An Unexpected Apprentice

by Jody Lynn Nye

  “I should make you a shielding spell, but I am reluctant to break the link to the book. You are our only guide, Tildi. Can you bear it?”

  “I will,” Tildi said stoutly, determined to keep Edynn’s faith in her.

  Edynn smiled, and patted her arm. “No wonder Olen was so proud of you.” Tildi was gratified.

  Serafina came to her mother’s saddlebow. “The tree is hollow. No one is in it, but I am certain that our thief was the source of this so-called miracle. I will tell these people that this superstition of theirs was wrought by mortals.”

  Edynn put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “No, don’t. Let them enjoy having a miracle. At least we have confirmation that he was here recently. Good sir,” she said, calling to the headman. “Have you seen any strangers in this area over the last weeks?”

  The big man returned to her at once. “No, lady. Just the blessing from the Mother. You’ve brought it back to us. We’re grateful, lady, we are.”

  “Nothing has gone missing in all this time? No one has seen a thing out of the ordinary?”

  He frowned up at her, impatient with her questions. “Nothing. No. Just that two men who died three days ago, struck down by the Father afore their time, just t’ north o’ town. That’s why we’re all here during what oughter be a workday. We was about to bury them. I think they must be curst. Maybe they’re why the miracle left. That would explain the Father’s hand on ’im.”

  “My husband had naethin’ to do wi’ mir’cle leavin’!” protested a middle-aged woman in a gray dress and cap.

  The headman ignored her. This had the air of an ongoing argument. Edynn exchanged glances with Captain Teryn.

  “Are they belowground?” the captain asked.

  “No’ yet.”

  “May I see the bodies?”

  “Nae, y’ll no’ defile my poor husband!” the woman screeched. Another woman, probably the widow of the other dead man, joined her. The headman turned his back on them and led the captain away from the common. A few minutes later, they returned. Teryn came to Edynn and saluted.

  “It’s as the headman said,” she reported, in her crisp manner. “One has a burn on his hand, and a red handprint in the center of his chest, matching the scorch in the shirt over it. If the mark is anything to go upon, we can stop looking for a woman thief. It’s a man’s handprint.”

  “What about the other?” Edynn asked.

  “He just died of shock,” Teryn said. “Not a mark on him.”

  “Our thief kills again,” Rin said, drawing her dark brows down.

  “If he was here only three days ago, we are close behind him,” Lakanta said eagerly. “Let’s be off! The trail will stand out as bright as day now.”

  “I agree with her, Mother,” Serafina said, to the others’ surprise. Edynn nodded. She raised her voice so all the townsfolk could hear her.

  “Good people, we thank you. We are sorry to have interrupted the funeral. May we offer our sympathies, and hope that the Mother will embrace their return to the soil.”

  She started to turn her horse. The headman leaped to grab her reins out of her hand.

  “You can’t go,” he said, panic in his eyes.

  “You must all stay,” the villagers beseeched them, surrounding the horses. “You must stay forever! You must share the Mother’s blessing with us!”

  “She, the wee one,” cried a woman in a faded brown dress. “It’s she who made the mir’cle return. Make her stay!”

  The crowd swarmed toward Tildi. All the large people with their reaching hands terrified the smallfolk girl.

  “Get me away,” she pleaded to Rin. “Hurry!” The centaur stretched one strong arm around behind and enfolded Tildi tight against her. A toothless woman with raw, red hands grabbed Tildi’s arm and pulled. Tildi shrieked, feeling herself slipping. The warm feeling distracted her. Stay. Stay forever. She let go of Rin’s long hair and reached for the scroll in her collar.

  “Stand back, I say!” Rin demanded. She rose onto her hind legs and flailed her front hooves. Tildi’s legs flew out from under her. She scrambled for a handhold but she did not fall. She was secure in the centaur’s mighty grasp. The shock put her back in her right mind. “Let us pass, or I’ll give you the Mother’s gift!” The people dodged around her. A big man tried to grab Tildi off her back. Rin kicked him in the stomach. He went flying backwards, knocking over several of his fellows. Others hurried in to take his place, unwilling to let the new source of miracles leave.

  In a moment Rin was flanked by the soldiers. Teryn drew her sword and put the point of it under the headman’s chin. Morag brandished a polearm. The villagers were taken aback by his strange appearance, but they knew enough to see he was a seasoned warrior. Edynn held up her staff, as did Serafina, and pointed it at the villagers.

  “Do not be so foolish,” the elder wizardess said to them. “You had the blessing for a long while? How long?”

  “A month and a week,” the headman said sullenly.

  Edynn nodded. “Thirty-seven days. Then you were blessed far longer than many. I for one have never heard of such a thing anywhere, and I have traveled the world. Any of you?” she asked the companions. They all shook their heads. “Then you must celebrate what you had. You have the miracle here to prove it, a tree that walked! We are on our own pilgrimage. We must go. It would be wrong to keep us. Others have need of our services.” Edynn fixed an appealing gaze upon him. The headman stared at her for a while, then backed away, gesturing to his people to clear the way. “Thank you.”

  With Teryn in the lead, they rode out of Walnut Tree. Tildi glanced behind her at the people, who had all turned to watch the light in the tree fade away. They had frightened her, but she felt sorry for them.

  “Nine days’ wonder,” Teryn said. “They’ll heal.”

  “So much for a night in a comfortable house,” Lakanta said ruefully. “I was going to ask them for hospitality. Oh, well, I’ve spent worse nights in between doors than outdoors.”

  Tildi glanced back as the houses disappeared behind them. “I wouldn’t have liked to stay there,” she said. “We might have gotten shut up in that tree to keep us from going.”

  Edynn still wondered. “Now, why did the thief stay so long? Is he wounded? Ill? Is the book doing him harm?”

  “See what its magic does to others?” Serafina said. “It must be making some kind of mark on him. Perhaps it finally took its toll.”

  Once the village was out of sight, Rin shouldered into the lead again. Tildi pulled herself together and straightened the roll of parchment in her shirt laces. The runes were bright as gold, and the rude trail they followed was narrow but level. They ought to be able to cover plenty of ground before nightfall. Tildi followed Rin’s lead and ducked low to avoid a branch as thick as her arm that hung over the path at the height of a man’s head.

  When she straightened up, the runes were gone.

  Deprived of her guideposts, the centaur let out a snort and danced to a halt. She swiveled her body so that she was facing Tildi.

  “Where did they go, child?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tildi said, gazing around her in amazement. “I took my eyes off the trail for a moment, and it all vanished.”

  “Is something wrong with your page? Did that tree back there suck all the magic out of it?”

  Tildi took out the leaf and unrolled it. It seemed intact, and as beautiful as ever. “It looks all right.”

  “Let us go back. We must have missed where our thief turned.”

  Tildi nodded and held the leaf at arm’s length to bring out the maximum effect in the runes. Could something have happened to it in Walnut Tree? No, because within a yard or two, the brilliant glow broke out strongly again.

  “What’s the matter?” Edynn asked, as she and Teryn caught up with them. “Why did we stop?”

  “We missed our turning, that is all,” Rin said mildly. “Will you be our marker? Stay here.”

  Rin and Tildi described a l
arge spiral, until they were riding in a circle a hundred yards across. No runes were visible except for the pale glow that Tildi was able to evoke from the leaf that she carried and on the trail that they had followed.

  “The track goes nowhere from here,” Rin reported when they returned to where the others were waiting. “It ends at this point.”

  “Perhaps he turned back in his own footsteps,” Lakanta suggested. “He is still hidden somewhere close by.”

  “If he had, then the runes in Walnut Tree would not have gone out,” Edynn said. “We are really not that far from the village.”

  “We’ll go back and look,” Tildi said.

  “I will come with you,” Teryn declared. She made a sign to Morag, who drew his sword and laid it across his saddlebow.

  Even Lakanta’s suggestion bore no fruit. They returned as near to Walnut Tree as they dared, but could find no evidence that the thief had turned off. Edynn received the news with a sigh.

  “We shall have to find another means of tracing the Great Book later,” she said. The lines around her eyes and mouth had deepened. “But for now I must rest. I’m just not as young as I used to be. Let us make camp here.”

  Everyone was subdued as they rested on the lee side of a low hill above a narrow stream. Tildi could see how concerned Edynn was. The elder wizardess sat on the blanket that her daughter set out for her and kept to her own thoughts. Serafina bustled around her like a sick nurse. She was worried because her mother was tired. Tildi felt sorry for her. She tried to help but the young woman rebuffed her. She returned to her own blanket, subdued. No one had an appetite for the ruined food that Morag set before them, and the water that Teryn was forced to use to mix with the wine was so heavy that everything smelled of sulfur. The two soldiers sat at a distance from them on the other side of the fire. The only sounds were the crackling of the fire and the faint gurgle of the stream. The sun set furtively behind a wreath of gray clouds. Tildi hoped they didn’t presage an overnight thunderstorm.

  “Does anyone know any stories?” Lakanta asked, a trifle too brightly. She was mending a crack in one of the company’s cooking pots with a foot-sized bellows and a string of bright bronze metal.

  No one answered her. Tildi felt dejected and lost. On a normal evening she would have watched the peddler plying her tinker’s skills with interest, but she could not work up the energy even to do that. She plucked up blades of grass and tossed them into the narrow rivulet, watching their tiny runes spin in circles as the current took them. Her usefulness seemed to have come to an abrupt end. The Great Book had disappeared. She had been so hopeful when they rode into the tiny village. Ah, but so had the villagers, thinking that they’d been given the answer to their prayers as well. It worried her that she had been reluctant to leave the village, even though she was frightened. The feeling she got while near the walnut tree was heady, exhilarating. She wanted to feel it again—but Edynn had told her to fight it.

  “I was asking,” Lakanta said, in a more subdued voice than Tildi had ever heard her use before, “because of the story you told about how you came by that.” She pointed at Tildi’s scroll.

  Tildi looked up at her. The usually cheerful little woman looked quite serious.

  “My mother bought it from a peddler. I never knew his name. He was a nice man. I remember that he came through the Quarters about twice a year, spring and fall, up to a few years ago. Gosto always thought he was fair-minded about price. He was stockily built, small for a human, blond hair, round nose, and round cheeks. His beard grew a little grayer over the years, but he had a lot of energy.” She cocked her head as she studied the woman beside her. “He looked a little bit like you, now that I think about it.”

  Lakanta smiled. “Most folks look like me where I come from. He was my husband.”

  “Your husband!” Tildi echoed.

  The little woman chuckled. “Yes! You don’t think anyone would marry someone like me? No, don’t answer that. I am only joking. We loved each other dearly. We both fell into the merchanting life, though he liked to travel in the west most of the time, and I enjoy the east. We usually met each other somewhere in the middle, every few months or so. No one has seen him in more than two years. He and I had promised to meet in Lavender, in northwest Ivirenn, on Midsummer Day, but he never came. I wondered whether you might know what became of him. He would probably have visited the Quarters just before setting out to meet me.”

  Tildi leaned over and put her hand on the merchant’s. “I am very sorry, but I don’t have any idea what my brothers discussed with him on that last visit. We women were seldom allowed to bargain for ourselves with visiting peddlers. I rarely spoke with him.”

  Lakanta nodded. “Ah. The reason I ask, is that you say that the thraiks took all of your brothers. And your parents. I just wonder if it might be that the thraiks got him, too, him being in the open so much and having had contact with that leaf. Ah, I’m sorry. I have been wanting to ask since that day at Silvertree. You know how I talk, it’s a wonder I haven’t come bursting out with it before now, but I am so desperately worried about him.” Her blue eyes were very bright. “Ah, well, I’m not trying to make you a partner in affliction.”

  Tildi squeezed her hand. “I hope it’s not true. I hope you find what became of him. Could a message have gone astray?”

  “We always sent several messages when we were going to be delayed,” Lakanta said, dabbing at her eyes with the hem of her sleeve. “I just have to accept he’s gone.”

  “I had heard of thraiks choosing their victims,” Edynn said, speaking at last. “A scholar of the Shining Ones whom I know narrowly avoided being carried off. Since Lokfur spends most of his time buried in the libraries of the university town where he lives, he has probably been spared more often than he knows. It could be that others who have had contact with copies of the Great Book or certain runes attract them.” The old wizardess shook her head. “But how can that be? The attacks should have ended with the theft of the book, when Knemet got what he wanted. It’s still a mystery.”

  “Perhaps they do not all serve him,” Rin suggested, sitting on the grass with her legs gathered up under her.

  “If he is the thief at all,” Tildi said timidly. “If it is Knemet, where would he be going?”

  Edynn gave her a kindly look. “You seek to solve our own mystery? Ah, let me think. The Shining Ones were reputed to have had a hall of learning in one of the Noble Kingdoms, built for them by one of the kings. I wish I had Porrak here. He loves to quote obscure passages at one. No one really knows where it lies. It was destroyed during the war between the Shining Ones. Wizards have searched for it since then, but no trace remains.”

  “Could he be on his way to rebuild the hall? That is what I might do, if I had long-lost power given back to me. And he would know exactly where to go.”

  Serafina looked at her. “That’s a good thought, smallfolk,” she said. “But wiser heads than yours have considered it. Since the theft, scholars and wizards alike have been seeking the remains of the hall.”

  Tildi felt blood rush to her cheeks. “What I wished to ask was, did my leaf come from there? Teldo taught me some of the laws of magic. The Law of Macrocosm says that one thing that touched another still has a connection to it.”

  “Don’t lecture me on the basics of ancient knowledge that you only know by hearsay!” Serafina snapped. “Macrocosm means that a larger thing is tied by magic to a small thing identical to it. You mean the Law of Contagion.”

  “Perhaps I do,” Tildi said in a small voice.

  “Now, daughter,” Edynn chided Serafina from her side of the fire. “She might have called it by the wrong name, yet she may have the most practical notion I have heard.” The senior wizardess was sitting up. Her dark eyes had a snap to them again. “Where were our minds when we were in council at Olen’s? Why did we not just apply the Law of Contagion to Tildi’s leaf? It is a true copy. It must once have touched the Great Book itself, if only for the scribes to compare
a rune or two. The man has prevented us from following him, but the book cannot!”

  “Eh?” Rin said, springing to all four hooves. Her large eyes glowed with excitement in the firelight. “What must we do?”

  “It’s a simple spell,” Edynn said, as the others gathered near her. “Where is our map?”

  Teryn had been listening. She sprang up and retrieved the map from her saddlebag on the ground near her feet. Wordlessly, she handed it to Edynn.

  “Thank you, Captain,” the senior wizardess said with a smile. “Tildi, come sit near me. We are about to improvise. Rarely do I have a chance to exercise two principles of magic at the same time, but it would seem we must. I hope they do not cancel each other out.”

  “What do you wish me to do?” Tildi asked.

  “Ah, you will be doing most of the work, child,” Edynn said. She tapped the girl’s shoulder with a long finger. “We cannot touch that which you bear, and contact will be required. It will also be a good experience for you. Now, are you truly willing to assist in this? You have said that you felt the power pressing in on you. This will make the connection between your leaf and the Great Book stronger. It will have an effect on you; you must be prepared for that.”

  “I am. I mean I will,” Tildi said at once, ignoring both the qualms that made her stomach twist and the insidious voice that urged her to seize whatever chance she had at the power.

  “No, child, please take the time to think about it,” Edynn said very seriously. “I’m not asking you to bake cakes for a feast. This will require you to reach into the depths of your being, and make yourself vulnerable to forces beyond your control. It may not work. You may come to harm, and though we will take precautions they may not be enough to save you. You could die in this effort. Magic is a risk.”

  Tildi swallowed deeply. “Do we have any chance of finding the thief without it?”

  “Ah, there you have me,” Edynn said, her voice soft. “I don’t believe so.”