The morning was cool and quiet, the air crisp and clear, not yet touched by summer’s heat. Sunshine dripped through the forest canopy. Up above, birds chirped a sweet song.

  Then someone screamed.

  “Triand!”

  Triand rolled over without opening her eyes. “If it’s more witch hunters, tell ‘em we’re wizards, that’s a different division.”

  “Wake up, you old bat!”

  “You don’t have to get personal ...” Triand sat up, rubbed her eyes, and looked into an unshaved face poking out under a stained red kerchief. “Hey, you’re not Iwy.”

  “Over here.” Iwy stood in the middle of the protective circle with her bread knife drawn. The forest around them had sprouted eight men of varying ages but equal levels of unwashedness. All of them had swords.

  Triand stretched herself. “Mornin’, gentlemen. Fine day, innit? Anything we can do for you?”

  Unshaved number one grinned. “You could kindly hand over all your valuables. It’s for a good cause.” There was a chorus of laughter.

  Triand’s hand brushed against the tree trunk behind her as she stretched her arms again. “Is it? Which one?”

  “Your life.”

  “I already bought insurance.”

  Another man rolled his eyes. He lacked more teeth than the others and a good portion of his right ear, which seemed to make him the default leader. “Look, grandma, this is a robbery. Dave was just tryin’ to be smart.”

  “Weeell, have you boys noticed the protective circle around us?”

  “Have you noticed that you need to eat or drink sometime and will have to leave the circle?”

  “Got me there. Did you listen, Iwy? He got me.”

  Iwy tried to keep her panic at bay. She could already feel her powers not working and a bread knife was only useful against one opponent. She hoped Triand had some magic trick up her robe sleeve. She stage-whispered a “What do we do?” to the still unimpressed mage.

  “Well, I know there’s a stream only one mile down, so I’d say we refill our bottles and head back to the main road. Come on.” Triand dragged herself up on her staff and began packing her bundle. “Go on, pack up. We got a long way to go today.” She stomped on the forest floor three times for emphasis, grinning all the time. “Come on, look lively.”

  Iwy automatically did as she was told, not fully believing any of this was happening. “What about them?”

  “Oh, they’re busy.”

  One of the robbers elbowed the one next to him. “Yeah, come on out of the circle, girl. Niklas here can carry your bag for you.”

  “Go on, Iwy, one, two, three.” Triand pushed her in the back and she stumbled forward.

  The robbers pounced.

  Or at least tried to. All eight torsos performed a forward motion, but the lower halves ... didn’t. Smart Dave was the first one to notice the roots.

  The two women ducked between him and the apparent leader.

  The men pulled on their legs, which by now were sinking slightly into the soft forest ground, pulled downwards by tree roots that grew stronger with every second. “What the hell did you do, you old witch?” The mostly tooth- and earless man swung his sword in her general direction, missing by only an inch or two.

  “Oh, right, that. Learned that trick from a druid I used to, uh, step out with. She loved doin’ that to me. Anyway. Enjoy your day. Don’t let the squirrels bite ya.”

  The forest was filled with the musical sound of eight men’s curses as they walked on. Granted, this was a neat trick. One Iwy could have used on her siblings once or twice, especially her older brother Derek, who Iwy would personally run out of town with a pitchfork if they weren’t related, the lazy no-good berk. It seemed just the tiniest bit cruel.

  Triand didn’t seem to think so as she nudged her baffled apprentice. “C’mon, kid, that was fun.”

  Iwy tried to ignore the “kid” part. She didn’t hold with nicknames, considering she’d been “Celia’s second girl” for most of her life. “So, are they ever going to free themselves?”

  The mage waved the question away. “They’ll hack themselves through by sundown. It’s not like I’m feeding them to the bears.”

  They had known each other for less than a day and already they’d had a run-in with witch hunters and robbers. Iwy had somehow gotten through her entire life avoiding both. Triand didn’t seem bothered by any of this. Iwy wanted to know more about her. After all, she was her master for now. Which was for the best, she reminded herself. Best for everyone involved. And apprenticeships, her parents had insisted, no matter how odd the profession, needed to be taken seriously, otherwise where would the world be? But if they were going to be travelling together for a while, it would be nice to know what she was dealing with. “So, uh, you’re my master now.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “You don’t have to call me that,” Triand said.

  “Did you ever have one?”

  “A bit, yes. Actually, not really. Actually, it’s been a while.”

  That might have been the wrong approach. “Where’s home?”

  “You live in Riansfield, have you already forgotten that?”

  “No, I mean you.”

  “Oh, right. Don’t have one.”

  “Oh, I’m sor...”

  “Don’t need one, don’t want one. I got roads. I like roads.”

  Iwy had heard that magic types tended to be secretive, but this was still an impressive amount of non-answers. She switched topics. “So, you know druids?” The only information Iwy had on druids came from travellers passing on stories in exchange for beer at the pub. They always made it sound like they were a sort of weird independent community who hugged trees and lived in the forest to avoid paying taxes. Many a joke had been made about joining them for this aspect alone. “I’ve never met one, what are they like?”

  “Really laid-back. Decent conversation partners. But you have to stay away from their pipeweed unless you want to get into an argument with a five-foot-tall gopher.”

  “I don’t understand”, Iwy said later, when they had reached the stream. “Why would a druid root you to the ground?”

  “Weeell, you know, fun.” Triand winked.

  Iwy had the feeling that from this point onward, her life would consist mainly of questions.

  “Are you at least going to tell me where we’re heading?” she asked as they stepped back on the road.

  “Riestra.”

  “The city? Why?” Once, as a small girl, Iwy had been to the city and enjoyed none of it. Granted, at least the new-fangled witch hunter guild would have trouble picking her out of a crowd.

  She glanced at Triand. Or not.

  “I need some resources from the wizard sanctum. Some scrolls I want to have a look at. Maybe we’ll even find a solution to your little control problem. Added bonus, no witch hunters. They tend to stay away from wizard cities.”

  That made sense; the magic types stuck together.

  “Too high a chance of accidentally arrestin’ a wizard. They’d have the entire order on their case.”

  Or not. “Wait, they have no problems with wizard magic?”

  “Nope.”

  “Only with witches?”

  “Yep.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Yep.”

  What Iwy knew about wizards fit on a bookmark. They waved sticks and mumbled dead languages. She now vaguely recalled a haughty old man in Riestra, wearing what she had thought was a bathrobe, nagging her to get out of the way. In hindsight, he had looked a lot like in the books her younger sister Elisia read.

  She had never heard anyone speak ill of them, though Old Tom down at the pub had once said they were no better than the gentry, but as far as Iwy could tell, they didn’t rule over anything. Now she wondered why that was.

  The road west was empty. Iwy could make out someone’s haycart in the distance. It might have been neighbour Danils, but the cart was too far away to call to.

  At the other end of the road lay home. She could be there in a few hours if she kept running. She could ... no, no, no, she couldn’t.

  As they walked on, she spotted more and more people out in the fields, scything through the rows. If Iwy had been home, by this time she would already have lit a fire in the stove, fed the chickens, collected the eggs, brought in wood, and helped Ma with the breakfast before heading out with her siblings to tend to their own fields. It was a hot summer, not as hot as Old Woman Marni remembered from her youth, but still much better than last year, when summer hadn’t come at all. Marni kept notes on that. The last years had been much too cold for the most part, she said. Could only hope for a better harvest this year.

  She reached into her bag for breakfast and immediately felt a pang of guilt as her fingers brushed against the talisman her sister Josie had given her when the siblings had said their goodbyes in the cellar the night before she left. Derek had joked about now having two witches in the family and earned himself a slap.

  Iwy fashioned a makeshift bacon sandwich while walking and dug into it. She offered a half to Triand who refused politely. Iwy hadn’t seen her eat anything at all so far, and she had slept through most of yesterday. Wasn’t she starving? Did wizards – or whatever in the world she was – not need to eat?

  “So. What does an apprentice do?”

  “For now, just hang around and remember most of what I’m telling you.”

  This sounded vaguely disappointing. “My father said you had some sort of work to do,” Iwy prompted.

  The mage made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, that, yeah. Just a bit of … transport, really, yes, let’s call it transport. I’ll tell you about that some other time.”

  “Why not now if it’s important?”

  “Because I need to know if you’re up for the task.”

  That probably meant the mage had some tests planned for her. This was like school all over again. But at school, at least your books told you what was in store for you next.

  Triand was sipping on her flask again. The contents smelled like they could strip a wall off paint. Finding the mage passed-out drunk was apparently not going to be a one-off event. “So. Lesson time. How much you know about magic, kid?”

  ‘Practically nothing’ was probably not the answer Triand was looking for. Putting salt on the doorstep and sage in the window shouldn’t count, everyone did that. “I don’t know. It’s sort of everywhere, I guess? And some people can use it and some can’t?”

  “Weeell, technic’lly, everyone can use magic. That’s the first thing you need to know. For most people it stays pretty mundane, though.”

  “No one in my family can.”

  “Really? No one makes better tea than the others even though they use the same leaves and kettle? No one’s barley ever gets ripe before anyone else’s? No one there who somehow never gets bitten by an insect?”

  Iwy thought about it. Granted, there were some things she had always wondered about, things that people noticed and commented on, like ... “Ma’s ale never goes sour. Never. Her friends keep asking her for her secret, but she says it just never happens to her.”

  “There you go. You wouldn’t happen to have brought any so we can, uh, check?”

  Iwy ignored this. “My sister Josie can fix everything, so you’d never know it had been broken. And Jendrick can make preserves better than our grandma.”

  “See? Mundane. But useful.”

  “How is that magic and not talent? Or dumb luck?”

  “Where d’you think talent and dumb luck come from? You know, imagine magic as air. Everyone can feel air, right? And imagine mages as old people. We feel every little draught and breeze, and we know when it’s going to rain when other people don’t.”

  Against her better judgement, Iwy was interested. Triand seemed to sense this and took another swig.

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “Oh, do you ever. Got anything to write?”

  * * *

  The witch hunter leader nodded. He did so rather carefully; it had taken some time to patch him up after his horse had dragged him for a mile. Even worse, his black suit was still dusty; you couldn’t get a decent laundry in these backwoods for love or money. How was that supposed to look? A witch hunter was to uphold a certain dignity, otherwise what would people think?

  The group of men currently in front of his table at a third-rate inn seemed at least impressed enough. One of them even took off his red kerchief. “So, you’re saying, guv, if someone were to tell you about the whereabouts of a couple o’ witches, that someone would get a reward or something?”

  “Someone might.”

  “And how high might that reward be?”

  “Five silvers.” He surveyed the crowd. Tough customers. “Per person, say.”

  Smart Dave flashed a fifty percent toothless grin. “Ain’t that just our lucky day.”