“Of course it isn’t natural,” Darranacy answered promptly. “It’s magic!”
Mama Kilina just shook her head and went back to her cookery.
“You’re right, of course,” Korun said. “It is magic, and it gives you an advantage over the rest of us, since you don’t need to worry about your next meal. But have you done much with that advantage? It doesn’t appear to me that you have. You’re still here in the Field, and it’s been, as you say, four months since your parents died.”
“There’s no hurry,” Darranacy said defensively. “I’m still young.”
“Ah, but wouldn’t it be wise to use your advantage and get yourself out of here while you are still young?”
“I will get out of here!” Darranacy shouted. “And I’ll stay out!”
“When?”
“When I’m old enough for an apprenticeship! When I’m good and ready!”
Korun shook his head. “I don’t think,” he said, “that this is quite what old Naral had in mind when he put the spell on you.”
“Who cares what old Naral thinks?”
“You ought to, girl,” Mama Kilina snapped. “Without him, you’d be no better off than any of us. If your mother hadn’t been his apprentice once, and if he hadn’t felt guilty when one of the spells he had taught her went wrong, you’d be starving now.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Darranacy retorted, “because if Mother had never been his apprentice, she wouldn’t have had any spells to go wrong, and she’d still be alive!”
“No, she wouldn’t,” Kilina insisted, “because it wasn’t her spell that killed her, as you well know, it was the demon your father summoned. Bad luck, mixing two schools of magic in a marriage like that, that’s what I say.”
“But if she hadn’t been a wizard, she would have run, instead of trying to stop the demon from taking Daddy — if she’d ever have married a demonologist in the first place.”
Kilina shook her head. “Wizard or no, and whatever else, your mother probably wouldn’t have left your father if all the demons of Hell were after him.”
Darranacy opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She couldn’t think of any way to argue with that. Should she insist that her mother would have fled, she’d be denying her parents’ love for each other.
Why did they have to die, anyway? Why did magic have to be so dangerous?
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said at last. “They’re both dead, and Naral did give me the bloodstone.”
“Yes,” Korun said, “He gave you the stone and the spell, and he told you that that was all he could do, to let you get by until you could find a place for yourself.”
“Well, then?” Darranacy snapped.
“Darra,” Korun said quietly, “I think he had four days in mind, maybe as much as four sixnights, but not four months — or four years, the way you’ve been going.”
“Three years. I’ll be twelve in less than three years, and then I’ll find an apprenticeship.”
“You plan to stay that long? To keep the spell that long?”
“Why not?” Darranacy stared up at him.
“Do you think you’ll be in any shape to serve an apprenticeship after three years here?”
“Why not?” Darranacy asked again.
Korun didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to.
Naral hadn’t mentioned anything about the bloodstone’s spell being unhealthy; Darranacy was sure that Korun was just jealous when he said that.
But even so, what would she have to wear after three years in the Field? She’d have outgrown all her clothes, and would just have rags. Who would she know who could give her a reference? What sort of diseases might she have caught? The bloodstone didn’t keep away disease. Or fleas, or lice, or ringworm, or any number of other things that might deter a prospective master.
Magic always seemed to have these little tricks and loopholes built into it — but then, so did everything else in life. Nothing was ever as simple as she wanted it to be.
“All right, then, I’ll find a place sooner!” she said. “I’ll fix myself up and I’ll be in fine shape when I turn twelve!”
Korun smiled sadly.
“You think I won’t find a place for myself?” she demanded.
“I think you won’t unless you start looking,” Korun told her. “I’ve seen too many people start out with fine plans and high hopes only to rot here in the Wall Street Field. You think Mama Kilina, here, never set her sights any higher than this?”
Darranacy turned and started to say something rude, then stopped.
She had never thought of Mama Kilina ever being anywhere else. Just days after the demon had carried her parents off, leaving their tidy little apartment and shop a burnt-out ruin, and after Naral had enchanted her but refused to take her in, the tax collector had come around for the annual payment on the family’s property.
Darranacy hadn’t had the payment — she hadn’t had any money at all, had never found where her parents had hidden their savings, if in fact they had any. She had packed up a few belongings and fled, crying, and had come to the Field — everyone in Ethshar of the Sands knew that that was the last refuge, the place where the city guard never bothered you and nobody cared who you were or what you’d done. She’d found Mama Kilina there, sitting by her cooking pot, just as she was now, and it had never occurred to her, then or any time since, to wonder how old Kilina came there.
Even Kilina must have been young once, though.
Mama Kilina grinned at her. She still had almost half her teeth, Darranacy saw.
Darranacy did not want to ever wind up like Mama Kilina, bent and old and eating rotten cabbage.
“All right,” Darranacy said, “I’ll find a place, then. Right now!”
“How?” Korun asked quietly.
Darranacy looked up at him angrily. “Why should I tell you?” she demanded, as she stared challengingly at Korun.
He shrugged. “Please yourself, child,” he said. He squatted down by the cookpot. “Spare me a little, Mama?”
Darranacy watched as the two of them ate Mama Kilina’s cabbage stew. The smell reached her, and simultaneously revolted and enticed her.
She never felt real hunger now, but the smell of food could still affect her — even such food as this. She remembered the happy meals with her parents in the back of the shop, the pastries her father sometimes bought her when they were out on one errand or another, how she would sit and nibble at a bowl of salted nuts while she practiced her reading...
But she couldn’t eat anything now. It would break the spell, and then she’d need to find more food or starve, she’d need to find clean water — the stuff the others here in the Field drank, mostly rainwater collected from gutters of the city ramparts or from gravel-lined pits dug in the mud, was foul and full of disease. Attempts to dig a proper well had always been stopped by the city guard — the edict that had created the Field in the first place said that no permanent structure was permitted between Wall Street and the city wall itself, and that included wells as well as buildings.
Once she had a proper home again, then she could break the spell. Not before.
She thought over Korun’s words. He was right, it was time to find a proper home.
She stood up and turned away from Mama Kilina and her cookpot, and began walking.
Darranacy reached her own little shelter, built of sticks and knotted-together rags pilfered from Grandgate Market — a crude thing that could be knocked down, or simply trampled, in a matter of seconds if the city guard ever decided to clear the Field out properly. She ducked inside, shoved aside her crude bedding, and dug into the sand, uncovering the pack she had hidden there.