Everybody Hates Bilius

  He wasn't paying attention to where he was. That was his mistake. Because he was thinking about ways to cook eels, and whether Cook might be willing to try some of them, he stumbled into trouble. He saw the boys, and they got a good, long look at him.

  There were five of them, slightly older boys, maybe eleven or twelve years to Taylor's nine. They swatted trees with sticks and laughed furtively at some forbidden remark. The townsfolk weren't supposed to be on the two hills behind the legate's mansion. Supposedly, everyone knew that. They had a whole line of hills to explore, filled with forests and orchards, running down into the pastureland and then the neatly separated fields of cropland. Yet they had to be in Taylor's forest, the one place where he was allowed to roam.

  "Looks like we found a rat." Their looks made Taylor's heart race with an urgent thrill. These boys were dangerous to him. Whatever motivated his own staff to dislike him so much was operating with full force on these children. Their ringleader was a big kid, like a sixteen-year-old but with baby fat still in his cheeks. "What's in the bucket, rat?"

  "Fish." He tried to keep his voice calm. Cold. Forbidding. "You're not supposed to be on this hill. You'll get in trouble." His nine-year-old voice wasn't up to the task.

  "Not if we bury you here." They grinned like a single, malicious organism and swung their sticks.

  Taylor had been hated plenty of times before, in other lives, but never so senselessly. He was sure these boys didn't know who he was and had never met him. Yet they hated him enough on sight to threaten to kill him.

  He had exactly one combat-friendly spell, Flare, and he used it. All it did was make flashes of light and loud noises, but he could use it without words. He didn't wait for the boys to make good on their promise. He lowered the bucket without spilling anything while he thought the words of his spell, and released peewee-league mayhem into their faces.

  He could have run. Maybe that would have been the end of it, or maybe not. But instead, he started grabbing rocks and chucked them at the blinded kids. Throwing was part of his daily practice, and he didn't hold back. He threw stones at their heads. When they tried to cover their heads, he aimed for their groins.

  Nobody smart fights fair. And Taylor assumed he was fighting for his life.

  When three of them were down with bleeding heads or clutching their pummeled privates, he Flared them again. It made him mana sick, especially after his exertions at the spring, but he was used to it. Taylor laid into the survivors with his fishing pole, whipping the flexible rod hard enough to sting and leave long, ugly welts on their arms and backs. It felt good, but it would have felt better if they fought back more. His Bilius heart was angry, and these boys made themselves targets.

  The only boy who resisted took a stance and attempted to use the stick in his hand as a sword, guarding his body from Taylor's attacks. He parried a few times, and grinned hungrily at the smaller boy.

  "You're a dead rat!" With his early growth, beefy frame, and wavy blonde hair, he could have been any of a hundred squires Taylor had known. Teach them a little swordplay, and they were convinced they'd rule the world someday.

  Taylor responded in the same cold voice he attempted earlier. "You suck at this." His next strikes took advantage of the rod's flexibility, bent and snapped to avoid the boy's defense, and beat him on the ribs and shoulders.

  Under other circumstances, maybe they could have been great friends. Under the present ones, he had to hurt the golden-haired beef-boy until he was on his knees. He didn't stop until the bigger kid dropped his stick and put his arms around his head.

  "Take your friends home. Don't ever come back. And don't threaten to kill people for no reason. Someone might take you seriously."

  Beef-boy was crying. "You're a monster! Everyone hates you."

  Taylor was shocked to learn these kids knew who he was, or that he had any kind of reputation. But, it would explain why Blake would never take him into town, no matter how nicely he asked.

  "Why does everyone hate me?"

  The boy wiped tears on his sleeve. "We just do."

  The victor fetched his bucket of eels and passed the tear-stained child on his way downhill. He didn't look at the boy when he spoke.

  "Try to hurt me again; I'll bury you in these woods."

  The first thing he did on arriving at the mansion was deliver his eels to an enthusiastic Cook. The second thing was to find Blake and tell him what happened. The handyman listened intently, head bowed, and asked a few questions. Then, he saddled the horse and rode into town without explanation. Shrugging his shoulders, Taylor took a bath and retreated to his library to study the eels' mana stones.

  Under a magnifying glass, the stone was clearer and whiter than the cheap stuff they used to power the mansion's lights. None of his books covered the lifecycle of eels, but if they migrated to the sea and then returned as adults, they could spend as many as eight years at sea. Where in the ocean would they find a source of mana to live in or consume? They held a significant amount of mana, or else he wouldn't feel them from so far away. His newest prize would be perfect for training.

  He was so engrossed that he didn't hear the hoofbeats or the sounds of people entering the house. He didn't know Blake had returned until he was at the library door, telling him to go to Father's office. When Taylor arrived, he realized he'd made another mistake. There was a woman in the seat of authority, Father's seat, behind Father's desk. If he'd been smarter, he would have paid attention to her arrival and taken it himself.

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  She wore men's clothes, a long dark jacket cut close to her frame over a white shirt. The sole spot of color was a short red scarf tied around her neck. She had a long, symmetrical face, a tad on the ascetic side, with an expression that could have melted bronze. She reminded Taylor of a librarian whose budget had just been cut for the second time.

  "Bilius, what were you thinking today? You savaged five boys with magic. They could have been killed! I'll have to pay for damages, and it's coming out of the mansion's budget. Your father will hear about it. Now explain yourself, right now!"

  The unfairness of her demands should have made him angry, but he was too amused by the circumstances. He could guess who she was, but as this was their first meeting …

  "Who are you?"

  "Who am I? Don't play with me, boy. I can make your life a lot harder than it is now."

  "I'm not playing. I literally don't know who you are. We just met, you haven't introduced yourself, you obviously know who I am, but I don't know anything about you. Not even your name."

  She seemed surprised to learn he didn't know her. "I am Meltissa Jane, Curator of Mourne. I am also your legal guardian."

  Guardian? That seemed unlikely. "Some guardian. I've never seen you once, not even when the nanny left me for dead and ran away with all my clothes. Nobody thought about my education until I asked to go to school. And, apparently, everybody in Mourne hates me, for reasons that have never been explained. So I'm not answering any of your questions until I get an answer to mine. What is so wrong with me? Why did five children threaten to kill me today, on my own grounds, without an explanation? Why can't my staff bear to look at me? Explain that, or you get nothing!"

  He was shouting. His little fists were clenched, and he was leaking mana. He didn't mean to work himself up so much, but his anger was an honest one. Something deeply wrong was at work in his life. His certainty grew as his supposed guardian looked at him with such intense revulsion he was sure to be evicted, cast out into the snow without a coat or any money to buy food.

  "You killed your mother when you came out of her, and she cursed you with her dying breath. Anyone who sees your face hates you. Your father abandoned his ancestral home, took his other children, and left me here to deal with you!" Even under the curse's influence, assuming it was real, Curator Jane realized she might have gone too far. She stood up suddenly from Father's chair and turned her back on him to look out the window.

  To Taylor, the curse sounded like a problem with an easy solution.

  "Is that all? Blake? Fetch me a sheet. Preferably a thin one that I can see out of. Or a burlap sack, a veil, anything. You get the idea."

  "All right." Blake had been standing behind him, so he hadn't been watching Taylor's face. That's the only reason he was still in the room.

  Guardian and ward waited silently for Blake's return with a large section of Cook's cheesecloth. Taylor draped it over his head to make himself as shapeless as possible.

  "How is it, Blake?"

  "It's good." He sounded mildly surprised. Coming from the laconic groundskeeper, it was a shout of amazement.

  "Curator?"

  She turned cautiously to look at him. When she wasn't immediately repulsed, she faced him completely. Taylor couldn't read her well enough through the cheesecloth to tell if she was surprised or ashamed, but she was something.

  "I know it's like the worst ghost costume ever invented, but if it lets us talk without you hating me then I call it progress."

  "You said they were on mansion grounds. Can you prove that?"

  "There are tracks," Taylor pointed to where the scuffle happened, "and blood. I can show you."

  "Blake, get Bilius a chair. I'll be back soon. Stay. Here."

  "Curator," he stopped her at the door, "when they threatened me, they sounded serious. I attacked first."

  "We'll talk about it when I get back. That and … other things."

  Jane returned with a hard, satisfied look that even cheesecloth couldn't block. She had Taylor tell his side of the story and asked questions, including what was in the bucket. She even asked to see the eels, and wanted a demonstration of Flare, which he gave her through an open window, lighting up the evening yard with sudden lights and popping noises that echoed off the house's stone walls. Taylor couldn't be sure, but she might have been a little pleased. Very, very little. It was more a change in the set of her shoulders than anything she did with her face.

  "You have nothing to worry about, Bilius. The boys lied about where they were and what they were doing, and you wounded them with rocks instead of magic. It won't be hard to discount their claim you attacked them out of nowhere with deadly spells. However, if it happens again, please keep in mind that people may be acting under the power of your curse. You could go a little easier on them or just run away. Consider the matter closed.

  "Now to other things. You are owed an apology. The adults around you should have thought of giving you a mask or a hat or something ages ago. Now that I can face you without the curse hammering at me, I'm shocked at how little you've been cared for. I'm impressed you didn't die. For the little that it's worth, I am sorry.

  "More importantly, we're going to do better. I am your guardian, and I intend to start acting like it. I can't let you go into town until we've learned how to control your curse, but I will entertain any reasonable requests. "

  "Clothes and blankets. They don't have to be new, just warm and in my size."

  "I'll send someone up to get your measurements. Make a list of everything you need."

  "And I want lessons from you."

  That set her back for several seconds. Clearly, she didn't want to deny him on the heels of we're going to do better, but she thought it was a lot to ask.

  "I don't have three days a week to spend with you. That's what I pay Ophelia for. Curators have a lot of duties, especially when their legate is away. I'm doing the work of two people."

  "That's just it. I have no idea what curators and legates are or what they do. I feel like someone in my position should know something about it. If you gave me things to read, and we met once a week to talk about them, that might be enough. I just want to understand how the town works: officials and their duties, economy, infrastructure, that kind of thing."

  "Are you planning on inheriting Mourne? It isn't likely to happen while you're dragging a curse everywhere you go."

  "I know that. But a legate's son shouldn't be as ignorant as I am. And management skills could be handy in all kinds of situations. An education is never wasted."

  Part of what he said startled the curator. He didn't know what it was, but he had stumbled onto just the right words. Her mouth hung open for a second in surprise, and her head moved in disbelief, side-to-side, just slightly, as if reading a large sign from up close. Finally, she sank back into Father's chair.

  "Very well, Bilius d'Mourne, I will be your mentor." She produced a thick tome from nowhere and let it drop with a thud onto Father's desk. "Let's begin with Elsanne Wolt's Essentials, chapters one through five. And don't you dare write in my book."