Lesson of the Fire (10 page)

If nothing else, Asa will teach him to feign
creativity.

Erika’s brown eyes sparkled in the
flickering light as she waited for the expected response. As she
moved closer to the fire to stir the soup, her shadow on the wall
swelled, almost filling the entire room.

“What’s taking Sven so long?” she
murmured.

Her husband had left the Academy with
promises to return as soon as his business to the west was
finished. That had been an entire season ago. She knew Sven often
got so caught up in his latest project that he tended to forget his
family.

It’s a fault in
him,
Erika thought.
He should be here with us, raising his daughter.

The fire’s heat waned slightly. Erika picked
up a log from the small pile of wood stacked nearby and fed it to
the flames. The flames licked the new wood experimentally, still
clinging to the familiar fuels at the bottom of the pile. After a
few moments, the flames all but abandoned the old wood in favor of
devouring the new. She basked in the warmth.

Where is he? Asfrid Staute and the other
Protectorate wizards can renew the spells without him.

The fire soon grew so hot it began to hurt
her face. She sighed as she picked up a broom and started sweeping
the wooden floor. As she put the room into order, Erika noticed the
silence emanating from the nursery. Aware that this was not a
normal state for children, she decided to check on Asa and her
“class.”

“Sven Takraf, why can’t you just stay home
for a little while?” she asked the air.

As Erika moved away from the hearth, her
shadow shrank. By the time she reached the door to the nursery, the
fire illuminated the entire room. A knock on the front door
interrupted her as she reached for the nursery latch. She glided to
the entrance and opened it.

A mud-covered Erbark grinned at her from the
darkness outside. His left arm hung in a makeshift sling, and his
face was a mass of bruises. One eye was swollen shut.

“Erbark!” Erika cried. “What happened to
you?”

“I thought I’d visit Lori.”

“Olver attacked you again?”

He shrugged.

Erika knew the story of the warrior’s love
for this townswoman. Erbark visited Rustiford three or four times a
year, if he was not busy in the Protectorates, all for the sake of
Lori and her twelve children. The Rustifordian must be on her way
to forty, yet he proclaimed her the most beautiful woman alive.
Erika was somewhat jealous of this man’s devotion to a woman not
even his wife.

Sven could learn from Erbark.

“Come in. I’ve some soup.”

Erbark obeyed, carefully setting his travel
pack and javelins near the door.

“Sven hasn’t returned yet?”

She shook her head as she ladled some of her
rabbit and wild rice soup into a wooden bowl. Of course, the main
ingredients weren’t the most important. When it came to soups,
seasoning was everything.

“Whatever he’s doing, it’s important. You
know how he is.”

“I know, but two months without even a
message?”

Erbark ate his soup, watching her as she
fussed with her apron.

“I see him little enough already. He’s
always off adding a new town to the Protectorates or researching
some new spell. He’s so wrapped up in thinking about ways to help
everyone else, he forgets the simple stuff. I can’t remember the
last time he chopped wood or weeded our vegetable garden.”

“I’d be happy to do those things while I’m
here.”

“That’s not the point.”

“If it bothers you, tell him.”

“I’d have to find him.”

“I guess that’s true,” Erbark conceded.

“I don’t know what to do with the man,
Erbark.”

The fire cracked and popped in the
silence.

“Do you remember your wedding?” Erbark asked
suddenly. “Halfway through his hunting, he finally figured out how
to improve the defenses of the Protectorates using Blosin wands.
How long did you wait for him then?”

“Six spans.” She
blushed.
But he made it worth the
wait.

* * *

Erika had remained confident that despite
the six-span delay, Sven would return to fulfill his proposal to
her. Each day, more people told her she was wasting her time on
him, that he had abandoned her for some woman on the other side of
what was being called the Takraf Protectorates.

But each day brought word of him, in its own
fashion. As Sven renewed the spells protecting the forty other
towns in his tiny duxy, people heard of his wedding. The Morden
Moors had become safe around Leiben, and many people were able to
attend the event. Mar trickled into Leiben by the day, each
bringing vegetables and a pot. It was the job of the groom to bring
the meat. Erika’s mother, Batha, collected every pot to cook the
wedding soup in.

“Saw him headin’ to Erscht,” an old woman
told her. “Blesse’ is the day you’re wed.”

“Took his time makin’ us extra safe, ‘cause
we’re on the border,” a man said, scratching his hair and checking
his fingernails, as if lice could live where Sven walked. “We’re on
the ... perry-me’er, he called us.”

Through it all — the hustle and bustle of
preparation, the disparaging remarks and sideways glances — hope
burned in Erika.

He will return for
me,
she told herself.
He is a good man, a man who doesn’t go back on his
word.

When Sven finally returned to Leiben after
six spans of absence, it was all she could do not to throw herself
on him right there. She had to settle for a quiet handclasp, and
then she gasped with the rest of the crowd in attendance.

Trailing along behind Sven, like slaves to a
master, were four piles of deer, rabbit and duck. They were
suspended on nothing.

“Unload it,” Batha said quietly. Then,
louder, “Come on. We’ve seen him do it before.” To suit her words,
she grabbed two ducks by their necks and took them to the space
reserved for whatever the groom had managed to bring back.

He is splendid,
Erika thought, keeping her eyes downcast and her
hands busy on her shirt. But she sneaked glances at him.
Look at what he can do.

Then his eyes caught hers, and the smile on
his face was gorgeous.

“Are you nervous?” he asked her. “Tonight
...”

“Ah, Sven!” Erlend, Erika’s father, cried,
clapping him on the shoulder and neatly separating them. “Groom
can’t be stan’in’ aroun’, can he? C’mon, we’re to get firewood.”
Erbark joined Sven at the opposite shoulder with a smile for Erika,
and the three men left her there.

But Sven’s words hung in
her mind.
Tonight ...
They would be wed. Erika set about her tasks, trying to make
time move faster.

The meal could feed hundreds. The meat was
more than enough for the soup. Wild rice and roots, onions and
spices were added to make the blend plentiful. By rights, a
gathering this size should never have had enough food for more than
a bite for anyone, but whole cauldrons were still full when people
finished their seconds.

Hundreds of people congratulated Sven and
Erika as they sat side by side in the center of it all, eating
their soup. She beamed back at them, her heart and mind focused on
him like a bootmaker to her craft.

As the meal finished, the tale-telling and
laughter began. Elders from two dozen towns and villages within the
Protectorates began an impromptu contest, each striving to tell the
better tale. Stories and songs of Marrish and Dinah, Niminth and
Sendala, even the comedy of Mytaraza — the heroine who had
orchestrated a rather unusual protest among the women of
Marrishland and the Gien Empire in order to convince the two
nations to make peace. And every tale was bawdier than the last — a
squeamish foreigner might even say cruder. But by Seruvus they were
funny!

Ordinary people made fools of a hundred
pompous magocrats. Mapmakers set out on a thousand ludicrous
misadventures and almost always ended up dead by the end of the
story. Men masquerading as women. Women pretending to be men. Men
disguising themselves as women disguised as men. Mistaken
identities. People pretending to mistake someone’s identity. The
tales went on and on all afternoon and into the evening.

“Did you hear the tale of the mapmaker who
survived twenty-four missions into the Fens of Reur?” asked one
storyteller. “Neither has anyone else.”

“What do you call six mapmakers at the
bottom of a pool of quicksand?” countered another. “An
expedition.”

“How many mapmakers does it take to start a
fire during a thunderstorm?” a younger woman asked the crowd. “One.
Lightning always strikes a mapmaker first.”

Sven sat next to Erika and laughed heartily,
and she laughed with him. At one point, she brazenly snuck her hand
into his, and he stopped laughing immediately, his eyes softening
as they turned to look at her. Green eyes that held the world met
her own. He took his hand away and theatrically raised his arms
above his head, pretending to yawn. She shivered a little.

He’s moving the wedding
ceremony on,
she thought. Next to her,
Erlend and Batha were speaking quietly to themselves and laughing.
They knew what he was doing.

“The fires’re gettin’ hot. I think I could
use some cooler air,” Sven said after a minute.

Erika pressed a hand to Sven’s forehead. “It
feels like you might have a fever. Perhaps you’re comin’ down with
somethin’. Maybe you should lie down.”

Erika helped him to his feet and led him to
her house. They brushed the mud from their boots, and she lifted
the hide door open for him. She let it fall behind them, leaving
them both in the dark and quiet of her hut. The hearth fire had
been extinguished. She directed him to the side of the bed and
helped him undress. He lay down. She pulled off his boots, rubbed
his feet gently.

Now it was his turn to tremble. She bent
over his naked body in the darkness and kissed him softly on the
lips, lingering just long enough to make him eager for more before
she disappeared back into the dark.

“Just try to get some sleep,” she said and
then giggled. “Isn’t this silly?”

“It’s tradition,” he said quietly, his hand
holding hers.

“I know,” she answered, removing his hand.
“So you’ll just have to wait a few hours.” By the door, she saw his
boots. She grabbed them and took them with her.

Outside, Erlend and Batha watched her
return. Batha smiled at her, and Erlend nodded.

“The first sign of a successful marriage’s
the wife’s willin’ness to take her husban’s boots,” Batha said.

“An’ the second sign’s the husban’s denial
that anythin’ ever happened,” Erlend laughed.

Erika laughed, too.

“A strong marriage begins through waitin’.
If the wife trusts the husband to return from the hunt an’ does not
fool aroun’ while waitin’, the marriage’ll be strong. If the
husban’ respects his wife’s right to take his boots, the
marriage’ll last,” Erlend said. “It’s the same for all the Mar. We
trust an’ respect each other, an’ it makes us strong. When that
trust dies, so do the Mar. This’s why the ceremony’s the way it
is.”

“We know how impatient you are, Erika, but
you’ve got some waitin’ to do,” Batha added.

Slighly embarrassed, Erika said with mock
anger, “He made me wait six spans! Let’s see if he can handle six
hours.”

Erlend gave a low chuckle. “Your mother
could only wait two.”

Batha smiled. “An’ your father didn’t return
with enough meat to feed a mapmaker. Isn’t that right,
Littlehart?”

“The mapmaker was sick! You wouldn’t let him
eat any meat!”

All three of them laughed.

Erika allowed herself to be distracted by
everyone she knew, seeking out friends and family, letting Erbark
guide her around to meet people from other towns. As time passed,
people left to sleep. Finally, she was left with some of her
dearest friends, at a small fire in front of her house.

“Do the last bit there, dear,” Batha had
told her daughter. “It’ll drive him crazy.”

The soup was at near boiling, the herbs she
had gathered on her own added. It was certainly a bowl of flavorful
soup, the “love draught” she was supposed to be making him. Would
she be able to wait as patiently as him while he waited for the
soup to cool?

Fidelity, respect, patience — these are the
things one needed to survive. And to marry.

Taking a deep breath, she
went inside.
Tonight ...

Chapter 9

“
Cyan is for Elements. Often considered a
‘farl magic,’ it is among the most versatile of the myst colors
despite its arcane name. Elements can block, modify or counter
other spells, which is useful enough when facing an enemy wizard.
It also synergizes very well with every other kind of magic,
especially Knowledge.”

— Nightfire Tradition,

Nightfire’s Magical Primer

“You should take better care of yourself,
Erbark,” Erika said as they went to the front door. “You’re a
wizard, remember?”

He tied a knot in the broken knife belt and
reached for his green cloak. “Seems unfair using magic on someone
who can’t.”

“That’s not what I mean. You let Olver beat
you broken, and you don’t even heal yourself on the way home?”

Erbark shrugged. “Pain punishes my mistakes.
Scars prove how often I’ve been wrong.”

“We all earn our legends in different ways,”
another voice said from the living area behind them.

Both of them whirled in surprise.

Sven sat by the fire, red cloak emblazoned
with a broken marsord engulfed by flames. He sat sideways in the
chair, watching them. The fire flickered to his left, illuminating
half of his face while plunging the other in shadow. He smiled at
her — the light side warm and affectionate, the dark side sinister
and filled with rage.