That was also the way that a child would think, and he knew it. He walked along with his head down, feeling his stomach growl.
He’d nicked a few cabbage leaves growing alongside the road. He felt a little guilty about it, even though it was obviously wild and going to seed. The farmhouse off in the distance was missing a roof and most of an upper story, so it wasn’t like anyone would miss it.
Cabbage wasn’t exactly stealing. If they passed a living farm with corn or eggplant, though, he wouldn’t be able to help himself, and that would be stealing.
If we pass a living farm, I can pay for food, though. And maybe they can explain what happened here.
“Once we get to Harkhound, we’ll be able to get off the road,” said the armadillo.
“Off the main road?” Oliver was surprised. The road had become his whole world over the last four days, circumscribed by split rail fences and drainage ditches. “Why? I thought you said we’d get lost?”
“We might,” said the armadillo. “But something’s definitely following us.”
“What?” Oliver twisted his head to look behind him and saw only the slowly settling road dust. His stomach churned. The sorrel leaf suddenly didn’t taste so good. “The ghuls?”
“Most likely,” said the armadillo. “I haven’t seen them since the first night, but I’m nearly certain. I’d hoped we’d meet more people, so I thought we should stay on the road as long as we could, and it’s not like there’s a great deal of cover in these fields anyway, but…”
He trailed off. Oliver nodded glumly. The road had been deserted. And they certainly weren’t likely to meet anyone in Harkhound Forest, which meant that if the ghuls were coming after them, they were on their own.
He went back to reading about invisibility. When he looked up again, the blue band on the horizon had gotten almost imperceptibly larger.
They reached the forest edge around noon. The contrast could not have been more stark. On one side, fallow fields baked in the sun. On the other, the forest cast leafy shadows across the road.
The wagon ruts had vanished from the road a few miles back, at the last farmhouse. The broad road became narrower and fuzzed with green, but not completely overgrown. Even here, the drought had reached brown tendrils. Dried seedheads clicked together along the road, and the crickets sang a parched song. But there was green under the trees. The leaves were wilted, but not dry and curled.
The dirt under Oliver’s feet was packed hard, and vegetation hadn’t colonized it at all.
“It’s an old roadbed,” said the armadillo, when Oliver scuffed at it with his toe. “There was a time when people travelled to the Rainblades regularly.”
“What stopped them?” asked Oliver.
The armadillo gave him a thoughtful look. “Now that is a very good question, isn’t it?”
“And I’m guessing you don’t know the answer?”
“No,” said the armadillo. He stepped under the shade of the trees. Leaf shadow dropped bits of dappled light across his armored back. “Perhaps we’ll find out.”
One thing was certain, Oliver thought a few minutes later. Harkhound Forest felt alive.
There had been birds in the fields, perched on thistle stems in the ditches, singing occasionally from fence posts. But there were a great many more in the forest. Oliver saw them as much as heard them—little brown creepers scurrying up tree trunks and nuthatches with striped heads scurrying down. High up in the canopy, vireos sang their monotonous tune: Here-I-am where-are-you, here-I-am where-are-you.
The path became a mat of pine needles, edged in liverworts. A great vine of poison ivy snaked up a tree beside the path, its stem covered in roots like a centipede’s legs, and Oliver scooted to the far side to keep from brushing against it. (He could fix poison ivy—mostly—with herbs and a couple of magic words, like he had with the Jenson kid, but it was a pain and he didn’t have all the herbs with him.)
A burbling sound off in the distance indicated a stream. Oliver’s head jerked up when he recognized it. To have water—clean, flowing water, not something from a ditch—seemed a sudden luxury. He would love to wash his hands, and maybe even his clothes. He’d been wearing the same pants since he left the village, and they were so stiff with dust and sweat that there was a cracking sound when he bent his knees.
The armadillo made for the stream without asking. They had to step off the path, but any qualms Oliver felt—ghuls or no ghuls—were immediately washed away by the sight of the water.
It was a picture-perfect forest stream, the water dark and dappled, whipped to silver as it crossed the rocks. Oliver dropped his pack on the leafy shore. “Is it safe?” he asked, licking his lips.
The armadillo raised his head and sniffed. “No strange spirits. Of course, there’s him.”
Oliver followed the line of his familiar’s nose and let out a squawk.
The young man sitting on the rock looked as startled as Oliver felt.
For one thing, he hadn’t expected to see anybody out here, particularly not in the ill-omened Harkhound Forest, and if he had expected to see anybody, it wouldn’t have been a scruffy dark-skinned teenager with a growth of scraggly beard and acne scars on his forehead, carrying an ancient and mangled lute.
For another thing, the young man was a mage.
He wasn’t much of one, Oliver was pretty sure, probably not even as much as Oliver himself, but one of the things you picked up along the way was an ability to tell magic in somebody else. There was a hint of color around them, a thread of brightness to their outline. Oliver’s master had called it an aura. His had been very bright indeed. The young man’s wasn’t much at all, but still—
“You’re a wizard!” said Oliver.
“I’m not,” said the young man wretchedly. “Not really.”
The armadillo slapped Oliver’s shin with his tail and muttered something about manners.
“Sorry,” said Oliver contritely. “I—uh—I didn’t expect to see anyone out here. Um. Hi. I’m Oliver.”
He stuck out a hand. The young man looked at it gloomily and then stuck out his own. “I’m Trebastion.”
“That’s an odd name,” said Oliver.
“I know,” said Trebastion morosely. He looked around. “Um. Pull up a rock, I guess. There are plenty.” He bent his head over the lute and began plucking at it—plunk! plunk!—like drops of water into an out-of-tune puddle.
“Thanks,” Oliver sat down on a nearby rock, trying to find a position that didn’t involve something digging into his buttocks. The armadillo jumped in his lap like a cat, which didn’t help matters.
“Your familiar?” asked Trebastion. Oliver nodded. Trebastion went back to his lute: Plunk!
“So…” said Oliver, when it became clear that Trebastion wasn’t going to say anything. “What are you doing in the forest?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” said the young man. “Actually, I probably should ask you, because you’re an awfully young kid to be wandering through a horrible forest alone with only an armadillo, even if you are a wizard. But I’m not going to. It’s none of my business. I assume you’re running away from something.”
“Actually, no, I—”
PLUNK!
“It’s none of my business,” said Trebastion firmly. “I don’t want to know. If there’s an angry master coming after you, the less I know about it, the better.”
The armadillo snickered.
“There’s nobody after me,” said Oliver, surprised. “Well, I mean, there might be some gh—”
“None of my business!” (Plunka-plunka-PLINK!)
Oliver considered this. “Is somebody after you?”
Trebastion snorted. “Probably. They always think it’ll be a good idea, and then of course it isn’t, and I get blamed, even though I always warn them.” He gave a particularly hostile tweak of the strings, and something twanged warningly near the neck of the lute.
“Er?” said Oliver, who wasn’t following this at all.
/> “The important thing,” said Trebastion, plucking the lute as savagely as a cook might pluck a chicken, “the really important thing is that there’s nobody out here.”
Oliver was of the opinion that if there had been anybody in the immediate vicinity, they would have left with their hands over their ears. The lute was dreadfully out of tune, but it didn’t seem to matter, since Trebastion couldn’t play a tune anyway.
He was just wondering if he could ask Trebastion to stop when one of the lute strings broke. Trebastion yelped and sucked on a finger.
The armadillo sighed with relief.
“So… um… you came out here to get away from people?” asked Oliver, gesturing awkwardly at the looming woods. This seemed a little extreme, rather like jumping down a well because you were thirsty.
“People!” said Trebastion. “Always wanting things. Well, I’m sure you know. You’re a wizard.”
“Oh yes,” said Oliver. “In fact, my village sent me out to—”
“None of my business,” said Trebastion hastily. He glared at the broken lute and swung it off his lap. “You want some lunch?”
Oliver tried not to drool. He had eaten the last of his food yesterday, which had been dry and stale and mixed with lint from the bottom of his pack. “If you have any, I’d… um… it would be very nice.”
Whatever Oliver might think of his playing, Trebastion was not stingy with his food. He had bread and cheese, which he broke exactly in half, and handed half to Oliver.
“Thank you,” said the very minor mage, torn between wanting Trebastion to know how grateful he was and not wanting to look pathetic in front of the older boy.
Trebastion shrugged. “You looked hungry. I’ve been hungry. Happens a lot. Usually when I’m between one village and the next.” He stared broodingly at the lute.
There didn’t seem to be much to say to that. Oliver slipped the armadillo a bit of cheese and scooped up a cupful of stream water. It tasted exactly like he’d thought it would—cold, clear, with a faint tang of soil and leaf.
“Are you a minstrel, then?” Traveling minstrels came through town a few times a year. They were generally considered an entertaining nuisance, but even the worst of them could play a lot better than Trebastion.
Trebastion grumbled into his cheese. Oliver decided not to ask any more questions. The young man might possibly be crazy, but he had shared his lunch, and Oliver didn’t want to make him mad.
Truth be told, he didn’t want Trebastion to leave. He hadn’t realized how badly he’d been craving another human voice. It wasn’t that the armadillo didn’t count, it was just… well…
“Suppose I can tell you,” Trebastion said, licking crumbs out of his palm. “You’re practically a colleague, after all.”
“I am? Uh… sure?” Oliver looked down at the armadillo. The armadillo shrugged.
“Being a wizard.”
“Oh, that.”
“I make harps,” said Trebastion morosely. “Fiddles, too.”
“Oh?”
“Out of bones.”
“Oh.”
Trebastion seemed to be waiting for something. Oliver cast about for something to say. “I didn’t know you could make harps out of bones.”
“You can’t. That’s the magic bit.” He sounded both unhappy and rather proud. “They shouldn’t play at all, particularly not when you string them with the victim’s hair and all. No tensile strength to hair.”
Oliver put a foot down on the rock and eased himself into a position where he could bolt as soon as he got a chance.
“Not my victims,” said Trebastion, exasperated. “I don’t have any victims. Wouldn’t know what to do with one.”
“That’s good,” said Oliver faintly.
“It’s just… look, I was walking along by the mill one day back home, and there was this poor drowned woman who’d washed up there. I mean, she’d washed up a while ago, and the fish had been at her, so there really wasn’t a lot left but bones and some rags and hair, and I—I looked down at the bones and I just had this compulsion, and the next thing I know, I’m rooting around inside a corpse—”
Oliver felt slightly queasy and fed the crust of his bread to the armadillo.
“It was horrible,” said Trebastion. “I mean, can you imagine?”
Oliver could, rather more vividly than he wanted to.
“Anyway, the next thing I knew I was assembling this… harp. It looked like a harp, mostly. More than it looked like anything else, anyway.”
Oliver nodded. He’d had that happen with the vegetables sometimes when the magic got into a field—they weren’t quite vegetables anymore, but they were more like vegetables than anything else. Brussels sprouts were the worst. They actually grew fingernails.
“It was mostly magic holding it together,” Trebastion continued, “and then when it was finally done—I couldn’t stop working on it, you understand, it just—I had to finish it—and then I put it down, and the awful thing started playing.”
He looked at Oliver, apparently expecting surprise. Oliver looked at him blankly. It was a magic harp, what did he expect it to do? Cook omelets?
Finally, he said, “What did it play?”
“Murder ballads, mostly,” said Trebastion gloomily. “That one got stuck on Oh the Dreadful Wind and Rain. Sometimes they do others. But that’s not the worst bit. They shriek.”
“Shrieking is bad,” agreed Oliver.
“They won’t shut up, either. They’re murder victims, you see—I can only make the bone harp when they’re murdered—and then when their murderer is in the room, they scream like anything.”
“Well, that could be useful…”
“Not as much as you’d think,” said Trebastion. “I mean, yeah, it brings people to justice, but then they’ve got this screaming harp, and the things don’t shut up. And what do you do with it? Hardly anybody can bring themselves to bury one while it’s still screaming, and cremation is right out. They don’t seem to care if their murderer gets locked up or hung or anything, they just keep screaming. It’s pretty awful.”
“It sounds awful.”
Trebastion folded his arms. “So here I am, trying to get away from all… that.” He waved a hand vaguely behind him. “The last town was pretty bad. It was twins, and the harps did this awful harmonic line with each other, and even though their aunt asked me to do it… yeesh. I was not popular.” He gazed morosely at his lute.
Oliver had no idea what to say to all of this. Fortunately, Trebastion didn’t seem to expect him to say anything.
He felt tired and sweaty. He pulled off his shirt and swished it back and forth in the stream.
Trebastion watched this without comment. After awhile, he reached into his pack and dug out a bar of soap, which he tossed to Oliver.
“Thanks,” said Oliver.
Trebastion shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve learned a few things about wandering between towns. Soap’s worth packing.”
“I’ll remember that,” said Oliver. “Although if I ever get back from the Rainblades, I don’t want to wander ever again.” He realized that he was speaking the absolute truth. Even Harold the miller’s red face would have been welcome right now. It would have meant he wasn’t so far from home.
“Rainblades, huh?” asked Trebastion. “I’m not asking why you’re going there, you understand.”
“It’s really not a secret…”
“Not asking!” Trebastion waved his hands. “But do you know if they have harps?”
“Uh…” Oliver looked at the armadillo.
“Musical instruments wasn’t one of the things my mother thought to mention,” said the armadillo.
Apparently Trebastion knew enough about familiars not to be surprised by a talking armadillo. “Huh.” He hunched himself up on the rock. His cuffs were too short at both the wrists and the ankles, as if he’d been growing out of his clothes. “Do you think they have murder victims?”
“Um.” Oliver scrubbed the soap into the ar
mpits of the shirt until he’d worked up some suds. “I suppose every place does eventually, don’t they?”
“You’re a cynical kid,” said Trebastion.
“You make harps out of dead people,” said Oliver.
“Yes, but I haven’t allowed it to taint my basic optimism.”
The armadillo snorted. Oliver wrung out his shirt and tried smacking it on a rock a few times. It made a satisfying wet thwack!
“Tell you what,” said Trebastion, “I’ll come with you.”
Oliver stopped thwacking. “What?”
“To the Rainblades.” Trebastion picked up his lute. “They may be just the audience I’m after for my musical talents.”
Oliver suspected that the only audience for Trebastion’s musical talents would be stone deaf, but wasn’t sure how to say this tactfully. He was using the older boy’s soap, after all, and Trebastion had shared his bread and cheese.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about having Trebastion come with him. He didn’t seem like a bad sort, but he did make harps out of murder victims.
On the other hand, that probably wasn’t his fault. Magic took people that way sometimes. There were people who didn’t want to be wizards, wouldn’t know the first thing about how to become wizards, but it turned out they had some bizarre wild talent for something specific.
Oliver’s mom had told him about a friend she’d had when she was young, who charmed chickens. Chickens would leave whatever they were doing and mob her. She didn’t particularly want chickens, she didn’t like them, but they would peck through stone walls to be near her.
Eventually she’d had to run away to sea, where there were very few chickens.
Oliver had always thought that was a terrible wild talent to have, but it really didn’t compare to being compelled to make harps out of murder victims.
It sounded very unpleasant, mostly for Trebastion.
And if the ghuls were after them, it might be nice to have another set of eyes and ears.
Then again, it was also possible that Trebastion could be a terrible person who would kill a boy and his armadillo in their sleep, or worse yet, force them to listen to his music.
Minor Mage Page 6
