Fernwick and the road west. Early spring.
Ren left Fernwick on a morning when the snow was turning to slush.
It was not a special morning. No sunrise bathing the mountains in gold, no farewell song, no crowd at the gate. Only grey sky, dripping roofs and a path so sodden that Ren sank to his ankles with every step. The sheep watched him go, as they had watched him seven years ago when he came down the hill. Woolly and stupid and completely indifferent.
He did not carry much. A pack with a change of clothes, bread, dried meat and a whetstone. A woollen blanket. The sword he had used since his fourteenth winter, a plain blade from the south, with a nick near the hilt that Owen had never wanted ground out. So you remember that steel can give way too.
Owen walked beside him. He wore his old travelling cloak and led the mule by the bridle, on whose back two sacks were lashed whose contents he had not revealed to Ren.
“I’ll come as far as the last stop before the city,” he had said the evening before, in a tone that brooked no argument. “No further. Too many faces in Crownhaven know me. Even after seven years.”
Ren had not argued. He had, if he was honest, been relieved.
Odell stood at the gate.
The old village elder had grown even more bent in seven years, and the single tooth he had been so proud of had left him the winter before last. He leaned on a stick and watched Ren approach as if he were a sheep that had strayed and was now foolishly running in the wrong direction.
“So it’s true,” he mumbled. “The Academy.”
“It’s true.”
“Hm.” Odell chewed on nothing. Then he stretched out a gnarled hand and pressed something into Ren’s fist. A small, smooth stone, grey, with a hole in the middle. “From the stream. Found it as a boy. Supposed to bring luck.”
Ren looked at the stone. “Has it brought you luck?”
“I’m eighty and I’ve still got all my fingers.” Odell raised his bony shoulders. “You can’t ask for more than that out here.”
Ren put the stone in his pocket. He did not know what to say. He had lived seven years in this village, mended fences, carried sheep, pushed orcs off the palisade, and he had never learned how to say goodbye. Perhaps because his last goodbye had taken place in a burning house.
“Thank you,” he said at last.
“Come back if they don’t want you.” Odell turned and shuffled off, his stick deep in the slush. Over his shoulder he called: “And bring nails! Proper ones! Not that dwarf stuff, it’s too dear!”
Owen snorted quietly. Ren grinned.
Then they went.
At the bend where the path plunged into the forest, Ren stopped and turned round. Fernwick lay below him in the grey light, two dozen straw roofs behind a crooked palisade. Smoke rose from the chimneys. At the very east edge, beyond the stream, he could see Widow Wilmot’s hut, whose roof he had re-thatched with Owen in the third summer. Behind it the trampled training ground, now only a brown patch in the melting snow.
Just to be sure.
It had become a habit. He always looked back. But for the first time in a long while, he was not looking for danger.
Owen waited without saying anything. When Ren turned round again, he set the mule moving, and together they plunged in among the trees.
Harlby. Three days later.
Harlby was the largest town Ren had seen in seven years, and it felt as if someone were hitting him over the head with a wooden spoon.
It was loud. That was the first thing. On the market square traders were crying their wares, carts rumbled over the cobbles, somewhere two women were squabbling over a basket of eggs, a dog was chasing a cat, the cat was chasing nothing but had fled onto a barrel and was hissing from there at everyone who passed. And everywhere there were people. More people than lived in all of Fernwick, on a single square, all moving, all in a hurry, all talking at once.
Ren noticed that his hand was on his sword hilt. He took it away.
“Breathe,” Owen murmured beside him.
“I am breathing.”
“You’re breathing like someone expecting an orc.”
“There are more people here than orcs in a whole winter.”
“And none of them wants to kill you. Probably.” Owen pulled the mule along behind him, towards the other end of the square, where a row of covered wagons stood. “Most of them just want to sell you something.”
The caravan belonged to a cloth merchant named Barnaby Hobb, a small, round man with red cheeks and a voice so loud that it drowned out even the market. Every spring he drove wool from Eastreach to Crownhaven and, for a few coins, took along travellers who did not want to take the road alone. This year there were more than usual.
“Because of the trial,” he explained, while he counted Owen’s coins, twice, and then made them vanish into a purse under his shirt. “Same every year. Half of Eastreach thinks their son’s going to be a great battle mage. I’ve got three farm boys in the back on the wool wagon, a smith’s apprentice and …”
He broke off, because a shout rang out from the other end of the row of wagons.
“My hat!”
A hat sailed over the wagons. A broad-brimmed green felt hat with a tattered pheasant feather in it, spinning in the wind like a leaf in autumn. After it ran a boy, long and gangly, with straw-blond hair that stuck out in every direction and arms that seemed too long for his body.
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He stretched out his hand as he ran. The air twitched. A gust of wind caught under the hat, lifted it even higher, spun it twice in the air and then carried it, unerringly and at impressive speed, straight into the puddle at Ren’s feet.
The boy slithered to a halt. He looked at the hat. Then at Ren. Then at the hat again.
“That,” he said, “wasn’t quite how it was meant to go.”
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Ren bent down, lifted the hat out of the puddle and shook off the muddy water. The pheasant feather drooped sadly to one side.
“How was it meant to go?”
“Into my hand. Elegantly. With a little flourish at the end, like …” The boy made a sweeping gesture. “I’ve practised it a hundred times. A hundred times! At home it always works. I think it’s the houses here. They get the wind all muddled. At home there are only fields, so the wind knows where it wants to go.” He took the hat, regarded it mournfully and put it on anyway. Mud dripped down his collar. “Thanks. I’m Milo. Milo Fairweather. Are you coming along too? To Crownhaven? To the trial?”
Ren opened his mouth.
“You look like you’re going to the trial,” Milo went on before Ren could say anything. “Because of the sword. The farm boys in the back don’t have swords. One of them has a pitchfork, but I don’t think that counts. What can you do? I can do wind, you saw that. Well, you saw me try wind. Normally it’s better. Really. Where are you from?”
“Fernwick.”
“Where’s Fernwick?”
“East.”
“Further east? I thought you couldn’t get further east than Harlby without running into dwarves.” Milo beamed as if Ren had given him a present. “And what’s your name?”
“Ren.”
“Just Ren?”
“Just Ren.”
“Good. Short. Easy to remember.” Milo nodded vigorously. Mud dripped from the brim of his hat. “We’re going to be friends, Ren. I’ve got a feeling for these things.”
He turned and ran back to the wagons, one hand on his wet hat, already calling something to someone else as he went.
Ren watched him go.
Beside him Owen cleared his throat. It sounded suspiciously like a suppressed laugh.
“Don’t say anything.”
“I’m not saying anything.” Owen pulled the mule onward. “I’m just thinking.”
Milo had not lied. He really did talk without stopping.
He talked when the caravan rolled out of Harlby the next morning, and he talked all morning while they walked behind the wool wagon. He talked at lunch, with his mouth full, and he talked in the afternoon, when it began to rain, from under the brim of his hat, off which the water ran in little rivulets.
In those first two days Ren learned more about the Fairweather family than he had ever known about any family.
He learned that they had a farm near Harlby, with barley and turnips and a cow called Duchess who was cleverer than most people and knew it. That Milo’s mother baked the best apple fritters in all of Eastreach and that Milo could prove it, because she had packed him two dozen, of which eleven were left. That his father did not talk much, hardly at all really, and that Milo probably talked so much because someone in the family had to start.
And he learned about Wesley.
“Wes is my big brother.” It was the second evening. They sat by the campfire, a little apart from the others, and Milo had just passed the third apple fritter to Ren, although Ren had not asked for it. “Four years older than me. He’s with the Border Watch. In Hollowmere, that’s a fortress on the border with Orvundar, right down in the south. He’s an archer. The best of them all, he says. Well, that’s what he says. I actually believe him.”
Ren nodded. He bit into the fritter. It really was very good.
“He writes to us. Every month. Well, almost every month.” Milo poked at the embers with a stick. For the first time since Ren had known him, he spoke more slowly. “At the beginning he always wrote funny things. That the food is bad and the captain snores and that he saw a goblin trying to steal a goat and getting kicked by the goat. That sort of thing.”
He was silent for a moment. The fire crackled.
“Last autumn the letters stopped being funny. He doesn’t write much any more. Only that there are more of them. The orcs. That they don’t come in small groups any more, but in proper hordes. With banners. And that a dwarf fortress has fallen, up in the north. Greyhorn or something. The dwarves who pass through Hollowmere talk about nothing else.” He threw the stick into the fire. “In the last letter he wrote that they’ve been asking for reinforcements for a year. From Crownhaven. And that none come.”
Ren stopped chewing.
They never come. He did not know where the thought came from. He had never thought it before. But it fitted everything Bodvar had said, and everything his father had said in the throne room seven years ago, and the nod across the table.
“That’s why I want to go to the Academy.” Milo did not look at Ren. He looked into the fire. “Whoever finishes the Academy becomes a battle mage. And they send battle mages wherever there’s a fire. To the border too. To Hollowmere too.” A crooked grin that did not quite come off. “Then I’ll be the reinforcements. If no one else comes.”
Ren looked at him. The gangly boy with the mud-caked hat and the arms that were too long, who could not catch his own hat with the wind and still wanted to go to the border because his brother was there.
He did not know what to say. Again.
“That’s a good reason,” he said at last.
Milo blinked. Then he beamed again, as suddenly as if someone had lit a lantern. “Do you think so? My father says it’s the stupidest reason he’s ever heard. But he still gave me the money for the journey. And his old coat.” He tugged at the far too big brown coat hanging from his shoulders. “What about you? Why do you want to go?”
Ren had expected the question. He had prepared an answer on the way from Fernwick to Harlby and repeated it three times in his head, like the plan under the bridge. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
“My uncle was a soldier. He taught me everything he knows. Now I’m supposed to learn what he doesn’t know.”
It was not even a lie.
Milo nodded slowly, as if that were a very profound answer. Then his gaze fell on Ren’s left arm, on the leather bracer that reached from wrist to elbow.
“What’s that? Did you hurt yourself?”
“Old burn.”
“From fire? So you can do fire?”
“A little.”
“Show me!”
Ren hesitated. Then he raised his right hand, palm upwards, and let a flame rise above it. Not a big one. Just big enough that it did not flicker in the wind. Orange at the edges, yellow in the middle, calm as a candle in a closed room.
Milo whistled softly through his teeth. Then he grinned, stretched out his own hand, and a fine breath of air brushed over Ren’s flame. It leaned. Swayed back and forth like a dancer. Turned once around itself.
Milo nodded, satisfied. “Fire and wind. See? We go together.”
Ren let the flame go out. He said nothing. But he felt the corner of his mouth move, only a little, and he did not quite know whether he wanted that or not.
Later, when the others were asleep and Milo lay wrapped in his blanket beside the wool wagon, snoring so loudly that the horses twitched their ears uneasily, Ren sat with Owen at the edge of the camp and kept watch.
The sky had cleared. The stars stood cold and bright above the hills. In the west, somewhere beyond the horizon, lay Crownhaven.
After a while Owen broke the silence. “He likes you.”
“He likes everyone. At lunchtime today he told a cow by the roadside what his own cow is called.”
“And you like him too.”
Ren did not answer.
“You’re allowed to like him, Ren.” Owen spoke quietly, his eyes on the dark road. “That’s permitted. It’s not written anywhere that for the rest of your life you mustn’t let anyone near you.”
“I don’t know how to do it.” The words were out before Ren could stop them. He stared at his hands. “Talk to him. To anyone my age. He talks about his cow and his brother and his mother’s apple fritters, and I sit beside him thinking how many steps it is to the edge of the forest. Whether the men at the other fire are armed. Which wagon gives the best cover if someone shoots from that hill over there.” He shook his head. “He’s normal, Owen. He’s just … normal. And I don’t remember how that works.”
Owen was silent for a long time.
“Your father,” he said at last, “was the quietest boy in the whole Academy at seventeen. He sat in the library and read and talked to no one, because he was the heir of Ravenmoor and because everyone had taught him that an heir must be careful whom he trusts.” A small, crooked smile. “And then on the first day a loud, stubborn farm boy from the south sat down beside him and didn’t stop talking.”
Ren looked at him.
“Took three months before he answered me for the first time. With more than one word, I mean.” He shrugged. “After that he didn’t stop for twenty-three years.”
Ren looked over at Milo, who was murmuring something about a cow in his sleep and turning onto his other side. The hat lay beside him in the grass, the pheasant feather still sadly bent.
“I’m not my father,” Ren said quietly.
“No.” Owen stood, brushed the grass from his breeches and, as he passed, laid his hand briefly on Ren’s shoulder. “But you’ve got three years to find out who you are instead.”
He went to the fire to put on more wood.
Ren stayed sitting. He looked at the road leading west, black and empty in the starlight. Then at the hill to the north, over which the road would lead tomorrow.
And then his gaze caught.
On the crest of the hill, sharp against the starry sky, stood a rider. Motionless. Tall. The horse lowered its head to graze, but the rider did not move. He was looking down. At the camp. At the wagons.
Ren counted. Five heartbeats. Ten.
Then the rider turned his horse and vanished behind the crest, as if he had never been there.
Ren sat there for a long time, his hand on his sword, staring at the empty crest of the hill.
He did not wake anyone. It was only a rider. There were many riders on the road to Crownhaven.
But when Owen came back and sat down beside him again, Ren murmured: “North hill. A rider. He was watching us.”
Owen did not look. He only nodded, very slightly, as if Ren had told him it would rain tomorrow.
“I know. I saw him too.”