Griffin's Fate

Chapter Two - Part One

"I'm off to the Pellos'," Muriel said in a hushed voice from the entry hall. She stepped out of her house slippers and into solid boots. She pinned another shawl over her head and snatched up their market basket. In went a lantern and some bread as a decoy, all hidden under a cloth. She paused, thinking. "And I will have to tell the Baron, too."

"Milony?" Ken protested, rising from the bench. He was still wrapped pitifully in the first shawl. "Oh gods, why him?"

"It is the way these things are done." She pulled on a pair of doeskin gloves with a briskness that meant there would be no debate.

"But Meru, I want to go with you."

Both adults stopped him with a fearful look.

"Would you rather I saw crazy Old Tack?" she retorted, but dropped the basket when tears filled his eyes. She got on her tiptoes to put her hands on his shoulders. "Everything will be fine, Kupru. But you know we can't risk it. Cara will know what to do." She kissed his cheeks, gestured for them to get on with supper, and slipped out the front door.

Ken couldn't bring himself to eat and Raylim couldn't bear to be at the table. The latter folded into his ragged armchair by the hearth, mechanically chewing a hunk of bread. He lit what would have been his celebratory pipe and puffed quietly, staring into the fading coals. On any other night it was his usual behavior.

"S'not yer fault," the old man said at last to the room, aware it wasn't empty.

A chair slid closer and creaked but remained out of his sight. Raylim had said a number of words about mages over the years, and none of them kind. Ken waited while his grandfather by bond tried to find some better ones.

"Magic picks who It pleases." Raylim flicked his hand weakly from his armrest, as if fighting was pointless. "Plenty of stories of the fey touch coming on when folks is wound up...But you were just so happy." He savored the memory, then his furry brow knotted. He studied his heavy, worn hands. "An' we worked so hard. So damn, ruddy hard..." He drank deeply from his mug and his gray beard came away laced with cider. He wiped his arm across his mouth, taking a long sniff behind it. "You just gotta see this through, Ken, and hope."

"Hope what?" a voice asked softly.

"That you'll still want yer music, after they try and mold you inna some stuck-up mage."

The young man forced a laugh.

"You don't have to worry, Grampi. I'm going to be a stuck-up musician."

"Heh." He rarely accepted the nickname. "Hold onna that, yeah?"

Raylim turned around in his chair. Both of them were wet-eyed and red, even in the low light. The shadows from the dying hearth etched deep lines in the old man's face. He looked gravely tired and drawn. Ken's Mum would say trenajat, or heart-wounded. Ken's chest ached and he remembered the word's sibling trenojit, heart-mirrored. He worried about Raylim being left alone. Ken fiercely nodded his promise with a cocksure smile his Grampi took. But eventually the teenager's jittery knees needed to move. He didn't feel so sure anymore, about anything.

Ken marched upstairs and swung the lute case atop his bed. He clicked the latches and thrust the lid open, snatching the large feather up by its silvery white quill.

"What's your deal?" he hissed. He glared at it, and the only answer he got was a distant rumble of summer thunder. Nothing else happened. Shaking, he threw the feather down, and watched it softly fall and land on his floor. He rubbed his hands over his face and promised to get ahold of himself. He was acting moony. It wasn't the feather's fault. His Mum would be back soon with answers.

He wandered their little house and claimed the top of a trunk in his Mum's sewing room for the best view of the road. He fought to keep his mind empty and watched the passing of a wild, dry storm at sunset. The wind bent the spindly cypress trees into sinister shapes, but only a few long-tailed raindrops streaked the windowpanes.

Ken realized he knew nothing about magic. Only the silly Pub Rules everyone recited. Rules surely made up by some potted drunk. But folks liked the Rules because they felt about right.

Firstly, the number of proper mages a town had matched its number of places to buy a drink. Soffold had a halfhearted bar at the inn, so producing something feytouched once was the acceptable tithe. Done and gone years ago with Suri, and therefore not him.

Then there were the liquid measures, just as easy to remember. One in fifty got a dram of luck magic. Survivor's magic. Like when Drake Gisbin drew a perfect hand last month, then stumbled away from a lightning strike on his way home. Rus said his older brother was mostly still lucky. But now and again the big man would stare off, cursing a hum in his bones.

And in a town of five hundred like theirs one or two had a bottle's worth of folk magic. Could turn out to be wine or vinegar, but it always bore out a good story. Every scruffy sailor had unsinkable weather sense. Every tinker hawked finding charms. Hedgewitches were forever talking the fire out of some fool's burns and soothing colics with honeyed syrups. Respectable enough in a pinch, even if Old Tack on the pier was a mite scattered.

But what Ken had done hadn't felt at all like good luck, and he didn't recall offending anyone enough to be cursed.

And he'd even seen the last of the Pub Rules once. The one in five thousand. The poor sods who got the whole barrel, the bar, and half the cellar. Visible, wild casting. Actual mages. Best carted off to a college for everyone's safety. And right now, his Mum was at Suri's old house, asking her parents for directions.

Ken had only been six back then but he still knew it hadn't fit a case of mage fever. Suri had seemed in perfect health and in control of her wits. He watched another burst of wind rake over the marshes and drummed up everything he could from that day.

It had also been a miserable, sticky afternoon. The crew of youngsters had been wandering in the shade of the town wall and run into little Suri Pellos, sitting in a patch of dirt and stacking rocks. 'Making castles,' she'd called it, lording over her piles with her lower lip and fist stuck out fiercely. When Rus Gisbin and Cufric's son Azel had tried to knock them over the stones steamed, cracked, and exploded like rotten eggs. It had happened so matter-of-factly that for years after Ken thought it was just something rocks could do. The bullies came away with flecks of stone in their skin his Mum was called out to stitch up. Suri had fled barefoot into the woods. Sobbing, with her cinnamon-hued hand protecting a grazed cheek. Ken remembered her braided black pigtails bouncing behind her like a pair of rabbit's feet.

Her drips of blood in the road were left alone by the children, as something special but ominous. Some of the other lads took rocks, until their parents got wise. Ken had never known Suri very well but two days later her whole family took her away to be Tested. Weeks passed and lights returned in the Pellos' windows just after the harvest festival. Her parents smiled perfectly in the market but she was gone. According to Cades, the wealthier families had paid for Testers from abroad. Mages who came and left quietly with heavier purses and no apprentices. No sign of anyone catching her affliction, but it was months before Soffold's parents stopped looking askance at their children. Ghosts in the fields, magic on the thresholds, as they said.

Ken stared into the hallway at their own stone threshold and had a real, quiet cry. He was going to be taken away.