The Knight Who Turns to Stone

Elina had been a mage for three years and she still was not very good at it, which was a problem, because the man in front of her was about to turn to stone and he expected her to fix it. "You are a mage," he said. He said it like an accusation. "The village said there was a mage here. Are you the mage or not?" "I am a mage," Elina said. She did not add *sort of* or *still in training* or *please do not put your hopes on me*, even though all of those things were true, because the man looked tired and angry and like he had been disappointed by a lot of people already, and Elina did not want to be one more. The man was a knight. You could tell because he had a sword, and armour, although the armour was dented and dusty and one of the straps was held together with rope. He was tall and he had a scar on his jaw and he looked to be about thirty. He also looked, Elina thought, like someone who had not slept properly in a long time, and she was about to find out why. "My name is Sir Aldric," he said. "Two years ago I fought in the battle at Grey Hollow. There was an enemy sorcerer there. Before our soldiers cut him down, he put a curse on me." Aldric's jaw went tight. "Every night, when the sun goes down, I turn to stone. I cannot move, I cannot speak, I cannot do anything. I am a statue from sunset to sunrise. And then when the sun comes up I am flesh again." He looked at the window, where the light was already getting low and orange. "It happens soon. You will see it for yourself. I am not asking you to believe me. I am asking you to fix it." Elina did not know what to say. In three years of being a mage, sort of, she had cured a sick cow, found a lost ring, made it rain a little bit once by accident, and lit a great many candles. Nobody had ever come to her with a curse. Curses were the kind of thing you read about. They were the kind of thing real mages dealt with, the ones who had finished their training and got the proper robes. "I should tell you," she said, because lying to him felt worse than disappointing him, "that I have never broken a curse before. I have never even seen one. I do not want you to think I am something I am not." She waited for him to be angry. She thought he would shout, or leave, or call her useless, which is what the merchant in the next village had called her. But Sir Aldric just looked at her for a moment. And then, surprisingly, the angry line of his shoulders went down a little bit. "That," he said, "is the first honest thing anyone has said to me in two years. Every other mage I have found told me they could fix it. They all wanted my money first. Then they tried something, and it did not work, and they ran away before I turned to stone so I could not ask for the money back." He shook his head. "You are the first one who told me the truth before taking anything. So. You have never broken a curse. Fine. But you are a mage, and you are honest, and right now that is more than I have had in two years of looking." Elina felt something warm and a little bit scary happen in her chest. It was the feeling of being trusted. She was not used to it and she did not entirely know what to do with it. And then the sun went down. It was fast. One moment Sir Aldric was standing there, a tired angry honest man with rope holding his armour together, and the next there was a grey grinding sound, like a millstone, and Elina watched the colour drain out of him from his boots upward. His skin went grey. His eyes went grey, still open, still looking at her, and then they stopped looking at anything. The rope on his armour went hard. In the space of about ten seconds, Sir Aldric the knight was Sir Aldric the statue, standing in the middle of Elina's small cottage, one hand half-raised as if he had been about to say something else. Elina stood very still in the quiet. She walked all the way around him once. She touched his stone arm, carefully. It was cold, and solid, and absolutely real, and the curse was absolutely real, and a real cursed knight was absolutely standing in her cottage expecting a mage who could barely make it rain to save him. "Okay," Elina said out loud, to the statue, because the statue could not judge her for talking to herself. "Okay. I do not know how to do this. But you were honest with me, so I am going to be honest with you, even though you cannot hear me right now." She pulled a chair over and sat down in front of the stone knight, in the dark, and she made him a promise that she was not at all sure she could keep. "I am going to learn," Elina told him. "Whatever it takes. Wherever we have to go. I am going to learn how to break this, and I am going to break it. I have never been important to anybody before, Sir Aldric. You are the first person who ever needed me. I am not going to run away before sunrise." The statue did not answer. Outside, the first stars were coming out, and somewhere a long way off was the answer to a curse, and Elina sat with a stone knight all night and started, quietly, to plan.