A Succession of Bad Days (9 page)

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Authors: Graydon Saunders

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Chapter 12

On the way out from dinner, I got handed a letter; Chloris had two, Zora had a bunch, half a dozen at least, and Kynefrid had two. None for Dove that I saw.

Nobody wants to block the door, but there isn’t enough light to read in the tent, and we all know it. There’s this sort of stuck-ness until Dove, without actually saying anything, walks us all round to the bathhouse, one of the bathhouses,
that go with the gean whose refectory we eat in.

We are apparently entirely welcome to use it, I didn’t actually hear the conversation, I’ve had enough time and enough light to realize the letter is from Flaed, and it’s taken quite awhile to find me.

I didn’t know if Flaed’d gone north or over the Folded Hills; things had moved really fast, and it’s not like we had any kind of formal understanding.
None of the mechanisms of government would have kept track for us.

There’s the part of my head that thinks ‘good to hear from her’, but it’s pretty promptly outvoted by the rest of me, Flaed, not ‘her’. Any amount of sorcery would be too much.

It’s a quarter-hour later before I can actually open the letter; I’ve sluiced off yet again and am sitting beside the tub, not in it, because I’m just too
tired to try reading in the tub right now.

The light’s good.

Flaed, well, it’s Flaed; concern about me and concern about being displaced and where they’ll live and what they’ll eat and what the gean, who are mostly vegetable farmers, will do, bunches of odd things seen while being displaced, and how I’m doing and what’s this about an anti-panda, am I not still with my collective?

No actual information
about which valley Flaed is in or what the postal system thinks the place is called. Hardly anywhere in the Folded Hills has an official name, I can remember seeing how blank the map was before the anti-panda happened, and Flaed would never make a name up. Wouldn’t want to bother somebody who’s probably desperately trying to learn how to weed in the new place with questions, either.

I fold the
letter back up, and put it back into the cover, and put that on top of my pants, and get into the tub. It’s a climb; the thing is entirely above the floor, made out of vertical wood staves, softwood, don’t know it, a rounded rectangle five metres by eight. It’s a couple metres high, too, you could teach an older infant, five or six years old, to swim in the thing. It’s meant to hold way more than
five people, but there’s only one ladder, and the rule is, apparently, that you climb in and move around the tub sunwise until you would bump into somebody, then stop.

In my case it’d be
swim
round the tub if it weren’t for some kind of leg-frames, which I can walk on, if I don’t mind being only thigh-deep in the water. Nobody says anything, I don’t think there’s anything at all unusual about
this in the Creeks, even if nobody in the Township of Wending was much into mixed soaking tubs.

I wind up by Dove, trying to figure out how to get the seat flipped down so I can not hang on to the side. I manage it without too much trouble, the height adjusts. I suppose there are fourteen-year-olds in the Creeks they don’t want to drown.

Kynefrid looks asleep, and sounds it, snoring a bit. Kynefrid’s
hair is solid blue, not a blue tinge, and the yellow lights in here make it look unnaturally green. Everybody else’s hair is already green; every Creek I’ve seen has two-tone hair, in ear-to-ear stripes of light green and dark green. Zora’s combing, chasing out the memory of braids, the two shades of green ripple down Zora’s hair like sun on leaves. Unbound and wet from washing, it’s too long
to comb the whole length in one reach, not enough arm, it’s a seize-and-finish process.

My hair is brown, my eyes are brown, no one will ever believe I could do the horseshoe trick even with magic.

Dove doesn’t float at all. You can tell not floating is expected, the extra footrest things are pretty wide and there’s more than just feet would require. Have to be so you can keep yourself from sinking
too far to breathe. For all I know, any of us might be able to handle not breathing next year no problem, but not today.

The lighter green in Dove’s hair is darker than the darker shade in Zora’s; the darker green goes black in this light. Dove’s hair is kept short enough you can see the stripes, it’s not layers like woodgrain.

Chloris, between Dove and Zora, floats. I can’t tell if the floating
is annoying Chloris or the degree to which Dove and Zora don’t. Creek thing, social thing, Chloris thing, maybe Halt knows.

I smirk at myself, and Dove raises an eyebrow at me.

“Question I couldn’t answer, caught myself thinking
maybe Halt knows
.”

Dove outright grins.

A little while later, it’s a serious exercise of will to get out of the tub, get dressed, and start walking back to the tent. The
heat really helped, the walk is just endless, rather than fatal.

Can’t say we sleep like the dead, not really, but I’d believe it if you told me the dead could hear Kynefrid snoring.

Morning hurts.

Not as badly as I think it ought to, but enough to notice. It’s wet, too, a persistent clammy mist more than actual rain.

Hunger wins.

Zora and Dove wait for me, a little. I have to scuttle to catch
up. They seem to find the general fragility of non-Creeks mostly amusing, in a must-be-tough-to-be-you sort of way.

I don’t, I doubt any of us, need to think about getting into Westcreek Town; our feet know the way. Not being in someone else’s hurry makes for a restful morning, mist or no mist.

Outside the refectory is, well, I don’t know. Six little legs, three a side, and one huge one at the
back. The huge foot looks like there was some sort of collision between a chicken and a rabbit. The creature has thick practical teeth that could eat anything at all. Looks like it masses five hundred kilos or more, up past the low end of cow-sized.

It’s completely dead. Dead, and slung from a pole, and surrounded by sixteen armoured people, hefty even for Creeks.

Most Creeks have this impression
of general amiability, the way an ox or a draft horse often will; it hasn’t got anything to prove, you couldn’t possibly make it try, and besides there’s some work to do around here somewhere. This bunch look a bit scuffed, despite the armour and the spears and the mist, but it’s scuffed like the finish on an axe.

Someone comes out of the larder door; a senior cook, and somebody adult, they’re
in armour, and too small for a Creek. Really little, in the Creeks, slight and shorter than me. Everybody around the dead critter-thing straightens up, just a bit. Right. Large-critter critter-team, and a non-Creek team lead. Nobody’s acting like that’s odd.

The cook’s looking attentive while the team lead is saying something about how the critter’s really tasty even in the bland cooking. I’d
expect the phrase “bland cooking,” to earn a dire look, but all I see is puzzlement.

Right about then, someone notices us, or Dove, maybe, and they all get a bit straighter than they already were. Dove smiles sort of sideways, and nods back at them. The team lead makes a kind of formal wave. Dove straightens up a bit to return it, more formal still.

We’re in to the refectory proper before Zora
says, “What was that?”

Dove says “That’s half the colour party of the Wapentake of the Creeks.”

As names go, that’s outright historical. I have to think for a second to remember what a wapentake is, I thought
was
, from school.

Zora snorts, and makes an elbowing motion at Dove, something I wouldn’t do, and says “The critter!” in aggrieved tones.

Dove shrugs and keeps walking without pause toward
the sideboard. Or possibly the porridge vat. “Captain says it’s tasty.”

Zora makes a face. I’m, well, I figure if we’re getting fed and not even being asked to do dishes I don’t get to complain. Not that it’s likely a false claim. Anybody making team lead for a critter team, never mind
that
critter team, any kind of team so traditional and so risky you call the team lead
Captain
, can’t be in the
habit of making huge public mistakes.

Wake’s sitting alone, surrounded by a bunch of empty chairs. Given that we get a direct look and a wave, yeah, Wake’s been waiting for us. There’s a narrowing of eyes as we head over, and the next wave of Wake’s hand has, well, structure. I don’t know how that could possibly be true, it’s not like Wake’s bones have moved or there’s a change in the consistency
of the air, but my brain insists it’s structure.

My brain insists that the floor, the sensation of standing on the floor under my feet, the actual feeling of my own weight on the soles of my feet, sounds like the rustle of dry leaves in a wind, too. Half of being a wizard is probably knowing when to pay attention to your relentlessly unhelpful brain, and when you can drive yourself crazy by trying
to figure out what something means.

I’ve got my foot hooked around a chair leg before I realize that not only am I dry, I’m clean. Clean like the clothes I’m in were never dirty, once, ever. Since these pants were the ones I was displaced in, seventeen days from the Township of Wending to wherever it was at the bottom of the easternmost valley of the Folded Hills, and have been going to sorcerer
school in since, that’s, I wouldn’t have believed it at all before I woke up in the hospital here.

Zora’s grabbed the end of a braid, looks worried while rolling the last bit of hair between thumb and forefinger, and then relaxes a little.

Wake smiles. “Grant me a little wisdom.”

“Is this a next-year thing?” I try not to sound flustered. Maybe putting the plate and the bowl and the other plate
and the mug and the handful of spoons down will provide enough plausible flustered. Dove and Zora wait for my hand to get away from the spoons before grabbing theirs with the relaxation of a day off.

Different smile from Wake. Wake has a large stock of smiles. “Not all Independents may them so do. I should not you held this a reason to suppose you shall not learn it in time.”

Not next year, and
maybe not the year after. Repeat as necessary. Right.

Wake’s drinking coffee; doesn’t eat much, and I’m not sure Halt eats at all, beyond tea and the tiny scones of ritual. Blossom eats like the wolf of legend, so maybe it’s an old Independent thing, rather than an Independent thing.

All three of us get through the first plate before Wake says anything else. Which I suppose shows a certain seriousness
about the wisdom.

“Firstly, Zora, Grue functions as supervision; if you have a reason or desire to exercise the Power in Grue’s company, you may.”

Zora nods, chewing and wide-eyed with happiness. Being able to heat an oven by yourself in a minute or two has to be an attractive idea.

“Secondly, you — ” the movement of Wake’s coffee cup involves all of us — “may well have questions. Déci is a good
time to remind you to ask them.”

Dove stops eating, cutlery neatly arranged on the edge of the second plate. “Anybody else ever gone to a sorcerer school run like this one?”

Wake’s head shakes
no
. “Not within the span of our historical knowledge.”

“Blossom, Grue, and five others went through a predecessor approach, that attempted to maintain a balance between the traditional approach, with the
pre-eminent teaching of precise control before all other matters, and the novel idea of teaching indirect and externalized invocation of large amounts of the Power as the pre-eminent skill. Those concerned with the training of sorcerers in the Commonweal have been arguing about the results ever since.”

Dove’s looking really thoughtful. I’m thinking that the applesauce is suddenly less attractive
than I thought it was.

“When I write home, what do I tell my mother?” Zora’s voice won’t hold all the feelings behind, it comes out flat and shaky. “Sorcery is dangerous, that’s why there are rituals, so you do the important part consistently. Everybody who has ever made preserves and sterilized the jars knows that.” Wake nods. Plain boiling won’t get everything, not after however many tens
of thousands of years sorcerers have been trying to kill each other, anyone who won’t obey them, or anything else that annoyed them.

“There are only five of us; the fifty-fifty odds have to be from the traditional teaching style. So do I really say, Oh, Hi, Mom, Aunts, Uncles, everybody, this magic stuff is all kinds of fun and it’s really interesting and I’m working hard and it’s not impossible
that I’m going to survive it?”

Wake takes a deep breath, stops, does the chin-pointing thing toward where Kynefrid and Chloris are wandering in together. Can’t tell if they wanted some tent-time, or if they just had that much trouble waking up. Even without the careful warnings we get about eating, there’s no way they
want
to skip breakfast.

Zora nods. I go back to the applesauce, Dove gets up
and comes back with a whole pot of tea, just ahead of Kynefrid and Chloris. Tough to keep up with Dove even when you’re not balancing plates.

Kynefrid and Chloris sit down. Wake starts talking. I’m really not sure if Wake let the deep breath
out
at all between pointing and starting talking. “Zora has asked what truth there is, communicable to concerned family, regarding a student’s survival chances,
given that the novel training model in which you are engaged has not been used before, leading to a dearth of valid statistical expectations.

“I think, Halt thinks, it is more likely that you will survive the use-of-the-Power part of your schooling. The emphasis on external working removes a source of risk, even as the scale of Power use adds one, and on the balance we believe it will be to your
favour. The traditional approaches to training sorcerers emphasize control so harshly because they must; a significant error, when the operation of the Power is taking place within your brain, suffices to kill you. The approach you are following, that your teachers are taking with you, means a significant error will be worse for the landscape but maybe better for you.”

“We can try new things,
and it’s not a disaster.” Zora sounds thoughtful, hopeful, something like that.

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