Chapter Six

Mages spell components were both odd and slightly disgusting, I decided, as I picked through the inn keeper’s kitchen. It was a large room, used not just for the preparation of food, but for much of the family’s time.

The walls were lined with shelves holding everything from crockery to buckets, and the roof was strung with hocks of meat and drying herbs. Rivyn had to duck to avoid some of the beams, warped and roughly shaped, they seemed to sag in places. The floor was stone, scattered with thresh and debris from the cooking, resulting in a less than savoury scent if it was kicked up underfoot.

A bench was set along one wall, and shelves on the other. The shelves held a fascinating array of jars and items I could not even begin to identify. From the dust that gathered around and on top of most of the items, I imagined the innkeeper’s wife could not identify them either.

In the centre of the room was a large table made of roughly shaped and knotted wood, worn smooth and almost shiny in places. The table held an array of food ready for the innkeeper’s wife and daughters to prepare for the day’s guests. Carrots by the bushel, zucchini, potatoes, chickens, fresh herbs, and freshwater fish. Rivyn had complained that they were not from salt water, despite the village being inland and such a thing being nigh on impossible to achieve. The mage, I thought, had some odd ideas.

The inn keeper’s plumply pretty wife and daughters, one unfortunately taking more after her father than her mother, watched in entertained bemusement from the doorway.

“Why three fisheyes, not four or two?” I muttered.

“The rule of three,” Rivyn replied mildly as he sorted through the herbs. The little earth ware jars clanked as he forced the seals open in order to look within. “Ah, good, marjoram. It’s old, but the seal was good, so it will do.” He had an array of small pottery jars lined on the scarred benchtop before him which had passed the initial inspection, and he was in the process of transferring the contents into many little pouches from his bag.

“Why am I in charge of fisheyes and you’re finding marjoram?”

“Why must you complain about everything?”

“Three fisheyes,” I put them down on the bench next to him. “What’s next?”

“Thank you. Next,” he flicked his eyes over the ingredients on the table. “Chicken tongues.”

“I didn’t know chickens had tongues.”

“Of course, they have tongues,” he looked up at me, his eyes bright with amusement. “If you will, Siorin.” He was revelling in giving me the disgusting jobs, I thought, enjoying my reaction to the tasks as I performed them.

“And what are you finding?”

“I am going to go look outside for poisons. Unless you think you’re more qualified?” He arched his brows. “It sounds more pleasant than it is. I’ll probably come up in a rash from contact with their sap.”

“I’ll get the chicken tongues,” a rash did not sound pleasant.

“The whole of the tongue, not just the tip,” he said lightly as he ducked out the doorframe into the sunlight.

Once he had stepped out the kitchen door and wandered down the path, the inn keeper’s wife sidled closer. “How long have you been married?” she asked eagerly. She was much intrigued by Rivyn’s beauty and our errand in her kitchen.

“Some days it seems like forever,” I evaded the question as I cracked open the beak of one of the chicken corpses that she had on her table ready to cook. “How do you even... ha! Ah, that’s sort of,” I had to look away and swallow heavily. “Disgusting.”

“He’s very handsome,” she murmured, giving me the side eye and a knowing smile. 

“Yes,” I agreed under my breath. I had woken with his arm around me, and his big body curled around mine, and it had been ridiculously pleasant to lie there in such a way, and very tempting to turn around and slide my hands through his hair and meet his lips with mine.

I had the feeling that Rivyn held a wealth of experience in the secrets of love and passion within him, and that if I took the step to invite him to show me, he would not hesitate to do so. But it was one thing to speculate that my reputation had been utterly ruined by his absconding with me on the road, quite another to actively invite ruination, no matter how tempting the man.

“But a lot of trouble,” I added.

“Is he a lord, or a mage?” she wondered. “Or both?”

“A mage,” I did not know about the other. He might just be a Lord, for all I knew, he certainly had the mannerisms of someone used to more than I was. I did not know if there were Lords in the Fae court, or whether half mankind Fae would be eligible for titles. “Chicken tongues.” I went to the door. “What next?” I called out to him.

“That’s it,” he replied, startling me with his proximity. He had a clump of weeds in his hand. “Madam, if I may?” He took up one of her knives with an arched eyebrow.

“Of course, my lord,” she was fascinated, by the man and the magic.

“Make sure you wash this knife very well after,” he cautioned her. “Wash, rinse, and wash again. And be careful not to nick yourself on the blade.” He wielded the knife proficiently, cutting the leaves from the stems, and then the whole into a fine paste which he scraped off the kitchen surface into a jar. “Athucco.” He shook the jar, and the paste became a fine dust.

The inn keeper’s wife and her daughters all gasped in amazement. Rivyn met my eyes with amusement. He put all the ingredients into his various pouches. “We are done. Madam,” he handed her another coin from his seemingly limitless supply. “Siorin, my dear, let’s depart.”

Rivyn tipped the stable boy as he mounted Coryfe before pulling me up before him. He settled me against him in a way he found comfortable and took control of the reins. “Are you at all curious as to why I didn’t seduce you last night?” he asked conversationally, as we rode.

“I assumed because you’re an honourable man,” I replied, not quite sure why my lungs were suddenly breathless.

He snorted and pulled a few strands of hair from my head. “Virgin hair,” he chuckled.

“That is...” I fumed.

“A valuable spell component,” he finished for me. “You would not believe how hard it is to find.”

“What about the inn keeper’s daughters? Not that I am arguing for seduction, but still!”

He burst out laughing. “Oh, Siorin, you’re so... innocent. The inn keeper, like most inn keepers, has a side trade offering his wife and daughter’s services to his guests.”

“Oh,” I was shocked. “That’s awful.”

“Starving is awful,” he corrected me. “A little village like Nedin, it’s how they survive.”

“Is that why you stole me from the road?” I wondered. “Because you needed my hair?”

“No,” he drew Coryfe to a stop. “I stole you because my spell components were all but exhausted, and out of desperation, I cast a destiny spell I had in my pocket. You rode along, not a handful of breaths later.”

I was not even sure what to say to such a statement. It seemed a ridiculous reason for stealing a person, but then, he was a mage, and his relationship to magic was different to my own so perhaps he would find that reason enough. What ever was a destiny spell? It did, however, explain the strong smell of magic when Coryfe and I had come upon him.

He swung himself off Coryfe and arranged his spell components onto the road before us, muttering to himself, before mounting again behind me. “And this is what a portal is like when it’s not created in a hurry,” he told me with pride. “Aperianu.”

The air before us rippled, and for a moment, reflected us back, as if we gazed into a puddle of water suspended in the air, and then a light passed across the mirror-like surface, and it was as if a door opened before us onto a busy city street. I saw people on the other side dance back out of the way and registered buildings of stone and wood, and a dirty road, but there were so many people involved in so much activity the detail of their environment was lost to their motion.

Rivyn urged the reluctant Coryfe forwards through the opening in the air. There was no screech of wind, no bright flash of light as we stepped through - the difference between a completed spell, and an incomplete one.

We rode out onto filthy cobblestones. “The city of Nerith,” he told me, his lips near my ear. “Where my next target is. I am hoping, now that I have read the book, cover to cover, I can exchange it for the opportunity to read a very rare tome that they possess. It is a fair trade.”

The smell hit me as the bitter scent of the magic faded. It stank. The smell was indescribable. Refuse, fish, bodily waste... I saw someone empty a chamber pot out of an upstairs window onto the street below, and someone else throw dirty water from a bucket. Rivyn kept Coryfe to the centre of the street so as to avoid any putrid liquid, and made a sound of disgust, and then amusement as a man was caught in a discard from above and began to curse.

It smelt like plague would smell, I decided. Rats scurried across the road, undaunted by the people and horses that travelled along the same route, and mange-riddled dogs sulked in corners and dug through refuse piles. The horses’ excrement fell to the cobblestones and was trodden unheeded underfoot and the women, sensibly, bound their skirts up so as not to drag through the filth that frothed in grey-brown bubbles.

“I think I will be sick,” I commented.

“Go ahead, just lean out a little. No one will notice the difference,” Rivyn replied with repugnance. “This is how mankind lives in cities.” I could imagine the expression on his face, although I could not see it. His lip would be curled in a sneer.

The buildings had a lean to them, as if they sought to rest their foreheads against each other across the street, too wearied by the foul life underfoot to stand straight.

“Why do the buildings lean?”

“Bad footings, I imagine,” he replied. “Soil seepage. They are slowly sinking back into the ground. Thankfully, we are not lingering in this area, or we would probably pick up some disease or another. There is a school, of sorts, in the city centre. That is where we are headed. It is just bad luck that the portal opened where it did. The last time I was in Nerith, the city had not spread this far.”

How long had it been since he had been here, that the city had spread, and the building began to sink into the soil? “When were you here?” I asked him.

“Oh, some time ago now,” he said evasively.

“Do the Fae have cities?” I wondered what it was like where he was from. The stories always described things like three pointed leaves and red capped mushrooms but were vague on the homes of the Fae and their buildings. If story were to be believed, the Fae spent a lot of time riding in stately parade through the forests, in their finest raiment, attended by servants and bards. If Rivyn’s forestry were a guide, they certainly did not spend much time on foot in the forest hunting for rabbits.

“Yes, but not like this,” he replied his lips still near my ear as he leant into me, almost protectively placing his body over mine. Probably, I told myself wryly, he was protecting his virgin hair supply. “Most of our people live in the forests, amongst the trees. Their homes are either built in their boughs, in their hollowed bodies, in caverns beneath them, or harmoniously between them. Refuse is carried deep into the soil where it becomes fertiliser, to feed the trees they shelter amongst, and water is carried, pure and untainted, to their homes. The Fae would never live like this.”

“Why do we?” I wondered.

“I... don’t know,” he admitted, sounding confused. “I’ve never... wondered.”

“You say they. You don’t live in the forest?”

“No,” he replied. The hand that did not hold the reins rested over mine on my thigh, and his thumb stroked idly across my skin. “Where I am from, is in the mountains. Our city is built from stone quarried there. It is the centre of the Fae Court.”

We rode on in quiet distaste. Eventually, the crowded streets with the drunkenly leaning buildings, gave way to wider, cleaner streets, with more trees, framed by pretty buildings that held gardens front and back. The stone and woodwork here was more decorative in nature, of finer workmanship, than where we had been.

“Rich and poor,” Rivyn observed.

We came to a tall building, that loomed over the road ominously, fronted by solid round pillars. The entire structure made of impossibly large blocks of stone that would have taken magic or a giant to carve and place.

“And here we are, the Nerith City Mage Council and College.”

“And what exactly do you plan to do?” I turned in the saddle to face him. He looked up at the building with grim determination.

“Whatever I need to,” he told me.