Owlflight

that the horrible daubs on his wall in any way resembled them? They hardly even resembled portraits of human beings! The picture of Elspeth showed her atop her Companion, in an unreasonably heroic pose, both hands upraised with what were supposed to be bolts of lightning coming from her hands. But the “lightning bolts” looked more like sickly pale-green snakes, the Companion looked like a lumpy cow, the face of the Herald-Mage like a blob of dough with two currants stuck in for eyes and a slash of orange carrot for a mouth. She apparently had twisted legs, no neck, and enormous, pillowlike breasts. The Herald’s uniform and her Companion weren’t even white, they were a disgusting muddy-yellow sort of color, as if the painter hadn’t been able to afford a pure white pigment. Or maybe he’d used a cheap varnish that had yellowed as it aged. Darkwind at least looked human, but the bird on his shoulder had more in common with a fat chicken ready for the pot than any hawk that Darian had ever seen. The rest of the portraits were pretty much on the same level of skill - or lack of it - the firebird posing with the Adept was so ineptly done that most of the villagers thought it was supposed to represent a goose and had wondered aloud out of Justyn’s hearing why a mage would have such a silly familiar. As for Firesong’s mask - the Adept was never seen without one - it looked like a child’s drawing of a sunflower, and if everyone didn’t already know that it was a mask, a reasonable person could have thought the painting was of some fabulous monster.

It was painfully obvious that no woman had ever touched this cottage since the day Justyn moved in. Darian had gotten used to it over the last six months, but there was no doubt that it was a worse-than-typical aged bachelor’s study. Littering the leaning and badly-made bookcases were an assortment of cheap and flashy “magical” implements, a few tattered old books, a lot of unrecognizable but definitely dead animals which were allegedly “preserved” in some way, several spider webs, a couple of cracked mugs, the upper half of the skull of some largish animal, an apple core, and a great deal of dust. Darian had tried to clean the place up when he’d first been sent here, out of pure self-interest, but being told sharply to leave things alone on numerous occasions, he’d lost interest in cleaning up anything but his own little corner around his pallet in the loft.

Sitting right in front of Wizard Kyllian’s portrait on the top of a tipsy-looking bookcase was a beat-up and scruffy old black tomcat currently engaged in cleaning his hind leg, which stuck stiffly straight up into the air as the cat’s tongue rasped at the thin fur. This was Justyn’s familiar, or so he claimed. It certainly matched its Master, for a less-graceful cat Darian had never seen. It seemed to share the villagers’ contempt for its Master and his apprentice, ignoring both of them with a disdain more in keeping with the pampered pet of a princess than of a patchy-furred mongrel of indeterminate age, with a broken tail and chewed-up ears.

Carefully placed in a rack on the wall was a rather plain looking, partially split walking stick with a bit of crystal embedded in the top which Justyn said was his “wizard’s staff.” That, along with four chairs (none matching) and the thick, warped oak table with a book under one leg keeping it straight, comprised all of the furnishings of the room.

The table was covered with jars and bottles, the remains of last night’s dinner in stacked-up plates that had been shoved out of the way, bits of scribbled-on paper, burned-out ends of candles, and one empty wine bottle. Darian glanced with guilt at the stack of dirty dishes; he was supposed to have cleaned them up this morning, but he had been in such a hurry to get up and out before Justyn thought of giving him a lesson that he had neglected that duty entirely. Now he’d have to scrub them with sand to get all the dried-on gravy off them, and he’d have to do so before they could eat or they wouldn’t have anything to eat tonight’s dinner on. At least he’d remembered to take the turnip pasties over to the baker in time for them to go into the oven. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d forgotten and they’d had to make do with bread, raw turnips, onions, and sometimes a little cheese.

But the mess evidently didn’t bother Justyn at all; when Darian had first been apprenticed to him, the place had looked much the same. The day he’d moved his things in, Darian had been strictly forbidden to touch anything on any of the bookshelves without specific permission, which frankly led Darian to believe that old Justyn wasn’t certain what was on those shelves himself. It had occurred to him that Justyn was afraid that if Darian cleaned and organized things, the boy would ruin the wizard’s best excuse for not getting magics done immediately when people asked him for them. Hunting for this or that ingredient or piece of apparatus was a good excuse for stalling, and as Darian knew from his own experience, if you stalled long enough, people sometimes forgot their requests.

“Sit,” Justyn ordered. Darian slumped into a seat across from Justyn, taking the chair that wobbled the least. There was a plate with an apple on it right in front of his chair, and sitting where he could watch both the apple and Darian was Justyn. With a resigned sigh, Darian stared at the apple while Justyn stared just as intently at Darian.

He looks like a real rag-bag today, Darian thought critically, looking down at the wrinkled, winter-stored apple. He looks as if birds were nesting in his beard. Is this pan of his act, or is he getting even more senile? Justyn was about the most ill-kempt male in the village, his only wealth that of his untidy beard. He had three or four shabby and patched robes, all pretty much alike, with badly-made, lopsided, Esoteric Symbols sewn on them by Justyn himself. If you looked closely, you could see little rusty spots where Justyn had stabbed his thumb with the needle and bled on bis work. He kept them clean, Darian had to give the old man that much credit, although he was always spilling things on them that made stains that never would come out, rendering the garments into a mosaic of blotches of various faint colors. It was difficult to tell how old the mage was; his hair and beard were gray rather than white, with a few streaks of darker color in them, and his brownish eyes, very sad and tired, were sunken so deeply beneath his shaggy eyebrows that it was difficult to see the wrinkles at the corners. He could have been any age from forty to ninety, and since no one in the village knew anything of his history before he came to Errold’s Grove in the company of a Herald on circuit, his true age was anyone’s guess.

“Well?” Justyn said, showing a bit of impatience. “Are you going to just sit there wasting time, or are you going to actually do something?”

With another reluctant sigh, Darian stopped merely staring at the apple and began concentrating.

He narrowed his focus until the apple filled his vision and his mind, simultaneously relaxing and tensing. He concentrated on the apple being above the plate, as if an invisible hand held it there. As he concentrated, the apple began to wobble a little. The movement was so slight that it could have been caused by someone bumping the table itself, except that neither he nor Justyn had moved.

After a long moment of tension, he felt something inside himself relax.