Chapter 3: Rural Roads

Miro’s new companions, or whatever they were to him (captors had come to mind more than once), were no more forthcoming with conversation on the journey than they had been at the farmhouse. Miro estimated that they rode for about an hour in complete silence until they reached a spot where another path branched sharply off to the right, in the direction of the village of Applecreek, and thus marked the furthest point that Miro had ever been from home. A home that, Miro now realized, never truly felt like a home. When Sierra was alive, perhaps, but surely not with Bondook.

As familiar fields gave way to farms and villages he’d never seen, Miro’s experience bar chose to show itself, floating as much in front of his eyes as it did behind them. He hardly noticed it at first, wanting instead to shoo it away so it would let him enjoy the new sights. Then, his eyes went wide and he leaned forward in his seat, though it didn’t bring the bar any closer. He wasn’t sure if he’d seen right at first, the progress being almost imperceptible, but after a distance he knew he was right – the experience bar was slowly filling up.

He sat back in the saddle again. This was unexpected, but if he understood it correctly, it wasn’t entirely unbelievable. The bar did, after all, have a very generic moniker – “experience” etched in silver letters across a line that was richly blue when it was full. That could have been anything – practicing his spells made the most sense. Ending the life of a mouse? Troubling, but also had some merit. Being further away from home? That perhaps was a stretch, but with each new mile that he passed, he’d seen more of the world, he had new experiences, whatever their worth, and this must have qualified. There was no one in his life to explain how this system worked, no one even to confirm whether this was in fact a system and not something unique to Miro.

Him and Volod, the other mage that still lived in his village, had never exactly been on a first name basis, unless “cow pie” and “shepturd” (Volod always looked and sounded particularly proud of that one) counted as first names. This was something that now filled Miro with reluctant regret as it would have been nice to know if any other mages went through the same experiences.

Their relationship growing up had been strained, given that they were the first mages born in their village in almost ten years and there was an unspoken rivalry imposed on the two of them even though Miro had no interest or ability to pull ahead. The simmering conflict had peaked a couple of years earlier.

Miro had been cranking the pulley to haul a bale of hay to the top of the barn, standing directly underneath the load like Bondook had told him so many times not to do, when he heard a menacing rustle of dried straw overhead. Miro had no time to react. He looked up to find the load tumbling towards him, its rope catching slightly on a thick nail jutting out from the side of the barn, jostling it from its trajectory and having it ultimately drop to the ground right next to him. Mouth dry and heart pounding somewhere near his ankles, Miro looked up to find Volod standing on the path that went by the barn. He had the same wide-eyed look Miro thought he himself must have had when Bondook walked in on him that one time trying to set fire to the straw in his mattress.

“Good thing that didn’t get you!” Volod called with the entirely wrong emphasis and intonation.

“Yeah, good thing.” Had it not been for the loose nail on the wall, the bale would have brained him, and Miro wasn’t sure he would have ever gotten up.

“I guess I’ll be seeing you.” Volod gave a short wave and went about his way as if he actually had somewhere to be.

“I guess you will.”

The thing about Volod was that he had assumed everyone to be as stupid as he was, but not for a moment did Miro doubt that Volod had something to do with the hay bale falling that day, especially since that it was Volod’s favourite load to practice his powers on. Miro got his dues though, and the next time he saw Volod talking to the Stolyar Sisters, it took all of Miro’s concentration to make sure Volod’s pants spontaneously combusted. The sisters and Miro had a good laugh about it but Volod’s mom relayed the whole incident to Bondook and Miro ended up sleeping in the chicken coop for the next two nights.

From then on, Miro and Volod had an unspoken pact not only to never talk to each but just to never acknowledge the other’s existence ever again, which suited Miro just fine until now, when Miro realized he would have given his left foot just to interrogate Volod about his own experiences as a mage, and about any theories he had about how the system worked, no matter how unforgivably idiotic they may have been.

All Miro had to go by were his own observations and right now he could see no other explanation for what was happening to his experience bar other than that the overarching force that was controlling his mage abilities had decided that distance alone was sufficient and Miro wasn’t about to start complaining about it.

Whatever this situation that he found himself in was, it may not have been so bad after all. Who knows what other unexpected sources of experience he would encounter, and if they did intend to haul him all the way to the Capital, then he might get to the next level through that alone.

“So,” Miro started, moving his face closer to the ear of the rider that sat in front of him, “Now that we’re far enough away from my guardian …” nothing about the man’s movement suggested he heard Miro; even his short unkempt hair seemed to go out of its way to ignore him. “You know,” Miro continued. “Bondook? The fella built like a shaved boar? I suppose now that he’s out of earshot you can finally tell me where you’re taking me.”

The male rider remained silent, though the woman that rode ahead uttered some kind of command that Miro couldn’t make out.

“It’s okay, you can tell me,” Miro said, patting the rider on the shoulder, finding it far more muscular than the man’s slight frame would suggest.

“I thought I told you it was none of your concern,” the rider said, shrugging off Miro’s hand.

“Oh come on. Are you seriously planning on not telling me anything the whole way there? Wherever ‘there’ is? The whole day? Two days? A week?”

The rider had an almost admirable level of resolve. Perhaps he was a military man. Not that Miro had much experience with military folk, but a company of them did stay at their village overnight a few years ago and admiring them from afar, they seemed like a disciplined lot. Unfortunately for the rider, Miro’s own resolve was incomparable, and he decided to make this a challenge.

“Not even a hint as to how long we’ll be together?” Miro asked. “Alright, but just so you know, I’ve always preferred talking to not talking. Even though there’s not many people to talk to where I’m from. But you know who’re great listeners? Sheep. Did you know I have a whole flock of them at home? No? See, I don’t know what it is that you know about me. I know you know my family name. I didn’t even know my family name until this morning. But did you know I have sheep? Had, I guess. I even had names for all of them all. Want to know them all? There’s Fluffy, and Pillowy, and Cottony, and Cloudy, and Whitey.”

“That’s’ enough.”

“Actually, that’s not even half of them.”

“I mean that was enough out of you.”

“Yeah that’s not half of that either.”

Miro could tell that all the muscles in the rider’s body tensed.

“Look, the way I see it,” Miro said, “Is that you have a choice. You either let me go on and on until I talk my tongue raw, or we can participate in one of those conversation thingies, where I say something, you say something, I say something, you know how it works. I’m a very low maintenance conversation partner. I got to tell you I’ve never left where I grew up. So you can tell me pretty much anything and I’ll likely be amazed. How about where you were born? What’s that like? I guarantee you if describe me anything there, I’ve never heard of it before.”

Though the rider may have thought Miro’s comment about talking his tongue raw was idle hyperbole, that’s not how Miro saw things. Miro was more than content to prattle on, pausing only to take in his surroundings, which in turn gave him more inspiration for additional commentary. The woman rider had put additional distance between them, and any time their horse crossed the invisible barrier of her earshot, she’d glance back, and the horse Miro was on would immediately slow down. This continued for what seemed to Miro like hours, and even he began to grow weary of his own voice, prompting in him the slightest touch of sympathy for Bondook.

Miro thus decided that to quicken the depletion of the rider’s patience and hopefully bringing about his eventual capitulation, he raised the stakes. Miro began to sign the first bars of an old travelling song he’d picked up from some caravan that had rolled through their village a while back.

“Take me home / rural roads / to the place / of –”

The rider’s sharply raised hand made Miro stop mid-line.

“Your incessant jabber is one thing,” the rider looked over his shoulder at Miro, his prominent nose seeming to wag at him like a finger, and his eyes conveying the look of a man that had already seen a lot over his lifetime but nothing quite like this, “but I draw the line at singing.”

The rider continued to pin his stare on Miro, who thought that it may have been intended to be intimidating, but would merely make the payoff that much sweeter.

“I’ll have you know that where I’m from my voice is considered absolutely cherubic. Now, from where we left off – to the place / of our abodes – ”

The rider’s gloved hand came at Miro’s face fast and the slap would leave a welt. Worst of all was not the stinging, but that Miro did allow it to buy the rider a period of respite, which could only serve to encourage such abhorrent behavior further.

When the sun was at its highest, it was the male rider’s turn to break the sullen silent routine they fell into, turning around and thrusting some kind of dried animal turd into Miro’s hand.

“What’s this?” Miro regarded the lumpy brown bar, ready to drop it at any moment in disgust.

“Pressed oats and salted pork,” came the glowing review.

“Sounds appetizing.”

“That or starve.”

“No, I’m good, I’m good.”

Having only eaten Bondook’s cooking for the last nine years, Miro figured it couldn’t possibly taste any worse than it looked. He was wrong. Though it didn’t so much taste worse, but rather sadder, and he watched with a sort of admiration the two riders finish theirs off without as much as wincing.