Still, if it was mealtime, he’d probably better be getting back to Justyn. There were still dishes to scrub, and the pasties to fetch from the baker, or the old wretch would probably forget to eat, and then Darian would get the blame if Justyn got sick. Sometimes he wondered how Justyn had gotten along before he came - but then he realized that the women had taken care of him, the same way they cared for Kyle. So the villagers had gotten something out of apprenticing him to Justyn; they’d been able to stop cleaning up after and cooking for the Wizard. No wonder they’d been in such a hurry to get him bound over!
I’ll have to clean up after Kyle, too, if I don’t want to have to eat dinner in a room that looks like someone had butchered a pig there. Justyn is such a slob! How can he be so concerned with keeping wounds clean, and live the way he does? Wrinkling his lip a little with disgust, he stretched his arms and legs until the cramps went away, then climbed slowly down the side of the tree opposite the village. He didn’t want anyone to catch sight of him if he could help it; he’d already lost a couple of hiding places by being careless.
Here on the edge of the fields, where there was more sunlight, growth of bushes and vines was especially heavy, giving him cover that allowed him to get into the field without being seen. Already the air was hot and drowsy with midday heat, and hidden insects buzzed and droned on all sides of him. The ground here smelled damp; someone must have opened up the irrigation pipe for this field. He pushed through the dense underbrush until he came to a field of pole beans, and made his way through the rows of tall, tent-like arrangements of poles covered with climbing bean vines. They made a jagged hedge that was difficult to see through, and extended well over the top of his head. Eventually the field ended, and he reached the outskirts of the village on the northern side. He reentered Errold’s Grove near the firing pit for pottery and the storage shed where the finished pieces were kept. He didn’t see anyone, although the sounds of dinner being served and eaten were coming from every open window.
It must be later than I thought. He still didn’t feel much like hurrying, though; his bout of grief had pretty much killed his appetite, and with a bit of pique, he decided that Justyn could wait. If his Master was hungry, his Master could go fetch his own dinner from the baker, and clean a plate or two himself for a change.
He made his way slowly along the paths between the houses, kicking a round rock through the dust, nursing his grievances. The ordinary sounds of people who liked each other eating together only made him feel more abused and put upon, because he knew what those people must be thinking and saying about him. Vere and Harris had certainly recounted the tale of his defection to their families by now, and their wives had probably shared the story with others as they brought water from the well, or went to fetch dinner from the baker. So now everyone knew that Darian had shown his “true face” again, and they would be feeling very smug indeed. By suppertime tonight, he’d be the main topic of evening lectures to the family.
They’ll be looking at their children, and telling each other, “Thank the gods he isn’t like Darian!” or “My boy would never act like Darian.” Huh. As if they really had any idea half of what their precious children get into when they aren’t watching.
And the very next person he encountered would probably stop him in order to remind him of how ungrateful and unnatural he was. Every time he got into trouble - and “trouble” seemed to have a wide definition for these people - people would go out of their way to give him their own version of the lecture he’d already heard a thousand times or more - the sermon on how kind Justyn was for taking him in and apprenticing him without an apprenticing fee or any kind of familial relationship. Again. And again.
At least Justyn himself usually left that part out, perhaps because he remembered only too well how he had pestered Darian’s parents every time they came into Errold’s Grove. Darian could recall at least a dozen times that Justyn had come to his Mum and Dad, separately or together, to urge on them a plan of apprenticing him into Justyn’s service. There had been a great deal of fuss made about how dangerous it was for someone with Darian’s “potential” to remain untrained in his magic. Darian remembered his Dad once telling his Mum that Justyn was trying to frighten them into giving Darian over to him, and that she shouldn’t let the old man alarm her.
If Darian could not get away from whoever had decided to deliver the usual lecture, the haranguer would then go through the litany of Darian’s many character flaws and deficiencies, and the only variation was in how much emphasis an individual placed on a particular flaw. This part was actually useful; Darian had noticed over the course of several of these lectures that people tended to stress the flaw that they were most prone to themselves. For instance, the rudest man in the village, Old Man Gulian, tended to harp on how rude Darian was, and Erna Dele, who never spoke or showed a thank you for any favor and always expected more than she got, would go on at great length on how he didn’t appreciate what he was given. He learned a lot by listening to what people thought they saw as deficiencies in him.
Regardless of who was giving the lecture, it always ended with a homily on gratitude, obedience, and humility. That is, how he should daily demonstrate how grateful he was to everyone in Errold’s Grove by thanking all and sundry on every occasion for their generosity toward him - how he should show that gratitude by instant obedience to anything anyone wanted of him - and how he should be properly humble and prove that he knew his place in the scheme of things by groveling before everyone he came across.
How I should be so happy to have been permitted to become a bound-over slave that I should demonstrate that gratitude with humble servitude to anyone over the age of fifteen.
“It takes a village to raise a child,” was the old proverb, often quoted to Justyn when someone came to complain about Darian, and it certainly seemed as if everyone in the village had his or her own ideas of the proper way for Darian to behave!
Each time he heard the lecture, he was sorely tempted to kick the orator in the shins. He never did, though, because there was always that doubt that they might all be right and that he was in the wrong. After all, everyone here seemed to be in agreement on his behavior and worth except he himself, and after all, he was only a boy. What if he was entirely in the wrong? What if he was a bad person? What if he did deserve to be punished - what if Justyn was too tolerant of his behavior and he really deserved to be disciplined?
What if the reason his parents got swallowed up by the Forest was because he was a bad person, and this was how the gods had chosen to punish them for how he turned out?
That was the possibility that gave him a cold lump in the bottom of his stomach, and made him squirm with distress whenever he thought of it.
And that, of course, just made him want to be loud and wild and try some of the magics that Justyn talked about, just to show them all that he was not to be trodden underfoot like a weed and he was not going to take all their lectures and disapproval lying down.