FSF Magazine, June 2007 Read online

  The apprentice had spent enough time in the Agate Tower to know that there would be pursuit. He was moving fast and had four months’ head start; Paulus moved faster, riding through nights and spring storms, fording spring-swollen rivers, asking quiet questions over bottles in public houses along the only road over the mountains. He killed the first of the apprentice's collection on a farm between a bend in the road and a ripple of foothills: a small boy with a dirty face and a stick in his hand.

  Yes, mister, a man passed by here in the winter.

  Yes, mister, he had a ring over his glove. I was feeding the pig, and he told me I was a likely boy. Are you looking for him?

  Can I see your sword?

  They weren't supposed to choose children, Paulus was thinking as he rode on. Even apart from the cultural sanction, children's magic was powerful but unpredictable, tricky to harness. No wonder the guild was after this one.

  * * * *

  In a public house that evening, the day's chill slowly ebbing from his feet, Paulus said a prayer for the boy's parents. He hoped they hadn't sent anyone after him. It was bad enough to kill children; he had even less desire to take the lives of vengeful bumpkins. Best to keep moving. Already he had gained a month on the apprentice, who was moving fast for a normal man but not fast enough to stay ahead of Paulus, who had once been one of the king's rangers. Upstairs in his room, Paulus watched a thin drift of snow appear on the windowsill, spilling onto the plank floor. His prayer beads worked through his fingers. Go, boy, he thought. Speed your way to heaven. He dreamed of turtles, and of great birds that flew at night.

  In the morning the snow had stopped, and Paulus cut a piece of cheese from a wheel left out in the kitchen. He stuck the knife in the remaining cheese and set a coin next to it, then left through the back door and saddled his horse without waking the stable boy. He rode hard, into the mountains and over the first of the passes where the road lay under drifted snow taller than a man on horseback. The horse picked out the track; like Paulus, it had been this way before. It was blowing hard by noon, when they had come to the bottom of a broad valley dotted with farms and a single manor house. Paulus rode to the gates of the manor and waited to be noticed.

  The gate creaked open, revealing a choleric elder in threadbare velvet, huddled under a bearskin cloak. “Who comes to the house of Baron Branchefort?"

  Paulus dismounted and let the seneschal see the sigil of the Agate Tower dangling from the horse's bridle. “I ride on an errand from the wizards’ guild in The Fells,” he said. “Has an apprentice traveled through this valley?"

  "And how would I know an apprentice?"

  "He would wear a ring over the glove on his right hand. He is called Myros."

  The elder nodded. “Aye, he was here. Visited the Baron asking permission to gather plant lore."

  "Was this granted?"

  "It was. He was our guest for a week and a day, then rode to the head of the valley."

  "Did he gather any herbs?"

  "I did not observe."

  "You wouldn't have. His errand has nothing to do with plants. He travels to collect children."

  The elder held Paulus’ gaze for a long moment. “This is why you follow him."

  "It is. Are there children in your house?"

  "No. The Baron nears his eightieth year. We have few servants, and no children."

  Paulus offered up a prayer of thanks that he would not have to enter the manor. He had seen more than enough of noble houses fallen into somnolence. Standing at the gate of this one, his chest constricted and he thought of his brother.

  "Where,” he asked, “are the houses in this valley with children?"

  The elder looked up at the sky, then down at the ground between his feet. “Many children come into this world,” he said. “Few survive. Only one of the Baron's vassals has children below marriageable age. He is called Philo, and his house is the last before the road rises into the mountains again."

  Paulus nodded and mounted his horse again.

  "You will ease Philo's mind, I pray,” the elder said.

  "What ease I can give, I will give,” Paulus said, and rode north.

  * * * *

  Philo's house lay in the shadow of a double peak, across the saddle of which lay Paulus’ route over the mountains. As Paulus rode up, the sun rested between the peaks. A man about Paulus’ age, but with the caved-in chest and stooped neck of too much work and not enough food, was drawing water. A girl of seven or eight years stood waiting with an empty bucket.

  "Philo,” Paulus said.

  "That is my name,” Philo said, without looking up at Paulus, as he hauled a full bucket over the edge of the well. He emptied it into the bucket his daughter set on the ground at his feet. “And this is my daughter Sophia. Now you know what of us is worth knowing."

  "A young man wearing a ring over his glove has been here,” Paulus said.

  Philo dropped the bucket back into the well. “He has."

  "He spoke to your daughter."

  "That's right, sir, he did. Told her she was a likely girl. She's always seemed so to me, but if I was any judge of men or girls I wouldn't be here.” Still Philo had not met Paulus’ gaze. Paulus began to wonder what had passed between him and Myros; or was his demeanor caused by the Brancheforts?

  No matter.

  "I come from The Fells,” Paulus said. “My instructions are to gather the girl he spoke to. For service at the Agate Tower."

  At this, Philo looked up and Paulus and put a hand around his daughter's thin shoulders. Now it was Paulus who wanted to look away. He forced himself to hold Philo's eye. “She's my only, sir,” Philo said. “And my wife, we're too old to have another."

  "Philo,” Paulus said. “I have no quarrel with you. My errand is my errand."

  He watched the awful calculus of the peasant on Philo's face. One fewer mouth to feed. Giving his daughter over to a life of service with the wizards of The Fells, where she would spend the rest of her days forgetting what it was like to go to bed hungry. And against that....

  "May we visit her, sir?"

  "When she has been gone a year,” Paulus said. He was a poor liar, but this provision he remembered from his own journey to The Fells as a boy, when he had been taken into the King's Acrobats.

  His mother had never come. After a year he had stopped expecting her.

  "Before that,” he said, “she will still long for home. You may write as long as you do not ask her to return. Censors at the guild will destroy your letters if you do."

  Philo was nodding slowly. “We do love her, sir,” he said. “She's our only."

  And through all this, the girl Sophia spoke not a word.

  "I will return in the morning,” Paulus said.

  * * * *

  The ruse had cost him a day, and cost him, too, any chance of a better meal than jerky eaten under a tree. Paulus had started back to the manor house, then veered away from the road into a copse of beech and spruce. He had already lied more that day than during the previous ten years, and could no more maintain his fabrications than strike down young Sophia of Branchefort Valley in her father's presence. So he hobbled his horse, found dry ground beneath the spreading branches of a spruce tree, and prayed until sleep came. Then he dreamed of his mother, refusing to look at him as he craned his neck to see through the wagon gate and cried out Mama, good-bye, Mama.

  * * * *

  In the morning, Sophia was waiting in the lambskin coat Philo had been wearing the afternoon before. Rabbit fur wrapped her feet, and she held a small satchel in both hands. Philo and her mother stood behind her, each with a hand on her; the woman's hand moved to smooth the coat's collar, tug a tangle out of Sophia's hair. Philo reached down and took his daughter's hand.

  "May she write us?” the woman said.

  "After a year, ma'am,” answered Paulus. “Should she prove unsuitable, I will bring her back myself, with no dishonor to you. It's many a child isn't meant for the wizards’ service."

  "
Not unsuitable, not our Sophia,” Philo said. He swallowed.

  "Philo,” Paulus said. “Can you spare this coat? She will be warm on the journey."

  "I'd like her to have it,” Philo said. “It's all we can give her."

  Paulus could come up with no convincing reply. “There's fresh eggs and bread in the bag,” Sophia's mother said.

  "I thank you, ma'am,” Paulus said. “I am Paulus. Your man and I met yesterday."

  "I am Clio, sir,” she said. She was looking hard at him—seeing, Paulus knew, the scars on his hands and the long sword on his right hip.

  "Your daughter has her destiny, Clio,” Paulus said. “I am here to take her to it."

  Baby turtles, he told himself. Another might have killed all three by now, and moved on. The thought gave him no ease. He averted his eyes as Philo and Clio made their farewells. Braver than either, Sophia took Paulus’ hand and climbed onto the saddle in front of him. A tremor ran through her small body, but she reached out to get her fists into the horse's mane. She looked back at her parents as Paulus spurred the horse northward, and he wondered what she saw.

  * * * *

  When she spoke, much later when the northern pass out of Branchefort Valley was behind them, Paulus didn't register her voice at first. He was thinking about the boy who had been feeding his pig when Myros came. How easily children died. “Sir?” the girl said. “What do you call the horse?"

  "I never named him,” Paulus said.

  "Can I call him Brown?"

  "All right."

  "Your name is Brown,” Sophia told the horse.

  He could kill her at any time, could have killed her at any moment since crossing the pass. Could, for that matter, have cut her down with the empty bucket in her hands while her father was drawing water. Hesitation kills, Paulus thought.

  "What are the wizards like?” she asked.

  "They are wizards,” Paulus said. “Not like men. But not cruel."

  "How long until we get there?"

  "A little while yet,” Paulus said. He was silent after that, and they rode the edge of a canyon in which night fell early and forced them to make camp while the sky above was still light.

  At times, Paulus knew, he was slow to apprehend the consequences of his actions. Now he realized that he had complicated his task first by concocting a story and then by taking the girl. She was one of the apprentice's six; Myros might well know that Paulus had her, and if he also knew about the boy he might be provoked into retaliation. Better to have killed her quickly and ridden on. Regardless of the wizard's injunction, Paulus could not afford to carry her with him in his pursuit of Myros. Nor could he return her, now that his mouth had run away with his reason and pronounced that she might be returned if she did not satisfy the wizards. He could easily imagine what such a stigma might mean to a child in a place like Branchefort Valley. He stirred Philo's eggs over the fire and damned himself for losing sight of his task.

  Over the sound of the night breeze in the canyon, he heard Sophia crying quietly. End this, he thought, and rose into a crouch.

  "I'm afraid,” she said, and the sound of her voice destroyed his resolve. He sat next to her. Paulus had no knowledge of children. He had none of his own and had been taken from his own home at about Sophia's age, leaving behind three younger sisters whom he had never seen again.

  "Never been out of the valley before?” he asked her.

  She shook her head and wiped at her nose before tearing a piece of bread from the loaf and scooping eggs out of the bowl. Cowardice was a thick, bitter syrup in Paulus’ throat. The boy with the stick in his hand had fallen without a sound, face still bearing traces of his smile at seeing Paulus’ sword—yet Paulus knew that in the dying reaches of the boy's brain had been the knowledge of his murder. He found that he could not bear the idea of Sophia dying with that same knowledge. Her name, he thought. If I had not learned her name....

  "Let me tell you a story,” Paulus said, and then he fell silent because he couldn't remember any stories. He remembered the sound of his father's voice telling him stories when he was a small boy, but he couldn't hear any of the words. “There was a little girl who dreamed that she was a bird,” he began, and he let his voice follow the idea of that bird until Sophia was asleep. In the morning he buried the crusts of the bread with her, and burned the coat over her grave. As he climbed out of the canyon into sunlight, a wind sharp with snow raised gooseflesh on his arms. He filled his lungs and held his breath until the edges of his vision faded into red, then exhaled slowly, slowly, feeling his mind start to fade. At the point of unconsciousness he let himself breathe again, deeply and freely. He did not remember where he had learned the exercise, but it cleared his mind, and as his horse—Brown—picked his way across frosted scree below a peak like the head of a boil, Paulus let his mind wander. During the short time he had slept the night before, he had dreamed of being a dog, in a warm room with thick rugs and two great stone chairs too high for him to leap onto. There had been a kind woman and an old, old man, and another man who would not look at him but spoke gently. O queen, he thought; and after that, O brother.

  The motion of a hare bounding between rocks drew his attention. He slipped an old throwing knife from its sheath at the small of his back and waited for it to move again, thinking that now he was over the first high ridge of peaks and in this expanse of alpine valleys, game would be more plentiful. In the high country, above treeline, was nothing but pikas and the occasional adventuresome goat. He wished he had brought a bow, but the truth was that no one had ever mistaken him for a skillful archer; his boyhood circus training, though, had served him well where knives were concerned. When the hare made its move, Paulus flicked his wrist. Simple. Five minutes later, the hare was dressed and dangling from his saddle. He rode on, trying not to think of sopping up the hare's fat with Sophia's bread. Skill with knives or no, Paulus knew that hunger was going to be a close companion as he moved farther from settled regions. The hermits and occasional isolated hamlets huddled in the valleys would not all be as hospitable as the Brancheforts had been.

  Sparser settlement also meant that it would be harder to track Myros—although Myros would have his own problems, chief among them finding four more children to collect. Paulus had no doubt that all six of Myros’ collection would be children, and the certainty had come so quietly that he was reluctant to examine it too closely. He mistrusted his own intuition, feeling that it was often fueled by whatever it was he had paid the wizard to make him forget, and he feared breaking the spell by looking too closely at the workings of his mind.

  There was the problem, too, of where Myros was going—and why. Moving north as fast as feet could carry him, moving deeper and deeper into the winter that had already left the lowlands, Myros fled as if frantic to go backward in time. If he kept heading north, he would reach the marshes and tundras that gave onto the ice-choked Mare Ultima. What would Myros want with the tribes who followed the whales and caribou?

  A stirring in Paulus’ mind set his fingers tingling with more than the cold. I can block the memories of your mind, the wizard had said, but the body's memories are beyond my reach. Paulus looked at his hands and wondered what they remembered. He had paid good silver for his forgetfulness, but no wizard had yet charmed the curiosity out of man or woman, or the desire. Paulus’ brother was ample evidence of that.

  2

  Days passed, and fell from memory with the sunset. Paulus saw no one, and stopped remembering his dreams. He was well into the second range of mountains, leading Brown on a foot trail skirting snow-buried canyons, when he found the apprentice's third. He saw smoke funneling out of a crevice on the canyon wall, and found a cave entrance below it. Calling in, he roused an old hermit and described Myros. “Yes,” the hermit nodded, and invited Paulus in for hot water and flat bread. “He was here. And yes, he spoke to my lad and moved on. Quite a soft one to be this deep in the mountains."

  Paulus thought, but did not say, that there were many kinds
of hardness.

  "And he would not eat, nor drink,” the hermit went on. Paulus watched his fingers, how they moved through the silent catechism of the hermit's god. Nine beads on a catgut string, a sacred abacus ticking off the arithmetic of holiness. I will pray after, Paulus thought. Not now.

  "I thank you for your welcome,” he said.

  The hermit did not acknowledge this. “Wizards,” he grumbled, and spat into the fire.

  "Myros is not yet a wizard,” Paulus said. “I am sent to make sure he never will be."

  In the hermit's eyes, Paulus saw suspicion. And something else; their expression teased at a memory, irritating like a hair on the back of the tongue. Eyes like gray stones, they put him in mind of something, stirred echoes of a kind of love that he could not remember feeling since he was a boy.

  "If you are following him,” the hermit said, “what does it matter whether he spoke to my lad?"

  You have not been gone from inhabited places as long as all that, old man, thought Paulus. “I need to know if he is collecting,” he said, and might have said more but the hermit threw hot water in his face and at the same time someone caught hold of his hair from behind. He threw a forearm across his throat and felt the impact of the blade, and then burning as the hermit kicked the embers of the fire across his leggings. Paulus scissored his legs, scattering the coals back toward the hermit, and with his left hand gripped the wrist of whoever had hold of his hair. The blade caught him on the cheek, and with an animal roar he squeezed until he felt bones snap. The grip on his hair loosened, and he pivoted to his feet, twisting the arm and breaking it again before he saw that he held a long-haired boy of perhaps thirteen, face twisted with hate and fear and pain. Paulus let him go, and the boy sprang up with the knife again. Stepping to his right, Paulus slapped the knife hand down and punched the boy hard on the left temple, knocking him straight down into the packed-earth floor, where he lay motionless save for a slow movement of his lips.

  Looking over his shoulder, Paulus saw the hermit brandishing a burning branch. I have tried lies, and I have tried truth, he thought. This time he did not speak at all.