3. A Broken Pump

3

A Broken Pump

Safira Chastain

M y time with Kaylor flew by. He had a wealth of knowledge, and he reminded me of some of the gardeners I'd worked with, at home. I enjoyed his company, and his mild manner, such a change from the wizard's fire and the constant stress of being on the run.

The work gave me something to bury myself in, too, exactly the sort of distraction that would help me settle in and get used to my strange new surroundings. There were young plants for the garden well-started in the cold frames, and he'd been meticulous over the past several decades in documenting everything he did, every day. He gave me all of his journals, and a good deal of empty ones, and I spent every evening reading them. They held a wealth of knowledge about the ground that would soon be mine to tend, from weather patterns to soil amendments to which sections of the garden were prone to different troubles.

There weren't any horses for plowing on the island, and there wasn't really any need for them, since we were only tilling enough ground to keep the Spire of four people fed, as well as growing the flowers and herbs that were used for magic and for medicine. Altogether it was maybe three acres of tilled land. I could have readied the garden for spring by hand, but Bashen helped, hauling the plow with as much ease as any draft horse, and I turned over the soil while Kaylor wrapped up some of his projects in the greenhouses. The chickens had a delightful time, scratching the soil behind us, and eating up the small worms and insects that we disturbed.

We started seeds in the mortal greenhouse and I experimented a little with sowing some seeds outdoors too early, and protecting the soil from the frost with a thick layer of musty hay, to mixed success. Kaylor showed me how to use the pump for the outdoor well, which was enchanted and skimmed some of the confluence's power to pull water up from the ground for when the rains didn't comply with the desires of the garden. I pruned the perennials that liked to be pruned in the spring, and started a new brush pile for burning in the autumn.

The work was comfortable and comforting. I gave myself no time to think about anything else than what work there was to do, what things I was doing, and what I might do next. The deep-seated fear of the wizard stayed there, hovering at the back of my mind, but I tried my best not to feed it.

Barixeor was remote and on a major confluence. I couldn't be found. There were things to do in the gardens, and I did them instead of thinking about where I might flee next.

As it warmed, I started eating breakfast and lunch outdoors more often. I liked the sunlight, the resinous smell of the pine forest, and the clean, cool breeze off of Tsirisma Lake. Dinners had mixed attendance; both Marin and Kaylor tended to spend the evening alone several nights a week, and while sometimes Bashen was there, eating a measure of cooked grains with molasses or honey, more often he was absent.

Occasionally, when I ate indoors at an odd hour, he'd be working his way through a flake of hay, and I'd join him for a little bit of companionship. Bash seemed to like my company, and I enjoyed his. Perhaps that was only because I had no one else to talk to, but I thought it was more that he was kind and good-natured, and I longed for kindness.

Marin had been right about the water-horse. He came up onto the island in his horse shape a few times, mostly to graze on the fresh growth of grass near the shore, but twice I saw him standing at a distance, watching me while I worked. I didn't enjoy the observation, or the way that he could move so silently. On the occasions I saw him watching me, the next time I looked he was gone, which I found more unsettling than if he'd stayed.

He was a handsome creature as a horse, a mouse dun stallion with elegant lines. I guessed that his withers probably came up about as tall as me, and he looked strong and sleek. Unlike flesh-and-blood horses, Tsirisma Lake had no need of a winter coat, so his fur lay as smooth as a horse in high summer. With his crested neck, long mane and tail in a gray so dark they were nearly black, and the black barring on his legs and running in a list down his spine, he was a magnificent specimen.

I wondered how many people had seen him and tried to capture him. It was, in theory, easy enough: get a bridle onto a water-horse, and they were your slave until you freed them, or you died. I suspected the actual attempt was far more likely to leave the would-be capturer drowned than with an enslaved elemental.

Kaylor left in the late spring, content that I would take good care of the gardens he had poured so many years of his life into. I'd grown very fond of him in the six weeks we'd had together, but I suspected that my company was more than he actually wanted. While he'd been happy to teach me everything he knew about Barixeor's gardens and about the greenhouses, in truth I hadn 't needed much hand-holding. With his journals and a fortnight of assistance, I was doing well enough that he could have left then, and I would have been fine.

He'd promised me six weeks, and he'd stayed through it, but by the end, I could tell that he longed for solitude again. I didn't hold it against him. As Marin had said, everyone had come to Barixeor for their own reasons, and Kaylor liked the quiet. So when he left, I wished him well with a smile and a flower tucked into a buttonhole on his shirt, and only watched for a short while as Bashen rowed him across the lake.

The gardens were well along, with plants in different stages of growth, so that we wouldn't end up with two weeks of nothing but green beans, or the dread zucchini curse. I supposed that the timeless storage meant that it didn't matter if I harvested twenty pounds of zucchini a day for a fortnight, but it was more fun to use the produce brought in that day for your food, and I had nothing to do but tend the garden, the greenhouses, and the mushrooms. It was only to my benefit to make the task interesting.

Everything went smoothly for the next week, except that the rain seemed to have left with Kaylor. He'd mentioned that it rained less in the summer, but young seedlings and plants transplanted from cold frames need water, and lots of it. The pump worked magnificently for a whole five days, sending water through long drip-hoses that I'd snaked through the garden, and then, as if some friendly garden-spirit had left with its old master, the enchantment ground to a halt. On the sixth day, it barely functioned at all, and by the seventh, it had completely given up its ghost. If there'd been a sorcerer in Barixeor, this wouldn't have been an issue, but Barixeor hadn't had a Spirekeeper in over a year, and it was likely to be several more before one came.

I'd expressed curiosity as to why the Spire was so neglected, and Marin had laughed. There were only fifty sorcerers in the world, she pointed out, and not all of them had the training, temperament, or desire to become a Spirekeeper, let alone for one way out in the middle of nowhere. While there was probably someone out there who'd be interested, sooner or later, they might be in the middle of a project, or still training, or whatever else it was that sorcerers did with their time. She'd been told, when the former Spirekeeper had retired, that it wasn't uncommon for a Spire to remain empty for five or more years. He'd said, apparently, that while there was certainly some competition over them, a Spirekeeper had to be approved by the Mage Council and the Archmage, and that process could take a while. Plus, Marin said, said Council and Archmage might have someone in mind for the position, who needed some wooing.

All of that meant that it was likely to be years before there was a mage present to deal with my pump issues, and in the meantime, the plants still needed to be watered. The pump still worked manually, but there was a vast difference between lifting the handle and having water flow out in a steady stream for an hour, and standing there, pumping, for several hours, because I couldn't draw water out of the ground with nearly the same speed as the enchantment had been able to.

But the plants needed watering, and so I did it, standing there and sweating, my arms and shoulders burning, muttering curses to the sky-god Pehrren for withholding his water. I soaked in the hot bath for as long as I could stand it, after, and slathered my aching muscles with liniment before bed.

Then the next day I did it again, so sore that I needed to take breaks between bouts of watering. Bashen was in the middle of stripping and re-waxing the floors of the enormous ballroom that no one ever used, so I couldn't beg his help, and he wasn't a solution anyhow. If the summer was dry, this would be a routine part of my work, and I'd just need to suck it up and build up the muscle until there was time to build a windmill to do it for me. But the labor put me behind on some of the other necessary tasks, and left me weak and trembling when it came to hand-pulling weeds or thinning out plants.

I was in so much pain on the third day that Marin banished me to go soak in the hot pool, and went off to find Bashen to do my work for me. After I'd spent an hour forcing my punished body to relax, I went back into the kitchen to talk to her, unwilling to let myself be stymied by mere physical weakness. Marin gave me a dire look when I sat down at the kitchen table, but she brought over a mug of hot tea and a slice of apple crumble for me to pick at.

"You don't have to do everything on your own, you know," she said, putting a few more pots in the sink of steaming, sudsy water to soak before joining me. "Especially not at first."

I shook my head, looking down at my hands wrapped around the ceramic mug. "There's no sorcerer to replace the enchantment," I said, "And I can't just offload my work to Bashen."

Marin snorted out a small laugh. "Yes, but we hired you, remember?" she said. "It's not as if it takes a sorcerer to enchant a pump. It might take a few months, but we should be able to get a witch in to re-enchant it, and every day you didn't tell us was an extra day you had to pump by hand."

I hunched my shoulders, and my cheeks warmed. "I'm sorry," I said, just above a whisper. "I didn't want to be a bother."

Marin reached across the table and laid one gentle hand on my wrist, the touch of her skin cool. "You're not a bother, and it's nothing to be sorry for," she said in a compassionate tone.

I looked up to see her smiling at me with a soft expression. I searched her face, but there didn't seem to be any hidden unhappiness behind that look, and I gave her a small nod.

She gave my wrist a squeeze before lacing her fingers together in front of her. "I'll put together a description of the job, and contact the Dragonvault this evening. There's a discretionary budget for the Spire that I can draw on for things like this, though we might have to wait for someone to already be passing through Dalbrooke to be able to afford them."

"A couple months, you think?" I asked, fiddling with one of the slices of apple on my plate. That would be most of the summer... but better than potentially years of pumping.

"Maybe more, maybe less," Marin said. "Barixeor is remote, and not a lot of people are going to be willing to come out this far for a simple job. But there's always people who need money, and Dalbrooke gets witches and such coming through not that infrequently."

I nodded again, and finally started eating the apple crumble. Like everything Marin made, it was delicious. It seemed strange that a cook with her skill would live out here, in the middle of nowhere—but, then, she'd said that first day that everyone at Barixeor had their reasons for wanting to be here, and that she wouldn't want to trade away the solitude. I was hiding, and Kaylor had wanted peace and quiet. There were many other reasons for seeking out a life hidden away from the world, even if one was an excellent cook who could have been running a noble's kitchen.

I ended up taking the rest of the day off from hard labor, resting my tired body and doing some reading in Kaylor's journals. The greenhouses took up my afternoon, as I hand-pollinated one of the blooming abyssal shrubs with a small paintbrush. The labor was tedious, but quiet, and while there were pollinators in the greenhouses, it was a better way to ensure that the shrub would bear fruit later on in the year.

The fourth day, thank the gods, it rained.

But three days later, I found myself standing at the pump again, looking at it with a grim sort of determination. The garden needed water more than my arms needed not to hurt, and it was my job. I sent off a curse to whoever had decided that a proper windmill pump with a nice water reservoir uphill was too banal for a sorcerous Spire. Magic was all well and good until you didn't have so much as a hedgewitch around.

I rolled up my sleeves and put my hand on the pump's handle with a muttered curse, and heard, in a placid male voice, "Perhaps you would appreciate some assistance?"