Eleven miles of sheep track separate Ochrwyn from the last place a lorry can turn, and the walk in shows what the wizard has done to the country before he is seen. Gateposts are charred on their north faces only. A hawthorn at the second stile grows in a tight left-handed spiral. The drystone walls have been rebuilt stone by stone with the lichen turned inward, which takes a long time and has no use I can find. I arrive in late September, and rain comes down off the Cairn ridge for nine days before the figure at the top of the lane steps out of his tower.
He is six and a half feet tall and bent like a heron, with hands too big for his wrists and ink worked into the creases of every knuckle. The left eyebrow is gone, and the tip of his gray beard is singed to the yellow of old piano keys. His teal robe has a patch at the left elbow in a different wool. In October he does almost nothing a visitor would pay to see. He reads in the window above Ilfryn Tarn, eats oat porridge and smoked herring, and at seven each morning sweeps his doorstep with a birch broom, carrying the sweepings to the same corner of the yard. No spell is involved. He has also been at war for six years with a goose belonging to Peredur Lloyd, over the grass verge between their gates. The goose is ahead.
The first hard frost changes him. He goes out after dark and works on the open hillside, and by morning the grass carries scorched rings nine or ten feet across, each with a bare, dry floor where the frost has melted in a clean circle. Shepherds track him by them and drive their flocks around. Ochrwyn keeps one custom with him. A gift is an egg left on his gatepost with the small end toward the tower, which tells him nothing is owed. Nobody hands him anything directly. An egg set with the big end inward is read as a request, and he answers it.
By January snow shuts the lane and he casts almost nothing, saving whatever it is he spends. The window is lit by four in the afternoon, and the doorstep is swept anyway. At the March thaw he grows restless, climbs a ladder to reslate the byre roof by hand, mutters at every slate, and burns a ring in the yard before breakfast on four mornings out of seven. The ring behind the byre measured eleven feet across in December. On the last day of March I pace it again and make it fourteen feet and two inches.
- Classification
- Human spellcaster, solitary scholar
- Habitat
- Ruined towers on high moorland
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6.5 ft tall, stooped
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Highland moors of the far west
- Binomial
- Magus solitarius
- Diet
- Oats, smoked herring, boiled eggs
- Temperament
- Testy, patient, fiercely territorial