George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

“Can’t I learn it?”

“No.” He barked the word. Two hundred years of running and hiding and sneaking around the edges of the world had given him a voice as leathery and tough as his face. It should have sent her home crying.

And it did. Or it did start her crying, anyway. Even dripping tears she stood fast, staring at him while her shoulders quaked without sound. He could hardly stand to look at all that mute unhappiness.

Face half-twisted away, he grumbled: “Why are you crying?”

“I’m so lonely,” she whispered. “Peter’s sick and Mama’s milk dried up so they had to sent the baby to Auntie Relda’s. And Papa’s farming all day and hunting all night to pay the witching bill. I’m all alone.” The tears grew larger and the quaking grew stronger. A tiny sound came up in her throat, barely audible.

The sound pained his ears. He didn’t like the sounds children made when they were unhappy, and he didn’t understand her story. But he knew alone. He stepped away from the currant bush. “Who’s Peter?”

She swiped the snot from her face with her sleeve. “My brother. He stepped on a nail last week and then he couldn’t move his leg. So Eva the Witch put him on a cot in her house and bound his ankles with magic cord and rubbed his whole body with tincture of mandrake root.”

Mandrake. That was the smell. Rugel shivered.

He should have never come back to this place.

The girl had caught her breath and now added, in a pleased voice, “I’m going to be a witch like her when I grow up.”

He examined her face and could tell by looking that she was right. There was human magic pricking in the back of her eyes. Right now if she put her mind to it, she probably could call that hare out of the bush. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.

His silence did not discourage her. “Papa says our village is cursed.”

“Yes?” Feeling a story coming, Rugel sat down to take the weight off his feet. They ached sometimes. He’d like a better pair of boots, but he was only a so-so shoemaker. Maybe he would steal a pair, the next village.

The girl squatted so she could still see his face. “It rained so much this winter the rye fields washed away. That’s something bad.” She lowered her voice. “And I heard Papa tell Eva he thought there was something in the woods stealing our luck. Maybe something as bad as a hobgoblin.”

With his wizened brown face, Rugel had been called worse things. And he’d stolen plenty. Once his people had practiced the arts of calling ore from the dark places of the earth, of spinning straw into gold, but this was great earth-magic, and he, the last of the dwarves, did not dare such workings. He made do with safer, minor talents: animal charming, theft, invisibility. But not here. Even those shabby excuses for magic were too risky in this forest that reeked with the stink of mandrake.

The little girl settled onto her bottom, stretching her legs in front of her with a sound of contentment.

“I’m Rachel,” she announced.

He grunted. Her eyes were as round as a hare’s as she stared at him. She expected him to introduce himself, he realized. And for the first time since he was very young, he was tempted to tell someone — this girl — his name. He hadn’t heard his name spoken in another’s voice in so, so long.

He jumped to his feet. “I’ve got to go.”

“Will I see you again?” She sounded excited, tangling her legs in her hurry to catch up with him.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he called over his shoulder, and drawing on all his woods-craft, disappeared into the bracken. An odd piece of him wanted to hide and watch her enjoy his disappearing act. But instinct and habit kept him running. Instinct, and a breeze carrying the graveyard smell of mandrake.

Rugel didn’t want to see the girl again. He told himself that as he followed the game trails, fouling the wires of any un-sprung rabbit snares he found. It was a tiny revenge undersized for its risk. The men of village were already on-edge. If they caught him, they’d tip to violence.

He pinched a wire between his fingers, feeling a fading warmth. The trap was freshly sprung, the rabbit twitching when Rugel came across it. He could use magic to melt that wire, heat it until it boiled in the palm of his hand. It would be easy; there was so much power waiting in the rich earth of this place. It called to him and the quiet coals of magical talent hidden within him.

He struggled to resist the temptation to soak up power and blast every last wire snare in the forest. He was painfully close to the village. If he scaled the boulder beside him, he could see the roofs of the little town. It was smaller than the dwarven village they’d built it over. He refused to look at it. And if he allowed himself to use magic now, he’d never get away from that sight.

Slipping the rabbit into his pack, he looked at the warren entrance hidden in the lee of the boulder. The trapper had sought it out, placing his snare where the rabbits would pass it going in and out of their burrow. Placing death where an animal expected only the security of home.

That was humans, all right.

There was a bitter taste in Rugel’s mouth as he picked his way back to his little camp. He moved every night, caching his gear before setting out for the day’s errands. He’d never stayed so long in one place. But he’d never come back to this place before, never seen Bigs in the forest his people had replanted and nurtured. Stealing their catch and breaking their traps felt too right for him to just move on without doing so.

Rugel pulled the rabbit’s hind-leg loose of its flop-limbed body and began to gnaw it. Once he had eaten meat cooked well, spiced and sauced by his mother, the best cook in his village. But he’d learned early on not to risk fire. There’d been times men had found him, had taken one look at his lumpy face and tried to capture him.

They always wanted something. Gold, usually, the famed dwarven gold of all the stories, never mind that his people never had any use for that too-soft stone. And the Bigs that didn’t want gold wanted his luck. His little hands, his little feet, anything tiny and portable was fair game for a trophy, just like the rabbit’s foot he was carefully nibbling around; its claws were sharp.

He cast the paw deep into the brush. Soon enough something would clean it up. He had no fears humans would connect it to him. In the stories, dwarves never ate rabbit.

Rugel eyed the other rabbit leg, its lucky foot still hairy and dirty, and couldn’t bring himself to bite into it. He was old . He was sick of the taste of raw meat. And there wasn’t a soul alive who knew his name. He got to his feet. Maybe he’d try tickling trout for a real dinner.

The creek was cool, shadowed by thickets of willow grown tightly together, made impenetrable with lashings of vine and ivy. Here, where it meandered into a curve, the creek made a pool, deep and dark, overhung by an enormous alder. The alder’s pale trunk was lapped all over by the green tongues of lungwort. Rugel made a note to come back and collect the viridian lichen; it was good for bandaging wounds.

He was ashamed that such herblore was the extant of his healing practice, but life on the run precluded the use of greater magics. Once as a child, he had assisted his father as he healed a deer, its shoulder singed down to the muscle by the same wildfire that had swallowed the forest. Once he had helped his mother push disease out of an oak tree weakened by lightning strikes. But that was all earth magic, fed by the land itself. Every bit a dwarf used bound him more tightly to the soil he drew it from. When the Elders worked their great works, they became as rooted to the land as the alder with its lungwort.