David Farland - Wizardborn

Averan did not see the scene as a person would. Reavers have no eyes; instead, their philia sense life in ways she couldn’t understand. To a reaver, living animals glowed in the darkness the way that lightning glows.

Now, Averan recalled the reaver mage glowing, speaking to her in scents. “Follow my trail.”

In memory, Averan had no choice but to follow. Yet she felt terrified, and knew that she was marching to a place where she didn’t want to go. She detected scents in the air, the cries of reavers in supreme torment.

The philia near the One True Master’s anus began excreting words, and Averan scuttled forward to taste them.

“Do not fear,” the One True Master said. “You smell pain, but you shall not be subjected to it. The Blood of the Faithful will be sweet to you.”

The image faded. Averan realized that she’d blacked out.

She must have slept for a few minutes, because her eyes felt more rested. But her stomach still hurt from eating so much. She clutched it.

Averan fought a dull sense of panic. She remembered snatches of what had happened next. She recalled forcibles and an incantation.

The One True Master had given her servant an endowment. But Averan couldn’t figure out exactly which. Averan hadn’t been able to eat much of the monster’s brains—not even a tenth of them. She didn’t know all that the mage had known, couldn’t make much sense of most of the reaver’s thoughts and memories.

And it was the things that she didn’t know that scared Averan most.

She tried not to fret, held an image of the reaver in her mind, wondered why the reavers saw living creatures as if they glowed like lightning. Averan supposed that it was because there is lightning inside of people. On warm summer nights when clouds used to roll low over the graak’s aerie at Keep Haberd, she’d pull off her wool blanket and see small flashes of light against her skin. Beastmaster Brand had said that it was because there was lightning inside her.

Averan lay down next to Sir Borenson and rested her head on her hand. She noticed some pale green things—roots—woven into her robe.

She pulled a couple off, threw them into the hay. It had been raining all night, so her robe had been wet and then gotten covered in seeds.

Now the seeds were sprouting. They were everywhere in her robe, like little green worms. She decided to pick them out later.

The wagon passed under a tree, and Averan saw the shadows of leaves. She took a deep breath, inhaled the scent of fields and hills.

She sat up excitedly. They’d left the deadlands! Her head still ached. She squinted in the sunlight, pulled her robe close.

After a night of storm, the sun had surged into the sky, hurling splintered shafts of silver through broken clouds to dash against the emerald hillsides. The roosters at a nearby cottage celebrated by crowing as if it were the first sunrise in a month, and the whole land was filled with the cries of larks and the peeping of sparrows from under every bush.

To her left the round hills seemed to bow to the mountains. The night’s rain had soaked into summer-dried grass and left the land smelling drenched and new. The leaves of maples and alders turning on the lower slopes made them shimmer in shades of scarlet, russet, and gold.

To the right, a silver stream wound through a stand of alders. White ducks gabbled as they fed along the stream banks downhill.

Ahead lay a village with thatch-roofed cottages squatting by the road. Honeysuckle and ivy trailed over the garden walls.

Everything here seemed so alive—everything but Sir Borenson. He had gone from pale to a feverish red. Sweat streamed from his forehead.

“Where are we?” Averan asked.

“Balington,” Myrrima said. “You’ve been asleep for more than an hour.”

Averan looked at the cottages. Yesterday, she’d been able to sense Gaborn’s presence in battle. She’d seen the Earth King as a green flame that stood before her even when she closed her eyes. The Earth King was supposed to be here.

Now, she reached out with her feelings, tried to discern his location. But the flame had gone.

Still, there was something about Balington. She felt a power here, old and immense. She could not detect its center, could not tell if it meant her well or ill. She felt as if she were riding toward her destiny.

They drove into the village, past forty fine horses that stood all blanketed and barded outside the stables. Averan spotted a wagon there with several burly guards hovering nearby—keeping watch over the king’s treasure. It looked as if the king were getting ready to ride.

A village boy in leather pants, green smock, and feathered cap led a milk cow along the road. Cream leaked from her swollen udders.

Myrrima stopped long enough to ask the lad, “Where’s the king’s wizard?”

“Round the back,” he said, pointing toward the inn.

Myrrima drove the wagon to the back of the inn. She skirted a stone fence covered in jasmine and golden hop vines until she reached a wooden gate. She climbed down, unlatched it.

“Are you coming?” Myrrima asked. “You said you had a message for the king’s ears only.”

Now that she was here, Averan felt uneasy about the ruse. She feared that if she told Gaborn her story, he would think her mad. A dull pain throbbed at the base of her skull.

She summoned her courage. “I’m coming.”

She hopped out of the wagon on stiff legs and entered the garden gate. Brown and white pigeons strutted atop the thatch of a dovecote, cooing softly. A gray squirrel went leaping up a nearby cherry tree, its tail floating behind.

Gaborn’s Days stood at the top of the garden in a patch of sunlight. The skeletal scholar, with his close-cut hair and rust-colored robes, stood quietly with his hands clasped behind his back, merely observing.

The king himself sat on a stone beneath an almond tree in the midst of the garden. He wore a shirt of ring mail, as if for battle. Sweat darkened the quilted tunic beneath his arms, as if he had been doing heavy labor. But he merely talked. At least thirty knights surrounded him, all sitting on the grass in their finely burnished armor, the young squires with their bowl haircuts and rougher clothes lounging in the shadows beyond. Most of the lords hailed from Mystarria, but she saw some blank shields, and even a pair of Invincibles who had ripped off their surcoats so that they no longer wore the gold and crimson of Raj Ahten.

Gaborn sat with his back straight and chin high, engaged in light conversation. The queen sat at his feet, in a robe as softly yellow as a rose.

Averan saw no sign of the wizard that Myrrima was seeking. Indeed, Myrrima whispered a question to a lord, and he nodded toward the inn.

Myrrima hurried back out of the garden, and Averan just stood a moment, too nervous to speak.

Some minor noble was saying, “There’s tales going around Carris that a certain commoner, a fellow named Waggit, killed nine reavers in battle.”

“Nine?” several men guffawed in disbelief.

“No man who survived Carris should ever be called common,” Gaborn said. “And if the tales be true, I’m tempted to have this Waggit knighted and placed in my personal guard. What do you know of him?”

“He works in the mines at Silverdale,” the lord said. “I hear he’s somewhat...well, he’s simple.”

“A fool killed nine reavers?” Gaborn asked in disbelief.

“With a pickax, no less,” Lord Bowen confirmed. “The bards at Carris are already singing about it. I’d have brought the man to your attention sooner, but given his incapacity...”

“By the Powers, I would that all men were such fools!” Gaborn swore. “I’ll have him in my guard!”

The knights laughed, and Averan found herself smiling at the jest too. Gaborn could only make the man a guard if he cured him of his idiocy, and the only way to do that would be to have him take an endowment of wit from someone who was whole. Surely Gaborn would not waste a forcible on a fool, for in curing one fool, it would only make another—and at great cost to the kingdom. For the forcibles used in the endowment ceremony were made of metal that was far rarer than gold.