Stonefather

She smiled at him. “You’re a complete fool, Runnel. I forgive you for mocking me even after we took an oath.”

“I meant no mockery…”

But she was already gone.

Runnel went to the pissery, where urine was saved, and contributed his few ounces to some future slab of soap. Then he went to the cistern and drank again, so he wouldn’t waken with thirst in the night. But not too much, so he wouldn’t waken with a full bladder.

Mostly, though, he was putting off the climb up those stairs, to try to sleep at the top of a swaying, shaking building. I know how those Verylludden felt, with the ground shaking under them and their bronze swords turning to cheese.

Inside the house, though, all was still. Wherever Lark slept, she must be there; Ebb, he knew, slept by the door in the outer wall. Demwor might be awake but he wasn’t on watch on the lower floor.

I can say that I didn’t want to wake anybody by climbing the stair as they were trying to sleep.

It was a feeble plan, and he knew it — but having formed the idea, he acted on it at once. He found the steps leading down into the cellar.

It was dark, like a cloudy, moonless night. Even after waiting, his eyes still could not find light enough to make out anything at all.

His toes, though, found the stone flags of the floor easily enough. But there was something wrong — the stones were trembling almost as much as the wood of the upper stories had been. They also gave under his feet, shifting with his weight. Finally he realized: They had been laid across wood.

The watermages are so frightened even of this one stonemage that not only do they have Demwor to keep watch over the house, but also they have cut off the stone of the house from the living rock of the earth.

They’re afraid that even from here, Lord Brickel might be able to do some terrible thing to the stone underlying their city — or, more to the point, the channels through which their precious water flowed.

Well, it is precious water, thought Runnel. Six hours without water, and I begin to thirst. But when have I ever needed stone to slake my desire? If you have to choose between Tewstan and Yeggut, it was Yeggut who sustained life minute by minute and hour by hour.

Though if Tewstan hated you, where would you be safe from his wrath?

Not here in this cellar. You could put wood between the flagstones and the living stone below, but they could not have done that with the walls of the cellar, because they were holding up the upper floors. Walls had to touch the living stone, or the house could not stand.

Sure enough, the foundation of the great hearth of the common room above was stone that connected fully to the living rock; it was here that Runnel made his bed, his hand touching the stone of the foundation. Here alone the house did not tremble. Here alone he could sleep with the same ease he felt on the packed-earth floor of the hovel he had shared with his family all his life.

Yesternight I slept in the woods among the moldered corpses of heroes and invaders. And only the night before, with my family. So close is my village, almost a near neighbor of Mitherhome. Yet except for the soldiers who went away to the wars, which man of Farzibeck has traveled as far as I, or learned as much as I’ve already learned?

He could hear Father’s voice answering him. “Learn? You’ve learned nothing, except how to be a slave in a fool’s house, where a southerman lords it over you and a girl mocks you and you will grow nothing in the earth, only carry water and pour water, and chop vegetables for others to eat.”

“Shut up,” he said to his father.

How many times had he thought it, but dared not say the words? He had been slapped and shoved and punched and kicked a hundred times or more, as if he had spoken with such insolence. It was about time he finally said the things that he had already been punished for. He could swear at his father every day for a year and not be caught up with what the man owed him.

And as he went to sleep, he thought of Lark, so prudish, but so generous; so angry, but such a good storyteller. She talks to the birds, and the birds obey her, yet she doesn’t think that she’s a birdfriend; what could a birdfriend do more than she did, keeping the birds away from the house because she could not serve them well here? A strange world, where someone could be a mage and yet deny it so thoroughly that she did not believe in her own power and therefore could never use it.

It would be wonderful to be a birdfriend, for it was said that beast-mages could choose a clant, an animal that was like a second self to them. And having chosen a clant, they could learn to put their soul inside the creature, and see through its eyes, and feel all that it felt, and hear all that it heard. A birdfriend could use her clant to spy on people, or just to soar above the earth, or perhaps to take a hare or rabbit and bring it home, if the bird was a raptor. A birdmage would never have to starve.