#BABY MAMMOTH has earned TENURE

[jiubilant]

If it is Known that Ravi is never without the Staff of Magnus and also Known that he often visits Laf and also also Known that baby mammoths are fond of brandishing sticks . . . how many times has a baby run away with a powerful artifact

“And that is how,” says the Archmage of Winterhold, gesturing grandly to the Staff of Magnus, “after two hundred years, I found a walking-stick of perfect height. Snipp, snapp, snute, så er eventyret ute.”

“Most people,” says the mammoth-herder, “cut their own to size, Hrafi.”

“Now you tell me.”

Midday, and the rolling Hviting plains gleam golden-green. The mammoth-herder lounges in the tickly grass. Most of her beasts are browsing well downslope, rooting like great gardeners through goosefoot and sedge. They chew with calm deliberation. Only the two calves gambol nearby, trumpeting and treading on each other’s trunks—and turning, every so often, to make sure that their minder is paying attention.

“It is a good walking-stick,” she says, keeping a fond eye on the calves. The sun warms her shoulders. A sleepy breeze ripples through the grasses of the steppe. “And a good story. Wundorlic.”

“Yes, well.” With an embarrassed smile, her friend returns to his lunch. He’d bartered the bread from a passing drover; the mammoth-herder had supplied the cheese, and he’d mortared it all together with fascinating disregard for the proper way to eat anything. “Yarn for yarn. You’ve answered all my questions.”

“No small boast.” The mammoth-herder glances down at the Staff, propped like a broom against the Archmage’s bedroll and bag. It’s a twig like any other, she thinks. Only the blue flame flickering at its tip betrays it as a wizard’s companion. “You found it for the clevermen. Why did you keep it?”

“Had to,” says the Archmage, his voice somewhat muffled by sandwich. (That’s what he’d called it, though the mammoth-herder had witnessed no witchery in its production.) “It’s choosy. Burned my Master Wizard’s hand.”

The mammoth-herder raises her eyebrows. The calves trundle over, cross at being ignored; she coaxes one to her side, deft as a shepherd with a lamb, and scratches it under the chin.

“How does it—ouch,” she says, and makes a face. A wandering trunk had tweaked her beard. “How does it choose?”

“S’a matter of, ah, of might,” says the Archmage with a vague wave of the sandwich. “And—and stature, supposedly, and so forth. Far as I’ve read, anyway—oof—”

He goes down with a helpless laugh. The calf who had butted him tries to climb into his lap, finds it too small, and snuffles with indignation through his hair.

“Gently, lytling,” the mammoth-herder chides it, catching the curious trunk. The calf, out of the corner of its eye, gives her a martyred look.

Then it wriggles free and rummages through the Archmage’s packs. The Staff tips over. A kicked cookpot bounces down the slope. The Archmage, lying limbs akimbo in the grass, stifles an undignified snort as a few notes from his field journal flutter by.

“The mammoth,” he intones with mock solemnity, as if dictating to a scribe, “is a known vandal, and smokes like a chimney—”

“Might, you said,” says the mammoth-herder with a great grin, and plucks the man’s pipe from the calf’s trunk.

The Archmage seems disinclined to sit up. He pillows his head under one arm, smiling, and shuts his eyes. “Mm.”

“Stature.”

“S’what I said.”

“Why, then,” asks the mammoth-herder, not unkindly, “did it choose you?”

The Archmage blinks up at her. He’s wearing his squashed lunch. His hair sticks up in peaks where the calf had mussed it.

“I’ve no notion,” he says.

The calf, with a gleeful toss of its head, seizes the Staff and waves it. The Staff sends forth a delighted shower of sparks.