Forest Mage. Робин Хобб

stomach. I groped for something to say other than that I was horribly lonely and would never be able to go back to the Academy.

      ‘Has your saddle cinch been coming loose lately?’ I asked him.

      He squinted at me for a second, and then I saw his jaw loosen, as if he’d just realized something. ‘Come in, Nevare,’ he invited me, and stood back from the door.

      His room revealed him. There was a potbellied stove in one corner of the room, but no fire at this time of year. A disassembled long gun dominated the table in the room. He had shelves, but instead of books they held the clutter of his life. Interesting rocks were mixed with cheap medical remedies for backache and sore feet, a good-luck carving of a frog jostled up against a large seashell and a stuffed owl, and a wadded shirt awaited mending next to a spool of thread. Through an open door, I glimpsed his neatly made up bed in the next room. A bare room for a bare life, I thought to myself, and then grimaced as I realized that his room had more character than mine did. I imagined myself as Sergeant Duril years from now, no wife or children of my own, teaching a soldier son not mine, a solitary man.

      The two of us filled the small room and I felt more uncomfortable with my bulk than ever. ‘Sit down,’ he invited me, drawing out one of his chairs. I placed myself carefully on it, testing my weight against it. He pulled out the other chair and sat down. With no awkwardness at all, he launched into talk.

      ‘My cinch has come loose three times in the last month. And yesterday, when I was helping the crew jerk some big rocks out, a line I knew I’d tied and made the “hold fast” sign over came loose. Now, I can’t remember that ever happening to me before. I’m getting old, and thought maybe I wasn’t making the sign or maybe I was making it sloppy. Not a big thing to worry about, I told myself. But you seem to think it is. Why? Has your cinch been coming loose lately?’

      I nodded. ‘Ever since the Dancing Spindle stopped dancing. I think the plains magic is failing, Sergeant. But I also think that,’ and here I stopped, to slap my chest and then gestured at my belly, ‘that somehow this is a result of it.’

      He knit his brow. ‘You’re fat because of magic.’ He enunciated the words as if to be sure that he hadn’t mistaken what I’d said.

      Stated baldly, it sounded worse than silly. It sounded like a child’s feeble excuse, a cry of ‘look what you made me do!’ when a stack of blocks toppled. I looked down at the edge of his table and wished I hadn’t come and asked my foolish question. ‘Never mind,’ I said quickly, and stood to go.

      ‘Sit down.’ He didn’t speak the words as a command, but they were stronger than an invitation. His gaze met my eyes squarely. ‘Any explanation might be better than none, which is what I’ve got right now. And I’d like to know what you mean when you say the Spindle stopped dancing.’

      Slowly I took my seat again. That story was as good a place to begin as any. ‘Have you ever seen the Dancing Spindle?’

      He shrugged as he took his seat across the table from me. He picked up a rag and started cleaning gun parts. ‘Twice. It’s impressive, isn’t it?’

      ‘Did you think it moved when you saw it?’

      ‘Oh, yes. Well, no, I mean I didn’t believe it was moving when I saw it, but it sure looked like it was, from a distance.’

      ‘I got up close to it and it still seemed to me like it was moving. And then some idiot with a knife and a desire to carve his initials on something stopped it.’

      I expected him to snort in disbelief, or laugh. Instead he nodded. ‘Iron. Cold iron could stop it. But what’s that got to do with my cinch coming undone?’

      ‘I don’t know, exactly. It seemed to me that… well, I guessed that maybe if iron stopped the Spindle, the plains magic might all go away, too.’

      He took a little breath of dismay. After a moment, he wet his lips and then asked me carefully, ‘Nevare. What do you know?’

      I sat for a time and didn’t say anything. Then I said, ‘It started with Dewara.’

      He nodded to himself. ‘I’m not surprised. Go on.’ And so, for the first time, I told someone the whole tale of how I’d been captured by the plains magic, and how it had affected me at the Academy and the plague, and how I thought I had freed myself and then how the Spindle had swept me up and showed me the power it held before a boy’s mischief and an other self I could not control had stopped the Spindle’s dancing.

      Duril was a good listener. He didn’t ask questions, but he grunted in the right places and looked properly impressed when I told him about Epiny’s séance. Most important to me, as I told my story, he never once looked as if he thought I was lying.

      He only stopped me once in my telling, and that was when I spoke of the Dust Dance at the Dark Evening carnival. ‘Your hand lifted and gave the signal? You were the one who told them to start?’

      I hung my head in shame but I didn’t lie. ‘Yes. I did. Or the Speck part of me did. It’s hard to explain.’

      ‘Oh, Nevare. To be used against your own folk like that. This is bad, boy, much worse than I’d feared. If you’ve got the right of it at all, it has to be stopped. Or you could be the downfall of us all.’

      To hear him speak the true magnitude of what I’d done froze me. I sat, staring through him, to a horrible future in which everyone knew I’d betrayed Gernia. Wittingly or unwittingly didn’t matter when one contemplated that sort of treachery.

      Duril leaned forward and jabbed me lightly with his finger. ‘Finish the story, Nevare. Then we’ll think what we can do.’

      When I had finished the whole telling, he nodded sagely and leaned back in his chair. ‘Actually, I’ve heard about those Speck wizards, the big fat ones. They call them Great Men. Or Great Women, I guess, though I never heard of a female one. Fellow that spent most of his soldiering days out at Gettys told me. He claimed he’d seen one, and to hear him tell it, the man was the size of a horse, and proud as could be of it. That soldier told me that a Great Man is supposed to be all filled up with magic, and that’s why he’s so big.’

      I thought that over. ‘The Fat Man in the freak show claimed he got so fat because he’d had Speck plague. And the doctor at the Academy, Dr Amicas, said that putting on weight like this is a very rare side-effect of the plague, but not completely unknown. So how could that have anything to do with magic?’

      Sergeant Duril shrugged. ‘What is magic anyway? Do you understand it? I don’t. I know I’ve seen a few things that I can’t explain any way that makes sense or can be proved. And maybe that’s why I say that they were magic. Look at the “keep fast” charm. I don’t know how it works or why it should work. All I know is that for a lot of years, it worked and it worked well. And lately it doesn’t seem to work as well. So, somehow that magic is broken now. Maybe. Or maybe I’m not as strong as I used to be when I tighten a cinch, or maybe my cinch strap is getting old and worn. You could explain it away a thousand ways, Nevare. Or maybe you can just say, “it was magic and it doesn’t work any more”. Or maybe you could go to someone who believes in magic and thinks he knows how it works and ask him.’

      That last seemed a real proposal from him. ‘Who?’ I asked him.

      He crossed his arms on the table. ‘It all started with Dewara, didn’t it?’

      ‘Ah, well.’ I leaned back in his chair; it creaked a warning at me. I sat up straight. ‘It’s useless to try and find him. My father tried for months, right after he sent me home in shreds. Either none of his people knew where he was, or they weren’t telling. My father offered rewards and made threats. No one told him anything.’

      ‘Maybe I know a different way of asking,’ Duril suggested. ‘Sometimes coin isn’t the best way to buy something. Sometimes you have to offer more.’

      ‘Such as what?’ I demanded, but he shook his head and grinned, enjoying that he knew more