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He grunted in frustration. “I was stupid. I don’t know how it did it, but it did the same thing once before, back in Elal. I thought the hunters that caught you were that same group. Careless of me. I realize now that the ones in Wartson didn’t know who I was. These did. And this hunter had some way of making me freeze.”
“Probably some sort of canned spell it could deploy with a manual trigger. House Hanneil makes them, a bottled version of their mental magic tricks. Very proprietary. What I meant was, how did the hunter use it on you so easily, Wizard Phel?”
She set aside the bandages in a neat pile—the clean parts of those could be reused too—and began easing the blood-soaked pads away from his wounds. His muscles twitched, and he grunted in pain. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he replied, sounding strained. “How was I supposed to stop it from using that spell on me?”
Nic wanted to thump him between his shoulder blades. “Magic.” She said the word slowly. “How is it that you’re such a powerful wizard—remember, I’ve seen your scores—and you’re such a clumsy idiot about using it?”
“Wow, thanks. Flatter me some more,” he ground out.
She did thump him between the shoulder blades—on intact skin. It was like hitting a wall.
“Ow,” he complained.
“I know that didn’t hurt. Hand me the flask.” He passed it under his arm, and she poured it over the wounds where the stitches had indeed split. Mostly they looked all right. She just wanted to be sure his injuries stayed clean—and she rather enjoyed the sight of the water sliding in ripples over the uninjured parts.
He flinched. “Warn a guy, would you? That stuff is cold.”
“So warm it up. You boiled the water to cook the hunters, so warm this.”
He grunted noncommittally, but the water warmed under her hands. “There you go. Wasn’t that easy? You’re not a lost cause after all.”
“Good to know. Now I can sleep tonight instead of fretting about being a shitty wizard.” He sounded so disgusted that she allowed herself a smile.
Rubbing the soap between her wet hands, she gingerly washed the lacerations. “How old were you when the magic hit?” she asked quietly.
He let out a long breath, shifting his weight and propping his hands on his hips. The movement made his buttocks flex in a most interesting way, and she had to force herself to focus on cleaning his wounds. “Twenty-two,” he said, sounding reluctant.
Nic nodded. That explained a great deal. “And until then, you figured yourself for a regular guy.”
“Of course. Everyone else did, too. We were all regular people. You know this—nobody in Phel has had more than a glimmer of magic in generations. My great-grandmother was the last to have more than a bit useful for household tasks, and she didn’t have a lot. Then, one day…woosh!I’m making it rain.”
She suppressed a giggle at how appalled he sounded. “Is that how it happened?”
“More or less. We’d had a hot, dry spring, and seedlings that sprouted in the morning were crisped by sunset. We irrigated from dawn to dusk and couldn’t keep them wet enough. I was so… frustrated. We stood to lose the whole crop, which would have a cascading effect on the entire growing season, and our stores were depressingly lean. I was staring out at those hills of brown seedlings, wishing for rain—and suddenly water gushed out of a clear blue sky.”
Nic rinsed her hands, then the soap out of his wounds, picturing a gobsmacked Gabriel deluged by water pouring from nowhere, and swallowed a quiet snicker at the image. He heard it anyway. “Yeah, laugh, but I was horrified. Everyone ran screaming. I washed all the topsoil away before I figured out how to stop it.”
“I can only imagine,” she replied seriously, feeling empathy for that confused young man. “But after everyone got over the shock, your family must have been thrilled.”
“Yes and no. They were upset for a long time. Much consternation and gnashing of teeth. A common man of twenty-two doesn’t suddenly become a wizard, so they worried it was some kind of attack. Even if my family had any magic left, no one comes to it that late.”
“That’s not true. For many, especially males, itcanbe that late. If you’d been more a part of Convocation society, your magic potential would’ve been noted and measured early on—and you would’ve been educated in its use—but none of us know if we’ll be a wizard or familiar until the final maturations happen in the brain. That can happen as late as our early twenties. The magic is there, but until the brain integrates the pathways that allow us to consciously control it, we can’t use it. If we ever can.”
He was quiet a moment. “I didn’t feel any magic in myself.”
“How would you have recognized it?” she argued. Probably the intact stitches would hold. Better to leave them as is than attempting any of her amateurish repairs. “You expected to be like everyone else, so you pretty much were. There were probably clues, but they’d be easily dismissed if you didn’t know what to look for.”
“True. I never saw anything unusual in myself, but I didn’t have reason to. I was a relatively boring guy. I grew up learning to fight, take care of livestock, plow the fields, read books at night. I figured I’d have a life like my parents and grandparents. Marry a local girl, have some kids, later grandkids. I would’ve been happy with that life.”
Oh, hello, stab of jealousy.“Was there a particular girl you had in mind?”
“A girl,” he echoed in surprise. “Oh, that I wanted to marry? No. I mean, there were girls I kept company with, but I hadn’t found the right one yet. Figured I had time.” He snorted for his youthful ignorance. “Why?”
“You asked me,” she countered.
“And you didn’t answer,” he replied immediately.
