'Perhaps you will give me what you stole, and I will let you escape without the beating you so richly deserve!' Cormo snarled, taking a menacing step closer. Those hooves looked as large as dinner plates, and very heavy. 'Everybody knows these bushes belong to me! Everybody!'
'But that's the thing,' Kellen said, thinking quickly. 'I'm new here. My name's Kellen. I'm staying with my sister Idalia down at her cabin— maybe you know it? I don't know a lot about the forest, and I certainly wouldn't want to trespass in anybody's farms or gardens. Or berry patches.'
'Idalia.' Cormo suddenly looked worried, but tried to hide it. 'She's your sister, you say? Well—'
Just then Shalkan arrived, vaulting a fallen log at the edge of the clearing with the grace of a leaping deer. His sides worked as if he'd been running hard, but when he walked up to Kellen he sounded almost bored.
'Is there a problem here?' Shalkan drawled, sounding for all the world in that moment like one of the Senior Apprentice Undermages back at the Mage College—a particularly dandified fellow who cultivated a pose of great world weariness and took great delight in making trouble for the Student-Apprentices.
He tilted his head to the side, and his horn flashed in the sun. 'I see you've met my friend Kellen, Cormo. Idalia will be interested to know he's encountered you.'
Cormo took one look at the unicorn and backed up, shaking his head as if bees were swarming about it. 'There's plenty here for everyone, I always say,' Cormo muttered, turning and stomping away. 'Don't know why everyone has to make such a fuss.' He crashed off through the underbrush, still muttering to himself. Kellen couldn't make out all the words, but thought he caught something about 'damned unicorns.'
He turned to Shalkan, light-headed with relief. 'Glory, am I glad to see you!'
'It looked like you were handling things well enough on your own,' the unicorn observed. 'What happened?'
Kellen explained. '—and when I mentioned Idalia, he suddenly got very cautious. I think he would have let me keep the berries, even if you hadn't shown up.'
Shalkan snorted derisively. 'There's no 'let' about it—Cormo doesn't own this berry patch, and he knows it! He's a notorious bully—and a lazy one at that, to want you to do his picking for him. He comes from the village a few miles from here—the one that Idalia trades with. It's a human-Centaur village, actually. Most of them are good quiet farmers, just like folk anywhere, but a few of them are like Cormo. Once he found out you were Idalia's brother, of course, he didn't dare offend you. Well, to be honest, he didn't dare do anything that would offend your sister.'
'Why not?' Kellen asked curiously.
Shalkan chuckled. 'Centaurs can't learn magic. It's not a case of an old wives' tale or a Council proscription or tribal custom—they really can't. Some think it might be because they're closer to beasts than humans are—not in reasoning power, or intelligence, and certainly not because they don't have a soul, but in their natures—and obviously the beasts can't do magic at all. Mind you, they're so strong, they don't need magic most of the time! But if they need serious healing from something that might well injure them permanently or even kill them, they need to come to a Wildmage like Idalia—and there's no other Wildmage anywhere closer than the High Hills that I know of. Except maybe you.'
Kellen laughed. 'All I'm good for is finding lost cats, and getting myself kicked out of Armethalieh.'
'We'll see,' Shalkan said. 'You're young yet. And now there's been quite enough excitement for one day. We've got plenty of foodstuffs, and I think it's about time to be getting back.'
It took less time to gather up the spilled berries than it had to pick them, and now Kellen was very glad the other basket had been hidden in the brambles, as he suspected Cormo would certainly have been happy to steal it.
So even though there's magic here, that doesn't mean everyone is good and perfect. Still … unicorns and sylphs and undines and dryads and Centaurs… what next? Dragons?
KELLEN and Idalia spent the next day—starting out well before dawn— clearing out the fouled pond, a nasty task that reminded him more than a little of clearing Perulan's cistern. Kellen could smell the pond long before they reached it—it smelled like food gone bad. Worse than food gone bad, actually.
'I can see we're going to find someplace else to have our picnic,' Idalia said, wrinkling her nose at the stench. 'But once we clear the muck out, the pond will bring itself back fairly quickly.'
'What do we need to do?' Kellen asked, looking at it with disgust. Hie bloated, rotting carcass of the deer floated, half-submerged, in the center of the pond, surrounded by green scum and the half-eaten decaying bodies of dead fish. More dead fish were washed up against the edges of the pond, and the reeds and grass were brown and withered. They'd both come wearing heavy packs containing the tools they'd need—seines and buckets and rope and shovels—but Kellen wasn't sure anything short of a miracle could revive this place.
'First, let's get our tools in order. Then, you get to move the deer. Drag it a good way from here. Trust me, someone or something will want it, even if we don't! If nothing else, the vultures will. I'll leave the fish closer by— they'll stink, but most of the folk and the furred and feathered around here won't mind that, actually. And they'll be
