Stonefather полностью

The trouble was that Runnel knew the hearth was not alive. Or at least it hadn’t been. It touched the earth, with no wood under it like the flagstones of the cellar floor. Small stones linked it to bedrock. But Stokhos was saying that it was living rock — all of one piece.

“Clever,” said one of the other guests. “It all looks loose from the surface, but yes, it is all of one piece, deep inside.”

“Subtle,” said another. The admiration in their voices was obvious.

“You were never that good a student in school,” said Stokhos, chuckling — but the chuckle was artificial. He was genuinely surprised.

“A man never stops learning,” said Lord Brickel.

“But a wise man does not show his enemies what he has learned,” said Stokhos. Runnel understood: You risk being discovered.

“The fish sees only what’s in the water,” said Lord Brickel. Meaning: The watermages of Mitherhome can’t tell what’s going on deep inside the stone.

“But when the spring flood rolls loose cobbles down the stream, the fish sees that.” Meaning: What if they tried to repair or remove some of this stone and found it was no longer loose?

“Living stone doesn’t roll with the flood,” said Lord Brickel. Meaning: Why would anyone repair this hearth when living rock will never need repairing?

“Well,” said Stokhos, resuming his seat, “a bird like me can tell if the tree is sound before building his nest — but such as I cannot heal a dead tree and bring it back to life.”

Did that mean that Lord Brickel had leapt past the level of a rockbrother to do work that only stonefathers could do? No wonder Stokhos sounded surprised. A true stonefather was rare; a fathermage was rare in any of the houses of magic. That’s why in Lark’s story of the great battle with the Verylludden, the stonemages had been only cobblefriends and rockbrothers, and had to work together to do what a stonefather could have done alone. There might not have been a stonefather in all the world, or not one close enough to get to Mitherhome in time to save it.

From things he had heard all his life, he had always believed that magery was a combination of what you were born with, what you learned, and what you earned. The stories of wolfmages that alternately terrified and fascinated the children of Farzibeck talked of how a child would find that dogs were always drawn to him, then his parents would fear he might be a wolfmage, and kept him away from dogs. In the stories, the child always found a wolf pup out in the forest and fed and protected it, and thus gained in power among the wolves, not just because of his inborn ability, but also because he took risks and spent many hours serving and saving a wolfkin. But the stories all implied that a mage could never surpass the level of ability born in him.

Even if greater power could be earned, how could Lord Brickel have earned it when he was expressly forbidden to serve the stone? Of course, under that circumstance, it might be that any small service he gave could be magnified by the risk. That must be it.

What surprised Runnel most, however, had nothing to do with Lord Brickel. It was when Stokhos said, “A bird like me can tell if the tree is sound.” To Runnel, this clearly meant that only a rockbrother could sense whether stone was living or not.

But I can do that.

The idea of this took his breath away. He was like the wolfmages in the stories. He was like Lark—having a mage’s power without realizing it. He had thought that at most he might be a pebbleson, a person who liked stone but had no power over it. After all, wasn’t he a worshipper of Yeggut, like all his village?

And how had he ever served stone? How could you serve stone, except to bring it back to life when it was dead? And since that was a thing that only a stonefather could do, how could stonemages earn any increase in power? Yet Lord Brickel had done it.

Then it dawned on him. If he was indeed a rockbrother, or at least had one of the powers of a rockbrother, then when he came to this house, perhaps the power of two stonemages — one trained and one raw and untrained— combined so that the trained one, Lord Brickel, could do things beyond his ability alone.

I’m serving here in ways that I hadn’t even guessed, thought Runnel. It made him proud to be useful, not just in the housework but in the magery itself.

The meal went on, but the conversation shifted to safer subjects — or else the code was more obscure, and Runnel didn’t know how to understand it. No matter — they began to send him out for more ale and finally for a second round of food, which he knew would irritate Sourwell, though Nikwiz never seemed to mind. It was a late night, and when Demwor came home and saw the dinner was still going on, he sent Runnel to bed. “I’ll tend them myself till they finally notice it’s late,” said the steward. “I’ll tell the master myself if I have to — he has much work to do tomorrow. “

“Can I go along?” asked Runnel.