Fired Page 13

  “You brought them here,” pointed out Path.

  “Anything else that will put them in danger,” said Thorn.

  Path dipped her chin down and smiled at him coyly.

  “Ah,” she said, “such loyalty does you credit. I knew you were a soft touch when I saw you.”

  “If you won’t do us the favor of working with the tools you brought,” said Wayfare, grumpily, “then we will make a sacrifice and find something else for you to work with.” He cast a glance around at the rest of the alchemists, all of whom studiously avoided his gaze, apart from Cammel, who looked as though he were about to raise his hand until Path kicked him under the table. Wayfare looked around the room thoughtfully.

  “What is your history?” he said. “What have you Forged in the past? Or don’t you know the answer to that, either?”

  Thorn swallowed. “A girl — a young woman. I turned her into a fox. And a rabbit into a weasel. Neither of those were what I really wanted. It just sort of happened.”

  “You need practice,” said Freg confidently.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “You’ll never learn to control your powers without it.”

  Thorn put his right hand down on the table, splaying his fingers deliberately. He watched them as their eyes all followed it immediately, seemingly unconsciously, drawn to the movement of his fingers. He pushed the table enough so that it tilted slightly off balance on its three legs.

  “I want to learn how,” he said, “without endangering anyone or anything. I want to Forge without harming.” He hesitated for a moment, but kept himself from looking at Irae, sensing that his gaze would betray him. “I want to know how to choose the Forge, and how to reverse it.”

  It was no use trying to hide it; he could feel how she stiffened, lifting her chin. He kept his eyes away from hers nonetheless.

  “Yes, well,” said Path, “that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? So, we can help each other.”

  Still looking down at the table, at his own hand, Thorn nodded.

  “Which is even more reason why we need to see what you can do.”

  “But I’ve told you what I’ve done!”

  Wayfare leaned forward, staring at him fixedly. “That can’t be all. You’re a young man, I’ll wager you discovered your power when you were a child. Well, you’re an adult now, and if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that the passage from child to adult involves finding your boundaries. You can’t tell me you’ve gone all these years and only Forged twice.”

  Thorn steeled himself and looked up. He met his eyes, steadily.

  “No,” he said. “There have been more.”

  “Well?” pressed Path. “What was your first Forge, boy?”

  Thorn did not let his gaze drop from Wayfare’s for a second.

  “My first Forge,” he said, “was when I was five, or six, I don’t recall. My dog had died, and I made him into a briskplant.”

  For some reason, this made them all sit up straight and put their elbows on the table. Under the collective gaze of all five of the alchemists, Thorn felt uncomfortably like a butterfly being pinned to a sheet as a specimen.

  “Are you certain he was dead already?” said Wayfare.

  Even now, all these years on, when Thorn uncovered the memory and blew the dust from it, it still stung. The dog had been the first creature he could remember who ever showed him love, and he had sat with him as he died, feeling the heartbeat jump erratically and then slow, catching the last gasp of breath, the last unconscious stretch of the leg. Moments had passed, before Thorn had put his small hand on the dog’s side, unsure of just why, knowing only that he wanted things to change.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am certain.” The alchemists exchanged wordless glances, eyebrows raised, mouths drawing down in surprise. “What? You say you won’t tell me things, but you can’t really expect me to just accept that. Why are you acting as though this is such a shock to you? What does it mean?”

  “We need tell you nothing,” said Wayfare heavily, and Thorn could not tell whether he was more pleased or dismayed. “We owe you nothing, boy, and you have nothing with which to bargain. Let us draw our own conclusions, and we will tell you what to do and what to think.”

  Thorn drew his right hand up into a fist and banged it on the table. It was a great deal louder than he thought it would be; everyone jumped, including Thorn himself, and he fought the desire to apologize.

  “You may owe me nothing,” he said, “but I will be damned if I will let you make me hurt my friends.”

  “You are probably damned anyway,” said Wayfare, “and I don’t know exactly what you think will stop us.”

  The word bargain was circling around in Thorn’s mind, unable to connect with anything meaningful. But suddenly, like a burst of light, the memory of what he had in his bag jumped out at him. He leaped up with the thought of it.

  “Knowledge!” he said. “You say there are no books on the Forged. But I have access to one. I will give it to you if you help me with my questions and keep my friends safe and unchanged.”

  “A book on the Forged?” said Path. “Where have you come by that?”

  “A friend of mine is a legendarian.”

  Path looked to Wayfare, who looked thoughtful. They seemed to be considering the proposition.

  “It’s likely to be in your belongings,” said Wayfare, “and we have those.” He nodded to the bags where they were piled in the corner, Thorn’s pack on top. “I appreciate your informing us of what you have, but we would have found it sooner or later. I don’t know quite what you think you are bargaining with.”

  Quick, Thorn, quick!

  A voice in his head, screaming at him. He leaped away from the table, knocking over his chair again, and to the pile of belongings. Untying his bag one-handed as he backed away from them, he plucked the book from within. The alchemists had scarcely had the time to react to his movement, swift as it was, but Path and Crau were on their feet and moving towards him. He was bigger than they were, but there were more of them all together — he didn’t have much time. He caught a sideways glimpse of Irae rising to her feet, arms up, hands empty; Karyl did not move at all.

  The fire, Thorn!

  It was but the matter of a few short steps. He held the book out, close over the reaching flames of the nearest fire, and waited.

  “Can I bargain now?”

  “You wouldn’t do such a wicked thing,” breathed Path.

  “I would,” said Thorn, affecting an air of nonchalance though the threat to the book seemed like sacrilege. “It isn’t my book.”

  He heard a faint echo of Ruben begging him to return the books unharmed, and clenched his grip on it a little tighter, inching it closer to the flames.

  He could see Wayfare chewing on his lower lip. Suddenly the head alchemist held up a hand.

  “Very well!” he said. “We promise to help you and cause no harm or change, if you give me that book right now and work along with us.”

  Thorn looked to Irae, who was waiting in a kind of crouch for something to happen, to be needed, to move and to act. He swallowed and brought the book down to his side.

  “All right,” he said. “Just so we understand each other.”

  He returned to the table, and the others moved with him, warily, watching him closely to see what else he might do. He set the book down in front of Wayfare, who did not touch it but nodded at Path. She reached across, snatched it up greedily, and began to page through.

  “Be careful!” said Thorn.

  Wayfare eyed him. “You wouldn’t have burned it, would you? No — you’re far too careful with books.”

  “No, I wouldn’t have,” Thorn agreed, “but you didn’t know that. If you push me, I will do what I need to.”

  “All this over just a little bit of Forging,” sighed Cammel, shaking his head. “All we wanted was for you to change your friends. You might have easily changed them back again, once you had the skill.”

  Thorn op
ened his mouth to pursue that, but the alchemists were still discussing it and cut him off.

  “Perhaps he hasn’t got the knack,” said Freg.

  “Perhaps he’s an idiot,” said Path, to the book.

  “I know! It’s because of the girl,” said Cammel, looking up brightly as though the thought had just occurred to him. “He’s afraid he might hurt the girl.”

  “And if he hurts the girl’s father, the girl will be mad,” said Freg. “We know how that goes.”

  “But you’ve already done something with this one, haven’t you?” said Crau reasonably, gesturing at Karyl, who did not even look at him but kept his gaze on the ground.

  “What do you mean?” said Irae sharply.

  “Well, he isn’t really human, is he?” He turned and appealed to the rest of the alchemists. “He can’t be, can he? They turned a cow into a human, or a plant, or something. I know something’s off about him, because he puts my mouth all dry.”

  “He was healed,” said Irae, putting a hand on Karyl’s shoulder protectively.

  “Mm,” said Wayfare, sounding unconvinced, and squinting upwards at Karyl. “Healed by whom?”

  “By a healer,” said Irae, defensively.

  “Braeve,” said Thorn. “Braeve in the woods. An illusionist.”

  Path snorted with laughter, and Wayfare nudged her with his elbow. He shook his heavy head and turned still squinted eyes back to Irae.

  “I’d keep an eye on him, if I were you,” he said.

  Irae looked as though she were holding herself back, and Thorn put his hands on the table, palms down, one in front of Wayfare, one in front of Path.

  “Leave her be,” he said. “You said you would help us now. So help.”

  “Mm, and what is it you want me to help you with?” It was Wayfare who answered. Path was still staring at the book. “You’re unwilling to Forge. If you want to learn, you must practice.”

  Thorn nodded.

  “I will practice,” he said, “if you will teach me what I need to know.”

  “Well, then,” said Crau, rubbing his hands together, “enough of this nonsense.”

  “Not nonsense,” objected Freg, “we were eating dinner.”

  Crau shoved his bowl of soup away from himself.

  “Enough of this dinner,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

  “Now?” said Thorn.

  “Now.”

  9

  Memories In The Desert

  Five days passed by, and Thorn learned, practiced, and Forged.

  The Forging turned out to be the easy part.

  Learning was something else — the alchemists were divided in how they taught. What he learned from Path would be disagreed with by Cammel, and what Cammel repeated over and over would be scoffed at by Crau. Wayfare alone did not participate in the continuing education of Thorn.

  Thorn thought about asking him why, exactly, but decided he was perfectly fine with things as they were.

  The alchemists, of course, were not of the Forged themselves, and so they could only teach him what they had researched and investigated and studied. They did have an extensive catalog of Forged who had passed through the Badlands and stayed with them a while, practicing their skills and answering questions. Each of the alchemists had taken notes on each Forged, and so not all of the notations quite matched up, but it made for interesting reading. Some of the notes ended with the Forged going on their way — others ended rather more abruptly, leading Thorn to wonder what happened to the subject, but conclude that it was perhaps better not to know.

  He screwed up his courage and asked Path, anyway.

  She regarded him for a moment.

  “It is perhaps better not to know,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Thorn, almost gratefully.

  His practicing was as difficult as piecing together the notes on past experiences. They did not want him to Forge right away, despite their request at the outset. No, he needed to practice the feeling of Forging, the action, without actually summoning the glow.

  “For control,” Path told him. “You reach deep within now, to find the strength to Forge. With practice, with control, you can have it all the time just beneath your skin, waiting to be called on.” She picked up his hand and turned it upwards, palm toward the cavernous ceiling of the great room. “A line of living gold, just below the surface,” she said, tracing his lifelines with a reverent finger.

  Thorn let her touch him for a second more, then removed his hand from her grasp, politely.

  “I’ll work on that,” he said.

  “Here, you can learn all you need to know. To Forge as you want, to Forge permanently, irrevocably —”

  “Oh,” said Thorn, and he blushed, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. “I know how to do that. It needs the Anvil of the Soul.”

  “Indeed,” said Path, eyeing him. “And do you have such a thing?”

  “I do, as a matter of fact. We borrowed it from some monks.”

  Stolen was perhaps a better word. But the alchemists were close enough to outlaws themselves that they did not question it.

  No, the alchemists were not Forged — but they were alchemists, nonetheless, and they knew a great deal about turning things into other things. Alchemical geniuses all, they refined their knowledge, asked him questions about his process, about his learning, about his practice, about his temperature and the quickness of his heartbeat and his thoughts and his dreams, and they turned the knowledge into more notes, more scribbled papers.

  He also was quite sure, on the second day, that he caught Cammel and Crau in the middle of turning lead into gold. But they shooed him away before he could see it well enough to make certain.

  “For taxation purposes,” said Crau, which was ridiculous, Thorn thought. They would no more pay taxes here in the Badlands than he would have lived in the woods his entire life. What for, road maintenance? he wanted to ask. But things were going so well. He didn’t want to put this all at risk.

  Irae was clearly antsy but was just as clearly putting it aside in favor of allowing him to learn at his own pace without interference. Whenever he saw her — they did let her enter the main cave sometimes, mostly at mealtimes but even sometimes to say goodnight before she retired to sleep outside — she favored him with a slightly grim smile and told him to keep his chin up. Thorn didn’t know what that meant. No one had ever said it to him before, and he thought about it and thought about it when he should have been reading the notes and practicing reaching for the feel of the Forge without needing to dig deep. Keep your chin up, he whispered to himself at night, and was strangely comforted. Jelen, I don’t know what that means.

  It sounded like something good, though.

  The alchemists fed him regularly and let him wander freely around the inside of the main room. They took it in turns to teach and to watch him practice, evidently not wanting to overwhelm him, but they all gathered together at the little table when it was time to eat. After the first day, Karyl took his meals outside. He made Crau nervous, was the explanation. No one ever asked any more questions about what had happened to him, for which Thorn was secretly grateful.

  He read so much tiny written, hastily scrawled inkprint that the words swam before his eyes at night and he started to get headaches. He spent so many hours crouched over nothing, hand hovering in the air, biting his lip, reaching without wanting to reach for the glow, that his hand developed a tremble whenever he flexed his fingers. He dreamed at night of trying to Forge — of trying to Forge Irae, of all people, and in his dream she pushed his hand aside and sat up and put her hands on her hips.

  In his dream, she said, “Now, really. If I wanted you to touch me, Thorn, I would have asked you.”

  And then he woke up blushing like a schoolboy.

  On the third day they asked him to Forge.

  They kept him inside for it, still, and brought him a mouse. It was a small specimen, even for a mouse, and as he held it in his left palm, fingers
curled lightly around it, he could feel the heart beating, could hear it like a steady thrum, like a moth fluttering around what should have been his ears. He looked down at the soft gray fur and stroked it quietly with the index finger of his right hand.

  “Into what?” he said.

  It was Path who was with him, Path who had brought him the mouse.

  “What does it feel like?” she said quietly. “What shape should it take?”

  He concentrated.

  “It’s like a maze,” he said. “There are all these lines, all bright green, and they fork and jag and dodge, and I have to —” He fluttered his hand briefly in the air over the mouse, twisted his fingers and snapped them. “I have to bring them together before it can change. I have to unite them.”

  “It’s all about potential,” said the alchemist. “You can’t Forge something into something it doesn’t want to be.”

  “Right,” muttered Thorn, but there was an image of an orange-colored fox at the back of his mind. He shook his head pushed it away. “It can be — it wants to be — something larger. Nothing green, nothing growing — something that can move and dart around and —” He looked up. “Do we have any water?”

  She brought him a basin, and he held his left hand over it, turning it palm up. When he put his right hand to meet it, cupping it over the little ball of fur in his palm, the mouse stayed surprisingly still. Thorn held his breath, until Path reached out and touched his shoulder.

  “You need to breathe, or the glow will take too long,” she said.

  He breathed, though it wasn’t easy. His breath caught with a stab in his throat, and he pushed through it, closing his eyes briefly.

  “Live and breathe,” he whispered to the creature in his hands. “Breathe —”

  Differently.

  He heard Path, at his side, catch her breath.