Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits (28 page)

Ralas lived a little outside of the village, which made it easier to sneak off there and ask about your chilblains or your old dad's cough or whatever. I should know because I did—sneak off to ask her things I mean—some of the mums that asked me for gimpweed asked me about other stuff too, and if I didn't know, I asked Ralas. She never seemed to mind, and she always told me anything I could use, that I could pass on. She always seemed pleased to do it too. She liked helping people. Wizard training is supposed to make you want to help people if you aren't that way to begin with but I bet she didn't have to be taught to want to. And she never made me feel like a dumb clumsy kid when she said she'd have to see someone herself, that what was wrong sounded sort of complicated. And she never said ʺTell the old so-and-so to come here and pay my fee and stop trying to get it for free out of a kid.ʺ

Also although I'm really healthy, I have a sort of negative gift for finding sick hedgehogs and birds with broken wings and stuff, and I always brought them to her. A lot of them stayed on after they got better. So when I say ʺsneak offʺ you can sneak as much as you like but you won't surprise her, because she's got all these three-legged or bald or blind or somehow crooked-up creatures going squawk and squeal and chirp and yelp and so on, every time anyone comes near. And a lot of people did come to see her, people that weren't from our village too, so it was pretty noisy out there a lot of the time.

Mum and Dad and I were at a craft fair once and a foogit pup got trod on by a horse. Nobody knew who the pup belonged to and it was lying there crying with its leg at a funny angle and all sort of mashed looking. Everybody stared the other way. Once the animal was damaged no one was going to claim it, not when everyone else could see, and it was near noon and the craft fair wouldn't be over till sunset. It was weird somebody had brought it at all—it was way too young to be useful—and while foogits aren't the brightest lamp at the festival, you don't get wild foogit pups in the middles of craft fairs, so it must've belonged to somebody.

I asked someone where the town wizard lived, and I picked the pup up as carefully as I could—although it was amazingly good about this and sort of relaxed into me as if company was better than nothing—and went there. It was a grand house in the middle of town with stars painted all over it and a long fringe of charms hanging over the front door. It gave me the creeps—Ralas didn't use any of that show-offy stuff—but it didn't matter so long as he knew how to set broken bones. But whoever it was who answered the door wouldn't let me in to trouble ʺthe master.ʺ I'd just managed to say, ʺHe has a broken—ʺ when Stoneface said, ʺThe master doesn't deal with vermin,ʺ and shut the door. I'm not sure if he meant me or the pup. It's true I hadn't thought about how I was going to pay, but I don't believe the door thug had got that far in his thinking either.

So I went back to our waggon and stole a bit of lath from my dad, because I knew he'd say no if I asked but I also knew he wouldn't ask any questions if he recognised what I'd stolen, and then I had to use my belt and some of my sleeve because Mum would ask if some of the stuff she wrapped her candles in disappeared, and I splinted the pup's leg as best I could from having watched Ralas do it a lot better, although it was harder than that because, as I say, it wasn't just broken, it was kind of crunched up. There were a couple of places where the bone poked through the skin and I didn't have a clue what to do about that, I just made a big green smelly poultice of pretty much any plant I could find that hadn't been stomped flat by everybody at the fair and slapped it on. Mum was really annoyed, but mostly about my shirt (she said something about vermin too but I think she meant fleas) but she let me keep him till we got home. Nobody came around asking about him either.

But we didn't get home till ten days later and the bones had already started to knit (Ralas said) and, as I say, I didn't know what I was doing so the bones healed a bit funny and Sippy has been lame ever since, which is why he stayed with Ralas, but I don't think Mum would have let me keep him anyway. Ralas tried to make me feel better and kept saying that I was only eleven and Sippy's leg would have been tricky even for her, but the point is I'm a screw-up and Sippy is lame for life. Sippy's always really glad to see me when I go to Ralas' and that makes me feel both better and worse.

There was a joke in the family that the reason I didn't grow is because I kept wearing the growth off the bottoms of my feet with all the running I did for Mum. In finding all the best shortcuts through woods and fields, I found the best places for gimpweed, so I started looking for other stuff too, especially the common stuff that Ralas got through pretty fast. Ralas started letting me keep watch on her supplies so I could collect what she needed at the right time of year. That felt
really
good.

I started looking for new things when people would ask me, after I'd checked with Ralas what it was and where it grew and if it was good for what whoever wanted it for. Since you're not supposed to be sick in the first place, a lot of people are really dumb about what they think will make them better. Often I got the latest gossip as a kind of payment. It's less embarrassing than saying thank you. I was the first one to bring it to Birchhome that our councillor's daughter had run off with a smoother and her parents were going to disown her. I was also the first to hear when Fhig did something clever and got bumped up to Third Wing. Drat him.

But during the second year at a dragonrider academy you finally meet the dragons. And dragons and Dag were . . .
wham.
Suddenly all the stupid rules and the boring history and the human hierarchy just disappeared, because it was all about dragons.

And then Kel didn't go to Jwell after all but some young guy named Chooko who'd never had an apprentice before but who told good stories and furthermore amazingly would smile and look at you (even when you're the youngest and short for your age) when he came to your village and dropped in on the family of the second son who's going to be his first-ever apprentice in a few months. And he and Kel really hit it off.

So two sons down—and both of them happy—and one to go. Mum being Mum, I'd've thought she'd get going on me right away but maybe I was too much even for her tactical skills. Unless I started growing unexpectedly I could go on pretending to be fourteen forever, and never be apprenticed at all. Maybe I'd deliver candles for the rest of my life.

Dag came home on his half-year leave from the Academy right before Kel was going off with Chooko and they were both full of excitement and the future. Their future. Dag's
wham
with dragons was so spectacular he'd been jumped a class—Fhig hadn't done that either—so he was going to be eligible for his First Flight only next year. Which, just by the way, was the year I'd be fifteen and so far as I knew Mum and Dad hadn't even started looking for some desperate wizard they could bribe heavily (except they couldn't afford to, although Chooko was a lot cheaper than the Academy) to take me on as apprentice.

Dag and Kel's way of dealing with this awkwardness was to talk over my head about their own stuff (since they're so much taller than I am, this was very easy). They didn't mean to make me feel lower than a foogit pup. But what could they do, anyway?

Maybe my parents thought hanging out with Ralas would make me marginally more desirable as an apprentice. I would have flown like a starling and swum like a fish to be Ralas' apprentice but I knew that wasn't going to happen. When I was still only a little kid I'd overheard Mik, who had a third son to find a place for, asking Ralas about apprenticeship. Ralas had been very polite but said that she didn't take apprentices. I reminded myself of this a lot. At least it meant I didn't have to go through being turned down by her personally—and I didn't have to die of jealousy when she took somebody else. Although I'd still have to go away and be apprenticed to someone somewhere about something some day and stop hanging around her. I didn't really think Mum would keep me delivering candles forever. Maybe I wished she would.

Sippy believing I was wonderful was nice, even if he was only a foogit and it was only because he didn't realise it was my fault he was lame. He'd grown up a lot handsomer than I was expecting. Bigger too. Foogits are good watchdogs—nobody sleeps through a foogit howling—and tend to be less trouble than real dogs so you see them around pretty often, but only at the backs and edges of things—no one invites a foogit to lie by the hearth during its off-duty hours. Also foogits can move so fast, in that sort of goofy dance they do, they can make you dizzy if you watch them. And if you're a burglar, you probably will be watching them, because a good guard foogit will bite too, and their teeth sink in a ways. Not that Ralas needed that kind of protection. Some of the strangers who came to visit her were scarier than any burglar but I never saw her worried or bothered.

I've often wondered why it's okay to despise foogits. So that a foogit pup with a broken leg can lie crying in the middle of a hot fairground and no one will even bring it a bowl of water. I suppose it's because we hero-worship dragons and foogits play the fool in dragon stories. Usually there is no fool in a dragon story, because stories about dragons are always big and grand and solemn and exciting. But if you want something funny or ridiculous to happen somewhere in a dragon story you'll probably put in a foogit. I don't know why a foogit. But there's a connection between them and dragons somehow. Foogits are a bit dragon-shaped, although they're hairy and a dragon is scaly. And even the biggest foogit would look pretty silly next to the smallest dragon. Also dragons don't have topknots of hair that look like huka nests. No one can look dignified with a huka nest on their head.

I've seen dragons a few times, and around here the only dragons you're going to see are the smallest and the oldest and the slowest. But even they have that air about them: that they rule the world and they know it. I don't know why they let us little thin-skinned squeaky wingless humans order them around. I suppose that makes us feel kind of conceited too. Or maybe awed or even just confused. So then you look at a foogit and I guess it's sort of a joke, but the joke's in bad taste. Hard on the foogit, who didn't ask to look like a small hairy dragon with a silly dance. But if Sippy knew he was a buffoon he never let on. Or maybe he liked it. He was always cheerful and he always cheered me up.

You don't hear from your apprenticed relatives all that often. They're too busy being apprentices. We got a letter from Dag about twice a year, depending on there being someone to bring it, and because of the unpredictableness of this, it never seemed strange if we didn't get any letters. And there hadn't been any gossip, and now that our village had someone at the Academy every tinker passing through had an Academy story for us. There was just Dag, one day, turning up a week before we were expecting him for his half-year break, looking grey and hollow-eyed. We started out being delighted to see him but it was immediately obvious ʺdelightedʺ was the wrong response. It had been raining for weeks and the first thing I thought was that he'd caught a chill, and started patting my pockets for gislarane; I'd been carrying extra in case anyone I was delivering candles to was feeling shivery and sneezy. I gave him the gislarane but it wasn't a chill.

The story came out in jerks over the rest of the evening. I'm putting it together in more or less the right order now but he didn't tell it like this.

At first we thought he must be feverish after all because what he said didn't seem to make a lot of sense. Then for a while we thought it was about having been jumped a year. But bullying or social exile wasn't the kind of thing that would get Dag down. I even wondered if he might be in love. I had probably a strange view of love from Ralas' clientele.

That was closer. But it wasn't a girl. It was a dragon.

ʺI couldn't believe it, when the First Flight list went up. I don't know . . . I don't understand . . .
Hereyta,
for all the gods' sake,ʺ Dag said. ʺI know they say it's all handed down in the signs and so on. But they could just not do it—or they could tell me they'd changed their minds and I'd take my First Flight next year with my old class.ʺ

Typical of Dag that it didn't occur to him that this might be awkward or embarrassing.

ʺI can't believe they'd
do
this to Hereyta. But they're not going to change it. Some of the other cadets are pretty upset about it too. Fistagh says I should refuse to Fly.ʺ A grimace that had very little relationship to a smile passed briefly over Dag's face. ʺI've thought of that—it's about the only thing I have thought of—but not for Fistagh's reasons.ʺ Fistagh was one of the fourth-years who thought a third-year jumper was a bad idea. ʺBut I've decided—I
think
I've decided—that refusing to Fly—to try to Fly—would be even worse for Hereyta.ʺ