Ebba looked at the young mage she had taken as her apprentice in the traditional shamanic arts of Kjolte, and shook her head in despair. He was, even now, wondering if he should not have been “so cruel” to the talentless hack of a mage who had aided the raiding party that had come into camp the night before.

  She had come out to the central fire ring of the camp right after she and Jens had dropped all of the raiders. None of them looked especially

  While they had not killed anyone, their actions had led to one of the guards on duty during the night breaking both of his arms. The noisy sleep spell the little Piincar woman had cast had caught Yurlan as he was standing in an awkward space, and when he had fallen, it had broken both of the poor young man’s arms.

  And now Jens was sad that he had tied up the woman who had done it. He was sulking, even. Like a child himself.

  Had Ebba not been so old herself, she would never have taken the soft headed boy into her care. But, someone needed to learn all of what she had gained in her life, and her own shortsighted actions had left her on this pilgrimage too late in her life to train up anyone else.

  She was mad at herself now. And frustrated with how the Goddess had allowed her to make so many bad choices that she now sat here around her fire, waiting for the rest of the camp to awaken, as she sipped her tea and watched her mushroom-headed student finally dress himself in the morning cold as he mumbled and grumped about “hurting a little girl.”

  “Humph.” The old woman exhaled as Jens put on his pants again, this time right side out. “If she’s a child, I am her doting uncle.”

  “Grandmother of my heart, you should not scowl like that, your face will stick, and we will have to make our way through the world by scaring witches out of villages.” The voice of the caravan leader, Marna, sounded like the younger woman was smiling. As she approached out of the shadows, it was clear that Marna was not smiling. The tall, spare, raw boned woman walked calmly into the warm, flickering circle of firelight offered up by the small campfire that had been laid and tended by her apprentice.

  Marna’s face, long, blue and green skin tones, a lovely blending of graduated shades, highlighted how her generous mouth turned down at the corners in a mild frown, and the slight crinkling at the edges of her eyes as they squinted in a way that showed she was not happy.

  Not at all.

  From where he was pulling his tunic on, Jens tried to both stand up straighter, and bow at the same time. It would have been comical, had it been anyone else but the lad to whom Ebba was intending to trust her life’s works, the very secrets of her craft.

  Ebba sighed, and stood to greet the caravan leader. Her own hair was pulled into the single braid she favored that was coiled about her head twice before it hung down the left side of her head to dangle by her belt. Her mother had always chided her on her vanity, but Ebba knew she was never a great beauty, and her figure would never draw mens’ eyes, so she always thought her lovely, thick, long hair was a vanity with which she could live. However, she noticed that Marna’s hair, mostly brown and streaked with the red-blonde of a Coaster who spent most of her time out in the sunlight, and all shot through with not a few bright silver strands, was down and flowing freely about her shoulders, and looked a mess to the older matron.

  …did this young woman even own a comb?... she let the less than generous thought bubble up through her mind before dismissing it entirely.

  “Elder Ebba, I thank you for saving the caravan. You and Jens,” here she nodded to the boy, and he blushed in the firelight, his cheeks purpling. “But, I have to ask you, how did you know?” The words were out of Marna’s mouth before she had considered them, and it showed, as she looked at Ebba as if she were about to ask forgiveness.

  Ebba raised an eyebrow at the younger woman, shaking her head. It was rude to question a shaman about what they did and how. And a well raised Daughter of the Ghorma would know that in her bones. But, looking at the younger woman, Ebba saw her face, despite the acknowledgement of her social lapse, was both serious and shadowed with the echoes of what might have been.

  “I will tell you, Marna Kormersdaughter, but only this once, today because you might need to know the next time you travel this road.” Ebba sighed, and nodded to herself. Some traditions kept people in ignorance, and served only that end. “They had a trained mage with them. The little woman who is even now tied up like a sausage in her long coat.” She gestured over to the middle of the caravan, at the central fire where the raiders were all still blissfully asleep, and tied together in a lump by the fire.

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  “She was not trained well.” And at this Ebba made a face of disgust at sloppy and incomplete work where the Talent was concerned. “She knew enough to put our guards to sleep all at once, but was not strong enough to do that same thing to the entire camp.” And here the old woman laughed lightly.

  “Her spell was…” searching for a word, the right word, she looked to her apprentice, who added helpfully while he prepared a cup of tea for Ebba, “Her spell was very loud, Mistress Marna, to anyone else who has the Talent and any training to recognise it.”

  “Yes,” Ebba affirmed. “The little girl was loud. Like a yell in the night when a whisper was needed. She knew she could not cover the camp, so she only covered the guards, and Jens and I heard her little screech as she cast her curse.”

  ‘A curse?” Marna looked alarmed.

  Ebba Longhair held up her hands making flapping motions to let Marna know to not panic. “Nothing so dire. She lacks power to do anything so hurtful on purpose. This is like a nettle snake bite, it will wear off at sunrise. Maybe a little later than that, but not much. And” she shrugged, considering it, “I can wake them up if we need to.”

  Marna looked satisfied with that answer.

  Then Ebba remembered, “One of the guards, the one who laughs like a seawolf…”

  “Yurlan?” Marna asked.

  “Yes, that one. He is badly hurt. Bring him to me first. Before the sun comes up. And Jens and I will work to set his broken arms.

  Marna looked slightly paler in the waning light of the two moons that were still out in the dark night sky. “Jens, go help bring Yurlan here. Keep him asleep if you need to. He will be in too much pain if he wakes up before we can see to him.” She looked at the two young people, and after a beat made shooing motions at them. “Go. Go go go! Off with you! Meet me at the main fire, with the prisoners. Shoo with you both!”

  The two scuttled off into the dark to retrieve Yurlan, as Ebba finished her tea. Putting the cup down, she grabbed her walking stick, a smooth headed and twisted old piece of a branch from a cherry tree she had found years ago.

  As she approached the circle, Ebba looked over the sleeping bodies of the men tied up on one side of the low smouldering pile of red and orange embers. She could smell alcohol on at least one of the men. Not the fresh fumes of the happily drunken man enjoying himself, but the sour smell of one who drank every moment they were awake when they could afford it. The smell reminded the elderly shamanni of the double distilled spirits used by some crafters in the working of their arts, nothing that should have been either ingested, nor produced by a living body.

  In the very base of the Well of her Mind she could feel Jens had reached the sleeping Yurlan, and lay another Crown of Sleep upon him, rather than risk him waking up screaming in pain. The tugging on her own soul of his use of his Talent made her smile with how quietly it was done, the boy had a solid foundation of training.

  Looking at the men where they lay trussed and in their small clothes, she could now tell which one was the one trying to kill himself with hard spirits. He was a petite man, a Piincar in his fifties, maybe his sixties. Closer inspection showed he was the oldest of the raiders, and was a fifty-something year old man, about Marna’s age if anything, and he had stripped years from his life trying to make his body into a second stage distillery for the cheapest of spirits.

  The other men tied up with him looked healthier. Their bodies all thin from a lack of meals, but not to the point of starvation. Dirty. They all needed to be thrown into the nearest river and handed scrub brushes at sword point.

  “Oh, filthy young men will be filthy young men until they find a reason to not be filthy, or they die.” she said the old adage under her breath as she made her way around the fire to the tied up magelet who indeed looked like a newly tied sausage waiting to get smoked.

  And the shine of blue eyes caught the light of the dying fire as Ebba neared the girl. Bound and gagged, she was entering a state of panic as Ebba Longhair loomed over her tiny frame in the dim light. Ebba was slightly surprised to see her awake, having cast the sleep charm on the girl herself, but if she had been awake for more than a moment or two, she was too panicked to pull herself together to cast a spell to free her hands and feet from the tight ropes which held her.

  Crouching near the girl’s head, Ebba reached out a single, long, knurled finger to tap on the little mage’s forehead.

  The girl blinked hard in shock at each tap.

  With each word, Ebba wove a binding on the girl to keep her from being able to reach for her Talent.

  “My girl, you have stepped into the wrong camp,” a firm tap to the place just on the center of her forehead with each word spoken. “And now you will have to convince a few people here why you and your friends should be allowed to see noon ever again.”

  And she smiled as the girl tried to struggle against the new bonds that held her more firmly than the exceptional knots Jens had tied with leather cords and hempen ropes. It was a broad smile. An unpleasant smile that Ebba had practiced often specifically to make young people quail and quake at the specter of decades which they may have just forfeited by crossing Mistress Ebba Longhair, Northern Shamanni, and Queen of the Forest Witches of Kjolta.

  “And after you have convinced them, you will have to convince me.” With that, she let the color of her eyes slide from a muddied hazel to bright red, the whites of her sclera shifting to a bloodshot black.

  She didn’t cackle. Cackling was tack in the morning. Only hacks and wannabes who lived in cities actually cackled anymore.

  Ebba just smiled, letting her jaw creak ominously as her lips spread ever wider.