“I think it is hard to love a Wizard,” I said. “Though it is very good to make alliances with them.”
“Who else knows of this Wizardry?”
“No one. I was not supposed to tell anyone, but you and Didir¾well, you are part of me. It is like talking to myself. Oh, Chance knows, for he was there when she told me. But she doesn’t trifle with the truth, Necromancer. If she says she is, she is.”
“Oh, I have no doubt of it. I wonder if you’ve thought what else she is?”
“Another Talent than Wizardry! I didn’t know such was possible.”
He laughed. “Peter, the young are truly amazing. In each of the young, the world is reborn. No, I do not mean that Jinian has any other Talent. What she is, other than a Wizard, is a human person, female, about seventeen years old. In my experience, human persons of that age¾and those considerably older also¾are much alike. Most of them love, hate, weep, lust, tremble with fear. Most of them fight and forgive and resolve with high courage. May I suggest, if you are resolved upon friendship with Jinian, that it be with the person rather than with the Wizard. Likely the Wizard needs no one¾not even Jinian herself. Likely Jinian needs someone during those times that the Wizard is not in residence.” And he patted me very kindly as though I had been some half trained fustigar.
This so gained my attention that I wandered off for several hours and did not talk to anyone during that time.
Chance caught me when I returned. He wanted to talk about the battle, about the great bones, the mightiness of them. “And they went on and on, long after you’d all given up raising them. So Dorn and Queynt say.”
I was truly puzzled by that, but I told him it was true, so far as I knew. “The forces of the world,” he said, “according to Queynt. Oh, there’s things here we know nothing of, according to Queynt.” He spoke proudly, not at all awed or envious, possibly the only person in all that company save Jinian who accepted Vitior Vulpas Queynt as mere man. I knew Queynt had found a follower, a companion, a true friend. Well, part of me said, I no longer need a child minder. Well, part of me said, you will miss him dreadfully if he goes off with anyone else.
So.
What may I tell you?
Of Mavin and Thandbar? She approached him warily, ready to become a worshipper if he proved to be an idol, holding reverence in readiness. When I passed them an hour later, Mavin was telling him some story about Schlaizy Noithn, and he was bent double with laughter. I sniffed. I had not thought it that amusing when it had happened to me.
Of Barish-Windlow and Himaggery, circling one another in mixed antagonism and love, Himaggery full of protest and fury at the fate of the hundred thousand in the ice caverns, Windlow equally distraught, Barish trying to fight them on two fronts, justifying his experiment on the grounds of human progress. Himaggery wondered what it was a hundred thousand master Gamesmen were to do, how they were to live when released from age old bondage; Barish overrode Windlow’s concern to shout that he expected people to use their heads about it. I pitied Barish and envied him. He had too much Windlow in him to be what he had once been. But then, what he had once been had needed a lot of Windlow in it.
Later I saw him bend down to pluck the leaves from a tiny gray herb growing in a crack of the stone. He crushed the leaves beneath his nostrils and touched them to his tongue as I had seen Windlow do a thousand times. I went to him then and hugged him, looking up to see the stranger looking at me out of Barish’s eyes. But it was Windlow’s voice which called me by name and returned my embrace.
Of Quench and the techs, gathered around the machine in Barish’s Keep, talking in an impenetrable language while some of their group scavenged among the bookshelves. “Fixable!” Quench crowed at last. “The machine can be fixed! There are spare parts in the case. We can take the thing apart and reassemble it in the caverns…” So he had been set on a proper track by Himaggery and Mavin, and I was glad to have him among the people I liked and trusted. I decided to forgive him for that business with the cap. He had not meant it ill.