By the time Ellen had fitted them with traveling food and fresh blankets and secured for them passage on a paddle ship heading up the Ardole, Rose just about believed that the efforts weren’t part of some sort of trap. And she was almost old hat at calling Stinky Emrys (which was apparently his proper name). It was made easier by the fact that he didn’t seem to stink aboard the ship. Though over the smell of the fish haul, the sick crusted into the ship, and the smoke from the stove that ran the paddle, she doubted very much that she’d ever smell anything ever again.
It wasn’t until they were clear of Port Oramar and the stink of fish had been pushed out by the stink of the stove and vomit that he said anything to Rose. “You look sick.” Rose hadn’t exactly committed his voice to memory, especially since he’d only spoken a few hasty and confused words to her the night before (or was it two? Time had gone mushy). She didn’t recall the character of the thing, but it hit her now as a bit watery. Thinner than she’d have guessed.
looking at him (puffy as he was, he was still not a small man, after all, or frail).
For her part, Rose stifled a heave. “What gave you that impression?” She glanced at the small bucket she was keeping next to her seat at the rear. She hadn’t needed it yet – she wasn’t prone to seasickness – but the smell had brought her close. Fresh sick would have set her off for sure, but old sick was barely manageable. She’d shifted from her chair to this bench, mostly to let the cushion air out. Stinky made a sad face and sat heavily upon the floor beside the bench where Rose was currently clutching at her middle.
“You didn’t apologize.”
Rose looked at the clear madman beside her. “For what?”
“Attacking me.”
“Piss off, I did so.”
“You apologized to Ellen, but not to me.”
“Well,” said Rose, feeling less sick and more like a raging fire, “I was sorry to her. I’m not sorry to you. You snuck up on me and you got what you deserved.” She expected him to yell back. Or argue. He merely watched her, still with sad eyes like she were a puppy with a broken leg, so she continued with, “Don’t look at me like I’m not the one who laid you out, Stinky.”
Stinky frowned. “I don’t appreciate that name. Also, I do not believe that you can smell me at the moment. If you could, I hope you’d appreciate that I bathed and laundered freshly before embarking.” She stuck her tongue out at him. Emrys took a long moment just to stare ahead. Rose longed to get up in the chair and storm out, but didn’t trust her body, her balance, or her stomach. So she was still sitting there when he said, “If, however, you did apologize for smashing me in the head, I would be happy to help you with the smell of the ship.”
“Oh? You’ve got a pair of old underthings I can use as a face mask?” The young man didn’t respond to this. He merely sat for another few minutes before standing with a grunt, like a much older man, and walking toward the door to the inner cabin. Who the shit did he think he was, anyway? This sucked, yeah, but she didn’t need his charity.
It was a full three hours later when Rose decided that she had better apologize because if there was even a slim possibility that he could help her, she needed it. The smell of the foul smoke being belched out of the top of the pipe on the ship was more than she could handle. Initially, she’d thought that the vomit and fish smell would be the worst, but this was it. She’d always assumed the big coal engines would smell like a coal burning fire, but not so. It was thicker, syrupy, and bitter. It was like sucking in the ash while it was warm. At first it hadn’t been so bad, but it got worse the longer she was in it, and it was on everything.
The apology came out in a rush because, despite her profuse sorrying back at the library when she’d been trying to avoid imprisonment or execution, she wasn’t really accustomed to it. She had thought she might say something like, “Despite the fact that you were sneaking up on me in the midst of illegal activities and it was totally a reasonable reaction, I am sorry that I so easily disabled you.” That would have been nice. What came out was more like, “Look, I guess I’m sorry about your face or whatever, what?”
Emrys smiles. Unfortunately, it looked nice on him. Like his face hadn’t been made for anything serious like thinking or negotiating with heads of state, but only for smiling at children and kittens. It somehow worked with the damp pink look he had going on. He reached into his pocket and extracted something. It was the pendant he’d been wearing in the library. Of course, they’d given it back. Gesturing one hand in a little whirling motion and then at her upper torso he said, “Put this on, please.”
Her first instinct was to say no, of course, but he just seemed too casual about it that she somehow doubted it was related to the act of apologizing. So, she put the thing around her neck, but she didn’t love that glow. She didn’t let it rest against her flesh or anything. She laid it on her shirt. Emrys spoke in a rush. Something like “kood always”. Rose instinctively grabbed the thing to pull it from her neck, but then she felt it. A brief rush of coolness, like someone blowing round her neck everywhere at once. And then, it settled down to a faint trickle of air, but glory of glories, the smell was suddenly and entirely gone! Rose’s mouth was hanging open, there was no helping it. It was the first time she’d smelled fresh air since the library. But that wasn’t the most amazing part. The most amazing part was that Emrys made a little bow and then winked at her! And then he just turned, casual as you please, and walked toward the fore of the ship.
Rose was too happy with the chance to look a gift horse in the teeth, so she kept to herself for the rest of the night, enjoying a good night’s sleep. Emrys left her alone, despite the fact that they were sharing a cramped cabin. In fact, she was out well before he turned in for the night and she only vaguely caught him dressing and leaving in the morning. She wasn’t usually a late sleeper – her teacher would never have allowed it – but after the few days she’d had, she knew she needed it. If she’d been back in his hut, he’d have said something shitty like, “Excess rest when we are tired is how we teach our bodies that it’s okay to be weak” but she didn’t care. What was the point of leaving your teacher behind if you still had to do everything he said? But eventually she had to admit that even without her teacher here, she wasn’t that good at sleeping in, and she dragged herself upright in bed.
She checked in with her legs: something she did every morning. She stretched a bit, waited out some of the twitching and muscle spasms that were common in the morning, and moved herself around the bed getting in some of the stretches that would make it less likely that those spasms would become cramps later. She couldn’t really feel the cramps except as pressure, but that’s what made them so dangerous. There was an undignified bunch of massaging and grunting, especially in this new and very small bed. Eventually she pulled the squishy cushion from her chair and gave it a wipe down and a sniff. Then she gave it a second sniff. Then she felt quite stupid for forgetting about the bit of chain around her neck and took it off before giving the padding a third sniff. This time it smelled as awful as ever, but not so bad that it needed more than a cursory wipe down, which was good because she had no idea where she’d wash the thing on a ship. Eventually she settled into the chair (hastily donning the necklace again) and set about hauling up her legs to tie her soft shoes on and then to the arduous task of maneuvering her way out of a tiny room that had never been designed with her or her chair in mind. It wasn’t a short fight, but she won.
The gentle chug chug of the ship’s engine was omnipresent, but you got used to it. There was no side-to-side motion as she’d had the one time she’d gone on an ocean ship (nor was she violently seasick as she’d been then). The river just wasn’t deep enough to cause such movements. Her tiny room, of course, wasn’t where the facilities were. Those were in a different too-small room with a door that her chair would never fit through. The first day here, she’d considered reshaping the door, but that would have caused a stir, so she’d settled for having the crew provide her with a long stick that she could wedge into the corner, getting her to both the toilet and the small basin. It wasn’t ideal, but she’d dealt with worse. It was, however, proof that Ellen either didn’t care about such things or, more likely, just never thought about them, like many people.
The ship they were on was called, she thought, the Crystania Fields. That wasn’t any field she’d heard of, but it was probably some family name or a play on the name of the first mate’s dog or something. It was a coal powered paddle ship, which were common enough sights on this river. The coal and paddles would get the thing upriver, and the current would bring it back down. They were wildly popular lately, since the design had gone from being a closely guarded military secret to a piece of public knowledge. Now every rich asshole owned one.
Rose made her way out of the bathroom (and beyond one harrowing moment where she thought she might pitch to the ground) and along the almost-too-narrow hallways to the ramp up top. It was usually used, she thought, for cargo, but it worked just fine for her as well. Would have worked just fine for the other passengers, too. Who needs stairs? The ramp was a bit steep, but she was plenty strong. A little elbow grease (what even WAS elbow grease?) took her to the top where the meager passenger meal was being served in what passed for a common space. Usually it was open to the sky, but today it was spitting a bit and a tarp had been pulled over everything. It was still misty and damp, but at least they weren’t getting actively wet. She saw Stinky – Emrys – chatting amiably with a gaggle of crew members. They were all lean dirty muscle and brownish faces (even the ones who might normally look pale, leading Rose to assume they worked the engine room) to his soft pink puddle of a face, but they all seemed to be enraptured by one of the men who was gesticulating wildly and just closing out a story that ended with, “Not with my ribbons you don’t!” Rose was sure it would have been funny if she’d heard it. Emrys laughed.
Rose pushed herself over to the mess table. It was manned by a tall fellow with the sort of nose generally reserved for waterfowl. He hastily filled a bowl for Rose: a pretty standard millet porridge, but they dressed it up with some sugar, raspberries, and a solace of sweet cream. It had a slip of twice baked bread sticking out of it which would be better for sopping up the remnants. Not her favorite breakfast, but nicer than the sort of things she was used to. She had a brief memory of her teacher telling her that flavor in the morning is an invitation to obsession, a turn of phrase that she had always hated and never understood.
After half the bowl was put away, she caught Emrys’s eye and held it. His smile slipped and he made his way over to her. For one horrifying moment she thought he might get down on a knee to talk to her, but he only made a slight bow and said, “I hope the smell is much better today?” as if it were a question rather than a statement.
“Yeah, much improved. How the hell did you do that?” He opened his mouth, but then looked about the deck. Instead, he stood and walked to the side of her. He indicated the grips on the back of her chair (though it took her a moment to remember they were even there; they saw so little use) and made a face as if asking permission. Rose was sure she made a face. She was about to open her mouth and tell him exactly where he could put those hands and how little she needed him to push her around when she caught his face. He wasn’t really looking at her. He was looking at the other passengers. There weren’t many of them: the ship was carrying maybe seventeen or eighteen other people who weren’t part of the crew, and many of them were not on deck, but it was clear that he was more interested in what they thought. Rose wasn’t sure why, exactly. She wheeled herself back and began to push toward the … umm … was that the aft? Or the rear? Stern? Anyway, the back part. Emrys was talking to himself as they walked, but Rose couldn’t hear him very well and she assumed it was part of an act for the benefit of everyone else.
Once there, he stopped her at the back rail and moved to stand beside her, watching the river fall away from them. It took Rose a moment to realize what was wrong. She wasn’t wet. There was no rain hitting her, not even the little piss of rain that had been everywhere at breakfast (the bowl of which she still carried. Oh well). “What the hell?! Now how are you doing that?!”
He smiled again and this time he DID lower himself, though it wasn’t exactly in a patronizing way. He merely sat on the lip beneath the handrail, so they were closer to eye level. “My magical training is not a very common path. Most people study general spellcraft and theory, but what I do is with very specific kinds of spirits. I am an elementalist. I work with the spirits of the elements. Like the air spirit that is keeping the water and foul smells away from us right now. They’re small things and usually invisible. You can’t see them. Most don’t even have bodies.”
“Huh. So, they’re not very useful, then? I mean, apart from the wind stuff?”
“Actually, they’re quite useful,” said Emrys, with an actual honest to gods twinkle in his eye. “It’s not just the air elementals I can summon. And they usually do not have bodies. I can give them bodies. Which, as you can imagine, can be very useful. This one I bound to myself before we left, and I can use its magic for myself, like to keep the smell away.”
Rose wasn’t so convinced. Her teacher had been full of a lot of shit, but he’d also said, “relying on tools or allies means things can fail you. You must be enough.” And she’d agreed with that one. “Okay, but then how are you keeping the stink off me? I know enough about magic to know it’s usually stuff you can see, right?” Rose actually didn’t know much about magic, but she’d heard that in a story and she hoped it was true.
“If I know something or someone very intimately, I can impart some of the magic to them.” Rose must have made a horrified face because the next moment he was shaking his head and waving his hands, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, that word is less vulgar in my language. What I mean is someone I know very well.”
Rose took a moment to relax from all the wondering how he got to know her intimately and then went back to wondering it again. “You don’t know me at all, man!”
“Yes, correct. But I have worn that pendant for a long time. I know it very well, so I can use it as an anchor for my magic. Think of it like a magical device, but it only exists for a short time.” Whatever he saw on her face must have calmed him. “Can I ask you a personal question,” the soft man asked, in his watery voice.
“You can ask,” Rose said, the way she always did to people who were about to ask her about the chair, because of course he was.
But he surprised her. “I have studied magic with some very good teachers. What you did to me was no magical incantation. It was no power or theorem. You didn’t draw power from stored knowledge. It was a reflex.”
“Says who? Maybe I’m just very fast.” She wasn’t, of course, but there was no reason to tell him that.
But Emrys shook his head. “I do not think so. Some very talented mages make it seem that way by being prepared, but I saw none of the signs of that. So, either you are a mage so skilled that I cannot detect your talent or you are …. something else.”
He looked at Rose in a quizzical way. Shit, she’d given it away when he’d said the word. It was a normal enough thing to say, but for a moment she’d thought he was about to call her out. He misunderstood her look, maybe, because he said, “I know we don’t know each other very well. I know you feel as if you cannot trust me. But if we are to travel into danger together, I would like to be prepared. The best defense a student of the magical arts can have is knowledge and preparation.”
What a twat. “Did some arrogant wizard teach you that on your first day of wizard classes?”
Emrys stood and looked out over the water. He said a word under his breath. To Rose it sounded like “blue blow”. The rain began to sprinkle on her again. “It was, actually. High Lord Zedock Aberton said it on my first day at Penmark. I never forgot it.” He turned and walked back toward the front part of the ship, leaving Rose to sulk in the spitting mist of the day.
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