Home > Minor Mage

Minor Mage
Author: T. Kingfisher

1

 

 

Oliver was a very minor mage. His familiar reminded him of this several times a day.

He only knew three spells, and one of them was to control his allergy to armadillo dander. His attempts to summon elementals resulted in nosebleeds, and there is nothing more embarrassing than having your elemental leave the circle to get you a tissue, pat you comfortingly, and then disappear in a puff of magic. The armadillo had about wet himself laughing.

He was a very minor mage.

Unfortunately, he was all they had.

 

 

They stood on the edge of the town: the boy, the armadillo, and the crowd. No one was moving. If an artist had painted the scene, it would have been Still Life with Armadillo, or perhaps Mob Scene, Interrupted.

Oliver looked at the crowd. Up until about an hour ago, they had been his friends and neighbors. Now they were familiar strangers, trying to look somber and serious and mostly just looking scared and a little uncertain. This was a bad thing to see on the faces of so many adults.

“Well go on, get moving,” said Harold, the miller. “Sooner you get started, sooner we’ll get rain.”

He made a little shooing gesture, as if Oliver was a chicken that had wandered into the yard.

Harold the miller was not a handsome man, and less so when he was red with embarrassed anger, so Oliver turned and looked at the road instead.

It was an expanse of baked dust the color of bone. It wound between plowed fields for a little way, accompanied by drainage ditches full of nettles, then disappeared in the distance, over a hill and into the back of beyond. Far off in the distance, the bulk of the Rainblade Mountains were a dark blue shadow against the sky.

Oliver knew the farms that the road ran past, at least as far as the hill. After that, there were fallow fields, and after those… nothing.

Well, presumably there was something, but nobody went that way. It wasn’t forbidden, it wasn’t dangerous, it was just rather pointless. There wasn’t anything there worth visiting.

The crowd of townspeople shifted nervously. Someone muttered something toward the back and was immediately hushed.

There is something about a group of people that is less than the sum of its parts. Few individuals in the crowd would have dreamed of putting a kid—even a kid who was also a mage—onto the road and telling him to bring back rain. And yet when they were all together, somehow the conversation had gotten more and more heated and more and more stern and what had been a vague idea became an order, and suddenly something slightly less than a mob but rather more than a friendly gathering of neighbors had arrived at the doorstep of Oliver’s house. He’d been afraid the miller was going to drag him out of the house by the collar.

This was not something he’d ever worried about before, and he didn’t much like it.

The most obnoxious thing about it all was that he’d been planning on going anyway.

You didn’t need to be a wizard to know the crops did need rain. Even the fields near the road, watered painstakingly by hand, had a parched look. The leaves drooped limply, as if the plants were panting in the heat.

You didn’t need to be a wizard to realize that if the rains didn’t come, it was going to get very bad in the village.

But you also definitely didn’t need to be a wizard to know that Oliver’s mom was not going to let her twelve-year-old son hare off to the distant Rainblade Mountains, past bandits and monsters and lord knew what else.

His mother was a retired mercenary, but not so retired that she wouldn’t have kicked and abused Harold twice around the village square for even suggesting such a thing. But she had gone up to Wishinghall to help his sister with the new baby, and she’d left him, because the village needed their mage, even a very minor one.

Oliver had started packing his bag almost as soon as she was out the door. He just hadn’t expected to have the entire village turn up on the doorstep before he had a chance to leave.

The funny thing—not amusing, exactly, but funny nonetheless—was that he’d been entirely willing to risk his life for the village, and now here they were, demanding that he do something he’d been planning to do anyway, and apparently willing to throw him out on his ear if he didn’t.

He’d be lying if he said that this hadn’t soured his enthusiasm a bit.

“Err,” said Vezzo. He had a farmer’s tanned skin and broad, scarred hands. “Look, Oliver, it’s not that we’re happy about this, but you’re the town wizard, and it’s your job to bring the rains. Your predecessor made the journey to the Rainblades when he was young.”

“How young?” asked Oliver, who had a pretty good idea of the answer.

“Err,” said Vezzo, and appeared to find something fascinating stuck under his fingernails.

“Twenty-five,” said the armadillo, who had been quiet up until now. “My mother was his familiar at the time.”

“None of that,” said Harold loudly, determinedly not looking at the armadillo. He’d never seemed to like Oliver’s familiar, which was a major reason that Oliver didn’t like him. “None of that now, boy. You’re a wizard, you’ll be just fine. And we’re not forcing you. You’re the wizard. It’s your job to go.”

And I was going! thought Oliver. I was trying to decide whether to pack three pairs of socks or only two, and then I was going to feed the chickens and head over to Vezzo’s farm so that he could tell Mom where I’d gone!

Vezzo stood beside Harold. The farmer looked like an extremely uncomfortable ox, but like an ox, he was blocking Oliver’s path.

“It is your job, Oliver,” he said quietly. “I’m not happy about it, but we’ve got to have rain.”

There were lines between the farmer’s eyes, and deeper ones running in furrows from the sides of his nose, as deep as if he’d plowed them.

“You could have asked, you know,” said Oliver a bit sadly. He had always liked Vezzo.

“It was supposed to just be asking,” said the farmer. He leveled a bitter look at Harold. “Somehow it turned into more than that.”

Oliver sighed. “It’s fine,” he said. “Just—you tell Mom, okay? Not him.” He flapped a hand at Harold. “He’ll come up with some stupid story about it to try to save his skin. You tell her how it really happened.”

“Now see here—” Harold began, eyes nearly popping with outrage.

“I will,” said Vezzo, ignoring the miller. “I promise, I’ll tell her exactly what happened. She’ll be awfully mad, but I’ll tell her anyway. You have my word.”

He held out a hand.

Oliver shook. Vezzo’s hand was almost twice the size of his and heavily callused.

The crowd, collectively, seemed to sigh. The armadillo also sighed and leaned his small armored body against Oliver’s shins.

“Right, then,” said Harold the miller. “If that’s all settled—”

“Just stop,” said Oliver. “Just… stop talking, okay? I’m going, all right? I was going to go anyway.”

The miller might have had something to say about that, but Vezzo put a big hand on the man’s shoulder and he fell silent. That was something of a relief.

Oliver looked over the crowd. None of them said anything. He saw his mother’s friend, Matty, who was always baking, and who had brought him a meat pie yesterday for dinner, and even she wouldn’t look at him. She was twisting her apron in her hands, and she looked like she was about to cry.

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