Welcome to The Children of Una series. Here’s a handy index of the published chapters.
In the previous chapter, Danen is introduced to his uncle and those attending him. The young fellow he took for his uncle’s servant turns out to be an acolyte with unusual origins, like himself, and Danen is eager to try out their new magical abilities together.
A flash of blue blinded them both. They tasted the iron-tang of blood on the air. Weighty, fleshy fruit appeared in Danen’s outstretched hand. Whooping in delight, he shoved the orange against Aster’s chest. The other boy caught it, surprise plain on his face. But Danen was too busy celebrating with cartwheels to notice.
A sound arrested Danen’s acrobatics and both boys swung to see Corundus approaching along the shady path. His meaty palms smacked together in a slow clap. Between that and his self-satisfied smile, the boys knew he’d seen everything. “Well, well. What do you think my Lord will say to this?”
Danen stumbled to a halt next to the other boy.
Aster’s body was taut with fear. “To which lord do you refer, Corundus?”
Danen admired the other boy’s control in the face of danger. Not that Danen feared getting into trouble, exactly, but he was wary of the trouble he instinctively knew Corundus to be. Instead of being cowed by confrontation, Danen had a habit of charging headlong to meet it. “Aster, have you ever seen a southern hen rat?”
The young man turned, gaping. Unable to guess what Danen might say next.
“They’re huge.” Danen’s face split into a mischievous grin. “Such a nuisance! But you’d be surprised how easy they are to catch. Come on, I’ll show you!”
With that, Danen turned on his heel and cut through the mulched beds.
Corundus sputtered. His tone barely concealing his consternation as he called after them. “Don’t think I won’t tell the High Mage where you’ve gone! He’ll hear about this unless you come back and . . .”
But the boys were too far away to hear out the courtier’s threats.
At the edge of the orange grove Danen veered to race down the slope, running to a barn that stood at the border of the house and fields. Aster followed, reluctantly at first, and then with a burst of energy to match Danen’s. They sped past field workers pushing barrows of ripe fruit toward the house, their bare feet kicking up dust. Both boys were only lightly huffing for breath when they stumbled to a halt inside the barn doors. Danen led the way up a ladder into the loft, but Aster hesitated on the top rung, surveying the mounded stacks of straw and dubiously stained pitchforks resting near to hand.
“You were joking about the rats, right? I don’t like killing. Not even pests.”
Danen smiled sheepishly. “The only rat I smelled was Corundus.”
“Oh.” Aster cocked his head, studying Danen. “You catch on fast. He is a pest.”
Danen’s expression darkened. “I didn’t like how he spoke to my Amma.”
He leaned against one of the support beams and crossed his arms over his chest. Aster squatted in the hay and twirled a strand between his fingers. Danen thought a mage acolyte looked as out of place in a hayloft as a bejeweled damsel. But he didn’t miss the irony of Aster’s situation. The other boy’s hands still bore the marks of hard labor, but now they’d be trained to form intangible spells in mid-air.
The Vinnegottera heir lifted his own hands in front of his face and studied the gentle lines and delicate creases. Despite his active childhood, he’d never been marked by scar or callous. His skin was tan because he couldn’t be kept inside a whole afternoon. But these southern, loamy slopes had always been kind and sent him home unscathed.
“How’d you find out you could be a mage if you wanted?” Danen tucked his hands under his armpits.
“I didn’t.” The farm boy’s laugh was a gentle clucking. He straightened and fixed wise, blue eyes on Danen. “I was doing weed-binding spells without realizing it. Lord Coblaine happened to discover me.”
“How?”
Aster shook his head. “I don’t know how those things work. I’m uneducated, especially for an acolyte. Your uncle promoted me without ceremony.” Aster smiled. “Corundus was furious.”
“Did he want the position for himself?” Danen asked.
“Corundus isn’t a mage!”
Too many threads were unraveling from the conversation, and Danen had a restless desire to know what path was about to open before his own feet. He reached for the strand he wanted, without pausing to wonder what Aster’s story had to do with him.
“Did you want to be a mage?”
“Whether I wanted to do something besides farm never occurred to me. I liked farming fine, I guess.” Aster shrugged.
“That’s not really an answer,” Danen huffed. “How’d my uncle find you, anyway? Did you break some kind of magic law or something?”
Aster shook his head. “One morning, Lord Coblaine just appeared, asking who’d left a trail of messy spell-casting all across our fields. Once he’d gotten past my Da’s suspicions, he was invited into the house for coffee. He walked in and just stopped short. Stared at me with this haunted look on his face. Like he’d expected to see someone else. I think he had his own reasons for taking me on. But he insists it was the obvious thing to do.”
“Obvious how?” Danen was not satisfied with the boy’s apparent willingness to remain in the dark.
“What good is a farmer who can cast spells?”
“I’d think a lot of good, actually! But did you want to leave?”
Aster opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. He studied Danen.
“Do you suppose I’m much different than you? You’re excited about being a mage, right?”
“It’s not the same.” Danen shook his head. “Sure, I like the idea of trying something new. But I wish I had a say in it! Why send me off with my uncle all of a sudden? You want to know something weird? I was told never to take this off —”
He pulled the amulet out from under his tunic and showed it to the other boy.
“— but I was never told why. I didn’t know I had magic abilities until last night! Nobody’ll tell me what happened last time Uncle Lew visited. No one’s asked whether I want to go with him. It’s assumed I’ll think it a grand adventure. What if I’d rather stay here?”
“Would you?”
“El’s, no!” Danen pushed off the support beam and began to pace. “I’d rather go to sea.”
Aster was quiet a long time. Danen’s pacing kept him from noticing the silence at first. Then he stopped short. He glared at the other boy as though he’d been caught crying and teased. “What’d you say?”
“I said nothing,” Aster stood. “But you should know, we don’t use that curse. It’s not respectable at the Mage College to be offensive to Elves. That sort of thing may be fashionable elsewhere, but no one should say it where an Elf might overhear.”
“What? El’s?”
Aster studied him. “You didn’t know what it meant?”
Danen had the decency to blush. “Sailors say it all the time.”
Dropping his guard, the other boy chuckled and shook his head. “You’d best forget it.”
“I guess I’d best forget everything.” Danen said, his anger dissolving into self pity. “I’m leaving everything I know and love.”
In the whole of his life, Danen had only his mother for companionship. She’d never encouraged his inclination to wallow, but he found it easier to deflate in the face of seemingly insurmountable hardships than to rise above them. His inflated confidence in himself on occasions where he was sure of winning made this fault all the more troublesome. He rarely learned from his weaknesses and did not often challenge his strengths to reach new heights.
Aster, on the other hand, was a younger son from a large, working family. His childhood had provided no room for self-pity. He felt disadvantaged, dealing with someone as capricious as his new friend.
In the awkward interlude that followed, Aster listened to the creak of the barn roof. Something was scratching about in the rafters. Heat pulsed in the closeness of the loft. Sweat was trickling down between the farm boy’s shoulder blades. Novice though he was, he sensed that the tension in his body wasn’t his own. It crashed into him from Danen’s direction like surf breaking. He watched the other boy snatch up a pitchfork and use it to move hay from one haystack to another.
“You want to be asked to go and you want to be asked to stay. Which would you say ‘yes’ to?” Aster wondered.
Danen didn’t answer. His jaw set into a harder line as sweat trickled along it and dripped from his chin. He didn’t stop forking hay.
Aster went to stand behind Danen’s shoulder. “Lord Coblaine won’t ask. He is a prince, after all.”
Danen turned to meet the acolyte’s eye. His brown ones looked out from their shadowy hollows with more emptiness than Aster had expected to see in them.
“My uncle’s not the one I wish would ask.”
If Aster had known what to say in the face of such misery, he would have. A wiser man would’ve known to encourage the boy to let his questions fly home to the ones they belonged with, instead of flinging them in the face of a stranger.
“Let’s go somewhere cooler,” Aster suggested.
“I’d say we could go swim in the creek, but Da will be home soon. I ought to stay and be ready to greet him.”
“Is that a southern custom?”
“Just Da’s.” Danen shrugged. “He likes to keep to a schedule.”
“Then,” Aster looked around the barn hopefully. “Is there a water trough somewhere?”
Danen wrinkled his nose. “Really?”
Aster sniffed his shirt front. “Definitely.”
“I’ve a better idea,” Danen said. “Take my hand.”
Aster stepped closer, looking at the other boy critically. “What are you thinking?”
Danen’s grin tilted, showing teeth. “Are you scared?”
“Spell-casting is seri —”
Before he could finish speaking, Danen leaned over and grasped Aster’s forearm. His raised fist opened, splayed fingers revealing the blue flame of his half-begun spell. Aster’s eyes widened in horror at the same moment Danen initiated the casting.
Dear Reader,
As I am telling the story of a young man ruled by an overbearing father who will come resent all rule because of it, I’m thankful that we are not always left to rule ourselves. Like Danen, I have found self-rule to be a miserable kingdom in which to live. I hope you know the freedom of bending one’s will to the true ruler over Life and Death, Jesus Christ the Righteous.
Happy Easter, ahead of time.
~LL