An Unexpected Apprentice

by Jody Lynn Nye

  Rin shook out her long hair, still damp but cleared of its crown of snow, and bound it into a single plait. Where her dwarven cloak didn’t cover it, her striped coat was matted from the wet. “We are being blown backward a pace for every two steps forward. I believe it is growing worse by the hour.”

  “I am afraid you are right,” Edynn said. “We must risk flying through the storm.”

  “Is that wise, Mother?” Serafina asked.

  “I think it’s worth the try. It’s daylight. We’ll never be stronger than we are at this moment. Every night we spend in this weather is depleting to us. We could freeze in our sleep.”

  “This is our enemy’s intention,” Teryn stated.

  “I am sure you are right,” Edynn said. “That is why we must take the greater risk and escape from here. If we can get a purchase on the air we can climb above the clouds. Once there we will be able to see our way again.”

  “Well, then why not?” Lakanta asked. Edynn turned to her.

  “Because it is not a certainty that the spell will hold. One slip, and one of us can plunge to her death, and the others would never know it until we landed again. It will be horribly cold, much worse than anything we have experienced before. The storm clouds themselves will be enough to freeze us to death, and we have to go through them. There’s no going around them. They could stretch for a hundred miles in every direction. I am in favor of going before we are too tired.”

  Tildi trembled at the idea of freezing or falling, but she took one look at the snow falling inches from them. “If we have a chance, I would take it,” she said.

  “We could die trying,” Edynn warned them. “The winds could drag us back to earth.”

  Tildi swallowed deeply. “Then they do. It’ll be a fast end, then.”

  “Much more preferable,” Lakanta said. “If there’s one thing in life I don’t want, it’s a long, painful demise.”

  “Lakanta!” Serafina exclaimed, shocked. The peddler grinned at her.

  “I agree with Tildi,” Rin said, rescuing the discussion, though she hid a smile. “It’s much faster than trudging our way through the drifts. One way or another, we could die. Better to take the initiative again. This thief must not direct our lives.”

  Morag, on guard at the edge of the overhang, plodded over to Teryn with a flat brown object in his hands and a puzzled expression on his misshapen face. Before the captain could examine it, Lakanta beamed at him and raced out into the storm. She returned with a large woven basket covered by a bright-colored cloth.

  “Luncheon, everyone,” she said, setting down her burden against the wall. She shook snow off the cloth and laid it on the floor. From the basket she took earthenware platters edged with gold. They were filled with palm-sized, golden pastries. Steam rose, bringing with it a savory aroma. Tildi took a deep breath and sighed with pleasure. “Pies, ham and egg, by the look of them. Simple but filling. Ah, wine! May all creation bless them and their halls of stone. I think what our friend’s got there is the desserts. Tuck in, now.”

  “They have been listening to us,” Teryn said, eyeing the walls distrustfully, as she passed food around to the others.

  “In that case,” Edynn said, lifting her glass and enjoying the contrast of the brilliant red wine against the cold whiteness of the snow, “thanks again to our hosts.”

  “They may not welcome our presence,” Rin said, “but they will facilitate our departure.”

  Tildi was surprised at how hungry she was. She had never had to travel so far during winter, and found it absolutely exhausting. Teryn and Morag took charge of the remaining food. They exchanged grim looks, which Tildi understood to mean should the thin times continue, they did not want to risk being caught without provisions again.

  “The wind is coming directly from the quarter we wish to go toward,” Serafina said, pointing at the gold dot on the map. “If we fly into its teeth, we could use the power to climb higher faster.”

  “Wouldn’t it be safer to go with our backs to it?” Teryn asked.

  “What does it profit to delay?” Rin asked, swirling her cloak around and fastening it over her shoulders and withers. “Let us try something. I’m tired of not seeing the sun.”

  Tildi recited the spell over her hooves and hoped for the best. They rode out into a solid mass of whiteness. On Edynn’s signal, Rin kicked off from the ground, scattering a mass of snow around her, and cantered upward. Tildi peered over her shoulder. Ice crystals stung her eyes, but she didn’t dare hide her face. She willed Rin to stay airborne.

  The others disappeared in behind the blizzard’s curtain. Tildi was chilled to the bone in the first few yards. There was no way to see how far up they were. She worried they would bump into the surrounding cliffs. Once Rin’s hooves touched the stone, the spell would break. If they were not solidly on the ground, they could fall off. No one would see them.

  Her face and hands stiffened painfully with ice. She tried to pay no attention to anything except the feeling of Rin’s strong muscles under her as the centaur reached higher and higher. Snow mounded up so thickly upon them that Tildi had to clear her face to breathe. Every breath was a struggle. The frigid air hurt her lungs. The crystals banging into her skin felt like needles. She thought it was impossible to feel any colder, but it got worse the higher they went.

  A gust of wind hit them head-on, and Rin stumbled. Her head went down, and they fell, turning head over heels. Tildi shrieked, clinging to Rin’s cloak. Her hands were so numb. She thought she would lose her grip. Somehow she kept hold. Her legs flapped in the wind like a tattered rag on a fence. The centaur threw her head back and struggled with all six limbs to right herself. Tildi’s stomach felt as if it had been left behind. Suddenly, she felt a thud. Rin paused, one foot raised. She scrabbled with her other hooves for purchase in the air. Tildi recited the charm to herself. Suddenly, they were running again.

  Rin turned to look at Tildi. Snow decorated her long, dark lashes with diamonds. “Never say a princess of the Windmanes ever gave up a race! Let us see if we can beat the others to the sun!”

  Tildi put her head down against Rin’s neck and felt her surge strongly upward. Her ears burned with cold, but she heard a faint sound over the roar of the wind. Higher and higher they galloped. The pellets of frozen snow became sleet, then the sleet thinned into a freezing mist that seemed to surround them forever.

  “Now!” Rin cried. Suddenly the mist broke around them, and they headed upward into blue, blue sky. The wind died away. The clouds beneath Rin’s hooves looked like a dark gray quilt. She tilted her head back, pushing her hood off onto her shoulders. The snow and ice began to melt off in sheets of droplets. Rin sighed. “Ah, the sun.”

  As the circulation returned to her limbs, Tildi looked around her. The noise she had heard was Teryn. The captain cantered over the tops of the slate-gray clouds waving her sword in triumph. Her cheeks were pink and her snapping blue eyes aglow with triumph.

  “Rabantae!” she cried. “Rabantae! Your enemies cannot defeat you!” Morag still looked frozen, galloping in her wake.

  Lakanta surfaced, her purple hood and the perked ears of her horse shedding snow as they emerged. The little peddler broke into a wide smile, and she waved to Rin and Tildi as she rode toward them. “The best part of that journey was the ending, my friends. Where are the others?”

  They waited anxiously until a bank of clouds half a mile distant began to roil and bubble like stew in a pot. At last, the mist broke apart. Serafina, her head nearly down on her mare’s neck, cantered upward, pulling the reins of her mother’s steed. Edynn was holding fast to the saddlebow with one hand, and her staff with the other. The jewel in the tip was gleaming dimly.

  Her hood had fallen back. She looked exhausted, but she was otherwise unscathed.

  “Good to see you, my friends,” Edynn shouted hoarsely, her long white hair gleaming with ice.

  “You, too!” Rin shouted, riding over to touch hands with the two wizardesses. Serafina unbent eno
ugh to clasp Tildi’s hand with her cold fingers. “What an adventure! I shall have much to brag about at our next festival!”

  Color returned to their faces swiftly under the warmth of the sun. Edynn pointed upward with her staff, and the rest followed her as she rode higher and higher. Tildi looked down. She was stunned to see what a small area was covered by the unnatural winter storm. It seemed to lap at the edges of the mountains that contained it like an overfull bathtub, but extended no farther. She felt in her pouch for the precious leaf, which she had wrapped well against the weather. It was dry and unscathed. She gave a sigh of relief.

  Teryn sheathed her sword and produced her map. Edynn looked for the golden dot, moving to the northeast. She pointed her staff over the backs of the next range of mountains. “That way, my friends.”

  With a deferential nod, Teryn took point, spurring her horse. Rin fell into the pace behind her, and the others spread out at her sides.

  Tildi glanced back. The storm seemed to be trying to follow them. The gray clouds crawled in their wake for a while, but appeared to collapse back into the ravine, too weak to follow farther.

  “It will dissipate soon,” Edynn told her. “We are free. Let us seek our quarry.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Nemeth was angry. He huddled in the woods close enough to an elven village that he could see a few of the inhabitants passing in and out of the soft gray-skinned trees that they had hollowed out for houses, but he could not stop thinking about his pursuers. He was so much nearer to his destination, but the ones behind him had not gone away. They had ignored all of his warnings, even the catastrophic winter storm that he had conjured to turn them back days ago. They had had him on the run, when it ought to have been the other way around.

  The voices in his mind seemed ever louder, especially that of Father Time. He was displeased and threatening retribution if Nemeth did not bring him the book. The tone distracted Nemeth, who was trying to formulate an easy means of stealing food. The irony was not lost upon him that he was capable of altering the climate, but not of creating a feast for himself out of raw ingredients.

  Still, he had used the power of the book to improve his techiques. He sent an illusion to the mind of the slender, golden-skinned lad sitting on a stone, reading a book as he minded the spit on an open fire before his home, a tree hollowed but still living. Nemeth blanched at the sight of the domiciles in this village. They might have looked pastoral and pleasant to him once, but he now saw them as a cluster of prisons.

  Not even aware that he was doing it, the boy made a quarter turn to the right on his seat, and continued cranking an invisible handle, never looking up from his book. Nemeth flicked a finger, and the spit rose vertically into the air. The meat on it divided in two—no need to be a hog about it—and one half of it sailed toward him. The rest of it returned to the spit. In the elven boy’s mind Nemeth changed the image of the roast to fit its new dimensions. He would never remember that it had been different.

  Nemeth let the chunk of meat hover behind him, dripping savory juices, until he had returned to the spot deep in the forest that he had chosen as his place of rest for the day. He had transformed bushes into a couch, which he covered with a blanket of silken leaves. This was surmounted by a living canopy from a slender rowan tree that let in a pleasant green light but would repel rain or too much sun. A cup of leaves held wine made from dew and berries that had gathered themselves together at his command. All these skills that he had seen in his fellow wizards that had eluded him all his life were to be found within the pages of the book. If he had only known how simple it was to bend the world to his will! The meat landed on a platter he had fashioned out of a stone, using the pattern of an exquisite dinner service that he found in the description of a castle in Oscora, then divided itself further, into dainty slices. Nemeth rested in his bower and commenced to dine.

  He looked more at ease than he was. The voices continued to chatter in the back of his mind. Nemeth chewed his dinner pensively, dishes, meat, and haven forgotten. He just wanted his revenge, nothing more. These pursuers were refusing to give up the chase. He was but a couple of days’ flight from his goal. They must not be allowed to follow him there. Every threat he had sent to deter them had been swept aside. They were relentless. Only death would stop them.

  Once the thought had come out, Nemeth realized he had no choice. He had been pushed past reasonable alternatives. They knew where he was. If he had been a different kind of man he would have been able to raise an army of friends to help protect him against them. I have no friends, he thought angrily. No, he must raise a force. An army.

  He thought of conscripting the elves in the village. They were crafty and tough fighters. But they had magic of their own. They might sense his intent and refuse to do his bidding. He could sense their thoughts, all concerned with mundane matters such as the weather and music.

  Nemeth sought about him for a useful alternative, peering through the nearby forest for a likely creature to transform. The answer fell directly into his lap: a twig. He held it up. It had long, thin fingers, just like a hand. Nemeth smiled as he felt a stirring in it unlike any piece of wood he had ever touched. There was a voice inside it.

  He reached for the book. It almost spun in his hands until he came to the type of tree under which he was sitting. The thin beech was conscious of its surroundings. Its pinkish gray bark concealed a lost brother of humankind. Well, they should become more human. Amid the individual runes for each tree he found the collective one that indicated all of this species within this forest. There were more than a hundred. He smiled. An ample number. He had played with wooden soldiers as a boy, the toys given him by his father, when the poor man thought he was raising a guardsman like himself. He was bitterly disappointed that Nemeth would rather try calling the rain than learning fighting stances, but the neighbors liked it, and Nemeth was encouraged to go on. He was apprenticed to a master wizard, and meant to go home after a few years as a trained weather-witch, but he never did. He wished often that he had. He would have avoided the humiliation he had suffered in Orontae. No, that would have meant he would never have had the book in his arms. He held the scroll tightly, feeling its perfection like silk that soothed his nerves. All had been worthwhile if he ended up with this treasure.

  These would be his wooden soldiers. It would be so simple. He unlocked the rune and began to change a dot here, a stroke there. He reshaped their branches into thin, attenuated arms, each ending in a spear.

  Around him the forest began to come to life. The beeches began to stretch and move, hoisting their shallow roots out of the soil. He felt their anger as they woke up, fury at all living and moving things. They sensed him sitting among them, and turned on him, reaching for him, stabbing at him with their re-formed limbs. Nemeth brushed aside the branches with a swift stroke on the page.

  “You cannot touch me,” he said. “I am your master. Furthermore”—he completed another small stroke, moving a gold line—“you shall not touch anyone else until I am ready for you to do so.”

  He sat in their midst as they shrieked and sallied at him. They were as impotent as his enemy. He felt sorry for them. It would be a terrible thing to be transformed against his will. He had done it to himself and hated it, but he had had no choice. They had no choice. These were his soldiers, and they would do his fighting for him. The living beeches did not understand, and threw themselves against the invisible barrier he had set around them. The ground shook with the violence of their anger.

  “Hold your fury,” he said, though he knew they could not understand. “Soon there will be an enemy for you to slay.”

  Nemeth waited. He knew that the followers were approaching, and fast. The merry voices in his head were drawing closer all the time. He must wait for them here. Once they were at the mercy of his army, he would be free to go about his business.

  It happened sooner than he thought it would. The book was no longer alone. Another aura touched it familiarly. He felt
jealousy welling up within him.

  “How dare they?” he demanded, shaking the pillars of his forest seat. How could they? He had no true friend but the book. It must respond to him alone.

  He knew the answer at once. One of the followers carried a fragment of a copy, just like the one that he had used to trace the book to its fastness.

  It didn’t matter. His toy soldiers would wipe them out. They came closer and closer, until the auras overlapped, began to join. It was almost too much for Nemeth to stand. He waited until the aura was at a level with him. With a wave of his hands, he set the trees free. They rushed away, seeking victims for their rage, leaving the jumbled floor of the forest empty.

  In no hurry, Nemeth rose from his leafy bower and took to the air. There was no need for him to see what came after.

  Tildi felt the change in the air as soon as they came over the range of low hills toward the dense oak forest. She knew the sensation well. It had been her constant companion during her trip north to Overhill. To a lesser degree, she had felt it in Walnut Tree and in the winter canyon days before. The leaf felt the master copy nearby, and dearly wanted to join it. Tildi fought being lost in the warmth of its presence.

  “It’s here!” she shouted to Edynn.

  Edynn cantered silently toward her over the sky. “Are you sure?”

  “He’s down there somewhere,” Tildi insisted. “We are drawing closer. Look!”

  She pointed toward the sun. The angry gold orb in the sky bore a rune that flickered deep red.

  Serafina blanched. “That is power beyond anything I have ever seen before. It’s … excessive.”

  “I saw that on my way from the Quarters.”