The headbutting was getting out of hand.
Dan was halfway up the slope, walking back from the well, when he heard it; a particular dry thunk of a skull meeting another one, followed by a bleating that meant one of the younger ones had been on the receiving end. He sighed and put the bucket down.
"Pell."
Pell was a five-year-old ram who had decided several months ago that he was the largest, the strongest, and the most consequential creature on the hill, and that this entitled him to push the younger ones around at his discretion. He was, technically, the largest and the strongest. He was, in no other sense, the most consequential anything.
Dan crossed the grass, eventually meeting Pell, who looked up at him, blank and untroubled.
"Pell, what did I say about Cori?"
The ram stared.
"I said. What. Did I say. About Cori."
Cori, the small one, was on his side a few feet away, getting up. He was mostly fine, but that was not the point.
"You are bigger, and he is smaller. That is not a competition. We have discussed this." Dan crouched to Pell's level. "Next time, you spend the afternoon on the other side of the fence. By yourself. With the goats."
Pell, who was a sheep, did not visibly absorb the consequences being outlined to him, but Dan held his stare for a long moment anyway, then exhaled.
"Go on."
"Baa-aa-aa!"
Pell trotted off, unrepentant, in the direction of the rest of the flock. Dan then went to check on Cori, who had already recovered fully and butted his hand affectionately when he reached down to scratch his ear.
"You're alright," Dan said. "You're alright, little one."
The day was warm, and the grass was good. He'd done most of his real work for the morning already; moved the water, checked the fence on the south slope, separated the two ewes who didn't get along. The rest of the day was, on paper, his to do whatever he wanted with.
So he plucked a long piece of dry grass from the side of the path, put one end of it in his mouth, and walked over to the tree at the top of the hill to sit down in the shade. He then leaned back against the bark, and watched the flock for a moment, then closed his eyes, sighing.
Dan was, he realized, bored.
He had been on the same hill with the same sheep for the better part of his adult life and had started to wonder, in quiet moments, whether anything was ever going to change. He was twenty. He had been doing this since he was twelve. That was eight years of the same hill, the same grass, the same problems with a Pell, the same gentle conversation with a Cori, the same long afternoons listening to nothing in particular.
...He had to go into town later. The flour was running low, the salt was running lower, and he was nearly out of the lamp oil that let him read at night. He thought about it and immediately regretted doing so.
Town meant people, and people came in two flavours where he was concerned: those who looked at him with pity because his parents had been dead since he was twelve, and those who looked at him with judgement because he hadn't done anything visible with the eight years since. Both flavours wanted to talk to him about it and both flavours got an earful when they did.
He had something of a reputation by now, which was its own kind of problem, because reputations meant that even people who hadn't intended to engage with him sometimes did anyway, just to see if the reputation held.
Yena was fine, though. She ran the bakery and let him buy bread without commentary, and he liked her for that and for several other quieter reasons.
Yena, however, was not currently in Kessenmark. She'd left with a caravan three days ago. Dan was going to have to deal with whoever was minding the bakery in her absence, which would almost certainly be her brother, who was, in Dan's private and considered opinion, a man who could have done with several fewer opinions and approximately twice as much chewing before swallowing.
He sighed, chewing his piece of grass and thought, very seriously, about not going into town today at all.
It was then that movement on the road caught his eye and he opened them properly to look.
A small group was coming up the path that climbed his hill from the lower town. He could see them only in outline at this distance, five or six figures, walking with purpose. Dan sat up.
He brought his right hand up, joined his thumb and his index finger into a small circle, and held it in front of his eye.
"[Eye of the Hawk]," he murmured.
The circle filled. The scene at the base of the hill snapped close as though it were a dozen paces away, and he panned slowly across it.
Two of the city guards. Toran was one of them; Toran was always one of them. The other was Marek, who was at least tolerable. The captain himself was behind them, walking stiffly. Something had clearly happened.
Oh? There was Yena, too.
She was supposed to be in Tessavar by now, at her sister's, but was instead walking up his hill beside the captain, and although she didn't appear visibly hurt, the fact that she was here at all meant the caravan she'd been on had not made it through.
Dan kept panning. There was a woman in armor at the rear of the small group, sword at her hip, and a couple of figures behind her he couldn't quite resolve. That was new.
He lowered his hand and the spell faded as he sat there for a moment.
Guards coming up the hill, with Yena, meant they were bringing her to him, which meant something had happened that involved both of them, and probably him by extension. His immediate instinct was that this was going to be trouble in one of several specific shapes, all of which he was prepared to dislike.
Dan was working through which shape was most likely when he heard a soft bleat behind him, very close.
Closer than any of the flock should have been.
So he turned, and found a man standing twenty paces up the slope behind him, on the other side of the same tree, white-haired and in blue robes, holding Cori in both arms. Cori was very content and the man was smiling slightly and scratching behind one of the sheep's ears with his thumb.
Dan's hand went to the staff he kept beside him.
"Hey!" he called. "Hey, who are you?"
"Oh," the man said. "Hello." His voice was unhurried. "I didn't mean to frighten you. My apologies."
Dan's face warmed in a way he immediately resented. He always prided himself on a good sense of space. He always had. He could tell when a sheep was behind him from the shift in the grass, and he could feel approaching feet in the ground from twenty paces away, and on more than one occasion he had identified Toran specifically from the rhythm of his walking. Yet he had not heard or felt this man at all. Nothing until Cori. And Cori had been at the bottom of the slope a minute ago.
"I-I wasn't afraid."
"Mm." The man smiled politely, as though that was a perfectly reasonable thing to have said.
A new voice chuckled from above and Dan's head snapped up.
There was... a chicken in the tree.
A white rooster, comfortably perched on the lowest branch, looking down at him. His feathers were clean, mostly. There was a great deal of red along the breast and underside that Dan understood after about half a second to be blood. The rooster did not appear to be wounded, which meant the blood was not, in the strictest sense, his.
His comb was upright and his eyes were intelligent in a way Dan did not enjoy registering.
"...What manner of creature are you?"
The chicken's face, which Dan had not previously realized chickens had, went through a fast and surprisingly expressive series of states and arrived at irritated.
"Call me a creature again, boy, and I will cut your tongue out for your insolence."
...Dan did not know why this felt like a real threat from a chicken, but it did. He couldn't feel anything from this one either, not in the way he could usually feel things from animals, and that absence was worse than a presence would have been. He gulped as the white-haired man held up one hand in the rooster's direction.
"Now, now, Oz. We are not the ones in the right here. We did sneak up on him."
The rooster, Oz, made a small dismissive sound but did not say anything more as the man turned back to Dan.
He politely bowed his head a fraction. "My name is Sael. My apologies again, for the approach. We did not mean to alarm you." A short pause. "You are Dan, yes?"
Dan frowned, mostly out of confusion.
"...Yes?"
"He asked you a question, boy," Oz said from the tree. "Why do you answer with another question?"
"Ignore him, young Dan."
Young Dan?
Dan looked at him properly, for the first time. The man could not have been more than twenty-five. Thirty at the absolute outside, stretched. Closer to Dan's own age than to anyone's father, and that comparison was the thing that had been quietly bothering Dan since the man first spoke, because someone roughly his own age was not supposed to be this difficult to read.
Then Dan recognized the second part of it, the part that the youth of the face had been distracting from. Mages lived longer than they looked. Most of the proper ones aged at a fraction of the rate of everyone else, and an old one could keep a young man's face for years without breaking a sweat. That was probably what this was. The man was a mage, possibly an old one in a young body, which would also explain why his presence didn't register the way other people's did.
This was unreasonably comforting.
"Who are you?"
The chicken's head came around sharply.
"Are you stupid, child?"
"Don't call me—"
"He has just told you his name. It was Sael. He said it not thirty seconds ago. Did you not hear him?"
Dan was now annoyed at a chicken. This was the morning he was apparently going to have.
"Enough, Oz," Sael said. "Manners."
"This isn't him anyway," Oz said. He angled his head down toward Dan. "Look at his eyes. Hazel. Both of them. Hazel, in both cases. There is no point in dragging the boy into a conversation if he is not the one we are here for. Tell me again, what was the description?"
Sael sighed.
"Ten years old. One eye copper. The other nearly white."
"Both hazel."
"I can see that."
"Then this is not him."
"It might still be relevant. The compass is pointing at him, not at someone else on the hill."
"The compass is faulty. We have established this. It pointed at a valley earlier today and the valley contained no children. Now it is pointing at a shepherd who is, generously, twenty."
"It pointed at the valley because we were meant to deal with the bandits in the valley."
"That is your interpretation. My interpretation is that the compass is broken and we are wasting an afternoon."
"It was working very precisely last night."
"That was last night."
"...Hey," Dan said, but neither of them looked at him.
"It is still pointing at him now," Sael said. "It is doing so with the same steadiness it had last night. That suggests the compass has selected him for a reason that is not necessarily the reason we came looking."
"Or the compass has selected him for no reason at all and you are constructing reasons after the fact."
"...Hey," Dan said.
"I would disagree with y—"
"HEY!"
Both of them stopped and looked at him.
"Who are you people?!"
The chicken let out a small, percussive sound of disbelief.
"See? See? He really is stupid! How many times do we have to tell him our names? We have told him already. He heard mine from you and you have told him yours already. The branch I am sitting on knows our names by now!"
Behind them, on the slope, the rest of the group arrived. Dan heard them before he saw them: boots, breathing, the captain's voice saying something low and tight to one of the guards.
They came around the curve of the hill at a pace that suggested they had been hurrying for the last quarter of the climb, with the captain at the front and Toran behind him, both of them red in the face and out of breath. The captain stopped about fifteen feet away when he saw the scene; Sael holding Cori, Dan standing with his guiding staff half-raised, Oz on the branch. His expression went through several configurations and settled on something close to horror.
He took a half step forward, bowing slightly, both hands raised in front of him.
"My lord. My lord, I hope the boy has not offended you in any way?"
"Hmm?" Said Sael. "No, he hasn't."
"He has a tongue on him, my lord, as I tried to mention earlier. If he has said anything inappropriate to your lordship, I assure you, the town does not condone—"
"He has not. He's fine."
"...You are most generous, my lord."
The other guards, Marek and Toran and another whose name Dan did not know, were now bowing as well, in varying degrees of depth, all of them facing Sael, none of them looking directly at him for more than a half second at a time. Dan stared at them, then at Sael, then back at them.
Lord?
"...Is he," Dan said, very carefully, "a noble?"
Yena had come up behind the captain, less out of breath. She walked over to Dan and stopped beside him and put her hand on his arm, gently.
"Dan."
"What?"
"That's Sael."
"I know. He told me, I heard him."
"No, Dan." She continued. "That's the Sael. Sael the Great. The Archmage of the Age of Ash."
Dan frowned, looking at the white-haired man standing under the tree.
The rumors had been going around for weeks. He'd heard pieces of them in the bakery, in the smithy, in the small clusters of townsfolk who liked to gather near the well in the evenings. The Archmage from the old age, walking the world again, as though four hundred years were nothing. Dan had filed all of it under the heading of things people said when they wanted something more interesting to talk about than the weather, and he had not given any of it more than a passing thought.
But now...
"You—" Dan was interrupeted as Sael had stopped looking at him and turned slightly toward the south. His head was very still.
Cori, still in his arms, made a small confused sound and shifted, and Sael did not appear to notice. His expression had emptied.
"What is it, uh, m'lord?" Dan asked.
Sael did not answer right away, but when he did, his voice was quiet, almost to himself.
"Corruption."