A Little Village by the Sea

Unable to come up with a solution for his latest alarming problem, Kalen spent the afternoon sitting in that one spot under the slowly dying tree.

It had occurred to him that he could spread his toxic magic around by staying on the move, thus reducing its impact on any single living thing. But he was already a mass murderer of trees. What was one more?

And since he couldn’t go home and be around other humans in his present state, he might as well stiffen his spine and see just how bad the damage would be if he let the magic leak in one location. He ate dried fish and an apple for his supper, prayed to all the gods whose names he could recall that the leak would resolve itself in the night, and went to sleep.

When morning came, the tree was well and truly dead. The little branch that had given Kalen his first clue about the effect he was having on the world around him was crispy and brown.

He stared at it gloomily.

It was having another of those strange rustling moments, as if it was being shaken gently by an unseen force. Only now its needles were falling to the ground like rain.

Kalen wondered if there was such a thing as a practitioner who was naturally gifted at destroying things.

Since the damage hadn’t repaired itself as quickly as he’d hoped, he decided to try what he’d been too nervous to do yesterday. He would cast a couple of cantrips to empty his pathways, and he wouldn’t draw new magic into them to replace what he’d used.

He couldn’t bleed magic if he didn’t have any to bleed, he reasoned. And if the spells themselves were toxic in the same way the leakage was, at least he was still far enough from home to avoid disaster.

Kalen didn’t even bother to stand. He stayed slumped against the tree and formed the pattern for the water-cooling cantrip while he chanted it. It was the easiest one, and he knew it by heart. His pathways bent to make the shape for him.

Are they a little easier to work with than they used to be? Maybe they were, but he couldn’t bring himself to exult in it at the moment.

He aimed the casting at nothing in particular since he was cold and didn’t actually want his drinking water chilled. A minute later, as his head started to ring, he realized he wasn’t breathing. Even though he’d told himself nothing bad should happen, he hadn’t really believed it wouldn’t.

He’d expected the tree across from him to fall over in a blast of wind or dry up into a husk.

But the magic hadn’t done anything like that. The air around Kalen might have been a touch cooler, but that was all.

So when I cast spells they behave properly, he thought with relief. It’s only the leaking magic itself that does strange things.

He fought off the instinctive urge to draw in more power. The aurora was weakening now, but it was still there, offering him plenty of mana. Instead, he cast the cantrip one more time.

He sat waiting, pushing away the tingle of raw power that seemed to press against him from every direction. He remembered doing this when he was younger, before he knew he was a practitioner. He must have been crazy.

It was so hard not to allow his pathways to refill. When they were really, truly empty, as they were now, it was disquieting. Kalen didn’t think he’d ever actually had them in this state for more than a few seconds.

Years ago, when he’d pushed back the atmospheric mana and magic offered by the aurora, he hadn’t even been aware of his pathways. He hadn’t ever used them so they were never truly empty. They just weren’t stuffed to bursting.

Examining them now, he thought it was less like looking at empty stream beds and more like looking at a mapmaker’s sketch of those stream beds. The pathways seemed strangely two-dimensional like this.

I don’t care if it feels awful, Kalen thought defiantly. You can just stay empty until you start behaving normally! I can hold out forever if I need to.

He gritted his teeth, determined to weather the trial with nobility and courage for as long as it took. But his plan fell apart within a few minutes.

Apparently, Kalen didn’t have as much say in the matter as he’d assumed he did. Slowly but surely, the leak he was trying to stop reversed itself. Now, Kalen’s pathways were allowing mana in without his permission.

What’s this? he thought, startled and dismayed. It goes both ways?

How in the world was he supposed to fix it, then?

#

With nothing else to do, Kalen spent the rest of the day walking back and forth between his rock and his tree. The pine was his now, he’d decided. Since he’d killed it.

There was no purpose to the walk except for his pressing need to clear his own mind. He’d been too quick to panic yesterday. The situation was urgent, but it wasn’t a true emergency. Yet.

He had a little time to think, and he needed to use it.

There was a way for him to go back home right now. With the leak working in reverse, he wasn’t spreading dangerous magic around anymore. He could return if he wanted and just steadily keep his pathways empty with spells.

But Kalen had grown too used to pulling mana in. Doing it had become unconscious over the past few years. He could manage not to as long as he focused, but he would have to rest eventually.

So he would need to escape from the house every night for as long as the leak persisted and sleep in the woods. That didn’t seem ideal, though he would rely on it in a pinch. And it should be easier when the current aurora faded away completely.

If it was only that, he could deal with it. And Kalen still had hope his magic would eventually go back to normal. Or as normal as it ever was. It had the last time he’d felt this way.

But what about everything else?

Kalen couldn’t undo the mistakes he’d made. There was just no way.

He…had never experienced anything like this. He had never before broken anything that couldn’t be repaired or paid for. He’d never hurt his family except with the occasional unkind word.

And he’d never faced a problem so far beyond his capacity to grasp with his own intellect.

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Kalen took a lot of pride in his ability to analyze and plan out his magical endeavors. He was constantly frustrated by all the things he lacked as a practitioner, but in many ways, he enjoyed the challenge of figuring out how to work around his difficulties and achieve small successes despite them.

He knew it was arrogant, but he had long considered himself to be more clever than his peers. And in the months since Zevnie and Arlade had left Hemarland, he’d unconsciously extended that vague feeling of superiority to the adults in the village as well.

Kalen was not physically strong. He was often on the periphery of village social life. So his personal pride was built on the fact that he knew things the others didn’t.

He’d read books. He’d studied Nanu’s map. He had learned about other islands and the Archipelago from Zevnie. He was worldly.

I’ve been so foolish. I don’t know anything at all.

His lack of real insight into worldly affairs was his undoing now. Before he could make good choices, Kalen needed to understand how people would react to someone his age blowing down hundreds of trees with a single spell…and he just didn’t. He could barely grasp how his family and their neighbors would see it.

Kalen has done something strange and dangerous and stupid, they would probably think. We shouldn’t have tolerated that boy playing around with mysterious wizarn powers.

Kalen wasn’t entirely sure what the village would do about it, but they would definitely forbid him from using magic. Maybe they would send him to sea so that he could get some sense knocked into him by the harsh reality of working aboard a ship? That had happened to older boys a couple of times in Kalen’s memory. Once it had been someone who’d gotten caught stealing, and the other time it was a fellow who’d made promises to multiple girls who thought he was courting them exclusively.

But it didn’t really matter what the people who’d known Kalen since he was a small child did to him…it was what came after. After the news of Kalen’s mishap spread beyond their little village by the sea.

Kalen knew it would spread. Throughout Hemarland for certain and probably farther. Every occurrence even slightly out of the ordinary did.

Kalen had heard that the cooper in Baitown had a second family on another island. He had heard that a woman there had lost an eye last winter fighting off a hemarwolf that was attacking her cattle. He even knew that on Deerbird, three hundred leagues south, they’d suffered a volcanic eruption several months ago.

News traveled even out here. And the odder it was the farther it went.

Kalen’s news was plenty odd.

Even assuming the people of Hemarland didn’t want to burn him at the stake, how long would it take for word to spread to the continent? And when it did, what would the reaction of people there be?

Would they dismiss it as a rumor grown out of control? Would the story disappear entirely in that land where stories of magic were surely much, much more commonplace?

That seems reasonable, he thought hopefully. There are other people my age who’ve been training since they were babies. Some of them can probably do such things.

If it didn’t disappear though…what about the people hunting Orellen children with the potential to become Maguses? If they heard the rumor, would they think Kalen’s accident was suspicious enough to travel all the way to Hemarland and kill him?

It seemed far-fetched, but not entirely outside the realm of possibility. They wouldn’t be aware of the fact that he was just an idiot who’d only made it to low magician a day ago. And if the rumor traveled hand-in-hand with the other curious thing about Kalen—that he’d been found all alone at sea several years ago…

Kalen just didn’t know. He had no clue how seriously the Orellen hunters were taking their jobs or how they thought or what they looked for in their victims. Maybe hearing he’d done wind magic would actually make them think he couldn’t possibly be the right person? After all, the Orellens were supposed to be spatial practitioners.

He did sort of think Sorcerer Arlade might appear in a flash of light with a manic expression on her face if she ever heard about the incident. But who knew for sure? Kalen wouldn’t be surprised if she’d dragged Zevnie to someplace nobody else knew existed to study magical earthworms or something.

How am I supposed to start making a plan to keep myself and my parents and Fanna safe if I don’t know what’s going to happen next?

With annoyance, he realized he’d been thinking so hard he’d stopped controlling his pathways again. They’d almost completely refilled. Sighing, he stopped walking and sat down on the trunk of one of the trees he’d toppled to sing his cantrip.

I have to focus on the essential things first, he thought after he’d finished. No, the essential thing. Just one. I’m probably going to make bad decisions since I don’t understand enough to make good ones. But if I just try to make one single thing right for sure…maybe I can manage it?

It was his family. Obviously it had to be his family. If everything else went wrong, but Kalen’s family was safe at the end of it all, then he would consider his work a success.

He thought as hard as he ever had over the next couple of hours. He ruthlessly squashed down the plaintive whining of his own fears and wishes.

And as the sun set and the forest darkened around him, Kalen finally found an answer.

#

Late the next evening, Kalen crouched at the edge of the forest behind a thatch of plants and looked down toward the little village by the sea that had been his home for all his life. He watched as the lanterns were lit in every house.

He could make out the shapes of Clem and Ogro working on a project outside Clem’s longcabin. They were building something. Maybe it was a sled for winter? They were called inside as the sky darkened.

From his own house, the sound of his father banging a wooden spoon against an iron pot rang out. It was the signal for any wandering pigs to find their way back to the barn for supper.

That was good. Sleepynerth, no doubt scenting him on the breeze, had been meandering in Kalen’s direction at her usual leisurely pace. At the sound of the pan, she turned back toward the more certain joys of her trough.

Once it was full dark, Kalen crept out of the forest and secreted himself behind the massive woodpile his anxious father had built over the past weeks. He waited until his target appeared, checking his pathways to make sure they were still nearly empty.

When his cousin finally exited the cabin and approached the outhouse, humming a familiar tune, Kalen stepped out from behind the woodpile and whispered, “Lander, I need your help.”

“Gah! Shit!” Lander cried, leaping back and waving his arms as if to fend off an attacker.

“Shhhhh!” Kalen hissed, jumping forward to slap a hand over his mouth. “The others can’t know I’m here.”

“Kalen?” Lander knocked his hand away easily. “What are you doing creeping around the privy in the middle of the night? Do you want to frighten people to death? That’s it, isn’t it? You needed a fresh corpse for your wizarn spells, and you thought this would do it!”

“Hush,” Kalen said. “This is serious, Lander. I need your help with something important. I’ve…I’ve made a mistake.”

Lander’s eyes narrowed in the moonlight. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay.” He wasn’t, but the words came automatically. “Can you meet me in the woods tonight? Without anyone knowing? Or tomorrow’s fine, I guess, if you can get away. It just needs to be soon.”

“Don’t you want to come inside and have something to eat?” Lander said slowly. “There’s soup, and it’s hot still.”

“I’m not hungry.” Kalen became aware that he wasn’t meeting his cousin’s eyes and forced himself to do it. “Really, I’m fine. But I’ve done something dangerous and stupid, and I can’t make it right without your help.”

He smiled.

If anything, that made Lander look even more concerned.

“Then…I’ll come soon,” he said. “I’ve been sleeping in your room while you’re away anyway, so they probably won’t notice me missing.”

Kalen felt immediately nervous when they parted, fearing against reason that Lander would tell the adults he was here.

He shouldn’t have worried. Lander had never been one to tell tales on his younger siblings or Kalen. And sure enough, he appeared not long after, carrying a small bundle under his arm.

Kalen stepped out from where he’d been hiding and waved him over. Lander’s long legs carried him quickly. When they were face to face, neither of them spoke for an awkwardly long period of time.

“Well, you’re the one who demanded a moonlight tryst,” Lander said finally. “And here I am even though you’re not a pretty girl.”

Kalen sighed. “Right. Sorry. It’s just hard to know how to start.”

Lander shoved the bundle toward him. It turned out to be a set of clean clothes and a small seeded loaf smeared with salted lard.

“Start by changing into this,” Lander said. “You stink.”

“I haven’t bathed in a while. I’ve been busy thinking.”

“Next time think while you scrub your pits,” Lander advised. “Now, what are you so upset about? I don’t see how you could have committed any really good crimes while you were all alone in the woods.”

Kalen had planned out what to say and the best way to make his cousin believe him. And it was early enough still that Lander could make it back home if they went quietly. “Come with me to my rock. I need to show you something. On the way there, I’ll tell you a scary story.”

Even in the dimness, Kalen could see his cousin rolling his eyes.

“No story you’ve got is going to persuade me to hike in the woods all night long. Just tell me what you’ve done so I can help.”

“It’s a story about me,” said Kalen. He licked his lips nervously and then whispered, “It’s a story about how I ended up in the ocean that day. And who I was before that.”