Chapter 23 Mushrooms
Three days later, the Arcanist stood with his arms crossed and a bored expression on his face while Rolan vomited violently into a blackberry bush.
“Why… didn’t you… stop me…?” Rolan groaned, doubled over as cramps racked his abdomen.
“I told you yesterday the yellow mushrooms were poisonous,” Luc said with a shrug.
“Well, I forgot!” Rolan retched again, the last of his measly breakfast splattering onto the forest floor. “You could have reminded me! You saw me pick and eat the blasted thing!”
“There’s no teacher like a bad experience,” the Arcanist replied, unconcerned. “Are you done?”
“Yes,” Rolan complained. “I’m done! Done with mushrooms. Done with nature. Done with being your blasted apprentice! I want to go home. Maybe my meals in the city were moldy, but at least they stayed in my stomach!”
“Fine,” said Luc. “If you can find your way back to Crisanth, not only will we part ways, but I’ll give you enough coin to buy hot meals for a month.”
Scowling, Rolan wiped his chin on his sleeve and looked around, miserable enough to take Luc up on the offer.
But as usual, he was hopelessly lost. His lessons on woodcraft—foraging, shelter making, water finding, basic directions—were not going well.
This came as a surprise to him, given he could always find his way in the city.
But out here in the forest, every tree looked the same. Worse, every mushroom looked the same.
Luc sighed. “How do you find east, boy?”
Rolan scrunched his nose. “Uh… something about a stick. Oh! You jam it in the ground.”
He found a branch and pushed it into the moist moss, then stepped back. “Then… uh…” Glancing at Luc, hopeful for clues, he found none. The Arcanist’s face was as blank as a stone wall.
Rolan tossed his hands high. “I don’t know! You ask a badger for directions. Is that it?”
Luc rolled his eyes and turned, walking deeper into the forest. With a sigh that swept from his bones, Rolan followed.
Three days they’d been in this forest. Three days they’d wandered while Luc taught him the ways of the wild and Rolan struggled to keep up.
They camped in lean-tos they built from sticks, which was admittedly kind of fun, until it got dark and Luc’s ring of torches felt pathetically small against the black abyss of night.
They came across Cryptics, none bigger than a deer, which Luc handled.
“Why can’t I kill one?” Rolan asked. Not that he particularly wanted to.
The memory of the first—and last—one he’d finished off still haunted his dreams. The secret he’d absorbed played against his eyelids whenever he shut them, making him shiver with dread.
But he remembered the rush of power that came when he’d crushed the relic, the Arcana flooding through him, opening his senses to their widest. That part was worth a few bad secrets, he thought. “I could help you, if I used Arcana.”
“It’s against all law, both civil and Arcane,” said Luc.
At Rolan’s confused expression, he added, “The king’s law forbids it because if everyone knew how to find the Hollow Path and ran around smashing relics, they’d all find out one another’s secrets the wrong way.
There would be endless fighting and worse.
And the Arcane Council forbids it because Arcana is dangerous stuff in the wrong hands.
Only an Arcanist who has taken the oaths may break relics. ”
“You let me break a relic.”
“As a teaching moment,” Luc said. “Which is allowed under Arcane law, by the way.”
“The Arcane Council,” said Rolan thoughtfully, thinking back to the books in Luc’s house. “That’s the group of Arcanists who control all the other Arcanists, right?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say they control us. But they govern our order. As Arcanists, we’re a bit outside the king’s law, and the king’s courts don’t like to handle us. So we handle ourselves, elect our own leaders, run our own trials and inquests and whatnot.”
“So we don’t answer to any king?” Rolan liked the sound of that. He didn’t know much about King Malkos, and according to the maps in Luc’s books, Crisanth was about as far from the capital as a city could get and still be within the kingdom’s borders.
“Of course we answer to the king,” Luc replied, quashing the sudden flame of anarchy that had lit in Rolan’s chest. “To him and his appointed dukes and duchesses. We’re not lawless vigilantes, boy.”
“What a shame,” sighed Rolan.
“A stone,” said Luc.
“Huh?”
“After you plant the stick in the ground, you place a stone at the end of its shadow. Then you wait fifteen minutes, and place another stone where the shadow has moved. Draw a line between them, and you have an arrow pointing east.”
“Oh,” grumbled Rolan. “Yeah. That’s what I was about to say, before you butted in with all your boring talk of kings and councils.”
“Good,” said Luc. “Then you can find north for us now, which will lead us to a nice, dry cave I know of where we can get a proper night’s sleep. Or you can send us in the wrong direction, and we can spend another night in the open, with the Cryptics.”
Scowling, Rolan found a stick and two stones and what he hoped was a north bearing.
They set off again, Rolan leading the way.
Luc offered no hints as to whether it was the right direction, and Rolan ground his teeth together, thinking that if he had to sleep another night in the open forest he would probably either go insane or beg a Cryptic to put him out of his misery.
Either way, he’d be done with Luc and his horrible forest lessons.
But then Rolan stumbled into a meadow, and all thoughts of north and south and surly Arcanists vanished from his thoughts.
Because standing there, in the wildflowers and sweet green grass, was a unicorn.
“Don’t move,” whispered Luc, crouching beside Rolan in a screen of ferns. “Don’t approach it.”
Rolan gaped. He was so shocked, he couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to.
A unicorn.
Real and solid, right there in front of him.
It was white and slender with a long, elegant neck that arched proudly, its horn glittering golden in a shaft of sunlight.
Its mane and tail flowed and rippled like water, despite the fact there was not a breath of wind in the air.
All around the unicorn hovered a pale, glowing aura, as soft as moonlight.
“I thought they were just a story,” Rolan said softly. He remembered declaring as much to Anaya once, thinking himself oh so worldly and wise. But he’d never been so thrilled to be proven wrong. A dopey smile spread across his face. He wondered what it would be like to touch it.
“It’s a Cryptic,” said Luc.
And just like that, the fuzzy warmth in Rolan’s chest went cold. “What? How?”
He stared at the unicorn as it flicked its ears, his hand going to his knives. But Luc caught his wrist, stilling him.
“It’s not the bad kind,” the Arcanist said. “We’ve nothing to fear from it.”
“There are good Cryptics?”
Luc nodded. “They’re very rare. I’ve only ever seen a handful. Some precious few Cryptics are born not of shameful secrets, but noble ones.”
“Noble secrets?”
The Arcanist watched the unicorn, his eyes as soft as Rolan had ever seen them.
The expression made the man look younger.
Gentler. Like another person altogether.
“A poor mother who gives all her meager food to her children, telling them she isn’t hungry.
A man who gives his fortune away in secret, to help the needy.
” He looked up at Rolan. “There are many terrible secrets in the world. But there are some so beautiful, they’d split your heart open to hear them.
It is our misfortune that they are so much rarer. ”
“Have you ever killed a good Cryptic?” asked Rolan. “Did it drop a relic too?”
Luc stayed silent, and Rolan was too afraid of spooking the unicorn to press him for an answer. They watched the creature meander through the meadow, shaking its mane. It never dipped its head to graze, like a living creature would. Cryptics did not need to eat.
He wished fiercely that Anaya were there to see it. He tried to engrave every detail of the unicorn into his memory so that he could tell her about it later.
“Once,” said Luc, and it took Rolan a moment to recall the question he’d asked. When he did, he turned his gaze from the unicorn to stare at the Arcanist, his eyes round.
“It’s said the relic of a noble Cryptic can grant any wish,” Luc added, his tone strangely wistful.
“Seriously?” gasped Rolan.
Too loud.
The unicorn snorted and took off at a gallop, vanishing in moments, and Rolan gave a regretful sigh. “Can it really grant any wish?”
“No,” said Luc, his eyes going hard again, his jaw flexing. “Perhaps some wishes. But not all. Come, the sun’s low and the cave is near.”
That, at least, was a bit of good news. The cave wasn’t just dry.
It was stocked with a cache of supplies, including, to Rolan’s delight, food.
Jars of peaches preserved in honey, flagons of blackberry cordial, and other delectables that had Rolan weak in the knees.
Apparently Luc used the place to camp quite frequently, and Rolan was only slightly annoyed they hadn’t spent every night in the woods here.
It was hard to stay indignant when he had honey dripping down his tongue and Luc was frying flatbread on the campfire, the sunflower-seed oil in his pan sizzling tantalizingly.
“What’s that?” Rolan asked, pointing his dagger at a list of names carved into the cave’s rock wall.
Luc glanced at the names. “Arcanists. My predecessors who spent their lives guarding Crisanth.”
Running his fingers over the carvings, Rolan sounded out a few of the names until he found Lucas Farlight at the bottom. The letters were precise and sharp, just like Luc’s handwriting. “Hey, that’s you!”
Luc grunted.
“So these are all the Arcanists who came before you? Will I get to add my name to the list?”
He looked back at Luc and saw the man gazing into the flames, his dark pupils drinking in the light. “Perhaps.”