Chapter 5
Chander edged around Evann and went to stand by Quinton. “What?” Chander asked. “What do you mean?”
When the older man didn’t respond right away, Chander threw a glance back over his shoulder at Evann. From the expression on his face, Evann wasn’t sure if the other boy was angry, confused, or concerned. He could sympathize with Chander, he decided, since he was feeling a bit of all three of those things himself.
Quinton shook his head sharply, then looked at Evann. “Do you know the dragon’s name?”
“Only a use-name.”
“So you know that much,” Quinton muttered. “What is it?”
“Rufous.”
Quinton sat up straight again. “Rufous? Black dragon?”
“Uh-huh,” Evann said.
“The new Solon?”
“Yes,” Evann said, wondering how Quinton knew that, if dragons were so unwelcome in Morshton.
“Tell me everything.”
And so Evann did, beginning with the night he ran away from home. He recounted meeting Rufous, their travels, going to the dragon conclave, and figuring out a way to give Rufous fire without getting himself killed.
Quinton grunted at that, but when Evann paused he waved a hand for the story to continue.
So Evann continued, telling of the adventures of the summer, culminating in the double duel at his home village—dragon against dragon and wizard against boy-who-became-a-wizard.
“So I broke his staff,” Evann concluded after he changed the staff back to a glowing spade. “That broke the spells he was holding on Rufous and my family and the other villagers. He fell down like a dead man, and Rufous, once he was freed, sent Moriach crashing to the ground. Moriach hit hard enough that it broke him, and before long he died. And I ended up with a head full of the other wizard’s . . . stuff . . . sort of.”
“How long ago was this, again?”
“Not quite two weeks,” Evann repeated again.
Having finished his tale, Evann leaned on the spade and looked at Quinton. For a long moment, the older man just sat there, staring at the table top. Finally, he sighed.
“Boy . . . Evann . . . that story is so outlandish, if it wasn’t for that,” he gestured at the blue glowing spade, “I’d call you a dreamer at best and a liar at worst. But that,” pointing at the spade again, “is just a bit hard to ignore.”
Evann grinned.
There was another moment of quiet, then Quinton slammed his hands on the table and stood. “So!” he exclaimed. “However odd the story, you are a wizard, and you are one with way more knowledge and spellcraft in your head than you should have, especially for your age.” He frowned for a moment. “You didn’t mention the wizard’s name.”
Evann shook his head. “He told the villagers it was Oreton. But that’s all I know.”
“Right,” Quinton said. “Hard to get answers from a dead man.”
“How did you know he’s dead,” Evann asked.
Quinton’s mouth twisted. “A wizard’s duel major is usually fatal for the loser.” Evann swallowed at that. Something else the old stories hadn’t been crystal clear about. “However, occasionally a wizard does survive being defeated. But in every case I’ve heard of, it would have almost been better to have not survived. Mind, spirit, and soul are always broken by such. Dealing with an adult body with the mind of a maybe three year old child in it . . . it might have been better if he had died.” He shook his head.
“So,” Quinton continued, “what did he look like?”
“Medium height, pudgy, sallow skin, thin brown hair. Not much to look at, really,” Evann said.
“What color was his magic?”
“Green . . . ish,” Evann said with a scrunched-up face. “Sort of puke-green.”
“Ah,” Quinton said. “That would be Oreton.” He shook his head again. “It couldn’t have happened to a better choice, but Name of the Name, if that’s whose craft has landed in your head, you do need some help, and soon. It’s not as easy as you might think, assimilating craft without it affecting you. Not like you can pour some soapy water in one ear and wash your mind out, after all.”
“So are you a wizard?” Evann finally asked the question that had been lurking behind his teeth ever since they arrived in this room.
Quinton looked at Evann. “Am I a wizard? What kind of question is that?”
“An honest one,” Evann replied. “Are you a wizard?”
“What do you think?”
Evann started to answer, then something stopped his words. Could he determine on his own if Quinton was a wizard? No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than he attempted to find out.
Is he a wizard? he thought very intently.
The blue light from the spade seemed to swell a bit, then faded again, but nothing occurred that Evann could consider to be an answer. All right, then, try something else. After another moment of thought, Evann grinned.
Does he have a wizard’s staff?
And that triggered a response. The blue light strengthened, and the staff leaned forward slightly in Evann’s hand. He stepped in the direction it was leaning, one step at a time, until he was next to the table. Quinton and Chander watched as he moved; Quinton with narrowed eyes, Chander with widened.
The staff leaned toward the hat that Quinton had tossed onto the table when he walked into the room. Evann looked at the hat—no staff there. But then something occurred to Evann. If he could make his spade look like a walking staff, perhaps other wizards could make their staffs look like almost anything—like, say, a hat.
Evann reached out and gently touched the hat with his spade. He wasn’t sure what would happen—if anything would happen—but he was startled when there was suddenly a staff standing on the top of the table with the hat perched atop it. After a moment, he looked over his shoulder at Quinton with a big grin on his face.
Quinton snorted. “Don’t look so pleased with yourself, boy. A good wizard would have noticed it as soon as he walked in the room. I did with your shovel, after all.”
“Spade,” Evann said.
“Whatever,” the older man said with a wave of his hand. The staff hopped up and made a thump when it landed on the table. Quinton looked at it sourly. “Behave yourself, you.”
The hat fell down to the table again, and the staff changed into the little wooden plaques Evann had seen in the tavern and cascaded into the hat. Evann looked at that, and said, “I didn’t know that was possible . . . making the staff separate into pieces like that, I mean.”
“Well, boy,” Quinton said, “there are a lot of things you don’t know. Some of them are more important than that little trick.” Chander seemed to choke a bit at that. Quinton looked over at him and quirked his mouth a bit, but didn’t say anything.
“So you are a wizard,” Evann stated this time.
Quinton held out his hand, and the staff elevated out of the hat again and floated over to the waiting fingers. “Yes, boy, I am a wizard. Satisfied?” That last was said in a rather sarcastic tone of voice.
Evann wasn’t bothered by sarcasm much. He’d heard it almost every day of his life once he started toddling along on his own two feet, usually directed at him. “Just wanted to make sure,” he replied.
Quinton looked over to where Chander’s eyes had opened to the size of saucers, almost. “Yes, I’m a wizard. Get over it. I put my boots on one at a time, just like you do.”
Chander’s eyes narrowed. “You never told me.”
Quinton snorted. “You didn’t need to know. And if you hadn’t brought the boy . . .”
“Evann,” Evann interjected.
“Whatever . . .” with another wave of the wizardly hand, “. . . to me, you still wouldn’t know.”
“Why not?” Chander’s face was showing signs of matching Evann’s older sister’s most stubborn expression. Evann was a bit fascinated by that, as Aniosha—said older sister—could almost out-stubborn his father, who was admitted and admired by the entire village and surrounding countryside as being the most stubborn man alive. (Well, except for his mother. For her, admiration was replaced by exasperation.) He waited to see how Chander measured up.
“Chander, has it occurred to you that I obviously don’t want everyone in Morshton to know that I’m a wizard? Has it occurred to you that I really don’t want to have to deal with the kind of folk who seek out Alemandra, Sammo, or Rogier on a daily basis? Has it occurred to you that any wizard who’s worth his staff, much less his name, is going to try to not attract attention?”
“No, no, and why?” Chander said, ticking off his fingers with the responses. Very like Aniosha, Evann thought with a grin.
“Partly so we can avoid muddle-headed questions like that,” Quinton growled. Evann kept grinning at that. That sounded so like his father whenever Evann had asked more questions than the blacksmith had wanted to handle. “I didn’t tell you anything because I didn’t want to be caught up by the local gossip webs.”
Chander looked affronted. “I wouldn’t say anything to anyone.”
“Ha!” Quinton said. “Chander, you’re the biggest gossip I know.”
“I listen, Quinton,” Chander said seriously. “I may help a rumor or two on their way, but I never start anything. And I bring everything of any interest to you.”
After a moment, Quinton’s mouth quirked again. “Fair enough. But even so, someone who’s on the quiet usually has his reasons, and those reasons are usually kept quiet as well. What you don’t know, you can’t let slip, Chander.”
Chander thought about that for a moment. “Fair enough,” he conceded in turn.
Evann quit grinning, disappointed. Aniosha would never have given up that easily.
The moment was disrupted by the arrival of a large raven in one of the open windows, who settled in with a flurry of wings before flipping them about and mantling them. The bird cocked his head at an angle and moved his head around in quick jerky movements. Quinton looked at him. “Hmm. You’re new. You’re welcome here, as long as you behave. No thieving, or you’ll lose tail feathers.”
“Kwourk.”
Quinton appeared to dismiss the bird from his mind as he turned toward Evann. “Boy . . .”
“Evann,” Evann said firmly.
Quinton tilted his head as if to consider Evann from a different angle. “Evann,” he said after a long moment. “So what is to be done about you?”
Evann tilted his head the same direction. “Can . . . no, will you help me?”
The older wizard sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to,” he said with a sour expression. “Leaving you the way you are is an invitation for disaster.”
Evann bridled a little bit. “If I’m too much trouble, just send me to someone else. I don’t want to be someplace where I’m not wanted.”
“Boy—Evann,” Quinton said, “it has nothing to do with want. And even if I refused you, there is no one to send you to. You’ve already seen the other so-called wizards in Morshton, and you had the wisdom to walk away from them. Congratulations.” The wizard’s dry tone spurred a laugh from Evann. “There is no one else in Morshton—unless they’re good enough to hide from me, which isn’t likely—and letting you leave to walk to a city where you could find someone decent to work with . . . let’s just say, I don’t think you have that much time.”
Quinton’s expression had gone sober, and the tone of his voice matched. Evann’s feeling of uncertainty from last night returned in full force. “Time?” he said, voice warbling just a bit.
“If it’s been two weeks since your duel, then your time may be running out.” Quinton’s tone was now grim.
“Why?” Evann squelched a warble, but he felt it inside.
Quinton sighed. “I’m too tired to do the long answer. We’ll go over it another day. But a short answer . . . hmm, you said your father was a blacksmith, right?”
“Yes.” Evann wondered where this was going.
“So do you know what oil of vitriol is?”
Evann shivered. “Uh-huh. Da used to make it for the priest and for a goldsmith he knows to check how pure gold pieces were.”
“Did he ever show you what it does?”
Evann shivered again. “Uh-huh . . . on a piece of bread and on a dead mouse. He wanted to make sure none of us would mess with it. My sister puked.”
Quinton’s mouth quirked. “I assume by that note that you didn’t?”
“Well . . . almost,” Evann admitted. “But what does that have to do with my having the other wizard’s magic in my head?”
“You know how the mouse kind of burned and smoldered and smoked and stank?” Quinton asked. Evann nodded. “Well, if you don’t get the strange magic under control, that’s kind of what will start happening to your magic.” Evann flinched. “And you know how the bread turned to black and ashes?” Quinton didn’t wait for Evann to react. “That’s sort of what will happen to your mind.”
Evann’s stomach lurched. He really felt sick all of a sudden, and swallowed hard several times to try and keep his earlier sausage meal from climbing back up his throat. Feeling very light-headed, he clutched on to his spade and leaned on it.
Quinton apparently could read his expression. “Bucket’s over in the corner if you need it,” he said with a nod of his head in that direction. “It might be good if you sat down.” He snagged another stool out from under the table and shoved it toward Evann.
Once Evann was sure he could move without causing his stomach to erupt, he stepped over to the stool and gingerly took a seat. That did seem to help, and after a couple of deep slow breaths things seemed to have calmed down some. His stomach was still not exactly settled, but it didn’t seem on the verge of outright rebellion, either.
Quinton was watching him with care, and at that point seemed to be satisfied Evann wasn’t going to puke all over everything. Evann wasn’t quite as certain as the wizard, though.
“ ‘Kind of’ and ‘Sort of’,” Evann said quietly, and raised his eyebrows.
Quinton smiled a bit. “Stout lad,” he replied. “Not many could have taken that news and done as well as you.” He sobered again. “The truth is that you are in trouble—serious trouble. And the descriptions I gave you are just physical examples that compare in some way to what will really happen. But it’s not going to happen right away, and I think we have time to get you trained to prevent it. But it’s going to take everything you’ve got in the way of attention and focus and gumption to make it happen.”
Evann pushed to his feet. “I left home to find a dragon. I survived becoming a wizard. I expect I’ll survive this as well.” He sounded very determined, even to his own ear. “I need to find a room or someplace to sleep, and I need to find a job to pay for it.”
“No, you don’t,” Quinton said with a bit of a scowl. “You’ll be sleeping here, and I’ll see to it you get fed. I wasn’t jesting when I said that it’s going to take everything you’ve got. You can’t afford to be distracted by other worries. Your bed is over there.” The wizard pointed to a far corner. Evann looked at Quinton with his mouth open. “Go put your things on your bed, and then step back over here. You need to get started.” Evann didn’t move. “Now, apprentice!”
Evann moved. As he did so, Quinton looked to where the raven was rustling around in a bowl with his beak. “Behave, you.”
“K-k-k-k.”