He took them from her and led her back to the garments. Once started, she couldn’t stop; he encouraged her. In a few minutes her arms were loaded with skirts and blouses and a couple of heavy capes—after all, this was the rainy season, Mist remarked.
“And a hat,” he said firmly. “You never know what sort of weather you’re going to run into here. There! That’s enough to carry, isn’t it?”
“Oh!” she said, with sudden dismay. “Is it far?”
He shook his head, grinning. “No, but you can come right back again if you want, now you know the Way. Let’s go.” Reluctantly she tore herself away from all the wonderful things. Mist led her back along the path, retracing their steps up the hill. The silence of the forest returned, and the sandy surface was cool under her feet. He continued to carry her shoes for her, while she labored under the weighty burden of skirts and cloaks and blouses. She thought he might offer those bulgy arms to assist her, but evidently such thoughts did not occur to Novice Mist.
Still, the Market had made her feel better. She was going to enjoy trying on all these wonderful things.
“Sorcerers?” she said cautiously. “Some of those people were sorcerers?”
He smiled down at her with his pale yellow eyes. There was something almost appealing in the sleepy way he did that. “I expect so. ‘Most everyone here. seems to be either a mage or a sorcerer. There’s novices and recorders and archivists and analysts and archons—and the Keeper, of course. And a few oddball specialists, like Mistress Mearn. We’ll get all that explained to us when lessons start. Something to do with the moon and needing a sixth novice. Right now, we just wait, and enjoy ourselves.”
The sky must have clouded over very quickly, for rain had begun to fall. She could hear it on the leaves, high above. Very little was getting through, so it wasn’t heavy. In the distance she heard wind, as if a storm were coming. The air had more of a piney smell to it now.
The path was steeper than she had remembered, winding up a hillside. Strange that she did not recall noticing the great mossy rocks scattered around the forest floor. Big as cottages, some of them. And now she was seeing trees more familiar to her—cedars and cottonwoods. And even conifers.
“This isn’t the way we came!” she said, with sudden alarm. She had seen no branchings, or side roads.
Mist chuckled. “Yes, it is. It’s the Way we came, but the Way is not a usual sort of path, Thaile. We’re going to your Place.” Inexplicably, her heart leaped. “My Place? The . . . the. . .” Her confusion flustered her. “The Gaib Place?” That sounded wrong, somehow.
“No. The Thaile Place. Of course you’re Thaile of the College now, to anyone outside, but here you can talk of the Thaile Place if you want. Almost there.”
Thaile Place sounded horribly wrong, somehow. Thaile of the . . . Gaib Place? What Place? That thought at the back of her mind . . .
Then the Way swung around a massive cedar and came to an end at the edge of a rain-soaked clearing, carpeted with grass of brilliant green, speckled with tiny white flowers. At the far side stood a cottage.
“Oh! Oh, my!” She stared. She looked up disbelievingly at Mist’s triumphant smile.
“Mine? Really for me?”
“Yours. All yours. Unless you want to invite some young man to come and share it with you, of course. That’s entirely up to you.”
She did not need Feeling to know what thought lay behind that smirk. Her happiness faltered. Young man? Live with her? The elusive shadow at the back of her mind . . .
“I’ll show you the Mist Place,” he said. “Quite different! It’s on a lake, and I have a canoe. Take you canoeing.”
“One Place at a time!” she said. “Let’s run.”
They ran over the grass, although the rain was not too heavy. The cottage became ever more wonderful as she approacheda porch for sitting on in warm evenings and windows with some sort of shiny stuff in them and a tall chimney so the fire wouldn’t smoke. Gaib had tried to make one of those several times, but it had always fallen down in the next storm.
When she drew near, she saw that the walls were made of flat wood with tight, straight edges. Disloyal as it seemed even to think so, the Gaib Place had been very drafty, because the chinking between the logs kept falling out. This sorcerous place did not seem to have any chinking, it fit so well.
Probably Mist’s cottage would be woven basketwork, as that was how houses were made down in the warm lowlands. How did she know that? Could she have learned it on the journey? She really did not have any clear memories at all of a journey . . .
There was no chicken coop, not that she could see, and no vegetable patch. No goats or pigs, either, but Mist had said she could help herself to food at the Market, and that would certainly be easier than growing and digging and weeding. What on earth was she going to do with herself all day? Apart from fighting off Mist in a canoe, of course.
5
Even had Thaile believed all the marvels Jain had promised her, she could still never have imagined the glory of the cottage. She would not have believed that one person would be expected to need so much space: a room for sitting, a room for sleeping, a room for cooking, a room for washing. Floors and walls and furniture were all made of the flat, shiny wood, smooth and gleaming, and she had never seen a smooth wall in her life before. There were thick cloths to walk on, and soft chairs to sit on, all prettily patterned. More cloths hung by the windows, instead of shutters, and magical stuff like clear ice kept out the rain. Even the lanterns were sorcerous, needing no oil or candles.
Perhaps the greatest wonder of all was the mirror. Thaile knew about mirrors. Her great-grandmother had owned one, and when Thaile had kept Death Watch over her, she had passed the time by playing with it. The family had almost come to blows afterward, determining who would inherit the mirror and who must continue admiring themselves in water. Phain’s mirror had been foggy, an irregular shape, and about the size of a cowpat. The mirror on Thaile’s new bedroom wall was straight-edged, taller than Mist, big as a door, clear as air.
She was definitely plumper than she had thought.
Something about the Place roused her to assert herself. She was a pixie, this was her Place, and Mist was only a visitor. She resented his supercilious air as he showed how familiar he was with magic bathtubs and magic cookpots and beds made of feathers—less than two weeks ago, he must have been just as ignorant as she. She especially disliked his emotions when he demonstrated how to submerge in the featherbed. Let him fantasize about the girls he had left behind, she would rather be left out. She wanted to explore every tiniest corner of this wonderful cottage and experiment with all the magical gadgets, especially the hotwater bathtub. She wanted to try on all the sumptuous clothes now heaped so carelessly on a chair, and see what she looked like with no clothes at all. She most certainly did not want this brash canoeist with his oversize hands and buttery eyes rolling around when she did so, not even if he sat outside on the porch. Maybe there were no chinks in the walls, but there might be knotholes.
“Are you hungry?” she inquired. “Yes!”
“Well, you may not be much of a cook, but I am. So you go back to the Market and get some food.”
A big smile lit up his very ordinary face. “Right. What?”
“Anything you like. And, Mist?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t hurry back.”
For a moment she Felt hurt, then resignation. “An hour?”
“Make it two.”
She watched through the glass pane of the window as Novice Mist went striding off along the Way in the rain, magnificent in his gleaming new blue and silver cloak.
By the time he returned, the strange day was almost over; shadows were lengthening. She Felt him as he approached along the Way, but the urgent desires that now troubled Novice Mist originated more in his belly than in his groin. She was hungry, too, now.
She had managed to stop her weeping some time before, and had washed her face in cold water. A last glance in the mirror persuaded her that the remaining tinge of red around her eyes was faint enough to escape Mist’s attention. She would certainly not start weeping again with him present.