Forest Mage

“You still up to traveling tomorrow?” I asked Hitch.

“You bet,” he replied.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

JOURNEY TO GETTYS

I did one final task before I left the next morning. I got up at dawn and slipped out of the house before Buel was stirring. I needn’t have been so quiet. His cheeks were red, and he slept the slumber of an ill man. But I went like a creeping mouse, for I wanted no witnesses.

I went to the abandoned vegetable patch. I stooped down and set my hands on the earth. I closed my eyes. I pressed my palms firmly against the wet and matted vegetation and the soil beneath it. I spoke aloud, more to focus myself than because I thought it necessary. “I will travel better and more swiftly if I know that Amzil and her children are provided for. Grow.”

After a time, I opened my eyes. A fine misty rain was falling all around me. It beaded in tiny droplets on my shirtsleeves and clung to my eyelashes. My gut was in my way. It was hard to crouch low and touch the ground. I felt like I was folding myself. I couldn’t take a full breath. And nothing had happened.

But I hadn’t really expected anything to happen, had I?

Revelation. How could anyone do a magic that he didn’t believe in? I gave up my crouch. I knelt on the wet earth. I pressed my hands firmly to the soil. I took a deep breath, and discarded both my disbelief and my deep-seated fear that the magic was real and I could do this. I made myself recall the sense of power I’d felt when I’d clasped the sapling growing from Tree Woman’s breast. That power. That flowing transference of being. That was what I wanted. I took a deep breath. Then I clenched my fingers in the gritty soil and breathed out, breathed out until there was no air left in my lungs, and still I forced something out of myself, not from my hands but from my gut and through my arms and down and out of my fingers. Colors danced at the edges of my vision. Something was happening. I watched it. The ragged grasses and jagged leaved weeds dwindled, sinking back into the earth. The vegetables I blessed swelled and grew. Turnips shouldered purple tops above the soil. A yellowing stalk of a potato plant went green, lifted from the ground, and thrust up buds that opened to small white flowers. The fronds of carrots lifted above the brown soil, stood tall and dark green. I held the flex of whatever it was I strained, held it until spots danced before my eyes.

I opened my eyes, lost my balance as the world spun around me, and rolled over on my side in the soil. I breathed, deep gasping breaths. My arms and legs tingled as if they’d fallen asleep. I worked my aching hands, flexing them, trying to get the blood flowing through my numbed limbs. When I could, I sat up.

I had expected the vision to pass. It had not. All around me, in a perfect circle, the weeds had vanished. My chosen vegetables remained, crisp and tall, ready for harvest. There were round heads of cabbage set in wide-leafed cups of foliage and the tall feather fronds of carrots, there were turnip leaves and red-stemmed beet tops and a patch of potatoes gone to bloom.

It took me three efforts to push away from the ground and stand up. Then I teetered on my legs like a new colt. I was giddy, not just with what I had achieved, but from the effort I’d spent achieving it. It took me a few moments to realize another, even more amazing change.

My clothing hung almost loose on me.

It was a minor change, or would have been to anyone else but me. The uncomfortable binding of my trouser waistband, the way my shirt cut into me under my arms, the tightness of my collar—in short, in every place where a moment ago my garments had been uncomfortably tight, they now rode looser. To prove it to myself, I seized the waistband of my trousers and shifted them around my waist. They moved freely. I was still a fat man. But I was marginally less fat than I’d been a few moments before.

And I was ravenously hungry.

With that realization, my senses woke to the bounty all around me. An overpowering drive to replenish what I had lost drove all awe from my mind. I tugged a carrot from the earth. It was long and a deep orange-red. The end of it broke off in the soil. I forced my fingers through the packed earth, seized the broken piece, and pulled it up. I wiped the loose damp soil from the pieces and then crunched into the carrot. The grit on it ground between my back teeth as I chewed it, adding its own earthy note to the flavor. I ground the orange root to juicy sweetness in my mouth. Never had I tasted such a remarkable vegetable. The innermost core of it was sweet, and the whole of it was crisp, not tough at all. I chewed on the thick end of the green, curiously tasting the feathery tops of the carrot. My glance fell on a turnip. The leafy top came off in my hand when I tried to pull it. No matter. I stuffed the greens into my mouth and chewed them as I dug my fingers into the earth around the purple-and-white root. I pulled it up in one try. Smaller roots like seeking tendrils hung from it, crusted with dirt. I shook it and then wiped it on my trouser leg.