Minor Mage

by T. Kingfisher

  Still…

  The armadillo cleared his throat. “You should know,” he said, “even if you don’t come with us, that we had a run-in with some ghuls a few days ago.”

  “Ghuls?” said Trebastion. “Corpse-eaters? Like in the stories? Seriously?”

  “Big knuckles, bad skin, the whole lot,” said Oliver. “Along with the cannibalism, of course.”

  “Huh.” The musician looked over his shoulder. “You’re sure?”

  “Oh, very. They wanted to eat us.”

  “There’s a chance they may have followed us to Harkhound,” said the armadillo.

  Trebastion thought this over while Oliver wrung his shirt out a few more times. It was still very damp, and putting it back on felt disgusting, but it was a warm day and it would dry out soon enough. If he tried to cram it in his pack, it’d probably get all moldy and he’d still have to wear it eventually.

  “So, there may be ghuls in the forest.”

  “Right,” said the armadillo.

  “But you guys are going to try to go away from the ghuls.” Trebastion said slowly.

  “That’s the plan,” said Oliver.

  “Then I’m definitely coming with you.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Actually… well, fair’s fair. There may be a few people after me, too.”

  Oliver waited.

  Trebastion fiddled with his pack straps. “The last town… I said I wasn’t very popular.”

  “You did,” agreed Oliver.

  “Yeah, well… turns out the murderer was. Popular, that is. Regular pillar of the community. Everybody was very upset. There were some very unkind things said. As if I could make a harp accuse the wrong person.”

  Oliver put a hand over his eyes and felt very old.

  “So. Err. His relatives were very angry. They may have broken him out of the holding cell. I mean, it wasn’t much of a cell, it was the church cellar, that’s not much a cell if you ask me, particularly not for somebody with fifty relatives, half of them church elders, but—well, anyway.” He fiddled with the pack straps some more.

  “So, this guy’s relatives are still mad at you?”

  “I left town in a hurry,” said Trebastion. “But I think they might be. There was a lot of yelling. I didn’t stick around to see who it was directed at. If they weren’t after me then, they might be now, anyhow—the harps never shut up, you understand, and I’d be the convenient scapegoat, and they might think that killing me would make the harps stop shrieking.”

  “Would it?” asked Oliver, professionally interested. Some magics did persist after the wizard died, while others stopped immediately, and there was no real consensus on the topic.

  “It’s never been tried,” said Trebastion. “I’m not real keen on finding out, you understand.”

  “So, there’s a murderer after you,” said Oliver.

  “Yes, but there’s cannibal ghuls after you,” said Trebastion.

  Oliver was forced to admit that this was fair.

  “In that case,” said the armadillo, stepping on Oliver’s foot, “I think we’d be happy to have you travel with us as far as the Rainblades. We can watch each other’s backs.”

  “Sounds delightful,” said Trebastion, picking up his pack.

  The armadillo strode confidently off into the underbrush, with the teenage musician in his wake, and left Oliver trying to catch up, wondering what exactly had just happened.

  6

  Travelling with Trebastion was better. Oliver was willing to admit that after the first hour.

  It wasn’t that he talked a lot, because he really didn’t. The minstrel was perfectly happy to talk, but if Oliver or the armadillo stopped responding in more than monosyllables, Trebastion took the hint.

  And it wasn’t that he was good in the woods, because he wasn’t.

  “Is this berry edible, do you think?”

  “No,” said Oliver.

  “How about this one?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose—”

  Trebastion popped it into his mouth.

  “—but you’d have to be really desperate,” Oliver finished, as Trebastion gagged and spit it out again. “Sorry, I didn’t think you’d—well. That’s bitterberry. You can use it as a spice, but it’s not something you can really eat straight.”

  “Bleaaagghgh!” said Trebastion, gargling with stream water. “You should have warned me.”

  “I was going to…”

  “Fair enough. I guess.”

  No, the really nice thing about Trebastion was the noises.

  Every time a branch had broken, when travelling alone, Oliver had immediately thought, It’s the ghuls! and turned to look. He did this even knowing that ghuls don’t travel very far even in twilight, let alone in broad daylight, because while his head knew this, his gut was convinced that this one time, he had found amazing daylight-loving ghuls and they were just about to eat him.

  It was not restful. In a forest filled with squirrels and birds and rabbits and other things that might make leaves rustle or twigs crack, it was the exact opposite of restful.

  But since Trebastion was there, blundering along with all the woodcraft of a milch-cow, Oliver stopped worrying. If a twig snapped, it was probably Trebastion. If leaves clattered, Trebastion had probably stepped on them. If someone began screaming, “Aaaaah! Get it off me!” it meant that Trebastion had walked into a spiderweb again.

  Having an explanation for the sounds helped enormously, even if every ghul for ten miles could probably have followed the sounds of Trebastion yelping.

  “You’re not used to the woods, are you?” asked Oliver, after a couple of hours of this.

  “Not really, no,” admitted the older boy. “Usually when I travel, I stick to the main roads. I’m very good at going to the back door of an inn and looking starved and pitiful and willing to wash dishes. There’s a certain sort of woman who always wants to feed me. It’s a survival skill.”

  “Huh,” said Oliver. They had located a stand of huckleberries just coming into the late-summer fruit. The tiny, tart berries were delicious, but the thought of inn cooking—real cooking, with baked bread and roast drippings—was almost too much to bear.

  “You’re good at all this nature stuff, though,” said Trebastion, waving a vague hand at the surrounding forest. “You know all the plants and stuff.”

  Oliver flushed. “I guess. It’s from being a mage. You use a lot of plants, so you have to learn them. I’m not very good, though. I only know a few edible mushrooms, but I don’t know the ones here and I’m not comfortable guessing. There’s probably lots all around us, except we won’t be able to tell them from the really poisonous ones.”

  “I am hungry,” said Trebastion, “but I vote that we avoid the mushrooms. I don’t want to turn blue or explode or—err—”

  “Vomit to death,” said the armadillo helpfully.

  “Thank you, yes.”

  They made camp that night in stages. When it was still light, they built a small fire and boiled water for tea. Dinner was the remains of Trebastion’s cheese, sorrel leaves, a few slightly squashed huckleberries, and a peeled and roasted cattail root, which tasted like a potato crossed with a muddy rope.

  “You’re sure this won’t kill us?” asked Trebastion.

  “Pretty sure.” The fibers were so thick that Oliver had to scrape them through his teeth. “It beats starving, anyway.”

  “If you say so,” muttered the minstrel, tackling another hunk of cattail.

  Once they had eaten and put out the fire, the armadillo got them back on their feet and struck out into the woods. “We’ve been going parallel to the main road,” he said. “Now we’re going to go due south away from it, or as close as we can manage. The ghuls might find the fire, but they won’t find us, and we can backtrack to the road in the morning.”

  “Uh,” said Trebastion. “That sounds… logical?”

  “Are you sure we can find our way back?” asked Oliver, who knew a little more about how deceptive directi
ons can be in the woods.

  “No,” said the armadillo. “But we can hardly miss the Rainblades, even if we do lose the road.”

  “I guess that’s true.” They plodded into the leaf-strewn woods.

  “Where did you come from, anyway?” asked Oliver. “The last town, I mean. I didn’t see any towns on the way here.”

  “North,” said Trebastion. “I’m not asking where you’re from—”

  “Loosestrife.”

  Trebastion sighed. “See, I wasn’t asking.”

  “It’s not a secret,” said Oliver, baffled. “I don’t care if you know where I’m from.”

  “You’re not running away from a cruel master?”

  “Uh… no? I’m going to the Rainblades to get rain.”

  Trebastion was silent, except for the crunching of twigs. “Well, that’s a thing you could do, I guess. Anyway, the last town was north of Harkhound. I went south along the edge for a bit, but there wasn’t any place to hide except in the forest. And I know the forest is supposed to be weird, but it was better than getting caught by Stern and his buddies.”

  “Weird how?” asked Oliver. “I keep hearing it’s bad, but not how.”

  He didn’t mind the forest. It was deeper than the woods he was used to, and the green was a darker green, but it felt alive in a way that the dead farms hadn’t.

  Trebastion shrugged. “I dunno. Stories. Strange lights. Trees walking around except they might be dead people, not really trees. The usual.”

  “I haven’t seen any of that,” said Oliver.

  “The slugs taste normal so far,” volunteered the armadillo, “but we’re not very far in yet.”

  Trebastion gave this statement the grave consideration it deserved, and then fell down a hillside and had to be picked back up again.

  “And there’s the song, too,” he added, slapping pine needles off his clothes.

  “Song?” said Oliver warily.

  Trebastion swung his lute around front and tried to strum a chord. It didn’t go well for the chord. “Ah… let me see… there’s a couple versions…”

  “There always are,” said the armadillo grimly.

  Trebastion ignored this and launched into a song which, it became immediately clear, he did not remember.

  “Twas all late on a midsummer’s day,

  The farmer’s wife, she lost her way,

  In the trees, in the trees

  The shadows lie deep

  In the trees, in the trees

  Where… uh… something sleep…

  Something—uh—dark-haired wife

  The farmer he vowed… oh, blast…”

  He had a surprisingly deep singing voice, much better than his lute playing. His memory, however, left something to be desired.

  “Look, I mostly do love songs,” he said. “This one’s not popular. People don’t like to be reminded much.”

  “But what happened? Who lost their way?”

  “The farmer’s dark-haired wife,” said Trebastion. “Depending on the version, either she got lost in the woods picking hazelnuts, or she ran away from him. So, he decides to burn the edge of the woods down in revenge, on either the trees or his wife. In the trees, in the trees… That’s the chorus. I don’t have the voice for it. You really need somebody who can do spooky and ethereal.”

  “But what happened to the farmer?” asked Oliver.

  “Oh, he died,” said Trebastion. He slung the lute back over his shoulder and hurried to catch up to the armadillo. “The woods burned, for seven days and seven more,”—he sang the words—”and the smoke that came out hung over the farms by the woods and killed everything. The smoke, it lay as thick as sorrow, on the plow and on the harrow… oh, hmm, maybe it wasn’t plow, maybe it was ground…”

  “Plow would make more sense,” said the armadillo without looking back. “Speaking of agricultural implements.”

  “Sense has nothing to do with songs,” said Trebastion. “What kind of idiot burns the woods down when somebody’s lost in them? What if she had a broken leg? He’d have burned her alive.” He shook his head. “Anyhow, that’s supposed to be why the farms around here are all abandoned. The smoke from the woods poisoned the ground.”

  Oliver remembered the strange, empty farmhouses and the abandoned fields. “Did this actually happen?”

  “Dunno,” admitted Trebastion. They came to a small clearing and skirted the edge of it warily. “People say it did. I’ve heard the song performed and the old men at the bar say it was true and happened when they were a lad. But they’ll say that about all kinds of songs. All I know is that once you get around the northeast corner of Harkhound, the farms are suddenly standing empty and there aren’t any inns. You gotta go east for days to find even a little pothole of a town.”

  Oliver, who lived in that particular pothole, kicked himself again mentally for never having asked about what lay west. Why had he never asked? Why had nobody ever talked about it?

  Because it was just farms and then the Rainblades. Because there was nothing worth seeing and the farmers came to us. Because things that have been empty since old men were lads just aren’t very interesting.

  And then he remembered Vezzo saying, “There’s bad ground between here and there.”

  Of course, that’s what the farmers would remember. Bad ground.

  “But the trees didn’t burn, did they?” he asked abruptly.

  “Eh?” said Trebastion, who was trying to eat a pine cone.

  “If this happened, oh—sixty or seventy years ago, say—we wouldn’t have some of these trees. Forests come back fast, but some of these trees are hundreds of years old.”

  “Oh,” said Trebastion. “Well, that’s the end bit of the song. Most of the forest didn’t burn. It just got angry. The smoke poured out over the fields and supposedly went on for miles. Fourscore leagues and ten, I think, or tenscore leagues and four, although that’d be a really long way, so probably the first one. The farmer died in the smoke and all the farms were abandoned because it poisoned the ground, but the forest survived.” He cleared his throat and sang:

  “In the trees, in the trees

  Her spirit still walks

  In her kirtle of red

  In the trees, in the trees, in the trees.”

  “The farmer’s wife, you mean?” asked Oliver.

  “Yep,” said Trebastion. “The forest was still there. Is still there. And her ghost is still wandering around it.”

  You would have to be an expert in armadillo body language (as Oliver was) to see the armadillo’s skepticism. His familiar did not have much use for ghost stories.

  “Why would she want to wander around it, anyway?” asked Oliver.

  “Song doesn’t say,” said Trebastion. “But I figure she’s mad at getting burned alive.”

  “Or at having married an arsonist,” said the armadillo dryly.

  “Well. That, too.”

  They walked along in silence for a little while. Oliver stubbed his toe and gritted his teeth. Trebastion fell over a stick.

  “How persistent are the ghuls likely to be, anyway?” asked Trebastion, when he had gotten up again.

  “I guess they’ll follow us until they find someone easier to eat,” said Oliver, who had been thinking about this subject a great deal for several days. “All the farms were empty. Maybe it was like your song, but I don’t know for sure. And if there’s no livestock and no people, I guess we’re the easiest.”

  “Huh.”

  They kept walking. The shape of the armadillo started to grow fuzzy in the evening gloom.

  “How persistent is your guy likely to be?” asked Oliver.

  “Oh, fairly persistent, I imagine. He was the mayor.”

  “And he was killing people?”

  “Believe me, I was as surprised as you are.”

  Oliver ducked under a branch. Trebastion didn’t and yelped as it hit him in the face.

  “So, you’re after the rains,” he said, when he’d stopped the bleedi
ng.

  “That’s the plan,” said Oliver.

  “And the rain’s in the mountains?”

  “Supposedly the Cloud Herders have it,” said Oliver. He didn’t know what the Cloud Herders would be like, but he had a vague image of mystical priests, standing atop stone outcroppings while lightning played around their arms. Someone like the old wizard, with a long beard and robes, although with better hygiene and less underwear on their head.

  Trebastion considered this for a while.

  “Not very sporting, sending out a kid off to the mountains alone, is it?”

  “I’m not that much younger than you,” said Oliver, irritated.

  “Yes, but the only thing people ask me to do is make a screaming harp, and it’s not really dangerous.”

  Oliver sighed. “They didn’t know there would be ghuls,” he said. He didn’t know why he was defending the villagers, but he couldn’t very well let Trebastion think they were all monsters. “And they didn’t really mean to send me off the way they did. They were scared, that’s all.”

  The armadillo said nothing.

  “I’m scared,” said Trebastion. “All the time. At the moment, I’m scared that Mayor Stern is going to come along and gut me like a fish. I still don’t make people go off and get me rain.”

  Oliver rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but there’s only one of you.”

  Trebastion tripped over a tree root. “I am sure that made a lot of sense,” he said, when he had recovered, “but I don’t follow.”

  Oliver paused. The armadillo lifted his head and sniffed the air.

  “You’re one person,” said Oliver. “And I’m one person. But there were thirty or forty villagers.” He tried to come up with a good way to phrase it, to make Trebastion understand. “And they were all together, getting riled up and making it hard for each other to think. None of them would have done anything like that by themselves, except maybe Harold.”

  They continued on for a few minutes in silence, or as much silence as Trebastion could muster.

  “But they did do it,” observed Trebastion finally. “I mean, it happened.”

  Oliver sighed. “Yeah. But I’m not doing it for all of them together like that. I’m doing it for all of them separately. For Vezzo and Matty and… everybody. Our neighbors.” He could picture them each distinctly in his head. Matty was probably crying over the chickens right now. Vezzo might even be looking off to the west, his big hands clenched at his sides, wondering if Oliver was okay.