Veneficus: Stones of the Chosen by Chris Page Page B

life of the settlement. Most of his time was spent alone in hidden hollows and copse, closely observing the seasonal movements and changes of nature and animals and living in his own head. The other settlement boys around his age, when not taunting him, kept out of his way, especially after the dwelling house affair.
    The largest building in the Malmesbury settlement was known as the dwelling house, an open structure in the center of all the other dwellings and in which all communal life took place. It was a circular building with a pitched reed roof interwoven through strong willow boughs with eight sturdy oak posts to support it. The settlement elders met there regularly to discuss communal matters and collect the geld; the crops and harvest was sold there; village women gathered there to weave their rough tunics and to chatter, and it was used for hand-fasting ceremonies, proclamations, feast day celebrations, and anything else requiring an assembly of the inhabitants. One quiet summer afternoon Will was sitting in a shady spot under a beech tree on the edge of the settlement, when he was suddenly hit by a barrage of hard acorns. A group of five giggling settlement boys aged from seven to ten stepped from behind an oak tree nearby and sauntered off, still firing at him spasmodically using their crude, jute-stringed slings, a favorite and easily mastered weapon. Wearying of the sport - baiting and firing at Will was a common pastime of theirs and one to which he never retaliated - they took to chasing each other in and around the sturdy poles of the dwelling house.
    Ruefully rubbing the stinging spots where the acorns had peppered his body, Will found himself wishing that something ill would happen to them to teach them a lesson. Something
    like the roof of the dwelling house falling on their heads.
    And that was precisely what happened.
    With a crackling of seasoned willow boughs, the entire roof collapsed on top of the five boys. When the dust and reed debris had cleared, the eight sturdy oak posts were the only things left standing.
    Luckily there had not been anything else going on there at the time.
    Coughing and spluttering, four of the boys, covered in broken reeds, dust, and bits of willow, crawled out from the heap that had been the settlement house roof.
    But one of them did not.
    A group of people appeared instantly and, with much pointing, shouting, and frantic tearing away at the debris, finally dug out the missing boy, and he was carried unconscious back to his home. The following day he appeared with a huge purple bruise on his forehead and his broken right leg in a wooden splint.
    Will had been horrified. Although no one in the settlement associated him with the collapsed roof, he knew that he had caused it. His thought processes had been too specific and the result too instantaneous. He knew he was different from the others in some vaguely undefined way, knew he possessed some sort of power, but this demonstration of it was frightening, especially when used to harm a relatively innocent settlement boy. A few stinging acorns certainly didn’t merit his injuries, and this boy could easily have been killed.
    In a blind panic he had run into the woods and sat there for a long time considering the consequences of what had just happened. It was then he decided that he would not speak. Silence would be his shield against the strange things that he could not yet understand. Something else had happened that day. When he had fled into the woods he’d been accompanied. A pair of pica had stayed high in the treetops but kept with him. Chattering and flapping around loudly it was almost as if they knew of his distress and wanted him to know that they were there.
    Strangely, from that point on he became more aware of them. They always seemed to be around him. In his many private sojourns into private places in the meadows and woods around the settlement, unnoticed at first, an inevitable pair of the black-and-white