Adrian Silvercrest's Arc

Chapter 2 of 23

By morning Elara had a rule for him. "You don't eat if you don't work. That's the village. No one carries a stranger." She pushed a cup of water into Adrian's hand and pointed him at the door. "Try the forge first. Then the farm. Somebody will take you, or nobody will, and if it's nobody you sleep in the woods tonight." The blacksmith's shop sat at the end of the lane, its timbers black with soot, an anvil squatting inside the open doors. Adrian rolled his sleeves and asked for work. The smith laughed at his hands, then handed him the bellows. Adrian pumped until his shoulders burned. He held tongs wrong and dropped a hot bar. The smith swore and sent him out. "Come back when you've done a day of real labor somewhere else." Adrian walked to the farm at the edge of the fields. An old man in overalls and a straw hat stood by a broken fence post, staring at it like he could fix it by will. A boy, maybe twelve, held the other end. "I need work," Adrian said. "I'll take food. Not coin." The old man looked at Adrian's soft palms. "I'm Dan. I don't have coin anyway. Bank's already taking most of what I've got." He nodded at the post. "You dig. Boy holds. We'll see." Adrian dug. The shovel bit his hands raw by noon. Dan watched without speaking. When the post stood straight, Dan handed him bread and a strip of salt pork. "Tomorrow. Same time." He came back the next day, and the next. He learned to swing a mattock. He learned to milk. He carried water until his arms shook. In the evenings Elara drilled him on speech. "Say 'yeah.' Not 'indeed.'" He said yeah. She smiled and looked away too fast. At the end of the second week, Dan called him over at the fence. The grandson stood behind, watching. "You work," Dan said. "I told the smith. He'll take you afternoons. Says he needs a second pair of hands for the plow blades." He paused. "Village talked. Nobody's calling you a freeloader." Adrian felt his throat tighten. He nodded once, the way Dan nodded. He walked back through the lane with dirt on his knees and calluses splitting open on his palms. A man stepped out from between two cottages. Black hair, blue eyes, a dark robe stitched with small stars. He smiled like he'd been looking for Adrian a long time. "Your Highness," the man said quietly. "Or should I say the young man who dug fence posts today. I wondered where you'd gone." Adrian froze. He knew the voice before he placed the face. "Aldric." "Your father's wizard." Aldric's smile did not move. "And your friend, once. Still, I hope. We should talk before someone else finds you first."