Owlflight

as profound as his grief. But that didn’t stop them from intruding. His arms and legs felt cramped, his hands stung where he’d pounded them against the bark and scraped them, and one hip hurt, jammed as it was against the hard bark of the tree. Finally he decided it was time to leave. He sat up, his eyes sore and dry, and peered down through the branches to see if there was anyone about to catch him when he climbed down.

There was no one working in the field below, and from the fact that the long shadows of the trees had crept over the village, he’d been up here a while. He guessed that the women who usually worked in the bean field had probably left their work to go prepare dinner for the men and children. The wind was in the wrong direction for him to catch aromas coming from the village, but it was a good bet that if he could smell anything, it would be the mingled aromas of stews, soups, pies and pasties, same as always.

I wonder why they bother making individual dinners.

Surely it would make more sense just to make one big pot of stew for the whole village, he thought, with a touch of contempt. After all, everyone in the village uses the same half-dozen recipes. I don’t think anyone has ever tried to make anything new since I’ve been here.

Perhaps it was that, as difficult as things were, there were still some who were more prosperous than the rest, who could afford a little more meat and spices in their food, and who made sure to enjoy that distinction from everyone else whenever the opportunity presented itself.

As if by sharing a bit of spice with everyone else they’d lose the chance to lord it over their neighbors, he thought sourly. The half-dozen “well-to-do” families were the ones who seemed to go out of their way to complain about his behavior. As if they didn’t already have the best houses in town, and can even pay somebody else to cook and clean for them!

Still, if it was mealtime, he’d probably better be getting back to Justyn. There were still dishes to scrub, and the pasties to fetch from the baker, or the old wretch would probably forget to eat, and then Darian would get the blame if Justyn got sick. Sometimes he wondered how Justyn had gotten along before he came - but then he realized that the women had taken care of him, the same way they cared for Kyle. So the villagers had gotten something out of apprenticing him to Justyn; they’d been able to stop cleaning up after and cooking for the Wizard. No wonder they’d been in such a hurry to get him bound over!

I’ll have to clean up after Kyle, too, if I don’t want to have to eat dinner in a room that looks like someone had butchered a pig there. Justyn is such a slob! How can he be so concerned with keeping wounds clean, and live the way he does? Wrinkling his lip a little with disgust, he stretched his arms and legs until the cramps went away, then climbed slowly down the side of the tree opposite the village. He didn’t want anyone to catch sight of him if he could help it; he’d already lost a couple of hiding places by being careless.

Here on the edge of the fields, where there was more sunlight, growth of bushes and vines was especially heavy, giving him cover that allowed him to get into the field without being seen. Already the air was hot and drowsy with midday heat, and hidden insects buzzed and droned on all sides of him. The ground here smelled damp; someone must have opened up the irrigation pipe for this field. He pushed through the dense underbrush until he came to a field of pole beans, and made his way through the rows of tall, tent-like arrangements of poles covered with climbing bean vines. They made a jagged hedge that was difficult to see through, and extended well over the top of his head. Eventually the field ended, and he reached the outskirts of the village on the northern side. He reentered Errold’s Grove near the firing pit for pottery and the storage shed where the finished pieces were kept. He didn’t see anyone, although the sounds of dinner being served and eaten were coming from every open window.

It must be later than I thought. He still didn’t feel much like hurrying, though; his bout of grief had pretty much killed his appetite, and with a bit of pique, he decided that Justyn could wait. If his Master was hungry, his Master could go fetch his own dinner from the baker, and clean a plate or two himself for a change.

He made his way slowly along the paths between the houses, kicking a round rock through the dust, nursing his grievances. The ordinary sounds of people who liked each other eating together only made him feel more abused and put upon, because he knew what those people must be thinking and saying about him. Vere and Harris had certainly recounted the tale of his defection to their families by now, and their wives had probably shared the story with others as they brought water from the well, or went to fetch dinner from the baker. So now everyone knew that Darian had shown his “true face” again, and they would be feeling very smug indeed. By suppertime tonight, he’d be the main topic of evening lectures to the family.

They’ll be looking at their children, and telling each other, “Thank the gods he isn’t like Darian!” or “My boy would never act like Darian.” Huh. As if they really had any idea half of what their precious children get into when they aren’t watching.

And the very next person he encountered would probably stop him in order to remind him of how ungrateful and unnatural he was. Every time he got into trouble - and “trouble” seemed to have a wide definition for these people - people would go out of their way to give him their own version of the lecture he’d already heard a thousand times or more - the sermon on how kind Justyn was for taking him in and apprenticing him without an apprenticing fee or any kind of familial relationship. Again. And again.

At least Justyn himself usually left that part out, perhaps because he remembered only too well how he had pestered Darian’s parents every time they came into Errold’s Grove. Darian could recall at least a dozen times that Justyn had come to his Mum and Dad, separately or together, to urge on them a plan of apprenticing him into Justyn’s service. There had been a great deal of fuss made about how dangerous it was for someone with Darian’s “potential” to remain untrained in his magic. Darian remembered his Dad once telling his Mum that Justyn was trying to frighten them into giving Darian over to him, and that she shouldn’t let the old man alarm her.

If Darian could not get away from whoever had decided to deliver the usual lecture, the haranguer would then go through the litany of Darian’s many character flaws and deficiencies, and the only variation was in how much emphasis an individual placed on a particular flaw. This part was actually useful; Darian had noticed over the course of several of these lectures that people tended to stress the flaw that they were