It failed to materialize. Stupid book.
What good was such a short article? Why didn’t it tell you what you really needed to know, like how far a ghul would follow you, or if they were attached to their home territories? The entry for unicorns was twice as long, and what good was that to anybody? Unicorns were cowards and only dangerous in packs. Every now and then you’d get one hanging around the village trash heap, but it’d run off if you yelled at it. But there it was, six whole paragraphs, and meanwhile he knew no more about ghuls than he had an hour ago.
Oliver sighed. They had come to another bridge. The armadillo scrambled down the embankment to the water and Oliver tucked the book under his arm and followed him.
The water was warm and dusty, but better than nothing. Oliver filled his waterskin again.
This time, rather than going over the useless entry for ghuls, Oliver looked for spells. What he’d really needed last night was to be invisible, even if just for a short time. There was a spell for that. It was complicated, but he had nothing else to do right now.
“Hexus,” he read, under his breath. “Hexus el-ashin invisio…”
“What’s that?” asked the armadillo sharply, turning his head. “What are you up to?”
“I’m trying to turn invisible,” said Oliver. “If I could get the invisibility spell to work, I wouldn’t have had to run from the ghuls.”
The armadillo snorted. “You can’t cast that one.”
“How do you know?” asked Oliver. “I bet I could. It’s fern spores and magic words, which is pretty straightforward. I can get the spores in the forest. Then I’ll have them, and if the ghuls show up—”
The armadillo shook his head. “The old mage couldn’t cast that one at the height of his powers. You’re wasting your time.”
Oliver gritted his teeth. “I can learn the words.”
“You can learn the words,” agreed the armadillo, “but you don’t have the power. Not yet. Maybe when you’re older.”
Maybe when you’re older. Oliver fumed silently. He wished people would make up their minds. He was too young to learn powerful spells, but apparently, he was old enough to send off on his own to bring rain back from the other side of a cursed forest.
“It’s not fair,” he growled.
“What is?” asked the armadillo. “Look, there are other spells. They’re smaller, but they might be useful. You could find one to cover your smell. Or to make yourself look like a tree, say.”
“Oh, that’s useful,” muttered Oliver. “I’m running away from the ghuls, and hey, presto, a sudden tree in the road! They’d have to be pretty dense not to see through that.”
The armadillo snorted.
“I’m tired of being a minor mage,” said Oliver.
“Minor isn’t useless,” said the armadillo. “Remember the Jenson kid?”
Oliver bit his lip. The Jenson kid had been seven years old and had been trying to climb trees. He’d picked one covered in poison ivy and hadn’t realized it. He’d rubbed his eyes and wiped his nose and when the rash came on, both eyes swelled shut and his nose closed and all he could do was lie in bed and sob miserably, while his mother held his hands down to keep him tearing his own skin off.
Fixing poison ivy wasn’t hard. Oliver had come right away and done the cantrip with the herbs. He’d done it twice, just in case, and sure enough, in under an hour, the swelling went down and the kid could open his eyes and breathe again. His mother had thrown her arms around Oliver and nearly cried. Mrs. Jenson was a tall, raw-boned woman, and she’d put her face down on top of Oliver’s head and kissed his hair. Oliver had been both touched by her gratitude and desperately uncomfortable. That much emotion made him feel like he was seeing inside people’s guts, and he didn’t want to know so much about them.
Obviously, he was glad that he’d been able to help with such a small thing. He fixed poison ivy all the time, and he didn’t ever charge for it because he wouldn’t have wished that kind of itching on his worst enemy. But he’d much rather have been able to turn invisible or throw lightning around. Something impressive that didn’t leave people hugging you and crying.
They kept walking. Oliver tried to fix the invisibility spell words into his memory anyway. The armadillo was younger than he was, and he wasn’t right about everything.
5
It did not take as long to reach Harkhound Forest as the armadillo had thought. Perhaps his mother had remembered the journey incorrectly, or perhaps the forest had crept toward them. They were only four days out from the village when a band of darker blue appeared on the horizon.
The armadillo lifted a paw and pointed. “Harkhound,” he said.
“It looks big,” said Oliver, eyeing the sweep of dark blue. It went as far as he could see to the south, and most of the way to the north. The white peaks of the Rainblades, which were visible from the village on a clear day, seemed to float over the backs of the trees.
“It is big.” The armadillo started walking again. “I’ll be glad to get there,” he said over his shoulder.
“Will there be food, do you think?” They were down to extremely scant rations. Oliver had been scavenging what he could from the ditches, but the drought had left food scarce. He’d been chewing on sorrel awhile, which had a pleasantly sour taste, but you’d get sick if you ate too much.
He’d been hoping that there would be farmhouses, but there weren’t—or more accurately, there were, but they were empty.
It was unsettling. The ground was dry and cracked, but that was only from this summer, wasn’t it? It shouldn’t have been enough for people to leave. He knew farmers, he’d grown up with them, and they felt about the land the way wizards felt about their familiars. It was the land that told them what they were.
The fields lay fallow. There was a short stubble of weeds in places, and in others the ground was bare. The farmhouses looked like hollowed out jack-o-lanterns, with the windows and doors gaping open.
“Did something happen here?” asked Oliver. “We’d have heard about a plague, wouldn’t we?”
“Would we?” asked the armadillo. He paused and sat back on his haunches. “Nobody goes to the Rainblades and Harkhound, do they?”
Oliver thought about it. Everyone said that the Rainblades were strange and dangerous, which was why sending a mage was such a big deal. And now that he thought about it, everyone from Loosestrife went north and east and south, but not very far west. There was the little belt of orchard and woods and then some farm fields, but he couldn’t think of many farmers that lived more than a day’s travel to the west.
“I guess not,” he admitted. He felt annoyed with himself for never noticing before, and never asking what lay to the west. He’d just assumed that it would be farmland of the sort he understood.
That’s such a little kid thing to think. I should have done better. I’m a mage, even if I’m only twelve.
They kept walking and passed more buildings. There was something that might have been a barn, but it had collapsed. Some of the houses looked as if they had been abandoned for a long, long time.