Marco took a steadying breath and cast the Level 1 Ignition spell into the small pile of dry tinder on the ground in front of him. He peered through the evening gloom as he cast the spell, trying hard to keep the magic in balance as he guided it into the midst of the tinder. He stabilised the spell so it wouldn’t go flying away when the power was released, then activated it.

  There was a crunch of feet from behind him, and Marco flinched, losing control at the critical moment. The spell blasted away from him, darting through the air and leaving a bright trail like a frightened firefly before hitting the trunk of a nearby tree and fizzing out. There was a faint smell like burned sugar in the air from the dispersed magic.

  Marco cursed under his breath, partly at the loss of the spell, and partly from fright. He turned his head awkwardly and looked up from where he squatted to see who had interrupted him.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said a polite, mellow voice. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just looking for a place to camp.”

  The stranger was tall - unusually tall - and dressed from head to toe in a dark green robe. A deep hood hid any sign of a face from Marco’s gaze. The effect might have been eerie, but Marco didn’t feel it so. Instead, he felt a curious fascination, and the annoyance and fright he’d felt a moment before vanished as he peered up through the gloom at the tall stranger.

  “Hey, that’s okay,” he said, and found that he meant it. “I was trying to get my fire lit with a spell. You walked in on me at a crucial moment, you see, so I lost control of the magic.”

  “Sounds dangerous,” the stranger said.

  Marco laughed. “Not really. Magic is pretty flighty at the best of times, but it doesn’t tend to do any harm, even when you lose control of it.” Part of his mind was surprised, not only at the fact that he felt completely comfortable, but because he was immediately sharing his opinions on magic, a subject that he normally kept quiet about. He would normally only discuss the topic with people he really trusted. Sadly, people he really trusted were few and far between these days.

  The stranger took a few steps closer. “Do you mind if I sit?”

  “Please,” Marco said politely, gesturing to the space on the opposite side from the little pile of kindling. “Sit, be comfortable. If you’ll give me a moment, I’ll have another go at lighting this fire. Then we can have some heat and light as well as conversation.”

  “That would be pleasant,” the stranger said as they lowered themselves down smoothly into a cross-legged position opposite Marco. “It’s a cold night, and I’ve not had a chance for friendly conversation for some time.”

  Marco caught a glimpse of well-made boots and a bright belt buckle gleaming in the faint light of the dim evening as the stranger sat down, but the hood was so deep and there was still no sign of a face. He smiled at the stranger, surprised at how keen he was to make the person feel welcome.

  He turned his attention back to the magic.

  Ignition was a simple spell at Level 1, a very basic piece of magic that Marco had known for years. But even the simplest of the elemental lore magics were worthy of respect, and took some effort and care to cast.

  Magic was a skill that could be learned by anyone, but that did not mean that it was equally easy for anyone to learn. Marco likened it to music - people had an innate skill for it, or they did not, but even those with no skill at all could still learn to do it. Unlike music, Marco had some innate talent for magic, and he’d pursued spellwork with an avid interest ever since he’d been old enough to start practicing in earnest. The result was a respectable, though hardly impressive, collection of Level 1 spells from the Lore of Fire, a few Level 1 spells from the Lore of Water, and even one Water Level 2 spell, though he struggled to cast that one effectively.

  Now, he re-centered his attention on the magic. He was keenly aware of the stranger watching him as he worked. He wasn’t used to having an audience when he did magic, and the presence of others changed the experience. But he put the feeling of being watched to one side as far as he was able, and brought the spell to the front of his mind again.

  This time, he was more successful at casting. He let the spell take shape in his mind, then guided it carefully through his body and out into the world. A small, glowing orange sphere about the size of hazelnut appeared, hovering over the upright palm of his hand. He guided the little glowing sphere into the pile of tinder, his intent, angular face illuminated by the light of his spell as he did so. He balanced the spell in position within the pile of sticks, then released its power.

  “Yes!” he said under his breath, clenching his hands into exultant fists as the Ignition spell flared up and lit the small pile of kindling with a hiss and a crackle. He was delighted. Even casting a small spell like this felt like an achievement - more so since he had an audience.

  Greedy flames ran up the small shavings of wood and sparked in the sappy twigs. without missing a beat Marco began piling larger pieces of dry wood onto the small blaze. After a minute or so, he had a good little fire going, burning brightly and throwing out a generous heat. The flames flickered up, sending sparks spinning between the branches of the tall pine trees above and illuminating the little woodland clearing with a cheerful yellow light.

  He checked the pile of wood he’d gathered earlier and gauged it sufficient for a few hours. He took three larger pieces and carefully stacked them on the fire, then looked up to find his companion watching him. In the light and heat of the fire, she'd pushed back her hood to reveal a face so beautiful he found it difficult to look at. Her hair gleamed as dark red as sunrise, and her eyes were the green shaded moss.

  She was an elf.

  That explained her extreme height, her mellow voice, and perhaps the unexpected feeling of calm and trust that she’d immediately inspired in Marco. Elves were known to be trustworthy and generous, and their goodness had an effect on those around them.

  He smiled. “Well, there we go. Heat and light, as promised.”

  The words came out a little too heartily, and a small, awkward silence blossomed in the space behind them. The truth was that Marco was intimidated by the elf’s beauty. It wasn’t human beauty. A beautiful human woman made Marco feel like he wanted to get close to her, get to know her, fall in love with her. This elf was beautiful the way dawn was beautiful, or a glade of trees in spring, or a flight of migrating geese over the red of an autumn forest. If the raw gorgeousness of a river valley in the height of summer had been distilled into a person, it might have looked something like this.

  She was beautiful, but remote, not beautiful in a way that had anything to do with him. her beauty humbled him, making him feel just a small piece in a vast and mysterious world.

  “Heat and light are welcome,” she said into the silence. “I feel the cold.” She leaned forward and held her long-fingered hands out over the flames. “I was looking for a place to stop and make a fire myself. I was lucky to find you.”

  Another awkward silence.

  Marco smiled. “Have you eaten? I have some food - it’s not much, but I’m happy to share.”

  Have you ever experienced how awkward barriers between people break down when they eat together? A gathering of folk may have to work hard to keep conversation going; there may be silences, disagreements, even arguments, but after a solid meal has been shared, these things have a tendency to be washed away. That was how Marco felt as he and his new acquaintance opened their bags and began to lay out their food, commenting on each other’s supplies and exchanging tastes of each other’s rations.

  It was just traveller’s fare, and nothing special, but neither the elf nor Marco was reluctant to have a change. She had dried apples, small, fresh oranges that she said she’d bought from a passing peddler on the road two days before, a loaf of seed bread, and two little sweet cakes that she said came from her hometown of Learian, in the elven country to the south. Marco had bread too, but his was thick with raisins and candied citrus peel. He had a pat of fresh butter that he’d bought at a farm he’d passed earlier that same day. When she saw the butter, the elf gave a little cry of delight and exclaimed that she’d not had butter for her bread in days.

  When he pulled out his jar of honey and said that he had enough for both of them to have a taste, she laughed in delight like a little child. He had wine - sweet and good though not very strong - and some dried meat. He also had a pouch of beef sausages, and he took out a little travel pan from his pack and fried them over the fire, making the flames hiss and spit as the fat ran over the edge of the pan into the flames.

  They shared everything equally, and the elf - whose name was Seana - laughed and chattered away happily about the food as she tasted everything. Afterward, Marco walked a little way away to the stream where he washed his pan out, scoured the bottom with a handful of river sand, then washed his face and hands and drank deeply.

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  “You say you’ve been on the road for some days?” he asked as he returned to the fire, built it up, and sat back on a blanket, leaning against his pack.

  “Some weeks, more like,” Seana replied. She groaned as she stretched, then leaned back against the trunk of a tree and stuck her boots out toward the fire. The light from the flames struck sparks from her deep green eyes and from her long, thick, dark red hair. “And you?”

  “A week… no, eight days,” Marco said.

  “You’re going to Calth?”

  Marco nodded. “I’m going to see someone about a job.”

  “Me too,” Seana said quietly, and there was something in her tone that made him look up.

  He followed his intuition, the wine giving him confidence to make the leap in a way he probably would not have done normally. “A job you don’t want to take?” he asked.

  She looked at him levelly for a long moment, and the silence that developed then was not awkward, but it was tense in a different way. She took a breath as if to speak, then shook her head. “A job I don’t want to take,” she agreed.

  Marco could see that she didn’t want to speak more about it, so he grinned. “I don’t want to take up the job I’m going to either,” he confessed.

  She sat forward now, smiling, her expression becoming more relaxed again. “If you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine,” she offered confidentially.

  Marco raised an eyebrow. “Mine’s no great secret,” he said. “There’s an opening at the numbers guild. They need an apprentice in the accounts department.”

  “Sounds… enthralling,” Seana said, her mouth quirking for a moment. “You like numbers?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t dislike them,” he said, “but there are other things I’d rather do. A guild apprenticeship is good, don’t get me wrong. I’m lucky to have it, but it’s…” he trailed off, trying to find a word that was truthful, while not being disloyal to his family connections who had got him the job.

  “Boring?” Seana suggested.

  He snorted with laughter. “I was trying to come up with a kinder word for it, but I suppose there’s no need to.”

  “Not at all. You’re in sympathetic company.”

  He raised his hands helplessly. “What can I do? My uncle Alous exerted influence to get me the post, and my mother and father are overjoyed. It’s decent money, and it’s stable work - everyone needs people with numbers guild qualifications, and that’s not going to change. But you’re right, it is boring. I feel like I’m being really ungrateful, you know?”

  “What would you rather do?” Her voice was as mellow as honey, deeper than he’d have expected from a woman, and so rich he wished she would speak more. His own voice sounded harsh and shrill in comparison to hers. He tried to ignore that.

  He sighed. “It’s a funny thing, but no one has ever asked me that.”

  Selea did not speak, and he could tell she was giving him time to think. After a moment, he grinned again. “I’d rather do magic. But there’s no money in that. Not in the kind of magic I want to do.”

  “Fire magic?”

  Marco put another log on their campfire and nodded. “It’s so satisfying. And I’ve seen what it can do when it’s taken to a high level. When I was young - really young, like five or six years old - there was a fire in our village. It was the blacksmith’s shop, and there was this mage staying over in the village. A fire mage. He just walked up to the fire and took control of it.”

  “He put it out?”

  “No, not exactly. He pulled the fire out. He pulled it out of the building. He held his hands up and spread his fingers wide and walked toward the fire, reaching for it, and it just… came to him. It’s hard to describe. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since, but he just pulled the fire out of the building. Then it was whirling about in the stone square in front of the smith’s shop, and he… this sounds stupid, but it’s the only way I can say it - he folded it up. It was as if the fire was a huge blanket two stories high. He just folded it over and over again until it was a little square of glowing stuff in his hand. Then he tucked it into his pocket and walked away.”

  Seana was listening, spellbound, her lips slightly parted and her huge green eyes sparkling with interest. Her dark red hair tumbled artlessly down around her shoulders, contrasting with the forest green of her robe. She had sat up and was leaning in closer to the fire, warming her long-fingered hands as she listened. Suddenly, and to his own surprise and discomfort, the remoteness of her beauty was whipped away from her, and she was suddenly gorgeous in a very human way. Marco felt his throat go dry and his heart skipped a beat, but thankfully he didn’t have to speak just then.

  The moment passed.

  “That’s amazing,” she said breathlessly. She sat back from the flames and straightened her spine, and like a cloud passing over the sun, the inhuman remoteness came back to her face.

  Marco cleared his throat and took a swallow from his waterskin as the shocking power of her beauty passed. “It was amazing,” he continued. “I tried to speak to the man, but my parents wouldn’t let me, and he left town the next day. The people in the village didn’t want to talk about it. It was as if the man had done something shameful.”

  Seana scowled. “But I don’t understand. He stopped the building burning, didn’t he?”

  “Not just that. He saved the village smithy, but he saved the lives of the smith and his whole family as well. Nine people, Seana - the smith, her husband, her old father, both her husband’s parents, and her three little children. I thought the mage would be celebrated - a hero, like in the stories - but he went off the next day, early, and no one wanted to talk about what had happened.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Seana said.

  Marco took a sip from the wineskin and passed it to Seana. She took it and nodded thanks, then drank carefully, dabbed her lips, and handed it back. He watched her as she drank, noticing the little differences that showed her as not human, looking for the intensely human beauty he’d seen for a moment, and not seeing it.

  There was something in the way her arms and wrists moved, as if her joints were more mobile than his, and there was something in the way she held her head, and the way her eyes were less the classic almond shape that you would expect in a human. They were more circular, almost like a cat’s, the lashes sitting strangely under her arched brows. Small, small differences, but they added up. She was not a human, and that made her all the more interesting.

  “You’ve not been around humans much, have you?” Marco asked.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked, her voice a little sharp as her eyes searched his face, suddenly wary.

  He gave her a half smile and rummaged in his bag, digging out another blanket to wrap around his shoulders. “If you’d spent time with humans, you’d know that they don’t like elemental mages. Oh, they’ll make use of them when they have to, but skill in the elemental magics is seen as kind of shameful among a lot of people. Unnatural, you know?”

  “I didn’t know.” She sat thoughtfully for a moment while Marco rearranged the blanket he’d been sitting on, moving it closer to the fire.

  “It seems a shame,” she said as he lay down, pillowing his head against his pack. “Magic always seemed like a great thing to me. We didn’t have any in the village where I grew up.”

  “I’d heard that elves don’t have magic. Is that true, then?”

  “It’s true. Sometimes, you get a renegade who develops a taint for it and goes off to follow it.”

  “A taint… you mean a talent?”

  “I suppose so. But the elves call it a taint. The family usually hushes it up, and the practitioner is never seen again.”

  He rolled over so he could look at her. “So elves think magic is shameful too?”

  “Not magic in itself,” Seana said. “They don’t think there’s anything wrong with humans doing magic. But it’s wrong for an elf to want to do it. And it’s very wrong for an elf to go beyond wanting it and actually to do it.”

  He tossed another log on the fire. That would keep him warm, burning down to embers as he slept. There was enough wood left to restart the fire in the morning. He’d be able to use the embers to get the fire going again quickly and heat water for breakfast.

  “People are weird,” Marco said, snuggling into his blankets.

  Seana laughed quietly. “All people? Not just humans?”

  “Humans, elves… I’ve not met any other kinds of people, except… Well, there was an old ork in the village when I was young. Ran the library, and was always trying to get people into books. He was okay, I guess.”

  He half closed his eyes against the smoke from the newly catching log, which chose that moment to sweep toward him and go up his nose. He lay flat, not breathing in, and waited for it to pass. When it did, he was aware of Seana laying out her blankets on the other side of the fire.

  “Hey,” he said sleepily. “I told you about the job I’m going to that I don’t want to do. You never told me yours.”

  “Hmm?” she said. She had already laid down and wrapped herself in her blanket and cloak. He turned his head and looked through the wrinkled heat haze above the shifting flames. She looked cosy, her knees drawn up to her chest, her hood pulled over her head, and only the pale oval of her face and the glint of her deep green eyes showing beneath the hood and blankets.

  “You said you were going to do a job you didn’t want to do," he repeated, “same as me. You said you’d tell me yours if I told you mine.”

  “Oh,” she laughed. There was a long silence. “Can I tell you tomorrow?”

  “You want to walk on to Calth together then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  He rolled onto his back and looked up again. The wine, though not strong, had gone to his head, and combined with the long day of walking he’d just done, Marco was ready for sleep. The stars were very clear tonight, and he could see them more clearly now the light of the fire had died down.

  The huge span of the night sky stretched above him, and he breathed slowly, enjoying the smell of the pinewoods, and his full belly, and the thick blanket and the crackling fire on its thick ember bed, keeping him warm. He wondered about Seana, and wondered about how his trip to the guild would be tomorrow, and he wondered what the job was that she’d tell him about tomorrow.

  His thoughts swirled and spread and smeared like the light of the stars across the sky as he dropped like a stone into a deep, dreamless sleep.