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Caedmon quickly said a protective spell, and he noticed that Pallavi did the same. “We mean you no harm,” he called up to the woman with the crossbow.
By his side, he heard Ellard mutter, “Always a classic. Not as good as, ‘I come in peace,’ though.” Stasya giggled.
Ignoring them, he held up his hands so that the unseen archer could tell he was unarmed. Granted, if he were attacked, he wouldn’t need a sword or bow to kill the person at the window, but she didn’t need to know that yet. “We are four simple travelers. We wish to take shelter for the night in this house.”
There was a pause, and he could hear several voices up in the house, talking together in low, serious tones. Then the woman called out again. “I don’t think so. We don’t know that you haven’t got the plague. We all came from Leornian. The plague is there, you know.”
“Yes, we’ve heard,” said Ellard. “So you’re not the owners of this estate?”
“Um...not as such,” admitted the woman.
“By what right, then, do you deny us entry into this house?” said Ellard, grinning.
“By the right of this crossbow,” the woman replied. “Also, there are ten of us and only four of you.”
Ellard looked like he was going to reply, but Caedmon shot him a look, and the boy obediently fell silent.
“We have been summoned by the duke to advise him,” said Caedmon. “If you give us shelter, we will remember it, and reward you later.”
There was more muttering in the house, some of it quite loud and vociferous. When the woman returned to the window, however, she said, “I’m sorry. We can’t afford to let you in. You can sleep in the barn, though.”
The four hillichmagnars looked at each other. “Like hell we’re going to sleep in a barn,” said Ellard. “These people are trespassers, with no more right to that house than we’ve got. It would take us two minutes to send them packing. We wouldn’t even have to hurt them. Not permanently, anyway.”
“Do you really think so?” asked Stasya, looking wide-eyed at Ellard.
“There’s no point in starting a fight if we don’t have to,” said Pallavi. “But if these people have weapons, I’d rather stay well away from them.”
“No sleeping in the barn, then?” asked Caedmon.
“Sleeping under a roof would be nice, but Stasya and I have been out in the open for four weeks now, and I don’t see how one more night will make much of a difference.”
“Yes, sleeping in the woods,” said Ellard quietly. “How novel.” Again, Stasya laughed.
When they led their horses past the barn, they saw that there were a great many hoof prints there, leading off into the hills. “I don’t like this,” muttered Pallavi.
“Perhaps they enjoy taking pony rides through the countryside while waiting out the plague,” said Ellard. “Who are we to judge?”
Caedmon led them through a field and a thicket of azaleas into a woodlot on the other side. “I think we had better set a watch all night,” he said, and the other three agreed. “Now, if we are to have a cooking fire, we had better find some firewood. Ellard?”
“Of course,” said the boy. “Stasya, would you like to come along?”
The girl jumped up and joined him with an eager smile, and before Caedmon could even think how to phrase the polite admonishment that was floating around his mind, they were off, climbing up into the hills and deeper into the woods.
“It’s nice they seem to be getting along,” observed Pallavi.
Caedmon nodded and tried to reassure himself that there was surely nothing untoward going on. “They have just met,” he thought. “They barely know each other. Could they be...? No, surely not.”
Pallavi’s voice recalled him from his thoughts. “I suppose you’re mad at me, aren’t you?”
He spun around. “Mad at you? Whatever for?”
She shook her head, as if he were being deliberately thick. “For not saying goodbye when I left Diernemynster.”
He had been annoyed by that at the time, but he had long since come to the conclusion that she must have had her reasons. “I think Astrid was more upset that you had left than I was.”
“Astrid,” said Pallavi, with sudden bitterness in her voice, “can jump off Mt. Osmund for all I care. I really wanted to say goodbye to you, Caedmon, but I had to leave. I couldn’t face having all those people watch me go.”
Her disappearance had caused a great deal of comment at the time. And more than a little unkind speculation, as well. Caedmon would have liked to have known what had made her leave, but at the same time, he didn’t feel it was right to pry. They had been friends for centuries, and he assumed that if she wanted to tell him, she would.
For several minutes, she sat by herself, picking at the grass by her knees and chewing her lower lip thoughtfully. She seemed to be weighing her words, considering what to say. But then she threw the grass blades away and said, “There’s no point in bringing any of that up again. I don’t know why I even mentioned it. Just as long as you’re not mad at me, Caedmon.”
“I could never be mad at you,” he replied.
She laughed. “I’m sure you could be, actually. I’ve seen you get mad at people, and you’re very good at it. It’s a shame to let a talent like that go to waste.”
***
THE FALLEN BRANCH LEVITATED a few inches off the ground. About one foot down its length, the bark peeled back, and a bright line of bare wood appeared, running around the circumference of the branch. There was a sound like a door shutting softly, and the foot-long section of wood was floating free in the air before it split itself neatly into four quarters and settled to the ground. Then the process repeated itself. Another section was cut away and quartered, and then another, and then another.
Stasya watched, slack-jawed with wonder, as the firewood stacked itself into a neat, tight-fitting bundle. “That’s...that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” she told Ellard.
“You’re making me blush,” he said, though there wasn’t a hint of red on his finely-chiseled cheekbones. “It’s really quite a simple spell. I worked it out when I was a kid so I wouldn’t have to do chores. I’ve got spells for sweeping the floor and cleaning laundry, too.”
“If you were allowed to marry,” she said, “you’d make some girl very happy.”
“I think I can do that even without getting married,” he said. A corner of his mouth turned up, and he winked at her. Then he laughed, as if to reassure her that he was only pretending to be lewd. “So, tell me what it was like growing up in a tent, following the herds.”
She told him a little about her family and the clans. He seemed very interested—much more interested than the subject warranted. They talked a little about her time at Atherton, too. He told her how sorry he was that Evika had died. “I didn’t know her well,” he said, “but I did meet her once. She was very kind.” When he said that, it was much less annoying than when Pallavi had said virtually the same thing.
“How old were you when you realized you could do magy?” he asked.
For as long as she could remember, she had had a sort of sixth sense about animals. She had always known when a horse didn’t want to be ridden that day, or when one of the rams in the flock was going to charge. But that wasn’t necessarily magysk. Some people just had a talent for dealing with animals.
She found out for certain about her magy at the same age all hillichmagnars did. “Not long after I turned 12,” she said, “my oldest sister tried to push me in the stream. I fell, but I didn’t hit the water.”
“That must have been quite a surprise for your sister.”
“It was quite the surprise for me, too. Vasily Sergeyevich found me not long after that—I think he must have heard what happened. And then I met Evika Videle and went to Atherton. How did you find out you could do magy?”
“Oh, when I was maybe 6 I started a bit of a fire. I was doing that wood chopping spell when I was 7.”
She told him how amazing that was, even though she didn’t quite believe him. No hillichmagnar showed signs of their divine nature until turning 12, but she could tell he was very proud of starting early, so she didn’t argue with him. He beamed as he told her some other spells he had worked out, and even demonstrated a few of them. After a while, they realized they had been gone for some time, so he levitated the pile of chopped firewood, and it floated along behind them as they walked back toward the camp.
As they went along, she asked, “So what is it like to study with Caedmon Aldred?”
His smile faded slightly. “Oh, Caedmon? He’s...well, how can I put this? Look, I wouldn’t say a word against him. He’s brilliant, really. But he’s old-fashioned, you know? He’s a little too set in his ways for my taste. He’s everything that Diernemynster represents, good and bad.”
“That’s a marvelous way to put that,” she said. She told him how she had found Diernemynster cold and unwelcoming, and he said that he had thought the very same thing. Then a thought struck her, and she said, “Pallavi was telling me about something a few days ago. It was about herblore, but the exact herb isn’t important. She was saying that there was an old tradition of magy in the Wislicbeorgs that Diernemynster more or less destroyed.”
“Sort-of like how Diernemynster hunted down and killed Kuhlbert the Magnificent,” he said.
“I suppose so,” she replied. “But wasn’t he a dark hillichmagnar? Pallavi implied it was a good thing he was killed, but she also said that Caedmon and Astrid regret killing him now.”
He scuffed his feet thoughtfully in the leaves as he walked. “I think there are always going to be people who don’t see the value in the old ways. Just like there are people who are threatened by anything new and powerful. There has to be balance.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye and grinned. “But what do I know? I’m still a student like you.”