It was bad enough here at the Gaib Place, remote though it was. She could Feel what everyone in the district was feeling—love, anger, happiness, boredom, and stranger things, too. To go and visit the neighbors’ Places was torment, because the Feelings were stronger at close quarters, and she could not help but learn to recognize each person’s own Feelings. That made it all worse. Even from here, she knew when Looth made love to his wife, or Heem raged at his children. Sometimes at night she would be wakened by thunderclaps of passion from her father in the, next room. They terrified and disgusted her, although they were not so nauseating as the underlying slithery hypocrisy of her mother’s acceptance. She’d always thought her mother was the loving one and her father stolid.
Behind all the Feelings of the district lay a never-ending murmur of thousands of other Feelings from far away. Sometimes she thought she could Feel the whole world, all the people of Thume, and all the demons who lived Outside, as well.
Today she had Felt the stranger coming and had run up to her secret place and crouched there for hours. She’d Felt her mother’s alarm begin when she’d detected the approach of the unknown, also. And then her father’s lower, slower emotions had turned to alarm, too.
Her mother must have gone away, because her feelings had faded even as the stranger’s grew stronger. Thaile had wished then that she had done what Frial had likely done, heading over the ridge to visit the Wide Place, or the Heem Place, or somewhere. She should not have stayed here at all.
By the time her father’s sudden terror struck, she had become too paralyzed to do anything except hunker down as small as she could, like a baby bird in its nest. Then the stranger’s spite and anger had stopped abruptly, cut off all at once. That had been almost worse, because after that she could not place him—she was quite certain, somehow, that it was a man who was visiting the Gaib Place and he was still there.
After a little while, she Felt pain from her father, real pain. She whimpered in sympathy. She had never known Gaib to react like that, even when he’d dropped the log on his toe last month and limped for days. No, no! What was the stranger doing to him? She began to pray—to the God of Places, the God of Mercy, the Keeper . . .
Without warning, a blast of amusement surged over her, very strong, very close. Someone was laughing. Someone was extraordinarily happy about something. Her terror faded before it and she discovered that she was starting to smile in sympathy. Whatever could be so incredibly funny?
“Thaile!” cried an unfamiliar voice, not far off. “Thaile, come out wherever you are!” The voice was full of the same laughter she had been sensing.
Obviously it was the stranger, although how he could have come up from the cottage so quickly she could not imagine. He no longer Felt dangerous at all; the contempt and anger were all gone now. There was only that wonderfully reassuring hilarity. If she didn’t go out to him, then he might come looking for her. He was probably a sorcerer and could find her secret place if he wanted to. So there was no use refusing him.
Thaile wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands, ran fingers through the tangle of her curls, and scrambled under the fallen tree that barred the exit—all legs and arms, like the climbing frog her mother called her sometimes.
He was a slender, lanky man in green, sitting on a brown blanket, which he had spread in a sunlit spot below an airy acacia tree. He was laying out things on the blanket, and she stood behind a bush for a moment to watch. She saw plates and bowls, but she could not see where he was getting them from. The blanket, she realized, must be a cloak, for it had a fur collar and very few blankets had collars. She could feel a snigger coming on, like a need to sneeze.
He raised his head and looked right at her. He waved an arm cheerfully. ”Come on! I’m not going to hurt you!”
Grinning shyly, she walked through the trees to his patch of brightness. He was really quite good-looking, she decided, with curly brown hair and extremely pointy ears. His clothes were beautiful and his smile melted all the prickly fears inside her.
“Sit down, Thaile. I’m Jain of the College.”
“You’re a sorcerer!” She ought to be frightened out of her wits. She wondered why she felt so happy instead.
He grinned. “Not quite. I’m only a mage—but that doesn’t matter just now. I expect you’re hungry? I know you’re hungry! So am I. How about some icy-cold orange juice to start with?”
She sat down, tucking her legs as far out of sight as she could, because they were all scratched and dirty, and very skinny legs anyway. Her frock was torn and full of burrs. She drank from the shiny metal cup he gave her. It was astonishingly heavy. She wondered why she could not Feel anything from him, being so close, but all she sensed was that bubbling, laughing amusement, the sort of happiness you want to share with someone else. That was all. Funny! Most men put out scary want-you Feelings when they were near her, even quite young boys; and most male adolescents were unbearable at close quarters now, because of that. Although she hated to think of it, she Felt that want you even from Wide, her sister’s man . . . and even her own father sometimes had traces of it. It was a man thing men couldn’t help, shed assumed. So either this Jain sorcerer was not a normal man at all, or he was capable of hiding his real feelings from her.
“You can speak, can’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”
He looked at her squarely. “Call me Jain. I want to be friends and you have absolutely nothing to fear from me. I’m a recorder, from the College. I’m not a monster. Not a freak. Just an ordinary sort of man. I have a Place of my own and a goodwife who shares it with me and I’m not going to do anything nasty at all. All right?”
If he had a Place of his own, then why wasn’t he at home in it, growing something, as a man should?
“What did you do to Gaib?” she muttered.
Jain’s bony face grew sad. “He lied to me, Thaile. He knew I’m a recorder, yet he told me lies. That’s forbidden by the Blood Laws, you know.”
She nodded dumbly, aware of tiny veins of fear within her wanting-to-laugh feelings.
“I punished him a little. Don’t worry; he’ll be all right. You won’t lie to me. And I won’t lie to you. I have to tell you some things. But first, eat up!”
She looked over the dishes he had laid out and her mouth began watering so hard that she couldn’t have spoken anyway. There were bowls of fruit, steaming rice, juicy pork chops, bright vegetables—plus all sorts of other things she couldn’t even identify. She stared at them, unable to believe that all this was just for the two of them.
Jain was watching her with a wry smile. “Don’t know where to start, do you? Look, just for fun, try this first. It’s cake and I don’t suppose you’ve ever tasted anything like it in your life.”
Cake, Thaile decided quickly, was perfect bliss. She began to eat as if she had not eaten in a year or more.
Jain himself nibbled on a fig, although it had to be a sorcerous fig at this time of year. It was all sorcerous.
“You eat,” he said pensively, “and I’ll talk. First, I have to tell you some history. Maybe you’ve heard this, maybe not. Doesn’t matter. This lovely land of ours is called Thume, right? It lies between two lots of mountains—those up there, the Progistes, and the Qobles, far away. It has sea on the other two sides—big, big water. Over the mountains and over the seas live other people. You’ve heard of the red-haired demons and so on. Well, they’re not really demons, they’re just people, but they’re very violent people, most of them.”
She nodded with her mouth full, to show that she was listening. Jain would be better looking if his eyes had more slant to them, she thought.
“You Felt one of their battles, didn’t you?” he said. “Yes, I know about that. Don’t worry! The Keeper knows about it, too. It was she who told me. There were thousands of men killed that day, at a place called Bone Pass. The dark-haired men killed the red-haired men, mostly.” He sighed and took another fig.