The Goblin Mirror

2

THE WHITE BITCH HAD WHELPED IN THE NIGHT—SOFT nosed, was nudging the newborn pups against her belly to nurse in the morning chill.

No few of them were yellow. Yuri was quick to point that out; and Tamas rubbed the ears of the gawky yellow hound that thrust its head under his arm to have a look at the puppies: Zadny, they called the ugly stray, who desperately wanted to please, who was good-tempered and keen to do what a body wanted. Somebody had lost a fine dog, in Tamas estimation, the day Zadny had slipped his leash: he had arrived in the ice wind, starved and foot-sore, refusing every hand but Tamas' own, from which day he was Tamas' dog, and fastest of all the dogs Tamas used. In case wanderlust took him away this spring, Tamas was delighted to see the puppies.

But Tamas came to the kennel in armor this dawn, with grandfather's third best sword bumping at his side, breakfast uneasy in his stomach, and the stark realization in his mind that he could not be here, that Yuri must inherit the puppies— to see them walk, and tumble, and play. Yuri had run up looking for him and Bogdan as if nothing else were going on in the yard: Bogdan was busy at the stables, in the deepest throes of packing; but lamas had excused himself and come for Yuri's sake; and, laced with changes that would pass without him, was suddenly beset with apprehensions.

Yuri lifted up a puppy and showed him the face. "It has to be his, doesn't it?"

"No question,' * Tamas said, rubbing the blunt puppy nose that had Zadny's yellow fur. "Only lighter. But puppies are, you can't tell yet." He had come here to mollify Yuri's offended sense of importance; now he felt unease, and a sense of loss he could not define. It prompted him to say, "Take care of them. If anything should happen—"

"It won't happen!" Yuri scowled and set the puppy down against its mother. "No reason I can't go, I'm only two years behind you, but no one sees that."

It was three. But shading on two. " 'Anything can always happen,' " Tamas quoted Karoly, and reached out to squeeze Yuri's sullenly averted shoulder. "Maybe it's nothing, all this business, maybe it's just a bad year and it's a foolish goose chase, over-mountain. It might be. It's not what goes on there that I'm worried about, it's what happens here."

There was a wet-eyed angry look from Yuri. "Nothing happens here. Nothing ever happens here!"

"So it's your job to see it doesn't. Hear me?" His brother longed after importance. Tamas offered what romance he could. "Noises in the stables, scratches at the windows ..."

"Birds," Yuri said sullenly. "That's all, it's birds. It's springtime, master Karoly says so, what do they expect?"

"Just take care. And don't go off alone in the woods and don't let your friends go. There could be a troll, and I don't want you to find it."

"I thought there was a troll. I thought you were supposed to kill it on your way."

"If we meet it on our way. We're supposed to ride over-mountain and back, that's all we're supposed to do. Master Karoly isn't happy with things here, that's why we're going to talk to his sister, isn't it? It's no good if we get there and something dreadful's happened back here, if the house has burned down or something. So watch out for things. Keep an eye on every thing—don't let your friends be stupid, don't go into the woods. Don't let something go wrong. You're . taking Bogdan's place in the house. —And take care of Zadny for me. All right? The houndsmaster doesn't like him; he threatens to lose him in the woods, and I want you to watch out for him and see he's all right while I'm gone. Promise me."

There was not much time. Men were mustering in the yard. And talk had only broken the dam: Yuri glared at him with tears brimming, temper and shame equally ruddy in his cheeks. "You get to do everything. Bogdan ignores me. It's not fair!"

"It's the first time, I promise you, it's the first time I've ever gone anywhere—and next time, you will go. You'll be tall as I am in another year."

"It won't do any good. The baby has to stay home if the rest of you get killed. For the rest of my life they'll say, 'Somebody has to stay home . . .' "

"Take care of Zadny. Keep out of trouble. Promise me?"

"I promise." Sullenly. Tearfully.

"Come on." He tousled Yuri's hair and Yuri batted at his hand.

"Don't treat me like a baby. Don't do that."

"I promise. Never again." This morning seemed an ominous time for Never Agains. He skirted around that thought, into irrevocable decision. "Come on. Walk me to the yard."

Yuri got up in glum silence and dusted himself off. Zadny came wagging up, brushed his cold nose against Tamas' hand, and got in his way—Zadny was roundly cursed for that habit, by cook, by Taddeuscz the houndsmaster, by Bogdan, especially since the day Zadny had gotten shut upstairs and chewed Bogdan's best boots. Zadny had a way of crossing one's path on stairs, or in doorways. Zadny chewed on things. He was lost, Tamas was wont to argue on his dog's behalf. —He likes to be close to people. He hasn't grown into his feet yet. He hasn't had anyone to teach him manners.

He thought of Zadny underfoot in the yard, with the horses, or the very likely chance of Zadny following them down the road. "Yuri," he said, "we have to tie him," and Yuri agreed, and got a rope.

It was a betrayal. He got down on one knee and tied the knot tight, getting dog all over him in the process, and a wet kiss of forgiveness in the face. "Be good," he told Zadny.

"Stay, mind Yuri." After which he got up, wiped his face and his leather surcoat, and went with Yuri out of the kennels.

Barking pursued them through the gate, onto the trampled earth and flagstone of the larger courtyard, where horses and grooms mixed with stray goats and a handful of agile pigeons. The escort was gathering, with relatives and well-wishers, mothers and wives and younger brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents, all weaving perilously in and out among the horses, all turned out in holiday best because it was no hunting parry they were organizing, it was as bold and ambitious a setting-forth as anyone had made for years in Maggiar, to legendary over-mountain, with the chance of trolls along the way—fifteen men, all told, with their horses and three pack ponies loaded with grain and canvas for the mountain passes. The commotion caught Tamas up, making his heart beat faster. Colors and edges seemed both bright and unreal this morning. Master Nikolai was shouting at the grooms. Jerzy was flirting with a knot of Zav's cousins. Bogdan, looking every bit a lord's son and a warrior, was taking his leave of their mother and father at the top of the steps.

Tamas eeled through the confusion, hurried up the few steps to the landing with Yuri in his wake. "Do you suppose you can get this lot away today?" then- father asked Bogdan just then. Bogdan laughed and took his leave, clapping Tamas on the arm and ruffling Yuri's hair as he passed, with, "Be good, little brother."

Tamas went and kissed his mother—"Be careful," she said to him, straightened his cloak-pin and remarked how handsome he was, but she had said a great deal more than that last evening—about witches and trolls and the necessity of watching what he ate and what he drank and never, never, never believing something that looked too good to be true.

"We'll be back before high summer," he told her, seeing tears glistening—high summer was what master Nikolai had assured all of them; he kissed her a second time, guilty for her tears, then briskly hugged his father, who patted him on the shoulders, saying, dryly, "Tamas,—keep a leash on your brother."

"I will," he promised, startled: his father had never said such a thing before, never hinted in all their lives that he doubted Bogdan's leadership, and he was not sure it was not a joke, except his father was not laughing. Had there been some falling out this morning? Bogdan at least had been laughing as he left.

Their father hugged him a second time, closer, clapped him on the back and shoved him after Bogdan, as if that was after all his final judgment of the sons he was sending out into the world—but, lord Sun, he had no idea how he was supposed to restrain Bogdan's headlong rush at obstacles: master Karoly could hardly do that. He was the younger son, Bogdan was in command, and their father told him to keep Bogdan out of difficulties?

The clatter of horses racketed off the courtyard walls, drowning shouts and conversations as Tamas went down the steps, past master Karoly, in armor like the rest of them, who was on his way up to his father. He spotted his own horse in the milling yard: the grooms had brought him, and they had indeed tied his packs on for him as they had said. He headed that direction in relief, done with good-byes and parental tears. Now his only worry was not to look foolish among the older men—when out of nowhere a chubby girl ran up, pressed a heavy packet into his hands and fled.

He stopped, confused, as Yuri turned up at his elbow, breathlessly asking could he have use of his hunting bow while he was gone, his own was too short for him, and he needed a far heavier pull than Bogdan's old cast-off . . .

"Yes," Tamas said absently. The packet the girl had given him smelled wonderfully of cake and spice; and he wondered who she was, or what he had done to deserve her attention. Other girls were giving out gifts of cakes or garlands to their sweethearts—but he was notoriously, famously shy of girls— everyone teased him for it; she intended he give it to Bogdan, that was most probably the answer.

"Tamas? Can I?"

He remembered his promise not to ruffle Yuri's hair—just in time. Yuri stood looking up at him, promising fervently, "I'll take care of it," —meaning the bow, which would only gather dust this summer, and that was not good for a bow. Or for other things. "Use anything," he said. "Anything of mine you like." One did not hunt trolls and come back and play with kites and tops. The clothes, he would outgrow. The few things else . . . why detail a few sentimental trinkets? Yuri had the last of his boyhood to go, the exploring years, the hunting and the fishing out at distant farms a marvelous half day away from home and supper. . . .

Pottery crashed. Michal's horse, fighting the grooms to avoid a gaggle of girls, backed into stacks of baskets, then surged back toward the screaming girls, across a ruin of apples. Chaos spun through the yard, Michal and the grooms all cursing as they restrained the horse.

"All right, all right," the master huntsman shouted, "to horse, lord Sun, clear back, can we have less commotion and get us underway? Master Karoly? M'lord Tamas? Can we get to horse?"

His face went hot. He glanced back, where Karoly was still with their father, insisting, he suddenly realized, on rehearsing every detail he had gone over with their father last night—he knew Karoiy and he could catch the gist of it from here. So he ran back up the steps, tugged master Karoly by the sleeve, with: "Master Karoly, we're leaving right now," and drew the old man down to the yard.

"The weather-glass," Karoly was calling over his shoulder as grooms at the foot of the steps were boosting his armored weight into the saddle. "Don't forget the weather-glass, I showed Yuri how to read it—"

Their father called back, "Be off or you'll be here for harvest. —And mind, listen to advice, master Karoly!"

"—have to keep the water up to level!" Karoly shouted back, while Tamas tucked his be-ribboned prize into his saddle pack before mounting. "Be careful!" Yuri wished him, with worry on his face.

"Use your heads!" their father bellowed across the yard.

Bogdan, ahorse, laughed and waved, already turning away; "Good-bye!" Yuri was shouting, and with his foot in the stirrup, Tamas had an overwhelming impulse to glance back toward his parents and his home as if—as if, it seemed, he had only this last moment to fix everything in memory, everything about this place ...

But Bogdan was riding for the gate with Karoly and Nikolai, leaving no time for moon-gazing, and he hit the saddle as his horse joined the milling spill outward, overtaking Bogdan and the horse his own was most used to following. Hooves rumbled on the bridge, thumped onto the solid earth of the road, and the voices and the cheering grew faint. When he looked back a third time, home was gray, forbidding walls and a last pale glimpse of festive well-wishers within the gates, but no sight of Yuri, who was probably sulking. The day seemed perilous, full of omens; yet there was nothing he could put a thought around, as master Karoly would say. As if—

As if he were on the brink of his own forever after—or maybe only of growing up. It was a slice of his whole year this journey might take, bound where there might be bandits, or trolls. And he had given everything away.

He asked himself why now. Yuri would only lose the things—Yuri was fourteen, still careless, and could Yuri know the value of a broken toy horse and a bird's nest? Yuri would toss the keepsakes into the midden and use the painted box to hold his fishing weights.

But fields surrounded them now. The horses ran out then-first wind and settled to a steady pace as friends sorted out their riding groups. In a little more there was no sign or sight of the keep at all, only orchards on either side, and a dark straggle of wild woods in front of them. The day had settled to a steady creaking of leather and jingling of harness and armor—as life would be for days and days, and probably more of that than of meeting bandits.

And they were not strangers he was riding with, they were mostly Bogdan's friends; and a few of his father's men. Bogdan might be in command for appearance's sake, but master Nikolai was in charge where it came to trolls—not to mention master Karoly, who could tilt any odds to Nikolai.

As the day passed, it felt like any ordinary hunting-party, forgetting the armor and the swords and master Karoly's presence with them: the jokes and gibes were the same, older men testing the younger ones—in which, being youngest and a fair target, he made no jokes, only defended himself. He could trade gibes with his lord brother, if he chose, which the others only rarely dared—

But he would not do that in public. Not in front of Bogdan's friends. Bogdan was anxious about having him along: Bogdan was always anxious about his wit in front of witnesses, and generally left him alone: by Bogdan's example, he supposed, so did Bogdan's friends, although he was a fair target on certain points, like girls and hunting, and doubtless had a reputation for glum, dull silence.

'Keep a leash on Bogdan,' indeed. Only because he was a weight on his brother, and knew court proprieties and not to set his elbows on the table.

And maintaining Bogdan's good humor in this company meant calling down no untoward attention on himself, making no mistakes and not becoming the butt of jokes. Of Bogdan's friends, Filip was amiable enough. Of the grown men, master Karoly was safe, even master Nikolai. But Jerzy— lord Sun, who could deal with Jerzy, elegant master Barb-in-everything? Or Michal, who was still smarting about his horse and the apple baskets?

Apples, Jerzy recalled at every opportunity. Michal was frowning, dark as the thunderclouds that shaded their road, and making shorter and shorter retorts.

In that way they passed from fields to occasional thicket. It rained, a sudden downpour, and they rode under rain-dripping branches of the deeper woods — ("Where's weather-witching?" the grumble was heard then in the ranks. "Our own wizard along, and we're soaked the first day out. Wake up, master Karoly!")

But the air held a clean fresh scent the rest of the day; Jerzy wearied of apples; and they camped in a charcoaler's clearance as the trail grew too dim for safety, with a fire of wood and leftover lumps of charcoal.

Then everyone broke out the drink and the packets of honeyed sweetmeats, fresh baked bread and cheese and sausages, all the rich food that was bound to go bad in a few days, and shared it around—"Oh, ho!" Bogdan said, as Tamas offered the cake, "that's not cook's work, is it?"

"I think she meant it for you," Tamas said, trying to hand it to him. But Bogdan waved it off— "I'm sure it's yours," Bogdan said. "Keeping secrets, are we, brother?"

"Many," he retorted shortly, and glanced down, for fear of the cake becoming as notorious as apples.

But in fact, the plump maid's spice cake was delightful, and, sharing it around, and with the men not too wickedly asking who the mysterious sweetheart was, he found himself thinking she had been somewhat pretty: the gatewarden's second daughter, if he had his girls sorted out.

And not even an impossible match for lord Stani's second son, although his mother would hold out for (he shuddered) Jerzy's hot-tempered younger sister, or lazy third-cousin Kataryzna, lord Sun save him. A wife was another prospect that came with growing up and riding with the men. All too soon, someone else's decision was going to arrive in his life with a clutter of baggage, disarranging his quarters, his habits, his days, his holidays, and his time to himself. And while spice cake was a benefit, the loss of privacy was not.

"Don't mind if I do," master Nikolai said, taking a chunk. "Mmm."

Master Karoly meanwhile had strayed off about the fringes of the clearing, among the trees. Nikolai's eyes were on him. So then were Bogdan's.

"Master Karoly," Bogdan called out as Karoly wandered further into shadow, but the old man showed no disposition to come back.

"It's going to be that way," Bogdan muttered, and elbowed Filip on his other side. "Filip, —god, —go watch him. Don't trouble him, but don't let him find a bear out there."

Filip swore wearily, got up and took his sword and his piece of cake with him, while master Nikolai washed his mouthful down with a long drink from his flask.

"Trolls aren't much for fires," Nikolai said, and finding every eye on him, went on with satisfaction: "They're not much for wizards either. The one I killed, now, that was the year a whole band of them came in on one of our farmers, killed the family, him, his wife, her brother, all the livestock. We found just the bones left of most of them. Dreadful winter. When we tracked them up into the mountains they charged right into the firelight and tried to make off with our horses. Either they thought we'd be easy as the farmers or they were that hungry. Trolls have a prodigious appetite."

"What did you do?" Jozef wanted to know. Jozef was new in the hold, an exchange from maternal uncle Ludwik's hold at Jazny-brook. Tamas and Bogdan and every youngster in me household had begged the tale every winter, how Nikolai had grabbed the chief troll's tail and cut it off, but Jozef was a new audience.

"... bear-sized, these were. Big as a bear at least. You could take them for bears, except the faces, except the tail. It's long and naked as a rat's; and if you can grab that, you've got him. Except then you have to decide what to do with him."

Nikolai was joking with Jozef; the older men's eyes were sparkling with amusement. "So what did you do?" Jerzy asked, in the exact moment.

"Why," Nikolai said, "cut it off and ran like hell."

Laughter around the fire. Of course Nikolai could be talked into telling his story in detail, starting from the ruined farmhouse, and the dreadful find there.

Meanwhile Karoly came trailing back with Filip, sat down in silence and seemed to listen, hunched over with his arms about his knees. Nikolai told of the events near the cave, and how he had done for the king of the trolls, and him big as a bear and strong as two men.

The whole woods seemed full of sighs and whispers. An owl called. Jozef jumped, and laughed about it.

Karoly said, afterward, "I don't look for them here. Though it's possible. We should have a guard tonight."

"Jerzy," Bogdan said.

"A guard against what!" Jerzy protested. "That's what I'd like to know, if I'm going to sit up listening."

"Against whatever comes," Karoly murmured, staring abstractedly into the fire, and that was all subsequent questions could get out of him.

Jerzy, grumbling, dislodged Michal from the most comfortable spot near the fire, set his back against a tree and propped his sword across him, while the rest of them settled to sleep: Jerzy, and Michal, Filip, Pavel and Zev, that was the sequence of watch Bogdan set up, to take them to dawn; and Tamas loosened the belts and the straps of his armor and slid out of some of it, besides the boots—he watched what Nikolai and Bogdan did, to see how much comfort was prudent under the circumstances; and settled down with his saddle packs for a pillow, and Nikolai's story to darken his thoughts.

The newly leaved trees rustled and sighed over them. Night-creatures creaked and hooted through the woods around about. Their horses moved about their firelit grazing, bickered and shifted suddenly, rousing several heads from blankets, then quieted for a while. Nikolai had sat down near Jerzy, on watch, and the two of them talked in low voices, something to do with bear tracks in the woods: Tamas tried to hear, his mind too full, he feared, for sleep, and what regarded trolls or bears interested him. He shut his eyes to rest them while he listened; but he waked with the sun filtering through the trees, the whole camp stirring, and Bogdan calling him the family lay-about.

Things were immediately dull once Bogdan and Tamas had ridden away. Night was worse, with no brothers bickering down the hall. And breakfast was altogether glum and much too quiet. Yuri stirred his porridge about, with no appetite for it, slouched about his morning duties for Karoly, the slate-marking and the daily estimation of the weather-glass, then ghosted through their mother's sight, their mother moping and sewing and discussing with her audience of maids and matrons.

But he was too old to have to sit with that. He went down to their father's hearings of the fanners and tradesmen, but the only excitement there to be had was the story about farmer Padriaczw's bull and widow Miriam's cow, and once that was done, he slumped downstairs toward the yard to look for some of the other boys.

He was sure he would find them about the kitchens. But cook was making pastries, and said the boys had ridden out to Ambrozy's holdings to hunt rabbits.

That was completely unfair. Nobody had told him. Never mind he had slept late, and dallied about master Karoly's study, and lingered to hear about the bull and the widow's cow: one of them could at least have looked for him, and he was not now even interested to go and scare rabbits with a pack of boys too busy to come and find him.

So he collected a few special scraps for the white bitch and his brother's dog, deciding puppies were more fun than traitors, and that he and Zadny could go hunt rabbits around the orchard outside the wall.

So he flew down the scullery stairs, leaped puddles of wash water, and skipped down and around to the rickety kennel fence, near the stables. His father's dogs immediately set up a row, wanting what he had; Bogdan*s six hurled themselves at their kennel gate and barked and yelped to attract his attention.

But the new mother, the white bitch, put her nose up to the gate and took her scraps with licks of gratitude, like the lady she was. He counted to see were the puppies all in their nest and they were. Then he went as far as Zadny's lonely and ramshackle pen, which Tamas had made doubly strong to keep the other dogs from fighting with him.

But no Zadny came up to the gate; and when Yuri lifted the latch and looked, there was the rope lying in the mud, chewed through.

He had let Zadny get away. Tamas would kill him.

No, Tamas would forgive him, and that was a thousand times worse.

"Where are you going?" the armorer asked. "Isn't that Tamas' bow you're taking?"

"He lent it to me," Yuri said. And never answered the first question, in his flight downstairs.

"Where are you going?" cook asked, when he begged a hamper of food.

"To find the boys," he lied—although it was not quite a lie, if one could count his brother and their friends. "Please could I have extra? They'll probably be starved."

"Where are you going?" the stabletnaster asked, when he caught him saddling his pony, Gracja.

"Oh, cook gave me this for the boys." He showed the basket, but not what was in it.

"You mind don't break your neck," the stablemaster said. Yuri was sure the stablemaster was thinking mostly of the pony's neck and the pony's welfare, no matter Gracja was his pony and he had never brought her to harm.

"Where are you going, young lord?" the guard at the gate asked.

"Oh, out and about," he said, and rode through.

"When will you be back?" the guard called after him.

"When I find my brother's dog," he shouted back, and set Gracja to a brisk trot, because me guard was hard of hearing, and every boy knew it.

And because he knew what direction Zadny had gone, and how far he might go, and because that direction was (he would admit it to himself only for a moment or two) exactly the way his heart wanted to go, at least in his fondest imagination . . . only, in his pretending, he dreamed of overtaking Zadny just as Zadny reached the men on the mountainside, and hearing his eldest brother say, "Oh, let him come, he's already here."

But that was not what Bogdan would say. And he knew the look Tamas would give him if he could not even keep his dog safe in his pen.

He had some pride. And if he was out all night and if he came back with Zadny, maybe everybody including his traitor friends would have worried enough to realize they cared.

It was forest for the next whole day; and expecting trolls palled after a time, in Tamas' thinking. The land began to rise. They saw game, but never yet a sign of trolls, and made no diversion to hunt—Bogdan maintained that rabbit stew would be a fine supper and argued that they could spare the time; but Nikolai overruled him, as Nikolai had their father's instructions to do, saying they could enjoy that luxury on the way back: it was better they move along, until they knew for certain what weather they were feeing in the mountains.

Besides, they had the remnant of the cakes and cheese and sausage from home; and they had to dispose of that before it went stale or spoiled—amazing, Tamas said to himself, how obsessively men's thoughts turned to their next meal, when there would be no kitchen to provide it; and how after two days of looking for trolls under every log and bush, the mind wandered and began to observe other detail for relief, the flight of birds, the sunlight on new leaves, and the quick scurrying of vermin in the undergrowth.

The damage of the winter past was everywhere evident, in bushes that should be budding, now attempting to come up from the root; in trees leafing only above the reach of deer. But deer left little sign, now; instead, there was a great busyness of small scavengers—at one days-old carcass, like a swarm of rats when the granary door was opened.

—The forest is wounded, Tamas thought, not to the death, yet, but wounded—when no one could imagine a forest this wide and healthy could take harm, even by fire. He would never have said there could ever be too many deer, or too many foxes, but seeing the damage here, considering scratchings at doors and desperate flutterings at the eaves of the keep itself, he began to believe it more than a mere omen of harm: the harm here might be subtle, but it was already begun, in a spring that would not come with its usual vigor, and in the abundance of carcasses that the wolves had not touched.

There were always deaths in winter, that the melting snow turned up—deaths culling the weak and the old and the lame: but these were too many, and too recent: animals that had survived the whiter were dying of privation, one kind preying on the next. Undergrowth was less. Roots had washed bare in the rains. Berry-thickets were scant of leaves. The other men began to remark on it, and asked Karoly what he thought.

Karoly said, "One thing touches everything." But when Jerzy asked what he meant, Karoly only looked at the sky through the branches, gazing, it might be, toward the hills, and said, "That answer is over the mountains."

It was a good thing cook had put extra biscuits in the basket; and a bad one he had not managed to come away with but a light cloak—but, Yuri said to himself in the chill of the night, if he had gone out with a blanket and everything he needed he would never have gotten away.

And if he had been a little earlier going out to see to Zadny the way he had promised, he might have caught Zadny before he chewed through the rope.

But there was no use sleeping with might-have-beens, his father would say. He was in the woods. He had called after Zadny until every farmer in the valley and every deer in the forest must have heard him. It was only after the sun went down that he had begun to think overmuch about trolls, and wolves, and bears; and now in the dark it seemed scary to call out. This was the hour the four-footed hunters were out— and the time that trolls moved about, looking for boys and lost dogs to have for their suppers, if they could not catch a deer.

Or maybe they would rather catch boys and stupid dogs.

He had given up trying to start a fire. He had never been good at it. He wrapped himself in his cloak. Gracja's blanket was too sweaty and he had rubbed her down with it. And now he was acutely aware of the dark around about him, and the sighing of the leaves and the calling of night creatures he would swear he had never heard before in his life.

But then he had never been alone in the woods.

Perhaps he should give up and go home tomorrow morning. Surely they were searching the woods for him now, although he had not heard them, and whatever their opinion, he was not lost: he was absolutely confident of the general direction of home, and he had found what he was sure was Bogdan's party's trail through the woods, which was one of the usual ones. Zadny, with a hound's keen nose, had surely found it, too, and followed it.

And ever so much he wished that Zadny's keen nose could find him, because he could hear something moving about in the brush, and something was beginning to make Gracja very nervous.

He leapt up, the way he judged his brothers would, waved his cloaked arms and yelled, "Go away!" in his gruffest voice.

Whatever-it-was scampered away through the woods. Gracja jumped and almost broke her tether. Yuri sat down and tucked his cloak about him again, feeling better, at least.

Maybe even a wolf had been afraid of him. Maybe a bear. At best a deer or two.

God, he hoped that had not been Zadny.

"Zadny?" he called out into the dark. "Zadny? Here, boy—come here." It raised a dreadful noise in the night, and he imagined every bear and every troll within earshot pricking up its ears and saying, "Now there's a boy in the woods, isn't it?"

"Zadny?"

He heard a stirring in the brush. He imagined wolves and bears at least, took up Tamas1 bow and nocked an arrow and waited.

"Zadny?" His arm trembled. He wished he had tried harder to start a fire.

But a pale starlit nose crept out from under the leaves, and ungainly large forefeet followed. "Zadny!" Yuri exclaimed, letting the string relax. "Lord Sun, I'm glad to see you! Come on, come on, boy!"

He had, he had realized it this morning, come away with no rope or leash, only Gracja's tether, and that was in essential use. So it had to be his belt. He laid the bow down as Zadny came out and regarded him in the dark, he talked gently to the hound the way Tamas would:

"Come on, come here, boy." He knelt down, delved into his pack and pulled out a biscuit. "Here, boy, cook sent it, come on, there's a lad ..."

Zadny would not approach his hand. He broke off a bit and tossed it, but like a wild thing, Zadny took that and shied out of reach, and stood staring at him from a safer distance like a deer about to bolt.

"Oh, I'm not going to grab you. Here's a nice biscuit, nice dog, good dog, Zadny. You know me. I'm Tamas' brother. Tamas said to take care of you. The houndsmaster didn't hit you, did he? He surely didn't hit you. And you wouldn't run off from the puppies, would you? Tamas said you were to mind me while he was gone, and you're not to follow him, you hear? He won't like that."

Zadny might hear, but not for any coaxing would he let a hand near him. Offer a morsel of biscuit and Zadny would creep up, stretch as far as he could, snatch the bit and go; on the second such approach Yuri made a grab after him.

That was a mistake. Zadny shot off into the brush and vanished.

"Zadny?" Yuri called, over and over again, and apologized. "I'm sorry. I won't do it again, there's a good boy.

The nose came back, under the leaves. The forepaws did. But not a bit closer would Zadny come, not for any coaxing.

Yuri slept finally, exhausted; and waked with a sloppy wet tongue on his face. His eyes flashed open on dawn woods and a yellow hound's face, and he made a startled snatch after Zadny's collar.

And missed again.

"Zadny," he pleaded. "Zadny, come back here!"

But the dog simply stood out of reach while he saddled Gracja and climbed up.

Then the hound trotted off his own way, the way his master had gone.

The next day's ride was climbing. All the party bundled up in cloaks as soft-leaved trees gave way to cedar and to scrub pine. Snow patched the ground and fell in spits and fits from the gray overcast, until the horses went with beards of ice. High on the mountainside, they stretched their two canvasses between stout, uneven trees, in a wide spot in what Nikolai swore was the right trail. They shared a fireless supper, huddled in cloaks, with the wind roaring and thundering at their tents. Trolls could carry them all off tonight and welcome, Michal swore: slow roasting was preferable to freezing.

"Trolls wouldn't go out in this," Bogdan said, and more loudly: "I think a wizard's company ought to be worth better weather, don't you, master Karoly?"

"It could be worse," Karoly retorted, "and it could have been better, if we'd stopped where I said, an hour lower down."

They were at recriminations, now: things had devolved to that. Master Karoly had said wait, Bogdan had said go ahead, Nikolai had grudgingly admitted there was a stopping-place further on; and now they were all at odds, with the canvas snapping and thundering in the gusts.

With no warning then their canvas ripped, letting in a great gust of cold air, and Bogdan and master Karoly were shouting and swearing at each other, while Filip and Zev grabbed after the canvas and called for cord, shouting down all recriminations. Tamas hugged his cloak about him and buried his cold nose beneath its folds, lifting it only to say (but no one stopped arguing to listen) that if they used the sense the horses had and sat close against one another they would all be warmer.

"The storms aren't through," Nikolai said. "We should have waited."

But Bogdan said, "We're in it now. You say we're halfway. This is no time to talk about quitting."

lamas agreed with Bogdan, though no one listened to his muttered opinion. Michal and Zev and Filip had patched the canvas with a rock and a wrap of cord, which stopped most of the wind; and in relative comfort he drowsed and waked to find the wind fallen and everything still. Filip was on watch, tucked up at the door with a dusting of snow on his knees—he moved his feet as Tamas got on his knees and looked out from under their shelter.

The dawn sky shone cold and clear and the horses were bunched in the shelter of the pines near the other tent. New snow made dusty blankets on their backs and in the hollow of the canvas. Like the mountain storms he had heard Nikolai tell of all his life, this one had been fast and bitter—but it had left the air clean and tingling with life.

Karoly was awake, too: Karoly got up from his place at the back of the shelter, and excused his way over sleepers, on business Tamas figured for urgent and private until Karoly failed to return in the usual time.

"He's been gone a while," Filip whispered, and got up; Tamas rose to go with him, stiff and sore in every joint, peered out and saw the old man standing out in the open, looking out off the cliff into the distances of a rose and shadow sky, where shone a few bright morning stars.

Maybe he's working magic, Tamas thought. He had never seen Karoly at work: master Karoly had taught him and Bogdan and Yuri what he called the principles of the arts, shown them the weather-glass and other such prognosticating devices; but the true magic master Karoly had never given them, nor ever worked in front of witnesses, unless one counted his communing with the walls of the keep and the earth of the fields.

"What's he doing out there?" Filip whispered distressedly at his shoulder.

"I don't know," he whispered back. Nikolai and Bogdan stirred, then, grumbled and swore they might as well be up and moving, there was no sleeping with all the whispering and the coming and going, and they'd made acquaintance with every rock under them.

"Why are we under snow?" Jerzy asked, punching the patched canvas, that sifted snow down on everyone. "If he's so great a wizard, why do we have such rotten luck?"

"Because he can't do everything at once," Tamas said under his breath; he had stopped expecting the men to listen to him. "We haven't met any trolls, we haven't lost anybody, we got to cover last night before the storm broke. ..."

"I'd like to know what he is doing," Michal complained. "Standing on the edge like that—a wind could blow him right down the mountain."

He's listening, Tamas thought of a sudden, he had no idea why, but he thought of master Karoly listening to the stone of the hold, and thought, if those stones talk to him—what might a whole mountain sound like?

There had been a time he could have turned back, Yuri said to himself, wedged in behind Gracja, among pines, among rocks, and nursing his little fire into a dawn spitting and blustering with snow. The first night he could have come back and lied and said, well, he had not found the dog. But not after another day. Not after a third, Zadny always dancing out of arms' reach, accepting his charity and always, with a worried expression, looking off the way the men had gone, as if he would wait for a boy on a pony, but only just, only long enough; and he would stay for a boy and a pony to sleep, but never quite long enough.

If he had to go back now and claim he had outright lost the dog, he might have to maintain that lie between himself and his brother for ever, perhaps. And if he went back and told the truth, the other boys would say he had been outwitted by a mongrel stray, and that was a tag he would have to live with for the rest of his life. That he had hedged the truth with everyone, and that Zadny running away had given him a chance to do exactly what he wanted to do, did rub at his conscience—but there was actually no choice but to keep going now. They would forgive you if you were dead and they would forgive you if everything turned out all right (well, truth, papa would put him on bread and water for a week when he got home.) But when you got a reputation for lying or foolishness when you were fourteen, nobody ever forgot it, and your friends when they were grown men would never let you forget it—unless you were lord of Maggiar, which, being the youngest of lord Stani's sons, he never would be.

So he could not go back without the dog, who would not be caught, and very soon now, by tomorrow, he would be out of food and closer to over-mountain than he was to home, which meant he had to find Tamas and Bogdan. He certainly was not lost: Zadny gave every sign of knowing where he was going—and he could see the traces the horses had left, so he knew Zadny was not mistaken. They were going to be slower: Gracja was nothing for speed and he had had to camp early and hunt for food along the way; but eventually, on the other side of the mountains, he would catch up with Tamas and Bogdan and the rest of the men, in that country grandmother had told them about.

Or Zadny would run ahead and find them first, and while they were still wondering where Zadny had come from, he would come riding up on his pony and say blithely—he had this planned—Hello, brothers. And when Tamas called him a fool: You said I should watch your dog. Was I going to let him get eaten by bears?

No, it was Bogdan who would yell at him, first: Tamas would want to, but after Bogdan had vented his temper, Tamas would start defending him: that was the way he planned his reception.

And, after all, they could hardly send him home at that point: that was what he was sure master Karoly would answer to the men's objections to having him along. But he did not want to look at master Karoly until after his brothers had gotten to quarreling, because master Karoly would see through him otherwise and give him one of those soul-seeing looks Karoly could give . . .

In all versions, he had first to get there, and not to freeze before he got to the pass, which he had to reach today, if he was following master Nikolai's accounts. He had worked from dusk into full dark last night to get a smell of smoke out of the driest pine tinder he could manage—he had had it drying in his pocket all day, the way Nikolai had said one should in the mountains, where sudden showers and snow-fells were likely and the air was moist. He had cut pine boughs for a bed and for shelter to sleep under, and had Gracja's blanket under him and his cloak over him, besides. He had fed his fire dry tinder and pine needles before he offered it twigs and little branches and more tinder before solid wood, the way Nikolai had taught him in his ninth summer. The biscuits might have run out—he had shared the last one with Gracja and Zadny yesterday noon—but he had chopped and stuffed grass into Gracja's empty saddlebags and his empty food basket, so she had food for the climb, be it ever so little. Yesterday afternoon he had shot and cleaned a rabbit, that he had cooked last night, while Zadny had had the offal for his supper. This morning he peeled the red, soft lining out of cedar for tinder for his next fire. He would pack a fistful of that in his pocket, and as much dry wood, broken to lie flat, as he could tie to the saddle. All these tilings he had learned from master Nikolai in whiter tales, how he had done when he had hunted trolls—and unlike some boys of his acquaintance, he listened when his teachers told stories, of which he was very glad this morning.

He was still reasonably warm in the shelter of the rocks, while the sleet skirted around the mountainside; and Zadny, the rascal, came almost but not quite within reach, seeking that warmth. He had not slept soundly last night. Keep the fire going: master Nikolai had said that was the most vital thing. People had died up here who had let their fires go out, frozen stiff by the time the searchers found them—and he had never kept an all night fire by himself.

That was the only truly scary part, knowing his life continually depended on things he had never done before—like getting a fire to take, like staying awake, with no older brothers to wake him if he nodded. But he had done it. He had not frozen last night. So he thought he could do the other things, and the next and the next.

He had a small bit of rabbit for breakfast, and gave the bone to Zadny, who came just close enough to nip it in his teeth. He thought if Zadny were truly clever he would find his own rabbit, but he did not think Zadny was thinking about being hungry right now until someone held food in front of him. Nikolai said it was four days from the start to the top of the mountain, he had tucked that away in his memory, too, so that was all the breakfast he afforded himself. He crawled out of his bed of pine boughs into the cruel wind, dusted the snow off Gracja, and put the warm blanket he had slept with on Gracja's back, before the saddle that had been his pillow.

Then he bundled up the wood he had had drying all night next the fire's heat, and tied it on with Gracja's saddle-strings. He had done everything Nikolai had taught him to do; his breath hissed with shivers as he climbed onto Gracja's back the hard way, with a great deal of squirming about to bring his leg over Gracja's neck, because of the wood; the cloak flapped in the wind, and half-blinded him—it was not a graceful mount, but he was up and on his way to the hardest part of the climb, with Zadny already leaving tracks in the new-fallen snow.

He would show up on the other side of the mountain with Gracja and Zadny and say, "Of course I made it. No, I didn't have any trouble—none at all ..."

"Quiet every where," Nikolai remarked, riding closer to lamas and Bogdan. "No sight nor sign of trolls."

"No sight nor sign of anything," Bogdan complained, with a gesture outward, toward the sky and the eagles that hunted above them, in the thin, cold air. "Except them. —Where are the trolls, master Karoly?"

"Minding their own business," master Karoly retorted.

Master Karoly meant they should ask him no more questions; but it was a half-hearted shot, as if he was thinking about something else entirely.

"Something's wrong with him," Nikolai muttered to Bogdan. "He hasn't complained once today."

It's true, Tamas kept thinking—he kept hearing that remark over and over in his head and it made him more and more uneasy about Karoly. Something was wrong, something that distracted the old man, as if he were hearing something distant and difficult.

Bogdan remarked finally, when they were riding side by side, "The old master's worried. Has he talked to you?"

Tamas shook his head. "No." He waited for Bogdan to confide further in him, the way Bogdan would if they were at home and without Bogdan's friends around. But that was all Bogdan said. He asked finally, to fill the silence, "How far are we from the top? Did Nikolai say?"

"We're past it, Nikolai says. We're through the pass and going around the mountain—Nikolai says. But he's never been farther than this."

The valley looked no different than the one they knew. There was nothing magical about it, nothing that gran had described, no sign of trolls or faery. Bogdan rode beside him a while more in silence, then fell back to talk with Filip, in words too low to hear, perhaps confiding his worries to his friend, since his brother was too young for his confidences.

The journey was not turning out as he had hoped. It was certainly something to see the mountains from up here. But what had seemed an adventure into once-upon-a-time at its outset, came down to ordinary, barren stone, with more spits of sleet to sting their faces. Karoly was not talking to any of them, the older men were not talking to the younger—they rode in their own small group, with Jerzy wondering aloud were they on the right trail; and no one was interested in Stani's second eldest's opinions or his presence.

But it did,, thank the god, seem that the trail was slightly downward, now; and by afternoon, that pitch was unmistakable, even steep—all rocks and scrub pine, never yet a flat place and never yet a leaf the horses could use to fill their stomachs, but at least the wind was not so bitter cold, and even Jerzy grew more cheerful.

Now, Tamas thought, they would begin to see the landmarks their gran had described. A place called Krukczy Straz, that was the first—a tower in pine woods, that guarded the broad valley where the road went down to Hasel, where there might even be relatives, if grandmother's kin were alive. At Krukczy Straz they might find a warm gate-house to sleep in, at least, even if it was nothing but the defensive tower its name implied. There would be warm water for washing, and a good meal, and hay for the horses, and they might still get there tonight, if it was well up in the highlands, the way he recalled in gran's stories.

"Isn't there a tower?" he ventured, riding close to master Karoly. "Do you think we can reach it tonight?"

Everyone else was more cheerful. Master Karoly was not. Karoly took a glum moment about answering him. "It's possible. Or not. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?"

It was certainly not the forgiving master Karoly of the drafty tower study or the orchards around home. Tamas rode by him a moment more, wondering if Karoly would have more to say, or remember his presence—a lad could begin to wonder if he had not gone invisible to his companions, or whether Karoly saw him at all: Karoly did not so much as look at him again, or speak. He let his horse drift back to a slower walk, until it was him in the middle, between Nikolai's group; and Bogdan's group.

Tell Bogdan about it? Tamas wondered. What could I say? Master Karoly frowned at me?

The trail meandered along the mountain and then plunged steeply, wearingly downward, with never a sprig of grass for the horses, into a dead, skeletal ruin of pine and cedar. They had fed the horses the scant grain they were carrying, and pressed their journey late into the afternoon on a level road, with the mountains like a wall around them, unforgiving, sleet-dusted lumps of rock.

"This is madness," Jerzy said, as a sudden bitter wind howled out of the heights, whipping at their cloaks and the winter-coat of the horses. "Are we on the trail at all? I swear we're going up again."

"It is the road," master Karoly broke his silence to say. "It's illusion. We're still descending."

"I'm not sure you know where we are, old man. I'm not sure we didn't take a wrong turn on the mountain—"

"No," Karoly said shortly.

"Master Karoly," Bogdan said, "we're out of supplies; and if we come to green grass, or if things get better lower down, that's one thing: but it's far from encouraging, what we're seeing. We can't press on without limits: these horses can't do it, we can't do it—"

"We can't make it back over the pass," Nikolai said, "without supplies. There's no point arguing it. No matter where we are, we've got to go ahead. It is a road, it has to go somewhere, and somewhere has to be down from the heights. We should keep moving, past sunset tonight if need be."

"It is the right road," Karoly said under his breath.

Tamas said, "Grandmother mentioned—" and then held his peace, because what gran had said had no more currency than what Karoly knew.

"We're lost," Jerzy maintained; and Karoly only shook his head and looked away across the valley. Wisps of cloud veiled the depths. Birds circled far out across the gray expanse, eagles or carrion crows it was hard to say: size and color were illusory in this place. The birds made long shadows on the clouds.

Crows, Tamas decided, as they rode lower, through a foggy patch. Carrion crows and ravens fit everything they had seen so far; not only Maggiar had suffered a blight last winter. Trees on the mountains had died, leaving sticks of evergreens. The wind came out of the west, down the throat of the pass and against their backs, cold and damp off the patches of sleet on the slag-heap mountains. Instead of gran's waterfalls they found frozen, soot-stained ice; instead of the pine groves of her stories, charcoal stumps thrust up through sere, blackened brush.

Filip said, "The whole forest burned."

Master Nikolai said, with despair in his voice, "At least we've passed well below the tree line now. Spring will bring out the green in the lowlands, no matter the fire. There's bound to be forage further down."

Down was where they were surely going now, Karoly and Nikolai were right in that. The horses maintained a weary, jolting pace. The dusk between the mountains had closed about them, and since the foggy patch, cloud hung around the heights above their heads, gray and heavy with snow, casting everything in gloom.

Maybe Jerzy's right, Tamas thought: maybe we missed some turn of the trail on the heights and we've come down in the wrong valley—

But could master Karoly let us go astray? He's a wizard, Jerzy said it, persistently: Why don't we meet better luck?

Except if master Karoly could have cured what was wrong at home, wouldn't he have? And if he could have gotten us through the mountains without the storm, wouldn't he have? He's come here looking for his sister because things are happening he can't do anything about. Didn't he say to our father—I have bad dreams?

They passed into a defile of pale rock and a wide stream below the trail, that Karoly suddenly proclaimed was the road he remembered.

"Was it this grim?" master Nikolai asked.

"No," master Karoly admitted, still riding.

The men said other things as the road wound around the barren hillside, a slip zone of rockfalls and a long slope of rubble and dead brush down to a barren streamside—an appalling place, deeply shadowed by mountain walls on either side, but the road was most definitely a road now, broad and well-defined. They came to a milestone of the Old Folk, which explained the stonework bracings along this stretch-such roads ran here and there in Maggiar, too, with similar milestones; but a grinning face was roughly painted on it.

"What's that?" master Nikolai wanted to know.

"No good thing," Karoly said. Nikolai had reined to a stop at that find, so had they all, but Karoly passed it by with a look, as if it was part and parcel of everything in the land.

"What?" Bogdan called after him angrily. "Master Karoly, where are you leading us? What do you know, that you're not telling us?"

"That there's no way but this," master Karoly said over his shoulder. "That we've no choice but straight ahead. Come on!"

"Bogdan," Tamas began to say, with a strong feeling of misgiving about this road, but Bogdan set his horse to overtake Karoly's, saying something about keeping Karoly from breaking his neck; master Nikolai did the same, and the rest of them followed.

Tamas cast a second glance at the stone that seemed to mock any further venture down this road, wondering if the men all knew what that painted countenance signified, and he did not. He did not want to be a coward, and they would not regard his arguing. He worked his weary horse up to the head of the column with Bogdan and Nikolai and Karoly— easier on the overtaking just then as the road wound along the hillside to a steep descent.

But there they caught the first hopeful sight, a pale green vision of sunlight in the east, beyond the mountain shadow. Against that sunlight a dark tower loomed on the roadway, its foundations butted against the stream.

"Krukczy Straz," Bogdan murmured.

It surely was, Tamas thought. It was after all the road their grandmother had described to them, burned and dreadful as the mountains had become. They had come through the right pass, after all, and elsewhere the land was catching the sunlight still, like a promise of better things. "Quickly now," master Karoly said, silencing their chatter, and urged his horse faster down the road, that passed right alongside the tower crest.

Hisses then, sharp and quick, that no archer had to guess at; "Jerzy!" Filip cried. Tamas looked wildly about as horses bolted past and his own shied and reared. He saw Bogdan hit and falling as his own horse stepped backward on the road edge. He knew one heart-stopping moment of falling over the edge and onto the rubble, into a thunderous slippage of stones, battered and deafened in the rolling tide that carried him. He had time to despair of finding a stopping place. He had time to think of finding hold. The slide was a roaring in his ears and every handhold moved with him, slipping and tumbling as he went, down and down into choking dust.