~~~24~~~
1008 A.D.
Adam paused a moment before responding, uncertain that he’d heard her correctly. “I… I what?”
She pulled her hand back, startled, then reached back for his face, touching his cheek. “You look… mostly the same. Like the mean man. But your voice sounds wrong.” She cocked her head. “Why does your voice sound so different?”
He could feel her emotions, sense her thoughts, knew she’d realized he wasn’t the man she knew as Maynard since she’d seen him that morning, since that slight reaction he’d nearly missed. That’s why she had the confidence to stand near him, to say what she’d said. She knew he wasn’t the mean man, and his speaking voice confirmed it.
And that meant she deserved the truth. “You know why my voice sounds different, Lizzie. It’s because your thoughts are correct. My voice sounds different because I’m not Maynard. The Maynard you know, the mean man… he is still asleep in his bed. I am… a friend.”
She nodded. “I knew you weren’t really him. His…” She paused for a moment, and he sensed that she weighed the option of telling him something she’d told no one else. Her instincts told her to talk. “There’s a sound about him. It is… gloomy. And angry. Yours is very different. Happy.” She looked at him expectantly. “You know what that means. Don’t you?”
He did. Most Energy users recognized Energy in another person in a manner that correlated to their standard senses. Most would feel it as a slight warmth or brush of air, which gave them general information. Others had more advanced detection systems. Will and the future Hope had both explained that they heard sounds and had learned to distinguish between the “tones” generated by each Energy user. All tones were unique, and they could thus recognize friends and enemies through those Energy tones without requiring a line of sight or telepathic connection. Elizabeth was describing the Energy “tone” she heard from him. She’d “hear” only very quiet, faint tones for non-Energy users, as all living creatures possessed Energy in trace amounts as part of being alive.
It didn’t surprise him to hear that Maynard’s Energy tone was one of deep gloom.
“I do know what you mean. You are developing a new ability that very few people in the world have. It is why you can hear sounds coming from people and use those sounds to tell them apart. Does that make sense?”
She nodded, a relieved expression on her face. He could understand why. His father had told her that the berries she’d eaten were believed to cause madness, leading the eater to hear disembodied voices. He was telling her there was nothing wrong with her. She had reason to smile.
“You might be wondering why I’m here, and why I’m pretending to be Maynard.”
She nodded, but her posture changed. Gone was the protective, fearful slouch. Instead, the terrified huddle vanished like a lifting fog. She was now a student, able to ask questions and get answers… and, somehow, she knew this stranger wouldn’t hurt her.
“The simple answer is that I’m a friend. I know of you because of a man called Adam, who wanted to give you a power you call magic. He did so… but he did so in a way that caused you a lot of pain. More pain than it should have. He didn’t know everything he needed to know to give you this power in a safe manner, and was so upset that he left.” He’d started pacing, head to the ground as he talked, but paused to look at her. “He would never intentionally hurt you. I hope you understand that.”
There was enough hesitation before she nodded her head to give away her doubts on that subject; she wasn’t completely sure that their father wasn’t at least okay with her suffering a bit if they achieved the desired result. But she trusted him, and that meant she’d trust his assessment. “You say you are a friend of Adam. How do you know him? Are you… are you actually him?” She tilted her head to the side. “Are you Adam?”
He felt a deep surprise. “No. I’m not him. I’ve met him, though, as he is even now journeying to better understand this thing you call magic. As I said, he felt such deep guilt about your suffering that he could not bear to be around and be reminded of the fact that you’d nearly died because of his error. He told me of this, told me of the village, and said that if I was to come across this place, I should seek you out and offer my assistance. I have more experience than he does, and I can better answer the questions you will have.” The face she knew as Maynard smiled. “And so here I am. It seems you are learning about your magic quite well on your own.”
Her eyes returned the smile, the freckles on her cheeks dancing, before she turned serious once more. “Adam was always very nice to me. Not everyone was. But what he did… it hurt. It hurt a lot.” She shivered. “I still have bad dreams at night. I wake up and remember and cry.” She paused. “I thought I was going to die.”
“But you didn’t. You are still very much alive. And now… things are very different for you, aren’t they? You can feel a warmth inside you that can move around, depending on how you think about it, right? You hear voices in your head and realize you aren’t imagining them, they’re the voices in the heads of people around you, and you can hear them and understand them. You know how people really feel, no matter what they might say.” He stooped down and looked her in the eye. “Nobody can lie to you anymore. Can they?”
She stared at him. “Yes. But I don’t know how. Or why.”
He stood back up. “I learned the right way to let the magic flow in someone. Unfortunately, I did not meet your friend Adam until after he tried to help you. When we talked, he said he one day hoped he could return, and he hoped you would learn about your new power.” He winked. “And you can decide who else gets those powers. And who doesn’t.”
The level of mischief in her grin was a type of magic in itself. “I hope there’s a way to do it so people don’t get as sick as I did.”
He nodded at her. “Your friend Adam had the right food, but he gave you far too much. They’re called morange berries, and it’s best to eat about thirty. He thinks he gave you more than one hundred. Morange berries… well, it’s like they clean all the dirty straw out of the stalls in the barn that you help clean. And it cleans very well. It just does it… inside your body.” He saw that she understood and continued. “If you eat too many… well, it would be like cleaning the straw and then burning the stall down, too.”
Elizabeth winced. “So it… burned me inside because I ate too many?”
“It’s a useful way to think of it. Or think of it this way: if you eat the correct number of berries, it’s like starting a fire inside your home. It keeps you warm and only burns what you want it to burn. But if you put too much wood on the fire, the fire gets too large to control, and instead of staying warm, you burn your house down.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“For those who you help, the morange berries will make them feel sick. And it will make them… well, make messes.” She winced again. “But there’s a way to make it not feel quite so bad.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the pouches. He found an empty burlap sack on one of the tables, ripped the pouch open, and poured the contents inside. Elizabeth moved to stand by him at the table, watching as the fine powder filled the bag. “This is the root of a plant called zirple. I’ve crushed it, so it looks like salt that’s a bit grayer in color. It works a lot like the morange berries, but is much gentler to people. It will have the same effects as the morange berries… but it would take someone only using zirple several decades to develop the power you have already developed.” He smiled. “I don’t think most people want to wait that long.”
She nodded. “I’d be very old by then.”
He smiled. Little Elizabeth had no idea that she’d one day celebrate her thousandth birthday. A few decades would be a meaningless wait in a life of such length… but she wasn’t ready to hear that yet. “You would be. But the good news is that when you take a big dose of zirple with the correct number of morange berries… they work very well together. The morange makes the magic wake up in you very quickly
, and the zirple makes the experience much less unpleasant.” He fished for an analogy. “So the morange is the fire and the zirple is… the zirple is the stones around the fire that keep it from spreading so it just gives you heat.”
She nodded, then brightened. “Do you have any of the berries? I have looked here in the Schola and in the forest around us, but I have not seen any more. I think I ate them all when… when…” She swallowed. “You know.”
He shook his head. “I don’t have any of the berries. They’re quite rare, unfortunately. Zirple is much more common.” He tilted his head. “You want to give this to your mother, don’t you? But you don’t want her to get hurt.”
She nodded. “Momma deserves to have magic. I don’t think the others here do. Maybe Eva. She’s felt guilty about making Adam leave. I think she misses him a lot.”
Adam pretended to be surprised at her analysis… which was, of course, completely accurate. “I won’t claim to know who here deserves magic, but I imagine your mother is a fine candidate. We don’t have any morange berries, but you can still give her the zirple powder. Not a lot, not all of it at once.” He saw her eyes widen in fear and held up his hand. “It wouldn’t hurt her if she consumed all of it at the same time. There’s just no benefit to doing so. It won’t make her magic develop faster. Zirple works best on its own when you take a small amount each day for a long time. What you can do is hide small bits of zirple powder in the pockets of your dress. When you fetch water for her to drink, take a small pinch from your pocket and drop it in.” He didn’t know if pockets on dresses were common in this region of the world in this era—might be a nice research project when he got back to his own time—but the little girl’s current outfit certainly had them. He suspected she used them to carry different grains around to feed the various animals she helped her mother tend. Finding a salt-like powder in her dress would likely raise little suspicion.
The little girl nodded, looking down at the ground, and he sensed her trying to remember all he told her. She pointed at the bag, one larger than her pockets could hold. “Should I keep that in here?”
He glanced around the Schola before shaking his head. “No. There’s a chance someone else would notice it and use it, and it sounds like you think that would be a bad thing. I will make sure this bag ends up under your bed before you wake up tomorrow morning. You can move it wherever you need to move it after that. Okay?”
She nodded, and hesitated before asking him a question. “You can hear the voices in your head?”
He nodded.
“What… how do I stop hearing them? I don’t like what I hear, most of the time. Especially Daddy. He… I don’t want to hear what he thinks.” He saw her frightened posture return, slouched, arms wrapped around her stomach. “I don’t want to be a mean person like him.”
He could appreciate her concern. The thoughts she’d heard, the emotions she’d felt… she’d probably aged decades in the past year in her understanding of people, gleaned from those private thoughts a deeper understanding of her neighbors than those who’d known each other for decades.
And as to her comment about Arthur… Adam couldn’t help but wonder if she wouldn’t say the same thing if she knew the identity of her real father.
“You can stop the thoughts from coming into your head, but it takes practice. The best thing to do is focus your attention on something else. If you are hearing someone’s thoughts in your head, just find the warmth in you and try to make it move around. You won’t notice their thoughts as much.” Her reaction suggested that his example hadn’t helped, and he offered another. “Pretend you are in a crowd of people who are all talking. In that situation, you can focus so you only hear what your mother is saying, right? You focus on her voice, and then it’s like the others aren’t talking at all and you don’t hear what they say.”
That helped. Elizabeth nodded. “Okay, I will try that.”
He held up a hand. “I do have to caution you. You already know this, but a lot of the people here would probably use magic to do mean things.”
Her face clouded. “That is what I have learned from hearing them think. It’s… I am afraid of so many of them now.”
He winced. “Because of that, you need to hide the zirple I will leave with you very well. It will take them a long time to become as powerful as you, should they find and steal it. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
“Good. But there’s something else, too. The only way someone here would try to steal the zirple root, or try to use it if they did… is if they realize you have magic. They will want what you have, and will try to figure out the secret if you don’t tell them. It is very, very important that you do not show people that you have magic. For example, if they think something that angers or surprises you, do not react.”
“I won’t. That’s why I like to play with the animals. People just think I am scolding the goats for eating something or laughing about something one of the baby chicks did.”
He smiled. “That’s very clever, Lizzie. But I must leave you with one more warning. It is the warning that will help you remember how important it is to make sure nobody here realizes you have already developed magic. They think you are still helping them find an answer. If they figure out that you already know the answer… well, they are not very nice people. They may want to… hurt you if they figure out what you’ve done.”
She winced, her face lined with worry. “Like Maynard. He’s very, very mean. If he was very angry with me, he would…” She swallowed. “I think he might try to kill me.” Tears dripped from her eyes, and she shook.
Adam put an arm around her shoulder. “I know. You must remember that after I leave you, the next person you see who looks like Maynard will be the real Maynard, and you should not trust him.” He sighed. “It’s okay to practice and learn what you can do, but I would recommend doing that only when you’re sure nobody else can see what you’re doing.”
She nodded and wiped the tears from her face. “You’re leaving now?”
He sighed. “The longer I stay here, the sooner my disguise might stop fooling people.” He winked. “Of course, the rest of them aren’t as clever as you.”
She giggled. That made him smile.
“Before I leave, though… I think if we leave and you look perfectly healthy, people will be suspicious. That’s not a good thing. I think we should make it look like you tried something and it didn’t feel good. I think that Maynard should have decided that you were pretending and that his solution gave you magic, so he ate the same thing, and he felt sick as well. We will both look sick, and Maynard will go back to his cabin and sleep the rest of the day.”
She winced. “I don’t want to feel sick, though.”
“You don’t have to feel sick. You just have to look like you’re sick.” He pulled the second pouch out and tore it open, revealing a pair of cayenne peppers. “Do you know what these are?”
She shook her head. “They smell funny.”
“They come from far away, but they have a very interesting feature. They are very, very hot when you eat them. When you swallow them, they don’t hurt you at all. But the food will make your face turn red, it will make your eyes water like you’re crying, and it will make your whole body sweat. You aren’t sick, but you will look like you’re sick.”
She gave him an odd look. “You carry those around with you?”
He shrugged. “I actually like the taste, so I had some available for a time just like this.” He offered her one of the peppers, she accepted, and they both bit in at the same time.
Moments later—after he’d hidden the large bag of ground zirple root inside his artificially sized clothing—the two of them staggered out of the Schola, eyes red and watering, skin red, sweat pouring from their bodies. Genevieve, her maternal radar attuned to her daughter’s every move, sprinted from the small paddock to help her Lizzie back to their cottage, furious eyes staring daggers at Maynard for wreaking such an affliction on the little
girl.
Just as he’d intended. He’d played his role perfectly in that regard.
Now he had to get Maynard back to his cabin and make sure he remembered the events of this day just as Adam intended.
~~~25~~~
1008 A.D.
Adam staggered toward the well, moaning loudly, drawing attention to his apparent distress. He pushed aside a man already there and finished cranking the handle until the bucket reached him, then drank directly from it before dumping the remainder over his head. He stared wildly at the man he’d displaced, silencing the man’s words of annoyance. He could almost see himself through the thoughts of those watching him: face beet red, eyes watering, snot pouring from his nose, sweat cascading through every pore.
He’d selected the most potent peppers he could find, and they were providing him with just the physical reaction he required.
He dropped the bucket and lumbered past the ovens, making certain that Arthur caught sight of him in this distressed state. The village baker watched the village hunter and realized what had happened. The oafish giant thought he’d figured it out, thought he’d sneak development of his magical powers in without anyone knowing, and in the process of eating the same filth they’d fed the little girl, had condemned the village to a meatless meal this evening due to his selfishness. Adam suspected that the real Maynard would feel Arthur’s verbal wrath the next day; he didn’t mind driving a minor, temporary wedge between bully and enforcer.
After reaching Maynard’s cottage, he slammed the door behind him, undoubtedly registering his demand to remain undisturbed to all his neighbors. He pulled the makeshift shade closed, a reasonable action for one who needed to sleep off whatever ailment left him blundering around in an almost drunken manner. He left the nano and Energy perimeters in place and settled himself on the dirt floor, resting his head against the dirt wall, waiting for the eventual fading of the cayenne pepper’s potent symptoms.
Adam's Journey (The Aliomenti Saga - Book 8) Page 12