The Goblin Mirror

1

A WITCH WIND, COUNTRY FOLK CALLED THE SUDDEN STORM that plunged Maggiar from autumn into winter, that stripped the colored leaves from forest and orchard all in a night. Behind it came an ice wind, edged with sleet and bitter cold— but that same winter brought a wealth of game the like of which the old folk had never seen. Hunters trekked home over the drifts with their pack ponies laden with meat and furs to keep old and young well-fed and warm; and with ample stock besides for trade to the west: deer and badger skins, marten and fox and ermine, from a plenitude of game that never seemed diminished. By midwinter deer had stripped the forest branches low enough to reach, foxes raided middens and storehouses, and the hunters could not shoot or trap them fast enough. Deer took to farmers' fruit trees. Boar rooted after winter stores, and marten and ermine hunted right up under the porches of Maggiar's isolated steadings. The old folk said: It was never like this before.

Behind the deer and the marten came the wolves, well-fed, content, inclined to lie about at first, but more and more of their voices sang in the mountain heights, songs cold and keen as the winter wind, that set folk looking anxiously toward the shutters at night and asking themselves was the door latch snug enough and had they barred all the sheds?

At last and as suddenly came the melting wind, a dark nighttime storm that rattled doors and windows, pelted the trodden snow with mingled sleet and rain, and turned the fields overnight to hedge-rimmed lakes. Farmers slogged about their spring chores in mud-weighted boots, attempted planting in the high spots, and swore that they had never seen so quick a thaw or so much flooding.

In that season hunters began to find strange tracks in the woods, and spied shadowy movements flitting at the edge of the eye—a creature that left beatiike prints, walking upright. The forest took on a dangerous feeling then, and the Old Folk whispered that a troll might have moved in. As yet no one had seen it, but the woodcutters and the charcoal burners cast anxious looks over their shoulders as they worked; while in lord Slant's keep, hunters old and young gathered and whispered in somber tones. Lord Stani's wizard, Karoly, wore a longer and longer look, casting the bones often and listening with his ear to the stone of the walls and the earth of the courtyard. Lord Stani asked Karoly what he heard in the earth, and the hunters asked. At one such asking, Karoly only muttered that many things seemed blessings that were not, and that father Sun and mother Earth never gave so liberally without a cost.

A deer was found at the forest edge totally blind and thin as a wraith—hunters killed it out of pity and let it lie and rot. That, too, they whispered about, unsure why that single death so disturbed men—but the truth was, once pity had afflicted them, a sense of guilt crept in, and made them think twice about the pelts stacked so high in the storehouses. It made them wonder for the first time whether luck that came so easily could be wholesome, or whether there might be something wrong in what they had gained too cheaply—as if they had plundered what was sound and left what was lame to breed and increase.

Master Karoly waked the watch one midnight swearing that he smelled something burning—not cookfires or rushlights, but something like old straw set ablaze. The watch failed to smell it, the night scullions railed to find it in the kitchens, and no more discriminating nose they roused could smell it at all. Still, when a wizard insisted, it seemed only prudent to wake the lord and lady, so before all was done, lord Stani had his men and lady Agnieszka her women searching the keep from tower to deepest cellars, while servants scoured every outbuilding and haystack inside the walls and nearby for any hint of smoke.

But nothing turned up, after the hold had been in uproar half the night. There was bleary-eyed grumbling among the people at breakfast that their wizard might be confused in his old age—complaint that fell silent once Karoly came draggling into the hall, haggard and worried, and begging their pardons for his foolishness. Somber looks followed his distracted passage through the room, and folk whispered how wizards sometimes had the Sight, though Karoly had never had it: the bones gave him merest hints about the future.

In one rainy mid-afternoon soon after, Karoly asked a passing serving maid what child was hurt; but the maid heard no crying child at all. Karoly stopped more than one servant, upstairs and down, distressedly asking did they not hear some child? And that report sent more chills through the keep. A ghost, some muttered. Ill luck, the servants began to say. The cooks obsessively feared fire, and parents kept an anxious eye to their children.

"What do you see?" lord Stani asked Karoly that night. "Is there some danger—of fire? Of flood? Or is it some other thing?" There had been peace in lord Stani's land for all his lifetime, except the ordinary bear trundling out of the forest after easier pickings, and once, twenty years ago, an incursion of bandits. So lord Stani asked the questions the hunters had asked, as a man who had known peace all his life, and feared now, as the hunters feared, that his run of luck might have been too much and too long. "I need leave," Karoly said for reply, "to visit my sister over the mountains, and , ask her what she sees. My dreams worry me."

Lord Stani (the servants who witnessed it reported so) asked very cautiously, "So what do you dream, Karoly?" :. Karoly was silent a moment, gazing at the wall. Finally he said, "Wizards' dreams are all true and all treacherous; and if we knew always what we dreamed, we'd be no wiser. I put no trust in my dreams. I beg you, let me go." No one had known Karoly had a sister—that news flew | quickly about the halls, likewise Karoly's saying that.

"Something drove the deer." The rumor of the hour said that lord Stani was reluctant for his old tutor to leave, especially now, but saw no way of stopping him, none, at least, that Karoly would regard. It was foolhardy to ignore Karoly's advice, that was the consensus on the scullery stairs and in the smithy: some disaster boded, that Karoly sought to head off at its source.

So Stani called his two elder sons, Bogdan and Tamas, and bade them take Karoly through the mountains and bring him home again as soon as possible.

"It may be an old man's notion," lord Stani told them, "or it may be foresight—he always was wise before. Don't let his horse throw him, don't let him go cold or hungry— and above all bring him back in one piece. Woodcraft was never his best point; and he has no seat at all. If his horse so much as caught wind of a bear, he'd be afoot with it."

The brothers laughed, restless with the spring rains and delighted with the proposal. Bogdan said, "So much worse for the bear," and Tamas, the younger, said, "We'll take good care of him, papa." No one of their generation had ever ventured over the mountains. They had distant cousins and uncles in that land, they supposed. They knew of places like Krukczy Straz and Hasel, Burdigen, and Albaz, where their grandmother had had brothers and sisters—a land, the gran had told them, of beautiful waterfalls and tall pine forests. They knew all the names of them: the land over-mountain was their own land of once upon a time, and to ride out on their father's orders, to find this unguessed and surely witchly sister of master Karoly's—for the rescue of Maggiar, if the .rumors were true—all this, and to have a winter full of their own tales to tell when they got safely back again? This was the chance of their young lives.

Their mother took a far dimmer view of matters. Lady Agnieszka went storming to lord Stani's chambers and servants pressed ears against the doors and listened wide-eyed to the shouting inside for half an hour; while the youngest of lord Stani's three sons, Yuri, aged fourteen, declared to his friends that Bogdan as heir should by no means put himself in danger; he should be the one to ride with Tamas—which opinion he bore to lord Stani, himself, hard on his mother's icy retreat.

But to no avail. Lord Stani informed his youngest son in no uncertain terms he was the sacrifice to his mother's good graces, the piece held in reserve against fate and accident; lord Stani said no, and no, and no.

After which, Nikolai, the master huntsman, his feet propped in front of the kitchen fire, told the pastry cook, "Trolls, that's what it is. Truth is, I'd rather not have the boys along. And come to that, I'd rather not have the old man. Send us up in the mountains and let us singe a few hides, I'd say, and leave the youngsters out of it. But the boy's of that age. ..."

Bogdan, he meant. Bogdan, who was lord Stani's own image, dark haired and broad shouldered, the first in every game and every hunt; lord Stani foresaw the day Bogdan would be in his place, and wanted his heir to gain the levelheadedness and the experience of border keeping a lord ought to have. Bogdan should see the land over-mountain and maybe, lord Stani had confided it to Nikolai in private, come back with a grown man's sober sense, less temper, and less interest in girls and hunting.

As for the younger son, Tamas, just past his seventeenth winter—shy, too-gentle Tamas, prettier than any girl in the keep—the boy was a fine hunter, if he could hit anything he'd tracked; a fine bowman, against straw targets; a serious, silent lad who would sit for an hour contemplating an antheap or picking a flower apart to find out what was inside. A little slow-witted, Nikolai summed him up, a little girlish, decidedly different from Bogdan's headlong rush at life. And this was the boy lord Stani sent in his charge, likely to hunt trolls?

Because that was what was really behind this flood of game, lord Stani himself had said as much to Nikolai when he had charged him pick the men for the escort and see that both the boys and the wizard got back with a whole skin.

"Don't speak of trolls," the pretty cook said, making an averting sign.

"I'll bring you a tail," Nikolai said. He was courting the cook. And not lying: a troll-tail he had taken, once upon a time, and given it to a silly maid he had been courting then. But Zofia was horrified. The kneading of bread had grown furious.

"You keep those boys safe," Zofia said.

"Keep Tamas safe. That's why m'lord sent young wander-wits: to put a rein on master head-foremost Bogdan."

Zofia frowned. The dough changed shape and folded again, in Zofia's strong, floury hands, a fascinating process. "The scullions heard a thing in the eaves last night," Zofia said. "Skritching and scratching and beating with its wings. And master Karoly said yesterday—he was sitting just where, you are, having a sip of tea—he said we should do without mushroom picking, not send the lasses out, not go in the woods. And I says, Why? What's out there? and he says, Just don't be sending the youngsters beneath the shade of the trees. Why? I says again. Is it trolls? And he says—he takes this long sip of tea, like he's thinking—but he says something odd, then, like: There might be a troll, but it didn't want to come here.—That's just the way he said it. What do you make of it?"

"That it's exactly what I said to m'lord upstairs, a fat summer in the high country. A fat summer, a bad winter, too many deer. They strip the woods and they're straight for the orchards, it's as simple as that."

"And the trolls?"

"The wolves and the trolls, they go where the pickings are. But now that the bears are waked up—" Nikolai re-crossed his feet on the bench, so the fire warmth reached the sole of his other foot. "They'll put master troll back up the mountain in short order. Then they'll be rattling the shed doors and sifting the midden heaps—so you can look to hear trolls under every haystack, half of them with cubs and all in a bad humor."

"It's not lucky to make fun." Zofia licked a floury thumb and made a gesture toward the witch-knot on the rafters, garlic and barley stalks. "You watch those two boys, you hear, don't you be letting them do something foolish, and don't you and Karoly do it, or the lord and lady won't let you back again.—You!" Thump of the dough on the table, and a scullion froze in his tracks. "Fetch the milk upstairs, and don't be slopping half of it.—I swear, the help is all scatter-wits this evening."

But Nikolai, thinking about the lord's two sons, said, half to himself, "The boys with trolls is one thing. Over-mountain is another. See his sister, the old man says. Why hasn't he seen his sister before this, is what I'd like to know, and where did he get a sister and what's he to do with her of a sudden? He's never been back over-mountain that I know. And I ask lord Stani about this sister business and he says Karoly insists and we should go."

"Old Jan says he'd come and go over-mountain."

"Upon a time, you mean."

"When he and the old lord was pups, long before you or I was bora." Another folding in, another cloud of flour. "Old Jan was saying how Karoly was always out and around, in those days, off in the woods, up in the hills ... the old lord, too—or least as far as old Jan remembers. So there could be a sister over-mountain, could be a horde of sisters, for all anybody knows. And how did the old lord find the lady gran? We all know she at least come from there." The dough thumped down onto the table, whump. "Lady gran used to come down here and stir the pots herself. 'More salt,' she'd say, and me mum and she'd be going round and round about the pepper and the spice. . . ."Whack. "She used to get herbs from Karoly. Karoly'd go pick at the right of the moon and the old lady'd say, Which side of the tree did you dig it from? And Karoly would say, snippishlike, The right one. I 'member that, plain as plain, I'd be stirring the pot, me standing on a step stool, I was so little, and they'd be arguing. And me mum said I shouldn't listen, the old lady had strange practices, that was what me mum called it. Strange practices. The lady gran died and they still hang charms on the grave. Don't they?"

It was true. And it was certainly not the first time Nikolai had heard witchery and the lady gran joined in one breath— along with the observation that Karoly had been the guiding hand behind the young lord, Stani having been about Yuri's age at the time the old lord went over his horse's neck and never walked again—and the lady gran had had her way with the land until lord Stani was toward twenty and nine, with the god only knew what arrangements (or doings) between her and Karoly.

"Don't they?"

"They do that," he said. Women's business and witches. It was bad enough Karoly wanted to consult a witch: Nikolai wanted no part of the lady gran's business. The lady was in her grave and stayed there, thank the god; trolls were enough trouble for any man.

Cook gave a shake of her head and mounded the dough into a bowl, threw a towel over it. "Over-mountain isn't where I'd like to be right now, with strange doings and things flying about a' night. Ask yourself what was trying to get in with the scullions last night, eh?"

The boy was clumping up the steps with the milk pail. He came in white faced and hasty, all ears. Nikolai looked at the boy, who set the pail down and said, "Is that all, dame Zofia?"

"Be off," cook said. And when the door was shut: "They don't want to go into the barn, don't want to go to the sheds in the dark. I don't rightly blame them."

"There's no troll in the courtyard. They don't go where there's this many people."

"If they eat them one by one there's not that many people, is there?" Cook's voice sank to a mutter. "I don't like the store room meself, and that's the truth. Karoly said keep all the latches tight. And what did he mean by that; and what was that smell of burning, I'd like to know. So he's running off to over-mountain, to the lady gran's relatives as well as his, if you ask me—and lord Stani sending the boys with him ... at whose asking, I want to know. His lady certainly didn't want it; and lord Stani wasn't listening to her at all, that's what the maids heard come out of that room."

That was what the men were saying, too, down in the courtyard and in the stables and the barn. The grooms were saying other things, how the barley sheaves above the stable door had fallen down in the wind, the doors had come open, and something had scared the horses last night, the same maybe as had scared the scullions.

Or maybe the wind had been what had them all upset. The old man smelted smoke and heard lost babies, rumors of it traveled from village to farmstead, and you could stay in the kitchen listening to tales until all the world outside seemed dark and evil.

But Nikolai had a lonely walk out to the tower tonight to reach his quarters, and on the way up the twisty, narrow tower stairs, where the light he carried up from the doorway made rippling giant shadows on the stones, he found himself thinking about the upstairs shutters and wondering if he'd left them latched or open on the night.

Foolish notion. An open window had never bothered him before. There was nothing to fear—nothing that wouldn't have a better chance at him tomorrow night, when they were sleeping under the stars. But there was something about old piles of stone like this, that had seen lords and servants come and go, that they accumulated shadows and odd sounds, and creaks and sighs of wind; you could well expect to meet the lady gran or old lord Ladislaw on the stairs—and it was no good thing to think of, on the eve of going troll-hunting and wizard-shepherding: the lady gran might be safe in her grave these last ten years, but he had to open the door of his room and probe the shadows, a grown man, for shame! who did not like to find the shutters open on the night and the light blowing precariously in his hands.

He went and pulled the shutters closed. In that instant the lamp blew out and the door slammed shut, thump! plunging the room into dark and echoing through the tower like doom. It actually took courage to turn again and calmly latch the shutters, to remember his way blind through the dark of his own chambers, feel after the door, and open it.

A very little light came up from below, not enough to light the steps. He found the lamp on the table and felt his way downstairs again to light it—not the first time the door had played that rotten trick, with the wind coming out of the south; not the first time he had trekked down the steps to relight the lamp—but he had never had a heart-thumping panic like this, god, not since he was nine years old, and he'd dared me bogle in the hay-loft that the neighbor boys refused to face.

It had known better than to meddle with him, and fled with a great rustling of straw and a clap of wings.

He lit the lamp. He climbed the stairs and on that last turn half-feared that the shutters in his room would be open again, or that something would be waiting in the shadows, or behind the door. That was the price of listening to stories, and he was a fool to think about them. Zofia was probably snug in her own bed, forgetful of all her notions.

But he thought not. He somehow thought not, tonight. And even with the shutters shut and the lamp burning bright, he longed for the morning, when they could be under the sky and out from under vaults of stone and memories.

Trolls and wolves isn't all that's wrong, he thought to himself, suddenly, for no good reason. He remembered over-mountain, at least the glimpse of it he had had from the heights, the year of the troll. He remembered a green land under a strangely golden sky, and a feeling he had had then of secrets beneath that green and witchcraft thick as leaves in that country. He had come from the north, followed the soldiers at fifteen, through wars and famine and the doings of wizards and witches—but that place had had a spooky feeling to it even that long ago. He had closed his mind to it, then: put away the memory until it was nudged by a rattling shutter and talk of the lady gran.

Karoly? Karoiy was a dabbler, a pot-wizard, a weather-witcher. Think of Karoly and you thought of wheaten charms and jars and jars of powders for toothache and the gout. Karoly was sunny fields and winter firesides—

(But in the lady gran's day Karoly had gone off for days on end, that was so. One wondered where. Or why. Assignations with some sunburned country lass? Karoly was a man. And the lady gran—)

The lady on the stairs, dreadful in the lamplight—she had not been old. Her hair had been black. He remembered it as black, the year he had come to Maggiar. "Whose are you?" she had asked. "Whose are you, pretty? And what are you doing on my stairs?"

Shutters rattled with the wind. Forget the pretty cook, her pastries and her stories. Forget the lady gran, the stairs and the long-ago dark. Lord Stani's master huntsman longed for sky above him, for the sighing of leaves—the forest had no memory such as stones acquired, when men piled them up and dwelled in them and made walls and bolts to keep themselves safe from each other inside.