"Please take me with you!"
Sael stood on the road in front of Dan and was, for a moment, deeply, deeply confused.
Dan had his shepherd's staff in one hand and was breathing hard. He had run for some part of the distance from Kessenmark; his face was flushed, the hem of his cloak was damp from the grass on the side of the road, and he had clearly been preparing his line for the entire run up. He was looking at Sael with a kind of expectant hope.
"...Don't you have sheep to take care of?" Said a still confused Sael.
The sentence was halfway out of his mouth before he heard himself, and the back of his mind, which had not been consulted in advance, pointed out that the line might have come across as diminishing. He had not meant it as diminishing. He had genuinely been asking; there was a flock of sheep at the top of the hill above Kessenmark, and the flock had a shepherd, and the shepherd was supposed to be standing in front of him. The question had followed naturally.
But it had not landed as he had meant it, and Dan's face had begun to do something he did not like.
He needed to clarify.
"What I mean is, the work of a shepherd is... it is honest work. It is, in fact, work that has a long and respected tradition in nearly every culture I have encountered in four hundred years of travel, particularly in pastoral economies along..."
Dan's face shifted further.
"...a-and there is nothing diminishing about it. There is nothing you should feel small about. It is a fine profession. I myself, at one point in my early career, took a six-month engagement with a farmer to take care of his sheeps."
"...Excuse me?"
Sael stopped.
He felt, distinctly, the small click of a social situation arriving somewhere he had not intended to take it. He had been trying to make Dan feel better about being a shepherd, which had been generous of him, he thought, and instead Dan was now looking at him with the expression he had worn the first time Sael had lifted Cori off the hill.
This was not going well.
Sael briefly regretted coming down alone. He should have brought Ilsa. Ilsa would have already wrapped this conversation into a tidy little fold and handed it back to Dan with both ends tied. Sael was, on reflection, beginning to think that bringing Ilsa with him to all social negotiations going forward was going to become a question of basic operational hygiene.
Behind him, Oz spoke.
"What he is trying to say is that he does not want you to come with us."
Dan's head turned slightly.
"We are travelling," Oz went on. "We are travelling fast. We are not in the business of acquiring rural strays along the way, and the Archmage will not say this to you because he is incapable of saying it to you, but I am perfectly capable, and I am saying it now: no."
A beat passed.
"Also, you have sheep. Go take care of them."
Well, this wasn't ideal, Sael thought. But the message had, on balance, passed. He took half a step forward and tried again.
"I am sorry. I am not very good with people. What I meant, without the lack of politeness, was that we are travelling fast and I cannot easily bring along anyone who is not already with us. And you have, as I said, a flock to care for, which I assumed you would not wish to leave."
Dan straightened slightly. The expression he had been wearing eased a little, although he did not look entirely satisfied yet.
"I gave them to Yena."
"...Pardon?"
"The sheep. I gave them to Yena. The whole flock, for the time being. She knows them, and she has a brother who farmed before he took the bakery; he'll help her with the rougher work. I left them in her keeping for as long as it takes." Dan adjusted the staff in his hand. "And the cottage will hold. The fences are sound and the south paddock's been good all summer. I made the arrangements properly. I wasn't running."
He took a small breath.
"I... I want to travel. I want to learn magic — better than what I have, I mean. I did not have the means for an academy, and what I know I taught myself, mostly out of borrowed books and a few hours with a hedge-mage who came through when I was fourteen. But I am stuck on this hill, and I think I have been wasting what I might be capable of, and—"
"What are you trying to ask for, little human?"
Oz's voice cut across the rest of it cleanly and Dan stopped mid-sentence.
He hesitated for a moment. Sael could see him hesitate. A small adjustment passed through him, and then he set his staff down carefully on the ground beside him, and then he did something Sael was not prepared for: he knelt.
Both knees first, then forward, until his forehead met the dirt of the road.
"Please take me on as your disciple, old man!"
To that, Sael did not say anything. Instead, it was Oz who let out a small dry chuckle from where he was perched.
"Well. At least the boy understands what station he is in. That is more than most of the rural specimens we have encountered today have demonstrated. Credit where it is due."
Dan kept his forehead on the road.
"However," Oz continued, "I should inform you, for the sake of clarity, that the Archmage and I are not currently in the market for apprentices. We have one already. Sael has been training him for some weeks, and the present arrangement has not yet stabilised to the point where adding another would be wise. Furthermore, the relationship between a master and a disciple is a sacred one, not lightly entered into, and one cannot simply throw oneself onto a road and expect a binding agreement to materialise out of dirt and—"
"Sure."
Oz stopped.
"...Bok?"
Dan lifted his head off the ground. "Really?"
"Yes, sure," Sael said again.
"What do you mean, sure?!" Oz had turned his head fully to look at Sael, the feathers at his throat raising slightly. "have just spent a respectable amount of time explaining the importance of the bond between teacher and pupil, the seriousness with which it is undertaken, the formality that traditionally surrounds the recognition of capacity, the establishment of mutual obligation, the considered weight of accepting responsibility for another being's path. You cannot simply sure him! This boy has no manners, no academy training, no standing of any kind! He has only sheep. He has, until this morning, been a person with sheep. You are an Archmage. The cheapening of the title alone—"
"Oz."
"What?!"
"Look at him."
"...What do you think I have been doing?" said the rooster, confused.
"No. Look at him. Not with your eyes." Sael nodded once at Dan, who was now sitting up properly on his heels, looking from one of them to the other with a fairly large degree of confusion. "Look at the mana around him."
Oz paused.
He slowly turned his head again, and looked at Dan, and the focus of the look shifted; the small visible adjustment of a being going from ordinary sight to the deeper register that experienced practitioners could pull into when they wanted to read what the air around a person was carrying.
A second passed, then...
"...Interesting."
Dan looked between them. "What? What is it?"
"You said you were self-taught, yes?" Sael said.
"Mostly, yes, sir. I had a few weeks with a hedge-mage when I was fourteen and I have read what I could borrow from the keep's library on market days, but nobody has trained me properly, no."
Sael nodded.
"That is quite surprising, then. The mana around you is unusually dense. And your level, if I am reading it correctly, is two hundred and thirty."
Dan frowned in confusion, muttering to himself about how others' levels could even be read.
Two hundred and thirty.
That was a number Sael was used to seeing on experienced adventurers. Robin was within twenty levels of it, and Robin had spent the better part of his earlier life in a guild that had taken him through every kind of work the road could put in front of him. Two hundred and thirty was the level of someone who had been earning it for years, in difficult conditions, normally under instruction.
It was not the level of a self-taught shepherd on a hill in Eredor, with all due respect to shepherd of anywhere.
Sael looked at Dan. "Stand up," he said.
The young man obeyed, brushing the dirt off his knees and the front of his cloak, and looked at Sael without saying anything for a moment, as though he had not yet allowed himself to believe the past minute had happened.
"You may not know it," Sael said, "but you are quite gifted. The mana around you is unusually intense for an untrained mage. If you genuinely want to become a formal one, I see no problem in helping with that. It could only be good for the world."
Dan remained silent, and Sael got the sense that the young man still did not quite believe it. Which was strange. He had been the one to ask, and Sael had said yes. Those two things, together, ought to have been enough, and yet Dan's face was still doing the small uncertain thing it had been doing since he stood up.
Hmm. Sael did not entirely understand, but he decided to file it for later.
"There are conditions, however. I am on a quest at the moment, of which Ilsa is the formal bearer. The quest is to prevent the return of Corruption to this world. Whatever instruction I can give you will be given on the road, in whatever moments the work permits, and you will need to keep up with us as we travel."
Dan paused. "...So that rumour is true as well?"
"Hmm."
He left it at that. Whatever versions of the rumour were now circulating through the eastern corridor, he did not have the time to address them one by one.
"The instruction itself will be informal but direct. I will let you cast what you already know, watch you while you do it, correct what needs correcting, and then we will move forward in stages. You will also have a senior in Orion, who has been with me a few months longer. I trust the two of you will get along, and that you will help each other where you can. He is patient, and you do not strike me as someone who will require much hand-holding, which is fortunate, because I have a limited capacity for offering it."
Dan let out a breath he had clearly been holding.
"Thank you. Thank you, old man, thank you—"
"Have some respect, worm." Oz's voice came in flatly. "It is master, to you."
"Oh, it is fine," Sael said. "I am old."
Dan, who had momentarily looked alarmed at being called a worm, recovered. "...Thank you, master."
"You are welcome. Get ready then, please. We are already running a little late."
Sael then raised one hand, and Dan came off the ground.
The boy made a small surprised sound at it, then his face changed and he started laughing.
"Magic is incredible."
"That it is." Said Sael. "Try to stay oriented. I am taking us up."
They rose slowly through the cool night air. Sael kept the levitation gentle for Dan's sake, and drifted up alongside him, hands in his pockets, the road dropping away below them and the lights of Kessenmark visible to the south.
On the way up, his mind returned, without him quite asking it to, to something Oz had said earlier.
The Archmage and I are not currently in the market for apprentices.
He had not registered the line properly at the time, since he had been busy being lectured about decorum, and the words had passed through him without catching, but now they caught.
We have one already.
It was the we that did it. Oz had not said the Archmage already has one. He had said we. Sael did not remember the dragon ever speaking about Orion in those terms before, and the word, turned over now, had not been casual. It had the shape of something deliberately chosen.
He considered, for a moment, asking Oz about it, then he decided not to.
If Oz, who had spent the better part of his very long existence as a dragon insisting that humans were beneath him by definition, was beginning to think of Orion in the same proximity-adjacent terms he applied to himself and Sael, then Sael did not want to call attention to it. Not yet. The kindest thing he could do was let the change settle on its own.
He had thought, when he had first bound Oz to that body, that the punishment would take a century at minimum to crack open something workable in him. Possibly more. But it might, he allowed himself to think, take rather less than that.