Chapter Fourteen #2
Ligard and Acha, however, insisted on coming with them to Eryri. “May the One bless your journey, Owl,” said Ligard to Taz, and Acha told Sephie, “We shall miss you, Rose. You and your music.”
“The forests will remember you,” Druisten said. “Your mountain is along that path. Go with the forests’ goodwill.” And without further ado, he stepped back through the gate he’d opened into the Eryri forest, and Ligard and Acha followed him.
The gate closed and disappeared. Taz and Stephie stared at the path between two trees that had, for a brief time, held a gate to somewhere in England.
“Not people for long goodbyes, are they?” said Taz.
“They will remember us,” Sephie commented. “Does that mean we can go back?”
Taz shook his head. “I do not know. Come, Sephie. I do not want to be on the mountain side after night falls.”
*
“Tell me what I am walking into,” said Sephie as they moved along a mountain track that wound across a steep slope. “The place you grew up in sounds like a training camp, is that right?”
True enough. “You could say that,” Taz admitted.
“Hebog—that is the Hawk’s real name—Hebog comes from the village of Caerywell.
In fact, he is the local noble, the only survivor of his family.
The village is in a high valley, easily defended, so when he chose to start a college for mages and a school for fighters, he came back to Caerywell. ”
“He took you in after your parents died, you said,” Sephie prompted.
“After they were killed,” Taz corrected. “Yes. My parents’ friends hid me and sent word to Hebog. He came to collect me.”
Because Taz was showing signs of a mage gift. Hebog had been quite blunt about it. “I take in orphans who can use magic,” he had said. “I will feed you, house you, clothe you, and train you. And when you are grown, you will use your gift the way I tell you.”
It had been a better offer than the alternative, which was to become a pit boy in the mines, particularly once Taz had realized that Hebog’s one burning goal was to punish the English until they left Wales. “I’ll go with you, sir,” he had said.
“Was he kind to you?” Sephie asked.
The question defied a simple answer. Hebog had no kindness in him.
Taz shrugged, uncomfortable with the only answer he had to give.
“He treated me as well as he did anyone else.” As well as he treated anyone else whose control of magic disappointed him.
He treated Taz’s fumbles and twists as if they were deliberate slaps in Hebog’s face.
Sephie must have felt the prevarication in the answer, for she shot him a sharp glance. “He was not kind to you,” she murmured, as if answering her own question rather than asking one.
“He was not kind to anyone,” Taz admitted. “And I disappointed him. He took me for my mage gift, but it was flawed. When I tried to use magic, it twisted into something I didn’t intend.”
“Except when you sang.”
Taz flinched at the memory of Hebog’s reaction when Taz had tried to sing his way through one of Hebog’s assignments. “He did not allow singing,” he said. “Not during magic practice. He said that bard magic was a myth—that he’d never seen it.”
“The joke is on him, then,” Sephie said.
Her comment surprised a laugh out of Taz. She was right, of course. “I wonder how Hebog will feel about that,” he said.
“He allowed you to learn the telyn, though,” she mused. “And gardening, too.”
“We all did our turn in the garden,” Taz told her, dealing with the simpler matter first. “We grew all our own food. Most of the others grumbled about weeding and planting and the like, but I enjoyed it. I’d swap other duties to spend more time with the plants, and I learned a few spells and a lot of plant lore from our gardener and from a man I met in the forest nearby.
He was a bard and a garden witch. It was him who discovered that when I sang at my work, the plants grew better and there were fewer pests. ”
“And Hebog still didn’t believe in your magic?” Sephie asked.
Taz shook his head. Hebog looked down on Daffyd the gardener as a peasant.
How could he possibly accept that the man knew anything about magic?
“He believed making me into a gardener would serve the cause,” he replied.
“He could send me to serve the English, knowing that nobody questions a gardener.” Which proved to be the case.
The mission to Baradine’s manor had been only the latest in a long succession.
She did not comment, and for a while they walked on in silence. The path had changed from the relatively level path across a slope to a tumble of rocks that formed uneven steps uphill, and they needed their breath for climbing.
Once the path leveled out again, though, he told her about the telyn and the other instruments he had learned.
“It was the same with learning to play musical instruments. Hebog wanted a disguise that would take me along the roads without being questioned. And into the taverns and the like.” That had worked, too.
Bards were more visible than gardeners, but the English nobility firmly believed that those who made music for a living were delicate flowers who presented no threat.
Taz snorted. They should try walking the roads and singing for their supper in the dead of winter.
“Something funny?” Sephie asked.
“The English,” he said. “Those raised in families with power, especially. They think education and intelligence are the same thing. They don’t believe a gardener or a bard can possibly be a threat to them.”
“Are the Welsh so different, then?” Sephie asked.
It was a fair question. The truth was that the Welsh families where the magic ran strong were as likely as the English to despise those they thought as beneath them. “Probably not,” he acknowledged.
Sephie sighed. “Perhaps we should have stayed with the fae. They don’t have such divisions.”
“They are all magical beings,” Taz pointed out. “Besides, they didn’t ask us to stay.”
*
The journey from the forest to Hebog’s mountain fastness took most of the rest of the day.
As they walked, Sephie asked more questions about the village that was their destination.
Cymraeg was the main language spoken, though most people knew at least a little English.
It was taught to all, and mastery of the language was required in those who were sent out into England or Scotland to spy or to foment trouble.