She stretched, feeling the ease of her body in the warmth, and her mind drifted back to Ivory. She had had no one in her life to desire. When the young wizard first came riding by so slim and arrogant, she wished she could want him; but she didn’t and couldn’t, and so she had thought him spell-protected. Rose had explained to her how wizards’ spells worked ‘so that it never enters your head nor theirs, see, because it would take from their power, they say’. But Ivory, poor Ivory, had been all too unprotected. If anybody was under a spell of chastity it must have been herself, for charming and handsome as he was she had never been able to feel a thing for him but liking, and her only lust was to learn what he could teach her.
She considered herself, sitting in the deep silence of the Grove. No bird sang; the breeze was down; the leaves hung still. Am I ensorcelled? Am I a sterile thing, not whole, not a woman? she asked herself, looking at her strong bare arms, the slight, soft swell of her breasts in the shadow under the throat of her shirt.
She looked up and saw the Hoary Man come out of a dark aisle of great oaks and come towards her across the glade.
He stopped in front of her. She felt herself blush, her face and throat burning, dizzy, her ears ringing. She sought words, anything to say, to turn his attention away from her, and could find nothing at all. He sat down near her. She looked down, as if studying the skeleton of a last-year’s leaf by her hand.
What do I want? she asked herself, and the answer came not in words but throughout her whole body and soul: the fire, a greater fire than that, the flight, the flight burning –
She came back into herself, into the still air under the trees. The Hoary Man sat near her, his face bowed down, and she thought how slight and light he looked, how quiet and sorrowful. There was nothing to fear. There was no harm.
He looked over at her.
“Irian,” he said, “do you hear the leaves?”
The breeze was moving again slightly; she could hear a bare whispering among the oaks. “A little,” she said.
“Do you hear the words?”
“No.”
She asked nothing and he said no more. Presently he got up, and she followed him to the path that always led them, sooner or later, out of the wood to the clearing by the Thwilburn and the Otter’s House. When they came there, it was late afternoon. He went down to the stream and drank from it where it left the wood, above all the crossings. She did the same. Then sitting in the cool, long grass of the bank, he began to speak.
“My people, the Kargs, they worship gods. Twin gods, brothers. And the king there is also a god. But before that and after are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.”
The Old Powers,” Irian said.
He nodded. There, women know the Old Powers. Here too, witches. And the knowledge is bad – eh?”
When he added that little questioning “eh?” or “neh?” to the end of what had seemed a statement it always took her by surprise. She said nothing.
“Dark is bad,” said the Patterner. “Eh?”
Irian drew a deep breath and looked at him eye to eye as they sat there. “”Only in dark the light,”” she said.
“Ah,” he said. He looked away so that she could not see his expression.
“I should go,” she said. “I can walk in the Grove, but not live there. It isn’t my – my place. And the Master Chanter said I did harm by being here.”
“We all do harm by being,” said the Patterner.
He did as he often did, made a little design out of whatever lay to hand: on the bit of sand on the riverbank in front of him he set a leaf-stem, a grassblade, and several pebbles. He studied them and rearranged them. “Now I must speak of harm,” he said.