Well… trying to eat.
It was a strange meal. Nothing had been cooked. It was a sort of odd hodge-podge of preserves and ancient, crusty bread and a raw onion and half a wheel of cheese with moldy edges.
It wasn’t the worst meal he’d ever had, but it was… well, an odd thing to set out for a visitor. Oliver supposed that they’d eaten earlier in the day and Mrs. Bryerly hadn’t wanted to cook a whole meal for a passing stranger, but it did resemble a bunch of things dragged at random out of the pantry without much thought as to how they went together. Cheese and bread and onion you could just about see, but blueberry preserves? And he had no idea what was supposed to be in the other jar at all, except that it was brown and gritty-looking.
A bit of the cheese wrapped in a bit of the onion and plastered on a hunk of the bread was edible, if awfully dry. Oliver had to ask for water, and there was a long pause and then Mrs. Bryerly jumped up and said, “How silly of me! Of course!” and shooed Mr. Bryerly off to the pump to fetch some.
Even if his throat hadn’t been dry from the bread, Oliver doubted he could get a word in edgewise. Mrs. Bryerly was as tall as her husband and much wider, but she still managed to flutter somehow, in a manner that might have been girlish once but now resembled an injured goose trying to escape the farmer. And she talked non-stop. Oliver had barely managed to tell his story, and only in the vaguest terms before she ran over the top of it with boundless sympathy.
“So hard!” she said, for the third or fourth time. “To send a boy all that way!” She dabbed at her eyes. “So cruel! So inhuman of them!”
Oliver stared at the cheese, feeling strange.
Here was somebody ready to agree with him on every count, and instead he had a strong desire to defend the villagers, because… well… they weren’t inhuman. Not at all. Vezzo was a good man and always brought around a cut of beef after slaughter, and Matty had lost two children and had a fragile sweetness that would shiver into tears if you said an unkind word to her.
“Such unfeeling brutes! Oh, you poor boy!”
Sure, they’d done a pretty mean thing, putting him on the road like that, Harold had certainly been awful about it, but… well… he was the wizard. Somebody had to bring rain. And they’d been scared. Scared people did cruel and stupid things, sometimes, but Vezzo and Matty had still done their best for him.
“Oh, if I could only give them a piece of my mind! I would!”
Oliver found himself missing his mother. Not that you could admit that, not if you were a twelve-year-old boy—you might as well just give up completely at that point. But her no-nonsense briskness would have been a welcome counterpoint to Mrs. Brylery’s fluttering. He poked at the brown preserves with a knife, wondering what they were and how they would taste on bread.
“Still thy tongue, wife,” rumbled the old farmer.
“Oh, dear,” she said, ignoring her husband, “oh, dear. It seems so hard! If only he could stay with us!”
Oliver opened his mouth to say that it was fine, he was the wizard and this was his job, but closed it again instead.
The farmer was watching him, and something—his archaic speech or the deep hollows under his eyes or something else Oliver couldn’t quite put a name to—made the young wizard feel desperately uncomfortable.
It wasn’t a rational thing, it was certainly rude, but he suddenly wanted nothing so much as to bolt from the room, away from the fluttering of Mrs. Bryerly and the strange, glittering eyes of her husband.
“If—if I could just stay in your hayloft tonight—” he stammered. It seemed this dreadful dinner could not be over soon enough. He bit into the preserve-covered bread. Fig. He hated figs. He tried to swallow, nearly choked, and had to take several large gulps of water.
“Oh, no! Oh, poor boy, you must stay here with us. We’ll make you up a bed by the fire, all nice and snug.” She beamed at him, ignoring the fact that there was no fire, that the hearth was cold and cobwebbed and clearly had not held a fire for a long time. The only light came from the windows, which had faded until he was very nearly eating in the dark.
“No! Err—” Oliver didn’t question why or how, but he knew he didn’t want to stay in the house. “Ah—I can’t. It’s my familiar. He—err—he’s not very well housebroken.”
He expected a tail smack for that, but the armadillo was sitting bolt upright at his feet and didn’t so much as flick his ears.
Mrs. Bryerly’s nose wrinkled. “Oh,” she said, in a rather less fluttery voice. “Oh, I see.”
There was an awkward silence. Mrs. Bryerly’s hands flexed, twisting the edges of her apron. She also had enormous knuckles, like red walnuts.
“I’ll see thee to the barn, then,” said Mr. Bryerly, and rose. Oliver jumped up and followed.
The farmyard’s shadows lay deep and indistinct in the twilight. Oliver followed the stoop-shouldered form of the farmer across the yard. The ground had been churned to muck by years of hooves, and then dried into an irregular, treacherous landscape. Shrubs shielded the house in leafy darkness.
“Mind thee don’t scare the cows,” said the farmer, lifting the heavy wooden bar from the barn door. He held the door open. “Hayloft’s down at the end.”
“Er. Thank you,” said Oliver, stepping into the barn. He glanced around. It was very dark, except for a few chinks where a little light slipped in. “Ah, is there a—”
Creeaaaaaak.
The door shut behind him. Darkness slapped him across the face.
“Err—”
He heard the thump as the bar was ground into place.
Oliver did not like this at all.
“Armadillo, can you—”
The tail smacked across his shins. He fell silent.
A minute or two dragged by. Oliver heard the grunt of something alive from farther down the barn.
“Arma—”
The armadillo gave him another warning tail flick.
Oliver waited. Something big was breathing in the dark.
Then he heard it, without quite realizing what he’d been listening for—the sound of the farmer’s footsteps, going away.
Mr. Bryerly had stood outside the barn for several minutes, not moving.
That was… well, it was awfully creepy, anyway.
“He’s gone,” said the armadillo quietly, after the footsteps had faded. “We’re locked in, though.”
“Well,” said Oliver doubtfully, “I suppose you still have to lock the barn so the cows don’t get out…”
“There are no cows,” said the armadillo grimly. “There’s two pigs, and they’re scared to death.”
“We’re strangers.”
“They’re not scared of us.”
“Oh.”
Silence fell. Oliver waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He could hear the armadillo scuffling around.
“Why would he lie about the cows?”
He half expected the armadillo to snap at him, but instead, he came over, and Oliver felt the small, scaled weight lean against his legs. “That’s an interesting question,” said the armadillo. “I don’t think he meant to, actually. I think he either forgot there were no more cows, or it was something he thought he was supposed to say, without quite knowing what it meant.”