“How big was it?” Rolan asked. “What did it look like? How did you beat it?”
“Go to bed, boy.”
“But—”
Luc snored, and while Rolan was certain that it was a fake snore meant to shut him up, he let the questions drop. Angrily, he stalked into his closet and lay down on his little cot, and he stayed awake until morning out of pure spite.
- CHAPTER 10 -VISITORS
Rolan didn’t run away the next morning.
It was raining, and he didn’t like getting wet.
He didn’t run away the day after that, either, but only because the rain had left the path all muddy. And the day afterthat, his ankle was sore from when he jumped off the loft and landed on it funny. The ankle healed in a few days, but then he got a weird rash on his arm from a plant he’d picked in the field behind Luc’s house.
He decided to stick around a few more days, just in case it turned serious.
Rolan woke one morning to realize that he’d been in the Arcanist’s house for two weeks. He really did need to make some progress on his running-away plan, but maybe… maybe he would wait untilthe melons in Luc’s garden had ripened. They were nearly ready, and he didlovea freshly cut melon. They were so expensive in the city. He’d wait, and bring some back for his pa.
The waiting would be easier if Rolan weren’t sobored.
During the day, Luc slept late, made breakfast, then went outside. There, rain or shine, he did a thing Rolan found utterly perplexing. A narrow pole, no thicker than Rolan’s wrist, was driven into the dirt behind the carrot patch. While a baffled Rolan looked on, the Arcanist would balance atop the pole, standing on just one foot, the other leg bent at the knee, with his hands held slightly away from his body. He would stand there like that with his eyes shut, silent and motionless, pretending to be a scarecrow for all Rolan could make out. After ten or twenty minutes of this lunacy, the Arcanist would calmly open his eyes, jump down, and go about his day. As if standing utterly still atop poles was a normal thing normal people did every morning. When Rolan asked him what in the name of truth he wasdoingup there, Luc only grunted in reply.
Whatever. Rolan didn’t really care, anyway. He did try to stand on the pole a few times, when the Arcanist wasn’t looking. It had to be easy, if an old man could do it. And Rolan had always been light on his feet, able to balance on the gutters and lampposts of Crisanth as he scurried about the rooftops to escape the guards.
But every time he managed to leap up onto the pole, it would wobble, sending him tumbling to the mud. Whatever the trick to it was, Rolan couldn’t figure it out. The blasted thing was set up to make him fail.
Once, he spotted Luc watching him from across the vegetable patch, the man’s stoic face as expressionless as always. Rolan toppled off the pole, cursing, and did not try to balance on it again.
Besides the pole thing, Luc mostly just did farm chores. He hoed vegetables and fed livestock and mended fences. He hauled hay and curried his horse. And Rolan shadowed him everywhere, waiting for Luc to give him something to do. But Luc never did. Rolan might as well have been a ghost flitting about, invisible. Luc put food on his plate and made him bathe every other day, but beyond that, he ignored Rolan entirely.
Each night, Luc departed with all his weapons and his cloak and his silence, and Rolan amused himself around the house until he finally fell asleep, angry and restless. When would the apprentice stuff begin? When would he get a sword? When would Lucspeakto him other than the occasional grunt or reminder to wash between his toes?
It was stupid, is what it was.
He was pretty sure Anaya’s apprenticeship hadn’t gone like this. He remembered her first weeks with Evaine, and how the apothecary had her running ragged all over the city, fetching and carrying and delivering, and sometimes, he was sure, just running for the sake of wearing Anaya out. It had been horrible. He’d barely seen Anaya at all during those days.
Hisapprenticeship, however, was turning into a complete bore. Oh, he loved the free food and the warm bed and the fact that no one was jumping him in an alley and forcing him to turn out his pockets or eat a mouse they’d caught or any of the other awful things the older boys in Crisanth calledfun. He didn’t miss hunting through dark alleys and creepy sewers in search of his pa, or flinching when hehadfound him, but he was in one of his moods, the moods that usually meant it was best for Rolan to sleep behind the blacksmith’s shop for a few nights. No. He didn’t miss that at all.
But he felt he should be doing something. In all that open grass and under that great blue sky, he felt trapped.
Finally, he confronted Luc.
He waited until the man was in the tub one afternoon and thus unable to vanish into the barn or the woods or any of his other usual escapes. He had a tendency to disappear when Rolan wanted to speak with him.
Despite the water being murky with dirt and suds, obscuring everything beneath the surface, Rolan kept his eyes firmly on the sky as he approached the Arcanist.
“I’m bored,” he declared, which wasn’t at all the elegant and persuasive speech he’d planned out. But with the Arcanist in the tub, glaring daggers at him, he got flustered.
Luc said nothing.
Rolan waited, having figured out Luc’s trick of ignoring him until he got evenmorebored and wandered off. Not this time. He was staying put until he got what he wanted. He could be patient and surly too.
They went into a deadlock, each trying to outwait and outsilence the other.
Finally, Luc spoke, his tone dangerously calm. “Do you want to fight Cryptics?”
Rolan let out a breath. “No.”
