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The Venn at this time of year was somewhere on the edge of bland and beautiful. After the harsh months of winter, only the evergreens – the pines and spruces – still held on to their deep, moody greens. The birches, oaks, and their deciduous cousins looked empty and rough in comparison. Overhead, the boughs of green needles gave way to a greyish-brown blur of naked branches, giving little shade from the sun but casting a darker atmosphere over the road all the same. In places, green buds were beginning to form on the tips of twigs, and a bold tree here and there displayed a canopy of leaves that were nearly opened in full, providing a splash of green to the otherwise unremarkable scenery.
The farther they rode, however, the more impressive their surroundings became. Even a day’s journey into the Venn, the vastness of the forest was becoming apparent. The trees were taller here than near Smallwater, and the spaces in between were marked less and less by the signs of the lumber crews. Great purple ferns were blooming to life, their cotton-like spores drifting on the air, and man-sized toadstools loomed in the shadows, sprouting from the husks of long-dead trees and mounds of damp earth.
Ollo, however, had not been able to truly appreciate the wonder of the forest until they stopped to make camp that evening. After listening to Ryeth speak that morning, he had spent most of the day’s ride staring at random objects – stones, sticks, coins – and attempting to will them into movement. His efforts had given him little success, however, and by the time they unloaded their sleeping rolls from the cart and watered the mules, Ollo’s head was aching with the strain.
“You’ll do your mind harm if you push too hard at first,” Ryeth warned. “A lot of fellows at the Academy go a bit mad during their first few months.”
Ollo winced, holding a hand to his forehead. “I can see why,” he said. He cut a strip of bark from a nearby willow sapling and chewed on it, drinking the bitter juice that came out. His father used to do the same to ease the aching in his legs after a long day’s work. “All my life I’ve been told it’s bad news when people start talking to themselves, and now I make it my life’s mission.”
“True enough,” Ryeth laughed. “Does that really work?” he asked, pointing to the willow bark in Ollo’s hand. 240Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡp58t5d649g
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He nodded. “Not quite fast enough, but it does work.”
Ryeth started collecting strips of bark from the little sapling and placing them in a little bag on his belt. “I’m guessing, but boiling it down will likely enhance the properties. This may come in useful.”
“Let’s hope we won’t need that much,” Ollo said, chewing his bitter cud. “If you take too much from one tree, you’ll kill it.”
“There are lots of trees around,” Ryeth shrugged. “And besides, you’re probably going to need more of this during the next little while. Until your mind comes into tune, the pain will be common. If it gets too bad, give yourself a break – the Academy wasn’t built in a day.” He finished collecting bark and tied up the little bag, storing it one of the carts many crates. When we came back to the fire where Ollo was sitting, he was carrying something small and metal in his hand.
“What’s this?” Ollo asked, accepting the item.
“It’s another of my wayfinders,” the lanterner said. “Or, it would be if I hadn’t forgotten to complete the binding before I left the Academy. Right now it’s just a piece of fancy metalwork. I was going to dispose of it, but while you’re training your skills, you may as well hang onto it. You can work on binding the needle to one of your copper coins, seeing as I don’t have a massive metal block with me at the moment.”
Ollo turned the wayfinder over in his hands, watching the well-oiled little needle swing around freely on its axis. “What are the odds I can get this thing to work before we make it to Bardport?”
“That depends,” Ryeth replied, “on how long it will take to get there and how good you are. Some people have a knack for chanting, others – not so much. But when you figure it out, you’ll just know.”
Staring at the flames in front of him and biting into one of their sausages, Ollo wondered what he’d be doing if he were back in Smallwater. Walking along the river, drinking at the Laughing Ass, sitting by his own little fire back at the cottage. Maybe he’d be with Sweda. Maybe if he’d stayed around, tried a little harder, things would be different. Things had seemed to be going so well, but looking back, Ollo supposed he had been a bit distant. Distracted. But he’d always been that way, always dreaming, thinking ahead or looking back. He was never quite in the moment, but somewhere else, sometime else. And now that he really was somewhere else, he realized he wanted nothing more than to go back.
His thoughts were broken by a crackling, shifting sound in the fire, and Ollo looked up to find Ryeth sound asleep, snoring quietly on the other side of the flames. Toying with the wayfinder, he leaned his head back against a nearby tree stump and – after what seemed like a long while – fell asleep.
*
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The morning came quickly and less than an hour after sunrise the two travellers were fed and back on the road, bouncing along behind the mules and falling in and out of conversation. At around noon they encountered another group. A small crew of lumbermen were leading horses and their load of lumber back to Smallwater. Ollo and Ryeth led the mules off the road to allow them passage, nodding quietly as the workers moved past with their load of enormous logs, leaving a trail of torn earth in their wake.
“They don’t normally cut this far in,” Ollo explained, “but good lumber is becoming more spare at the edge of the Venn. Most are hesitant to travel too deep into the forest, so lumber crews usually work along the edges, rather than work their way inward.”
“What sense does that make?” Ryeth asked, frowning. “The largest trees will be in the deeper wood.”
Ollo nodded in agreement. “That’s true, but the Venn is an ancient forest. People are afraid of creatures in the deep forest – fayres and the like. Legends, wive’s tales… Most would prefer to sail around the coast than take the forest path. I’m surprised even you chose this route, to be honest. Surely somebody must have warned you?”
“Well, yes,” said Ryeth, “but I have little use for superstition. Besides, the Academy has limited funds for studies such as my own. Even with the sales from my own wares, I’ll have just enough to make the round trip on foot.”
“I suppose,” Ollo agreed. “All the same, all the legends must contain a little truth. Surely, fayres can’t be that strange a thing for you to believe, having studied magic and all?”
Ryeth rolled his eyes. “Binding, runes, alchemy – these things make sense. They can be broken down, observed, studied. Tales about fayres that carry off children and animals and turn them into trees – that sounds more like somebody’s idea of a bedtime story. Have you ever seen a fayre?”
“Well, no, but I’d like to.” He’d only been half joking when he’d told his mother about trying to catch one.
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up, friend,” Ryeth said. “How’s your training coming along?”
Ollo hardly felt like he was training at all. What it felt like, was that he was staring at two copper sents in the palm of his hand and occasionally mumbling or humming to himself. It felt a lot like trying to go mad on purpose. “I feel like it would be coming along a lot better if I knew what I was supposed to be looking for. All this talk of chanting and coming into tune – I still have no idea with you’re talking about.”
“That’s fair,” Ryeth said. “None of it really makes much sense until you come into tune. That’s a big part of why people are so reluctant to trust the mystic arts or approach it themselves. However, when somebody is sick or needs specialized metalwork for a job, they’re only too quick to ask help from the nearest lightkeeper. People tend to only see the value in such things when there’s a way for them to benefit from it directly.”
“I already see the value in it,” Ollo responded, “I just can’t make any sense of it.”
Ryeth shook the reins to get the mules going again – one of them had been distracted by berries growing from the roadside. “Think of it this way,” he said. “Focus on how the two coins are alike. Focus on the connection between them. Is it not possible that they were formed from the same ingot?”
Ollo squinted at the coppers. “I suppose so.”
“Don’t suppose,” scolded Ryeth, “know this. The coins were formed from the same ingot. Follow me?”
“Okay. I mean… yes. Yes,” Ollo said, more confidently than before.
“Good. Is it not possible that the metal was refined from the same vein of ore?”
Ollo stared ever harder at the coins. “Yes.”
Ryeth nodded. “Good. These coins are one and the same. They have been together from the beginning of time. Born from the same vein, from the heart of the same mountain. Yes?”
“Yes,” Ollo said, and tried hard to believe it.
“If that is true,” Ryeth continued, “what is keeping them apart?”
Ollo stared at the coins, their worn faces marked by little scratches, dents, like the markings on his fingertips or the grains in a freshly sawn log. He let out a long, steady breath and watched as the little scratches danced and winked with the light of the sun, an oddly bright glowing that brought the smell of copper to his nose. The hairs on he back of his neck stood up, his eyes began to water, there was a warm sensation deep within his chest. He put a hand to his forehead – the stabbing pain was back. “This is impossible,” he said.
Ryeth was looking at him strangely. “Nonsense,” he said, turning back to the mules. “It was by will of man that those two coins are not together, and so will of man can put them back.”
When he finished speaking, Ryeth breathed a long, low sound. Ollo felt it as much as heard it – it was an odd sensation, as though he were inside an enormous drum that had been beat upon. As Ryeth did this, Ollo felt a sudden warmth in the coins and jumped with surprise as they snapped together in the palm of his hand, bound tightly together as though they had been forged as one.
The lanterner laughed when he saw Ollo’s expression of shock, and the two sents fell apart again. “See, my friend? Not impossible. Not hardly.”
“Not for you,” Ollo replied. He put the coins away and pulled out a strip of the willow bark to chew on, his forehead throbbing with sharp pain. “These books you’re meant to collect – I imagine they’re worth quite a lot, yes?”
“Quite a lot,” Ryeth answered. “In the hands of the right person, they could be invaluable.”
Ollo considered this for a moment. “I’m surprised the Academy would trust a single person to collect them. There’re so many things that could go wrong, so many dangers. Is this a normal thing?”
Ryeth appeared to think this was a strange question. “Not abnormal, at least. You must understand – this is all part of my training to become a full-fledged lightkeeper. All lanterners go through a similar trial near the end of their studies. Often times it will involve a study of certain binding principles, but just as often we are sent on what some call deliveries. The mystic arts are a very practical field of study, so I consider this form of exercise to be fitting of the trade. ‘Magic’ is not often as glamorous as people believe.”
“I suppose,” Ollo said. “All the same, I would think if it was something really important they would at least send a team of people.”
Ryeth shrugged, and Ollo felt as though he might have misspoken. He decided to let it rest and stepped down from the cart to walk for a while. He was not used to sitting in the mule cart yet and the bumpy, hole-ridden road made his stomach queasy after an hour or more of riding.
“How much farther to Stonepool, you reckon?” asked Ryeth.
Ollo looked up at the sun through the trees. “Another couple of hours… we’ll be there well before dark.”
“Good,” said Ryeth. “It’ll be nice to rest in a bed tonight, my back is a bit stiff.”
“Agreed,” said Ollo. “Although this may be our last bed until Bardport. After Stonepool the roads are far less travelled. I doubt we’ll cross any more Inns for quite some time. Things go a bit downhill from there – if you’ll pardon the expression.”
Ryeth nodded. “I should have assumed as much. And you know the way?”
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“Yes,” Ollo said. “We’ll not go astray. But we’ll still have to be careful. If you thought the people in my hometown were superstitious, just wait until we reach the deep woods.”
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