Mercedes Lackey - Owlflight

Justyn felt a bit badly that he was talking about Kyle as if the woodcutter wasn’t there, but in a sense he wasn’t. He’d had enough poppy and brandy that he wouldn’t recall a thing that had been said once the drugs wore off. And even if he did, Justyn rather doubted that he’d take offense at any of it, since worse things had been said in his presence that he never took offense to. He felt no guilt whatsoever about setting up Widow Clay, however. The good Widow had been setting her cap at him of late, and that was something he wanted to put an end to by whatever means it took! The last thing he needed was some meddling woman coming in here and “setting his life to rights.”

Both the farmers brightened at that idea, and they didn’t say anything more about magic. Instead, they exchanged the kind of cryptic sentences that almost amount to a code among close kin, and Justyn gathered that their conversation had something to do with a plan to persuade the Widow Clay that her best interests lay in dragging Kyle over the broom. Justyn rather doubted that Kyle would mind if she did; he’d probably accept being married with the good - natured calm with which he accepted having his leg stitched up. As for the Widow—well, she'd have nothing to com­plain about in Kyle.

Justyn continued to sew the two sticky flaps of skin together with tiny, delicate stitches a woman would have envied, but the meticulous work was not engrossing enough to keep his mind off the past.

The irony was, at one time he would have been able to mend a minor wound like this with magic, using magic to bind the layers of skin and muscle together, leaving the leg as sound as it had been before the injury. Granted, his grasp of power had been minor compared to the great mages like Kyllian and Quenten, but at least it had worked reliably— and what was more, it probably would be working better after the end of the Storms than the magics of those who were his superiors in power. He had never used ley-line magic, much less node-magic, and the loss of the ley-lines would have made little difference to him. He had been a hedge-wizard, one of those who practiced earth-magics, with a little touch of mind-magic thrown in for good measure, and he had served in the ranks of Wolfstone's Pack, a mer­cenary company recruited by Herald-Captain Kerowyn to aid Valdemar and Rethwellan in the war against Hardorn. His had been a minor role in that Company; using the earth-magics to tell him where the enemy was and how many his numbers were, helping patch up the wounded, helping conceal their own men from the enemy and his mages. Kerowyn's Skybolts had worked with the Pack in the past, and they were one of the few mercenary Companies she felt sure enough of to trust in the treacherous times when Ancar still ruled Hardorn. All that had been explained very care­fully to the members of the Pack, as had the risks and pos­sible rewards, and the Company had voted unanimously to take the contract. After all, it was Captain Kero they were talking about; no one who took the same side as she did ever found himself working for people he would really rather have lost down a mine shaft. And usually no one found himself facing a situation where foreign commanders were spending mere lives like base coin that they couldn’t get rid of fast enough.

Justyn had only just hired on with the Pack, and he’d been eager to see some real fighting, to get right into the thick of things. But he had quickly discovered that the place of a junior mage, a mere hedge-wizard, was going to be back with the support-troops.

And foolish me, that wasn‘t enough excitement for me.

He tried to volunteer every time they called for able bodies, but wisely the commanders kept passing him right over - until they came to the desperate running battles with Ancar’s troops that decimated their own ranks and left the commanders little choice but to put a weapon into the hands of anyone they could spare and hope for the best.

Justyn had been a good enough archer, but his mind-magic had given him an edge; as long as he got his arrow going in the right direction, he could think it into a target. With a bow in his hands, he impressed even the archery-sergeant, and so they kept him with the archers, and he got more than his share of excitement. Until his first battle, he’d thought that actually killing someone might be a very difficult thing, for he would be thinking his arrow into the body of a man, not a straw target - but then when he saw what he faced, there was actually a grim and melancholy sort of pleasure in it. “Hell-puppets” were what the other fighters called Ancar’s line-troopers; conscripted and controlled entirely by blood-magic, Ancar had depleted the countryside for fighters, and had raised the power for the spells that controlled them by killing their families in cold blood. When Justyn killed one of the troopers, it was actually a longed-for release for the poor clod.

Spell-bound and spell-ridden, for most of them that arrow came as a blessing, taking them out of Ancar’s hands and on to a place where their loved ones were probably already waiting. Ancar had not used his people well, to say the least, and Justyn found himself sending prayers along with each arrow.

And as for the officers and mages commanding Ancar’s troops - there was great pleasure in ridding the world of creatures so depraved and sadistic. And perhaps it was wrong for him to feel pleasure in killing even something as vile as Ancar’s toadies, but he couldn’t find it in his heart to regret taking even one of them out of the world.

And fighting was a great deal more exciting than grinding herbs, lighting campfires, and sealing wounds. When the archery-sergeant had halfheartedly given him the option to go back with his old group, he’d declined.

And, to be honest, I felt more like a man. I was actually doing something, and other men, other fighters, praised me for it. How could I go back to work among the cooks and the mule-drivers?

It wasn’t only the members of the Pack who praised him, either. He’d met several of the Valdemarans in the form of some of the Guard when they’d picked up a stray squad or two along the way, the sadly-depleted remnants of a Valdemaran Company that had been holding the line before the Pack came to reinforce them. They thought he was a fine soldier, and said as much as they all shared exhaustion and the rare hot meal between engagements.

Heady stuff for a young fool, I suppose.

“Wonder where the boy went?” Harris said idly, interrupting Justyn’s thoughts. Justyn had the needle clamped between his teeth and couldn’t answer, but the question was rhetorical, for the man answered it himself. “Probably ran off into the woods. My boy’s seen him running off there before. I’m telling you, Justyn, there’s bad blood there, and you’d better do something about it before he gets more than himself into trouble.”

Justyn really wasn’t paying much attention, lost in his own thoughts as he was, and the half-conscious grunt he made in reply seemed to satisfy the man. At the moment, he really didn’t want to think about young Darian, though he was getting an increasing number of complaints from the villagers that he wasn’t keeping the boy under firm enough discipline.

No, his thoughts were in the past, at the moment, drawn there by the task of stitching up something that could have been a wound made on purpose, rather than accidentally.

If I hadn’t been so young, I would have realized from the state of the Valdemaran Guard and the fact that my own commanders were willing to risk a mage in the front lines that something was very, very wrong.

What had gone wrong was that they were all trapped on the wrong side of the enemy lines, and only the fact that they had good commanders had gotten them as far as they had gone. He had learned later that the Guard and Pack Captains had agreed on a last-ditch dash for the Border at a weak spot in the enemy lines, hoping for a combination of surprise and overconfidence to bring them all through. And the ploy worked -