Most of the charms and recipes required herbs, so he’d learned a certain amount of herb-lore, but it was tricky stuff, and he had to rely heavily on the armadillo’s sense of smell. His mother, who was very proud of her son the wizard, planted the more common plants in her herb garden, or grew them in pots on the windowsill. But some things only grew out in the woods, or along streams, and he’d have to go looking. When roosters got a touch of cockatrice fever, and started laying eggs full of snakes, for example—you needed wood sorrel for that, and trout lily. That involved a hike through the woods with the armadillo trotting at his heels.
Oliver was stocky and tended to be on the plump side, but scrambling around in the forest looking for obscure plants, his only guides a book of black-and-white drawings and a snide armadillo, had kept him reasonably fit.
Magic was hard and tricky and demanding, and it went wrong more often than not, but it was interesting, too, like solving a constantly changing jigsaw puzzle.
It was a pretty good job, all things considered. He hadn’t learned many real spells—three in all, and the one to protect against armadillo dander probably didn’t count—but he knew plenty of recipes for charms, and the villagers paid in eggs and cheese and butter and bacon, sometimes more than he and his mother and sister could eat. They had the best fed pigs in the village. The armadillo had eaten so much that he was reduced to a slow waddle and insisted on being carried everywhere, until Oliver put him on a strict diet of only one egg a week, and no more cream.
This worked until his sister had gotten married and moved away and now the eggs were starting to pile up again. But it would have been unforgivably rude not to accept food when people were determined to give you something, so his mother had been pickling eggs by the gallon. Some days it seemed like half the plants he gathered went to season pickles.
It was the plants that had alerted him to the drought.
He was used to plants by now. He knew the difference between the shapes of leaves, whether they were pointed like a spear or had fingers like a hand, whether they were fuzzy or waxy or smooth.
He knew that none of those leaves should be turning brown and curling up at the edges.
He knew that the bluebells should be sending up leaves like cabbages at the end of March, not the beginning of February. It got warm too early and the plants came up too early and then it got hotter and hotter and they died early, too. The trees budded out a month before the spring festival and their roots began to drink the wells dry.
Oliver knew that the streams should be choked with livercress right now, and that the edge of the forest should be thick and green, instead of brown and dry.
Instead, the streams were mostly mud and the livercress had vanished months ago, which meant that he was using dried leaves instead of fresh, and it worried him.
It worried him more when he walked through the marsh and found it dry and crackling underfoot, the grasses as stiff yellow as broom bristles. It looked like late fall instead of summer.
It was bad. Trees that he had known when he was barely old enough to toddle were losing leaves like they were about to die.
That was why, when the mob had showed up, they’d found him with his bag already packed.
Somebody had to bring back the rains, and apparently it was going to have to be him.
Apple trees lined the edge of the road as they passed the orchard. The few apples that hung from the branches were small and tired looking. The drought hadn’t done them any good, either.
They weren’t ripe yet, but Oliver hadn’t had any breakfast. The likeliest one of the lot was far out of reach.
He stopped, leaning against the fence rail. The armadillo took advantage of the halt to wash his face like a scaly cat.
“Pushme, pullme…” whispered Oliver under his breath, and concentrated hard on the stem of the apple.
Doing a spell was a hard thing to explain. It was like thinking hard about something, but sort of sideways. You concentrated, and you said the word, and then you pushed with the inside of your head, really hard—
The stem snapped, and the apple slipped through the leaves, bounced off a branch, and landed at the edge of the road. Oliver pounced on it.
He’d learned the pushme pullme spell the previous spring, when Harold the miller had a gremlin infestation in the mill and hadn’t bothered to call him out until they started breaking the machinery. It was dangerous to have gremlins in the mill—if they got caught in the gears and ground up with the flour, the bread had a tendency to explode, or bleed, or turn into a flock of starlings and go screaming around the kitchen. But Harold had always been cheap, and he didn’t care if people complained.
When faced with a potential repair bill, though, he’d called Oliver out quick enough, but by then, quail bones and anise and rue wasn’t nearly enough. They’d left little packages of mischief meshed in all the gears and cogs, and Oliver had to go over the entire millworks, popping out each mischief and catching it in a clean linen handkerchief. He’d had a huge bag full of the stuff by the end, like a sack full of smoke and nettles. It had taken days, while Harold breathed down his neck and lost money, and Oliver had mastered the pushme pullme spell in desperation, to knock the mischief loose, or pull it close enough to grab.
It wasn’t nearly as useful as having an invisible hand—he’d read about such a spell but couldn’t get it to work—but it was about as good as having an invisible foot. You could close doors with it, or prop them open, pull things close or kick them away. If he was very patient, he could pick up fairly small things, with almost exactly the same painful mental effort as trying to pick something up with his toes.
It was also an excellent spell for picking apples he couldn’t reach. He took a bite. It was sour but refreshing.
“You’ll regret eating that later,” said the armadillo.
“I know,” said Oliver, taking another bite.
3
Oliver slept that night under a tree, which was horribly uncomfortable. He had a jacket for a blanket, and his backpack for a pillow. As pillows went, it did not compare well to his goosedown pillow at home. It was lumpy and buckled and the corner of 101 Esoteric Home Recipes dug unpleasantly into his cheek.
The shortcomings of the pillow, however, were nothing compared to using the ground as a mattress. Things poked him and prodded him, the ground was hard and rocky, and the only crop to survive the drought seemed to be the bumper crop of insects.
His discomfort was made worse by the queasy, cramping feeling from eating not one but three sour apples. They had been delicious at the time, but it wasn’t a good thing to eat on an empty stomach. He hadn’t even bothered making dinner. (The armadillo hadn’t said I told you so, which only made Oliver that much more aware that his familiar had indeed told him so.)
“Quit squirming,” grumbled the armadillo.
“There’s rocks on the ground,” muttered Oliver.
“It’s the ground. It’s made of rocks.”
Not for the first time, Oliver wondered if speech was really a good idea in a familiar.
After a minor eternity of something that wasn’t quite as satisfying as sleep, but was at least a little like it, the sun came up. Oliver got up with it. He drank from the drainage ditch beside the road. There was a thin film of dust on top of the water. Insects clung to the dry plant stems and sang back and forth across the armadillo’s head.