Brightly Woven(17)

“Move,” I said. “If you want to stop, then fine, I’ll go ahead by myself. You can go wander off a cliff for all I care!”

“I’m sorry I said that about Astraea,” he said quietly. I tried to step around him, but he moved with me. “I haven’t been able to find any customers in the past few towns we’ve passed through, because opinions toward the wizards have changed. A lot of people blame the wizards for the king’s death and the war. I’ll be lucky to find a few jobs here and there to keep us going, but don’t think, not even for a moment, that I’ve forgotten why we set out in the first place.”

His face was so sincere that my body seemed to unwind on its own accord, loosening all the knots and frustrations.

“Well, have you ever thought of bathing?” I asked, turning away. “No one wants to hire a wizard who smells worse than their outhouse. And who knows what creatures are living in that hair?”

“Why do I need to brush my hair, anyway?” He lifted his arm and gave a few experimental whiffs. “And I smell wonderful. All manly and whatnot.”

Seeing my look of utter disgust, without another word, he wrapped an arm loosely around my shoulders, and the black cloak came up around us, and I was falling, falling, falling…

The moment my feet hit the ground, I pushed him away from me. North tripped over his heavy cloaks, stumbling backward until he fell onto the dirt with a startled curse.

“Don’t do that without giving me some warning!” I cried, my head still swimming dizzily.

He grunted as he picked himself off the ground.

“All right, all right,” he said. “Next time I’ll warn you when I’m about to twist the magical pillars of time and the world.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I said crossly. “But you’d better!”

“I thought you’d like twisting…,” he mumbled, picking leaves from his matted black hair.

“Twisting,” I repeated slowly. “Is that what it is? Why can’t we just twist to Provincia if it’ll get us there faster?”

North let out a dry laugh. “Don’t you think that if I was capable of doing it, we would already be in the capital by now? Twisting is extremely difficult for a wizard to do alone, let alone with someone else.”

“How far can you twist us at a time, then?” I asked.

“A mile—at the most,” he said. “And that’s quite a feat.”

I blew a stray curl out of my eyes. “Where are we now?”

“Our best chance for a job. Have a look.”

Dellark had been far nicer than anything I was used to in Cliffton. But even at night, this city was grand, far grander than anything my imagination could have produced, and for an instant I was sure we were in Provincia. Its walls and towers reached toward the sky in columns of the purest white. I followed the line of purple flags on the towers down to the moat surrounding the city. From a distance, the walls glinted in a way that reminded me of the porcelain in Mrs. Whitty’s shop at home. So smooth, like cream. It was Fairwell, home of master artists and their apprentices, the city that was to have been my first stop on the road to my future. I would take this chance to walk its streets, even with a reeking wizard at my side.

“Fairwell seems to have captured your heart as well,” North commented, pausing only a moment to readjust his leather bag.

I nodded. “It’s so…” I couldn’t find the right word. Even I, a world away in my little desert house, had heard stories of Fairwell’s fabulous glass sculptures. I had to find the green crystal dragons, and the blown vases large enough to fit a grown man inside. Henry would be incredibly jealous—in all of his travels, he had never once seen the white walls of Fairwell.

“Looks like they still haven’t fixed the bridge,” North said absently. In the distance, I could just make out a long, thin board that stretched over a waterless moat.

“Great Mother, what happened to it?” I asked. There should have been a drawbridge, or at least a stone entry into the city.

“Fairwell had an awful time with hedge witches a few years back,” North said. His shoulders slumped slightly. “But you probably don’t know what a hedge witch is, do you?”

“They take care of the gardening at the palace?” I tried.

“What we all wouldn’t give if they did.” The wizard chuckled. “They’re rogue women with magical ability, shunned by the wizarding community for their practices. They usually live on the outskirts of cities and steal shipments in and out of them to survive.”

“So there are no…male hedge witches?”

“No, we just call them rogue wizards or something of the like.”

“Well, that hardly seems fair,” I said. “Why are only the women singled out that way?”

“They got that name because for a very long time, female wizards were banned from learning most magic. It’s not that way anymore, of course, and you’re almost as likely to see a female wizard now as a male one,” he said. “About two hundred years ago, after the last great war with Auster, there were few magisters left with the skill to take on apprentices. At the time, the Sorcerer Imperial decided that the male wizards would be the ones to receive schooling, so that the next children of children would have a selection of magisters to choose from. Many women were unhappy, to say the least, and left to create their own communities where they taught themselves and one another. Those women and their descendants never came back to proper wizarding society.”