Free Rosemary Kirstein - Steerswoman 04 by The Language of Power Page A

twinkled. “Greydon gets a knock on his door one
day, and he opens it up—and it’s the wizard himself. And Kieran just pushes by
him, walks straight into the house, straight through it, straight out the
back—by now the whole family’s following behind—and straight to the outhouse.
    “He gets in; he shuts the door.
    “A few minutes go by. Then the wizard comes out, and looking
neither left nor right, walks straight through the family to the back door and
out the front again. But he says to Greydon as he passes by: ‘Don’t go in
there.’”
    Marel chuckled. “And they all just stood there in the back
yard, staring at the outhouse … and then—”
    He clapped his hands suddenly, causing Rowan to startle.
“The whole thing went straight up in the air! Over the rooftops, and flying in
a hundred pieces!” He laughed openly now, and Rowan could not help but do the
same. “What a mess! Everyone in the neighborhood was a week cleaning it all off
the roofs! We had a few words to say to Greydon, I’ll tell you! Oh, and we
never let him forget it, either; for years after, we all would show up on his
doorstep on the anniversary of the date, and force a celebration on him,
willy-nilly. ‘Flying Turd Day,’ we called it.” He gave himself over to
laughter, eventually pulling a neat white handkerchief from a drawer to wipe
his eyes. “Ah, me.”
    The steerswoman found the tale more than simply amusing. It
was not safe to have pit-style outhouses anywhere near wells or other
underground water sources; contamination could pass through the ground into the
water, especially in a damp environment. The well water would be foul at the
least, and a source of disease at the worst.
    Kieran had done the city a kindness. And interestingly, he
had done it in a way that provided amusement to the residents, a tale to tell
to others—long past the wizard’s own demise. It seemed almost an intentional
augmentation of the wizard’s personal legend. “Do you think,” Rowan asked,
“that people in Donner tend to remember Kieran kindly rather than otherwise?”
    “I don’t know … some do, certainly. I expect, if he’d
lived longer, we all might have come to.” And it seemed that this thought had
not occurred to him before, and he gave it some consideration.
    Rowan said cautiously: “How did he die?”
    “How? Old age, or so we were told. He seemed elderly.”
    “Can you remember whether Jannik appeared in town before,
after, or at the same time as Kieran’s death?” If Kieran’s death had not been
natural, Jannik, as the next master of this holding, seemed a likely suspect.
    “Jannik? Oh, after. Hard to pin down, but I’d say, at least
a month, maybe two.”
    Rowan was taken aback. “So long a gap? How did you deal with
the dragons, with no wizard to keep them in check?”
    “Oh, there was no problem with the dragons, none at all.”
    “I find that rather interesting …”
    “Still,” Marel said, “I expect they were never completely uncontrolled,
really. I have to assume the apprentice took care of that.”
    “Apprentice?” Rowan asked. Wizard’s apprentices were, if
possible, even more mysterious than their masters. They appeared, apparently
from nowhere, served and studied for a length of time, and then vanished. Some
resurfaced as wizards elsewhere, years or decades later; most were never heard
from again. But she had not heard of Kieran possessing an apprentice …
    Her puzzling stopped short; she felt cold. “Apprentice?” she
said again.
    “Oh, yes,” Marel continued. “In fact, we’d assumed that he would
stay on; but when Jannik showed up, there was no argument at all—”
    “—What was his name?”
    Marel waved his son over again. “Reeder, I can’t recall;
what was the name of Kieran’s apprentice? You spoke to him a few times, didn’t
you?”
    Reeder flicked his pale, bland gaze from his father’s face
to the steerswoman’s, and Rowan thought: No. It cannot possibly be