When she woke, the Master Patterner was sitting nearby, and a basket was on the grass between them.
“Hungry? Eat,” he said.
“I’ll eat later, sir. Thank you,” said Irian.
“I am hungry now,” said the mage. He took a hardboiled egg from the basket, cracked, shelled, and ate it.
They call this the Otter’s House,” he said. “Very old. As old as the Great House. Everything is old, here. We are old – the Masters.”
“You’re not,” Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty, though it was hard to tell; she kept thinking his hair was white, because it was not black.
“But I came far. Miles can be years. I am Kargish, from Karego. You know?”
“The Hoary Men!” said Irian, staring openly at him. All Daisy’s ballads of the Hoary Men who sailed out of the east to lay the land waste and spit innocent babes on their lances, and the story of how Erreth-Akbe lost the Ring of Peace, and the new songs and the King’s Tale about how Archmage Sparrowhawk had gone among the Hoary Men and come back with that ring –
“Hoary?” said the Patterner.
“Frosty. White,” she said, looking away, embarrassed.
“Ah.” Presently he said, “The Master Summoner is not old.” And she got a sidelong look from those narrow, ice-coloured eyes.
She said nothing.
“I think you feared him.”
She nodded.
When she said nothing, and some time had passed, he said, “In the shadow of these trees is no harm. Only truth.”
“When he passed me,” she said in a low voice, “I saw a grave.”
“Ah,” said the Patterner.
He had made a little heap of bits of eggshell on the ground by his knee. He arranged the white fragments into a curve, then closed it into a circle. “Yes,” he said, studying his eggshells, then, scratching up the earth a bit, he neatly and delicately buried them. He dusted off his hands. Again his glance flicked to Irian and away.
“You have been a witch, Irian?”
“No.”
“But you have some knowledge.”
“No. I don’t. Rose wouldn’t teach me. She said she didn’t dare. Because I had power but she didn’t know what it was.”
“Your Rose is a wise flower,” said the mage, unsmiling.
“But I know I have -I have something to do, to be. That’s why I wanted to come here. To find out. On the Isle of the Wise.”
She was getting used to his strange face now and was able to read it. She thought that he looked sad. His way of speaking was harsh, quick, dry, peaceable. The men of the Isle are not always wise, eh?” he said. “Maybe the Doorkeeper.” He looked at her now, not glancing but squarely, his eyes catching and holding hers. “But there. In the wood. Under the trees. There is the old wisdom. Never old. I can’t teach you. I can take you into the Grove.” After a minute he stood up. “Yes?”
“Yes,” she said uncertainly.
“The house is all right?”
“Yes -“
“Tomorrow,” he said, and strode off.
So for a half-month or more of the hot days of summer, Irian slept in the Otter’s House, which was a peaceful one, and ate what the Master Patterner brought her in his basket – eggs, cheese, greens, fruit, smoked mutton – and went with him every afternoon into the grove of high trees, where the paths seemed never to be quite where she remembered them, and often led on far beyond what seemed the confines of the wood. They walked there in silence, and spoke seldom when they rested. The mage was a quiet man. Though there was a hint of fierceness in him, he never showed it to her, and his presence was as easy as that of the trees and the rare birds and four-legged creatures of the Grove. As he had said, he did not try to teach her. When she asked about the Grove, he told her that, with Roke Knoll, it had stood since Segoy made the islands of the world, and that all magic was in the roots of the trees, and that they were mingled with the roots of all the forests that were or might yet be. “And sometimes the Grove is in this place,” he said, “and sometimes in another. But it is always.”