But given the way my luck has been running, if I run away and try to find them, there won’t be any of them for leagues around, he thought dispiritedly while he shuffled toward a copse of trees. Everything I touch falls apart. Even Justyn would have been better off if he’d never seen me. Hellfires, I bet he really doesn’t want me around anymore. He’d probably be grateful if I just disappeared.
He hunted for the fungus in a rather halfhearted fashion as he tried to formulate plans that didn’t fall apart the moment he considered what opposition to them he might encounter. One thing he knew; even if nobody in the village wanted him around, the moment he tried to run off, they’d go after him. It wasn’t logical, but it was the way they did things. It didn’t matter if the outcome was what they wanted, whatever happened had to be accomplished under their control.
Take the case of Ananda’s rooster, for instance. Ananda Pellard had an old rooster that was the most evil-minded, aggressive bird Darian had ever seen. She couldn’t catch it to trim off its spurs, and it would attack anything, even grown people, inflicting some painful punctures on children. Ananda always said that she ought to put it down, but it was obvious she was afraid to try and catch it to kill it. One night something plucked it out of the tree it roosted in - Ananda said she heard it squawk, and in the morning there was only a pile of loose feathers with blood on them. Probably it had been an owl, and you would have thought that everyone would be glad that the nasty old bird had been taken care of.
But no. Nothing would do but that the men sat up for the next several nights to try and kill whatever had come in to get the rooster. Darian wouldn’t have been surprised if it had only been Ananda who was upset - after all, it was her bird, and even a tough old rooster made perfectly good soup - but it seemed as if half the village was annoyed, and all because what had happened hadn’t been under their control.
So if he ran away, even though none of them wanted him there anymore, they would be angry and upset and sure to send someone after him to catch him and bring him back. So whatever course he took, he had to be somehow certain of being able to elude pursuit.
None of this made any sense, of course, but nothing was making any sense anymore.
He honestly, truly, tried to keep from going too far away, but he couldn’t find any of the shelf-fungus growing near at hand, and he really hadn’t expected to. The last time he’d hunted for the stuff, he’d had to climb so far up tree trunks that Justyn had been alarmed, and he knew that it wouldn’t grow farther up than he’d gone, since there was too much light. So, since it needed a great deal of indirect light, and that meant the edge of the Forest, he finally decided to work his way along the riverbank.
It was a slow process; he hunted tree by tree, looking for fungus at ground level, then peering up along the trunk to see if there was any higher growth, then finally climbing to see if what he had spotted was the kind of fungus he wanted, or something else. And that was probably exactly as Justyn had planned, too, for Justyn knew more about where things grew on the edge of the Forest than Darian did. He must have climbed twenty trees before he found a single growth.
By that time, at least, he had worked out something to try to keep the fetid-smelling juice off his hands when he broke the piece off. He wrapped several layers of leaves over the place where he held the fungus to break it off, and immediately discarded them once the fungus was safely in the basket. Although it still smelled terrible, he managed not to get any of the smell on himself.
He was up a third tree, when he gradually became aware of a great deal of noise and shouting from the direction of the village. He craned his head as far as he could around the tree trunk, and nearly fell off the limb he was sitting on.
There was smoke rising from the village, and from the road beyond it - he saw people, made small by the distance, trying frantically to catch loose horses, or heading toward the river with bundles on their backs and children stumbling along behind, moving as quickly as they could.
A moment more, and he saw the red of flame flickering on the other side of the river, light glancing off something very bright and metallic, and the shouts turned to screams.
A single thought formed through the shock. Something was happening. The village of Errold’s Grove - somehow, for some reason - was under attack!
What am I going to do with this boy? Justyn thought, as he watched Darian slouch his way through the corn, heading to the edge of the woods. The boy vanished from sight within moments - and he wasn’t trying to hide, this time. No wonder he could evade virtually any watcher! Why, he didn’t even make the stalks move as he passed through them - if you didn’t know he was in the field, you’d think it was empty.
Justyn sighed heavily, went back into the cottage, shut the door firmly behind him to discourage visitors, and sank into his chair. He didn’t want to see anyone else today, unless it was a tearing emergency. All morning he had been receiving visitors eager to give him their own idea of what he should do about Darian’s latest infraction, and some of the speakers had voiced something stronger than mere opinion. It was clear that if he couldn’t get Darian turned around, there were those who would take care of the situation for him.
Most of them wanted him to dismiss the boy, and didn’t really care what happened to him after he was dismissed. He wouldn’t be allowed to stay here, that was certain. The villagers didn’t like the way their children were reacting to his presence - or, more specifically, his actions. “He’s a disruptive influence,” was how Derrel Lutter, the shopkeeper, put it. “He doesn’t fit, an’ evejy part of a village has to fit.”
Widow Clay had dropped by on the pretext of having her bad knee looked at, and had been more to the point. “The other children think he’s some kind of hero. Or at least, they think he’s somebody to look up to. If he’s allowed to sass his elders and get away with it, every young’un in Errold’s Grove is gonna start doin’ the same,” she’d pointed out. “So unless you want to be the reason for a lot of spanked bottoms and soapy mouths, you’d better get that boy to act like something other than a savage. Folks have given him a certain amount of room, on account of losing his parents and all, but they’re out of patience.”
And the woman was perfectly right. Although he held himself aloof from the other children in the village, Darian was a profound influence on them and even Justyn had noticed it. They envied his freedom, freedom to run off and do what he wanted, and freedom to speak his mind even to an adult. They all wished that their parents had been as adventurous as his, and when he was willing to talk about it (which was not often) they hung on every word of his stories about living in the Forest. Any one of them would happily have traded places with him, even though life with Justyn was hardly one of exalted status. And when they could get away with it, they flat-out imitated him. The most coveted item among the village children at the moment was a tooled leather vest like Darian wore; that was what virtually all of them, of both sexes, had requested as birthing-day presents. Justyn had actually considered that attitude a healthy one, and he had secretly hoped some of it might rub off on the parents. It had been something of a half daydream of his. If their elders got some spine back, and decided to stop fearing the Forest and go back out to do what had brought prosperity to the village in the first place, then the place would stop stagnating. It might even prosper again, and they would discover that there was nothing so terrible in the Pelagiris after all. They would stop denigrating Darian’s parents, and might even stoop to consulting him about the Forest, which would raise both his status and Justyn’s in the eyes of the village.