laughed probably didn’t help matters.
“How are we meant to achieve the least of our goals with that dangerous rabble undermining us at every turn and clamoring like idiots whenever something doesn’t please them?”
“Meh,” said Krakus, chewing. Even that much encouraged Lech to continue. Krakus stopped listening again. This was a perfect steak, tender and juicy and rare. Lech had already finished his dish of lentils and barley. No wonder he stayed so rail-skinny and farted so noxiously: silent-but-deadlies that hung in the room after he left.
Krakus, well, Krakus had gotten used to them for the most part, almost as used to them as to Lech’s cold, soft-voiced rages; the last time Lech raised his voice, by Krakus’s reckoning, they were about eighteen.
“—listen to them,” Lech said.
“Oh no, Lech, I’m sure not,” Krakus said, with his mouth full. It didn’t do just to nod seriously every so often; Lech enjoyed arguing with himself.
“But they do. Every year, Muscoda loses sons and daughters to that filth—gone to be Knights, if you please, and take silly tattoos on their hands.”
No sillier than a tonsure, Krakus thought, but he kept it to himself this time, and took a big spoonful of mashed potato instead: slightly lumpy and loaded with butter, precisely the way he liked. Now if only his Mendicant would let him eat in peace.
“The people listen,” Lech insisted. “It’s always thus, with sensationalist claptrap like they spout. The people can’t help but listen when they speak that way. They take men away from our fields and women away from motherhood. They blaspheme Naheel Queen of Heaven—have you heard the tales they tell of Her Consort? Disgusting. Theirs is a pure love, a love uncorrupted by carnal lusts.”
Krakus swallowed his potatoes, wishing he’d had a better taste of them, and said, “I know, Lech.” Sometimes that shut him up.
Not this time. “Not that they’d know anything of purity. Why, they rut like stallions and mares, wherever they can, and drink like soldiers. They curse like soldiers, too, especially Vail, blast his eyes!”
Saying nothing, Krakus tried to focus on his food again. Once Lech got going on Vandis, no power of Krakus could push that wagon out of the rut.
“They’re even saying the detector is unethical, if you can believe such a thing. They’re trying to organize the people against us, when they should—”
“If they bother you so much, keep them out,” Krakus snapped, cutting at his steak with more force than necessary.
“They—what did you say?”
“I said, keep them out.” He picked up a shredded piece of meat and put it in his mouth. Around it, he added, “Out of Muscoda. Just don’t let them in anymore. You’re bosom friends with Prince Vlad. Put a bug in his ear.” And not in mine.
“That would never—” Lech stopped, blinking. “That could work.”
Krakus raised his eyebrows and took another bite, gesturing with his knife: yeah.
“Close the border,” Lech said vaguely. “We could—there’s potential in that, there’s benefit to everyone in that.”
“Sure. Go write Vlad about it.”
“Yes,” Lech said, wearing his pinched Thinking Face now. “Yes—light me a lamp, will you, Krakus? It’s dark in the study.”
Krakus shut his eyes. All he’d wanted to do was enjoy his supper, but if he didn’t get the lamp for his Brother, he wouldn’t get to do it in peace; Lech would start pacing and composing the letter he was going to write when Krakus got around to fetching him the light. Krakus heaved himself to his feet and went across to the cabinet. He took out one of the extra lamps inside and lit it from a taper. Then he trudged to the study door and, opening it, went in. Once he had the lamp on the desk and a few more tapers burning, he called, “Come on in now, it’s nice and bright.”
“Thank you, Krakus,” Lech said, sailing in with supreme dignity.
“Sure,” Krakus said, going back to his supper. It was mostly cold, but at least he got to eat it in peace, undisturbed except for the furious scratching of a quill from the study.
Piece of Work
two weeks later
Wealaia
They left Elwin's Ford behind on a morning washed clean by rain the night before, diving straight into the wood behind the way station. It was probably a little past time, Vandis reflected as Dingus, about fifty yards ahead, bounded from boulder to boulder. They'd been out for hours, and he was still hopping around like a tall, skinny monkey.
"Hey, Vandis, when’s dinner?"
"Whenever you fix it."
"Okay. Can we stop soon?"
"We can stop as soon as you find us a good spot."
"Gotcha!" Dingus slid down the back of the boulder and disappeared into the trees.
"I'm too old for this," Vandis muttered, and walked on down the path. Flying got him quickly from one place to the next; at his top speed he could make Windish from Tarvylania in slightly under four hours, though it left him exhausted and shivering from the cold, high sky. This, though—well, he was seeing things he hadn't had time to notice in years, and it was pretty, but after about six hours watching Dingus, he felt thoroughly worn out anyway. Vandis's Squire was an entirely different person than he'd been cooped up in the way station. His posture straightened, as if all his fears and shyness slid right off his shoulders, and he moved with confidence. He'd done well enough in the library, especially when it was just the two of them bent over books and parchment, and Vandis had thought he loved it. Dingus was eager to study, no doubt about that, but all that time he'd been positively wild to go outside, and Vandis hadn't even seen it.
Come to think of it, he hadn't seen Dingus himself in almost an hour. He frowned and stopped in the path, arms akimbo; he would've laid money on the boy’s ability to find his way around. He'd never had to be told twice where something was.
"Dingus!" he shouted, praying he wouldn't have to backtrack. With all the boy's hopping, it could take hours to trace him.
"I'm right here," Dingus said, coming out on the path ahead of him—the opposite side. He had one of their collapsible leather buckets in one hand, and a string of four squirrels in the other. "C'mon, fire's this way."
"I thought you'd gotten lost."
"Lost? In the green?" Dingus laughed, shaking his head, and struck into the forest on the other side of the path.
"It's happened a time or two," Vandis said dryly.
Dingus shrugged. "There's a crick over yonder. I got us all set up." Vandis followed him a little over half a mile, arrow-straight to a cheerful little blaze in a firepit that could've been a diagram in a textbook, next to a stream rushing with last night's rain. "You can sit there while I
cook," he said, pointing at a fallen tree half covered with moss. He took the cast-iron skillet out of his pack and set it on the tripod already in the center of the fire.
Vandis didn't sit. He folded his arms and watched Dingus work at skinning and jointing the fat squirrels. He scraped a little fat off one of the pelts, and the pieces went into the frying pan with the contents of the bucket: two handfuls of garlic mustard and a pile of white and brown mushrooms, which he quartered with the same pocketknife. "Those had better be good to eat."
"Sure, they're—" Dingus said a hituleti word that had never crossed Vandis's ears. He added a few pinches of salt and then took out some other ingredients. Vandis gave in and sat down. "Fry bread," Dingus explained while he mixed flour, cornmeal, and some of their clean water in a bowl. "'Cause we don't got no yeast with us."
"Any yeast," Vandis said. "We don't have any yeast."
"We should get some, we get a chance. Should've brought it, but I didn't like to tell you how to do." He grimaced, then went to the fire and stirred the squirrels. "Five pounds each of pemmican and hardtack, and no yeast. That shit ain't even food, Vandis. You eat stew every day, or what?"
"I haven't been ranging, really ranging, in a while," Vandis admitted. "How long do you think it’s been since I cooked for myself? Years."
"You think pemmican and trail biscuit's food, you don't cook for me neither." Vandis was about to take him to task for the smart mouth, but then he said, "You got the coffee beans in your pack. If you give 'em over, I can start it." Once he had the beans, he set to grinding them in the small mortar. "You know," he went on, "we had some yeast, I could make sticky buns for breakfast with the molasses you brought, or if we find some bees. It's coming on berry season, too. It'd be a shame to waste 'em all when I can do us up a fluffy pancake with berries in. We didn't bring no—I mean, any lard. You can't make pastry with no—"
Vandis held up a hand to stop him. "Pastry. Fluffy pancakes. Sticky buns."
"Uh-huh."
"Dingus...we're in the middle of the forest."
"I know." Dingus beamed, put the coffee pot on the fire, and stirred the squirrels again.