Chapter 15: Chapter 14

Nym didn’t want to speak ill of Ciana. She’d literally saved his life, after all. She’d been there for him every single day and he missed her terribly. He would always be thankful for what she’d done for him.

But the Trough and Saddle’s cook was so much better than her.

It wasn’t really a fair comparison. Their meals had consisted of a lot of root vegetables and small game, with occasional sea-food. The cooking method was pretty much always a stew or broth. She worked with what she had. He hadn’t missed too many meals when he stayed with her.

But… bread! Cheese! A real slab of meat! The cook had fried things, there was butter involved in the process. There were seasonings, including the best seasoning of all: almost a week of going hungry in the woods. Nym barely even registered some of the noises he made while he was eating.

“Enough, lad,” the farmer sitting next to him. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were my wife back when we were first married.”

Nym cocked his head to the side. “It’s really good,” he explained.

The whole bar started laughing. “Leave him alone, Shep. Poor kid’s so scrawny, he probably hasn’t had a real meal in years,” a different farmer said. “Besides, that’s a perfectly normal reaction to having Shary’s cooking for the first time.”

There was a chorus of agreements and the raising of a few mugs, but after that the farmers ignored him and Nym lost track of their conversation. Before he knew it, the plate was empty and a woman was sliding a second one in front of him.

“Here ya go, darling,” she said.

Nym paused. Part of him wanted to tear into it, but he needed to save up his remaining money. He wanted clothes without holes, maybe a coat. Shoes seemed less important since he spent so much of his time flying now, but still, cold toes were uncomfortable. He was expecting a few more long days in the woods scrounging up materials for Cern just to afford a full set of clothes, and if he spent the money now, it’d just be that much more work.

“Thank you, but I can’t afford it,” he said quietly.

“Aw, don’t you worry about that. Just this one time, it’s on me,” she told him.

“Are you sure?” he asked with a frown.

The empty plate disappeared from the bar and the woman leaned forward. “Just because you appreciate the food so much, just this one time, you can have an extra plate,” she said with a wink.

“Hey now, we appreciate your cooking, Shary!” one of the farmers called out.

“I know all about what you appreciate about me,” she called out. “You can pay full price.”

“Don’t be like that!”

“Yer lucky I don’t charge you extra.”

Nym lost track of what was going on again as he devoured the second plate. It was in fact every single bit as good as the first one, but by the end he was starting to slow down. There just wasn’t enough room in his stomach, and it was a bit of a struggle to finish. “Whew,” he said at the end. “That was so good.”

Stuffed to burst, he waddled across the floor to find his room, where he found a big wooden washing tub. If he’d been an adult, it would have been cramped, but he had plenty of room. There was a brush on a handle and a block of soap left there for him too, both sat on top of a folded towel left on the bed.

Nym couldn’t remember ever having a warm bath. His sole memory had been of him very young in a room where everything looked expensive, from the clothes to the decorations. He was sure he’d been accustomed to all sorts of luxuries in his early life, luxuries he couldn’t even imagine now. Just a hot meal and a bath were novelties to him.

He scrubbed a week’s worth of dirt and grime off, leaving behind water that was more brown than clear, and regarded his clothing dubiously. He didn’t really have any plans to go anywhere but bed now, and though he was missing a washboard, he did his best to scrub the pants and shirt in the dirty tub water.

A quick application of hydrokinesis dried them back out. They were… marginally cleaner. He shrugged and put them back on. They felt less stiff, at least. Maybe. It was hard to tell. But then he looked at the nice clean bed, a real bed too, not just a pallet on the floor, and then back at his own clothes. They came right back off before he jumped into bed.

It was sized to hold an adult, which meant he had plenty of room to roll around, and even if it wasn’t all that much more comfortable than what he normally slept on, it was infinitely better than the piles of moss and pine needles he’d been using lately. Nym fell asleep before he even realized it, and barely even woke up when someone knocked on the door.

“Wha-?” he asked sleepily, the blanket wrapped around him.

“Sorry, but we need the tub back. Gonna be a few minutes getting the water drained so we can haul it out,” the teenager at the door told him.

Without thinking, Nym used telekinesis to open the window and sent the water out in a long, undulating tendril. It splashed out into the yard while the teen stared at him, slack-jawed. The tub floated up a few inches and flew forward to bump against the teen. “Go ‘way,” Nym told him, closing the door on him and collapsing back into the bed.

* * *

The smell of breakfast woke him up before the sun rose. He staggered out of bed and dressed himself, then shuffled into the common room and climbed up onto one of the bar stools. There was no one there yet, so he just leaned over the bar and laid his head back down.

“Go back to your room if you want to sleep,” Babkin said from behind him.

Nym groaned and sat back up. “I am so sore,” he complained. “I think I’m sick.”

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“You’re too young to be sore,” Babkin said. “I need to have a chat with you. Please join me in my office.”

That woke Nym up. “Am I in trouble?” he asked.

“Should you be? What did you do?”

“Nothing!” Nym protested. It was even true, he hadn’t done anything wrong in Zoskan, but he supposed someone from Palmara might have followed him here. Nobody should know where he’d went when he left, and Ciana was the only one who’d seen which way he’d went.

“We’ll see. Come with me please.”

Nym followed the huge innkeeper back to his office. The man took his seat behind his desk in an over-wide chair and picked up his pipe. After a few moments of fiddling, he had it lit and was puffing away at it. He said. “First, no, you’re not in trouble here. I just need to get some things cleared up. First, you’re a mage.”

“No I’m not.”

Babkin shook his head. “You scared my son when you emptied that tub out for him last night. By the way, if you stay here longer, don’t dump water out of your window again. We have a place for it. But you showed that you can use magic, and not just basic first circle spells. You’re a mage.”

Nym thought about that for a second. He could do second circle magic, true, but there had to be more to it than just that. Also, he had no idea what Babkin was talking about. He only vaguely remembered someone knocking on his door and waking him up, something about the tub.

His eyes widened. He’d done a first circle telekinesis spell and a second circle hydrokinesis spell. He thought about, trying to remember if he’d done them simultaneously. He barely even remembered doing them, let alone the mechanics of it. Had he forged two conduits at once and held first and second layer arcana in his soul well?

A simpler explanation would just be that he’d done them sequentially. That was much more likely. He decided that had to be it. There was no way he’d done by accident while half-asleep what he’d spent hours struggling and failing to achieve yesterday.

Back to the issue at hand. Was he a mage? “What makes someone a mage? Is it just that they can use second circle spells? Don’t they have to have a master or go to school or something?”

“Mage isn’t a profession,” Babkin told him. “It’s just a description of who are you, like saying I’m dark-haired or my son is blonde. You can use magic, therefore you are a mage. You will always be a mage, and the only way that changes is if you become even more of a mage and reach archmage status.”

“Oh. I guess I am a mage then. I never really thought about it before,” Nym said. He paused for a moment to consider that fact, then added, “Is that a bad thing?”

Babkin shrugged. “I don’t care. Some people would. It’s very unusual though. You’re too young to have such strong control over your magic. Maybe if it was basic first circle stuff, but it’s rare to see anyone with strong control over elemental magic younger than fifteen. Someone must have invested a lot of time and energy into teaching you, but you look like you’re homeless. Is someone going to show up and blow the door off my inn looking to bring you back home to the family castle?”

“No… no one like that is looking for me.” Maybe a guard from Palmara might make a scene, but Nym doubted anyone would show up who was capable of what Babkin was afraid of. As far as he knew, the only people in town who could do any magic at all were the magister and Amos, possibly Lathia. None of them had any reason to be looking for him.

Babkin grunted and took another puff off his pipe. “Does Cern know you can do magic?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. That’s how I got the money for the room. He sent me out to gather stuff for him in the forest.”

“He did what!” Babkin demanded, coming to his feet. “You’re a little boy. Even with magic, you are far too young to be roaming around the forest on your own!”

“It’s… it’s fine. Really. I was out there for days on my trip here anyway. It’s not so bad, except for the spiders.” Nym shuddered at the memory of waking up partially encased in webbing.

“Unacceptable. I will find some work for you to do here to earn your keep. Do not go back into the woods. You’re going to get yourself killed.”

Nym shook his head. “I need the money.”

“Boy, promise me you are not going to go back into the forest for Cern,” Babkin insisted.

“Sorry. I can’t do that.”

The innkeeper let out a rumble. “Very well. Come with me. We’re going to talk to Cern about this.”

“I don’t think-”

“Come along,” Babkin said. He strode out of the office and walked through the kitchen to the back door. Nym followed along his in wake, and the two of them stepped outside.

It was only a few minutes to the alchemist’s store, and Babkin didn’t stop pounding until he answered the door. Cern was wearing a robe loosely tied at the stomach and not much else. “By all that’s Holy, what do you want? It’s not even dawn yet.”

“Cern,” Babkin rumbled, his pipe billowing smoke. “Did you send a ten-year boy alone into the woods to find mushrooms and flowers for you?”

The alchemist’s eyes widened to a comic degree and he shot a glance over at Nym, who was standing behind and off to the side of the innkeeper. He groaned out loud. “You told him?” he asked, exasperated.

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