Book 2, Chapter 33

Father’s hesitation upon entering the hut was not lost on me. He wasn’t surprised to see me, but he had the air of a man dreading a task he knew he couldn’t put off any longer. After glancing at the row of potted plants I’d left lined up by the wall to be moved to the arbor, he slumped down at the table with a sigh and asked, “Did you do this?”

“The headaches certain people are getting?” I asked. “No. Nothing to do with me, well… other than killing the guy who was feeding those enchantments.”

“The rumor out in the fields is that you’ve cursed the village,” Father said. “You’re not safe here. People are getting scared, starting to ask if you’re some sort of monster in disguise. There’s been a lot of fear-mongering.”

“How quickly everyone forgets all the good I’ve done here.”

It wasn’t terribly surprising. In a way, it was almost a good thing. I wanted my family out of here, and an immediate danger from their neighbors might do more to convince them than a possible danger in the future that might never materialize.

I was in a hut made out of mud bricks with dirt floors. What little furniture it contained was carved from rough wood with very little thought given to sanding or smoothing it. The beds were pallets laid out on the ground with a single threadbare blanket each and no pillows. This wasn’t an opulent palace or richly decorated castle.

My parents were practical people, concerned with eking a living out of the dry, sandy soil that surrounded the village. They didn’t have the time or the disposition for politics, so there was no need to be subtle or to drop hints. Besides, I’d grown used to having enough personal power that I didn’t need to play those games anyway, even if it wasn’t necessarily true anymore.

“I want you to leave the village,” I said.

“For how long?” Mother asked.

They weren’t dismissing the idea out of hand. That was a good start. Hopefully that meant I could convince them. “Permanently. And I’d prefer if you didn’t come back to visit until this mess with that cabal Noctra was connected to is finished.”

“You mean until you’re done…” Mother trailed off and glanced at Senica.

“Yes,” I said.

“How long will that take?” Father asked. “We’re going to run into food issues if we try to leave. Even if we pick the garden clean first, we’ll end up with enough food to last a week or two before it starts going bad. That’s not enough time to establish a new food source.”

“No, no. That’s not a problem,” I said. “We can transplant everything in the garden and I can supplement that with some meat if needed. It’s not too difficult to hunt down food as long as you’re not picky.”

“What about monsters attacking us?” Mother asked.

“I’ll make a new ward stone. If it’s only covering a home and a garden, it’ll be cheap enough that we can keep it active all the time. Most of the problem with the big one here is that it’s covering a lot of extra land with the fields, the arbor, and the manor. Well, that and draw stones are ridiculously inefficient. Even the storage crystals I made aren’t as good as if Father powered the ward stone directly.”

Any concerns they had about safety or survival, I had an answer for. Truth be told, they were contributing more to the village than they were getting from it, which made sense. The village had Garrison people who weren’t out farming, and Collectors and Barrier Wardens, not to mention at least a fifth of it was getting up there in years and definitely wasn’t producing nearly as much as they consumed.

The hardest part was going to be the initial set up. I wasn’t content to let my family live in a cave or on a plateau somewhere in the wastes, especially since I wouldn’t be there to protect them myself. I was envisioning a house made of stone, steel, and glass, enchantments powered by the mana battery I’d taken from Freak’s lab, with a permanent ward stone that boasted a thousand-foot radius. There would be individual bedrooms in addition to a common area.

I’d need a few workshops for myself and some training areas for Senica and possibly Father. There was a spark of interest buried deep down in him; I’d seen it more than once. But when it came time to actually learn how to be a mage, he’d balked at the thought. Knowing what I did now about his youth and his time under the village’s previous governor, I suspected a misplaced sense of guilt was responsible for his refusal to learn magic.

As a child, Father had accidentally gotten a friend of his killed playing outside the village. A monster had chased them back in, and Lord Emeto had ended up fracturing the ward stone trying to strengthen the barrier to catch it and keep it out. The feedback from that had also slain the governor himself, who’d been cultivating my father’s talent for mana manipulation. The whole incident had turned Father into something of an outcast and put him off the idea of ever becoming a mage.

I could respect his decision if that’s what he truly wanted, but I thought some time away from the constant disdain of every single one of his peers might do wonders for changing his mind, especially if he was in a position where learning to cast spells would allow him to defend his home from monsters.

I laid out my plans to my parents and provided solutions to their questions. By the time the conversation started to wind down, there were no remaining doubts about whether it was possible, only whether they wanted to leave.

“My biggest issue is that it would be just us,” Mother said. Father didn’t argue, but I got the impression from the look on his face that he considered that more of a perk. “I know we could do it for a few weeks or even months if we needed, but what about Senica?”

“I’ll be fine, Mom. I can practice magic,” she said.

“You say that, but…”

“Just think on it tonight,” I said. “I’ll be here for another day or two.”

“You’re leaving so soon?” Father asked sharply.

“I only came back to get some projects in motion so that the mana I’d gathered wouldn’t go to waste,” I explained. “Speaking of which, I should get these relocated before bed.”

I gestured to the plants and picked them up with a series of telekinesis spells, one for each plant. Greater telekinesis could have grabbed them all in one spell, but it cost more mana and I’d grown too aware that wasting mana now could mean dying later if I ran out in a battle. I’d brought plenty back with me, but I had other plans for that.

“Let me help you carry those,” Father said, but I waved him off and sent them out the door.

“It’s fine. I’ll be back to sleep here if you don’t mind. I’m not sure what happened to that hut I was staying in at the arbor, but I suspect it went back to being a storage shed after I left.”

“Are you sure?”

Father was tired. I knew he didn’t want to make that walk, especially not in the dark. He’d worked all day, then given enough mana to the Collectors to cover his entire family. It meant a lot to me that he’d offered, but it was worth it to me to spend a bit of extra mana to save him the trouble.

“I’ll be back in an hour or so,” I said.

I got about ten feet down the street before I heard Senica start asking questions that I knew my mother didn’t want to answer. My sister was smarter than they were giving her credit for, perhaps smarter than a seven-year-old should be. It was hard for me to judge, really. I didn’t know a lot of seven-year-olds, and the ones I’d met in my previous life had been anything but normal.

Either way, it worked out just fine for me that those questions got asked when I wasn’t around to have to help answer them. I hummed to myself a little, a tune I’d picked up from Tanner during our brief relationship as teacher and student, and a floating line of potted plants followed me down the street.

* * *

The Arborists saw me coming well before I walked between their greenhouses, despite the late hour. I noted with some surprise a few signs of magic here and there, mostly amateur attempts at enchanting or transmutations. Those weren’t disciplines that I would have started an apprentice with, but they were probably the most useful in an Arborist’s daily life, so it wasn’t terribly surprising that Shel had decided to focus on that.

She met me by the fifth greenhouse, the one they’d been putting up with my help when I’d been exiled. We’d made a deal that she’d grow some things for me while I was gone in exchange for having her core ignited, and it was time to collect the current harvest and give her something new.

“What are those?” she asked, looking over my head at the plants.

“Remember those crumbly brown leaves I was using earlier? That’s from this one here. The glowing blue powder is made from drying out that one and grinding it up. The other two weren’t used today, but I want to try them as substitute ingredients once they’re ready. For now, I need to relocate them to the new greenhouse and harvest what you’ve been tending to while I was away.”

“Ah… About that,” Shel said. “I’m afraid most of it wasn’t really… successful.”

Growing magical plants took a delicate touch and a steady supply of mana. I’d left detailed instructions, but I honestly would have been pleasantly surprised if even half of it survived under Shel’s care. Still, it was better not to know that I’d expected a poor performance, especially since I wanted better for this new batch, at least for the few days I was planning on being here. If everything went well and I could move my parents out of the village, I’d set up my own greenhouse in our new home and relocate my alchemy supplies there.

“Let’s have a look at it,” I said.

Shel let me into the new greenhouse, all the way to the back wall where the entire table was filled with the herbs I’d wanted grown. It looked more like a patch of dead, yellowed grass than anything else. Scattered lightly across the dirt were small brown tufts that rose an inch or two higher than the dead grass, the sole survivors of the experiment.

Even in those, the mana was weak. Without seeing Shel’s technique for myself, my first guess was that she spread the mana too thin when she was feeding them. If she’d cut the amount of herbs down by half and gave it the same amount of mana, most of them would probably have thrived. Of course, there was always the possibility she’d oversaturate them as well.

I grabbed a wooden block from under a nearby table to use as a footstool to reach the plants that were still alive and pulled some sheers from my phantom space to trim what I needed from them. Then I used a bit of elemental manipulation to rupture the soil and grind away at all the dead herbs while moving the remaining living ones over to one side.

“I’ll put these new ones in here. Don’t worry about tending to them for now. I’ll take care of it myself while I’m here and show you how to do it if I haven’t already harvested them before I leave,” I said.

Shel gave me an appraising glance and asked, “You’re not mad about so many of them dying?”

“I’d prefer if they hadn’t, but it’s a bit late to do anything about it now. I’ll infuse some new seeds before I leave and you can try again later. The more you manage to keep alive, the more I’ll teach you. I suppose you’ve already decided what you’d like to learn next?”

“I have,” she said.

“Meet me at the manor tomorrow morning. I’ll be using the alchemy lab I set up there again. We can go over the lecture portion of the spell while I work, then I’ll help you with the exercises after.”

With our plans set, I made a single detour to the hut I’d briefly used and reclaimed the furniture my parents had donated, including my old pallet. After stuffing that all into my phantom space, I returned home and finally laid down to rest.