Free Glimpses by Lynn Flewelling

boots—before beating him senseless
and dumping him on a garbage heap outside the town walls.
    The merchant in Straightford had been clever,
too. He must have paid some wandering drysian to charm his purse;
the strings had tightened around Seregil’s wrist the minute he
touched silver. The man had friends on the street, too, who’d been
quick to come to his aid. Seregil had barely avoided another
beating, and escaped by throwing himself off a bridge into the
raging river that swept through the center of the town.
    He looked down at the tattered remains of the
purse still clinging around his right wrist. The silken bag had
torn as he fought his way to shore, and what coins it had held were
lost. The charmed purse strings still bit into his flesh, too tight
to pull off, and he had no knife to cut them. If he hadn’t failed
at all Nysander’s lessons, he reflected sourly, he might have had
the wit to break the charm.
    Then again, if I’d had any knack for magic, I
wouldn’t be here, alone, barefoot and starving, in the woods at ass
end of nowhere among stupid, ugly, flint-hearted Tírfaie, would
I?
    He sat back on his heels and gazed around,
hating this foreign landscape almost more than he hated himself at
the moment. The river, the road, the thick forest on every side, it
wasn’t so different from the lands of his father’s fai’thast, yet
it was.
    He could go back to Rhíminee, of course;
never mind all his tearful parting vows. Nysander had wept, too,
when he’d left that last time, and begged him to stay, but Seregil
had earned no place among wizards, only derision for his
bungling.
    He probably could have a place at court
again, if he was willing to humble himself; he was still Queen’s
kin, despite the disgrace that dogged him. They’d find him some new
menial office to fill. The debacles of his failed scribeship and
Orëska apprenticeship would fade in time, and rumors about him and
the prince. People wouldn’t always laugh behind their hands when he
passed.
    Yes, they will.
    The autumn sun was sinking fast now and he
was too exhausted to go any further. And why bother? He’d been
running away for months now, not going toward anything. He couldn’t
recall the last time he’d actually had a destination.
    “Piss on that!” he growled aloud. He drank
some water to calm his empty belly, then looked around for shelter.
Nothing in particular presented itself, so he hobbled up the
hillside to a copse and hunkered down against the sunny side of a
fir tree, trying to find a comfortable angle between the roots. The
sun was almost touching the distant mountain tops. The gentle
breeze was going cold and finding the rents in his ragged coat and
breeches. Shivering, he pulled a foot up on his thigh and gingerly
picked at a sharp stone lodged in his heel. The bottoms of his feet
were filthy and covered in small scratches and cuts. As a child he
wandered the forests of Bôkthersa on bare feet well callused and
tough, but those days were long gone.
     

     
    Better for you to have taken that boatman’s
offer in Isil, the mocking voice in his head went on. At least
you’d be under a roof. He’d probably even have stood you a tavern
meal after, if you’d played him right ...
    A wave of despair washed over him. Not for
the first time, he wondered why he hadn’t done as the others had
years ago: filled his pockets with ballast stones and thrown
himself overboard that first day of exile, when his homeland
slipped away under the horizon behind the ship.
    The glint of sun on water winked at him
through the trees below. There was nothing to stop him from doing
it now, except that he was too cold, too tired, and too miserable
to muster the energy it would take to walk back down to the bank
and throw himself in.
     
    ***
     

     
    He must have nodded off. Otherwise a Tírfaie
would never have gotten as close as this one had. As it was, he
just had time to throw himself into a nearby clump of caneberry
bushes before the man