Year 3

Amelia wasn't home. Zelgadis had knocked three times and then let himself in. (The door wasn't locked.) All her stuff looked normal so she was probably just out shopping or something. He was on his way back to town to look for her there when a girl perhaps ten or twelve years old met him coming the other direction. Zelgadis recognized her as the baker's daughter.

"Hello," she said cheerfully. "If you're looking for Miss Amelia, she's in the church holding a clinic. It was the mayor's idea. They thought you'd be back by now."

"I would have been, but on the way here I heard that in Taforashia they'd discovered the house of a powerful sorceress lost in the vines. She died of the plague and everyone forgot it was there and...you understood about one word in three of that, didn't you?"

The girl smiled at him patiently.

"The church you said? Right." Zelgadis headed toward the building.

The girl trailed behind him. "Is Miss Amelia really a priestess of Ceipheed?" she asked.

"A fairly high ranking one, I believe, although you wouldn't know it from the way she acts most of the time," Zelgadis answered absentmindedly.

The girl giggled and ran off in the direction of her house.

Inside the church, a small crowd of people was standing around idly under the benevolent gaze of the crude statue of Ceipheed. There was an outbreak of pointing and whispering when Zel stepped in the door. Most of the people in the town itself barely reacted to his stone skin at all any more, which was one of the reasons why he found this place so restful, but the same could not be said for the outlying farm families. One woman in particular was openly staring at him with wide, shocked eyes. Zelgadis took an involuntary step backward and reached reflexively for his face covering, but he forced himself to stop. This was his home turf, or the closest thing he had to any. He had every right to be here. He glared back at the woman and she finally dropped her gaze.

Amelia spotted him and waved him over, visibly radiating relief. She finished the recovery spell she was casting on a little boy's wrist and then led Zel right up to the same woman who had been staring at him. The girl standing beside the woman - probably her daughter, judging by the resemblance - gave a deep, hacking cough. Zelgadis winced at the thought of having to talk to them, but when he glared at the woman challengingly she merely looked back at him with weary hope. Appeased, he turned his attention to Amelia.

Amelia went through a rapid series of gestures that included stabbing a finger at the open page of a book, placing one forearm on top of the other across her chest and raising the top one, and holding up a spoon.

"I didn't get any of that," Zelgadis said. "Some context please?"

Amelia handed him the book and pointed to a particular paragraph. Zelgadis skimmed it. "...expectorant and cough suppressing properties...steep in honey...fights infections...toxic in concentrations exceeding... Okay, got it. Now, what was the rest of the message?"

Amelia held up two fingers on one hand and a spoon in the other hand. Then she put them down and picked up a small jar of syrup. Then the spoon again. Then crossed forearms with the top arm lifting. Then the spoon again, and finally the crossed arms again but this time with the other one on top and descending instead of lifting.

"What's this?" Zelgadis imitated the rising arm gesture.

Amelia blew out air through her teeth in frustration and dragged him outside. She pointed to the sun.

"Sun..."

She did the arm gesture again.

"...Rise? Sunrise and sunset?"

Amelia nodded.

Zelgadis went back to the mother and daughter. He said slowly and clearly in case they were as stupid as they were rustic, "Take two small spoonfuls of this cough syrup a day, one at sunrise, one at sunset. Don't take any more than that because this is a powerful medicine and it's easy to overdose." He looked to Amelia for confirmation.

She threw up her arms in a 'finally!' gesture and nodded.

The rest of the prescriptions went a lot more smoothly.

The snow was falling so thickly that Zelgadis could only see a few feet. Since those few feet didn't include any trees he assumed he was still on the path. Wasn't this kingdom supposed to have a dry climate? It was just his luck to arrive here on the day of what would probably prove to be the worst blizzard of the decade.

If he was going to end up snowed in, he would much rather it be in Amelia's house than in a snowbank so he pushed onward. Time seemed to stand still as he crunched through the changeless, unbroken whiteness of the fresh snow. Well, not entirely changeless. It was slowly getting deeper. It was above his ankles now. Mere hours ago, before the snow started, the ground had been bare brown. He kept slogging forward, mind more numb than his fingertips.

Faced with a sudden, knee-deep snowdrift, he looked up. The view, such as it was, seemed both darker and lighter than before. Darker because the sun was setting. Lighter because it was no longer enclosed by trees. He could make out the shapes of houses through the snow. Finally!

Without any tree branches to absorb part of the load, the snow was deeper here, and the wind had blown it into drifts that varied from too shallow to cover the toes of his boots up to nearly waist-deep. To make it worse, the fresh snow was too soft to support his weight (which was unsurprising given that he weighed much more than a normal human of his size) so however deep the snow was, that was how far he had to lift his boot to take his next step. Dusk had turned into night by the time he finally made it through the town and up the hill but finally he saw Amelia's red door in front of him.

He knocked but then, too cold to wait, just opened the door and stepped into the warm interior. Amelia was there, sitting by the fire. At his appearance, she dropped whatever project she had been working on and ran to help him tug off his snow-encrusted cape, boots and shirt. He fended her off, blushing furiously, when she tried to reach for his pants.

She blushed too and started to hang up his snowy clothes by the fire while he went into his bedroom to get some dry clothes. He changed out of his cold, wet pants into pyjamas and went back to join Amelia in front of the fire, hanging his pants with the rest of his wet clothes.

When he sat down, she held up her knitting against him and nodded in satisfaction. It was the start of an intricate cable sweater made from creamy, unbleached wool. Zelgadis touched his chest in surprise. For me?

Amelia gave him a brilliant smile.

Before long, he fell asleep on the hearth, head pillowed on his arms and face turned toward the warmth of the fire. When he woke up in the morning, there was a pillow under his head and blankets over the rest of him, and the snow was almost up to the window sills.

However, that apparently hadn't stopped Amelia from going out. When he went to return his pillow and blankets to his room, he opened the shutters to see how deep the snow was in the garden and discovered that there was a path forced through the snow from the back door to the well and then toward the back of the garden where the young fruit trees were. Amelia was just making her way back to the house with a watering can in her hand. She saw him looking at her and stopped in her tracks. They stared at each other soberly for a long moment. Finally Amelia continued on her way.

Zelgadis met her at the back door. It was his turn to help her strip off snowy outer clothes and hang them by the fire. Amelia squirmed in suspense although she tried not to.

Finally, Zelgadis broke the silence. "What will I find at the end of that path? The lime tree?" Amelia's guilty eyes confirmed his guess. "I thought it was suspicious you were trying to grow it this far north. I almost caught you watering the garden in the rain a few times but you do it so early in the morning I was never sure. That's your task isn't it? To water that lime tree every day. That's why you refuse to travel more than a few hours from this house."

Amelia started needlessly smoothing out her wet clothes on the rack.

"I knew you had a task. There had to be more to this than just the vow of silence. But that still doesn't tell me what enchantment you're trying to break, or why."

Amelia looked at him wide-eyed as if to say, 'Enchantment? What enchantment?'

"Keep your secrets. I know you have reasons for them. Now, what's for breakfast?"

Amelia blinked in surprise, gave him a grateful smile like the sun dawning, and went to look in the kitchen.

"Are you looking forward to Community Clean-up Day tomorrow?" the baker asked conversationally while Amelia was out in the back yard gathering herbs for the day's herb bread.

"Community Clean-up Day?" Zelgadis repeated blankly.

"Every spring after the snow melts we set a day to get together to clean up all the public spaces. It's amazing how much dirt, garbage and animal droppings get buried in the snowbanks during the winter. Then the snow melts and there it all is at once! So we sweep the road, pick up the garbage around town, fix up the church if it needs it and so on, and then in the evening we have a big dance. It's really the highlight of early spring."

Zelgadis thought grimly that it was a sign just how boring this town was that they considered picking up garbage the highlight of the season. However, all he said was, "I won't be able to go. I'm planning to leave town as soon as I finish breakfast."

Amelia came back inside in time to hear his response and she did not look happy about it. After the baker left, she looked up at Zelgadis with big, sad eyes.

"I have to go," he said uncomfortably. "I don't mind helping you out with spring cleaning while I'm here but it's been over a week now and we've scrubbed everything in this house. I still have a cure to search for, you know."

Amelia handed him a hoe and rake and looked at him pleadingly.

"You want me to turn over the soil in your vegetable beds and clear away the dead leaves before I go?"

Amelia nodded enthusiastically.

"Fine. I'll do those last two things for you but then I'm leaving."

Amelia nodded smugly. Her plan to stall him one more day so he would be forced to stay for Community Clean-up Day and the dance couldn't be more transparent. However, she was forgetting something very important.

Zelgadis finished his breakfast and then went out into the garden. He knelt down next to the first vegetable bed, touched a finger to the soil and used low-powered earth spells to churn the dirt until all the old roots were ripped apart. He repeated the spells on each of the other beds. Then he used air spells to blow all the dead leaves that had fallen onto the garden away into the forest. He returned to the house ten minutes after he'd left it, picked up his packed lunch off the kitchen counter and waved goodbye to Amelia.

With a sigh of defeat and wistful smile, she waved goodbye in return.

Amelia was reading a book on silent spell casting with the air of one performing a boring duty. Zelgadis was also finding it hard to concentrate on his book, a collection of legends he had read far too many times before, so he put it down and got out the game board. He held up a checker piece and a chess piece in front of Amelia inquiringly. She pointed to the chess piece without hesitation.

They were deep in a game when there was an urgent knock on the door. Zelgadis answered the door. A girl was standing there, "Please, sir, it's my little brother. He was climbing the rocks and he fell. He's hurt really badly!"

Amelia ran to grab her cloak and shoes. Zelgadis put a hand on his own cloak and looked at Amelia questioningly. She shook her head. She could handle this on her own.

Just before she left she pointed at the chess board and wagged her finger at him. He put his hand to his chest in mock-injury. Me? Cheat? Never!

When she got back, Zelgadis launched the strategy he'd been planning the whole time she was gone. He managed to capture her knight and bishop, but in the end she still won.