“What kind of farmer forgets about his cows?” asked Oliver, baffled.
“One that isn’t really a farmer, I expect.”
This was not comforting.
“Do you think they’re imposters?”
“I think they smell sweet,” said the armadillo unexpectedly.
“Huh?”
“Sweet.” The armadillo’s tail flicked like a nervous cat. “Like maple syrup and ant eggs, both of them.”
Oliver considered asking when the armadillo had sampled maple syrup and ant eggs and decided that perhaps he didn’t want to know.
“Not a normal smell, anyway,” the familiar continued. “Maybe not a human smell.”
This was even less comforting.
“You think they’re not human?”
“Does it matter?” The armadillo shrugged, making a kind of armored ripple. “Either they’re inhuman monsters pretending to be a sweet old couple, or they’re a sweet old couple that’s planning to kill you and bury you under the barn.”
“Good lord!”
Buried under the barn? he thought, and then, exasperated at himself, Does it really matter where they intend to bury you?
A grunt came from the darkness. Oliver saw a snout push into a patch of moonlight, and a gleam of small black eyes.
“Can you—err—talk to the pigs? Maybe they know what the Bryerlys are.”
“Hmm. Maybe. Pigs are pretty smart. There are some excellent pig familiars.”
“Eww. Who’d want a pig for a familiar?”
It was too dark to see the armadillo’s expression, but the outline of his ears had a wry tilt. “I don’t know… if you were, oh, just hypothetically, say, locked in a barn by a couple of murderers, would you rather have a ten-pound armadillo or our four-hundred-pound friend with the tusks over there?”
“Oh.” Oliver considered this. “I think I’d still rather have you.”
“Hmph.” Despite the circumstances, he could tell the armadillo was pleased. The familiar pressed briefly against his shins, then stumped over to the pig pen.
Watching animals communicate was not particularly interesting. They mostly stood around, shifting on their feet, and breathing. Now and then one of the pigs would grunt. If there was anything more exciting going on, it was lost in the shadows.
Oliver sat down on a crate and concentrated on listening to the sounds outside. He thought he might be able to keep the doors shut with the pushme pullme spell, if Mr. Bryerly came back, but probably not for very long. And of course, the doors opened out, so he couldn’t brace them shut from this side.
Eventually, one of the pigs stamped its foot and squealed. They both looked in the direction of the farmhouse. The armadillo sighed and also looked towards the farmhouse.
This seemed to end the conversation. The pigs retreated to the far corner, standing tightly packed together, and the armadillo drifted back over to where Oliver was sitting.
“I hate talking to pigs,” he muttered. “It takes weeks to get the kinks out of my tail…”
“What did they say?”
“They didn’t say anything,” grumbled the armadillo. “They’re not people in pig suits. They don’t have a language like ‘Swinese’ or something. They’re pigs.”
Oliver waited patiently. The armadillo tended to rant when he was nervous.
“They’re scared. It smells like they’ve been scared for a while. There used to be more pigs, and I think something bad happened to them.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know! They can’t tell me. They can’t really describe things, okay? Pig vocabulary is basically ‘yes/no, food, fear, happy, this-pig/not this-pig.’ There’s not a lot to work with.” The armadillo sighed. “But whatever happened, it was bad, and it scared them, and I get the feeling it wasn’t just like a pig being slaughtered. It seems like it must have been something weird.”
“Do they have names?” Oliver asked, rather interested. Communication with another species, even a pig, was something none of his books covered, and the armadillo didn’t quite count.
“Do they have—yes, they’re called Bacon and Pork Chop.” The armadillo hopped in frustration. “Of course they don’t have names! They’re pigs!”
“Oh.”
After a minute the armadillo relented. “They know who they are,” he said. “They know the difference between this-pig and that-pig. But they don’t have names like you and me. They don’t need them.”
This was fascinating and Oliver stored it away for later, but it was not particularly helpful at the moment.
“We have to get out of here,” he said. “I mean, obviously. I’d say we should wait until the Bryerlys are asleep, but they might be waiting until we’re asleep.”
“Mmm. Yes.” The armadillo considered for a moment. “We have to take the pigs.”
“What? With us?”
“No, no, but we have to let them out.”
“Where will they go?”
A shrug rippled against his leg. “I don’t know. The woods, probably. Anywhere. We can’t leave them here.”
“But—feral pigs—” Oliver had seen dogs torn up by pigs gone feral, and he didn’t want to see it ever again. A wild pig was as dangerous an animal as they ever saw around Loosestrife, worse than bears or mountain lions.
Still, the armadillo was right. They really couldn’t just leave them with the Bryerlys.
“Can you get them to promise not to hurt anybody?”
The armadillo scoffed. “No more than you could. It’s not that they wouldn’t, it’s that there’s no real way to communicate the concept. Pigs don’t make promises.”
“Oh.” Oliver sighed. It wasn’t much of a choice, really. “Well, I guess there’s no help for it. We can’t just leave them here. So, let’s get out, then.”
* * *
This was easier said than done.
“How do we get out?” he asked. The enormity of the situation clutched at him. “I’m only a minor mage,” he said, mostly to the pigs, feeling the need to apologize even though they couldn’t understand him. “I can’t call down lightning or make an earthquake or call up spirits to go after the Brylerlys.”
He paused as the idea hit him. “Well, I suppose I could try to call up an elemental—”
“We’re in enough trouble without you bleeding from the nose,” said the armadillo.
“I’m sorry—”
The tail that smacked his ankles felt like a whip. “Ow!”
“Quit apologizing! It’s not going to help!”
“Sor—oh, hell.” He tried to work out a way to apologize for apologizing and gave up.
“When you’re done,” said the armadillo, “you can get over here and see if that spell of yours will lift the bar.”
“Oh. Oh!”
Having something useful he could do, even if it wasn’t calling down lightning, made Oliver feel a lot better. He crouched by the barn door. Warping over the years had left a small gap between the doors—not enough to fit a finger through, but just enough to see the plank barring the door.