The Warden, page 8
“Except in keeping count of shares, of course,” Maurenia said.
“Except that,” Timmuk agreed. “Luckily Andresh is a deft hand at sums and tables. Never much for them myself—I was more a hands-on type. At any rate, when little brother and I left the family counting house knowing that Luth and the Lashes were at loose ends, and that Renia wanted to field test our designs…” He waved a hand vaguely.
“I see,” Aelis said, only she didn’t. As the dwarf had been talking, she’d glanced at his forearms and thought it highly improbable that the corded layers of muscle showing beneath the coarse dark hair were developed in any counting house.
Neither are the scars all over them. Knives, mostly, she noted.
“And what brings you to Lone Pine, Warden Aelis?” That was Maurenia, leaning forward as she asked, her hand toying idly with the rim of her mug.
“Assigned by the Lyceum,” she replied, “as we all are.” She stood suddenly, taken by an impulse to get away, to seem less accessible. “If you’ll pardon me, Maurenia and Timmuk.” She looked down at Pips, who’d slid off the bench and was clutching her leg. “Oh … do allow me to introduce you to Phillipa here—though she is more often called Pips. I daresay she will be a font of questions and a dedicated listener.”
Phillipa leaned out and waved at the half-elf and the dwarf, with the latter smiling a great face-crinkling smile at her. Maurenia tried to smile, but it was halfway between “grimace” and “trying to swallow bad wine,” Aelis thought.
“Can I see that big crossbow up close?” Pips blurted out before Aelis was out of earshot.
“Well, I’m sure Maurenia can be persuaded once we’ve let her have a bite to eat and a drink or two.”
“Or three or four,” the half-elf said, just loud enough for Aelis to hear as she retreated, and she found herself trying not to laugh.
She tried to catch Rus’s eye at the bar, but by then the Lashes—with the chance to study them, she realized their features were so similar that they must be brother and sister at least, and possibly twins—had come down and were taking his attention.
Well, she reasoned, they’re paying customers, and I’m not. Best I just get out of the way for now.
She headed outside to find things on the green and at the crossroads returning to normal. The ridiculous wagon the adventurers had come to town on was too large for any barn or stable, so it stood like a great sleeping dog along the long wall of the inn, with most of the gear that had been strapped to it carted away and the tent in its middle laid flat.
As she walked, she took stock. Flocks were being tended. People were doing whatever they did in gardens and fields. She was headed to her tower, thinking on the report she needed to write.
How am I even going to send it, she wondered, with no birds? The orrery is for emergencies, and this hardly counts. I suppose I simply write them up and put them on the next post carriage, as if a place like this is likely to see two in a year.
Aelis squared her shoulders and dismissed the thought. She was the Warden of Lone Pine, and she’d proven it today, and being Warden meant writing reports.
“Feel sorry for yourself another day,” she half muttered, half spat as she marched resolutely on.
7
THE BEAR
Aelis was halfway through her report, with one entire closely written page already set aside. Instead of taking the desk onto her lap in a chair, she’d used a table, for benefit of a flat surface to create the tiny, ciphered lettering the Lyceum required in a Warden’s official correspondence.
She’d hoped to get the report onto one page, but as she’d formulated it in her mind first, she knew it was going to require a second. So instead of simply relating what had happened with the adventurers and her first official use of power directly against another person, she also described the conditions generally.
Aelis felt as though she was missing details and paused several times to rack her brain for anything she needed to add, coming up empty each time.
She struggled over whether to mention the theft of the book, and twice nearly set the nib of the pen to the paper to include it. In the end, she decided that since she hadn’t formulated her official response and begun an investigation, it wouldn’t be proper to include it in an official report.
She had a hard time swallowing her own decision, but by the time she’d finished the report, dug wax and a seal from inside her desk, folded the letter and sealed it, stuck it in an envelope and sealed that, it had slipped from her mind.
After all, she reasoned, as she set the report down under a candelabra, the book may simply have been misplaced.
As she sat, she massaged her writing hand; making those precise, tiny ciphers had taken months of learning.
She recalled Professor Corbin, who kept his white robes as clean as a saint’s conscience and his Diviner’s diadem mirror-bright every single day she saw him, leaning over her shoulder and peering close at her first attempt at them.
He’d snorted, snatched up the paper, and held it aloft as an example to the room full of students.
“Were I an Invoker—and I thank the blind god every day that I wield a less clumsy art—I would combust this bit of scrap, because fuel is all it would ever be good for. Each time you form a letter it must be uniform in size, do you understand? Each instance of a character must look as precisely like every other instance of a character as is possible and then some.” Here, Corbin had turned his monocled eye on Aelis’s paper and sniffed. His lips were pinched, his cheeks thin to the point of gauntness, as was the rest of him. She’d often thought he was the kind of man who begrudged the world every breath he had to take, every morsel of food he had to eat.
“So far as I can tell, this paper would likely be interpreted as a battle to the death with a vicious flock of chickens, in which forty civilians, give or take, died due to the Warden’s actions. Is that what you were assigned to write, Miss de Lenti?”
She sat up straighter, focused her eyes on a far wall, and said, “No, Magister.”
“No. Since you are incapable of writing a coherent message, Miss de Lenti, you will go back to practicing characters. Fill a sheet with rows of the first five.” It was a humiliating assignment, a first-year student’s work, and this had been her third.
Eventually she’d learned that those sorts of humiliations were doled out by small-minded men like Corbin, and Archmagister Ressus Duvhalin, who saw something in her power and her intelligence that made them need to visit their petty miseries on her.
But she never, ever got used to it.
Aelis was well on her way to completely forgetting what she’d told herself on her way back to her tower when she heard the sound of a fist pounding hard on the door.
She snatched up her sword and rushed to the door, threw it open.
Outside was one of the village shepherd lads, breathing hard.
“Rus … said to come get you, quick,” he said, panting. “One o’ the lads came stumbling in all bloody, said a bear attacked his flock. Rus says bring a needle n’ thread…”
Given a task to focus on, Aelis snapped instantly from her self-pity. She buckled on her swordbelt and slipped the dagger onto it, then snatched up her heavy calfskin-and-brass case and hurried out the door, pausing only to throw a simple ward upon it. The boy had not run all the way there as she’d feared; two stout horses were tied at the end of her walkway.
She quickly outpaced the boy to the horses but he caught up as she paused to figure out what to do with her case so she could gain the saddle. Without time to tie it on, and nowhere to affix a rope anyway, she held it out to the boy, who took it, surprised. Once she climbed into the saddle, she took the case back from him.
The boy leapt quickly onto his own horse, clicked his tongue, and it exploded into a long stride and then a gallop. Aelis’s mount bolted after it. Only the breathing of the horses and the pounding hoofbeats marked time as the landscape slewed past them, fields turning into gardens and then houses. She saw people gathered outside the inn, including a couple of the armored Thorns, standing in the rough circle crowds always formed.
She slid out of the saddle and almost thumped face-first to the ground as her boots skidded, but she kept her feet and rushed forward, clutching her case to her chest.
“Out of the way,” she huffed, “out of the way.” The circle parted, and her first impression of what was inside it was blood, far too much blood for the source of it to still be alive. Rus was kneeling at the side of a young boy who was crying hysterically, with his hands flailing away at Rus’s arms.
She took the boy’s keening wail as a good sign. A dying body’d not have the energy to scream, she thought.
She slid to her knees at the boy’s other side, across from Rus, who was holding a rag tight against the boy’s scalp. “Let me see, let me see,” she hissed at him, waving his hands away with one hand while snapping open her case with the other.
There was blood all over the boy’s face, obscuring his eyes, and a flap of skin loose along his forehead—the only obvious wound. From her case she snatched a small dark cake, the size of a small bar of soap, smelling strongly of resin and wax. She rubbed the thumb of her left hand along the top of it; wherever her finger touched it, it softened. She snatched the bloody rag from Rus’s hand and made a swipe at the blood, then began wiping the waxy, pine-smelling stuff across the wound.
She glanced up, made eye contact with an unfamiliar face. “You,” she said firmly, “go fetch clean rags. Freshly laundered. Now!”
The boy was still thrashing and crying. She searched for and found a First Order Charm, a spell of calm and quiet, not as powerful as the overwhelming fatigue she’d laid upon Luth’s mind earlier. It was hard to grasp, slippery like an oil-slick stone, without the focus of her wand, but she found it and laid it through her left hand. Instantly, the boy’s thrashing ceased and his crying diminished to a weak sob.
“What’s your name, lad?” Her voice was as calm and smooth as she could make it.
“Burt,” the boy, whom she put at about thirteen, whimpered.
“Well, Burt,” she said, “I know this hurts, but if you give it time, it will diminish.” She looked back into her case, then back at the wound in his scalp. “That’s the only wound I can see; is it the only one you’ve got?”
“I think so,” the boy said.
“Then where’s the rest of the blood from?”
“From my flock,” the lad muttered as she grabbed a jar from her case with her fingertips and held it toward Rus, miming opening it.
“And it was a bear?”
“Aye. Bear slaughtered some of the sheep…”
“Is that how you got hurt?”
“I ran into a tree branch…”
Around the circle there was a titter of laughter. Aelis lifted her head and glared; by then, Rus had the jar open, and a pungent stench emanated from it. She dabbed a finger into it and took the minutest bit, then said, “I’m sorry, Burt,” and plunged that finger directly into his wound, spreading it around as quickly as she could.
Despite her charm, the boy squirmed and screamed, but then her finger was free and he calmed down almost instantly.
Aelis nodded at the jar and Rus closed it back up, setting it down. The farm lad she’d ordered to get rags returned and set down a pile of clean, fresh smelling cloths, and she took one and began to carefully dab at the blood that had obscured the boy’s features.
“Scalp wounds bleed freely, Burt, because the vessels that carry your blood there are quite close to the surface,” she said as she worked, and she felt the boy nod under her hand. “So I understand why this frightened you. But they aren’t too dangerous, really. You’ll come out of this well. Perhaps with a little scar, but what man doesn’t feel better about himself with a scar or two?”
Around her she heard the crowd laugh again, but it was a laugh she could live with.
“If someone would fetch us some warm water, and this boy some fresh clothes, I think we can move him indoors,” Aelis said as she gently wiped blood away from his eyes. One of his eyelids was nearly crusted shut; with careful strokes of her hand she coaxed it open. The boy’s eyes were blue, his gaze faraway.
She nodded to Rus and the two of them helped him stand on unsteady feet. “Water’ll get hot fastest in our kitchen,” the innkeeper said.
“You walk him in,” Aelis said. “I’ll be right along.” She stood, keeping her bloody hands away from her already likely ruined clothing, and gestured toward the boy. “Please, get my case and that jar.”
Then, only just realizing how hard and fast her heart was pounding, she followed Rus and Burt into the inn.
* * *
By the time she was seated in the inn, with a needle threaded and a pain-dulling infusion working its way through Burt’s system, Aelis was calm once more, with only the memory of sweat on her palms. With hot water and rags she had cleared the last of the blood from Burt’s head and face and washed her own hands, and now she set to the task of sewing the flap of skin that had been torn free back into place.
“You might be young enough yet not to scar today,” she murmured as she worked. The boy’s eyes turned toward her, slow to focus. “Even with the tea I’ve given you, this will sting. I’ll count to three and then begin.”
Then, without counting a single number, she slipped the needle through the loose edges of skin and drew the wound tightly closed. She leaned close and sniffed; she could still smell the faint tang of the compound she’d rubbed into it earlier.
She made the stitches minute, concentrating on the task with the tip of her tongue held between her front teeth. She felt people crowding around, watching her work, but it was easy to shut them out.
This kind of work, the nonmagical—or only mildly magical—work of an Anatomist, had always come easy to her. It had driven Duvhalin to distraction when she had consistently outperformed all the other students in the basics of suturing, surgery, and dissection.
Her long fingers were nimble, and tasks that relied on their fine use, no matter how complex, had always been a joy. She had outstripped her music tutor at the flute and the whistles by the time she was seven years old, and she could draw, sketch, and paint well enough that her father had brought in a succession of artists as tutors.
The memories, most of them pleasant, had absented her mind and let her fingers attend to their task unencumbered. Before she knew it, the wound was tightly closed and she was snipping the silken thread off.
“If it does scar, you can always let your hair grow long over it,” she said, standing up to straighten her neck and back, before bending right back down to peer into the boy’s eyes. “Or just wear it boldly. Scars tell a story.”
“The story of one who isn’t smart enough or fast enough,” someone muttered. She glanced over her shoulder as she straightened her back, to find Maurenia, Dashia, and Timmuk, all having settled on the bench across the table from where she sat.
“He’s a child,” she voiced, barely audibly, back at the half-elf who’d made the remark. Maurenia shrugged.
“Who can tell, with humans?”
Aelis rolled her eyes and looked back to Burt, whose blue eyes were slowly drifting shut. “I think we need to let this one get some rest. Have his parents been fetched?”
Slowly it dawned on Aelis that a bigger crowd than she’d anticipated—perhaps a dozen villagers—had crowded the room. When she said “parents” a thin-faced, compact woman rushed forward and grabbed the boy in her arms, with a wider, slower-moving man rolling along behind her.
“What’d you do with the flock?” the man rumbled, his arms crossed over his chest. Burt feebly stammered an answer while his mother leaned close to stare at the stitches, lifting a finger toward them hesitantly.
Aelis didn’t hesitate; her hand shot out and she stopped the woman’s grimy hand before she touched her son.
“Pardon, good miss,” Aelis said, lowering the woman’s hand firmly with her own. “You’re going to want to leave those alone. I’ll look at them in a week, and then again, and pull them out when I’m ready. In the meantime, don’t touch them. Don’t allow him to pull at them, or scratch them; cover his hands with mittens if you have to, or just trust that he’s a good lad who’ll do as he’s told.”
The man advanced on her, trying to loom over her; he succeeded mostly in watering her eyes with the stink of his body and his breath.
“He still hasn’t answered for what he did with the flock,” the man insisted, trying to look over her shoulder at the boy. Aelis realized that the village man clearly wanted nothing to do with getting close to her for his own superstitious reasons.
She stepped forward, forcing him to take a step back, his eyes rolling. But it put him out of arm’s reach of Burt, which seemed important to her at the moment.
“He did nothing with the flock. Bravely, your boy ran to the village to warn folk of a bear attack upon them. And now you are going to take him home, feed him, put him to bed, and not bother him with any further questions about the sheep. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Warden,” the man muttered, turning on his heel and beating a hasty path for the door. Half carrying Burt, the woman went slowly after him, but not before almost apologetically turning to Aelis.
“Thank you, Warden,” she mumbled, her darkened cheeks coloring more, “for looking after my son.” The crowd melted away behind Burt’s parents, leaving just Aelis, the Thorns, and Rus.
“Suppose I have to go bear-hunting now,” Aelis said, to no one in particular.
“You know,” Maurenia said, casually, slowly, as if savoring the words, “if you’re going to go hunt a killer bear—or worse, a mad bear—it sure would help if there was a large, mobile, powerful, accurate arbalest you could use. A functional one.”
“That would be the case,” Rus said from the bar, which he was wiping unnecessarily with a rag, “if people in these parts didn’t have a long and deeply held proscription about killing bears.”
