George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

Rugel passed the wattle fence of the first cottage. He had arrived at the village.

The girl’s breathing was very slight; her skin almost gray. He felt a pang. If only he could have prayed for her. If only he had taught her the secret for calling rabbits. But it was too late for that. Already, as he lowered her to the ground, he could hear voices coming from the cottage behind him.

He might have a few seconds. He could still run, like he’d run the last long years of his life. He would run. He’d run far away from this place, maybe as far as Ireland. But not until he made things right. She wouldn’t be here, almost dead, if it hadn’t been for him.

He owed her.

Rugel pressed his creased brown lips close to the little girl’s ear, and he whispered: “This is the secret of calling rabbits, girl.”

Her eyelids trembled. He couldn’t be certain she had heard him. He added anyway: “Call to them while you think rabbit thoughts. You’ve got the magic. All you need is the knowledge. Like calling to like.”

He wished she knew his name.

Then it was suddenly too late to run. Great hands closed on his arms and pulled him away from her, lifting him as easily as a child even as he kicked and screamed.

On the ground, Rachel went rigid, her back bending like a bow and foam spraying from her lips. Time slowed for Rugel as he felt a fist connect with his face, felt the skin above his eyebrow split, but he saw only the little girl’s face as it went red, then purple, then dark.

She was dying. It was too late for the witch’s cure.

And Rugel knew. The time for running was over. He reached down inside himself for the little spark of magic he’d kept banked all these years. The only way to feed it was to reach out to the earth, the stones and soil of this village. There would be no leaving once he touched that energy. He felt his body becoming hotter with the strength of his growing power.

“Rachel,” he whispered. He could barely see her beyond the crowd, jerking and twitching on the pale grass. He had forgotten how to break down the venom in her blood, but he could give her air, could shield her heart from the poison’s progress. He could buy time for the witch. Rugel stretched his magical grasp wider, drawing energy from the soil beneath the village, the boulder by the rabbit warren, the banks of the stream.

And then his heat was too much for his captors. There were shouts, and Rugel was flying through the air, his body launched from furious hands. He struck the edge of the mandrake patch with a horrible jolt.

He lay there for a second, feeling the magic catch hold of Rachel’s lungs, sensing her heart beating normally again, and then he forced himself to get up. He pushed deeper into the mandrake patch, knowing he ran over graves he’d dug himself. He might not be able to flee this place, but there was a still a chance he could escape the angry mass of villagers if he could just make it through this field.

He’d just spurred himself into a full run when he felt the first of the rocks strike his back.

He ran on and felt a bigger stone, as large as a man’s two fists joined, smash into his back and send him sprawling. In his memory, he saw his father, face down in the thin young soil with the fletching of an arrow between his shoulder blades.

Rugel lay on his belly in the soft loam, his arms and legs still pumping, still running, a reflex after two hundred years. The rocks kept coming, big and small, some thrown with greater accuracy than others. The back of his skull leaked hot trickles down into his collar, and when a stone smashed his shoulder blade he gasped with agony, sucking in humus and leaf bits. But his legs kept running.

The soil churned away under the motion of his legs and he felt himself burrowing down into the earth. After all that running, he’d forgotten. Dwarves were creatures of the earth, expert diggers, and safety to a dwarf always meant underground. It was so easy to forget, alone. After he’d buried his dead, all forty-eight men and women and children and elders, he had begun to run. He’d gotten good at running away.

He put effort into it now, concentrating power into his treading arms, and while he could still feel the rocks, he moved away from them; they were glancing off the muscle of his buttocks, hardly painful at all. The cool softness of soil pressed against his face. The cut above his eye no longer stung. He hoped the witch could take away Rachel’s pain the way the soil took away his.

Laughter bubbled up, exhilarated laughter — he was escaping, he was getting away, and he breathed in grit and loam with the ease of breathing air. It felt good, sliding into his lungs. Even the wriggle of the earthworms in his throat was no more irritating than the passage of air bubbles inside the intestines.

His arms slowed now, pressing up against stone immovable and massive, attenuating into slender coils that worked themselves into the stone’s crannies. There was shelter there, shelter and something tangy and mineral he found himself craving. His legs trembled as a soil creature, a nematode or wood louse, brushed bristles against sensitive skin.

Movement ground into such slowness it became near immobility, and Rugel felt his thoughts slow with it. His mind constricted to a single point of focus, so intense it was like a ray of brilliant green light, and stones, pain, villagers, and yes, even the little girl child, were forgotten entirely. There was only green and the peace of settling into the soil and the sense that up above there was something warm and vital he would someday reach up to touch with new green leaves.

Rachel sat with her knees clasped, staring at the spray of stones surrounding a pushed-up mound of soil. The little man had gone down in there. The villagers left, but he didn’t come out, not even later that night when Rachel snuck out of the witch’s hut to search for him. She watched the mound, intent for any movement. Some of the stones around it were stained blood-brown.

Someone patted her shoulder. It was Eva, the witch, and she squeezed the shoulder kindly before crossing to the mound and dropping to her knees. Her gnarled old hands seized a rock and tucked it quickly into the pocket of her apron.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

The little girl shook her head. She didn’t understand the woman’s impatient tone or the brisk movements of her hands collecting stones.

The old woman waved her hand, indicating the field full of plants with white flowers. “The stones will slow the growth of new seedlings. They’re not as bad as weeds, but they’ll make the roots grow in crooked.”

The girl reached out for one of the rocks, her movements slow and uncertain. Eva smiled broadly.

“That’s my girl. Got to take good care of the mandrake plants. They’re precious rare, and there aren’t many villages with a patch like ours.” Eva smoothed the soil over the mound, tamping it down like a farmer planting garlic.

The light of memory fired in Rachel’s eyes. “You used tincture of mandrake root when you helped my brother.”

“I did. It saved his life. And I used it to cure your snakebite.”

Rachel closed her fingers over a stone and felt its weight in her hand. In her mind’s eye, she saw the dwarf’s wrinkled face, coarse as a carved turnip a week after Samhain, his body as small and twisted as a mandrake root.

“The roots look like little men, don’t they?” Rachel asked, and she looked over the field, as big as her father’s field of peas and every foot lush with the green foliage of mandrake plants.

“Yes. Strange, isn’t it? How one of the best plants for curing a man looks like one? That’s the way things work, though. Like will call to like.” The old woman eased herself to her feet and gave Rachel’s shoulder another pat. “You come see me any time now, little Rachel. I’ve got plenty to teach you.”