Renegade’s Magic

‘Look for another little tree, near the end of her fallen trunk,’ I said. I pushed the words as hard as I could. But he did not hear me. After a pause, he spoke aloud to her. ‘I’m tired, Lisana. Tired and hungry and empty of magic. I need to find sustenance. And as soon as I can, I must leave for the Wintering Place. I haven’t forgotten what you told me. Believe me. What you taught me, I will live.’ He was very still, as if listening for me or for Lisana, but after a time he closed his eyes, puffed his cheeks and turned away from the little tree.

He started to follow the fading trail that led back down the ridge and eventually into a valley where a small stream flowed. Weariness dragged at us. He muttered as we walked and after a time, I realized he was speaking to me. I listened more closely to his rambling words. ‘You used it all. Did you hate us that much or were you just stupid? I saved that magic, hoarded it all thinking that I might get one chance. And now it’s all gone. Gone. You always complained to everyone who would listen that I’d stolen your beautiful wonderful future. Is that why you destroyed mine? Was it vengeance? Or stupidity?’

I had no way of responding. I was little more than a spark inside him now, clinging desperately to my self-awareness. The idea of letting go came to me. I shook myself free of it. What would happen to me if I did? Would I cease to be entirely, or would all my ideas, thoughts, and knowledge suddenly be merged with Soldier’s Boy? Would he consume me as I had tried to consume him? If he integrated me into his being, would I have any awareness of it? Would I live on only as odd bits of dreams that sometimes haunted the Speck Mage I would become?

The thought of merging my awareness with Soldier’s Boy and becoming merely a part of him held no appeal for me. Instead it filled me with loathing, and I struggled against it. ‘I am Nevare Burvelle,’ I told myself. ‘Soldier son of a New Noble lord. Destined to be a cavalla officer, to serve my king with courage, to distinguish myself on a field of battle. I will prevail. I will keep faith with Epiny and I will prevail.’ I would not become a set of disconnected memories inside some hulking forest mage. I would not.

And so I wearily clung to my identity and did little more than that for the next two days. I was an observer as Soldier’s Boy hiked wearily down to the stream. He found Likari dozing on the shady bank while Olikea scavenged in the shallows for a greyish-brown leggy creature that looked more like an insect than a fish to me. As she caught each one, she popped its head off with her thumbnail and then added it to the catch heaped on a lily leaf on the stream bank. The animals were small; two would fill her palm. She already had a small fire burning. As Soldier’s Boy approached, he greeted her with, ‘It is good that you are already finding food for me.’

She didn’t look up from her hunting. ‘I already know what you are going to say. That you have used up what magic you had, and we must stay another night here. Did you kill her?’

‘No. I let her go. She is no threat to us. And you are right that we must stay here, not one night, but three. I have decided that before I travel, I will rebuild some of my reserves. I will not be the Great Man I was when we rejoin the People, but I will not be this skeleton either. I will eat for three days. And then we will quick-walk to the people.’

‘By then, almost everyone will have returned to the Wintering Place! The best trading will be done, and all that will be left there are the things that are not quite perfect or have no newness to them!’

‘There will be other trading days in years to come. You will have to miss this one.’

Olikea filled her cheeks and then puffed the air out explosively. She had caught two more of the creatures, and she flung them down on those already heaped on the stream bank so hard that I heard the crack of their small shells as they hit. She was not pleased, and I was dimly surprised by how easily Soldier’s Boy dismissed her feelings on the matter.

She looked at him at last and surprise almost overcame her sullen glance. ‘What happened to your forehead?’

‘Never mind that,’ he said brusquely. ‘We need food. Busy yourself with that.’ With his foot, he stirred the sleeping Likari. ‘Up, boy. Gather food. Lots of it. I need to fill myself.’

Likari sat up, blinking, and knuckled his eyes. ‘What sort of food, Great One?’

‘Any food that you can get in quantity. Go now.’

The boy scuttled off. Olikea spoke from behind me. ‘Do not blame him if he cannot find much that is good. The time for the best harvesting is past. That is why we go to the Wintering Place.’

‘I know that.’ Soldier’s Boy turned and walked to the stream’s edge, upstream of Olikea. With a grunt and a sigh, he hunkered down and then sat on the ground. He reached over, pulled up a handful of water-grass, rinsed the muddy roots off in the flowing stream and then peeled the slimy outer skin off them. He bit off the thick white roots and as he chewed them, uprooted another handful of the stuff. The flavour was vaguely like onions.

By the time Likari returned with an armload of shrivelled plums, Soldier’s Boy had cleared a substantial patch of water-grass. He ate as methodically as a grazing cow. Olikea was busy with her own task; she had steamed the leggy creatures in layers of leaves and was now stripping them of legs and carapaces. The curl of meat from each one was scarcely the size of my little finger, but they smelled wonderful.

They ate together, with Soldier’s Boy taking the lion’s share of the food. The plums had dried in the sun’s heat; their flesh was thick and chewy and sweet, and contrasted pleasantly with the little crustaceans. When the food was gone, Soldier’s Boy commanded them both to find more, and then lay down to sleep. When they woke him, they had roasted a pile of yellow roots that had little flavour other than starch, and a porcupine was cooking on the fire. Likari had killed the creature with a club. Divested of its fur and quills, it showed a thick layer of fat. ‘You can see the kind of weather that soon will come!’ Olikea warned him.

‘Let me worry about such things,’ Soldier’s Boy dismissed her.

Night was deepening when that meal was gone. They slept in a huddle, Olikea against his belly and Likari cuddled against his back. Soldier’s Boy used a tiny bit of magic to hummock the moss into a nest around them while Likari had gathered armloads of fallen leaves to cover them. Over the leaves, he spread the winter blanket from my cemetery hut, even though both Olikea and Likari complained that it smelled odd. He had discovered that they had disposed of the clothing he had worn when they found him. Olikea had cut the shining brass buttons from his uniform and kept them, but the rest of it was gone, dropped somewhere in the forest when they were moving him. So all that he carried forward from my life was a winter blanket and a handful of buttons. It seemed fitting.

As they settled together in their bed with Olikea’s warm back to his chest and her firm buttocks resting on his thighs, Soldier’s Boy felt an insistent stirring of lust for the woman, but set it firmly aside. Later, after he had regained some of his flesh, he could enjoy her. For now, he must not expend any effort save to gather and eat food. As for Olikea, she showed no such interest in him at all, and Likari seemed blissfully unaware of any tension between the adults.

For the next two days, that was the pattern. As long as there was enough light to see, Olikea and Likari gathered food and Soldier’s Boy consumed it. They moved twice, following the stream, as Soldier’s Boy systematically harvested and ate every edible item that it could provide for him.

There was a freeze on the third night. There had been twinges of frost before, enough to hasten the turning of the leaves, but that night, the cold reached beneath the forest eaves. Despite the mossy nest and deep blanket of leaves, they all shivered through the night. Soldier’s Boy awoke aching, and Olikea and Likari were both grumpy. In response to Olikea’s complaints, Soldier’s Boy told her, ‘We will travel tonight. I have regained enough reserves that we will go swiftly. For now, go about your gathering. I will return shortly.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I go to the road’s end. I will not stay there long; have food ready for me when I return.’

‘This is a foolish risk you take. There will be workers there; they may attack you.’

‘They will not see me,’ Soldier’s Boy said firmly. And with that as his farewell, he set out.

As Soldier’s Boy had recovered his reserves and strength, so had I. He was still not as immense as he had been, but he had regained flesh and energy. He moved purposefully through the forest. The fallen leaves carpeted the moss. They rustled as he strode through them. As he approached the road’s end. Soldier’s Boy slowed and went more cautiously. For a large man, he moved very quietly, and he paused often to listen.

He heard only birdcalls and once, the thump and rustle of a disturbed rabbit. Emboldened, he ventured closer to what had been the road. Stillness reigned.

By this hour of the day, workers should have arrived, but there were no signs of them. He moved cautiously along the edge of the road. The greenery I had sent out across it had browned, but the vines and crawling brambles had survived and looked undisturbed. Where I had sent plants to block the culverts, swamps had formed on either side of the road. Insects buzzed and hummed near them.

He came to the shed where the men had been keeping watch that night. It was deserted. He walked through it and found the dice still out on the rough table just as the men had abandoned them. No one had been back here since that night.

‘Perhaps it was not a total waste of magic,’ he conceded reluctantly. ‘It looks as if the intruders are discouraged. I do not think they will come back before spring.’

He had turned back into the forest before I realized that he had deliberately spoken to me.

‘I thought I was doing what the magic wanted me to do.’ I could not decide if I wanted to apologize to him or not. It seemed strange to apologize to myself, and even more so to have to apologize for an action I’d been pushed into taking. I wasn’t even certain that he was aware of what I’d tried to say to him. I thought of the times when I’d thought I’d felt Soldier’s Boy stir inside me, the moments when my thoughts had seemed more Speckish than Gernian. Always, I’d felt that he deliberately concealed himself from me. Now I wondered if he had tried to share his views, only to feel as smothered as I did.

He spoke again, almost grudgingly, as if reluctant to acknowledge me. ‘The magic was mine, not yours to spend. And the magic speaks to me, not you. You should not have tampered with it.’

He seemed to resent me as much as I did him. It scarcely seemed fair. He was the one who had invaded my life. I reined in my resentment and asked my most pressing question.

‘Do you know what the magic wants you to do?’

He grinned hard. I sensed him weighing whether or not to reply. When he did, I felt it was because he could not resist the urge to brag. ‘Several times, I have acted on what the magic wished me to do.’

‘When? What did you do?’

‘You don’t remember the Dancing Spindle?’

‘Of course I do.’ At the Dancing Spindle, actions I had taken had ended the Spindle’s dance forever, and dispersed the magic of the plainspeople. I knew now that Soldier’s Boy had taken into himself as much of their magic as he could hold and had hoarded it. ‘But what else? When else did you obey the magic?’

His grin grew wider. ‘You don’t know, do you? That amuses me. Because at the time, I thought I felt you resisting me. And even now, I do not think I would be wise to tell you the things the magic prompted me to do. There were small things that I did, things that made no sense to me. But I did them. And I kept them from you, lest you try to undo them. You thought you had pushed me down; you thought you had absorbed me and made me a part of you. But I won then. And I’ve won now, Gernian. I will prevail.’

I nearly warned him not to be too certain of that. Then I decided not to provoke him to keep his guard up against me. He spoke no more to me but found and followed the stream to rejoin Likari and Olikea. She was sitting close by the fire, her arms wrapped around her naked body. The day had warmed, but not much.

‘Finding food would keep you warmer,’ he told her. ‘This is the last day we shall spend here. We’ll eat, and then sleep until nightfall.’

‘There isn’t much left to find here!’ Olikea protested, but just then Likari made a lie of her words.

He ran up to me, proudly displaying six silver fish hung from a willow wand through their gills. ‘I caught them all myself!’ he exclaimed. His hands and forearms were bright red from exposure to the icy waters.

‘Wonderful!’ Soldier’s Boy praised him and rumpled the boy’s hair. The child wriggled like a happy puppy. Olikea took the fish with a sour expression on her face and went to work cleaning them of guts and scales. Soldier’s Boy went back to the stream and began eating water-grass stems. He would have preferred to eat the foods richest in magic potential, but lacking those, he would fill my belly with anything that was edible.

When Olikea returned from her gathering, a hastily-woven carry sack held big mushrooms and a quantity of prickly cones. She gave the cones to Likari, and he pounded them on a rock by the stream to shake loose the fat seeds inside them. The mushrooms were thick and dense, with ranks of tubes rather than gills on the undersides of their orange caps. Olikea cut them into fat slices to toast over the fire with the fish.

After everyone had eaten, they all arranged themselves in the moss-and-leaves nest to sleep for the rest of the day. I felt no need for such rest. Instead, trapped behind the darkness of Soldier’s Boy’s closed eyes, my thoughts chased their own tails in endless circles. What had he done for the magic that I hadn’t even known about, and when had he done it? In dread, I thought of the times I had awakened from sleep-walking to find myself outside my cabin. Had it happened then? Or had it occurred when I was home in Widevale, or even while I was still at the Academy? I recalled how the Speck dancers had come to Old Thares with the travelling carnival. When I had seen them, I had lifted my hand and given them the sign to release the dreaded Speck plague on our capital city. Yes. I could see now that that had been the work of Soldier’s Boy. But what else had he done that I’d scarcely been aware of? Had he influenced my thoughts about my father? Had he precipitated my quarrel with Carsina?

When I decided that wondering about it was futile, my thoughts turned to Epiny, Spink and Amzil. I wondered if Epiny had reached her home safely, and if she had been able to convince both Spink and Amzil that I was still alive and that they had not failed me. I wondered about the rest of Gettys as well. I was fairly certain that my death would be dismissed easily. I doubted that there would be any serious inquiry into it. Gettys was a town composed of soldiers, convict workers and released convicts and their families. The Speck magic flooded the town with alternating tides of fear and despair. It was a place where violence and crime were as common as the dust blowing through the streets. A man beaten to death by a mob would only briefly shock the inhabitants, and no one else would ever know of it. I imagined that the official report, if there were one, would say that a condemned prisoner, Nevare Burv, had been shot to death while attempting to escape.