“There is a monster here that kills indiscriminately,” Esrahaddon told him with great and unexpected seriousness. “No weapon made by man can harm it. It comes at night and people die. Nothing will stop it except the sword that lies in that tower. You need to find a way inside and get that sword.”
Royce continued to stare.
“You are right. That is not the whole truth, but it is the truth nonetheless and all that I am willing to explain…for now. To learn more you need to get inside.”
“Stealing swords,” Royce muttered mostly to himself. “Okay, let’s take a look at this tower. The sooner I see it the sooner I can start cursing.”
“No,” the wizard replied. He looked back at the ground where the sun had already faded. He glanced up at the darkening sky. “Night is coming and we need to get indoors. In the morning we will go, but tonight we hide with the rest.”
Royce considered the wizard for a moment. “You know when I first met you there was all this talk about you being this scary wizard that could call lightning and raise mountains and now you can’t even fight a little monster, or open an old tower. I thought you were more powerful than this.”
“I was,” Esrahaddon said and for the first time the wizard held up his arms letting his sleeves fall back revealing the stumps where his hands should have been. “Magic is a little like playing the fiddle. It’s damn hard to do without hands.”
———
Dinner that evening was a vegetable pottage, a weak stew consisting of leeks, celery, onions, and potatoes in a thin broth. Hadrian took only a small portion that was far from filling, but he found it surprisingly tasty, filled with a mixture of unusual flavors that left a burning sensation in his mouth.
Lena and Russell Bothwick made good on their promise to put them up for the night, a kindness made all the more generous when they discovered how cramped the little house was. The Bothwicks had three children, four pigs, two sheep, and a goat they called Mammy, all of whom clustered in the single open room. Mosquitoes joined them as well, taking over the night shift from the flies. It was hard to breathe in the house filled with smoke, the scent of animals, and the steam from the stew pot. Royce and Hadrian staked out a bit of earth as near the open doorway as possible and sat on the floor.
“I didn’t know the first thing about farming,” Russell Bothwick was saying. Like most men in the village, he was dressed in a frayed and flimsy shirt that hung to his knees, belted around the waist with a length of twine. There were large, dark circles under his eyes, another trait consistent with the other inhabitants of Dahlgren. “I was a candle maker back in Drismoor. I worked as a journeyman in a trade shop on Hithil Street. It was Theron who kept us alive our first year here. We woulda starved or froze to death if not for Theron and Addie Wood. They took us under their wing and helped build this house. It was Theron that taught me how to plow a field.”
“Addie was my midwife when I had the twins,” Lena said while ladling out bowls, which Thrace handed to the children. The twin girls and Tad, exiled to the loft, looked down from their beds of straw, chins on hands, eyes watchful. “And Thrace here was our babysitter.”
“There was never a question about taking her in,” Russell said. “I only wish Theron would come too, but that man is stubborn.”
“I just can’t get over how beautiful that dress is,” Lena Bothwick said again, looking at Thrace and shaking her head. Russell grumbled something, but with a mouthful of stew, no one understood him.
Lena scowled. “Well it is.”
She stopped talking about it, but continued to stare. Lena was a gaunt woman with light brown hair, cut straight and short, giving her a boyish look. Her nose came to a point so sharp it looked like it could cut parchment. She had a rash of freckles and no eyebrows to speak of. The children all took after her, each sporting the same cropped hairstyle, son and daughters alike, while Russell had no hair at all.
Thrace entertained them with stories of her adventure to the big city, of the sights and number of people she found there. She explained that Hadrian and Royce took her to a lavish hotel. This brought worried looks from Lena but she relaxed as more details were revealed. Thrace raved about her bath in a hot water tub with perfumed soap and how she spent the night in a huge feather bed under a solid beamed roof. She never mentioned the Tradesmen’s Arch, or what happened underneath it.
Lena was mesmerized to the point of nearly letting the remainder of the stew boil over. Russell continued to grunt and grumble his way through the meal. Esrahaddon sat with his back to the side wall between Lena’s spinning wheel and the butter churn. His robe was now a dark gray. He was so quiet he could have been just a shadow. During dinner, Thrace spoon-fed the wizard.
How must that feel? Hadrian thought while watching them. What is it like to have held so much power and now unable to even hold a spoon?
After dinner, while helping Lena clean up Thrace was placing the washed bowls on a shelf and called out, “I remember this plate.” A smile appeared on her face as she spotted the only ceramic dish in the house. The pale white oval with delicate blue traceries lay carefully tucked in a back corner of the cupboard with all the other treasured family heirlooms. “I remember when I was little, Jessie Caswell and I—” she stopped and the house quieted. Even the children stopped fussing.
Lena stopped cleaning the dishes and put her arms around Thrace, pulling her close. Hadrian noticed lines on the woman’s face he had not seen previously. The two stood before the bucket of dirty water and silently cried together. “You shouldn’t have come back,” Lena whispered. “You should have stayed in that hotel with those people.”
“I can’t leave him,” Hadrian heard Thrace’s small voice muffled by Lena’s shoulder. “He’s all I have left.”
Thrace pulled back and Lena struggled to offer her a smile.
It was dark outside now. From his vantage point at the doorway, Hadrian could not see much of anything—a tiny patch of moonlight scattered here and there. Fireflies blinked leaving trails of light. The rest was lost in the vast black of the forest.