Free Lens of the World by R. A. MacAvoy

of smoke out the kitchen door and up through the vent in the roof; Powl was never expert at its use.
    I said that I hoped he was better, and he merely sighed. He did not touch the soup himself. He sat wrapped in a large cloak with capes upon it, of gorgeous subdued coloring. Perhaps he was shivering. “It may be… that I was coming down with the chill the day previous. It is going around in the city, I hear.”
    The soup was greasy and lacking in salt, but I had finished it. I was thoroughly warm by now and got up pink and shining from the bed. My town clothes were dry again from being suspended near the stove, but so smoke-smirched that they would need a thorough fullering to be presentable. I threw both peasant shirts over my head instead, and Powl didn’t stop me.
    I shook out the bedclothes. “Then here. I don’t need it anymore, Powl. I’m very warm.”
    He shook his head, refusing the bed. “I think, Nazhuret, that perhaps my decisions of that day were colored by illness.”
    As I heard my teacher come so close to apologizing—to me—I began to shiver again. Having gone so far in mind to reconcile myself to disaster, failure, and death, I could go no farther. It was too much that the whole experience might have been simply a mistake. Powl’s error. My misery and cold simply my teacher’s feverish blunder.
    I denied it. I told him I deserved every word and worse. That I only wanted the opportunity to prove I had learned from it. I fixed the stove, added salt to the soup, and put on a hot stone to warm Powl’s feet for him. He gave me one sad glance and did not bring up the matter again.
     
    That evening he was much better. That night, when I was alone, the fever descended on me and Powl found me sweating and babbling in Allec the next morning.
    I was very sick for two weeks, and for two weeks he slept on wool batts beside my bed.
     
    It was haying season, was it not, when I sent my last missive to you, sir? I remember the envelope was thick enough to chink a good-size hole in a stone wall.
    All these walls are wood, and the wet wind is blowing through them now. I am using two stones, a faultily ground lens, and the hilt of an old throwing dagger to hold the paper down, and what drops I flick from the pen travel westerly before hitting back into the inkwell.
    In the distance I see the shapes of men tilted against the rain and wind, their great hat brims sodden and heavy. This ought to be the oat harvest, and I ought to help. But in fact there is nothing more useful to do than go watch the rain beat the ripe grain flat, and the peasants can do that without my assistance.
    Yesterday evening I was at the local hostelry, bargaining labor against a barrel of summer’s ale, and I was forced to step on three physical quarrels aborning. From my own experience I know that tavern fights in autumn are inauspicious omens, like thick hair growing on the horses. It is only September, too.
    I can ask no better way to fill these sullen days than with this history. Let me clear autumn from my soul and push the inevitable winter to one side, for in my narrative now the nineteen-year-old Nazhuret has survived one autumn and one winter in his peculiar, enforced hermitage.
    I will stare at the glass of the rainy window for a minute and gather memories in place of oats.
     
    Beginning in early spring the weather cleared, and my daily study of glass and of star maps suddenly proved itself. I spent half my days asleep and half my nights adding to Adlar’s charts of the Northern Hemisphere.
    I took to stargazing as I had earlier to marbles, with a solitary,
intricate passion. I had good eyes, even for my age, and the old astronomer’s equipment was of
the best. Coming to the science with no background at all, I did not have the handicaps of the
constellation pictures between myself and the twinkles I saw in the lens. Borlad the Red Eye, of
mythological fame, was of no more celestial importance through the lens than the pale bluish