This was her chance, Darranacy realized. If she were going to say anything, learn anything useful from Shala, this would be the time.
“I don’t have any parents,” she said.
Shala blinked.
“They’re dead,” Darranacy continued.
“Oh, Darra, I’m sorry! So do you live with your grandparents, or something?”
Darranacy shook her head. “No,” she said. “I live by myself. In fact, I was here today looking for someone who might adopt me.”
“Oh!” Shala stared at her.
“Shala of Morningside, get in here!” Shala’s mother called from the door.
“I have to go — Darra, come on in! I’d love it if you could stay here — maybe not permanently, but maybe you could stay for a little while? I bet my Dad could find a place for you!” Shala grabbed Darranacy’s hand and began tugging her toward the house.
Darranacy came reluctantly. Now that she finally had the chance, she was losing her nerve. This wasn’t the right place, with a father who hated magic, and this big strange house — but it might be the only chance she would get.
At the door Shala announced loudly, “This is my friend Darra — can she stay for dinner?”
“No, I can’t,” Darranacy said quickly, even though the mouth-watering smells of roast beef and fresh-baked bread were incredibly, unbearably tempting.
But she couldn’t eat anything, or the spell would be broken and she would starve.
“Hello, Darra,” Shala’s mother said. “I saw you two playing so nicely out there — we’d be pleased if you stayed.” She gestured at the dining table.
“No,” Darranacy said weakly. “Thank you.”
She stared at the lavish meal that was set out — sliced roast beef and several different vegetables and hot buttered bread, steaming on the table.
It had been so long since she had eaten anything, and there was so much here, and it looked so good! This wasn’t the mess in Mama Kilina’s stewpot, this was real food.
Korun was almost right after all, she thought — right now she almost wished she didn’t have the spell on her.
But she needed the spell. She couldn’t trust these people, they wouldn’t want to keep the daughter of two magicians, and when they threw her out with her magic gone she’d have nothing left at all, she’d starve in the Wall Street Field.
This might be her chance to find a home — but it was too much to risk.
“Thank you for inviting me,” she said politely, “but I really can’t stay.”
“But Darra, you said you didn’t have any family!” Shala protested. “Why can’t you stay?”
Darranacy looked at Shala, and at her mother, and her father, and the housekeeper, all of them standing around the table and staring at their ungrateful guest. She patted the purse on her belt and felt the reassuring shape of the bloodstone.
“I just can’t,” she said. Her eyes felt hot and her throat thick, as if she were about to start crying.
“Well, all right,” Shala’s mother said. “If you can’t stay, you can’t, but we won’t let you go away empty-handed.” She picked up something from the table, and stepped over closer to Darranacy.
“Here,” she said, “just a little something.”
And as Darranacy started to refuse, Shala’s mother popped a candy into Darranacy’s mouth.
Darranacy froze, then started to spit the candy out, then stopped.
It was too late; she could feel it. The spell was broken, and her empty stomach growled, for the first time in four months.
And then she did start weeping, sobbing hysterically as she collapsed in a heap on the floor.
Shala’s entire family rushed to comfort her. It took twenty minutes before she had calmed down enough to make a clear explanation, and the food was cold when the five of them finally ate, but it was still the best dinner Darranacy had ever had.
She stayed three years.
And when the time came she was not apprenticed to a wizard, nor a demonologist, nor any other magician, but instead, at her own request, to a cook. The bloodstone, no longer enchanted, paid for her apprenticeship fee.
Cookery was a magic she could trust.
About “Ingredients”
Given the workings of wizardry as I described it in all the stories, it was clear that finding the ingredients for one’s spells might be the hardest part of the entire spell-working process. That was an obvious source of stories. I also wanted to give readers a glimpse of the political situation in the Kingdoms of Tintallion. This tale was the result.
Ingredients
Irillon watched, fascinated and appalled, as Therindallo was dragged up onto the scaffold. He wasn’t struggling, but that was obviously because he had already been severely beaten; his hair was matted with blood.
She frowned at that — partly from her natural human sympathy, but also wondering whether that might cause her any difficulty. She needed both blood and hair, but they were supposed to be separate — and she was fairly sure she needed the blood to be liquid, not clotted.
Finding herself thinking so callously about human blood troubled her. There were times, ever since she began her apprenticeship, when she had serious reservations about this whole wizardry business, and this was one of those times. In fact, this was perhaps the most extreme yet. She had always known that wizards required a variety of odd ingredients for their spells, and even that some of them were not just odd but loathsome, but until now she had not really given much thought to just what that meant — not until her master, Ethtallion the Mage, had told her what she was to fetch this time.
In the past eighteen months since becoming Ethtallion’s apprentice she had gathered ash from the hearth, had helped catch spiders, had ground up those spiders once they were properly dried out, had bought roosters’ toes from the local farmers, had collected her own tears and drawn her own blood when asked, and none of that had been especially unpleasant — not that drawing blood had been fun, but it was not really dreadful.
Collecting the blood and hair of an executed criminal, and a piece of the scaffold he died on, was an entirely different matter — especially since the “criminal” in question was being beheaded for a crime Irillon herself was equally guilty of. Therindallo’s “treason” was swearing fealty to the King of the Isle, rather than the King of the Coast, and Irillon of the Isle, like all her family, also took the Islander side in Tintallion’s civil war.
She could hardly admit that here in the royal seat of Tintallion of the Coast, though — she would be arrested immediately, or perhaps simply killed on the spot. At the thought she glanced nervously at her neighbors in the small, sullen crowd gathered in the plaza below the walls of Coast Castle.
They didn’t look very enthusiastic about the proceedings — but they were making no move to protest, either; the only visible movements were stamping and huddling against the cold. Irillon pulled her own cloak tight, and suddenly found herself shivering uncontrollably. She turned her attention back to the scaffold, trying to distract herself.
The guardsmen threw Therindallo on the block and buckled a strap across his shoulders; the executioner stepped forward and raised his axe. Then he paused, waiting, for no reason Irillon could see.
An official in royal livery stepped forward, fumbling with his coat; he pulled out a paper and began to read aloud.
It was a short speech that basically said King Serulinor was the rightful ruler of Tintallion and that he was having Therindallo’s head chopped off for not agreeing. A good many words were wasted reciting Serulinor’s alleged titles and grievances, and rejecting his cousin’s claim to the throne; Irillon’s attention wandered, and she found herself glancing up at the overcast sky, wondering whether it was going to snow again.