Again the big tusks flashed. “Keeps them out of mischief.”
“While you trade with Dwanish! Come on, Death Bird! It’s obvious. You’ve been feinting at Pondague all these years until you’ve got the Impire convinced that there’s no other way across the mountains. But you’ll never persuade me that you haven’t scouted out a few more passes by now! Moreover, the dwarves are your natural allies. That’s no big secret, either. When do you strike?”
Death Bird was glaring. “You’re the one who told me of my destiny. Prophesy for yourself.”
Rap had not really expected to be taken into his confidence. It could not be long now, though. Death Bird had picked up just enough impish culture to become a deadly foe to the Impire. He had spent seventeen years uniting his people and preparing his war. All the border struggles that the Impire had considered important had all just been training for the big one. This year? Or next? Or the year 3000?
Rap shivered. “It so happens I do have a prophecy for you. There’s an old belief that Emine’s Protocol will fail at the end of the millennium. That’s in two more years. I am informed on excellent authority that there’s something to it.”
The goblin chortled, giving away nothing at all. Satisfied with his grease coat, he began pulling on his buckskins. “Be nice to see Hub again. Throw a party for them. Er, with them, I mean.”
“You just may. But it means sorcery trouble.”
“Bright Water’s dead, you know that?”
“No. Hardly surprising.” The mad old loon had been witch of the north since 2682. “Who’s her successor?”
Death Bird’s square eyes twinkled amid their tattoos. Somehow his face seemed even greener with the rest of him covered in buckskin. “A dwarf, named Raspnex.”
“The one we met?”
“Zinixo’s uncle,” the goblin agreed, grinning like a hyena. Of course he would be pleased to have a dwarf on the White Throne if he’d been making treaties with the dwarves. North’s official prerogative was the jotnar raiders, but Bright Water had favored her goblins, also, although shed been too crazy to be reliable.
Rap thought back to his days of sorcery. “I wouldn’t have judged Raspnex’s heft to be quite up to warlock standard, but he’s not a bad man. He was the strongest of Zinixo’s votaries in Faerie. After I broke Zinixo and went back there, he hadn’t tried to imprint any of them. I was impressed.”
South, of course, was an elf. Elves and dwarves were born enemies, so there would be trouble within the Four again. Face it—there was always trouble within the Four! The witch of the west was a troll, Grunth. She was not especially powerful. Nor was Olybino, warlock of the east. Lith’rian was probably the strongest now, so it was odd he’d agreed to Raspnex . . .
Rap shrugged and left the matter to simmer on the back of his mind while he tackled other things—like his smoking left leg, for instance. He shifted around.
“How’s that little lovely you had with you last summer—Bluebell?”
“Fine. Not so little now.”
“How many wives does that make?” Death Bird became cagy. ”Several.”
“How many children?”
The goblin grinned. “State secret. How is your woman?”
“Oh, she’s fine,” Rap said. “Just had the cutest little son. We think he’s going to be sort of fair-haired impish, which is fine because we have a jotunn son already and one of our daughters is impish and the other is jotunn and thank the Gods none of them really looks like me, but just let me tell you what Kadie did the other day . . .”
Death Bird waited with ill-concealed impatience until Rap’s tale was complete. Without even a smile at the punchline, he launched into a dull and pointless account of how his oldest son, Blood Beak, had killed his first bear.
2
Even a pixie could be lonely, and a pixie with no place of her own was a lost soul. As the dry season grew drier and hotter, Thaile felt the call of the faraway College more strongly every day. Already it seemed to have stolen her from her friends, her family, and her familiar surroundings. Already it had enfolded her in its own occult, invisible embrace. She could make no plans; she could think no farther ahead than the onset of the next rainy season, because by then she would be sixteen and somewhere else and a different person, leading a wholly different life, which she could not even now imagine. The Gaib Place was no longer her home. The road ahead disappeared over a cliff.
Before the recorder came, she had just begun to join in the preliminary steps of courtship, the shy exchange of gifts to indicate interest. Jain’s visit ended that. The neighbors all knew of it. Suddenly she was a stranger to her friends, excluded from those rituals. No man was going to waste a sample of his handiwork by giving it to a woman who had to go away soon. Thaile, likewise, need not spend time crafting hats or gloves or any of the usual garment gifts that women produced for men—they would merely be refused with the traditional kindly fiction that they did not fit.
Only three of the boys she knew were of any interest, anyway, and they had all gone off on their explorations already.
Even her parents had reacted to her new destiny with a sort of rejection. It was certainly not deliberate and Thaile might not even have noticed it had she not had Feeling, but somehow Gaib and Frial seemed to have accepted that she was lost to them, as their other two children were lost to Places of their own. They had moved closer to each other in some subtle way, as if filling a gap. That might be just a part of life, a form of self-defense for the old, who should not spend their declining years in fruitless pining. But in this case, the lost child had not gone yet; she had no Place of her own for shelter and no replacement love.
Thaile had reluctantly concluded that her old life was ruined; she might as well embark on the new as soon as possible. To leave soon might be kinder to her parents than hanging around until the last minute. The coffee harvest was the busiest part of the year. She would stay and help with that and then depart. Meanwhile, as the beginning of summer was an easy time and her help not needed, she would start her farewells by going to visit her sister. It would be the first time she had ever been to the Wide Place, and almost certainly it would be the last.
As a father should, Gaib reacted to her announcement with predictably ponderous protests about the dangers of getting lost, raped, or eaten by bears. Frial considered the problem in her usual matter-of-fact way and said she didn’t think anyone with Thaile’s Feeling could ever get lost and would have to be incredibly stupid to get herself raped. And there weren’t any more bears there than there were here. Gaib reluctantly acquiesced in her decision, as he always did.
Thaile’s problem then was that what they said wasn’t what they felt. Underneath their affectionate concern, they felt guilty at having failed their child, angry that they didn’t know what they had done wrong, relieved that she would not be around for a little while to remind them of that failure, and then much more guilt for feeling that relief. At close quarters, with all their worries showing, people were unbearable.
The visit was not a success. The Wide Place was fair enough in itself, lurking in dim coolness below massive boughs. The air was heady with the smell of cedars, and nowhere could have been more private. The necessary compliments came easily.
And yet, within two minutes of her arrival, Thaile knew that she would not be staying long. Sheel was far more interested in her newborn second son than in a half-forgotten sister, and Wide was far more interested in the sister than he should have been. His fingers were all round her like mosquitoes. His erotic cravings seemed to fill the air like the aromatic scent of the trees or the warning hum of bees.
Within an hour Thaile knew that her sister regretted her choice. Wide had turned out to be a poor provider, lazy and shiftless. He hunted when he should have been harvesting, chased women when he should have been planting, and most of the rest of the time, also. Sheel admitted none of this, but her emotions did.
Later on the first evening, things turned even worse. Thaile mentioned the College. Apparently Sheel had never told Wide that her family was Gifted. He was not pleased to learn that his children would have to keep a Death Watch one day and might be stolen away by the College if they displayed Faculty.