She had fallen asleep watching the last embers of the small dinner fire she had lit die. It had been nice, nestling deeper into the furs she used for bedding and blankets as the chill and dank of the night air settled over her makeshift camp. She had dug, she hoped, the last pebble out of the ground beneath her, and with the thick late spring grass growing now, it was feeling almost as if this was comfortable. She rubbed her face against her pillow and closed her eyes.
She had given one last look at the castle as she had walked away into the desert. No… she hadn't. Her mother had done that. Rosalea had not felt the same hesitation, she did not fear that she was making possibly an incorrect choice - it had been simple, easy to know she had to get away. She hadn’t doubted, but her mother had.
The wolf trotted in front of her as she walked; with the baby, it had become hard to use her own magic, so Gaiden and his familiar kept the path clear and kept coming back to check on her, to make certain she was keeping up all right. She was, mostly. Her head hurt… it always hurt these days.
… Flames licked at the edges of her vision, “Rosalea…”
“Rosalea…”
“Rosalea!”
The sharp sound of a horse making a snorting sound cut into the girl’s dreams, finally bringing her to a state of wakefulness. “Rosalea, there are wolves!” Rosalea found herself instantly awake, sitting up in her makeshift bed with a heartbeat that was suddenly aflutter.
And then her drowsy brain registered the faint howling off in the distance… it also recognized that it was the time of the morning when the sun hadn’t really come up, but its pink haze had settled in the cold night air and caused things to get coated with dew… and that it was bitterly cold.
She flopped back into her skins and pulled them up over her face with a shiver, feeling the damp come off on her hands, “Annie, come on, those are miles away from here.” She tucked her fingers in with her, away from the biting cold of the spring air.
However, Annie came nearer, stomping her hoof and dragging it across the ground near Rosalea’s head, just above the skins, still very anxious. “Aaaannnniiiieeee,” Rosalea whined at her. “It is way too early and cold out still for this.”
“Why do we always have to be by ourselves? It’d be safer with a herd like we had before. You didn’t tell me you were taking me and never going back to anyone or anywhere.”
Rosalea sighed, listening to her snort, snork, and stamp at the ground and closed her eyes. “Because we do not really belong to any herd.” Her tone was so bitter, Annie started rubbing her nose aggressively where she could see the lump of the girl hidden within the blankets, and Rosalea sighed again. “All right, all right, I am up, stop it.”
She rolled out from beneath the thick furs and began shivering as she fished her clothes out from the bottom of the sleeping pallet. It helped them to be warm, but not warm enough as she climbed first into the trousers and wool tunic. Her fingers ached in the cold as she brushed somewhat damp hair, and began to light a fire to cook something actually warm for breakfast as well as some mint tea. As she poured the last of the flour meal into the water to cook into a loaf of flatbread for her meals today, she sighed. “Well, you are in luck, Annie, we have to find somewhere people are for a little while,” she informed the horse.
“Good, then the wolves will not get us.”
Rosalea rolled her eyes and slumped back against her pack and the tree as she listened to this paranoia. “I can talk to you as clearly as I can talk to them, so if we have any trouble, I will be able to deal with it. Now knock it off.” The mare snorted and continued to be agitated. Rosalea felt exasperation so intense, it squeezed a loud sigh out of her. She tried to cover herself in a blanket, maybe just doze a little more... but now the sun was up, and... well, she was just plain awake. Instead, she gave up and took out her irritation on the source of her disrupted sleep, “Annie, you and I have been together almost a year. We survived a winter together. We have not even seen a human in this forest, or any signs of them, in literally weeks. Nothing has ever caused you harm or even come close to causing you harm. You are so unreasonable.”
Annie’s ears flattened to her head and her nose wrinkled in sharp distaste, showing the bottoms of grass-stained teeth as she didn’t bother to use words to tell what she thought about Rosalea’s logic for their situation. Rosalea pretended not to notice and acted as if she possessed perfect equanimity, so Annie explained, “It’s not natural for your kind or mine to be alone all the time like this.”
Rosalea sighed and picked up a stick and poked the fire with some ill-tempered words on the tip of her mental tongue, but it did no good to take it out on Annie. “Well, no one explained that to anyone else, so here we are,” she said at last. She had tried to explain all this to the mare, that the Uryans did not want her because she was part Ieshan, and she did not want the Ieshans because she was part Uryan...
In any case, her yellow eyes and odd hair marked her as not one of the Myradulians, and most seemed like they only tolerated her long enough to trade. Only long enough to do that, because there were plenty of rumors about yellow-eyed people that could steal your soul. She didn’t feel that anyone was capable of stealing souls, but there was an argument to be made that mind magic was at least a little similar. Most people would not get close enough to touch her, and they had her leave whatever she was trading them behind to be picked up later. She leaned forward and pulled the pack around her still sprawled out bedding, digging out what jewelry remained. There was not a lot left, and what was left was the most expensive pieces that would be hard to make change for when she was looking for something like just a bag of flour. She pursed her lips… they dealt with her long enough to trade, yes, but she was running out of things to trade. I need to find work or something, maybe.
“So far, we have only been to big cities, and you do not like them either,” Rosalea said, changing the subject, “What if we try a small town?”
Annie flicked her tail and huffed, leaning down to graze on dew-soaked grass, apparently she was too annoyed to comment. Rosalea put her dough on the fire to try and cook it through, and got up with a brush to clean Annie of all the dirt she’d got on her from rolling about once the saddle was off last night. Annie slowly cooled off as Rosalea brushed the rich orange-gold of her main body and even worked her comb through the long gold mane. Annie turned, putting her dark nose against Rosalea’s face and huffed, breathing warm grassy humid air over her chilled skin. "I think a small place of humans would be more like home,” she acknowledged at last.
Rosalea put a hand up and pet the mare’s cheek and leaned her own cheek against the velvety nose. The next big damp grassy breath made her push the nose away, it was cold and wet enough this spring morning, “All right, you, stop it. Do you want me to finish brushing you or not?”
Annie moved her face away as Rosalea sighed. She thought about flour running out and how much she hated foraging and sleeping on the ground and this whole outdoors nightmare as a whole; she sometimes really missed home mornings like this. She would have woken up in a room already warmed by fire, maybe with a bath being drawn up by a maid with imber magic… Even if they just let us stay in a barn, it would be a relief to sleeping outside. If I hadn’t developed my magic so thoroughly, I would have frozen last winter until we found the lodgings in that last city for a while. She took her bread off of the heat and put her small cooking pan on with some water she filtered out of the air to boil for tea.
“Stay put, Annie. I am going to climb a tree, so I can see further and maybe we can find us a town.” Rosalea put her hand up to a rather tall pine tree’s branches, focusing on her plant vitae magic, and it bent a little to meet her hands. She gripped it and let the tree lift her up, then she used magic to keep the needles bent away from her and the sap off her hands, and she climbed as high as the tree could support her, looking out. Down the otherside of this hill, in a valley between it and another hill, she could see the unmistakable signs of a town. She recognized it by all the perfect squares of the fields. Since it was down the hill, it should only take a few hours to reach it.
She slid back down the tree, dug into her pack and got some dried meat out of it to munch on as she waited for the tea to steep in her pan. “Found one, and it was not even difficult,” she announced. She picked up the saddle, causing Annie to sigh at her. Rosalea ignored all the sighs, and today she did not fall for the trick where Annie held her breath to try to keep the saddle looser on her body. Last time, Rosalea had missed it, the whole saddle had fallen sideways and she had landed on the ground hard enough to have the bruises for weeks. Annie was only a little repentant, and since Rosalea could not compromise on the girth tightness, went back to the trick pretty rapidly.
She packed up her breakfast, finished her tea, and they set out.
Just as Rosalea estimated, it was only hours of going down the hillside until they got to the town. Things started to get marshy, and she could sense a large river flowing not too far away. The trees were still mostly pine trees and other conifers, but interspersed in now were some leafy trees that thrived better in the valley with a higher water level. The mountains all around this area probably drained into this valley and gave it plenty of water. It had a bit of an earthy, moist smell she didn’t much care for. She was not sure she would have opted to build a whole town in a river bottom, but the grass was thick and green, so perhaps it was good for livestock.
As they got nearer to the town, she became conscious of plants she had never seen in real life, but she knew were sometimes called “cattails” from books she had read when she was younger. It tempted her to go pick one and see if the seeds were really all that much like cotton, but the thick boggy water they grew in wasn’t appealing to her in the slightest, so she left the thought alone. The reeds hid a lot of life she could sense, plenty of frogs and snakes about the place. She also became aware of many ditches spanning the area. She remembered it was not like Myradulians to hide their presence, but to settle in a place and plan to stay there for generations. In that way, a fertile river bottom was just the place to be since they could sculpt the land to their liking.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Rosalea found a road, which neatly divided squares of fields, and walked her horse slowly along it. It struck her by how square the fields were, so square as to defy the whole of the rest of the landscape.
She came alongside a man who was working hard to pull a plow by hand. She stopped. “Sir, what’s this place called?” She made herself use a contraction consciously. She knew she sounded too educated to be someone who was a wanderer, but it was sometimes hard for her to remember to curb her language.
He looked her over with a critical eye, and then looked quite pointedly into her eyes. “A changer?” his voice was startled.
Rosalea instantly became defensive. People had clearly recognized her and what she was likely to be, but none had pointed it out directly. Of course, she was much deeper into Myradulian territory than most anyone like her had probably been before. After all, she had been traveling this way nearly nonstop for almost nine months. She prepared to urge Annie to a gallop. The horse danced, sensing her tension.
“Easy,” he said, putting his hands up. “I’m just surprised to see one here. I mean nothing by it.” Rosalea relaxed a little. After a moment he said, “You have come to Mire. Why do you ask?”
Rosalea debated about how much she should allow herself to tell him, and knew that she did not want to tell him more than was necessary. “I came here to trade or to earn some goods. I am out of flour and some other perishables.”
He nodded, staring at her rather intensely the whole time that she spoke to him. “I see you have at least two kinds of magic,” he observed.
“Uh, yes, I do,” she said, not certain at all what he was getting at with this line of questioning. She was confused at first how he identified her magic so quickly, but she remembered that mages of like-magics could see each other’s magical aura.
“Huh. Interesting person you are. So what goods were you looking for? Do you have any money?” Rosalea found the questions a little too probing, and subconsciously cued Annie to start backing up. The man flushed a little. “I’m sorry, that was very forward of me. My name’s Ian. I was curious because I have been looking for some extra help. I’d be willing to trade your help for a few weeks for the supplies you seek, and possibly a small amount of gold.”
“Oh,” Rosalea said, and settled forward in her saddle to help cue Annie to be still. The horse snorted at her and stomped her feet irritably. “I am in need of food, especially flour, and some things for my horse.”
He looked at the bridleless mare and then his gaze shifted back to Rosalea. “Did you lose the bridle?”
“No, I mean oats, treats, grain,” Rosalea said, dismissing the notice of the bridle.
He looked thoughtful for a moment, perhaps concluding that she could control her horse with magic. Then, he nodded. “I need help getting this field ready for the later months, and my daughter could use assistance with our sheep. If you’ll stay long enough to take care of those things, I’ll pay you a gold a week, put you up in our barn, and provide food. At the end of the agreement, I’ll give you fifty pounds of flour, fifty pounds of oats for the horse, and thirty pounds of fresh vegetables. Is that agreement acceptable?”
It was exactly what she had come for, so she nodded. She actually did not mind the idea of settling down for a while and working. It was its own kind of tiring to have to constantly stay on the move and cover all her tracks so neither of her people could find her. Mire felt quiet and out of the way, and she could change her mind at any time.
She had every intention of keeping it that way, until she knew or could decide what she should do. All year, it had weighed heavily on her mind that the liana wanted her safe right after her escape from the Ieshans and taught her basic magic skills. It weighed heavily on her mind that they wanted her to know that the prophecy could be read several ways, and that they wanted her to know Gaiden was not merely a Uryan. It made her afraid that possibly the prophecy was actually about her, and not some grandchild she was meant to have according to Ulric and the Ieshans. So far though, no Gods or anything else had come up in her life to clarify what she was supposed to do about any of it, so she was just trying to get away from it all for now. Still, Mire was a long way from anywhere, it felt like, and it seemed really nice to have indoor lodging, consistent food she didn’t have to provide for herself, and all she had to do was help. “That sounds like a very profitable deal for me,” she said.
He extended his hand to her. “Very well, it’s agreed. What’s your name?”
“I am Rosalea,” she answered, leaning down and over to shake his hand cordially.
“Excellent. I must say you came at the best of times for me. I have sorely needed help. Stay here, I will get my daughter, and she will get you settled in.”
Rosalea nodded as he disappeared for a moment.
“I think I am going to put you to work plowing, Annie,” she said.
The horse kicked irritably. “What makes you think I would consider cooperating with that?”
Rosalea sent the feeling of a shrug at her. “I was going to use the money we earn to get you some sugar. If you do not behave, then I will not give you any.”
Annie had a real sweet tooth, and she knew she had been out-maneuvered. “I get two every day that I have to be a common work horse,” she said irritably. “Also if he hurts me, I will refuse to continue, and you promised that I did not have to do bridles.”
“One treat in the morning and one at night,” Rosalea answered amiably. “Do you think that if we can put a harness on you, that you can listen to pulling sensations on your neck? And a halter, the other head thing without the part that goes in your mouth, you could let him lead you around?”
Annie sighed heavily. “If he hurts me, then no. But I will try to work with him.” Rosalea slowly dismounted and gave her a lot of pats as she waited for Ian to come back. When he returned, he was accompanied by a rather pretty young woman about Rosalea’s age. They both had black hair, and as Rosalea took an opportunity to really look at Ian, she realized he was very handsome. He lacked any deformities in his features, limbs, or movements. He walked forward to her.
“Rosalea, I’d like you to meet my daughter, Rhainnon.”
Rhainnon stepped forward, and also offered her hand to Rosalea. Rosalea slowly shook it. “Pleased to meet you,” she said with a bright smile. Rosalea was also startled by the fact that both people had straight, white teeth.
Rosalea looked to Ian, “Annie would be willing to help you pull the plow, but you must only use a halter and a harness on her. She will not take a bit, and if she finds you too rough, then I have agreed I will not make her continue. Would you like her help?”
Ian nodded. “Rhainnon, would you take Rosalea to the barn, help her with the harness, and sort out a place for her to stay?”
“This way,” she said. Her voice was quiet, definitely the kind that Rosalea might classify as “sweet” because of how gentle it was. She followed the girl to the barn with Annie following placidly behind. The girl opened the barn door.
“Thank you,” Rosalea offered. She felt awkward, and a little unequal to the other girl. Rhainnon had perfect blue eyes, a clear complexion, and long, thick black hair, which was braided behind her. It was as long as Rosalea’s had been before she had cut more than half of it off.
***
Rhainnon was not sure what she thought of the girl, or what she thought of her father hiring her so quickly. What was a girl that did not know what she was doing on a farm going to do to actually help anything? She was surprised that any kind of stranger was here looking for work at all. Most people with any kind of sense stayed far away from a place like this. She could not see the merit of her, though she knew her father must know something. She met the girl’s eyes. “Your eyes are yellow! You are a changer!”
The girl flushed and looked a little nervous. As Rhainnon was studying her face, she thought she saw the eyes change. For a moment, the eyes of a wolf looked back at her, there was a dark discoloration in one eye, and the soft expression of them faded to one of hardness and aggression. Rhainnon swallowed and blinked, but when she looked again, the changes were gone, and the girl was still giving her a concerned look.
Rhainnon put a smile on. “Well, it’s all right. We have a lot to worry about here, and so we don’t worry about that. As long as you behave and all.”
The girl smiled slightly. “I think I can handle behaving well.”
She pointed out the harness hanging on one wall, “Let’s get that down and try to fit it to your horse!” she said maybe a little too enthusiastically. It wasn’t the first time there had been unexplained images in the air around other people. Her father said it was magic. Her mother had forbidden her from learning it.
Rhainnon watched Rosalea getting down the harness from the wall, and thought, She doesn’t look very old. Why is her hair so gray? Maybe silvery? Like Rhainnon, this other girl kept her hair in a braid, but it didn’t reach much past her shoulders, and the hair was escaping the braid rather actively because of how thick it was, but also, probably, it had been cut very unevenly at some point. For someone who looked like she ought to be old, her face was so clearly young though; she could not be much older than Rhainnon herself. She’s so fair-skinned. I thought changers were all pretty dark with black hair.
Rosalea turned and held out the harness to Rhainnon, “I can take off the saddle,” she suggested.
Rhainnon nodded and accepted the harness. “Go ahead and hang the saddle up there,” she pointed to one of the dividers between the stalls.
“This barn smells and looks very clean and new, like it has just been built,” Rosalea observed as she went over to her pretty gold colored horse and began to undo the girth.
“My father is a plant and imber mage. He does scour it clean every year and use his vitae magic to help regenerate and strengthen the wood.” The girl nodded in a way that suggested to Rhainnon she already knew that. “Are you magic too?”
***
Rosalea debated on what she wanted to say. “I have a bit of magic. I am also an imber mage, and I can talk with animals with my vitae magic.” She opted to leave the rest out, she was conscious she was likely an oddity with her particular array of all the magics available to most humans. I shall just have to remember to not do things with the air and plants when people can notice it. “Your father mentioned that I could stay in the barn as part of working here. Is there a specific space I should use? Can I keep Annie here at night?”
Rhainnon nodded. “As long as you keep things clean, I’m sure Annie will be fine! Does she need to be in a paddock when we aren’t using her?”
Rosalea shook her head. “No, she stays nearby. I’m good at finding her.” Rosalea saw Rhainnon’s expression become thoughtful, and she wagered that the girl was wondering whether or not it was Rosalea’s magic that made the horse so reliable.
“Here, the stall closest to the door should be fine. You can sleep wherever you want. You can use the hay and straw up there- do you know the difference between the two?”
“Straw usually consists of stalks and chaff, and hay of greens?” Rosalea saw Rhainnon looked surprised and realized she probably said something weird as the girl blinked. Was that too technical of a definition, perhaps?
“Yes.” There was a pause. “Have you had anything to eat for lunch yet?” Rosalea shook her head. “Very well,” she hung up the harness, “Mother should have something ready. Why don’t you select a space and unpack your things as much as you feel that you need? I will bring out some food for us, and then we can get started.”
Rosalea nodded to her.
***
Rhainnon retreated then, leaving the girl in the barn. She couldn’t decide whether she liked the girl or not, but one thing was fairly clear to her. The girl didn’t know the first thing about the work she was about to get asked to do. Her father must have known that. So, she resolved to find out what ulterior motive had caused him to hire the girl.
I suppose until I figure out what he was up to, I at least have a hunch that she is nice enough. Way too proper and smart sounding though, what if she ran away from somewhere? It must be from far away, or she would never consent to stay here for weeks.