He chuckled. “I told you—I’m a mage now. Now I could make you believe it without actually saying anything.” He became serious again. “One word of power makes a genius of you. Two words of power makes an adept. That lets you be good at almost any mundane skill, a sort of superperson. Sometimes, if you have a real Faculty, you start to pick up some occult abilities then, too. I had found I had a fair insight. That means I could read people’s thoughts. Usually only a mage or a sorcerer can do that. Don’t worry—I rarely do.”
She thought this had been one of the rare times, though. If he read that thought, he didn’t reply to it.
“And three words make you a mage. I told you I’m a mage. I know three words. I can do magic, like showing you that imp. Probably I’ll be told a fourth word, when one becomes available. Four words make a full—blown sorcerer.”
Thaile noticed another piece of cake she had overlooked and decided she might just be able to squeeze it in. She was feeling that odd sort of excitement again.
“And me?” she asked with her mouth full.
Jain turned to look where the sun was slipping low in the western sky. He pointed that way, then stretched his arms overhead and rubbed them, as if he were growing stiff with sitting. “You have Faculty, without a doubt. You have to come to the College before your next birthday.”
Which was what she’d feared ever since the Death Watch. She didn’t want to go to the College, whatever and wherever it was. She wanted to find a good spot to be a Place and then a good man to share it with. Usually the boys liked to find the Place, but it wasn’t unknown for girls to, well, sort of lead them to likely sites. She wouldn’t mind the other way, either, if a quiet young man with wide shoulders and thick arms and a kind smile came by and said he’d found a great Place and would she come with him and look at it. . .
That was what life was for. A pixie was a flower that rooted in a place and grew and blossomed there and sent out its seeds in the wind to root in places of their own.
This College Jain talked of must hold dozens of people—recorders and mages and sorcerers and Gods knew what else. A seed couldn’t root in a patch all crowded with weeds!
“I didn’t want to, either,” Jain said sympathetically. “I was a little older than you. I had a Place all picked out already and I’d even shown it to a girl or two. But I had to go. That’s the law. I was mad and rebellious and sorry for myself. When I got to the College, I realized what I’d been missing all my life. And now—now I can’t bear the thought of ever leaving. Oh, Thaile! Human beings don’t have to live in chicken coops. At the College you’ll wash in hot water and wear fine dresses and eat fine food! Cake, even! You’ll sleep in real beds, you’ll . . . I don’t suppose you have the faintest idea what a real bed looks like, do you?”
She shook her head, pouting.
“Then trust me. Trust the Keeper! You will be very, very happy and never have any regrets.” His yellow eyes narrowed wolfishly. “And you haven’t any choice, anyway, remember! The Keeper knows of you; the Keeper never sleeps. Don’t try anything foolish, because it won’t work.”
She cringed before his slitted gaze.
“Not me,” he said. “I’m only a mage. I couldn’t put a compulsion on you that would last until you got to the College. But the Keeper will not be defied, Thaile. And stay away from old people, or sick people. Understand why?”
She shook her head, trying to edge backward off the cloak, away from him.
“Can you remember the word the old woman told you?” She nodded. It was a long, gibberishly thing that didn’t seem to mean anything, but she hadn’t forgotten it.
“Can you repeat it?”
She licked her lips and said, “That’s not allowed.”
He smiled. “Right. It isn’t. But even if it were, you probably couldn’t. Words are very hard to say, except when you’re dying. That’s why we have Death Watches. Whose idea was it to go visit at the Vool Place?”
His rapid changes of subject bewildered her. “Idea? I don’t know! That was ages ago.”
He scowled. “Maybe it was only coincidence, then. But at the College there’s tales of a Faculty so strong it can actually seek out words. That’s very rare, if it’s even possible. The most powerful of sorcerers can’t detect words directly! So maybe your case was just coincidence.”
She didn’t think he thought it was, though.
“Just in case,” he said, “you must stay away from old people and sick people. You don’t want to go picking up any more trash words. Can’t lose a word, once you know it!”
He smiled again, but then her attention was grabbed away by a huge explosion of terror and pity from Frial and an upwelling of anger and pain from Gaib.
“Your mother’s home,” Jain remarked, rising.
Thaile sprang up also and backed away a few steps, nauseated by her parents’ distress. “Tell me! Tell me what you did to him!”
The recorder snapped his fingers and his cloak floated up from the ground to adjust itself on his shoulders. The dishes and food had all vanished without Thaile noticing.
“You’ll be working party tricks of your own in a year or two, you know. ” He smirked cheerfully and placed a broadbrimmed hat on his head at a jaunty angle.
“What did you do to my father?” she shouted.
“I gave him a fright,” Jain said sulkily. “If you want to cheer him up, you can tell him that it’ll wear off by morning. I’m only a mage and that’s the best I can do on transformations. Thaile!”
She had started to run. His command seemed to root her toes in the turf, but she did not turn.
He came closer, right behind her, and she began to shake. She had become so used to Feeling other people’s emotions that he frightened her, because he was masked from her. She could smell a strange flowery scent about him, mixed with sweat.
“Forget them, Thaile. Your father is an ignorant, small-minded peasant. Your mother can’t be much better, if she has tolerated that oaf all her life. They live like beasts and they’ve brought you up to think that’s the right way to live. Well, it’s not! Come to the College as soon as you can. Don’t wait until you’re sixteen. Come soon. Come and learn how to be a human being. Come and learn your destiny. Forget these churls.”
Forget her family, her home? Never!
“There is more to life than rearing babies, Thaile!”
She listened to the silence for a whole minute before she realized that the recorder had disappeared and she was alone. She took off down the hill as fast as she could run.
Destiny obscure:
Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
— Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
FIVE
Hostages to fortune
1
The sun was returning to Krasnegar.
In midwinter there was almost no daylight at all. Sunlight appeared as a bright blur in the south for a short while at noon and then was gone, like a brief candle in a crypt. At the dark of the moon, the sky was an iron bowl bearing only a glitter of stars and the nightmare twitch of aurora. Those were too arrogant to illuminate human affairs, as if the sins of the climate were none of their business.
A full moon, though, never set. The stars and aurora fled before it. It soared through the sky, big as a silver plate, shedding a helpful blue light on the snow, so that men could emerge briefly from their lairs to view the stricken world.
The second full moon after midwinter was the traditional date of the Timber Meet, a custom that had developed in Inos’ reign. She had instituted winter expeditions to obtain lumber from the forests to the south, using horse sleds to bring the trunks over the bare hills to Krasnegar. Unfortunately, the forests belonged to the goblins. Goblins, as Rap had been known to remark, were green but not stupid. By the time he had married the queen and taken charge of such masculine matters as tree-cutting expeditions, the goblins had awakened to the value of lumber as a trade item.
That winter the first Krasnegarian team to venture south was quietly surrounded by about five times as many goblins, all armed with spears or bows and anxious to discuss the matter of stumpage. Goblins’ well-deserved reputation for being enthusiastic torturers added a certain urgency to the negotiations.