High Sorcery
The goblin king had not been particularly kingly.
I had noted this during the fight and filed it away as a minor disappointment for the gap between the title and the actuality. Kings, even of goblins, implied a certain organizational intelligence, a capacity for the longer view. Regal bearing. What we had actually found at the bottom of the third sublevel was simply a fat goblin with a shiny piece of polished brass which resembled a crown if you squinted. His henchmen had fought, he had not. I could only conclude that after years of brow-beating his kin, they had just assumed he was invincible and toppling him was impossible. I concluded the theory of goblin political structures had not been advanced once iota, even when my colleagues slew him. Even his monologue hadn’t been very gripping since he had fumbled with the longer words and spluttered the rest.
That was in the past now. It had been just over a week to get back and present his flabby head to the prince and claim the reward. My colleagues, my now ex-party members, were celebrating. I was simply in the room, waiting for it to quieten down so I could sleep and leave them forever. Already they were telling the story with ever more embellishments as everyone got more drunk. I was drinking too, but in the refined way that a wizard should. You could get tipsy, but not drunk. That was one of the unwritten rules. So, I watched instead and the rest of the room could tell I was tired and somewhat socially taxed.
I, Vincent Fargallow, was already tired at the tender age of 23 on that evening. It had been a long month of walking, tracking, evading, and all the required steps one had to take to defeat a goblin king before he sent his forces out. I had joined this adventuring party purely for the reward, which I had bargained to be money and a specific unused tower some distance from here (and in fact distant from everywhere else). It was one job which I never intended to repeat so that I could get ahead of the curve in the arts of wizardry. For you see, wizardry is an expensive profession. It requires a place of solitude, provisions, and equipment the likes of which no regular job would else have. The prince’s reward had been princely indeed, and with my talent of magic I decided to take the gamble to avoid decades of slow work. Goblins lived in narrow tunnels, a poor place to send in an army, thus adventurers had been sent forth and into that dingy dungeon and cut the fat head from the snake. Without a leader, goblins immediately scatter into infighting. I should know, I saw it in person.
I had been clear about this with myself from the beginning. I had not pretended that this was a quest of noble deeds to the other three, I had worked thoroughly and without complaint and on occasion, had done considerably more work when the situation required. I had not been a bad travel companion, but I could not become attached in any meaningful way to any of them. Not to Mira, our roguish femme fatale, who saw only the loot and plunder in it all. Neither Tor, a skilled swordsman who had saved me a few times, or Sera, who was an entirely adequate cleric, would be seeing me again.
Certainly, Tor was honourable and was genuinely surprised and grateful for the knighthood he had been bestowed, but that was his future set in stone. The prince had authority over him in a way that closed many doors I wanted to at least see into. He would no doubt run into Mira again if her plans to become a robber-baroness took hold. That had been amusing friction, though again it was a small-minded future as far as I was concerned. Sera had joined because her church had ordered it, to retrieve an entirely mundane artifact (a simple bronze bowl) from the goblin king’s pile of treasure. She was the best conversation to have at the time and whilst I understood the significance of retrieving the artifact, it was at the end of the day just a metal bowl.
It all paled to the future of wizardry I intended to undertake. I had been lucky many times over. Lucky to be able to use magic, lucky to find a master, but the single most fortunate thing I have ever encountered to this day is the fact my master wanted to actually teach. His efforts, through my actions, had carried us to victory. Master Pochesk, of the Green Eyes, was probably a one-in-twenty occurrence. Every aspiring mage expected to be sweeping floors and polishing potion bottles for years before being allowed to touch a wand. Their masters made them do it, so their apprentices should too. Plus, they could act high and mighty, dispensing fading wisdom to their underlings to feel smug for a decade. Much to my amazement, old Pochesk had started me working magic the day after my eighteenth birthday, which was the second day I was apprenticed to him.
For five years I learned. This is considered a very brief period in wizardry, but this is mostly because as I said before others fill this time with grandiose puffery. Pochesk knew the young were full of vim and vigour, and very much enjoyed teaching someone who was very much willing to pay attention. Despite his title, he did not have green eyes, just regular brown ones. He had only ever said it was an order of wizardry and nothing more. I can only suppose that one day I would be able to join them if I was worthy. Even so, those brown eyes never left me. Like some hawk he observed me, from the first day to the last. On the evening before I set out to join the party to slay the goblin king he had instilled into me a certain aspect of fear about himself. The back of my hands had born the marks of his repeated strikes with his staff from whenever I had made a mistake. In comparison, the goblins were much less of a threat than he was.
So, with money and deed to an old ruined tower in hand, I had bid farewell and set off. My apprenticeship had ended the day I had claimed the reward. Pochesk had made that clear. Alive or dead, a new apprentice would take my place. I vowed only to visit him when I considered myself ready to take on an apprentice of my own.
The common misconception about wizardry was that it rewarded effort. It did not reward effort. If effort were sufficient, every farmer who had ever broken his back across a generation of difficult soil would have been a king, and yet the world contained a remarkable shortage of farmer-kings and a remarkable abundance of broken backs. Effort was the entry price, the minimum ante required to sit at the table. What happened after you sat down had very little to do with how hard you had worked to get there.
It rewarded attention. Cunning. And a brain that thought in an off-kilter way. I struggle to explain it properly, because the mechanisms of wizardry look simple until you actually try to do them. You needed to be able to do magic, which is an innate quality many people possess. But wizardry is advanced not by rote learning in the traditional way, not wholly, because unlike the prayers of a cleric or the intuition of a mage, the logic of wizardry is bizarre to the outsider.
I had baffled my party’s associates explaining where the spell to detect hidden runic glyphs had come from.
Is it some formula in a spellbook?
No.
Then what is in the spellbook?
The means to cast it.
Then could I read the book to cast it?
Only if you already caught the spell and it only works on the one inside my head.
How do you catch spells?
That depends on the spell.
To me, it is eminently obvious how you locate and catch the spell to detect hidden runic glyphs: If you can think about a colour you cannot see, and hold a clay pot at the correct angle with your teeth, the rest comes naturally. The thing practically falls right into it. Wizardry does that to your mind, it makes it apparent how to find and capture spells, then force them into your mind and file them away neatly for later recalling. Could they do it? No, they’d never get the angle of the pot right, they wouldn’t be able to “feel” it.
Spells just sort of ended up existing like localised effects. Imagine if gravity was something that only happened in some random field somewhere and could be enticed into a person’s brain if you tricked it. The spells wizards handled were a feature of the world in the way that weather was a natural feature of the world, invisible currents and eddies in the ambient fabric of things, moving according to logics that were discoverable but not designed. You could learn to read them the way you learned to read wind by the movement of leaves, or heat by the shimmer of summer air above pale stone.
I was very proud of the spell which produced strokes of lightning that I knew. My master said he was envious of it, for mine seemed far less sluggish and prone to veering off course than his. It was how he knew I was ready to go forth without him. Pochesk had wanted me to be better than him, to take someone lesser and raise him higher. It was why I am where I am now, on this hill, in this tower, with this wolf.
But before the wolf, Immortality was the first problem I decided to tackle.
The reasoning was straightforward enough that I am somewhat surprised more practitioners do not arrive at it independently: if you intend to solve the problem of your own mortality, you must solve it while you still have the full capacity to do so, which means solving it young. Leave it too late and the solution arrives after the need for it when your knees would creak for the rest of eternity. The only answer is to begin immediately and accept that you will be working at something beyond your current abilities, which is, I have found, the only way anything worth doing gets done.
I knew it was possible. That much the evidence was clear on. The world contained practitioners of considerable age, some of them genuinely ancient, and they had arrived at their various conditions of extended existence through methods that ranged from the elegant to the catastrophic. The liches in their crypts, people affixed to soul-bound objects, those who chugged monthly elixirs that required an unbroken chain of ingredients stretching back decades. I had catalogued their failures as carefully as their successes, because the failures were more instructive.
Failure (in my opinion) mostly came in the form of being unable to turn it off. I wanted something I could also escape from, if it came to that. Not truly immortal. Long-lived, with the architecture to become something else afterward if the long life produced reasons to.
It took me the better part of a decade to find a method, which tells you something about the difficulty of the problem. Not the preparation however, the preparation was merely meticulous. I derived an answer not from a spellbook, but instead a cheap copy of a book of the classical legends I found in a collection being thrown out. For you see, Death loved Life. Personally. Specifically. The anthropomorphic personification of Death had, since before anything that could be called history, loved the anthropomorphic personification of Life with the completeness that only something eternal could sustain. It was in every tale without diminishment. Life was everywhere that living things were, he was at the end. Never the two seemed to touch.
That last part, after a careful translation from the original (and more expensive) book, was what touch meant. It meant Death was devoid of the ability to touch. Death was always portrayed as a skeleton. He had no flesh with which to touch.
Death had watched everything that lived and felt. Poems suggested He knew what they were, yet never seemed to have Him partake in the warmth and joys of Life. Tales of him in gardens, inside every fire, taking people into his embrace, even being depicted eating fruit in an artistic fashion.
Yet, if summoning Death was a known spell, why were the majority of mages mortal? It may surprise you to learn that communing with Him was actually fairly trivial, if often pointless. Death kept secrets well and did not perform “services”. The only real use of the spell was to ask if a certain individual was dead, and since Death was infinite He would answer with exacting and utter patience each time for it was his job to know. Simply put, despite what other legends said, you could not beat the reaper or trick Him for your soul.
My plan was simple. I would not trick Death. I would not ask Him anything. There would not be a bargain. Bad immortality was derived from selfish acts, so I arranged a gift instead. That was what took up the majority of the time for my preparation to offer the gift, and I was glad I started early.
The gift would only be loaned, for a one day and its sister night. I did not think I could handle more or needed more. I brewed many potions and prepared the best healing spells I had in my repertoire. If I was to offer up my flesh, I needed to withstand its loss. Being forward thinking I had a set of silver clamps made. Constructed to my exact specification by a metalsmith in a city who for the right price had not asked what they were for. The clamps were embossed on their inner surface with the relief skeleton of my own hands. They were the most important element.
I arranged all of it with the care of a man setting a table for an important guest, because that was what it was, and checked it three times, and on the third check found nothing to adjust, and so I sat down and spoke the summoning words into the room.
The room became cold first. The fire in the grate did not go out. The flames simply became less convincing. The colour drained from it next, until all was greyscale. Then His shadow appeared at the base of the door, growing and sliding out from under it. Whilst no door may bar Death in his duty, he still arose in front of it for a door is a place of entry and it was the appropriate place to appear.
Soon there was a figure in robes of plain black that fell without motion, under which suggested a skeleton. The hood was raised when he entered and He lowered it with a gesture that was almost considerate, the small social grace of someone who understood that faces were important to the people who had them and the revealed skull was very white and very clean. He moved, disconnected from physics, moving his robed limbs only to place his scythe by the door. Then he came to the chair I had placed opposite mine and his form flowed smoothly around it to collect in a sitting form. All without a sound.
I stood and bowed. “My lord Death. You are welcome.”
His jaw did not move. The words arrived without passing through air.
ᴛʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ ᴏᴜʀ ᴛʜɪʀᴅ ᴍᴇᴇᴛɪɴɢ, ᴠɪɴᴄᴇɴᴛ ꜰᴀʀɢᴀʟʟᴏᴡ. ʙᴜᴛ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴛɪᴍᴇ, ᴡᴇ ᴍᴇᴇᴛ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀ ᴜɴᴜꜱᴜᴀʟ ᴀᴜꜱᴘɪᴄᴇꜱ.
It was not quite what I had expected Him to say. It was more personal and considerate than what I had envisioned. You see, a reliable indicator of magical potential was the capacity to perceive Death. My first had been when I had a fever at seven years old. I remembered the corner of the room where he had been — simultaneously no more than a few paces away and at an enormous distance, in the corner of the room where I had been terrible ill.
The second had been when I had encountered a farmer and an ox on the road north of my master's tower. There had been a brief and violent chaos of dust and bellowing and men shouting, and there had been Death standing over the fallen man with the quality of someone who had arrived exactly on time. He had paid no-one else any heed, and left shortly after.
Curiosity had got the better of me. I had to know. “How close was I,” I said, “when we met the first time?”
ᴄʟᴏꜱᴇ ᴇɴᴏᴜɢʜ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ɪ ꜱᴛᴏᴏᴅ ʙʏ ɪɴ ᴄᴀꜱᴇ. ʏᴇᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴘᴇʀꜱɪꜱᴛᴇᴅ, ɪɴ ᴛʜᴀɴᴋꜱ, ɪ ʙᴇʟɪᴇᴠᴇ, ᴅᴜᴇ ᴛᴏ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴍᴏᴛʜᴇʀ.
I did not press further. It was more than I was expecting by far and it was not the reason for this summoning.
“I wish to offer you a gift,” I said, and placed my hands carefully into the silver clamps on the table, fitting each finger into the precise relief of its own skeleton, the metal cool and exact around them. “The flesh and blood of my hands and face. For one day and its sister night. For you to do as you will.”
Death tilted his head. It was a gesture he had clearly practised across an unimaginable span of time. A means for his unmoving features to belie some kind of emotion.
ᴅᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ɢɪᴠᴇ ᴛʜɪꜱ ɢɪꜰᴛ ꜰʀᴇᴇʟʏ?
“I do,” I said. I had thought about this answer as carefully. “Though no gift is without payment of self-satisfaction, I ask of you nothing in return. What you do with what I give, and what becomes of me as a consequence, I leave entirely to you.”
ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ ᴄʟᴇᴠᴇʀ, Death said. The quality of it was something approaching interest. ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʀᴇᴀᴅ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴄʟᴀꜱꜱɪᴄꜱ ᴛʜᴏʀᴏᴜɢʜʟʏ. ɪ ᴀᴄᴄᴇᴘᴛ ʏᴏᴜʀ ɢɪꜰᴛ.
I tied a piece of cloth around my head and jaw in the way I had practised many times before. “I am ready.”
As it turned out, I was slightly less prepared than I believed. I cannot be philosophical here, because it would meld with what physically happened. Death stood and unhurriedly but inevitably reached his bony hands to my face, hooked his fingers behind my ears and then…peeled. Away came my face, eyelids and ears and lips all. I could not close my eyes and so I could see the blood immediately cascade down me. I could not shut my ears, for I now lacked them, and my hands were bound, so I had to endure the tearing sound. Yet, the face came away like a porcelain mask and was placed upon Death’s own skull where it bonded perfectly with a jawline much like my own. The wrapped cloth kept my jaw from falling off, which without my tongue I did not have to feel it’s terrible texture. Under the clamps, my hands were made nude, the bones settling into the silver indents unmoving. A vital step to avoid the flanges from becoming disjointed when the skin returned to them.
However, it meant I would be trapped, clamped in place, unblinking and unmoving for a day and a night. If my preparations wore off before that time, then I am certain I would not feel philosophical at all. But I am a wizard, and so I did my best to meditate. I imagine that it truly was exactly a day and a night and no more, yet as the final hour moved and the effects numbing me to myself began to wane, I wish I had upped the doses.
Death returned, and returned my missing parts whole and without fuss. It was strange to see my own mask placed back so perfectly and how my hands were mended. Death departed immediately and without emotion, the terms and deal completed. With care I unclamped myself with my tied-up-chin nudging the handle and stood to inspect myself.
It had worked.
Death loved Life, so He had sought Her out immediately. To dance and cavort in Her gardens, feel Her warmth on His borrowed skin. Thusly my lips had kissed Hers, my hand had been in Her own. My flesh had now been somewhere I have not. It has seen something I have not. I am living in a body that has a memory I cannot access, of something I cannot imagine, and the memory has made it reluctant to age. Invigorated by the touch of Life herself. I suspect that publishing this method would result in this grace from Her being revoked, and was perhaps the reason it had never been so.
The tower received its long-overdue renovation now that I was confident I would be spending a lot more time in it. What had begun as a squat and graceless thing akin to a chess rook became over the course of two years something I was no longer embarrassed to live in. Now it was slender where it had been thick, deliberate where it had been merely solid, with windows placed to catch the morning light in the upper study and the evening light in the room below it. I soon had my mind on acquiring the land around the base of the hill to put a wall around it. Partly to keep the unwanted wildlife out, and partly to keep anything exotic in. It would certainly keep anyone not in need of my services away until their request was worth answering, that’s for sure.
My repertoire of spells grew. My reputation grew alongside it, which was a more complicated development. That sort of balance would require maintenance forever unless I moved. I never went back into a dungeon, which was a decision I made once and have not revisited. The work I had spent years building was not something I intended to end at the wrong end of a goblin's opportunistic blade. Money was something I would no longer need, for a good magician traded in favours and that was what reputation was, after all.
I visited the now venerable Pochesk. I had promised myself I would go only when I considered myself ready, and I kept that promise. I discharged every obligation I owed him and walked away from his tower for the last time with the specific lightness of a man who has settled every account and owes the world nothing it can point to. It was, I think, the freest I have ever felt.
Upon my return from my master the weather had turned cold enough to make flying impractical. I had spells for flight but they were unpleasant in wind and actively dangerous in ice, and I had long since made my peace with the phantom horse as a dignified enough alternative. It was a spell I had bartered some time ago, purchased in the form of a carved statuette as a focus. Whilst it was a phantasmagorical thing, it was yet solid enough to carry weight and requiring only the occasional directional prompting before it resumed its steady indifferent progress. It did not tire. It did not have opinions about the footing. It was, in the ways that mattered for travel, an improvement on the real thing.
The trees held the particular stillness of cold air and no wind, and in that stillness the corvids were making themselves heard. Not in alarm, not with the sharp declarative calls of genuine threat. It was something more anticipatory. The sound of birds that had identified a situation and were waiting for it to resolve in their favour.
I slowed the horse to try and see the source. Some of the birds had been following me, which was not unusual — magic attracted them in the same way that certain flowers attracted certain insects. If you owned a tower you ended up having to listen to birds and then you ended up feeding them. If you were a wizard you could understand them. Often it was less words and more intent. Hunger, anger, amusement, and suchlike emotions. Here I inferred anticipation from them. What they were attending to was just off the road to the left, where the treeline thinned around a small clearing.
There a mother wolf was lying on her side in the way that she would not be getting up again. The cause was not apparent and I did not spend long looking for it — Nature on the whole does not offer explanations for its decisions and has never shown much interest in my opinion of them. What was apparent, and what stopped me from directing the horse onward, was the small grey shape pressing itself against her flank with the focused insistence of something that had not yet fully understood the situation and was applying the only solution it knew.
The pup was perhaps three weeks old. Possibly four. Grey-furred in the universal manner of wolf pups, with the round unfinished quality of very young animals and eyes that were dark and wet. But I could not avoid the particular expression it had of something that wanted warmth and kept finding cold instead. He was nudging at her with his nose in a rhythm that was becoming less energetic as the cold did its patient work.
I sat on the phantom horse for a moment and looked at this.
Then I stepped down, because there was nothing else to be done, and I approached in the unhurried manner I had learned from years of being at ease around dogs — no sudden movements, no reach from above, the body angled slightly away to present as something other than a threat. The pup looked up at me. The corvids in the trees above us watched with the professional attention of an audience that has paid for the good seats.
He was very small in my hands. He smelled of the outdoors and had an animal warmth that I could tell was slowly flagging. He wriggled with a vigour that was somewhat at odds with his circumstances, simultaneously pressing into the warmth of my robes and craning back toward the still shape on the ground, caught between the thing he was losing and the warm thing he had found.
It seemed to me abundantly clear what I had to do, and no mortal force would have swayed me. I tucked him inside my coat against my chest and held him there with one arm and remounted my phantom horse.
There were spells to raise the dead. I had encountered the literature and found it displeasing. The things those spells produced were simply a thing with artificial animation, which neither healed or rotted. It offended something in me. I could not bring back the mother.
The pup nipped at my finger as I fiddled with him. The wriggling to escape had ceased, now began the squirming of getting comfortable. I thought about Life. I had my religious beliefs, but this did not feel like a test. Life did not test you, but Nature, which was Life's local representative and the harshest manager in any organisation I had ever encountered, did. I had been given, by luck and by the quality of one genuinely good teacher, a kinder introduction to the world than Nature typically provided. It seemed only appropriate to extend the same courtesy now.
I looked down at him. Dark eyes looked back up with the absolute attention of something that has decided, on limited but apparently sufficient evidence, that this is the warm thing and the warm thing is to be trusted.
"Isidore," I name him then. He nipped my finger again, which I took as ratification.
I settled him more securely inside my robe, gestured the phantom horse into motion, and had covered perhaps a quarter mile before I became aware that I was talking to the pup in a low continuous murmur about nothing in particular — the road, the trees, the cold, the tower's distance, the question of what wolves ate at three weeks old and whether I had anything suitable — in the tone of someone who has not spoken to another living thing in some time and has found, somewhat to their own surprise, that they have been missing it.
The crow had been following me for the better part of an hour before I addressed him.
I knew he was there. Corvids that follow wizards are rarely subtle about it, which I had always suspected was intentional — they wanted you to know they were watching, because corvids were relentlessly entrepreneurial. This one had positioned himself in the sequence of trees overhead with the studied nonchalance of someone pretending not to be where they obviously were.
Managing Isidore with one arm while reaching into my pack with the other, while simultaneously maintaining the suggestion of a posture on a horse that had no opinions about keeping you seated, was an exercise in on itself. Yet I managed to produce a strip of dried meat and held it out. Crow-speech was a spell I had acquired under my master and it tasted faintly of wet bark whenever I used it, but it was a good spell nevertheless.
The crow descended onto my shoulder with the decisiveness of someone who had been waiting for exactly this invitation and did not intend to pretend otherwise. He was large for his kind, with the slightly battered primaries of a bird who had been flying in this specific valley for long enough to have opinions about the weather, and he looked at me with the sideways intensity that corvids reserved for transactions they considered promising.
“Hark!” he announced, with the volume of someone addressing a larger audience than was present. “You have the pleasure of speaking to the esteemed Charax! I know you, wizard-man Fargallow, and either give unto me vittles, or your no doubt incoming request shall be denied most fervently!”
I gave him the dried meat, which he took without dignity.
“Find the druid Kywin,” I intoned, “who you no doubt know. Tell him I ask for his advice on the proper raising of wolves. Direct him to my tower, to be received as a guest.” I shifted Isidore slightly, who was making his feelings about the large black bird known through a series of small but emphatic sounds. “Upon your return, Charax, you will be rewarded, and more so if you succeed.”
I shook my shoulder to dislodge him and Charax departed in a single sweep of wings and with winter food promised clearly had no intention of dawdling.
I watched him go and then looked down at Isidore, who was watching the place where the crow had been with an adorable expression.
“You'll get used to them,” I told him.
The wolf now known as Isidore promptly yawned wide, showing a collection of pearly white teeth, then fell asleep.
Kywin did indeed arrive promptly, with an expression on his face which told me I had made some form of misstep that he intended to be present to watch most smugly. Kywin and I could not have looked less alike. Whilst I had ceased and partially undone my aging, and wore the robes and trappings of a respectable wizard about town, Kywin showed his age proudly in the humble brown habit of some more earthly monk. The most extravagant thing about him was the simple rope cord around his waist to keep his clothes close to his bony frame. Druids “naturally” became immortal, but in a way that seemed to permanently keep them as skinny pensioners and not much else. When I enquired as to their method, the only answer I ever got back was that “you eventually stop arguing with time” which did not seem very promising. From what I could gather, so long as they were doing their duty to Nature, She would keep them going with a detached indifference. It was a job for ever, and as I mentioned previously, you did not become a wizard to do hard work.
Kywin and I were still good friends, which was no doubt why he answered the summons so readily, but the relish of which he did so was soon revealed to me when he handed me a sizable package of meat. “The little lad is going to eat you out of house and tower, Vincent,” he said as I accepted the gift. “Now, let me see the little devil.”
As a graceful host, I bid him and his mud-splattered self into my tower, though a surreptitious spell sloughed off the filth before it could do any harm. The old man (we may be the same approximate age, but he gave off the impression so easily) shuffled down the corridors ahead of me, poking and prodding the various paraphernalia you ended up collecting after a few decades of arcane activities that deserved a space on the walls, before entering into the warm confines of the longue. There, upon several cushions in front of the fireplace, was Isidore. The wolf had been chewing a corner of one of them before tiring himself out and promptly falling asleep again. However, at the druid’s approach, he perked up immediately and bounded and fumbled towards him where he was easily scooped up by practiced hands.
“Now, what’s that mean old Vincent been feeding you?” he asked the puppy and I found myself absentmindedly handing the druid some of the meat from the package.
“I boiled him an egg, I thought-”
“An egg? Have you had an egg? Have you?” Kywin crooned and puppeted the wolf’s head to make him nod in agreement. “Well, you’ll be wanting a lot more than that!” he proffered a chunk of meat, which vanished instantly upon contact with Isidore. “You’re going to eat and eat until Vincent here learns why only the really stupid nobility keep pet wolves!”
“Thank you, oh wise druid,” I rolled my eyes at this. Kywin had seemingly de-aged immediately upon contact with the puppy and was taking great relish in taking up the role of the uncle who spoils their nephew.
“You’ll come to regret this act,” Kywin grinned and rubbed his beard at the wolf, who found the texture strange. “He’ll chew everything and anyone, and piss on anything else. Then he’ll howl at nothing at all hours, won’t you?” he crooned down again and gave another piece of meat, which was lasting longer this time around. “But you know all this already,” he deftly placed the occupied animal into my arms and took back the meat again in one single motion in an unexpected example of legerdemain.
“Please, make yourself at home,” I frowned at a chair, which slid itself behind the druid. Then at another, which did the same to me. We both sat at the same time.
“The crow told me all about it. You’re a good man after all, it seems.”
“After all? That’s a little insulting.”
“Consider it high praise from a druid.”
It was ever thus like this, a friendly bout of insulting banter. What else was eternity for? Kywin reclined in the chair absolutely, where he was from there was not a lot of upholstery.
“It was good of you to come,” I responded when his settling had ceased. “I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.”
“You would have managed. Wolves are tough enough to withstand a bumbling wizard’s attempt to feed them.”
So began the next few hours of my latest lesson, which was the proper care of my new charge. Isidore would very rapidly grow and in many respects would be like a nearly unmanageable dog. An expensive one at that, since according to Kywin he was not joking when he said the wolf would eat a goodly quantity. But the real issue would be letting him roam for exercise. It was out of the question to keep him in the tower, if not for health, then for my sanity. He would soon grow too large for me to physically overpower, so I would need to be forever vigilant to prevent that from ever being a problem.
Much like there were spells to speak to birds, so too was there methods to communicate with wolves. However, Kywin was forbidden to tell me how to do it, and I knew enough from experience that the spells I could acquire were not very good. Corvids were smart enough, some could even crudely speak without aid, but a wolf’s mind was entirely unlike a crow. So, the only means I could see was to employ Charax to act as an interpreter. I would be able to gauge what Isidore meant in broad strokes, but not be able to clearly articulate anything back.