Minor Mage

by T. Kingfisher

  He squared his shoulders. “I have a little money,” he said. “Not much.”

  “The rains cannot be bought with wealth,” said the Rain Wife, while the spiders scurried into a stern expression behind her head. “Rich men die without water, the same as everyone else.”

  Oliver bit his lip. Had he offended her? Had he failed? Had he come all this way, only to accidentally insult the Rain Wife and ruin everything? “I’m sorry,” he said. “My predecessor… he taught me everything… he didn’t tell me what to do here. If there was something I should bring.”

  She tilted her head to one side, studying him. The spiders arranged themselves into a thoughtful stillness.

  “Your mind is jumbled,” said the Rain Wife at last. “Your thoughts tangle together like uncarded wool.”

  Oh boy, he heard the armadillo think. If we have to wait until a human’s thoughts are untangled, we’ll die of old age before we get the rains back. Which was not polite, but also not wrong. Oliver’s heart, already in his toes, sank into the stony ground under his feet.

  The Rain Wife laughed. The sound was unexpectedly musical, like water trickling over stones. “No, small one,” she said to the armadillo, “we need not wait so long as that.”

  “You’re reading my mind!” breathed the armadillo.

  “Only the very top of it,” said the Rain Wife. “Only the thoughts that might become words.” She spread her hands. There were blue spirals on her palms that ran up her forearms and became blue deer with interlocking antlers that looked at Oliver with blank blue eyes. Behind her head, the spiders smiled, and their legs formed laugh lines. “Enough to see, mage, that you are young, and your thoughts are young and tangled.”

  “I am tired of being young,” said Oliver, because he was thinking it loudly enough that it probably didn’t matter if he said it out loud. “It didn’t matter that I was young, my village sent me anyway.” And he still resented that, but love and pity and resentment were all mixed together and he didn’t have any way to untangle them.

  “Yes,” agreed the Rain Wife. “That is the price your village paid. You will never love them with your whole heart again. The shadow of what they did in their fear will lie between you forever. But they will be alive, nonetheless, and learning to bridge that shadow—or decide not to—is the work of adulthood.”

  Oliver bowed his head, wondering if he would ever be old enough for that. Though I do miss Vezzo and Matty. And my mother. He wondered when he had grown old enough that he was no longer embarrassed that he missed his mother.

  The Rain Wife drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. Oliver could hear another, softer tapping, and he hoped very much that it was an echo, and not the sound of dozens of spiders tapping their feet. “Will you give me your magic?” she asked suddenly.

  “Err… what?” said Oliver.

  “Your magic,” said the Rain Wife. “In return for the rain.” She must have read his puzzled expression, because she lifted one blue-painted hand and waved it negligently. “It’s easy enough. I can spin it out of you, like spinning thread from wool. It would be gone, and you would be normal.”

  The thought was so bizarre and unexpected that he could only stare at her. Give up his magic? All of it? No longer be even the most minor of mages?

  “You’d be normal,” she said. “Like all the other boys. That’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? To be normal?”

  Oliver blinked at her. “N-no? Why would I want that?”

  The Rain Wife gazed at him for a long moment, then burst out laughing. She had a deep, husky laugh. On the woven face, the spiders roared with silent amusement. “I stand corrected, young man,” she said, wiping her eyes. “And thank you. At my age, sometimes you start to think you know how everything works already. It is nice to be put in my place from time to time. So, your magic is not a trauma and a torment for you, is it?”

  “No,” said Oliver. “I mean, I fix things…” His mind was a jumble of the Jenson boy with his swollen eyes and the gremlin-magic in the mill gears and all the other small problems that he was able to fix for people. It was useful. He hoped the Rain Wife could pull that out of his mind, because if he tried to explain it, he was afraid he’d sound like he was bragging. He had a feeling that this woman would not be very impressed with bragging.

  “Would you give that up for rain?”

  Oliver’s heart, which he’d thought could sink no lower, seemed to plunge to the center of the earth.

  Give up his magic? Trade this one great act for all the things he might do, forever after?

  You have to help people if they’re suffering.

  But if he had no magic, he couldn’t help people, could he? I mean, obviously I can, I can like… I don’t know, do their laundry or something, but I can’t fix things like the Jenson boy’s poison ivy or the mischief in the mill. It was easy to say that one person could always make a difference, but it was certainly a lot easier to make one if you had the ability to command arcane forces, even extremely minor ones.

  But it won’t matter if I can cure poison ivy if no one has rain. They’ll die.

  The armadillo crept closer and leaned against his shins. Oliver had a sudden sickening realization—if he had no magic, he’d have no familiar. And Eglamarck was his best friend.

  Could he really trade his best friend away? Even with the whole village at stake?

  No. The village had traded him for rain, and he was fairly certain, on some deep level, that was a wound that would scar over but never heal. He couldn’t turn around and do it to someone else.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t. I would, but…” He shook his head. The words wouldn’t come, or there were too many of them and he was afraid that they’d come all at once and he might start crying. He didn’t want to cry in front of the Rain Wife and Trebastion.

  The armadillo turned his narrow head and sighed.

  “No, you can’t,” said Trebastion. Oliver jumped a little. He’d completely forgotten the minstrel was there.

  Trebastion stepped forward until he was almost toe to toe with the Rain Wife. “Don’t take his. He needs it. You can take mine instead.”

  Oliver stared at the back of Trebastion’s head. “Really?” he said.

  “Really?” said the Rain Wife. Her eyes lingered on the bruises across his face.

  “My magic’s never done anything but ruin my life,” said Trebastion. “But Oliver here saved me. I’ll give it to you if you give him rain for his village.”

  The Rain Wife’s eyes lidded as she thought. Over her head, the spiders flashed through a dozen emotions in rapid succession—surprise, calculation, amusement, and more.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will agree to that.” She smiled toothily. “It is less than I should take, but you have both surprised me today, and for that, I will take a little less. Astonishment keeps a person young.” She stretched out a hand. “Give me your wrist.”

  Trebastion glanced nervously at the spiders above her head but held out his arm.

  “You don’t have to do this,” said Oliver. “You really don’t.”

  “Well, I’m going to,” said Trebastion.

  “But—”

  “Oliver, shut up and let me do something useful with my magic for once.”

  The Rain Wife’s face softened. “It won’t hurt much,” she said gently. “But you might want to close your eyes. People find this… unsettling.”

  Trebastion squeezed his eyes shut. Oliver wanted to look away, but professional curiosity kept him watching. He’d never known someone could take away someone else’s magic. How was it done?

  She held up a hand behind her and several large black-and-yellow spiders scuttled onto her hand from the woven face. She lowered them to Trebastion’s arm. “A little pinch, now,” she said. “I apologize, youngster. You, I think, have had enough pain to last you a long time.”

  Trebastion said, “Heh.” Then he winced as she flicked her hand and a thin skein of blood began to roll down from h
is wrist.

  The spiders descended on it. Oliver’s immediate thought was that they were going to begin to feed and he felt ill. But the reality, as it turned out, was different.

  They began to weave.

  Trebastion’s blood dyed their web—or perhaps they were weaving the blood itself into long lines of silk. Oliver did not know and could not guess. They worked busily, their threads crossing and interweaving, and a thin, ladder-like web began to drop from the minstrel’s wrist toward the floor. The rungs of the ladder ran back and forth erratically, forming a shape that looked almost like writing.

  Oliver squinted. The strands were much thicker than any web he’d ever seen, and the longer he looked, the more he was convinced that there really were words written in the rungs, but in an alphabet he did not know. He glanced at the Rain Wife, who was still holding Trebastion’s hand. “Is that…?”

  “In the old language of spiders,” she said. “No, I can’t read it either. My small friends try to translate, but there are things that I suspect mammals are not meant to know.” She smiled crookedly, looking down at the length of red web.

  It was only a few inches from the ground when the Rain Wife said, “Enough,” and put her thumb over the wound. The spiders hastily finished their work, tying off the ends. The largest arachnid lifted the web in its forelegs and offered it ceremoniously to the Rain Wife.

  “Put your thumb where mine is, youngster,” she said. Trebastion blinked at her, then hurried to comply. “It will stop bleeding in a few minutes. Cobweb is the finest of bandages, believe it or not.”

  “I believe you,” said Trebastion. “Is that it? Is the magic… gone?”

  The Rain Wife took the red web from her familiar’s legs and draped it along her arm. The glowing blue blazed up, turning into a web of violet… and then the red web was gone and the blue slowly returned to normal. “It’s gone,” she assured Trebastion.

  Trebastion’s eyes closed in unutterable relief.

  The Rain Wife glanced over at Oliver and smiled. “Does it frighten you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Oliver.

  “Good. It should. It frightened me; the first time I saw it done. But you have earned your chance at rain.” She pushed herself to her feet, picking up a cane from one side of the chair. Three yellow spiders made golden ornaments in her hair. “Open your eyes, young man, and let’s see this through.”

  12

  Trebastion stumbled a bit as they left the building. Oliver grabbed for him, but the Rain Wife was quicker, holding him up with one heavy arm and supporting them both on her cane. “Young man, I think you had best stay with us for a little while.”

  “Is it the magic?” asked Oliver. “Or the lack of magic, I guess?”

  “No,” said the Rain Wife, “it’s the fact that he’s got at least three bruised ribs, unless I miss my guess.”

  Trebastion managed a smile. “They weren’t so bad,” he said. “Until last night. Sleeping on the ground, you know.”

  “We’ll put you on a bed of cloud wool,” said the Rain Wife. “Could use some salve for those bruises, too. Someone took a dislike to you, did they?”

  “A man named Stern,” said Trebastion. “I may possibly have uncovered the fact he was murdering little girls.”

  “That’d do it, I expect. He still after you?”

  “I don’t think so, no. I think a ghul ate him.”

  “These things happen.” She glanced at him and made a grumbling sound in her throat. “You need feeding, too. We’ll put some meat on your ribs.”

  Trebastion ducked his head, smiling. Oliver was reminded of what he’d said in the forest, about a certain type of woman who always wanted to feed him.

  The Rain Wife looked over at the tall Cloud Herder who had brought them in. “Gregor? Your flock’s nearly due for shearing, but that’s an observation, not an order. You’ve got a new babe at home, and I’ll go ask Holly if it’s too much trouble.”

  Gregor tilted his head to one side. The blue light pulsed in his face. “I will see it through,” he said. “They found me, after all.”

  “You certain?”

  The tall man glanced at Oliver. “His people need the rain. We’ve enough put by for now.”

  “I’ll do my best to see you don’t suffer by it,” said the Rain Wife, nodding. “All right, young mage. Gregor will let you take his clouds.”

  It had not occurred to Oliver that the Cloud Herders might actually rely on their clouds the way that shepherds relied on sheep. Clouds were clouds, weren’t they? And yet the way that the two Herders were talking, they sounded more like animals, and if so, Oliver was asking for a lot.

  He looked up into the sky, which was vague and gray and undifferentiated. It was all cloud. How did this work?

  They retraced their steps up the hillside. The Rain Wife leaned heavily on her cane, but did not seem to be slowed down at all. Once or twice she even caught Trebastion as he staggered.

  At last they stood facing the flock of sheep that Oliver and Trebastion had spotted only an hour or two before. “Well, then,” said the Cloud Herder. He jerked his chin in the direction of the flock. “There’s the clouds, if you can ride the ram.”

  Oliver looked from the man to the sheep to the gray ram and said, “Um?”

  The Rain Wife chuckled. She took a waterskin from her belt and squirted a few drops into her palm. The liquid glowed watery blue. She dipped her thumb in it and turned to Trebastion. “Close your eyes.”

  He obeyed. She smeared her thumb across his eyelids, then turned to Oliver.

  Oliver closed his eyes obediently as she approached. He was still wary, but since Trebastion did not fall down screaming, presumably it was safe enough. Her thumb was warm and the blue liquid—cloud milk?—left a trail of dampness across his eyelids.

  He opened his eyes again, as the Rain Wife used her cane to hitch herself down and offer the same treatment to the armadillo.

  “Oh,” said Trebastion. “Oh, I see.” Oliver blinked several times.

  Oh.

  If clouds came to earth and grazed on hillsides… no, that wasn’t right. Clouds obviously had come to earth to graze on the hillsides. Oliver was looking at them.

  They still looked like sheep, more or less. But the sight the cloud milk gave him showed Oliver the truth. Their features shifted like clouds in the wind and sometimes they had more legs and sometimes rather less. He watched one turn around, not by turning but by simply pulling its head back into its wool and having it extrude on the other side of its body.

  And the ram… the ram was a storm cloud. Lightning crawled along his horns and his eyes glowed the same electric blue as the Cloud Herder’s tattoos. The long feathery hairs on the backs of his legs streamed in the wind, bits breaking off and fading away into mist.

  Oliver gulped.

  “I’m supposed to ride… him?”

  The Rain Wife nodded. “Get up on his back and the flock will follow. Ride him over the sky to the village, and they’ll rain for you. But then you must release him so that he can lead them back.” She jerked her head toward Gregor. “It’s his season’s shearing of rain that you’ve bought, but no amount of magic will buy the clouds themselves.”

  “That’s all right,” said Oliver, rubbing his palms on his trousers. The ram eyed him in an unfriendly fashion. “I… uh… All right. Nice sheep?”

  He took two steps forward and the ram lowered his head and charged.

  Oliver dove out of the way with a yelp, bruising his shoulder on the stony ground. “I don’t think he wants to be ridden!”

  “You’ll have to wrestle him down, I expect,” said Gregor. “He’s a fierce one.”

  “Wrestle him down?!”

  Gregor untied a piece of knotted rope from his waist and tossed it to Oliver. It looked—and felt—like a faded halter. Even with his cloud milk enhanced vision, Oliver couldn’t see anything special about it. “Is it magic?” he asked.

  “No, it’s rope,” said Gregor.

&n
bsp; The ram pawed the ground, glaring at Oliver with those brilliant blue eyes. His scalp felt strange and he lifted his hand to discover that his hair was standing on end.

  The ram charged again. Oliver leapt out of the way again. He was pretty sure that the only reason he didn’t get trampled that time was because the ram had to pull up short so as not to run into the Rain Wife, which he seemed unwilling to do.

  “Is there some trick to this?” he asked, scrambling to the safety of the Rain Wife’s feet. The ram paced back and forth, like something far more predatory than a sheep.

  She raised an eyebrow. “No trick. How did you survive the trip here, anyway?”

  “Mostly by tying people’s shoelaces together and asking for help!” Oh, if only he could have become invisible! He could have snuck up on the ram, jumped on his back, and… and… well, he’d still have to get the halter over his head and then ride the blasted beast, but at least he’d been farther along than he was now.

  “Armadillo?” he asked. “Can you talk to him?”

  “I have been,” said the armadillo. “It’s mostly swearing. He’s got a remarkable vocabulary, for a sheep.” Gregor made a noise suspiciously like a laugh. The Rain Wife did laugh, thumping her cane on the ground.

  “He thinks you’re after his ladies,” said the armadillo. “I suppose he’s not wrong.”

  “His owner said I could!”

  “I don’t think,” said the armadillo, as Oliver flung himself out of the way of another charge, “that he’s in the mood for a complex discussion of personal autonomy and property rights.”

  Oliver groaned. All right, he thought. All right. Stop reacting and think.

  “Pushme pullme,” he said under his breath, and tried to shove a magical foot in the ram’s way.

  The cloud ram tripped over it, just as he’d hoped, stumbled… and instead of falling, caught himself with a pair of legs that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier. He hopped awkwardly as his back legs became his front legs and vice versa but didn’t lose his footing.