Magic in Ithkar Read Online Free PDF Page B

up an old, old woman as gaudy as her trade, striped skirts, ripple-weave shawl, grizzled braids done up in yarn. “Who’s this?” she said.
    “I don’t know,” the friar said. “Son, you have a name?”
    “Sphix.” The blankets hanging leftward moved; a dark, frowning boy stood there; another move: on the right a man, huge and black-haired, with bare arms the largest he had seen on any man. Oh, Lords, the place was as warm. No knowing what ambushes. “Sphix, ma’am.” His eyes went back to the grandam in the braids, his smile immediate, winning, and tragic. “The good father said—”
    “Of your charity,” the friar said. “The lad was beaten. Robbed. I fed him.” The friar was dragging him through the maze, the grandam left behind; there was a corner of the tent, a pallet. “Mind your manners. You’re in Grandma Nosca’s tent. Wipe your feet; don’t tread the blankets.”
    They were pursued. The boy came bringing blankets, fine, new blankets. The friar handed them Sphix’s way and Sphix clutched them, gazed perplexedly at the religious, remembering the fat woman and the coin. So now there were blankets.
    “You a magician of some kind?” Sphix asked, half-afraid to hear the answer. “Everything come when you want it?”
    “When I need it. Mostly.” The friar sat down, kicked off his leather-and-wooden shoes, revealing gray woolen socks. He lay down and flipped the blankets over his rough habit. “To sleep, lad, sleep, that’s what we’re here for.”
    Sphix made his bed—never such a bed in all his life, not with first-time blankets. He worked his boots off (no socks), prudently tucked them under the blanket edge, and lay down with a great sigh.
    Coss tried to haunt the edges of his sleep; there was always, last before sleep, Khussan’s eyeless face. But he was too tired—too helpless, he told himself.
    Then even fear for his life was too little a fear. His stomach hurt, but it was that good kind of hurt rich food gave it. He tucked up and shut his eyes—
    —opened them again with the before-light bustle of activity. His boots were still there and likewise the coin in its place in his belt, which he had not even loosened.
    He rubbed his eyes. The friar stirred and sat up.
    He smelled coals.
    “Breakfast,” the friar said.
    Sphix began to sit up. The beating hurt enough to bring tears to his eyes; but it was of no consequence. He smelled fresh bread and imagined wondrous things, like jam and butter, tasting them in his memory of special days, the tavern table and old Melly’s preserves.
    Oh, Lords, to be a priest, he thought; and eat jam and butter.
    When the friar got up and made up his pallet, he took his cue, smiled his winningest smile, folding up his blankets. “Breakfast, Father?”
    The old man did not smile, not all the way. Sphix knew such smiles, was a connoisseur of expressions; and that look frightened him, that wistful, I-know-you-lie look.
    “Tea,” the old man said, “and bread and butter. That suit you?”
    Oh, mightily it suited.
    “Yes, Father.” He levered himself to his feet, staggered this way and that, and made the tent shake, wobbling into it. He kept the idiot cheerfulness on his face because the friar had an impatient look; he played the fool, because a fool could make laughter, turn questions, lie a bit.
    And get out after breakfast.
    “Who beat you?”
    “Father—” Instant, owlish sobriety. “I’ve no desire to know.”

    There was Nosca, eldest; her son, Olf (Blackbeard), western and broad-faced; and Olf’s wife, Tiggynu, eastern and flat-nosed, with small dark eyes and dusky skin and red enamel on her canines when she grinned. The imp was Stynnit, half-and-half, father’s nose and mother’s eyes and no one’s freckles but his own. Sphix scowled at the brat and the brat grinned, having everything all his life and eating bread each morning.
    Of a sudden, between the cakes and the second cup of tea, his aching ribs caught up to him, and it was