An Unexpected Apprentice

by Jody Lynn Nye

  She wondered if she ought to draw in light hairs on her face, and decided against it. A boy her size would just be beginning to see changes in himself, and she could always argue, if pressed, that “he” wasn’t old enough to grow a mustache yet, with a proper expression of chagrin. No, she must not speak to anyone. In spite of the startling change, the people hereabouts would know her voice. She had to get away before the first light, or trade her loneliness for a prison she couldn’t break. They could keep the land, and all that went with it, if they insisted, but she would not be part of the package, please and thank you.

  Until she departed, she kept her white cap tied on so that no unexpected visitor would see her barbered hair and ask awkward questions. She set about gathering up travel provisions, plus a few comforts. One of the boys’ rucksacks ought to hold what she needed. She hauled it down into the stillroom, keeping an ear out for visitors.

  Her boots were unsuitable for mountain travel, that she knew, but Teldo’s were barely two sizes bigger than hers. If she wore two pairs of stout socks they would fit just snugly. And clothes? For a moment she was shamed at having to travel as a boy. Still, she couldn’t put herself into danger if others saw an unescorted girl. She retained her own undergarments, chemises, and drawers, but took what clothes of Teldo’s that were closest to her size.

  She started to put the cap into the pack, took it out, put it back, took it out, and at last stuffed it down into the corner of the pack with her braid folded up inside it. Anyone who found that would figure out in an instant how she had disguised herself, and there would be a hunt after her in hours.

  Soap, a comb—ought she bring a razor for show? No, she told herself. Don’t waste the space on it when there were so many useful but heavy things that must be left behind. A stout knife, though, would come in handy. Pierin’s had been brought in by the farmhands that afternoon from the field where he had dropped it. Trying not to remember how the shiny, green-black residue got there, she scrubbed off the thraik blood, honed the blade sharp, and found a makeshift scabbard for it. She threaded it into the belt around her waist holding Teldo’s pants up. It weighed a surprising amount, but she’d be a fool to go without it. She took a few utensils that the boys swore were vital for sleeping in the wild, such as a jack for holding a kettle over a fire, and a long metal spoon that would not burn and could be used for stirring or eating. A pot for cooking and making tea. She rummaged through the pantry for food that would last several days, for who knew how long it would be before she reached a farm or an inn? A bottle of well water. Salt and a few herbs, to make camp food more interesting. Some physics, a roll of bandages and fleabane from the medicine cupboard. Fishhooks and a line. A jaunty cap and a warm cloak over all completed her wayfaring clothes.

  All of Teldo’s magical impedimenta must come with her. She might need it, and Bardol would certainly throw it out the moment someone let on to him what it had been used for. Teldo hadn’t much: a wand he had been carving out of alderwood; an ornate brass pot that he mysteriously referred to as a “cauldron”; a couple of rings and amulets. He’d paid such high sums for the latter that he had begged Tildi, his only confidant in matters magical, never to reveal to Gosto what they had cost. Teldo had never learned what they were for, but perhaps the wizard could translate the runes that decorated them. Most of the space in her pack she stuffed with his papers, most especially the leaf of the book they had never been able to read, his texts on magic, and his correspondence. Tildi folded up the letter from the wizard, Olen, offering Teldo the apprenticeship and tucked it into her bodice. If she reached Overhill with nothing else in her possession, she must have that.

  A bit of space remained. In her most practical heart she knew she ought to pack in a few more pairs of socks or a warm scarf. She found herself drifting around her brothers’ rooms. Why not take a memento of each one? No one else might like to hear the stories of how they had made this or found that—nothing was more boring than someone else’s family history—but it would be like bringing them with her. She already had Pierin’s knife and Teldo’s wand. Marco had a small pipe he had made from a river reed. With it he could play tunes as light as birdsong. Those went into the safest corner of the pack. It was more difficult with Gosto. In the end she took one of his handkerchiefs. They were large, practical, and entirely masculine, but softened by many washings into a texture like kidskin. How often she had tucked one into his overall pocket as he went out into the fields. They would come back filthy with soil and sweat, or torn from being used to help haul up a fence post, or covered with blood where they had been used to tie up a cut hand or wipe the face of a newborn lamb. These handkerchiefs were like a diary of Gosto’s day.

  Ruthlessly, she turned out the strongbox that Gosto had kept under a loose floorboard beneath his bed. The family’s small treasures were also kept there. Tildi removed the thin gold band that had been her mother’s wedding ring and her grandmother’s before her only worn on feasts, and all the hard coinage, leaving just enough money to pay Mirrin’s and his girls’ wages. It was still her money for three more days. By the time any pursuer could have guessed where she’d gone and caught up with her, she ought to have taken up her apprenticeship to the wizard Olen. Chances were that they’d no longer wish to bother with her, and the mayor and the elders could do what they liked with the farm. They would anyhow. Tildi simply wouldn’t have to be a party to it. Pity she wouldn’t be able to watch the alarm raised when she was noticed to be missing. By the time the girls and the farmhands returned to the house, she would be gone. No tea made. No breakfast laid out. No water pumped up for baths. No washing hanging out. No mending in the basket. No sticks broken for the fire. No bread rising in the bowl near the fireplace … . Once Tildi began to enumerate all the household tasks she did out of love for her brothers and had no intention whatsoever of doing for her unwanted intended, a long journey alone overland to an apprenticeship sounded like a week off with time to read in bed!

  She left the strongbox unlocked on the big table. After raising the hue and cry about her disappearance, Mirrin would figure out what it meant. Let Bardol and the council work out how to pay the farmhands thereafter. He could mortgage the crops. Time and Nature knew they were more than worth the cost.

  By the time Tildi had completed all her preparations she was hungry again. Blessing the kindness of smallfolks, she tucked into the funeral meats with good appetite. The leftovers, of which there was a good plenty, would make a fine lunch for her puzzled farmhands.

  A lightening in the sky showed pale gray through the crack between the storm shutters over the round, east-facing window in the kitchen. Tildi rose and donned her pack. She knew she had been putting off the final moment, but no time remained for dithering. She must go now, or accept her fate.

  Divided between sorrow for her loss and excitement at the prospect of the new and unknown, Tildi pulled the door closed behind her.

  Chapter Four

  A bird’s warble broke the hush of night as Tildi crossed the threshold.

  False dawn was not long away. The dark plum sky, with a few straggling specks of stars, began to grow silver above the treetops as she looked out over the garden gate along the track that led southeast, away from town. All of her male relatives had taken this road, to go trading with the humans on the other side of the Eastern Hills, leaving the females at home to wonder what the rest of the world was like. It was her turn to see, but only if she lent speed to her feet. Any moment now someone was going to pop out of one of the three houses that lay in sight of the Summerbees’ front door and order her back, demanding to know in the meanwhile what she had done to her hair, and why was she wearing her brother’s clothes? Had she gone mad? It was all that reading of fairy stories, Tildi Summerbee!

  If only she could go back to yesterday and keep everyone inside, so that when the thraiks descended, they would find no prey. Her heart clenched with sorrow, but she had to move on. The day was dawning, and soon she would be discovered.

&
nbsp; The hardest step she ever took was passing through the gate to the road. On this side lay the familiar, the safe, the known. On the other was the unknown, laden with who knew what dangers? She reached out to open the latch, but her hand kept dropping down to her side.

  If I don’t do it now, I never will, Tildi told herself. Go. Now. Hurry!

  A rooster crowing at the Bywells’ farm precipitated action. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d unlatched the gate and stepped out. It swung shut behind, hitting her in the heavy pack on her back. Tildi was knocked forward a pace.

  Well, if that’s not an omen, nothing is, she thought with wry humor, regaining her footing and reseating the pack. She glanced nervously up and down the road. She reassured herself. I’m a boy, she thought fiercely. I’m a boy! Remember that! I cannot be sent back to an empty hearth, for that’s not my fate. I am a man with an office to take up, and people to meet, lands to explore, sights to see before I do.

  The thought made her walk straighter, with a longer stride. There. Even her body believed it now. With a glance over her shoulder at the old farmhouse for farewell, she marched as quickly as she could toward the east and the graying sky. A few fat puffy clouds touched with orange and pink at the eastern edge anticipated the arrival of the sun.

  In the distance, a dog barked, and a few more roosters raised their hoarse cries. Tildi enjoyed a tender moment of longing for the life she was setting behind her. Dawn was a time of day she normally loved. As the one in charge of getting everyone else in the house up, Tildi rose at the first fingerling sun ray to peer over the ring of hills that surrounded the Quarters. She loved the freshness of the pure, newborn light, the cool sweetness of the air. Unless the weather was very cold, she always threw open the big windows to let in the scent before she started the fire to make the morning tea. Around her she scented the faint, sweet, tangy aroma of wood-smoke, as dozens of women like herself, and a few men, rose to the same task that would get their households up and moving. She could use a cup of that good, strong, sweet tea now. How tired she was! She was not accustomed to staying up all night, and grief bent her spine with exhaustion.

  Well, she’d best make speed now. Once she was out of any danger of being seen by her neighbors she could find herself a comfortable place to make camp. There she would be able to make herself a meal and take a nap. She bent her back to her pack and trudged gamely along the road. The rucksack’s weight wasn’t so overwhelming as to keep her from noticing the spring flowers peeking out at her on either side. Tildi admired the pinks, yellows, and purples, drinking them in to keep in her memory forever. With some difficulty because of the pack, she stooped to pick a small handful of the fragile blossoms, still damp with morning dew. She tied the stems together with strands of grass, and tucked the fragrant posy into the breast of her borrowed shirt. She would miss all the beauty of her home. If only things had not had to change!

  Get on with you, Tildi Summerbee, she thought severely. The future has to make itself now.

  She looked back over her shoulder toward her home. The trees and fences were lit silver-gilt by the light of the rising sun. Tildi felt her throat tighten with grief and longing.

  Farewell, she thought sadly. The last heir of the Summerbees is leaving in search of her fortune.

  She turned away, rasping up the empty road in the unfamiliarly rough pants and boots.

  From their property’s edge the land sloped upward in gentle, forested hills for several more miles until it met the foot of the eastern range that guarded the sunrise side of the Quarters. The massif was called the Eastern Hills out of modesty. The peaks were rounded at the top, but they stood as high as proper mountains ought to. Her smallfolk ancestors seemed not to have much imagination. The rest of her homeland was ringed by other ranges with, alas, equally prosaic names: the Northern Tors, the Southwesterns, and the Sunlit Hills that connected the long Southwesterns to the Eastern Hills. Her homeland lay in a kind of bowl that protected it from the rest of the world, but within those boundaries it rose to a dome shape, cut by many rivers and dotted with lakes and marshlands. In almost the precise geographical center was a high tarn known as the Eye Lake. Generations of schoolchildren, Tildi included, had been assured that from the air the water bubbling up from the vast underground streams was so clear that one could see through it down to the center of the earth, though none of them knew how the teacher or the author of the schoolbook had made that discovery. The five streams that flowed down from that lake divided the land into the five Quarters.

  Beyond the protective mountains to the south was an ocean. According to the schoolmaster’s map the Quarters occupied a small part at the south center of Niombra, the biggest of the world’s five continents. Beyond the steep cliffs that terminated the Eastern Hills lay the main river, the Arown. It flowed down all the way to the main trading seaport, protected by a wide, bean-shaped cove protected by natural seawalls.

  The Tench, the southeastern river that delineated the border between the Morningside and Noon Quarters, also reached the seaport, cutting underneath the Sunlits and emerging on the other side at the head of a picturesque waterfall high on the cliff face. The natural tunnel cut by the stream was wide enough and high enough for three smallfolk to walk abreast on either side if the river was not in a flood stage. The smallfolks made use of the handy shortcut to bring their goods to market in Tillerton. A cart drawn by a pair of ponies could make their way beside the torrent. Humans never came that way. The echoing tunnel was just low enough that the big folks would have had to walk stooped over for miles. Several attempts to raise the roof had been abandoned for fear of bringing the mountains down upon them.

  There were other terrors. Gosto used to scare his smaller siblings with tales of centipedes as long as his arm that haunted the tunnels. Their fierce pincers could nip off a finger. The ceiling was hung with bats that drank blood and ate eyeballs. Ants plied the roadway in silent, armored masses. They carried off shoes after mistaking them for prey, and Nature help the smallfolk who fell behind his fellows when the ant armies were afoot! Tildi always shivered to hear those stories. Once the terrifying journey in the dark had ended, descent to the port city was by way of a causeway cut into the cliff so narrow that the off pony was always walking with one hoof hanging off into thin air. Gosto had been a wonderful storyteller, and was looking forward to telling his tales to his own children as he put them safely to bed. Tildi knew how the seaport looked, how the people spoke, and how many ships went hither and thither from his descriptions.

  Teldo had only been interested in the city for what new wonders it could furnish to his deepest passion, magic. The seaport was home to sailors and sea witches, each with their own stories of magic, which Teldo had brought back to a rapt Tildi. One of the sea witches had sold Teldo the book of study she now carried in her backpack.

  Tildi hoped to see the port one day, but her path took her in a different direction. Olen lived in Overhill, many miles to the northeast. Perhaps in the future her master would send her to the seaport on an errand, or perhaps she would travel with him, on a flying chair or a horse that could travel a thousand yards in a step. Who knew what wonders lay in the years to come?

  So many lands lay around the Quarters, and lands beyond those, places she knew only from their names on maps. The lands immediately beyond the Arown were good farmland, the teacher had instructed the smallfolk children. Not quite as good as theirs, Tildi thought with pride. The Arown’s river valley flattened out in a series of long terraces that often flooded, constantly washing away the best of the topsoil.

  Beyond the Arown lay more mountain ranges, then the hot countries where nothing at all grew. According to the schoolroom map, they were all sand except in a few green oases. The sky was reputedly a deep blue without a single cloud. She couldn’t imagine living where there were no trees or grass or rain. The beasts there were strange, too. Each of them had a natural water reservoir within its body to sustain life in between oases.

  To the n
orth lay most of the noble kingdoms of humankind. Three were the oldest known, their origins going back more than ten thousand years, predating the earliest written records of the smallfolks, before the dawn of the written word. Overhill lay in Melenatae, the most southern of the three, and possibly the oldest of them all. Think of that, Tildi told herself. I am walking back into history, when I never dreamed I would be traveling at all.

  To the west and northwest lay more human kingdoms, but according to her lessons those territories in the high mountains were reputed to be shared by dwarves, whose realms were belowground. Tildi thought she had never met a dwarf, though Pierin insisted she had. Dwarves were reputed to be insular and unfriendly and did not welcome travelers. A story one visiting troubadour had brought to a meeting fire told of a cold winter’s journey where he could smell good food cooking all around him and heard music coming up from beneath his feet, but he never could locate the way in to the dwarves’ hall.

  South of the ocean was Niombra’s nearest neighbor, Sheatovra. She always loved hearing stories from Sheatovra. Men lived there, but so did many strange creatures such as werewolves. A peddler who came through the Quarter once brought a square of rough hide he said came from a werewolf he had slain with his own hands, but Gosto and the other men scoffed at that. No ordinary man, especially not a peddler, could kill a werewolf.