The hermit smiled. “You’re not as stupid as you look. A proper wizard would never drink a vial like that in a single draught, unless it was his own. He would sip it slowly, taking time to absorb and convert its essence. Very few, and only those with great skill and experience, could manage to take an entire dose all at once like that.”
“Then why did you tell me to gulp it down?” exclaimed Will angrily.
The old man smirked. “I didn’t. I never said anything about how you should take it.”
“Well you could at least have warned me!”
“It’s better this way anyway,” said the hermit. “If you had tried to drink it slowly, you’d have wasted most of it. I doubt you could have taken a second sip.”
Standing up, Will kicked loose dirt over the products of his insulted stomach. “I don’t see how it’s better. I threw it all up.”
“How do you feel?” asked the old man innocently.
Will paused in mid-thought. He hadn’t noticed before, but his bone-weary fatigue had vanished. Even the nausea had faded into the background and seemed to be rapidly disappearing. In a word, he was better. Much better. He looked at the old man in surprise. “How? It came up almost immediately.”
“The elixir is just a vector or intermediary,” explained the hermit. “It contains and sustains the turyn until it reaches its destination, which in this case was you.”
His head was spinning with unfamiliar words. “Vector?” asked Will.
The old man frowned for a moment. “Vector has several meanings, but in this case, I’m talking about a substance used to convey something from one place to another. Once you swallowed the elixir, it only took a few seconds for the turyn to diffuse from a small area of high concentration into the relatively empty space of your half-dead body. I’m using alchemical terms to describe it, but the principles are the same, although true drugs take quite a bit longer to diffuse, but I won’t get into osmotic pressure right now.” He paused, scratching his beard for a moment. “Actually, I suppose I should say ‘etheric pressure,’ since we’re talking about turyn.”
Will stared at him as though he were speaking a foreign tongue. “Huh?” was all he could manage.
The brief speech seemed to have improved the hermit’s mood somewhat, because he gave Will an apologetic look. “Pardon me. It’s been a long time since I had occasion to talk about any of this. I forget you’re not versed in it. Not to worry, I’ll loan you a primer this evening. Reading through it will help improve your vocabulary immensely.”
“Primer?” asked Will.
The old man nodded. “A book meant for learning.”
“Oh,” said Will, understanding at last. “You’ll have to just tell me. I can’t read.”
His new guardian stared at him as though he had grown a second head. “You can’t—what? Didn’t Erisa teach you?”
Will shook his head. “She says talking is faster anyway, so there’s no point in it,” he replied confidently.
The old man growled. “I don’t have years to sit around telling you everything. Besides which, since I’ve been alone so many years, speaking only to myself, I’ve forgotten how to communicate with ignoramuses. So, if you intend to learn anything from me, the first thing you’ll do is learn to read. We’ll start in the morning. I’m too tired to even think about it right now. I’ll show you the stove and you can start dinner.”
Will shrugged. “You expect me to cook? I don’t know how to cook.”
This was too much for the hermit. Throwing up his hands he shouted at the boy, “Then what good are you?” The sudden movement, combined with the noise, spooked a doe that had been grazing nearby, and the hermit’s eyes tracked her as she sprang away. In the space of an instant, he forgot about Will entirely. “Deer?” he muttered, as though he had forgotten the very existence of such an animal.
Seconds later his face reddened, and his eyes seemed to catch fire. Furious, he sprang to his feet and began running around one side of the house. “Fucking deer! Get away!”
Will watched him go with wide eyes. “He’s mad, utterly mad.”
From the far side of the house, he could hear the old man screaming, “Nooo! Stop! You bastards, what have you done to my squash?” The voice receded slightly as the hermit got farther away, but the volume of his voice was such that the words were quite clear to Will’s young ears. “I’ll kill every last one of you misbegotten wretches!”
Chapter 7
The next morning arrived bright and early, and Will greeted it with muscles stiff from spending a night on a cold, hard floor. The old man’s home had turned out to have two rooms. The front room, which Will had at first assumed was the entirety of the small house, was dirty, cluttered, and without a bed. Its main feature had been an old stone hearth that he had been forced to cook dinner over.
His efforts had been rewarded with singular praise from his new guardian. “That was by far one of the worst meals I have ever been forced to endure.”
“You didn’t have to eat it,” Will responded sullenly.
“Trust me, I won’t again,” the old man said. “But I did so out of respect for your talents. You have a lot of promise, boy.”
“Huh?”
The hermit nodded. “Definitely. When I eventually kick you out for laziness, stupidity, or some other yet undiscovered fault, you have a great career ahead of you. You could do well as the chief cook for King Lognion’s dungeon. One taste of your food would have his prisoners begging to confess their guilt. They’d probably entreat him to send them to the gallows just to escape your culinary torment.”
Will pressed his lips together firmly. He was quickly learning that the old man loved to goad him to anger. He wouldn’t reward the bastard this time.
“Let me ask you, though,” continued the old bastard. “Where did you get the inspiration to combine raw turnips with oat gruel?”
Will ground his teeth, refusing to respond.
“And not peeling the turnips, that was pure genius.” The old hermit sighed. “I can still taste the dirt and grit in my teeth. Do you think you could make it again?”
“You said you wouldn’t eat it,” Will replied.
“Oh, I won’t! I was just thinking that if we spread it around the garden, it might keep the deer away from my plants.”
The old man laughed long and hard after that, before eventually retiring to what must be his bedroom—the door to which Will had somehow failed to observe until the hermit rose and opened it. When he started to follow, the crotchety bastard had turned back to face him. “You sleep out here.” Then he shut the door and locked it.
With no blanket and no bed, Will slept on the floor beside the slowly dying hearth fire. Stretching to relieve the soreness in his shoulders, he glared unhappily at the old man when the door to the back room opened the next morning.
The cruel bastard’s first words of the day were, “Do you know how to cook eggs?” When Will shook his head ‘no,’ the old man showed him, supervising this time to prevent a repeat of the previous night’s disastrous dinner.