Page 63 of Into the West

Delia finished her soup and the last crumb of her broth-soaked biscuit, licked the bowl clean, and tucked it aside near the window. Then she hung her head over the edge of the bunk so she could see everyone.

The young mage sighed. “It’s either that, or clean feathers for his pillow.”

“Teaches you patience,” Sai said.

“But you said to never use magic for trivial tasks!”

“My pillow is not trivial.” Sai snorted. “If I have to explain to you why I am telling you to do this, you clearly are not ready for anything more delicate.”

Well, after all this time around mages, Delia could certainly think of lots of reasons why Sai would have set that task for his apprentice. Likely it had something to do with learning how to use very, very small amounts of magic energy with fine control. Or it might be it was meant to make Ven figure out an efficient way he could clean lots of feathers at once. But she wasn’t going to say anything unless he asked her. Not out of spite! She liked Venidel quite a lot. Sai might seem whimsical, but he never did anything without a very good reason.

Endars snickered just a tiny bit, and Jonaton snorted. “I’ve been there before. He’s tricking you into figuring out how to do it more efficiently. More feathers, more finesse, the same power,” Jonaton said. “If you can’t figure out your own spells, you’ll be an apprentice forever.”

Venidel hunched his shoulders sheepishly, but said nothing more than, “Thanks, Briada. I’ll be fine with morning.”

“And Delia is helping me with delivering your midday food, so let’s give her late afternoon,” Sai ordered. Delia was going to object to his heavy-handed orders, but he was right. She used her borrowed horse to go up and down their abbreviated barge-string to get everyone’s food to them, then would chase after Ivar with his and Bay’s share. Bay was quite a good dog about feeding himself, but mastiffs didn’t have heavy coats, and he needed food to keep himself warm.

I suppose someone could make him a coat. Can mastiffs wear boots? The cold must hurt his feet.

“Well, that’s sorted, then,” said Hakkon. “Amethyst, is there anything else we should know about from the main caravan?”

“Just that the different sections took it on themselves to pause so that everyone could be one single convoy again,” Amethyst said sweetly.

“That was the Dolls’ idea, wasn’t it?” Sai cackled.

Amethyst bowed her head a little. “Yes, Sai, it was. And we coordinated it. It seemed best, for many reasons, for Baron Kordas to return triumphant to those he defended. We are also discussing what the forest might be, but we have come to no conclusions yet. We are very handicapped by being in these bodies. We are even hampered by physical bodies from speaking to free vrondi. It is by no means impossible, but it is difficult.”

“Yes, yes, those wretched Impie mages wouldn’t have wanted you to be able to warn other vrondi about their trap, now, would they?” put in—Bret Fairweather, surprisingly.

“They wouldn’t have wanted you to be able to talk to the captive Earth Elemental child, either,” Endars speculated. “Hmm. You know, if it isn’t all tangled up in the magic that keeps you imprisoned in those shells, if it’s just a blocking spell laid on top of everything else, I might be able to fix that. I’m not bad at anything involving communication.”

“Not bad!” Sai cackled. “False modesty, you old rat. Doesn’t look good on you.”

Endars made a dismissive motion. “I’m not you or Ceri.”

“No, and thank the gods you aren’t! If we were all alike, Kordas wouldn’t need half of us!” Sai was very pleased with his joke, but Delia was intrigued.

“What can you do, Master Endars?” she asked.

“At the top of my list, I can work out spells that will allow you to talk to anything that has a language,” he said. “I already have a lot of spells that will do that—I can summon and speak to wild vrondi, for instance—but if I don’t have a spell already, I can construct one.”

“Can you teach someone how to speak with dogs?” Ivar asked, suddenly very interested.

“The dismissive answer is that dogs don’t have a language. The actual answer is that the language consists of body position, movements, scent, and very few words, of which the most important are ‘food,’ ‘water,’ ‘love,’ ‘angry,’ ‘kill,’ ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘there,’ ‘here,’ and the most important one of all, ‘HEY!’”

That broke them all up, and Bay, up in the prow on the floor, looked up expectantly, then stood and wagged his rump. Amethyst fished him a soft bone section out of the soup pot and gave it to him. He wolfed it down happily, and lay back down.

“I think I will take a pass on that, then,” said Ivar, still chuckling. “Bay knows he’s a Good Boy.”

Bay wagged again.

“I think everyone speaks enough dog for both parties to understand each other—dogs speak ‘honesty,’” Endars mused. “But a lot of what we think of as ‘spells’ are actually ‘language.’ Some forms of language can’t be fully understood without a matching body shape, too. Bay there expresses a lot with his tail, the angle of his hips, the height of his ears—there is a lot that humans like us just can’t express back without an amazing costume. We lack the body parts to ‘speak’ with.” He looked up and around, seeing virtually nobody was following him. “Other than that, I am the second-best scryer after Sai, and I can, with difficulty, set up something between two people that acts like Mindspeech.”

“You haven’t mentioned the most important other than your language spells,” Sai chided.

“Well . . . I don’t know that it works every time . . .” Endars temporized.

“It’s worked every time you tried it,” Sai countered. He cocked his head to one side, looking rather like a cat that was excessively pleased with itself. “He can trigger Mindspeech in people who have the potential for it.”