Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Sorcerer's Widow

“Why does she have us following her, anyway?” Ezak asked. “What good are we going to be when she finds that thing?”

“ I don’t know,” Kel said. “Why don’t you ask her?”

Ezak gave him that familiar frustrated glower that Kel knew meant “You really are an idiot, aren’t you?” Kel had long ago stopped letting it bother him, especially since some time back he had noticed that it often turned out, when Ezak did that, that in fact Kel was right and Ezak was wrong. He had never been enough of an idiot to point that out to Ezak, though.

This time he really didn’t think he was being foolish. In a sudden burst of determination, he ran forward, before Ezak could stop him, and said, “Excuse me, Dorna?”

She looked up from her talisman. “Yes?”

“Why are we here?”

She glanced back at Ezak, then looked Kel in the eye as they continued through the wheat. The two of them were roughly the same height, their eyes on a level, so this did not take any great effort. “Who is ‘we’?”

“Me. Ezak. If you really just wanted us to stay out of trouble you could have chased us off, or turned us over to a magistrate.”

“If I thought that would work , I might have-but you caused this problem, so it’s only fair you help me fix it.”

“You want us to help you with the…escaped thing?”

“Yes.” Her tone left no doubt that she meant it, and would not tolerate a refusal.

“But how? We don’t know…” He stopped in mid-sentence; he had been about to tell her that they didn’t know anything about magic, but at the last second he had remembered that Ezak was pretending to be a sorcerer.

“Don’t know what?”

“What you want us to do to help you,” he finished weakly.

She smiled. “Well, if we do have to catch the fil drepessis by force, it’ll be easier if we can surround it, so it can’t dodge.”

“Oh,” Kel said. That made perfect sense to him.

“Besides,” Dorna added, the smile vanishing, “I don’t think Shepherd’s Well has a magistrate, and there certainly wasn’t one I’d trust. I wasn’t about to leave the two of you back there with someone you might talk into helping you steal a wagonload of magic.”

“Steal?” Kel squeaked.

“Yes, steal. You can’t possibly still think you’re fooling me after you set the fil drepessis off, can you?”

Kel didn’t answer; he simply looked miserable.

Dorna stopped walking and turned to glare at him. “I knew you were frauds when we first met, when Ezak-if that’s really his name-said he and Nabal were apprentices together,” she said. “Not very bright frauds, either-I mean, leaving aside the fact that from the look of it Ezak wasn’t born yet when Nabal was a journeyman, did you really think I didn’t know my husband’s master? Didn’t know all his apprentices?”

“I don’t know,” Kel whispered, eyes cast down.

“Nabal’s master was my father . That’s how we met. You two really should have done your research more carefully.”

“Oh,” Kel said. After a moment, he asked, “His name wasn’t really Jabajag, then?”

“Of course not. I just made up the stupidest name I could think of to see whether Ezak would guess I was onto him. My father’s name was Arnen Azdaram’s son. He didn’t need some silly pompous name like Jabajag the Magnificent; he wasn’t some stupid wizard trying to impress his customers, he was a great sorcerer, an Initiate of the Inner Mysteries!”

She sounded furious, and Kel did not blame her. He and Ezak had made fools of themselves, trying to trick her, and she had every right to be angry with them.

But then she continued, “Nabal was his last and best apprentice, who inherited all my father’s magic, and you two thought you could…could just take it?” Her voice cracked, and Kel looked up to see tears in her eyes. “You wouldn’t know what to do with any of it! You probably can’t tell a tokka from a noog . How dare you?”

“I’m sorry,” Kel said. He realized, a bit belatedly, that she wasn’t really upset with him ; she was grieving. She had seemed so calm, so controlled, since they first met her that he had almost forgotten she had lost her husband just a few days ago. Now her control had slipped a little.

“You’re lucky I didn’t just blow you both to bloody bits,” she said, her voice wild. “I could , you know. I’m no sorcerer, I never apprenticed with my father or anyone else, but I’ve lived my whole life around sorcery. Even when I was a little girl, my father had to teach me which talismans were which so I could help him in his workshop without hurting myself. I know how to use a zir or a shokkun , and the wagon back at the inn is full of them.”

“I don’t know what those are,” Kel said.

“Of course you don’t!” she shouted. “Because you’re a dirty little sneak thief, not a sorcerer or a sorcerer’s wife.”

“Maybe we should just go away and leave you alone,” he said.

“Oh, no! Oh, no, you don’t. You two set the fil drepessis off, and you’re going to help me get it back! It’s worth almost as much as the rest of that wagon put together.”

Kel blinked. “It is?”

“Yes, it is! And while he obviously didn’t know my father, maybe that friend of yours really does know some sorcery, since he woke it up.”

“I…I don’t think so,” Kel said, glancing at Ezak, who was pointedly not listening.

“Well, even if he doesn’t, the fil drepessis responded to him, so I might need him to get it back, so you’re coming with me until we find it.” She was starting to regain control, Kel saw; she wiped the tears from one cheek.

“I don’t understand,” Kel said, “but I’ll try to help.”

She glared at him for a moment, then turned to glower at Ezak, who was standing thirty or forty feet away, trying to look unconcerned, as if he stood out in the middle of a wheat field every day. “What about him?”

“I don’t know,” Kel said. “I can’t tell Ezak what to do.”

“Well, you can tell him that if he doesn’t help, I’ll hunt him down and kill him. I can find him anywhere.”

“I’ll tell him,” Kel promised.

“Then go do it,” Dorna said, with a wave of her hand. “I’ll wait here.”

Kel nodded, then turned and ran to Ezak.

“What happened?” Ezak asked. “What does she want? What did she get so angry about?”

“She wants us to help her find that thing that ran off-and she knows we came to steal from her. Her husband’s master wasn’t named Jabajag. She said that to test you, and you failed.”

“What? But why did she… Why was she testing us?”

“I don’t know,” Kel lied.

“That’s what she’s mad about?”

“That, and her husband dying, and that thing running off.”

Ezak nodded. There was a calculating look in his eye that Kel did not like.

“She says it’s worth almost as much as the rest of the wagon put together, and if you don’t help her get it back she’ll hunt you down and kill you. She isn’t a sorcerer, but her husband taught her how to use some of his magic.” Kel did not want to say anything about Dorna’s father, though he wasn’t sure why not. “She says she may need you to catch it because you were the one who set it off.”

Ezak nodded again, then hesitated. “What is this thing we’re looking for?” he asked. “What does it do? Why is it so valuable?”

“I don’t know,” Kel said. “You could ask her.”

“Did she threaten to kill you? She threatened to kill me .”