Minor Mage

by T. Kingfisher

What good was such a short article? Why didn’t it tell you what you really needed to know, like how far a ghul would follow you, or if they were attached to their home territories? The entry for unicorns was twice as long, and what good was that to anybody? Unicorns were cowards and only dangerous in packs. Every now and then you’d get one hanging around the village trash heap, but it’d run off if you yelled at it. But there it was, six whole paragraphs, and meanwhile he knew no more about ghuls than he had an hour ago.

Vision wasn’t the armadillo’s keenest sense, but they looked less human than they had at the farm. Perhaps without the trappings of humanity, the chairs and tables to sit in and beds to sleep in, they had slid further away from their roots. The armadillo had always vaguely suspected that humans acted the way they did because they had so much furniture cluttering up their lives.

As soon as the familiar was gone, he closed his eyes and whispered, “Thank you,” to whatever their guide had been. He felt something then, a whisper so soft that it might have been a fern dreaming or the heartbeat of a vole underground. When he opened his eyes, the moonlight was dappled with apple red. Oliver was already on his knees, but he bowed his head, feeling complicated things he didn’t know how to deal with. When kindness came from murdered ghosts and lost pigs, and the adults that were supposed to help you were monsters that walked like men… What was he supposed to do? It wasn’t right. He wanted the world to be different. But I’m only a minor mage and I don’t know how to fix any of this…