“Mine,” I replied. “He is my senior.”
“What are a few centuries this way or that?” Mandor offered.
“I thought I felt a certain maturity of spirit,” she noted. “I’ve a mind to trust you further than I’d intended.”
“That’s very sporting of you,” he replied, “and I treasure the sentiment…”
“… But you’d rather I didn’t overdo it?”
“Precisely.”
“I’ve no intention of testing your loyalties to home and throne,” she said, “on such short acquaintance. It does concern both Amber and the Courts, but I see no conflict in the matter.”
“I do not doubt your prudence. I merely wanted to make my position clear.”
She turned back toward me.
“Merlin,” she said then, “I think you lied to me.”
I felt myself frowning as I tried to recall an occasion when I might have misled her about something. I shook my head.
“If I did,” I told her, “I don’t remember.”
“It was some years ago,” she said, “when I asked you to try walking your father’s Pattern.”
“Oh,” I answered, feeling myself blush and wondering whether it was apparent in this strange light.
“You took advantage of what I had told you about the Pattern’s resistance,” she continued. “You pretended it was preventing you from setting your foot upon it. But there was no visible sign of the resistance, such as there was when I tried stepping onto it.”
She looked at me, as if for confirmation. “So?” I said.
“So,” she replied, “it has become more important now than it was then, and I have to know: Were you faking it that day?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why?”
“Once I took one step upon it,” I explained, “I’d have been committed to walking it. Who knows where it might have led me and what situation might have followed? I was near the end of my holiday and in a hurry to get back to school: I didn’t have time for what might have turned into a lengthy expedition. Telling you there were difficulties seemed the most graceful way of begging off.”
“I think there’s more to it than that,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think Corwin told you something about it that the rest of us do not know-or that he left you a message. I believe you know more than you let on concerning the thing.”
I shrugged.
“Sorry, Fiona. I have no control over your suspicions,” I said: “Wish I could be of more help.”
“You can,” she replied.
“Tell me how.”
“Come with me to the place of the new Pattern. I want you to walk it.”
I shook my head.
“I’ve got a lot more pressing business,” I told her, ”than satisfying your curiosity about something my dad did years ago.”
“It’s more than just curiosity,” she said. “I told you once before that I think it’s what is behind the increased incidence of shadow storms.”
“And I gave you a perfectly good reason for something else being the cause. I believe it’s an adjustment to they partial destruction and recreation of the old Pattern.“
“Would you come this way?” she asked, and she turned from me and began to climb.
I glanced at Mandor, shrugged, and followed her. He came along.
We mounted toward a jagged screen of rock. She reached it first and made her way onto a lopsided ledge which ran partway along it. She traversed this until she came to a place where the rock wall had broken down into a wide V-shaped gap. She stood there with her back to us then, the light from the green sky doing strange things to her hair.
I came up beside her and followed the direction of her gaze. On a distant plain, far below us and to the left, a large black funnel spun like a top. It seemed the source of the roaring sound we had been hearing. The ground; appeared to be cracked beneath it. I stared for several minutes, but it did not change in form or position. Finally, I cleared my throat.
“Looks like a big tornado,” I said, “not going any place.”
“That’s why I want you to walk the new Pattern,” she’ told me. “I think it’s going to get us unless we get it first.”