That was not particularly comforting, but at least they weren’t traveling completely blind. Oliver took a last drink from the water bottle and stood up, dusting himself off. The pale dust of the road clung to his trousers in cream-colored streaks.
“Did he tell you what to do when you got to the Rainblades?” asked the armadillo.
“Um.” Oliver rubbed the back of his neck. It felt gritty. “Not exactly. It’s where the Cloud Herders live though, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“That’s what everyone says.”
“Well, far be it from me to argue with everyone.”
Oliver knew the armadillo was being sarcastic, but he said, “I tried arguing with everyone. You saw how that went.”
The armadillo muttered under his breath.
They kept walking.
Well, on the bright side, at least if Mom thinks they forced me to leave, she’ll be mad at Harold and not me.
This was a very cheering thought. He was a bit frightened of the journey and (if he was being honest) more than a little frightened of what might lie at the journey’s end, but both these things paled in comparison to fear of his mother’s wrath.
If she’d found out that he had snuck off to bring rain back… oh, hell. She might let him out of the house before he died of old age. If he was lucky.
But now he got to come back as the conquering hero. His mom would be glad to see him and wouldn’t yell at him for leaving. Harold was going to take the heat, not him.
Which he deserves. I’m pretty sure he tried to kick my familiar once when he thought I wasn’t looking.
Despite the heat, Oliver began to whistle.
I wonder what the Cloud Herders will look like.
The line of paw prints behind the armadillo began to weave back and forth across the road. Oliver reached down and scooped his familiar up in his arms.
“I can still walk,” said the armadillo.
Oliver didn’t say anything. Armadillos have their dignity. After a few moments, his familiar rested his armored cheek against Oliver’s own and sighed.
“Master?” asked a very young Oliver, cradling the faintly damp warmth of a very young armadillo in his hands. “Can I ask a question?”
“You can always ask,” said the old wizard. “You should always ask, in fact. Questions make the world go round! Whether I’ve got an answer is another matter.” He was having one of his good days, and his eyes were hard chips of sapphire in his wrinkled face.
The baby armadillo rolled over and snuffled at Oliver’s fingers. Oliver exhaled in sheer wonder. He had known the young armadillo for less than two hours and loved him fiercely. Sure, he was a very, very young armadillo, and somewhat unfinished looking, but he was already cuter and more entertaining than the baby next door.
The baby next door would have been radically improved with claws and a snout, as far as Oliver was concerned.
“Why do we have familiars?”
“Do you not want one, then?” asked the old mage. “Bit late, I’d say.”
“No!” Oliver clutched the armadillo to his chest, afraid that someone might snatch him away. The armadillo cheeped in protest, then dug with almost nonexistent claws at Oliver’s shirt, seeking the protection of someplace dark and warm. “I want him! I’m not saying I don’t! But why do we have familiars? What do they do?”
The old wizard grinned. The baby armadillo discovered the neck of Oliver’s shirt and began burrowing determinedly down inside. Oliver felt him clamber down and settle into the hammock where Oliver’s shirt was tucked into his pants.
He hoped that the armadillo wouldn’t pee on him again. There were four armadillo kits in the litter, three of which were nursing quietly on their mother, the old wizard’s familiar. The fourth had looked up when the door opened, let out a cheep, then wobbled determinedly across the floor to Oliver and peed on his foot.
“Well.” The old man leaned down and petted his own elderly familiar, who was laying on her side, looking like a small, scaly footrest. “Familiars are important. They remember things we forget. Some of them—not armadillos, usually, but other kinds—act as your hands. Someday you’ll be able move yourself into your familiar’s mind and watch through their eyes.” He stroked the mother armadillo’s ears, and she snorted with pleasure.
“Mostly, though, they remind us that we’re wizards…”
The armadillo did not have a name, or rather, he had only one name, and that was enough.
His true name was Eglamarck. Oliver knew better than to bandy that name about in public, or indeed, any time when it wasn’t strictly magically necessary. A familiar’s true name was the key to what made it a familiar, instead of just another armadillo nosing around in the dry lands and licking up insects. It was not to be used lightly.
Since he had a name for the important things, the armadillo did not see the point of having another one merely for the convenience of his wizard. He was not a dog. He wasn’t going to get saddled with a name like “Spot” or “Lucky” just so that he could be trotting back and forth at all hours when the name got called. If Oliver needed him, he’d be around.
Oliver’s predecessor, who had Eglamarck’s mother as a familiar for nearly seventy years, had told Oliver that it wasn’t worth fighting over. For the few years that he had taught Oliver, his armadillo had been “my armadillo” and Oliver’s had been “your young armadillo there.” They’d managed.
Oliver had resigned himself to having a familiar who was effectively named “Armadillo.”
His predecessor, that wonderful white-bearded old man, had told Oliver a lot of things. Unfortunately, he was nearly ninety by the time he’d taken on his last apprentice, and his mind wandered badly. He’d done his best, but some things he told Oliver four or five times, and many things he hadn’t told him at all.
But he’d given the young mage all the books he had, and a small, scaly bundle of infant armadillo, and from those things, Oliver had learned enough that the townspeople had taken him as the new mage.
It hadn’t been too bad, truth be told. People came to him when they had a magical problem—gremlins in the mill works or fairy lights in the pasture, potatoes that spoke in tongues when you baked them, or roosters that laid eggs that hatched into snakes and toads. Minor things.
Oliver would listen to the problem, or gingerly accept a handful of prophetic potatoes, nod gravely to the client, and go into his room in the attic. There he would pore through his books—usually the Encyclopedia of Common Magic—until he found what might possibly be causing it, and then, with trial and error and 101 Esoteric Home Remedies, he would go out and try to fix it.
Either because he was so young, or because the old mage had been old for such a long time and they had gotten used to a fairly low standard in wizardry, the villagers were fairly understanding of his mistakes. It helped that he didn’t charge until he was a hundred percent sure that the problem was gone, which usually meant waiting for at least a week and several follow-up visits. And he never charged very much anyway, which probably helped even more.
By the time he was eleven, Oliver was pretty good at identifying problems, if not always solving them. He could tell a possessed potato from one that had merely been planted in a patch of bad ground—magic lay under the dirt sometimes, like groundwater, and root vegetables were prone to draw it up—and he knew when to get out fire and salt and hemlock to drive out the wicked spirit at the heart of the spud, and when to simply advise the farmer to plant kale there in the future. He knew six charms to banish fairy lights (which one to use depended on the weather and it generally took at least two tries before he’d hit the correct one), and he could tell when a gremlin infestation was bad enough to merit a charm bundle made out of anise and quail bones, and when to just send in the cats.