Owlflight

by Mercedes Lackey

  I could be generous, Justyn thought. I could suppose that he’s in shock by now. Except that he hasn’t any of the symptoms of being in shock.

  Such stolidity in the face of serious injury had been the hallmark of some of the mercenary soldiers Justyn had tended in the past—the long gone past, so removed from what he was now that it might be the past of another person altogether. There were just some men who never felt much of anything, either physical or emotional. In general, they got along well with their fellows, and they made good enough soldiers, for although they never displayed the least bit of incentive, they always obeyed orders without question. And, if a woman didn’t mind being the one to make all the decisions, they made perfectly amiable husbands and fathers. Certainly their phlegmatic temperament never led to beatings or other abuse. There had been times when he envied them that easy acceptance.

  Virtually everyone in the village was cast from the same mold, and it wasn’t at all difficult to tell that Vere and Harris were Kyle’s cousins. All three of them were husky, light-haired, and brown-eyed, but Harris and Vere were darker than Kyle, and Kyle had features that were much more square. Justyn sometimes wondered if the reason he and Darian had never quite been accepted by the villagers was a simple matter of appearance; both he and Darian were thin and dark, in stark contrast to everyone else here. Or at least, he amended mentally, I was dark until my hair started going gray.

  “He’s gonna be laid up a couple of days,” Vere said with irritation, his thick brows furrowing in a decided frown. “That means we’ll have to spare someone from field work to keep an eye on him so he doesn’t get into trouble, all juiced up with that poppy like he is. Can’t you magic him, ‘stead of sewing him up like usual?”

  “I’ve told you before,” Justyn said patiently, manipulating the needle through a particularly tough patch of skin, “I’m not a Healer, I’m an herbalist, a surgeon, and a bonesetter. I would have to use a complicated magic spell to do what you suggest. Whatever it was that the Heralds did to end the mage-storms fractured all the magic, and left it scattered around like a broken mirror. It takes a long time to gather up enough shards of power to work any spells. It’s very tiring, it exhausts all the magic that’s nearby, and then, if you really needed some magic to be done in the case of an emergency, I wouldn’t be able to do it. What if something bad came out of the Pelagiris, and I couldn’t protect the village? You wouldn’t want that now, would you?”

  The farmers both shook their square, shaggy heads, but they also looked skeptical and cynical, and Justyn could hardly blame them. After all, no one in Errold’s Grove had ever seen him work anything involving powerful magic, and they had no reason to think he could do anything much.

  And they have every reason to doubt me, he admitted to himself, taking another careful, tiny stitch and tying it off.

  “Besides,” he added as an afterthought, “you can get Widow Clay to watch him. She can’t work in the fields with that bad leg, but she can still weave baskets, or knit and sew while she keeps an eye on him, and who knows? She might decide that he’s better than no husband at all, and then your wives won’t have to cook and clean for him anymore.”

  Justyn felt a bit badly that he was talking about Kyle as if the woodcutter wasn’t there, but in a sense he wasn’t. He’d had enough poppy and brandy that he wouldn’t recall a thing that had been said once the drugs wore off. And even if he did, Justyn rather doubted that he’d take offense at any of it, since worse things had been said in his presence that he never took offense to. He felt no guilt whatsoever about setting up Widow Clay, however. The good Widow had been setting her cap at him of late, and that was something he wanted to put an end to by whatever means it took! The last thing he needed was some meddling woman coming in here and “setting his life to rights.”

  Both the farmers brightened at that idea, and they didn’t say anything more about magic. Instead, they exchanged the kind of cryptic sentences that almost amount to a code among close kin, and Justyn gathered that their conversation had something to do with a plan to persuade the Widow Clay that her best interests lay in dragging Kyle over the broom. Justyn rather doubted that Kyle would mind if she did; he’d probably accept being married with the good-natured calm with which he accepted having his leg stitched up. As for the Widow—well, she’d have nothing to complain about in Kyle.

  Justyn continued to sew the two sticky flaps of skin together with tiny, delicate stitches a woman would have envied, but the meticulous work was not engrossing enough to keep his mind off the past.

  The irony was, at one time he would have been able to mend a minor wound like this with magic, using magic to bind the layers of skin and muscle together, leaving the leg as sound as it had been before the injury. Granted, his grasp of power had been minor compared to the great mages like Kyllian and Quenten, but at least it had worked reliably—and what was more, it probably would be working better after the end of the Storms than the magics of those who were his superiors in power. He had never used ley-line magic, much less node-magic, and the loss of the ley-lines would have made little difference to him. He had been a hedge-wizard, one of those who practiced earth-magics, with a little touch of mind-magic thrown in for good measure, and he had served in the ranks of Wolfstone’s Pack, a mercenary company recruited by Herald-Captain Kerowyn to aid Valdemar and Rethwellan in the war against Hardorn. His had been a minor role in that Company; using the earth-magics to tell him where the enemy was and how many his numbers were, helping patch up the wounded, helping conceal their own men from the enemy and his mages. Kerowyn’s Skybolts had worked with the Pack in the past, and they were one of the few mercenary Companies she felt sure enough of to trust in the treacherous times when Ancar still ruled Hardorn. All that had been explained very carefully to the members of the Pack, as had the risks and possible rewards, and the Company had voted unanimously to take the contract. After all, it was Captain Kero they were talking about; no one who took the same side as she did ever found himself working for people he would really rather have lost down a mine shaft. And usually no one found himself facing a situation where foreign commanders were spending merc lives like base coin that they couldn’t get rid of fast enough.

  Justyn had only just hired on with the Pack, and he’d been eager to see some real fighting, to get right into the thick of things. But he had quickly discovered that the place of a junior mage, a mere hedge-wizard, was going to be back with the support-troops.

  And foolish me, that wasn’t enough excitement for me.

  He tried to volunteer every time they called for able bodies, but wisely the commanders kept passing him right over—until they came to the desperate running battles with Ancar’s troops that decimated their own ranks and left the commanders little choice but to put a weapon into the hands of anyone they could spare and hope for the best.

  Justyn had been a good enough archer, but his mind-magic had given him an edge; as long as he got his arrow going in the right direction, he could think it into a target. With a bow in his hands, he impressed even the archery-sergeant, and so they kept him with the archers, and he got more than his share of excitement. Until his first battle, he’d thought that actually killing someone might be a very difficult thing, for he would be thinking his arrow into the body of a man, not a straw target—but then when he saw what he faced, there was actually a grim and melancholy sort of pleasure in it. “Hell-puppets” were what the other fighters called Ancar’s line-troopers; conscripted and controlled entirely by blood-magic, Ancar had depleted the country-side for fighters, and had raised the power for the spells that controlled them by killing their families in cold blood. When Justyn killed one of the troopers, it was actually a longed-for release for the poor clod.

  Spell-bound and spell-ridden, for most of them that arrow came as a blessing, taking them out of Ancar’s hands and on to a place where their loved ones were probably already waiting. Ancar had not used his people well, to say the least, and Justyn found himself sendi
ng prayers along with each arrow.

  And as for the officers and mages commanding Ancar’s troops—there was great pleasure in ridding the world of creatures so depraved and sadistic. And perhaps it was wrong for him to feel pleasure in killing even something as vile as Ancar’s toadies, but he couldn’t find it in his heart to regret taking even one of them out of the world.

  And fighting was a great deal more exciting than grinding herbs, lighting campfires, and sealing wounds. When the archery-sergeant had halfheartedly given him the option to go back with his old group, he’d declined.

  And, to be honest, I felt more like a man. I was actually doing something, and other men, other fighters, praised me for it. How could I go back to work among the cooks and the mule-drivers?

  It wasn’t only the members of the Pack who praised him, either. He’d met several of the Valdemarans in the form of some of the Guard when they’d picked up a stray squad or two along the way, the sadly-depleted remnants of a Valdemaran Company that had been holding the line before the Pack came to reinforce them. They thought he was a fine soldier, and said as much as they all shared exhaustion and the rare hot meal between engagements.

  Heady stuff for a young fool, I suppose.

  “Wonder where the boy went?” Harris said idly, interrupting Justyn’s thoughts. Justyn had the needle clamped between his teeth and couldn’t answer, but the question was rhetorical, for the man answered it himself. “Probably ran off into the woods. My boy’s seen him running off there before. I’m telling you, Justyn, there’s bad blood there, and you’d better do something about it before he gets more than himself into trouble.”

  Justyn really wasn’t paying much attention, lost in his own thoughts as he was, and the half-conscious grunt he made in reply seemed to satisfy the man. At the moment, he really didn’t want to think about young Darian, though he was getting an increasing number of complaints from the villagers that he wasn’t keeping the boy under firm enough discipline.

  No, his thoughts were in the past, at the moment, drawn there by the task of stitching up something that could have been a wound made on purpose, rather than accidentally.

  If I hadn’t been so young, I would have realized from the state of the Valdemaran Guard and the fact that my own commanders were willing to risk a mage in the front lines that something was very, very wrong.

  What had gone wrong was that they were all trapped on the wrong side of the enemy lines, and only the fact that they had good commanders had gotten them as far as they had gone. He had learned later that the Guard and Pack Captains had agreed on a last-ditch dash for the Border at a weak spot in the enemy lines, hoping for a combination of surprise and overconfidence to bring them all through. And the ploy worked—

  Except that for it to work, someone had to hold the rear-guard, and the most logical group was the mixed archery squad guarded by a handful of swordsmen.

  They fought their way back toward Valdemar, step by step, until the only barrier between them and safety was a river with a single wooden bridge. One man with a bow could hold the enemy off long enough for everyone else to get across—and by that time, he was considered the best shot in the group.

  So, of course, like a young hero who hasn’t quite grasped his own mortality, I volunteered.

  That was when he learned the great and vital truth about being a bowman.

  When you run out of arrows, you can do virtually nothing against a man with an ax.

  He had fended off attacks for a few moments with his bow and knife, getting some painful wounds in the process, and the last thing that he remembered was watching the flat of the ax blade descending in strangely-slowed time toward his head.

  He had awakened in the infirmary tent; after his heroic efforts, there hadn’t been a man in the decimated ranks willing to allow him to go down without trying to rescue him.

  But his skull had been cracked like a boiled egg, and it had only been good fortune and the fact that Wizard Kyllian was present at that very site that had kept him alive to thank his rescuers.

  Kyllian himself was too old by then to take part in any battle-magics; he had confined himself to instructing the new Herald-Mages and to helping the Healers when their own ranks grew too thin, for Fireflower was a School that produced mages who were equally versed in Healing and mage-craft. Reputed to be a great friend of Quenten, the head of the White Winds School at Bolthaven, Justyn really didn’t know why he’d chosen to come North when the Valdemarans sent out a call for mages through Quenten. Perhaps it was some need of his own that drew him there, or some urge to leave the sheltered confines of the Fireflower Retreat. He didn’t confide his reasons to Justyn, who was just one among many of the patients that he pulled back from the soon-to-be-dead and into the land of the living.

  It was obvious almost at once that Justyn was not going to be any good for fighting anymore; the blow to his head addled his vision enough that he would never be able to accurately sight an arrow again, and he simply had never had the strength of body to be a swordsman. Nor did he ride well enough for the cavalry.

  But there was still magic—the magic he’d despised, that suddenly seemed desirable again.

  But like a lover scorned, his magic had left him as well. Much of what he had learned, the blow to his head had driven from his memory; he had trouble Seeing mage-energies with any reliability, and the mind-magic he had was so seriously weakened he could no longer lift anything larger than a needle for more than a few moments.

  He had gone in a single instant from hero to a discard. And what would he do with himself outside of the mercenary Companies? He had no skills, no abilities, outside of those of the magic that was now mostly gone from him.

  When he was able to get out of bed and care for himself, the Healers turned him loose to complete his recovery on his own, and the Pack gave him his mustering-out pay and their good wishes. The Captain expressed his regret, but pointed out that the Pack couldn’t afford anyone who couldn’t pull his own weight, and suggested that he might find employment somewhere as a server in an inn, or the like.

  A server in an inn? Was that what he had come to? All at once, he couldn’t bear the idea that he must give up all of his once-promising future to become a menial, a drudge, another cipher with no future and no prospects. That was when he had approached the great wizard, hat in hand, like a beggar, and asked for advice.

  He must have fairly radiated despair, for Kyllian had sent away the people he was talking with and took him into his own tent, sitting him down and presenting him with a cup of very strong brandy.

  “I suppose you think that your life is over,” the great wizard had said, wearily but kindly. “And from your perspective, that’s an appropriate response. I understand you put on a fairly brave show out there.”

  He had flushed. “Brave, but stupid, I suppose—”

  “Depends on who you would ask. Your fellow mages, now, they would say it was stupid, I’m sure, risking your Gifts as well as your life in physical combat—but the fellows you shot covering fire for would have a different opinion.”

  He had been rather surprised that Kyllian remembered the details of how he had been injured, but there were more surprises in store for him.

  “So, you’re brave enough to die,” Kyllian had continued, watching him closely. “But are you brave enough to live? Are you brave enough to learn skills that will get you little gratitude, brave enough to practice them among people who will probably despise you and certainly won’t believe your tales of battle heroics, but who nevertheless will need what you can do?”

  What could he answer, except to nod mutely, having no notion of what that nod was going to get him into?

  “It wasn’t magic that saved you, boy,” the old man had told him bluntly. “It was simpler stuff than even you are used to practicing. Bonesetting and flesh-stitching, herbs and body-knowledge, patience and persistence and your own damned refusal to be a proper hero and die gloriously. Do you know what’s happened, out there in the hinte
rlands of Valdemar?”

  He had shaken his head; obviously, how could he have known? He wasn’t a native of the place—

  “Well, I do, because the Healers come and wail on my shoulder about it at least three times a day. There are no Healers out there now; they’ve all been pulled east to take care of this mess. Even the old wisewomen, the herbalists, and the beast-Healers have turned up here; anyone that could travel has come here, where the need is greatest. That leaves vast stretches of territory without anyone that a sick or injured farmer can turn to—not an earth-witch, not a hedge-wizard, not even a horse-leech. No one. And people are going to die of stupid things like coughs and festered wounds unless people like you take the time to acquire a few more skills and go out there to help them.” Kyllian had eyed Justyn shrewdly. “And I can virtually guarantee it will be a thankless proposition—but you’ll be doing a world of good, even if no one is willing to acknowledge it.”

  “Why do you care what happens to the people of Valdemar?” he’d asked, with equal bluntness. “And why should I?”

  The old wizard had smiled, an unexpectedly sweet smile that charmed Justyn in spite of himself. “I care—because I don’t care what land people own allegiance to, so long as they are good people. And I suppose I care because of the philosophies that made me choose the School I chose. Ask any Healer of whatever nation how he feels about Healing a man from another land, even one that is his enemy, and he will look at you as if you were demented for even asking such a foolish question. Healers don’t see nations, boy. They see need, and they act on that need. That is why I care.”