He exhaled. He knew he couldn’t have been holding his breath the whole time, but it felt like it.
He heard the footsteps fade, the cottage door slam. Muffled voices came from inside, then fell silent.
And that was all.
Oliver reached up and yanked the twig out of his ear.
He had to wait to cross the fields for at least a few more minutes. He was getting very cold, but he couldn’t make too much noise. He had to wait until he was sure the Bryerlys weren’t going to come back out looking.
As unobtrusively as possible, he rearranged his pack so the books weren’t jabbing into his back. Every creak of cloth and leather sounded like cannon fire in his ears, but no one came running.
He had to wait.
He really had to wait.
He wondered how long he’d been waiting.
Fear was bad, fear and boredom together were practically unbearable. He tried counting breaths, heartbeats, lilac leaves, and stars. He wondered if it had possibly been long enough. It felt like hours had passed, but the moon hadn’t budged at all in the sky.
Something poked his thigh. Oliver choked back a scream, but a thin squeak emerged anyway.
It was the armadillo. His familiar froze, ears swiveling, but nothing stirred in the cottage.
“You made it…” breathed Oliver, so quietly that he could barely hear himself.
The armadillo nodded. He looked around, then grabbed Oliver’s pant leg in his teeth and tugged. Oliver leaned forward, and the armadillo dropped the fabric and jerked his head towards the road.
Oliver nodded. I may be a very minor mage, but at least I’m quicker on the uptake than the pig.
He crawled out from under the lilac, raced across the yard, and over the stone fence. The armadillo came after, scrambling up and over the wall and down onto Oliver’s back like a stepladder.
They hurried along the wall, down to the barn again. On the far side, with the barn between them and the house, Oliver paused.
“Come on!” whispered the armadillo. “If they really are farmers, they’ll be up at dawn!”
“They’re not farmers,” said Oliver. “They’re ghuls. I don’t think they’ll be up at dawn.”
The armadillo paused. “Ghuls?” He scuffed his paws in the dirt. “I didn’t think—not here—are you sure?”
“They talked about eating me, and about mouthfuls of wormwood.”
“Ghuls. Well. That explains it. They’ll eat livestock if they can’t get humans. Let’s move.”
Oliver felt very exposed as they left the shadow of the barn. The barn would only block the farmhouse’s view for a few hundred yards. Long before they reached the road, they were hurrying along under the baleful gaze of those dark windows. If the ghuls looked out, they would be seen.
The skin on his back crawled.
“We’re fine,” said the armadillo quietly. “No one’s coming.”
“Sorry,” said Oliver. “I just—”
“I know.” The armadillo paused in its trotting long enough to push reassuringly against his calf. “You did good. Hiding by the house was a good idea—they checked the barn pretty closely. When they didn’t see you on the road, the man thought you’d gone invisible.”
“I wish.” Invisibility was an immensely difficult spell. Oliver couldn’t read half the words of the introduction, let alone the spell itself. “Did the pigs get away?”
“I think so. The boar took a chunk out of Mr. Bryerly’s leg. Assuming it formerly was someone named Mr. Bryerly, and not some random ghul pretending to be him.”
“I think it probably was just pretending,” said Oliver. He looked over his shoulder again. “He couldn’t remember the cows. I think any farmer would remember how many cows he had, even if he’d become a ghul.”
“Hmm,” said the armadillo. “You’re probably right.”
Oliver swallowed. “What do you think happened to the real Bryerlys, then?”
“Best not to think about it. Here’s the ditch.”
They reached the drainage ditch at the road. Oliver slid down the weed-choked slope. There hadn’t been any rain for months, but the bottom was still thick with green stems.
He reached the bottom and sat down hard.
“We should keep going,” the armadillo said.
“I know,” said Oliver thickly. “I’m sorry. I’ll get up in just a minute.”
“Mmm.” The armadillo came and sat on his feet.
It was being safe, even in the dubious safety of the drainage ditch. It didn’t make sense, but now that he wasn’t in so much danger, all the fear came plunging out of the back of his brain and ran away with him. His breath caught in his throat.
Oliver couldn’t burst into tears—not with the ghuls so close, even if they couldn’t hear him—but he felt a few tears slide, thin and hot, down his face. He felt very much like a child, not at all like someone who had braved a pair of bloodthirsty ghuls.
He’d been so sure, back in the village, that he could do this. He’d been worried about bringing extra socks, as if that mattered at all in a world with man-eating monsters in it.
He’d been so annoyed at the villagers, not for making him go, but for not being properly grateful about the fact that he was planning to do it anyway.
I can’t do this, he thought bleakly. That’s why Mom wouldn’t have let me go. She’d have known what it would be like.
He was barely two days down the road. How could he possibly get to the Rainblades? He was too minor a mage. The armadillo had saved him, and the pigs, but next time there might not be pigs, or the enemy might not be so foolish.
He wrapped his arms around his head and wished for his mother, which only made him feel younger and more hopeless. A real wizard wouldn’t be huddled in a ditch wishing for his mother.
(In this, at least, Oliver was dead wrong—many wizards over the ages, some of them very major mages indeed, have found themselves curled in ditches and wishing desperately for their mothers. But they tend not to mention these things in their memoirs.)
The armadillo leaned against him. Oliver reached out blindly and rubbed his familiar behind the ears. The gesture was so normal, so much like what they did every day, that it helped steady him. His next breath didn’t catch quite so hard in his throat, and he scrubbed at his face with his sleeve and wiped tears and blood away.
Maybe he couldn’t go all the way to the Rainblades. Maybe it was a fool’s journey after all.
But now, at this moment, he could get up.
“Okay,” he said, crawling to his feet. “Okay, let’s go.”
The next few hours were very strange.
The drainage ditch was about five feet deep and the weeds that grew up the sides rose another ten inches in the air, so Oliver could walk along the bottom without ducking down to stay out of sight. The moon was sinking but the air had the strange brightness of a midsummer night, and the bottom of the ditch was thick but not overgrown, full of horsetails and yarrow rather than brambles. So, his footing was not difficult to find—he only had to keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep his eyes on the small form of the armadillo trotting ahead of him. Sometimes his familiar was lost in the shadows, but the grass stems moved around him, a white froth of flowers churning in his wake, and Oliver was able to keep pace.