The night before, when Kayla entered the wagon she would be sleeping in, she was so exhausted that she didn’t bother looking at anything but the bed as she got ready for some much needed sleep. By the time she woke up, sun was pouring in through the opened window and Rhainne, to Kayla’s relief, was nowhere in sight. That gave her a little time to think, and to have a look around the wagon.
There were boxes, trunks, chests, and shelves everywhere, all of which were now closed or covered and looked to be locked. Magically. That was interesting; few people could afford so many magical locks. Rhianne didn't seem like she was rich enough, though perhaps that was what was in all those trunks and things-- did she think Kayla was some kind of petty thief? But no, she had freaked out because Kayla was from the Guild. Kayla could have, she thought, tried to unlock a few of them, but chances were that Rhianne would notice, and they might be set with traps in any case. Kayla hadn't gotten far enough in her training to make more than a clumsy try. Still, it irked her that Rhianne thought she was low enough to steal whatever it was. But then, Rhianne already owned those locks; she might just be paranoid.
There was something strangely familiar about the disorganized mess, Kayla thought, but she couldn't put a finger on what it was so she pushed it from her mind. The wagon, were it not for its owner, would have been comfortable enough. Kayla had always liked small spaces, much to her father's dismay-- he tried to give her a gigantic room, full of windows and expensive furniture, but she simply closed off a corner with screens and lived there. She just felt safer with walls close by.
“Hey! Sleepy head! You awake in there?” Jojo called from outside, pounding on the door. Kayla laughed to herself; she liked Jojo. She got up and opened the door.
“Well if I wasn't before I would be now,” she muttered, making sure it was loud enough for him to hear and fixing him with a glare that didn't last long. He laughed and then she couldn't help laughing with him.
In the light of day the laughing man looked far less sinister than when she had first seen him. Sure, he had black hair, a wicked widow's peak, a carefully trimmed goatee, several gold loops in his ears, and all around looked like some idiot's conception of a pirate... but now that Kayla had heard him laugh, she couldn't manage to be afraid of him. There was too much joy in that laugh, too much music.
“Come on, time to meet the whole crew,” he said, grabbing Kayla by the arm and dragging her down the steps. Making a show out of dragging her, anyway; Kayla had plenty of time to step carefully so she didn't fall.
“Do I have to?” Kayla whined, thinking of Rhianne's less than warm reception. She hoped the others would be better.
“Yep!”
The Maestro watched from his wagon as Jojo dragged the girl out of Rhianne's wagon. He hadn't wanted to put her there; Rhianne was notoriously prickly, and seemed to have something against the girl already, but there really was nowhere else. The Trio shared the largest wagon, David and Cherie had one, Elliot's was small and filled with his odd instruments anyway, and Jojo shared with Kardal. Well, Kardal rarely used the wagon, but the Maestro wasn't about to put a young girl in the same wagon as Jojo. The only other wagon with any space was his own, and he was less likely to share his own space than to inflict Jojo on the poor thing-- not like the man, rogue though he was, would actually take advantage of her. He didn't think so, anyway.
The Maestro was a private man, more so than even Rhianne, though with more reason. He, of course, knew her reasons for it; he knew the stories of all his minstrels. To be fair to Rhianne, none of the others had as much reason as she did to worry about people finding her, save the Maestro himself. He rarely let any of the troupe into his wagon; the idea of sharing it was... unpleasant. It wasn't that he didn't love his people, or that he didn't trust them. They all stayed distant out of respect, so it never really came up.
He laughed to himself as he watched Jojo introduce the girl to the Trio. Vivica, Idris, and Valerie, he had named them. Life, fire, and strength. He had no idea what they were saying, but the girl was blushing profusely. Cara... he wasn't sure why he had named her that. He had always been intuitive, and when he named things (or people), the names fit. He'd have to ask Kardal what it meant. She would probably want to know at some point.
After that first day of Adli asking him question after question, Julian had been given a stack of books taller than he was and told to read. He despaired at first, seeing the size of the tomes he was given, but as soon as he cracked the first one open... Julian never understood the fascination with books that Adli and so many of the older mages had, but on reading these he began to realize that his distaste for books had mainly been caused by the kind of books he had been allowed to read. Dry, dull, boring history, or technical manuals, which were only moderately better than laundry lists of dates because they were useful somehow. There were, of course, the polar opposite-- the stories the bards told, collected into books and somehow less alive on the page. Those were plenty interesting, but they weren't real. That was his experience with books: real and boring, or fun but fake. But these books that Adli gave him... these were something else.
At first he thought them merely technical manuals, like any other. Then as he read he found that the dry words had crept into his mind and were forming webs of connected information, and he felt the more he read the closer he got to understanding it. For the first time in his life he read late into the night without any thought of having something better to do. The hazy picture forming in his mind was so interconnected it made his studies of probability and chance look simple. What was it that Adli was studying, what was the big secret the Guild was so afraid of? For all that he felt closer to understanding the more he read, he knew he was nowhere near to the answer; if it were that simple, more people would know it. It was frustrating and yet somehow invigorating all at once, reaching for comprehension and grasping only wisps of certainty, like whispers of a forgotten dream in the light of day. When he slept, usually far too late and often at the very desk where he was reading, he dreamed of strange things that vanished as quickly as those moments of clarity.
Adli watched his apprentice disappear into the piles of books with an alacrity that surprised even him, and they were his books. Julian was a remarkable lad. He only hoped that the boy would not take the information and go where the warlocks had. At this point, Adli wasn’t at all sure whether he was doing the right thing. Perhaps the boy’s devotion to the girl, Kayla, would keep him from going down that road.
He hoped.
