Margaret Weis - Heroes And Fools

They were well out of town before slowing the horses to a trot. Samael peered behind them. “Do you think he’ll follow us?”

“Not for a while,” Daev answered. “When he wakes up, I don’t think he’ll find any reliable witnesses. We’ve got some time.” He considered. “We’ve got more than that.”

“We still have the printing press,” Samael said cheerfully.

“We still have half of our props,” Frenni said.

“We have my notebooks,” Kela said.

Daev felt the purse at his belt. “We have a fair amount of gold.”

Kela hugged him suddenly. “We still have our play and all your wonderful words. I haven’t been able to think of anything else since we started rehearsal.” She held him tight.

Samael glanced sideways at Frenni, who was watching with interest while he sat with an arm around the panting, happy Tasslehoff. “I have some work to do inside.” He lifted the canvas flap. “ Tasslehoff, come. Frenni, you too.”

“But-”

“I’ll need the help.” He pushed the kender backward into the wagon bed. Tasslehoff followed happily, and Samael closed the flap behind them.

“So the thing you loved was the play,” Daev said wonderingly.

“Of course. You wrote such beautiful things about love-you’re so wonderful, Daev. There’s no one like you in the whole world.”

“But I thought-” He shook his head. “Never mind what I thought.”

Kela looked up at him, her eyes shining. “What are you thinking now?”

Daev was thinking that perhaps he’d been exposed to too much of the love potion. He stopped thinking and kissed her.

Much later he had a disturbing thought. “Kela?”

“Yes, love.” She was nestled in his arm, but she was sketching the view ahead in a notebook. She frowned, trying to get the sunset shadows right.

“I’ve been reviewing our recent past.”

In seven lines she added a tree, which was not in the panorama ahead but which balanced the distant mountains nicely. “It’s been exciting.”

“Now I understand how much I love you-mostly because you-

“Accidentally, of course-”

“-made me jealous.” He paused. “Was it accidental?”

She laughed and kissed him.

That was no answer at all, he realized as he kissed her back.

“Frenni’s right,” he muttered to himself as he kissed Kela again. “In some things, thinking is less fun than improvising.”

The kender’s head popped out from under the canvas wagon back. “I heard my name.”

“I expected you to interrupt earlier.”

“I wanted to, but Samael sat on me.”

Samael gave one of his demented-sounding laughs. “You two needed privacy, and I needed something to sit on while I corrected the revised version of the Alchemist’s Handbook.” He looked disapprovingly at Frenni while he showed them the corrections.

Daev was thinking aloud. “There’s a play in this somewhere. . ”

Demial kept the door of the hut latched tight. She kept the heavy curtains drawn, edges overlapping, shutting out the light, the stars, and prying eyes.

No one else in the tiny village of Toral barred their doors and covered their windows. They went about their lives as they had before Ariakan’s army had come, over a year before, almost as they had before the war. It was as if they were denying that anything dark and hurtful would ever come into the small mountain village again.

Demial knew that wasn’t so. After all, she had fought in the war, hadn’t she? It wasn’t really darkness or the memories that she thought to keep out, though. It was nosy neighbors.

She kept the curtains closed all the time, and she dropped the wooden bar securely into place every night, even before she sat down alone to her meal. She checked the door and the windows again every morning before she picked up the staff that stood beside her fireplace. She checked them before she cast a spell with the staff that had belonged to a Nightlord, the gray-robed mage who had been her war leader, mentor, and teacher, who had taken Demial under her wing and out of this village.

As she did each morning, she cleared a space before the cold fireplace and knelt there, with the plain, wooden staff in her hands. No words for the spell came into her mind, as they once had, memorized perfectly. Magic didn’t work the way it had before the gods departed at the end of the Chaos War. The magic should not have worked at all, not without the power of Takhisis, the dark goddess who had ruled the Gray Wizards. It did work, however, and for that Demial was grateful. She didn’t question. She merely accepted the gift that had been left to her.

She asked only what she needed of the staff: warmth and food and sometimes some inconsequential, frivolous thing. Not too often a frivolous thing, because she feared that the staff’s power was limited, that it would not answer her requests indefinitely.

This morning, as every morning since she’d joined Quinn’s quest to reopen the mine, she asked only for a small amount of strength, enough to make her day go well. Asking to be just a little bit stronger than her tall, thin frame allowed was not a frivolous thing.

She clasped the staff across her body, her fingers finding a comfortable grip on it. The thick top was carved in the rough image of a dragon claw and was sharp edged with its hint of rough dragon scales. The roughness smoothed out, however, as the carved whorls began their graceful corkscrew down the staff, narrowing, growing farther apart until there was only smooth wood leading down to the brass-clad tip.

There were no words for the magic now, no memorized spells, no books of ancient runes. There were only her thoughts, her wish for what she wanted the staff to do. The magic did not feel the way it had during the war, when casting a spell had made her hot and electric, and she had basked in the approbation of the Nightlord. At that time she had felt something grow within herself, swell and build and burn until it could no longer be contained. It exploded outward, and the magic was cast into the air.

Now the magic came from without. It was no longer something to which she gave birth. It was something that happened outside her, over which she had no control, though it still made her nerves sing. It was wild and unschooled, and it left her feeling elated and invincible but also terribly sad for that which was gone forever.

This magic, the response to her wish, skittered along her arms and down over her skin. It probed at her muscles and slipped inside, leaving her shivering and shocked as ragged bursts of pain arced along her nerves. For a moment, she slumped over the staff, actually feeling weaker instead of stronger, but the sensation and the pain only lasted a moment. Then warmth coursed through her muscles, melting the weakness like hot water poured into her veins.

She knelt there a moment longer, enjoying the tingle of pleasure the spell left in its wake. Energized, she bounced to her feet, ready for the day. She put the staff back in its place, leaning against the fireplace.

Demial tidied the small room quickly. There wasn’t much work involved. Brush up the crumbs from her breakfast, wash out the plate and leave it to dry on the table, straighten the light blankets on her bed. She flipped the heavy wooden bar up, laughing softly at how easily it moved for her slender, strong fingers.

She was running a little late today. The edge of the morning sun was already visible over the trees, and the village street was empty, except for Lyrae, balancing her baby on one hip and a water bucket on the other.

“Lyrae, good morning!” Demial hurried to catch up, being careful to come up on Lyrae’s right, next to the bucket. Otherwise, she’d find herself with an armful of mewling infant. Lyrae had lost two babies during the war and had never expected to have another. Since this one had been born, she had not been parted from it, not even long enough to walk to the village well and draw water. While the woman couldn’t stand to be out of sight of the baby, she didn’t mind allowing someone else to hold it, a fact that Demial had discovered by unpleasant accident the first time she offered the woman some help with the morning burdens. It was part of Demial’s plan to appear sweet and helpful, but she was only willing to go so far. The slobbering, grasping child was too far.