Sorcerers are people, or were, and the one I measured stands five feet eleven inches in its boots. That part is ordinary. The eyes are not. The left pupil is a pinprick and the right is as wide as a cherry stone, and neither changes when a lantern is raised or lowered. It wears a long coat of tarred wool lined in moss-green silk, and its right hand is stained green to the second knuckle from whatever it grinds. Frost will not settle around its feet. On a morning when the pasture was white to the fence, I laid a tailor's tape across the bare ground and found it nine feet from edge to edge.
The oldest account is a tithe roll from Brennvik, in a clerk's cramped hand. It lists a tall tenant who 'pays in weather.' The clerk never explains. Two lines down he notes that the barley ripened a week early and that his own shadow went missing for three days, which he mentions only because he had to sign the page by candle. A century later the herring crews of Kolsund tell of a stranger who sold calm seas. His price was the shadows of their nets, carried off in a folded sack. Nets without shadows caught nothing until he handed them back. The crews also hold that every sorcerer owns one spell it will never cast. I have no means of testing that, and nobody living has watched one run out of the others. What I can report is the diet: smoked herring and rye crusts, taken from doorsteps left unlatched, and nothing else I found.
Valdis Harrek, schoolmaster at Kolsund, charted the bare rings for eleven winters. They step up the valley about four hundred yards a year toward Brennvik, in a line he called straighter than a ruled margin. Households along it press a thumb of hearth ash on each window frame, left thumb only, one print for every person sleeping inside. Harrek's own frame carries nineteen prints. Only seventeen people have ever slept in the schoolhouse. He has not explained the difference, and nobody has asked.
Harrek's notes carry one exception to all of it. A sorcerer lodged in the Kolsund smokehouse has eyes that match, frost on its boots, and a habit of haggling over herring like anyone else. It owes no weather, steals no shadows, and has lost at cards to the cooper twice. Harrek filed it as a tall man in a long coat. The ash is still on his window.
- Classification
- Human spellcaster, bargain-bound
- Habitat
- Fell roads and herring villages
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 5 ft 11 in in boots
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Northern fells and herring coast
- Binomial
- Veneficus glaciofugus
- Diet
- Smoked herring and rye crusts
- Temperament
- Patient, transactional, unblinking