His first instinct was to run and let someone else take the blame. His second thought was that this would be truly stupid. A mage could track him by the print his body had left in the mud. This occurred to him just as a man who had been kneeling near the corner of the wall rose to his feet.
He was stocky, not much taller than Arram, with skin a ruddy golden-brown. His black hair was cut short and streaked with gray. Dark eyes with long, sloping lids that lengthened at the corners looked Arram over. He wore a sturdy wool shirt under a sleeveless vest equipped with a number of pockets. His breeches, also covered with pockets, were heavily burdened with the tools of a working gardener. When he stood, it was easy to see that his legs were widely bowed, like someone who had spent a large part of his life on horseback.
Arram knew him. Everyone did who paid attention to the university gardens. He gulped. “Master Hulak, I’m so sorry! I never would have jumped the wall—”
“If you knew I was here?” the school’s head gardener, also a master in the study of plants, medicines, and poisons, asked gently.
Arram’s knees wanted to give way. “No, Master!” he protested. “If I’d known there was work being done here! I thought it was too early for…” His voice locked in his throat.
Hulak studied him for painful moments before he said, “So you think because you see no plants there is no work to be done? It is fine to gallop over my rows?” He raised a hand for silence when Arram would have defended himself. Clearly he was still thinking. At last he inquired, “You are Arram Draper, Varice’s friend?”
Arram nodded. “Yes, Master.” Everyone knows Varice, he thought.
“Not Master, only Hulak. You are said to be clever.” The older man watched him, his eyes seeming not to blink.
“I’m trying to be,” Arram replied honestly.
“You have left me with”—in a form of exquisite torture, the gardener pointed to each shattered jar and counted its number aloud—“seven broken vessels I had planned to use in the morning. These things are money out of my spring term budget.”
Arram saw coins—his coins—flying out of a drawer in the bursar’s office. “How mu—”
But there was that upraised palm commanding silence again. “No. More important is a student silly enough to think a garden is dead because he sees nothing above the ground.”
To add to Arram’s enjoyment, it began to truly pour. Hulak did not even seem to notice. Arram did, as mud ran down his chest, breeches, and feet. He said nothing, feeling that the worst was about to come.
“You repay me by coming each school day, at this time, for an hour.”
Arram heard himself whimper softly.
Hulak ignored him. “Today I am in the third garden from the river. Tomorrow I will be in the fourth garden, and so on, until I reach the end of this long corridor. The next day I will move south, to the first garden on that corridor, and on. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Arram mumbled.
“I will bring you better clothes for gardening, and sandals.” Hulak looked him up and down. “Mages should understand plants. Varice knows this. Now it is your turn. Tomorrow, after your monkey lesson.” He looked along the row. “Pick up the jar pieces, take them to the shed over there. Put them in the basket with others.” He returned to the row where he had been working.
Arram heaped as many shards of pottery as he could carry in half of a broken jar and bore them to the shed, walking around the garden instead of through. As he worked, one question plagued him: How had Hulak known who he was?
—
“Of course he knows,” Varice said when he finally met her and Ozorne for supper. “Master Hulak knows everything!” She patted Arram’s arm. “You’ll learn.”
Ozorne nodded. “The university paid a royal sum to woo him here from the Mohon tribes that live north of Jindazhen.”
Varice giggled. “It wasn’t the money,” she informed her friend. “Master Lindhall—he was the one who brought Master Hulak here—told him about all of the plants and trees in the East that Hulak had never seen. You just have to know how to talk to him.”
“Not this afternoon I didn’t,” Arram grumbled. “Now I have even more work before I can do my classroom studies!”
Ozorne patted his shoulder. “Just wait till we get to the Upper Academy, my dear fellow,” he said cheerfully. “You will dream of these happy, lazy days in the Lower Academy with wistful sorrow.”
Exhausted after his trying day, Arram gratefully fell into bed and slept almost immediately. It seemed as if he’d barely started a decent dream of a blond girl who beckoned him to her when thunder crashed overhead. She vanished and Arram pried his eyes open.
“That was going to be a good one,” he muttered to the gods of dreams.
The thunder—no, not thunder, but pounding on the door—resumed.
“Make it stop or I’ll make it stop,” Ozorne growled from his cubicle. “They teach me explosive spells now.”
Arram crawled out of his blankets and stumbled to the door. “What the—?” he demanded as he threw it open.
He stopped. The burly fist raised to pound again belonged to Yadeen. He looked no more awake than Arram. “If I am up and about, someone will share my misery,” he informed the youth. “The marble slabs that are the face of the imperial platform—at the great arena—fell during an earth tremor. Did you feel it?”
Arram shook his head.
“I would like you to help me put new stones in their place,” Yadeen explained. “To do so I need you to let me use your power as well as my own. Normally no one would ask this before you had learned the spells to stop another mage from drawing on you, but this is an emergency. Will you help me? I swear by Mithros, Minoss, and any god you prefer that I will make you do no lawless thing, nor hold back any amount of Gift to keep you subject to my will in the future.”
Arram gawped at the older man. Finally he found the wit to say, “Wouldn’t you rather have one of your personal students? The older ones, I mean?”
Yadeen grimaced. “For a task such as this, they lack…” He hesitated, then continued, “Sufficient raw power of the right order. I would need two or three of them, and one of my three is about to leave to serve at a quarry for a year. Rather than deal with all that, I would prefer one student, if possible.”
Arram jumped. “Yes, sir, of course, sir!” he said, and grabbed the clothes he had placed on his chair for the morning.
“Say nothing to anyone with regard to my evaluation of how many of my older students could do this,” Yadeen said, accepting a cup of tea from Irafa, who had emerged from her own room. “Both of you.” He raised his voice and looked toward Ozorne’s cubicle.
“Your secrets are safe,” the prince called back. “Though I’d say you need new students if your senior ones are this useless.”
“Their skills are elsewhere,” Yadeen retorted after a sip of tea. “Have you been asked to throw fire yet, or to work a simulacrum of yourself good enough to fool a master?”