A Tapestry of Spells (9 page)

Sarah reassessed her situation with a cold detachment. The truth was, she was outmatched in strength and steel. Her opponent was sporting not only his knives, but a sword and bow. No matter how much bravado she possessed, vanquishing him fairly was out of the question. The best she might be able to do would be to disable him and run. Her mother would have done that and left him with a spell to remember her by, but Sarah decided she could perhaps forgo that additional pleasantry.

She feinted to her left, then held up her hand suddenly.

“Something in my eye,” she said, blinking furiously and fishing about in her eye with the pinky of the hand that held her knife. “Nerochian rules of fair play, if you please, sir.”

He hesitated, then nodded and rested his daggers against his shoulder.

She bent over as if she were truly suffering, made a few womanly noises until he stepped closer—no doubt to offer aid—then straightened abruptly and caught him full under the chin with the heel of her hand.

He gasped, staggered backward with a curse, then landed full upon his arse.

Sarah turned to flee, then she stopped still. It took her a moment to decide what seemed odd, but when she realized what it was, she felt her mouth fall open. She’d heard that voice before—and quite recently. She turned back around slowly to face her foe.

It was him. The profoundly unpleasant and terribly powerful mage up the mountain. She was so surprised to find him there that she did nothing but gape at him for several moments in silence. He had thrown her bodily out of his house and warned her never to come back, yet there he was?

She didn’t suppose she should bother to ask him why he found himself on the ground in front of her instead of in his comfortable, if a bit dusty, house in the mountains. She revisited the idea of running, then decided there was little point in it, either. She couldn’t outrun his magic and apparently she couldn’t best him with her steel. All that remained her was a show of spine—or perhaps something he might not expect.

She held out her hand to him, to help him back to his feet.

He was still for a moment or two, then he returned his knives to the sheaths on his back as if he had done it thousands of times—which she was certain he had—and took her hand. Pulling him to his feet was more difficult than she’d suspected it might be, for he was rather solid for an old man, but she didn’t waste any time thinking on that. She was too busy hoping he wouldn’t do to her what she’d done to him.

“My apologies,” she said quickly. “I thought you meant me harm.”

“How do you know I don’t?” he asked, reaching inside his hood no doubt to check the condition of his jaw. “Nerochian rules of fair play, my arse. Woman, that was profoundly unsporting.”

“When outmanned, ’tis fair to use whatever advantage one has.”

“I don’t think that’s part of their code.”

“I might have heard that last part down at the pub,” she admitted.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said with a grunt. He shook his head and gave her a wide berth as he stepped past her.

Sarah frowned thoughtfully. He didn’t seem angry, though he certainly had cause. She turned to watch him, suppressing the slew of other questions she had, beginning with why he found himself taking the same path she did, what his plans were, why he hadn’t finished her off for the abuse to his chin, and finally, her sudden curiosity over whether or not he’d brought along anything tasty to eat.

The next time she set off on short notice on a perilous quest, she was going to be better kitted out.

He knelt down next to her wood, then looked up at her. “You couldn’t just spell this into complying?”

“I’m trying to be discreet.”

He didn’t seem to find that unusual. He simply struck his knife against his flint until he had a decent spark. He carefully blew on the moss until it surrendered and began to burn. Sarah thought to ask him why it was
he
didn’t spell the fire into a cheery blaze, but perhaps he preferred discretion as well.

He continued to feed his fire by degrees until it was warm enough that even she could actually hold her half-frozen hands against it and feel the heat. He did the same, sighing as he did so. His hood was still too far forward to see anything at all of his features, leading her to believe he was either horribly scarred, terribly wrinkled, or simply too ugly to be looked on without comments he perhaps didn’t care to have voiced.

He rose with a grace that belied his centuries of magic making, then shrugged out of a pack and set it down. He was certainly dressed for travel. He wore not only very useful winter clothing but a bow, a quiver of arrows, and the hilt of a very long, unpleasant-looking sword. Either he planned to hunt or he took pleasure in terrifying his victims before he finished them with his magic. She didn’t mind that, as long as she wasn’t the one in his sights. With any luck, Daniel would find himself there and be repaid for all the frights he’d given her over the years.

The mage squatted back down, then reached inside his pack and drew out a loaf of bread. He tore it and handed half to her.

Sarah accepted it with all the enthusiasm of the starving woman she was. The outside was burned to a crisp, but she didn’t care. It was without a doubt the best thing she had ever eaten.

She’d inhaled most of it before she thought to wonder if it had been poisoned or enspelled or subjected to some other dastardly bit of wizardly mischief. She paused, examined her stomach’s reaction to the new addition, and decided that the bread had only been subjected to too much time in the oven.

He held out a bottle, which she took without thinking. She drank before she thought better of it, then realized what she was tasting. It was Master Franciscus’s apple ale, something he rarely gave to anyone who didn’t meet his approval. She didn’t suppose the mage had intimidated his way into possession of it. The alemaster was a man possessing not only admirable calm but a quartet of well-used knives continually residing in his boots and his belt. Perhaps gold had been exchanged, along with a sizeable number of compliments.

She had one last drink on the off chance it might be her last, then handed the bottle back. Her companion set the bottle on her side of the fire, rummaged about in his pack, then handed her a bundle of cloth. She realized almost immediately that what she was holding in her hands was a heavy cloak. She looked at him in surprise.

“What’s this?”

“What it looks like.” He rose. “I’ll go scout for a bit. You should sleep.”

She maintained a neutral expression with effort. Sleep? With him watching over her? Was he daft? The rumors that swirled about the man were terrible and endless—and that was saying quite a bit considering the general character of Shettlestoune’s inhabitants. She wouldn’t have been surprised to listen to him weave any number of dastardly spells over her and laugh whilst he did so.

Then again, the man had endured her fist under his jaw and offered not even so much as a peep of a spell as retribution.

“I appreciate the suggestion,” she managed, “but I don’t need to.”

He stood there for a moment or two, then shrugged, turned, and melted into the shadows of the trees.

She couldn’t hear him moving, though that said nothing.

She took her knife out of her belt and drove it into the hard ground before her. No sense in not being prepared. The fire flickered softly against the wooden handle, which was cheering and unsettling at the same time. A complete stranger—and a very dangerous one, at that—had done something for her comfort without asking anything in return.

Astonishing.

She could scarce wrap her mind around it, so she pushed aside the gratitude she felt for a man who could have killed her with nothing more than a word and concentrated on the plans she had decided on during her first night of flight. Once she had rested for a bit, she would continue on over the hill to Bruaih, seek out the mage there, then bribe him to see to Daniel for her. Even if she had to stay a bit in town and work to earn enough to pay the mage his fee, she would do it without complaint. And once the mage was hired and Daniel seen to, her responsibility to the world would be discharged, and she could seek out her own very ordinary, unremarkable future.

She steadfastly refused to think about how far out of reach that future had become.

She rubbed her eyes suddenly. She yawned for good measure, then forced herself to stand up and shake off her weariness. She found her skirt and pulled it down over her head again, keeping her knife free of the waistband. She paced for a moment or two, stroked Castân soft ears and had a remarkably equine-sounding snort as her reward, then returned to the fire where she soon found herself sitting. She plumped the feed bag next to her not because she was going to use it as a pillow anytime soon but because she wanted to make sure it was still there, empty save for Lord Higgleton’s coins. She perhaps should have sewn them into the hem of her apron. Her mother had done that with regularity, citing not only the security of having her gold close to her, but the added benefit of being able to take the apron off and use it as a weapon.

Her mother, Sarah could admit, had been a very resourceful woman, if not necessarily a nurturing one.

She looked briefly for the mage, but saw no sign of him. Perhaps he needed a bit of exercise to keep his creaking knees from giving way. She was still curious about why he’d followed her, but if there was one thing she had learned over the course of her five-and-twenty years of life, it was not to ask mages too many questions. Perhaps he was restless. Perhaps he always carried extra food and gear for potential guests at his fire. Perhaps she had gone too long without sleep and was now conjuring things up out of her imagination that couldn’t possibly find home in reality.

She sat for as long as she could, then found that she could no longer keep her eyes open. If she didn’t at least lean over and close her eyes briefly, she was going to either be ill or pitch forward senseless into the fire.

She laid her head down and closed her eyes.

Just for a moment.

 

S
he woke at some point during the night, or at least she thought she woke. She opened her eyes and saw the mage sitting cross-legged across the fire from her, holding his hands to the blaze. His stillness likely should have frightened her witless given that he was a mage and they were generally at their most dangerous when silently thinking deep, disturbing thoughts, but somehow the sight was surprisingly soothing.

“Why did you come?” she thought she might have said.

He was long in answering. “Duty.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” she said with a sigh.

At least she thought she’d said as much. She wasn’t as cold as she had been and that alarmed her until she realized she wasn’t warm because she was freezing to death, she was warm because she was covered in his cloak.

She sighed again, then fell back into dreaming.

 

T
he sound of a loud slap woke her.

She opened her eyes and looked up to find a creature from the blackest pit of her worst dreams standing over her. She looked at his gnarled hands reaching down toward her and realized suddenly that she was not dreaming. The creature flinched. Sarah noticed that where there had been only a single arrow shaft protruding from his chest, now there were the well-worn wooden handles of two terrible hunting knives. The creature straightened, plucked thoughtfully at the knives for a moment or two, then threw back his head and howled.

His complaints were interrupted by three more loud thuds. The three arrows joining the knives seemed only to irritate the monstrous troll more, not deter him. Before she could make any more sense of that than the monster seemed to be trying to, she was hauled up to her feet and pulled through the remains of the fire. She found herself standing behind the mage as he cast aside his bow and drew his sword.

She absently beat at the now-smoking hem of her skirt, but that seemed far less pressing than wondering if the monstrous troll who was fussing with the weapons sticking out of his chest would die of his wounds or manage to stumble around the fire and be about his unfinished business. Or at least she wondered that until she watched the mage make quick work of dispatching him with his sword. Why he hadn’t just felled the beast with a bit of magic, she couldn’t have said and she didn’t want to know. It was enough to watch the troll fall to the ground with a crash and not move again.

“Collect your gear,” the mage said without so much as a change in his breathing. “And your useless hound.”

Sarah admired his calm in the face of what seemed less a pleasant trip through ruffian-infested woods and now more of an involuntary stay in an unrelenting nightmare. She found she wasn’t nearly so nonchalant about it. She hastily smothered the final embers glowing on the edges of her skirt and his cloak, retrieved her knife that hadn’t served her one bloody bit, then snatched up her feed bag. She took a deep breath, then whistled very unsuccessfully for her hor—er, dog. Castân shuffled over, eyeing the fallen creature with suspicion and no small amount of alarm.

Sarah couldn’t have agreed more. She watched the mage stride around the fire and go to retrieve his weapons. He was almost too efficient at the task, which made her wonder how he’d become so. Perhaps he found something unsporting about taking game by magical means. Perhaps he hunted things for pleasure alone.

Perhaps she needed to find a safe place to land where she could lock the door and fall apart in peace.

She needed a decent bit of sleep, that was all. She nodded to herself at that as she watched the mage stomp out the remains of the fire and pick up his pack. He snatched up his bow and pulled it over his head and across his chest, then turned toward her.

“We’ll run.”

Sarah nodded. She had spent the whole of her life running to escape a variety of things, so the thought didn’t trouble her. She stumbled after the mage, leaving Castân to trot along behind her.