Owlflight

I certainly wouldn’t, Darian thought with bitterness of his own.

He had to pass through one of the busier corners of the village to reach the woodpile, going around both the smithy and the baker. The savory scent of bread coming from the door of the bakery told the boy that Leander was removing loaves from the big brick oven that took up all of the back half of his shop. As for the smith, he was obviously hard at work, as the smithy rang with the blows of hammer on anvil, there was a scent of hot metal and steam on the breeze, and smoke coming from the smokehole in the roof. Leander wouldn’t pay any attention to Darian as he passed, but there was a chance that the smith might.

The smithy was a three-sided shed, the forge in the middle, the anvil toward the front. There was a fat old gray plowhorse waiting patiently for his feet to be attended to, tied to the post outside the smithy, and its owner, a man called Backet, watched as the smith hammered out a new shoe for it. Blacksmith Jakem, a huge, balding man with an incongruous paunch beneath his leather apron, paused in his work to watch Darian pass by, his eyes narrowed. Darian ignored him, as he usually ignored the adults of the village when he thought he could get away with it. Jakem didn’t think much of Darian, but that was hardly out of the ordinary. Darian didn’t think much of Jakem either. As he made the return trip with his three small logs, the smith hawked and spat into the fire.

“Ain’t nobody works as hard as a lazy ‘un,” he said loudly to the farmer sitting on a stump beside the forge.

“That’s the plain truth,” Old Man Backet agreed, taking off his hat to scratch his head. “Lazy ‘un will work twice’s hard as anybody else, tryin’ to avoid working at all.” He cast a sly look at Darian as he replied, to see if his words had struck a nerve.

Darian continued to ignore them; so long as the adults didn’t address him directly, there was a certain amount of immunity that being only thirteen gave him. He’d learned some time ago that a retort would only earn him trouble with his Master. Not that Wizard Justyn had ever laid a hand on him - but the reproachful lectures on how much he owed the villagers of Errold’s Grove and how little he repaid their care were worse than a beating.

Nobody ever asked me what I wanted, not once. Nobody gave me a choice. If I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t be here now - and no one would have had to think about “taking care of me.” I’d have offered to work just enough to get a tent and some supplies, and I’d have been off to try on my own. Now I’m stuck here enduring useless blathering from a senile Master and carrying firewood like a dog in harness.

He made three more such trips - ignoring the adults at the forge each time, although it certainly it did not escape his notice that the force and frequency of the smith’s blows increased each time he passed. If Jakem wanted to wear out his arm trying to impress upon Darian what so-called “industrious labor” looked and sounded like, it wasn’t going to bother Darian any.

Besides, if he told the smith why he was making such a production out of the simple task of fetching wood, he’d only get another tongue-lashing, and maybe a cuff on the side of the head into the bargain. The smith had a notoriously heavy hand with his own offspring, and if provoked he might well use it on Darian.

As Darian put his scant armload of wood down at the end of the third trip, the voice of doom emerged from the interior of the cottage.

“Darian, leave that for now and get in here. It’s time for your lesson.”

It was actually a fairly pleasant, masculine voice, a bit tired-sounding and querulous, but not too irritated or scolding. Nevertheless, if Darian had been a dog, he would have dropped his head and ears and tucked his tail down. “But the firewood - “ he protested, knowing that the protest would do him no good, but making it anyway.

“The wood can wait; I can’t. Come in now, Darian.”

Darian drew his brows together in a sullen scowl, but obeyed the summons, leaving the sunshine and the fresh air for the closed-in gloom of the cottage. He tried to leave the door open to admit a little breeze, but Justyn frowned and motioned to him to shut it behind him.

He waited with resignation for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. The only light in the cottage came from a trio of very small windows in three of the four walls; even though the shutters stood wide open, they still didn’t admit much light. Wizard Justyn waited for him at one end of the scarred and battered table taking up most of the right side of the room, which served as kitchen, dining room, workroom, and study, all in one. At the rear of the room was a set of rungs hammered into the stone of the wall that served as a ladder to the loft where Darian and his Master slept. Most of the rest of the wallspace was taken up with shelves, badly-made bookcases that leaned perilously toward each other, like drunks propping one another up, and several appalling pictures of famous mages. Darian’s father, who’d dabbled in painting, had once said that a good engraving or print was worth twenty bad paintings, and Darian could certainly see why. They made his eyes hurt just to look at them, but unfortunately, there was no way that he could avoid looking at them.

Most prominent was the best of the lot, a heroic portrait of a person not even a terrible painter could ruin entirely. His noble features and intelligent eyes made up to a small extent for the stiff daubs of his costume. Shown seated at a table from about the waist up, the great Wizard Kyllian, a Fireflower Mage, looked every inch the powerful sorcerer, right down to his familiar, a sleek and smug-looking striped creature at his elbow that might have been a cat, or might not have been. It was difficult to tell if Grimkin was something other than an ordinary feline, or if the painter had taken the same liberties with cat anatomy that he had with human. Arranged on either side of this portrait were the pictures of Herald-Mage Elspeth, Darkwind Hawkbrother, Quenten of White Winds and the powerful Adept Firesong, all of whom Wizard Justyn had allegedly seen and spoken with before he arrived here to serve Errold’s Grove. Darian was more than a little dubious about that claim. For one thing, how could a broken- down fake like old Justyn have ever gotten near enough to the legendary Elspeth and Darkwind to have seen them at close range, much less spoken to them? And if he had, how could he ever have thought