An Unexpected Apprentice

by Jody Lynn Nye

  She sent a kindly smile over her shoulder as she departed.

  Tildi’s meager belongings filled only two shallow drawers at the bottom of the grand wooden wardrobe and two hooks in the cabinet. It was just as well, because she would have needed a ladder to reach the hanging bar. There was room to store a hundred garments. Her clothing, which had seemed respectable enough in the Quarters, seemed ragged and faded in the gorgeous bedchamber. She took out what few items were still clean and unworn, and bundled the rest into the woven basket. Everything in her pack smelled of the road, especially her. She ought to take advantage of her own bathtub before dinner, and put on her best clothes to honor her master. She hoped he would like her.

  With the greatest of care, she stowed her books and papers in a small chest clearly intended for that purpose that stood beside the writing desk. Soft light shone through the window above it. Tildi glanced up, bemused. Something had changed in the last few moments. She was sure that the window had been higher off the floor. Now she could look comfortably over the sill into the gardens below.

  Tildi patted the soft-colored wall. “You are aware, aren’t you? You can change your insides as you please. Thank you. I’ve met some very fine trees since I left home, but you are the most amazing of them all.”

  The smooth wood warmed under her touch. Tildi almost imagined that it bulged out slightly to accept her touch like a cat arching its back.

  At the bottom of her dusty pack were her brothers’ token possessions. Tildi lifted them out and sat on the floor with them in her lap. Tears pricked at her eyes as she turned them over. They were precious to her, almost the only reminders that she had from home, and the only ones she really wanted. Beside them was another small white parcel. Tildi unwrapped it. It was her cap and the braid she had shorn off. Automatically she smoothed out the white linen and started to put it on, to regain a seemly appearance.

  No, she thought firmly, setting it aside. She could never go back to the way things were. It felt as if it had been a lifetime since she had left the Quarters, not a mere ten days. So short a time had passed to encompass so many changes. In that time she had been stripped of family, home, name, even gender, and taken on an identity and a dream that were not her own. Should she throw away the cap and braid?

  She made as if to drop them in the basket, but hesitated. It was too soon to make such a final choice. Tildi rolled up the cap with the hair inside it and stuffed it into the back of the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. Her brothers’ possessions she put into the drawer of one of the night tables, to keep those memories near at hand.

  A chiming like distant birdsong made Tildi drop her comb on her night-stand in surprise. That must be the dinner bell. She followed the sound out of her room and down the long, curving stairs to the ground floor. Now that daylight had fled, the interior of Silvertree was illuminated by sconces that shed a soft, golden light.

  A luxurious, hot bath had done much to soothe her nerves, which felt rubbed almost as skinless as her feet and shoulders. By the time she had returned to the room, others had been at work, ensuring further comforts. A pair of steps had been placed to make it easier for her to climb into the tall bed without a scramble. The night tables had been pushed much closer to it, and a soft rug now covered much of the floor. Other furnishings, including a tilting mirror, had been placed where she could use them. The writing desk had been replaced with one more suited to someone of her height, and her clothes were neatly folded upon a low chair. Lacking a single dress among her hastily assembled travel wardrobe, she was forced to don the neatest shirt and trousers she had, and hoped that they would be suitable for dining with a wizard.

  Panting, she fetched up in the grand corridor. There seemed to be dozens of rooms, but she could see no one to ask for directions. As if in answer to her thought, a sconce light flickered at the post of one on her right. Delicious smells wafted through the cracked door. Timidly, Tildi peeked inside. Floods of light gleamed from a dozen hanging lamps off a tablecloth whiter than snow. There must have been a hundred chairs set at the huge table, Tildi noted as she entered. Olen, seated alone at its head, waved her over.

  “Sit down, young Tildi,” he said. The corners of his long mustache lifted in a smile. Tildi climbed into the chair he indicated to his right. A large pillow had been placed in it to bring her up to the level of the table, but leaving room for her to rest her heels on the seat.

  “Where are all the other people?” Tildi asked, nodding at the forest of chairs.

  “Elsewhere,” Olen said vaguely, with a wave of his fingers. “It will just be the two of us this evening. We will talk a little about your duties and your education.”

  Mostly he told stories.

  Tildi found herself held rapt at Olen’s description of dire battles between wizards and unbelievable monsters, coronations of great kings and queens, the birth of phoenixes and the flight of dragons. A stream of servants in pale gray and green slipped in and out of the room silently, offering food from priceless, gold-trimmed dishes, and departing without a word, but Tildi paid little attention to what she ate except to note that all of it tasted wonderful. Gosto could have taken lessons from Olen, and had enormous fun swapping tales over a glass of his excellent wine.

  The wizard was an excellent host. He made sure that she had anything she needed, and her glass was never empty throughout the long meal. There must have been magic at work, for though she drank many glasses, she was as awake and aware as if she had had a long, restful night’s sleep. Many of his stories were humorous. Tildi laughed at them, and he seemed to share her pleasure, but she sensed a watchfulness in him. That was to be expected, since she was a newcomer, but there was more to the mood than that. When he was not launched upon one of his anecdotes he had a careworn expression that made his face look aged, like a shriveled apple. Something terrible was troubling him. A man with his many responsibilities couldn’t help but feel their burden, but this seemed to be a deep-felt problem on his mind all the time. She had seen that look on her father’s face the year that drought almost destroyed their crops.

  “Master Olen,” she began, and blushed when he raised his great eyebrows at her. “You seem preoccupied. May I help in any way?” she asked.

  “You will be doing enough,” Olen assured her. “But thank you for your consideration. Your empathy does you credit. I am sure your family must be ruing your loss.”

  She smiled sadly. If only they were.

  He flicked his long fingers, and servants seemed to rush from everywhere to clear the table. Tildi started to gather up her own plates, but a large man in a formal coat appeared at her side and gently but firmly took them out of her hands.

  “But, I want to help,” she said.

  “You’re an apprentice,” Olen said. “Let my servants do their job, and you do yours.” He rose. Tildi stood up to climb down from her perch, but a gentle force surrounded her, and before she could do more than gasp her feet were touching the ground. She gaped up at her master. “I’ll teach you that in no time, if you study hard. Shall we begin early tomorrow morning?”

  “Oh, yes, sir!” Tildi said.

  “Good. Good night to you.”

  Without another word he turned and strode away, robes flapping in his wake. Tildi frowned. In anyone else she would have found his departure to be inexcusably rude behavior, but she could not help recalling the look of deep concern in his eyes. Giving a grateful smile to the servants, she went up to bed.

  “Chuff!” Tildi smothered a sneeze in her dusting cloth.

  “You’re not going to let a little dirt get in your way, are you?” Olen asked, a trifle gruffly. He sat on a wooden chest with his hands on his knees and his head bent to avoid the ceiling.

  “No, master,” Tildi said.

  The small, dim room, shaped rather like the inside of a gourd, was full of boxes. Seated on the floor, Tildi pushed aside the rosewood coffer through which she had been searching, and pulled another to her.

  “You’re th
e only one in this house who can creep underneath that overhang without banging your head every other minute,” Olen explained. “I’m over twice your height. It’s best if I sit here out of the way. I’ll let you know when you have found what you’re looking for.”

  “I understand.” Tildi opened the small, brassbound chest, and found it to hold a single scroll nested in crushed velvet. “Is this it, master?” she asked, holding up a scroll.

  He peered through the dancing dust motes, lit up by the single, irregularly shaped window. “No. It ought to have a black ribbon around it.”

  Tildi shook her head and put it back in its box. Before she closed the chest she dusted the edges and polished the lock plate.

  “There is no need to do that,” Olen chided her.

  The next box, rough-hewn out of timbers but still airtight enough not to let in any dust, contained a mix of bound books and scrolls. Tildi began to sort through them in search of the black ribbon.

  “Only the scrolls, mind you,” Olen said, tapping his fingers on his knees. “The ancient form of the book. I’m not sure that it’s been bettered by these page-turn books. With a scroll you must read it in the direction that it is going, no hustling back and forth and getting things out of order. No. No. No,” he added, as Tildi held up one book after another for his inspection. “None of those.”

  “Have you ever thought of labeling the boxes, master?” Tildi asked.

  “Why? To shorten the search? I enjoy the challenge of the journey of discovery. In my hunt for a hidden resource I often come upon treasures that I have forgotten that I have. Such serendipity has frequently stirred me to make an intellectual leap that I would not otherwise have made. Don’t you think that is better than thinking like a clerk?”

  Tildi didn’t remind him that she was the one engaged upon the journey of discovery, not he. She flipped up the lid of a small, time-darkened box.

  A sour smell rose from the interior. She leaned back, coughing, with her nose wrinkled. Olen chuckled.

  “Ah, yes. The smell of the ages, which means ‘here is mildew, and a history.’ Is there a book inside?”

  “Yes,” Tildi said, dashing dust from the surface of the box with her cloth. Oddly, the book’s smell was not of mildew or dust, but reminded her of the clear scent that came after lightning. She conveyed the black-bound scroll to Olen, whose green eyes lit avidly.

  “Come, sit by me.” He shifted to make room and helped her up to sit beside him on the sea chest. He unrolled the book so she could see the first pages. He patted the open scroll. “This is the first book that I ever came into possession of that explains the runes of power without going off into recriminations or storytelling. I have admiration for this unknown teacher, for teacher she must have been. And an artist as well.

  “You know the basic runes we use for writing. Writing is an ancient art that describes the physical world around us in a few lines. But it is more than that. You use the simplified runes to express what you see, but in its purest form, the rune is the object. The two are connected. If you have the true rune before you of a person or a thing, what you do to that rune, happens to that person or thing. That is the basis of magic, the manipulation of those names to affect the physical reality.”

  Tildi was fascinated.

  “See here. This is the origin of all creation. The first image is the simple circle, the most all-encompassing symbol that contains all matter, all energy, all thought. You can deduce from this image, as the artist who compiled this tome did, that they are all one. It is when they became differentiated that they began to lose contact with one another.” Beneath the circle were three more symbols. Each had characteristics of the ring, but were all very distinct. In fact, when Tildi peered more closely at them, she realized that they were very complex, showing, as her first drawing of tree had, what had changed from when each was part of the circle. The artist who had drawn them must have been a very good observer. “It was a student of what became magic who discovered the links. He did not so much reestablish them, as redescribe them. From that revelation came more study.”

  The subsequent pages showed general runes. Tildi let out a pleased exclamation. She recognized all of these: tree, river, flower, sky, and, of course, fire.

  “Yes,” Olen said. “This section does resemble a reading primer for very young children. This is the distilling down of every image to find the very basic elements that these things have in common. Therefore, these runes direct energy to and from an entire class of objects, such as all trees. The early mages found that one had to be very general in order to direct a change in all of anything. In fact, since one mind’s influence is so diluted by attempting such an alteration, a general spell has no effect whatsoever. It is when you wish to enchant a single object that your power is the greatest, for then your attention is focused upon it. You can work upon its name, its single designation, and get results.

  “You can do magic without runes, but to understand what it is you do, you must study the image behind them. This is matter put into thought, or thought from which matter or energy arise. That is why you must truly know the name of something before you alter it, and once you know the name, you know much more than what it is called.”

  Tildi stared at the runes. “So if I know the name of something, I can change it?”

  “No. And yes. Once you know the name you have the key. Thereafter you must study to understand the nature of the object. Though you may see the rune, you will not necessarily know which strokes correspond to which characteristics. That comes over time, a lot of time. Some things are easy to change. Others are not. That is something apart from whether or not they ought to be changed. The balance of existence is maintained because there are reactions that come alongside every alteration, and the wise ones, such as we pretend to be, must take that into consideration. You can simply go ahead and alter or interfere with an object through its rune, if you are willing to take the consequences. Like the Shining Ones, or so they called themselves,” Olen said tersely. “They did not care, and see what trouble it’s caused?”

  “Have I seen some of that trouble yet, master?”

  “They created the thraik.”

  “Created!”

  “Indeed, yes, among other things. It’s the eternal scope of their meddling that both astonishes and appalls me.” At her puzzled expression he chuckled. “It’s not something I expect you to comprehend in its entirety now, or for many years, but you will. You will. I merely wish to stress that magic is easy for those who have the talent, or the opportunity. Judging whether to do that magic is not.”

  “I had heard,” Tildi said slowly, echoing something that Teldo had once told her, “that the ancient runes are what the world is made of.”

  “That’s a very simplified expression of the process,” Olen said. “Who told you that?”

  “My … my brother.”

  “Well, he did not precisely mislead you, Tildi. Indeed, that was a very penetrating thought from a layman. I’m rather surprised that he didn’t apply for an apprenticeship, too.” Tildi didn’t reply, and Olen did not notice. “If you think about these runes as a representation of each facet of existence, then you could, in fact, say that they are what the world is made of. You certainly have access to those elements through the runes. Like in the Great Book.”

  Tildi prepared to jump down again. “Shall I look for that one next, master? I’d like to see that.”

  Olen arrested her with one long hand. “It is not here, Tildi. Please to creation that it will never be anywhere where one can see it. Though the rumors trouble me—”

  He stopped himself. “Never mind. We are flipping ahead in the pages, and that is just what I said we would not do. It is best to do, not just to describe. Let’s take this book down to my study and I’ll demonstrate some simple applications that you can work on. I am pleased with your aptitude, and your application. Indeed, your energy makes me feel tired. What are you doing?” he asked, as Tildi headed for the remaining three ch
ests she had not had time to clean.

  “It won’t take a moment, master,” she said, setting to industriously with her cloth. Along with the broom she must see if she could get hold of some brass polish, or a lemon and some salt.

  “Stop dusting that,” Olen ordered, waving a hand at the box she was polishing. “It will only get dusty again, and your efforts will be wasted.”

  Tildi had heard similar logic over the years from her brothers, and ignored it. She finished cleaning the tops of all the chests. “There! Much better. I could come up here and attach labels so that you know what is in each,” she offered.

  Olen just shook his head. “Please don’t. Now, if you will let me reestablish authority, let us go down and work on the practical applications of rune manipulation.”

  The lessons were always electrifyingly interesting, even basic studies like working on identifying the parts of runes that indicated specific sections of an object. By the end of the first day, Tildi could cause the leaves to fall off a plant. By the end of the week, she could pick out a specific leaf, but she despaired of ever reattaching one, let alone learning all the intricacies of every rune ever drawn.

  When she was not studying, she explored Silvertree. The house was grand, with corridors that ran into one another, intersecting in odd corners. Many of the rooms were square or rectangular despite the round shape of the trunk they had been cut into, or perhaps grown into would be a closer truth.

  “An ancient forest once stood all around Silvertree,” Olen explained one day, in answer to her questions. “If you could see into the earth—teach you to one day,” he added, patting her on the shoulder, “you’d see the remains of mighty roots wider than whole blocks of this city. This is the only one left here.” Olen patted the wall. “One day both of us shall pass into memory. Silvertree gives a seed now and again. None of the saplings are as grand, as of yet, but give it ten or twelve thousand years, and we’ll see, we’ll see.”