Free Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet by Charlie N. Holmberg Page B

my belly. What would I do to have Arrice hold my hand, to hear Franc play his mandolin, or to sit close enough to Cleric Tuck just so I could lean my head on his shoulder?
    I look up at the stars. They look just as they did in Carmine.
    Allemas makes several trips to and from the wagon, loading up every last baking supply he owns. I don’t ask him why; I’m grateful he’s not making me do the work, and I want to be forgotten, if only for a little while. Perhaps he’s in a hurry. Perhaps he’s even sympathetic about my injury, but the prospect almost makes me laugh. Almost.
    I sit in the back of the wagon, shoved between sacks of flour and bundles of split wood, while Allemas drives his poor donkey higher up the road. I watch the animal, wishing I could will endurance into it. I can feel it strain with every lurching step. When we stop, I’ll try to sneak it a biscuit.
    Propping my feet up on the wagon, I lean back against the flour and watch the stars, finding familiar patterns among their twinkling lights. Arrice and Franc never watched stars with me; these are patterns I recall on my own. Odd, how memory works. How can I be so familiar with the stars, yet so bewildered when I try to think of my parents’ faces or my childhood? Sometimes I wonder if I ever had a family at all.
    Sometime before daybreak I fall asleep. I wake again as the sun pulls its heavy body over the horizon. Allemas stops at a stream for the donkey and jaunts into the woods, searching for . . . something. Climbing out of the wagon is slow going because of my wood-locked foot, but I manage it and offer the donkey one of my biscuits. The animal eats it happily. I can feel its relief somehow, as though it were my own.
    To my surprise, once Allemas returns, we ride up the narrowing road for only another quarter mile more before he attempts to drive the wagon through the dense wood. He doesn’t get far.
    “You’ll break a wheel,” I tell him. If that happens, I won’t be able to make the walk back to his home.
    “Hmm.” He thinks, looking up at the sky. “Can’t show you, no, no,” he murmurs to himself. “You have to learn, but you can’t learn that . Mine now.”
    He slips from the driver’s chair and unhitches the donkey. “We’ll go on foot.”
    I look down at my splint. Allemas sighs and says, “You ride Maire.”
    “Pardon?”
    “Maire,” he says, pointing to the donkey. “I named her Maire.”
    I stare but make my way toward the beast, swallowing the comment I wish to make. At least he’ll let me ride.
    “You can rename me,” he offers, but when I shake my head, his shoulders slump and he loads the donkey with a few supplies before wordlessly guiding us into the woods.
    We walk for a very long time. I don’t think the four-legged Maire would have made it if not for the enchanted biscuit I fed her. We walk for so long that the forest begins to look the same, as if we’re looping around and around, but the sun stays constant in the sky, above and slightly to the east. After a while, I realize it’s too constant. We’ve walked for hours, yet the sun hasn’t moved or crossed any closer to its western slumber . . . or its eastern rise. It merely stays where it is, watching.
    Shivers run up my arms, and I comfort myself by stroking the donkey’s coarse fur. Where has Allemas taken me? These woods are bespelled by a magic I cannot begin to understand. When I hold my breath, I can feel it tickling my exposed skin like glossy spiderwebs.
    Eventually the trees open into a wide grove in which sits an old well and a dilapidated house. It’s small and single story, made of weather-beaten wood. Half its roof has collapsed. Its windows have no glass, its chimney has fallen, and one side looks licked by fire, though the surrounding foliage is undamaged. I dismount Maire and limp toward it. The front door sags from its upper hinge. Inside the walls are mostly intact, though they’re splintering. There’s a large woodstove