Chapter 1

Silas had grown up studying his mother’s talents as a wise woman, or Hedge Mage as the true wizards and sorcerers derisively called them. He truly didn’t understand why the powerful ridiculed the lesser magic users, but knew his mother, Lilyia, had done a great deal of good for the people living around them, even though they too treated much of the family as if it had the pox. She brought in more money than did her husband, but always put it away and never made an issue of it. Normally payment was in kind, as few had much coin or much use for it.

His father, Archer, was a forester, and he hid his limited magical abilities, as they were not welcome among the foresters. As it was, he took a lot of put downs because he was married to a known Wise Woman. Archer was always paid in coin, so the family was free and well to do in comparison to most.

Of his two parents, Silas knew his mother was by far the smarter, but it was never, ever said out loud. His mother loved and honored her husband, even if she sometimes had to make some changes to his decrees. His older sister, Sylvana, was following in her mother’s footsteps, as was Silas, while Justifius, the youngest boy, was following his father’s path to become a forester. Each guild or profession, if they were not a guild, carefully controlled who could join, and children were normally given the inside track to follow their parents’ career or business. Moving to a new employment path took some arrangement, and normally started with the youngster becoming an apprentice at 10 to 12 years of age and working long and hard to rise in that field. Some became masters, while many never progressed past journeyman. The foresters, while not a guild, followed that example closely. Most were just foresters, but a few were selected or allowed to become senior or chief forester. The local noble who employed the foresters on the king’s behalf, had a great deal to do with who was selected and under the table dealings were far from rare.

Silas’s father was just a forester and would never rise past that, but it offered a steady job with reasonable pay and some benefits, like the meat from a kill that the lord did not want. That meat never saw a cook unless there was an abundance of it, when the lord’s staff ate well and his wife could send food to the poor.

So Silas grew up eating better than most and learning a great deal about the forest, the animals in it and how they interacted. His father taught him about the animals of the forest: how to track them, where they lived and what they ate. He became a good tracker by forester standards. His mother taught him a lot about plants and what they could do, good or bad. As well he learned where to find these plants and animals, what environments they preferred and how to respond if you stumbled on one or more. His father taught him to read the tracks to understand what the animal was doing, whether hunting for food, a mate or something else. He learned the way herbs were harvested, when they were harvested and how the recipes were written on the boards. Silas was not literate, in that he could not read Anglish or Latin, but he knew the jargon of the wise folk and all of their caricatures, with which they communicated. His mother taught him her magics, but it was hard as Silas always seemed to get a small flash and a slight burn, but no other result. It was his sister who realized that Silas was doing a small part incorrectly and causing the small powers of the land he drew on, to “ground” out his mental efforts before he shaped them to do his spell. It took a lot of work for Silas to correct that error in his methodology and cast successfully, but even then, he proved quite poor at spell casting and hardly powerful.