Back at what I’d started secretly to think of as home, even places that should have been green often weren’t. Like down near the waterline of Lake Mead or along the banks of the Colorado. If you were lucky, you might see a few scraggly bits of desert scruff here and there, stubbornly clinging to the rocky soil, or a mostly brown vine trailing up a cliff. But that was as good as it got, at least from nature.
Of course, it was Vegas, so everybody cheated. The casinos and shopping malls and golf courses all had greenery around them. The Bellagio had its own indoor garden. And Boulder City, a little town where the workers had been housed during the building of the Hoover Dam, had installed a lush carpet of grass in the new playground they’d built for their kids.
Only to come out the next day and find thirty or more hardy bighorn sheep munching on the free buffet.
Hey, it was Vegas.
The townspeople had eventually made peace with the sheep, who simply refused to budge, and in true Vegas style had even set up tours to the place. If you went at the right time of day, you could see the standoff between the visiting sheep and the local kids, each on their respective side of the playground, each ignoring the other. What you couldn’t see was anything like this.
I looked around at the complete opposite of Vegas, where even things that shouldn’t be green were anyway. Like the mill wheel, with its fine coating of bright green moss. Or the water, which was a dappled emerald thanks to the treetops that almost met over the stream. Or the sky, which was taking on an olive tinge in the east that foretold more rain in my future. Even the rocks under my feet were all rounded and mossy, having long ago given up any rough edges to the relentless flow of the soft, soft water.
It was heaven on my sore heels.
It was hell on my hundred or so scratches, but I decided I could live with it.
It was providing a bath for a future war mage.
“That’s nice,” I thought, drifting lazily over into a reed patch, where some little fishies started trying to nibble on my toes.
And then realization struck, and I almost drowned.
I came up, spluttering and coughing, and staring around—at a mass of black birds that had just taken off from the treetops. Their flapping and cawing covered the sounds I was making, like the weeds covered my body. Which was lucky. Because the river wasn’t that wide and Pritkin was just down from me, dabbling a foot in the water on the opposite bank.
I grabbed a bunch of weeds in both hands, and stared.
He was dressed in some whacked-out ghillie suit, or considering where we were, possibly something a drunk Druid had devised: a tunic covered in branches and leaves and vines, a hood shaggy with more of the same, and a pair of brown boots barely visible under the drooping foliage. His face was painted like a commando’s, too, all brown and green splotched, and his hair was midlength and shaggy instead of short and spiky.
But it was him. I knew him instantly, and almost yelled his name in sheer relief before I remembered. And clamped my teeth on my lower lip, hard enough to hurt.
Because this Pritkin didn’t know me.
This Pritkin wouldn’t even know the name I’d been about to shout, since he didn’t go by it yet. This Pritkin was a dangerous mage in a dangerous time, and he probably wouldn’t take it well if he knew he was being spied on. Fortunately, the reeds ensured that he didn’t immediately see me.
Unfortunately, that didn’t really help, since I had no idea what I was supposed to do now.
My thought processes, such as they were, went something like: urp.
Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit!
Rosier. Scan hillside frantically. No Rosier.
Damn him!
What a time to disappear—and for me to let him go!
But it shouldn’t have mattered. We hadn’t seen a soul all day. We were out in the middle of nowhere and Pritkin was supposed to be at court and it shouldn’t have mattered.
But he was here and it did and Rosier had only just left, maybe half an hour ago. It couldn’t have been much longer than that, so who knew when he’d be back? And what was I supposed to do in the meantime?
What was I supposed to do when Pritkin decided to leave?
Only he wasn’t.
He was getting naked instead.
For a moment, I just stared. I don’t know why. Probably still in shock. But the great ghillie-what’s-it went thump on the ground, leaving him standing there bare-chested in a pair of cut-off drawstring trousers and a decent tan.
I blinked. Pritkin didn’t tan. Pritkin was British-tourist pale even in Vegas because of all the war mage paraphernalia he carted around. It required a full-length coat or, when jogging, a bulky hoodie, to hide the various lethal bulges, and neither left the sun a lot of opportunities.