Master Juun didn’t have a horse or donkey for the alchemy cart, he had apprentices to haul. The excuse was often that whatever we were delivering had to be handled carefully, but I think the reality was that he didn’t need a beast of burden if he had us.
I didn’t know much about animals, so those weeks with the paladin were an education. Once we learned that I still needed to feed on blood he helped me become a better hunter. Not that he left the cabin, but he told stories.
One time he laughed for almost five whole minutes when he realized I didn’t understand that animals could smell so much better than we could.
He’d asked if I had approached the animals from down wind and I hadn’t understood why that would matter.
The wild chases and infrequent killing slowly changed to a much more controlled and skilled hunt as I began to learn.
When he learned that I killed the infrequent squirrels and birds I brought with thrown stones he fashioned me a sling that kept disappearing when I wasn’t paying attention to it. I never had enough time to practice with it so continued to throw stones, though my aim did get better.
I was learning more than just hunting skills and facts about animals. I was learning how to control my body. From throwing stones consistently with my new strength to looking at very distant things.
Of all the odd changes my eyesight was the quickest to learn how to control, if also the strangest. At first it came upon me without intent. I was staring into the woods, looking for something, and the world would seemingly lurch around me. It was confusing and disorientating and I didn’t know what it was. I’d shake my head and my vision would be back to normal.
I was in the swamps on my second or third hunting trip when I realized what was happening even if I couldn’t control it.
I was watching a boar some distance away. Then suddenly it felt like the world lurched and the boar was much larger in my vision while the edges of my sight blurred.
I moved and a queasy feeling rose up in my stomach. My eyes hurt, as if I had stared too long at the sun or read too long by candle light. Over time the control came. I could look at something far away and not only would it come into focus, but it seemed to grow larger as well. When it did whatever colors their were in it bled away to blacks and grays.
My hearing too would sometimes overreact. Outside of the paladin’s home the world would suddenly become massively loud. The smallest sounds were painful and direction was distorted.
My sense of smell would become hyper sensitive from time to time as well.
During our testing when my ears became hyper sensitive they only went back to normal when I stepped into the cabin and the pressure pressed down on me.
The paladin said it was a dampening effect of the fairy magic, and it seemed to effect everything. I could stare at the distant city wall for hours through the window and never once did my eyes change. Yet each night, with practice, I could shift my eyesight and see farther at the expense of color, almost at will when I was outside.
The hearing and smelling were different. I couldn’t yet control them, but the paladin had come up with some exercises for me to try.
The change with strength was the most obvious, if painful, to test.
Jumping was easy, but sometimes I would leap up much higher than normal as if my legs were suddenly much stronger. I’d often spin off balance and land hard. The paladin made suggestions and over time we modified the exercises until we found one that worked. I’d jump with a small hop at first and then a big one trying to burn blood as we called it. A normal jump and then one that burned blood, repeating it over and over even if most of the larger jumps never manifested. I didn’t always do anything spectacular when I tried but in time control began to manifest as did balance and agility.
Killing squirrels was difficult, not because I couldn’t throw a rock hard enough to kill them, but because I never really knew how hard I would throw each time I made the attempt. My strength wasn’t consistent, and accuracy was nearly impossible without consistency.
I saw other people on occasion as I hunted in the King’s Wood north of the city. When I saw, or on occasion heard them, I fled. There was no reason to risk harming them. There were fewer people in the swamps and many of the ones I saw there were shambling men. I killed them when I found them often by taking them to the ground and twisting their heads until their necks broke. They could still bite at that point but they couldn’t walk or crawl with their necks broken.
Once immobile I did the humane thing and smashed their skulls to a pulp. Crabs and birds would take care of the corpses afterward.
Once hunting changed from a luck based activity to a skill based activity killing became easy enough. I avoided using the stinger because it put me into the state of bliss where I lost my ability to think and plan like a man.
Rocks weren’t enough to bring down larger game but the paladin had a forearm length bronze and copper spearhead in his belongings, and since it was his and not the house’s it didn’t disappear. I used it as a long knife.
Sometimes if I could creep close enough to a creature I threw one of the stones as fast as I could at its head. While it rarely killed them instantly, it did leave the animals stunned and confused and I didn’t have to chase them as far through tangled underbrush in the forest or muddy wetlands of the swamp.
I could often burn blood to get them quickly, kill them, and then drink what blood I could before hauling the whole animal back to the Fairy House.
The paladin was teaching me how to butcher the various animals and what the inside bits were. What was good to eat and what wasn’t. We would end up with vast piles of meat, hides and furs of various quality spread out across all the furniture without a care for the mess they might leave. We would go over them, physically examining the organs and muscles and often figuring out where the corresponding organs or veins were in men.
Most of what we weren’t going to immediately eat I took to the garden and dumped out on the sharp blades of grass. The ground would shift and the whole mess would seemingly slide into the gap, while the hole sealed in upon itself from the sides. It was a slow enough process that the single time I sat down in the garden I had enough time to panic and physically leap up the stone wall when the ground shifted below me as if I was an offering.
While the barrier kept the rain off the garden and house I could now, for whatever reason, pass through the barrier as if it was not there. I could even jump directly into the garden from outside if I wished.
I accepted the fruits the trees dropped when I offered the animals as the paladin said I must or it might be taken as an insult. I think he meant it insulted the fairies, but he could have meant himself or his god. Even if I did not want the fruit, I took them, or else they would stay where they had fallen forever.
He’d been picking up the previous offerings I’d left.
The fruit exchanged in that way never rotted or disappeared when I wasn’t looking at it even if I took it out of the house and set it on the ground.
The paladin’s mental state and memory issues became much more obvious as time passed. He forgot many things, things we had already discussed or experimented on. He made suggestions as if he had never suggested them before. He would sometimes be surprised to see me climb the stairs from the lowest floor, as if he forgot I was downstairs at all.
He was never hostile towards me during those times but he was cold and distant, well aware I think, that he was losing his mind and memories.
I had never feared for my life before until one day I woke and took the stairs up to the middle floor. The one with the door that opened to ground level.
He was oiling his mace, saw me, and whispered something to the massive weapon before he stood.
With a casual sweep of his hand he threw the table across the room as he advanced toward me.
The look of concentration and dedication on his face was far more terrifying than rage or anger. I had no doubt in that frozen instant that he would smite me down with the weapon. While neither one of us understood what had happened the first time he had tried to kill me with the mace, we had experimented more. The mace had stopped both inside and outside the house, injuring me not at all. Though at those times he wasn’t trying to kill me, he was experimenting. I wasn’t willing to put my faith in the mace not killing again, not if he truly wanted it to because he forgot who I was.
I fled.
Down the stairs I went and out into the garden, his pounding slippers echoing behind me. There was no screamed challenge or bellowed taunt, just a man on his way to do some needed work.
It was terrifying, for the garden was wholly changed, as if it had picked up on his mood and his intentions. Suddenly I was no longer a guest, but an intruder.
No longer a place of hidden danger beneath exotic wonder and beauty, the garden too was working to kill me.
The plants tripped me up as the ground lurched and rose like the ocean waves. Branches snapped as if in strong wind to catch the edges of clothing or flesh. Everything seemed to have massive thorns that bit into skin and caught tight on clothing.
I burned blood as I never had before, and I did it without conscious thought but of course it did nothing for me. I had no added strength or quickness here with the fairy magic dampening my own, unlike the paladin who had tossed the table away as if it were a hand towel.
He was going to kill me, and I had to flee.
I remember the tripping, falling, and crawling across the horrid terrain the most. It seemed wherever I put foot or hand the ground began to drop away. I was constantly moving across ground that was trying to swallow me whole.
When I reached the wall the escape was almost easy. I climbed up and out of the garden so quickly that it felt like flying.
I was half expecting the barrier to stop me and dump me back inside but when I reached the top of the wall my probing hand went through and I rolled over the top of the wall. It was a short drop to the ground. The pressure left with a pop as I moved through the barrier.
I had to scrambled to my feet but I didn’t slow as I ran toward the swamps, now with enhanced strength and speed, checking over my shoulder a few times before I slid feet first near the edge of the once plowed fields so my head was just above the weeds.
I stared at the Fairy House while I sucked in air, but the paladin never opened the door, climbed the wall, or followed.
I didn’t know if he could leave. He’d stepped outside a few times, but only for as long as it took to conduct whatever experiment we had been trying at the time.
When I invited him to come on hunts with me he was polite but he always declined.
I spent the rest of the night in the swamps. The minor cuts and scrapes from the Fairy garden burned with the fire of healing, but didn’t heal. Perhaps it was like the withering sunlight and it would just take a long time. Perhaps it was poison and I would die from it.
I didn’t bleed from the cuts and scrapes so much as the black goo seeped out of me. I wondered if that was the black ooze itself or just my blood thick with death. I had nothing with me as I’d fled just after rising and the spear tip I used for hunting was still in the Fairy House.
I wore the set ill-fitting clothing I’d pulled from the dead in the swamp. The clothing was as clean as I could get it by washing them in the tub, but in horrible condition. I’d taken several injuries from boar tusks and twice deer had jumped up while I pursued and kicked me so hard I was thrown off my feet. While I could eventually heal from such injuries, the clothing could not.
Anything I made from the House’s material would disappear when I was no longer concentrating on it. The paladin had things he had brought with him, things like the spear or his books and those likely wouldn’t leave until he died, when the house would consume everything.
“I was told,” he had said once while he was making tea, “that it never consumes anything that belongs to the one who occupies it. Yet I’m continually missing wool socks. I was gifted several pairs by the farmers in Luffel, a small sheep herding village high in the mountains. Did I ever tell you about their so-called-yeti?”
Some days his stories went on like that for a while. Sometimes he was in a village to stand in judgment of an accused, or to hunt down monsters. On a few occasions he helped bless the grounds of new temples and churches.
“There is not a more humbling experience,” he told me with a straight face, “than to labor with the common man while building a house of worship. For at those times I’m no more powerful than anyone else. It is good from time to time to be reminded that while we are powerful, we are still men, and the power we wield is not truly ours.”
Sometimes he spoke to me in that way. As if I was another paladin serving some other god. I never corrected him, not to take advantage, but because there were days where he was well aware that I was undead. I liked how he treated me when he thought I was a paladin. On those days he thought we shared the same burdens and doubts, and he spoke to me differently.
When he knew what I was, even when he was having a good day, I could tell, if only from experiencing the days when he forgot what I was, that he was holding some part of himself in reserve in case he had to kill me.
I avoided physical contact with him simply because the coldness of my skin was what often led his mind back to what I really was.
After he knocked the curse out of me, or whatever the shadow thing had been, I never succumbed to the stupor that had come upon me each day.
Being awake all day was as much blessing as curse as I did not sleep, nor did my mind slow or rest. I considered, with mounting fear, that I would likely go mad from it.
When I brought it up one evening after the paladin woke, he explained to me what meditation was and read passages about it from his holy book.
I was impressed with his act. He opened the book found the correct page, for every page had beautiful drawings as well as text, and began reading.
I knew he could not read, but he sometimes mimed it like this. I don’t know why. Perhaps he needed the page open to help with his memory. Perhaps he was embarrassed he could not read and had forgotten I knew.
While he forgot things from time to time in the bestiary, he never seemed to have the same problem with his holy book.
He had shifted his sleep schedule so that he slept during the day so that he could be awake at night. His mind was sharpest just after waking, while the sky was still pink with the sun that had already sat beyond the horizon.
That is when we discussed things and made plans on what to test next or how to test things at all.
In the early morning hours, after having been awake all night, his mind would begin wander. He would tell stories or make endless cups tea, seating them beside his chair and forgetting about them just long enough that they disappeared. Then he would search for a tea cup, find none, and declare he was making some tea, asking if I would like a cup as well.
One night he did this twenty-four times without ever seeming to remember he had just completed the same task. Other nights his eyebrows would crowd down and he would stare at the table then look to me and say something like, “Forgot to keep my hand on the bloody thing.”
I took to staring at his tea cup so that it would not disappear only to have him complain under his breath that he’d let the tea go cold and would I like a hot cup?
I should have expected him to come after me sooner or later, but I had not. It had never occurred to me that his mind would wander so far as to not recognize me as a friend but see me only as a monster.
I didn’t intend to go back to the Fairy House at dawn. It was too risky. If he wouldn’t let me in I’d not have much time to find a place before the sun rose. And even if he did let me in, how long until it happened again?
I set out through the swamps, away from the city, making my way deeper into the heart of the swamp lands.
Fear rolled through me once as I stepped into a soft patch of mud that began sucking me down. It felt too much like the Fairy Garden giving way beneath my feet in an attempt to trap me.
I just walked, looking for anything that might give me cover from the sun.
I spotted some men deeper in the swamps as I walked through the mire. They had a crude raft of some sort that looked more like fully rounded tree trunks tied together than any sort of wooden planks. They had poles to maneuver in the shallow water and were pulling up crab traps removing the crabs, killing them, and tossing them into a woven basket.
They’d bait the crab trap and toss it back into the water.
I’d seen hundreds of crabs picking at the remains of piles of bodies that had either rotted or been cleaned by other scavengers in the swamps. The harbor crabs were larger, but the swamp crabs were more numerous.
I wondered, briefly, what life in the city was like. On a whim I called out to the men while standing behind a tree in case they had a crossbow or the like.
“Hello the raft!” I called out.
In the city, before the plague, I’d only gone to the docks when I had official alchemy business. Most of the time it was to spread rat poison on a ship. Sometimes it was with the rest of the apprentices and we had to drive for the snails in the kelp beds to make ink.
I couldn’t talk like a sailor, but I’d picked up things. They always called out to the ships, “Hello ship,” if they didn’t know the name.
The men on the raft froze and then abandoned their tasks to bring weapons to hand. They crouched and said nothing. I realized I could see them in the dim light, but they could not see me. I was not even burning blood to enhance my eyesight.
“How goes the city?” I called out. I saw them exchange looks but still no one spoke.
I was about to try again when one of the men lifted a bow and drew the string back. It seemed more walking staff than bow to my eyes but he held the arrow to his cheek as he squinted. He was not looking at me at all, and a moment later he must have realized he was not aiming at a man as he relaxed the weapon.
I waited and watched and in minutes they communicated silently with touch and look. Then one of the men took up a long pole and, oh so slowly and silently, dipped it into the water.
When I had called out, the noise of insects and birds had fallen away, but the noise of the swamp had long ago returned. I couldn’t hear the sound of their silent passage over the wildlife as they pulled themselves away from me and deeper into the swamp.
I considered visiting the city, but soon gave up on the idea. I’d burned blood today while fleeing the garden, and while I didn’t yet feel the yearning to replace it I likely would tomorrow. Besides I had to see if these cuts and scrapes would heal or fester.
And though I feared it, I needed to go back to see if the paladin was alright. It could be that he climbed the wall after me, fell, and lay injured in the garden.
I considered staying the night in the swamps but found nothing suitable to use to hide from the sun.
It did not occur to me at the time that I had of course slept beneath the waters while I was feral.
I walked back to the Fairy House, if I had to flee again I’d head further north. There was a collapsed stone building near a crossroad with a animal’s den under it I had woken up in once while I’d been feral.
When I reached the Fairy House I approached the wall, looked over it feeling the pressure on my head as I pressed through the barrier, and scanned the garden. He wasn’t in the garden.
I should leave. I knew that. I should go. He was fine. Yet I backed away and dropped into a crouch as I waited.
The boulder was so strikingly large that it still filled me with awe when I thought about moving it.
The druids, it was said, could fly about on stones like witches did with brooms. At least according to Cook’s stories.
I mentioned those stories from time to time in front of the other apprentices. Most of the time they listened. Other times they laughed at me and called me mule headed for believing such things. No one believed the Druids could fly stones.
While I could read, I was slow at it, and while I could write, the letters twisted and flipped against my will.
The Master had been so unhappy with my writing in the beginning that he had marched me back across the Slums to speak with Cook himself.
He accused the man of selling him a spoiled bill of goods.
Cook told him there was no longer a place for me, he’d taken in three babes since I had left and I was too big to feed anyway, I’d eat too much.
They argued and it was clear to me Master Juun would put me on the street, even if he couldn’t recoup his apprentice fees. Most apprentices that didn’t have the will or ability to learn alchemy transitioned into scribes, as it was still light on physical labor and required the difficult skills of reading and writing. Yet my twisting letters were the reason the Master was so unhappy.
“I’ve some cheese money,” the Cook had offered as a bribe.
I started crying then. I’d been able to stand silent as Master Juun shook me each time he made a point. I was meant to be a young man on my own after all. A young man earning a craft, yet I cried like a babe, when Cook offered up the Cheese money.
The cheese money was for the cheese the Cook would give the children on the high holidays. It was the only treat we ever had that he did not sneak away from the kitchens.
Master Juun took the coin in one hand and me in the other, and when we returned to the compound he put Journeyman Halbright in charge of me. Almost a half a year later the Master showed up in the kitchens before breakfast, frowned at me as I prepared breakfast and asked, “You’re still here?”
Journeyman Halbright had been correct though. I worked hard. I cleaned, split wood and hauled it, and even volunteered to go into the sewers to spread the rat poison without complaint. I woke early to start breakfast and hauled water, I refilled the ink pots and re-shelved the books, and did a hundred other tasks no one else wanted to do but that needed doing.
Journeyman Halbright remained for only another year before he passed his master’s test and went on his own way. In that time I was called only once before the master for evaluation.
The master had blinked down at me and looked to the journeyman.
“How would you evaluate this one?” the master had asked.
Journeyman Halbright had an odd way of speaking but he didn’t hesitate.
“He is slow to learn the letters. On track with his numbers and keeps neat ledgers. In the lab he excels at both extraction and cleaning, but is weak with the timing.”
Master Juun snorted and set his ledger aside.
“Of course he’s excelling, he’s been doing it far longer than anyone else. Tell me,” Master Juun said, “Why should I keep him if he learns so slowly?”
And Journeyman Halbright did tell him. Rarely had I felt pride, but I stood straighter as he listed off the tasks I saw to daily. There were more than I realized, more too I think, than the master realized.
“And it is not just the labor of five other apprentices,” Journeyman Halbright concluded, “it is his natural talent. He is slow to learn, but he can arrange all one-hundred and twenty tiles with more than one-hundred-sixteen correct. He switches pairs in the purples and I am not convinced those are not mislabeled as he switches them consistently. Skills can be taught, but such talent, it cannot.”
The master had looked at me differently then, and two days later, before both journeyman and the master I was set the task of arranging the tiles in order of color. These were not our tiles though. They came from either the Midtown Alchemist or the Crown District and they were stored in a gold trimmed box of great expense.
I concentrated and in a short period of time I saw could see the colors, the auras, of the type of magic each black tile had trapped within it. I set about arranging them.
When I said I was done, before they flipped the tiles over to check, Master Juun gave me a small stack of silver and iron coins.
“You have the rest of the day to yourself,” he told me, “do not get overly drunk and return before supper.”
I didn’t spend a coin of the money, instead I returned to Cook’s inn walked into the Kitchen where the man was bellowing orders to eight or nine grown men.
Cook turned his girth to me, opened his mouth to snap at me and then hooked a thumb at an open doorway.
“I can feed you tonight,” he said quickly, “and see about getting you work in the morning.”
“It’s for the cheese money,” I said, unsure if it was enough.
Cook spilled the coin out into a palm, barked an order to one of the kitchen staff as he put the coins back in the purse.
“Stolen?” he asked.
“No sir,” I said.
He nodded.
We spoke for a few more moments, then I said my farewells and exited the Slums through the Union Gate. Then I walked over here, sitting down about where I was now, and wondered what my future would hold if I couldn’t be an alchemist.
The Fairy House hadn’t changed in all that time, yet I had, more than I liked.
The pressure was building inside of me. In no time at it would burst indicating the official start of the day. Because of where the mountains were the sun itself would not rise high enough to burn me until a bit later. Still, I needed to check on him and possible flee from him.
I stood and moved toward the door.