An Unexpected Apprentice

by Jody Lynn Nye

  Tildi imagined the quilt she was helping the neighbors make for the upcoming wedding of their dairyman’s daughter. The girl loved red roses, and had embroidered them on every part of her trousseau. The quilt’s pattern was of stylized roses the size of Tildi’s head, in five shades of red thread on a green background. Red as blood, blood on green grass. She sat up and clutched her eyes to clear the image from them.

  Sleep would not come, not when she was haunting herself. Impatiently, she kicked her way out of bed. Tildi rejected the notion of a cup of cocoa or a glass of warm milk with honey. The sweetness would gag her. Wine or whiskey wouldn’t help, either. She must not think of the coming wedding, or she would get no sleep at all. Some kind of task would take her mind away. Something mind-numbingly tedious.

  She took on the task of gathering up and clearing out her brothers’ things to make way for Bardol’s, and any relatives or hangers-on he brought to Daybreak Bank with him.

  Tildi started in Gosto’s room. This had been their parents’ chamber, suitable for the head of the family. All the Summerbees’ treasures were there: the silver candlesticks that had been a wedding present to her grandparents; embroidered quilts made by several generations of talented needlewomen; shiny, thin, but durable dishes from some far-off land that Papa had bought from a peddler to please Mama when Gosto was born. All those things were to have been kept for the day when Gosto took a bride, but it had been too soon. At twenty-six he was considered too young to settle down, though he had proved himself a worthy successor to his father, taking up the task of managing the farm ten years before. Why, he had been a mere boy, a year younger than Tildi was now.

  Of his personal effects there was little. Gosto collected no extraneous belongings. There was little but his best clothing, kept freshened for meetings and special occasions, and his second-best clothing that he wore to spend evenings in the tavern with the other boys and their mates. He was muscular in build, the biggest of her brothers. Stocky Bardol might want these garments, as much as it griped Tildi even to think about it. She folded the clothes and laid them back in the chest at the end of the bed.

  Pierin’s room was another matter. He was so slim that no other grown man could fit his clothes. It would be best if Tildi offered them to one of the neighbors whose son had hit the weed-stalk stage, growing too long for his trousers by the week. He had several sets of best and second-best clothing. Pierin loved fine fabrics as much as any woman, and liked embroidery and other finery. He had been a charmer. Pierin could do anything with animals. There wasn’t a pony he couldn’t break in an hour with a gentle conversation, nor a bull he couldn’t take to cow. He’d never been butted by a goat, unlike the rest of them, who bore their bruises. He had a similar talent for bewitching smallfolks as well. Tildi smiled, clutching one of her second brother’s fancy waistcoats to her breast. Half the room was filled with gifts from pretty girls, “Just because.” Though he was a second son, he would have had no trouble at all when the time came to finding a wife—or six or seven. Thank Time and Nature that the smallfolks’ custom confined a marriage to two people!

  Marco had no garments that could be offered to other families, since he rarely got anything new. Any clothes that reached him were four-times hand-me-downs that had survived Teldo’s carelessness. Luckily their mother had raised them to buy the best and sturdiest cloth. Marco did not mind dressing in worn shirts and trousers. He cared little for finery, but he could not resist music manuscripts or strange instruments. Marco had been a gifted musician. He could play anything he picked up. Tildi touched the collection of pipes, drums, fiddles, and horns. She plucked the lowest string on the short harp in the corner of the room, letting it fill the chamber with its melancholy twang, as if it could evoke her baby brother’s presence. She hated to let the collection go, but it would be a tribute to him to donate it to the schoolmistress who taught the younger children, and hope they would be used well in Marco’s memory.

  It took a special effort for Tildi to push herself over the threshold of Teldo’s room. Her mother had joked that the two of them were twins born a year apart. “The longest lying-in in history!” she would say with a laugh.

  Tildi and Teldo were alike in nature, too. Each had a bookish bent and boundless curiosity for the nature world. They demanded to be read to, long after their younger brother had moved on to playing tunes on his first pennywhistle, and had an insatiable appetite for new books to read. Mama hadn’t minded. She borrowed whatever texts the neighbors had, and had first right of refusal for children’s books with all the regular peddlers who made their way semiannually through the Quarters.

  Some said that Mama had married beneath her, Gelina Bellwood wedding Bernardo Summerbee, a farmer. She had been a scholar’s daughter from Cedarbrake village in the Evenside quarter. She had never seen it as a lack, however, and had thrown herself into her husband’s work with the greatest of goodwill. She seemed glad that her third and fourth children inherited her intellectual gifts, and gradually ceded ownership of all her books to them as she became too busy to read them.

  Among them had been a treatise on magic. It was so old it was a yards-long piece of parchment wound onto a pair of spindles, not pages between covers as her schoolbooks had been. Page-books were a new invention, only a hundred or so years old, according to the aged aunts and uncles of the village. One very elderly aunt claimed she recalled when they first came to the Quarters, a human invention, of course, but not a bad idea, made looking for a recipe much easier.

  Teldo had devoured the book of magic, demanding to know more, badgering the troubadours to tell him tales of great wizards and great workings. He found their stories too light on details for his taste. Mama always sought for more histories and accounts. Once in a while she was lucky, presenting her purchases to him like a queen bestowing an honor. Papa didn’t hold much with magic, but as long as Teldo did his small chores, only those that were expected of an eight-year-old boy, he didn’t mind how Teldo spent his spare time.

  Once their parents were gone Teldo had thrown himself into his studies. He and Pierin soon began to make regular selling trips with their goat’s fleece-combings and their prime tree fruits down to the human-run port city of Tillerton. After one very successful venture he began a correspondence with a human who ran a bookshop there with a bent toward esoterica, who held manuscripts on approval for him, to be paid for out of his share of the sales. Teldo began to do his farmwork as quickly as he could so he could get back to his magical studies. He often indulged his curious little sister in secret, because she showed an aptitude for spell-crafting, and he did pick up on more refinements when he taught her what he knew. He ran far ahead of her—but only to start with. Over time she had practiced her little bits of magic. She could make a small fire. She did it now, as a sort of tribute to her lost brother. She wouldn’t let his teachings die. How she wished she held the power of the great wizards whose stories in which they had reveled! If she could have sent bursts of flame from her hands and burned the terrible thraik from the sky, she would have done it in a heartbeat, and never mind the cost—for cost there always was. Teldo had cautioned her that magicking exhausted the body, and some workings ate away at it. But she could do little things. Teldo was proud of her, as she was of him.

  Only one time did she dare to show her friends what she could do. They shrieked at her not to do that, that she’d get in trouble. Magic is not for the likes of us! After that she’d been careful to keep her secret, and talk only about the subjects that interested her friends: new clothes, new embroidery or knitting patterns, stories told by the traveling bards, and who was going to marry whom. She never again trusted them with the knowledge she gained. She could only share her triumphs with Teldo.

  More copious even than Pierin’s “trophies” were Teldo’s papers. He made notes on every facet of magic that he studied. They were full of erasures and scratched-out lines where he had learned something more from another source that contradicted what he had learned in the fir
st place. He had letters from apprentices in human cities, their correspondence paper the size of placemats. In them they discussed the smallest techniques to death. Teldo would read these avidly over and over, then reply. He could write and craft beautifully, and used his skills to attempt to render the spells that he read about. He had been studying runes from old manuscripts Mama had bought from a traveling peddler from the bigfolk lands many years ago. One in particular was his prize possession and the basis of his collection.

  That beautiful parchment was very old, but the material was still supple and pure white, obviously prepared by the best papermaker. The signs on it had been rendered in the most gloriously ornate style, furnished with curlicues and other fancies of calligraphy, in every color including bright gold and silver. There weren’t very many symbols on it, just nine, but they seemed very full of meaning. Struck by its beauty Mother had bought it from a peddler for her precocious children. The peddler had sold it cheap, because it hurt to hold it. Nobody to whom he had displayed it, not even collectors, wanted to touch it for more than a moment. Intrigued, Mama bought it, but she couldn’t decipher it, nor could anyone else in the village to whom she showed it. It piqued the curiosity of the two children. Mother brought it inside wrapped in the edge of her apron to keep it from getting dirty, and put it on the table in the midst of their schoolwork. It hurt to handle at first, but the longer Tildi and Teldo tried, the less it pained them. The symbols sort of looked like the words for tree, stone, and a few others that they knew, but not precisely. Teldo kept it as a curiosity, a special treasure, and never gave up trying to figure out what it meant.

  She remembered well when Teldo discovered what they were, if not their specific meaning. A few years ago he had become wildly excited, saying that its signs were like some in the magic books he had been studying.

  “These runes are what the world is made of, Tildi,” Teldo had instructed her, his voice solemn. She had asked him to tell her more but he couldn’t explain more than that. Mother had studied the parchment as well. All the family had seen it, touched it, wondered over it, but only Tildi and Teldo continued to peruse it after the others’ initial curiosity wore off.

  On the small desk underneath the window Tildi found Teldo’s pride and joy, the letter from a human wizard named Olen in the vast city of Overhill. Smallfolk had little use for magic in their prosaic existence. Teldo had applied for an apprenticeship with Olen, and had been accepted. Soon, he would have been going away. He had often told her he wished he could take her with him, but as she was merely a girl, there was little chance of that. He always said she couldn’t possibly understand enough about the great workings or the universal truths to be a true wizard. She scoffed at him, telling him he got it all out of a book, and if he could have picked it up there, so could she.

  “But you don’t really understand them,” he had argued.

  “All right, then,” she had countered, “why are the stars smaller than the sun?”

  He had no answer that satisfied either one of them. But here was the parchment that was sent to him by the great wizard. She ought to write to Olen and tell him of the tragedy. Teldo would never now be able to take up the apprenticeship, Tildi thought sadly.

  But she could.

  The thought crept in unbidden and surprised her so much she stood gazing for ten minutes at the letter in her hand.

  No, she thought, putting it down. She had no hope of getting permission from the elders even to ask the wizard if she might take Teldo’s place. Even if they had any respect for magic, they would insist that she would be useless, even dangerous as a mage. Why, she might have hysterics and let a demon loose upon the world! Instead, she must remain there and see that Bardol didn’t destroy her family’s ancestral holdings.

  But why? the annoying little voice in her mind demanded. The moment you say “I will,” the holdings won’t be yours any longer. You’ll be a chattel, thrown in with the estate as a makeweight. Bardol likes you as little as you like him. He could even beat you, and no one would cry against him for it.

  That truth was so painful that Tildi sank onto Teldo’s writing stool to think about it. She had nothing of her own left here at all, nothing but a few clothes and books and a few mementos of her parents.

  So why shouldn’t she go? She was as passionate about magic as Teldo. Perhaps not as advanced in her studies, but that could come in time. Probably the wizard had no real idea as to Teldo’s abilities. If … if he thought she was Teldo, he would take her on and let her learn. All she had to do was get to Overhill and present the letter. It was a radical idea to travel such a long distance, since she had never set foot outside the Quarters in her life, but she was good at finding her way. Once she had passed over the hills into the human realms, someone ought to be able to direct her to Overhill. Teldo had talked about the road over the Eastern Hills that divided the land of the smallfolks from the human realm beyond. She could remember almost everything that he and the other men said about the journey. How hard could it be, beyond a few days’ walking?

  For the first time since the tragedy she started to feel hope. She began to look around her with renewed interest. She must pack what she meant to take with her. What should she do first?

  Oh, but how could she leave the Quarters? Human ways were not smallfolk ways. What if she couldn’t find decent food, or if the living space offered her by the wizard—even if he did accept her as her brother—left no room for privacy? What if their practices were indecent or dishonorable? What hints she had had of the culture from reading Teldo’s correspondence told of lives very different from the ones smallfolks led in the Quarters. She would have no recourse but to return to Clearbeck—and Bardol.

  The little voice inside her head grew excited at the prospect. What if the culture is different? What if you cannot abide by the wizard’s rules? Find another place! You’ll learn more as you go along. There’s more to know outside the boundaries—a world is out there! She could see it for herself. Teldo would want her to.

  The thought of her brothers brought back the morning all over again. Tildi began to cry, harder than before. She was mourning not only their death, but the death of the pleasant life they had had here. Not one thing was left the way it had been at the moment she had awakened that day.

  And now she would change, too. Instead of being someone’s sister, she would be herself, by herself.

  The wizard Olen expected a male apprentice. He would never accept a mere female, so he must believe that she was Teldo. She must make herself look like her brother as best she could. The family had always remarked upon how much the two of them looked alike, leaving aside the obvious differences of gender and height—but the big folk rarely took them seriously. Gosto was always annoyed with his trading partners’ assertion that little folk were small enough to put in their pockets, so Olen would not be likely to notice small details that would give her away to other smallfolk. The inch or so between her height and Teldo’s wouldn’t be noticed. As for the rest, that was easily disguised. Surely the wizard didn’t expect to see her without her clothes! She wore cosmetics only for feast days. The only thing that would give her away was her long hair.

  The more she thought about it, the more that seemed like the only solution. This wizard, perhaps, represented a new beginning for her. She must grasp the opportunity and make the necessary change.

  In the dead of night she blocked all the windows in the big, empty house with the storm shutters. Anyone stopping by would assume that she wanted her privacy on her first night alone. They would be sad, but they would understand. She gathered up the fine shears from the sewing box, two looking glasses, a multibranched candlestick, and all the determination she had in her soul. Glancing up and back along the main hallway that intersected with the short passage that led from the front door, she wondered where she could have the most privacy.

  The stillroom was the obvious choice. It had solid stone walls with no windows through which a determined well-wisher could peer in.
Tildi carried her burdens down the winding flight of flagstone steps that led from the cupboard behind the central chimney, and locked herself in.

  Undoing the ties of her white cap, she set it aside with reverence. It symbolized the tradition of hundreds of years of her people, tradition upon which she was turning her back, but only because it had turned its back on her first. The face that looked out at her from the looking glass seemed trepidatious. Was she betraying all she knew? Shouldn’t she do as hundreds of her foremothers had, and give in to the commands of the male elders?

  No.

  She knew from the bottom of her heart that what they required was wrong.

  The long plait of hair fell down her back. Tildi felt for the spot where it met the nape of her neck, and brought the scissors around to it, with her eyes squeezed shut so she wouldn’t have to see the first devastating cut. Her hair had not been clipped since Jole Bywell had slopped leather glue in it when she was six. Cutting through was like sawing off her arm.

  The severed braid fell over her wrist like a garter snake dropping out of a tree. When she opened her eyes, the sight astonished her. She looked so much like Teldo, albeit Teldo in need of a good haircut, that tears began to run down her cheeks again. Tildi brushed them away with her wrist. He was gone forever. The only memory of him was here in her face. She’d do honor to that memory as best she could.

  With the two glasses arranged so she could see behind, she trimmed what remained of her hair in the same style she used to trim Teldo’s. She managed to achieve detachment from the task at hand, peering critically at her work instead of thinking that it was happening to her. She parted her hair on the side and combed the length over the side of her head. A snip here and there to cut carefully around her delicate ears, making sure it was even on both sides, and she was finished.

  There, she thought, turning her head to catch every angle in the two glasses, it looked just like her brothers’ hair did. After all, she cut theirs every month. When she was finished, she noticed the ends of her hair, freed of the weight they’d carried all these years, beginning to curl up on their own. The curls changed her face subtly, making it not entirely hers. Her reflection was that of a stranger, some cousin of the Summerbees. She was certain now that no one in the Quarter would know her at a distance. If she was observed by a neighbor they would assume that “he” had heard the news and had come to help his orphaned cousin. Alas, the Summerbees had no kin that lived close by. Even the ancient great-uncle of her mother’s had been gathered up by his many descendants and taken back into the distant downs in the warm Quarter to the southwest.