George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

“We don’t eat children,” Tolcet was saying. “There are plenty of fish and birds in the marshes.”

“I know,” Halsa said. She sounded sulky. “And the wizards live in houses with lots of stairs. Towers. Because they think they’re so much better than anybody else. So above the rest of the world.”

“And how do you know about the wizards of Perfil?” Tolcet said.

“The woman in the market,” Halsa said. “And the other people in the market. Some are afraid of the wizards and some think that there are no wizards. That they’re a story for children. That the marshes are full of runaway slaves and deserters. Nobody knows why wizards would come and build towers in the Perfil marsh where the ground is like cheese and no one can find them. Why do the wizards live in the marshes?”

“Because the marsh is full of magic,” Tolcet said.

“Then why do they build the towers so high?” Halsa said.

“Because wizards are curious,” Tolcet said. “They like to be able to see things that are far off. They like to be as close as possible to the stars. And they don’t like to be bothered by people who ask lots of questions.”

“Why do the wizards buy children?” Halsa said.

“To run up and down the stairs,” Tolcet said, “to fetch them water for bathing and to carry messages and to bring them breakfasts and dinners and lunches and suppers. Wizards are always hungry.”

“So am I,” Halsa said.

“Here,” Tolcet said. He gave Halsa an apple. “You see things that are in people’s heads. You can see things that are going to happen.”

“Yes,” Halsa said. “Sometimes.” The apple was wrinkled but sweet.

“Your cousin has a gift, too,” Tolcet said.

“Onion?” Halsa said scornfully. Onion saw that it had never felt like a gift to Halsa. No wonder she’d hidden it.

“Can you see what is in my head right now?” Tolcet said.

Halsa looked and Onion looked too. There was no curiosity or fear about in Tolcet’s head. There was nothing. There was no Tolcet, no wizard’s servant. Only brackish water and lonely white birds flying above it.

It’s beautiful, Onion said.

“What?” his aunt said, in the market. “Onion? Sit down, child.”

“Some people find it so,” Tolcet said, answering Onion. Halsa said nothing, but she frowned.

Tolcet and Halsa rode through the town and out of the town gates onto the road that led back towards Labbit and east, where there were more refugees coming and going, day and night. They were mostly women and children and they were afraid. There were rumors of armies behind them. There was a story that, in a fit of madness, the king had killed his youngest son. Onion saw a chess game, a thin-faced, anxious, yellow-haired boy Onion’s age moving a black queen across the board, and then the chess pieces scattered across a stone floor. A woman was saying something. The boy bent down to pick up the scattered pieces. The king was laughing. He had a sword in his hand and he brought it down and then there was blood on it. Onion had never seen a king before, although he had seen men with swords. He had seen men with blood on their swords.

Tolcet and Halsa went away from the road, following a wide river, which was less a river than a series of wide, shallow pools. On the other side of the river, muddy paths disappeared into thick stands of rushes and bushes full of berries. There was a feeling of watchfulness, and the cunning, curious stillness of something alive, something half-asleep and half-waiting, a hidden, invisible humming, as if even the air was saturated with magic.

“Berries! Ripe and sweet!” a girl was singing out, over and over again in the market. Onion wished she would be quiet. His aunt bought bread and salt and hard cheese. She piled them into Onion’s arms.

“It will be uncomfortable at first,” Tolcet was saying. “The marshes of Perfil are so full of magic that they drink up all other kinds of magic. The only ones who work magic in the marshes of Perfil are the wizards of Perfil. And there are bugs.”

“I don’t want anything to do with magic,” Halsa said primly.

Again Onion tried to look in Tolcet’s mind, but again all he saw was the marshes. Fat-petaled waxy white flowers and crouching trees that dangled their long brown fingers as if fishing. Tolcet laughed. “I can feel you looking,” he said. “Don’t look too long or you’ll fall in and drown.”

“I’m not looking!” Halsa said. But she was looking. Onion could feel her looking, as if she was turning a key in a door.

The marshes smelled salty and rich, like a bowl of broth. Tolcet’s horse ambled along, its hooves sinking into the path. Behind them, water welled up and filled the depressions. Fat jeweled flies clung, vibrating, to the rushes and once in a clear pool of water Onion saw a snake curling like a green ribbon through water weeds soft as a cloud of hair.

“Wait here and watch Bonti and Mik for me,” Onion’s aunt said. “I’ll go to the train station. Onion, are you all right?”

Onion nodded dreamily.

Tolcet and Halsa rode further into the marsh, away from the road and the Perfil market and Onion. It was very different from the journey to Perfil, which had been hurried and dusty and dry and on foot. Whenever Onion or one of the twins stumbled or lagged behind, Halsa had rounded them up like a dog chasing sheep, pinching and slapping. It was hard to imagine cruel, greedy, unhappy Halsa being able to pick things out of other people’s minds, although she had always seemed to know when Mik or Bonti had found something edible; where there might be a soft piece of ground to sleep; when they should duck off the road because soldiers were coming.

Halsa was thinking of her mother and her brothers. She was thinking about the look on her father’s face when the soldiers had shot him behind the barn; the earrings shaped like snakes; how the train to Qual would be blown up by saboteurs. She had been supposed to be on that train, she knew it. She was furious at Tolcet for taking her away; at Onion, because Tolcet had changed his mind about Onion.

Every now and then, while he waited in the market for his aunt to come back, Onion could see the pointy roofs of the wizard’s towers leaning against the sky as if they were waiting for him, just beyond the Perfil market, and then the towers would recede, and he would go with them, and find himself again with Tolcet and Halsa. Their path ran up along a canal of calm tarry water, angled off into thickets of bushes bent down with bright yellow berries, and then returned. It cut across other paths, these narrower and crookeder, overgrown and secret looking. At last they rode through a stand of sweet-smelling trees and came out into a hidden, grassy meadow that seemed not much larger than the Perfil market. Up close, the towers were not particularly splendid. They were tumbledown and lichen-covered and looked as if they might collapse at any moment. They were so close together one might have strung a line for laundry from tower to tower, if wizards had been concerned with such things as laundry. Efforts had been made to buttress the towers; some had long, eccentrically curving fins of strategically piled rocks. There were twelve standing towers that looked as if they might be occupied. Others were half in ruins or were only piles of rocks that had already been scavenged for useful building materials.

Around the meadow were more paths: worn, dirt paths and canals that sank into branchy, briary tangles, some so low that a boat would never have passed without catching. Even a swimmer would have to duck her head. Children sat on the half-ruined walls of toppled towers and watched Tolcet and Halsa ride up. There was a fire with a thin man stirring something in a pot. Two women were winding up a ball of rough-looking twine. They were dressed like Tolcet. More wizards’ servants, Halsa and Onion thought. Clearly wizards were very lazy.