The Goblin Mirror

9

LWI AMBLED TO A STOP IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE EVERLASTING woods, and it would have been oh, so much easier to give up and let the struggle go, Lwi refusing all reasonable urgings to go on. The morning had to come, and Tamas was so contused and so weary—but the easy way was the dangerous way, the easy way must always be suspect, master Karoly had always said—think twice and three tunes before you take the easy way.

Enough bones in this woods to make anybody think twice, he thought muzzily, and tugged at the reins and led Lwi's irregular steps on the straightest line he could walk among the trees, one step after the other, no wit left to reason what way he was going, except that everything ended, and that this night, like this woods, surely had an other side if he only persisted long enough in one direction, in one choice and not the dozen his mind wanted to skitter off into ...

It seemed to him at last that the woods was growing lighter ahead—like the moon at forest edge. He hoped then, that he had found the way out he was looking for, and the trees began to appear like shadowy pillars in some great hall, but he saw more trees beyond, and that light nearer and among them, as if the moon itself had come to rest in the very heart of the trees.

"Come here," a voice said softly, from everywhere at once. Ela, he thought at first, Ela's magic was talking to him, she had found the magical place she was looking for and she was calling him to her—and then he thought that the speaker seemed older than Ela: so readily a mind beset by spells began to apply ordinary judgments, as if such manifestations happened by mundane rules.

"Who are you?" he asked it.

"Why, the mistress of this woods, boy. What and who are you? Do you have a name? It seems I should know you."

The voice that had seemed to come from all about him came from his left this time; and he looked in that direction, seeing only massive trunks of trees.

"Tamas," he panted.

"What are you doing here?" The voice came from behind him now, the self-same voice, as if it were stalking him, but it was nowhere, when he turned unsteadily and looked. "What do you seek here, Tamas?"

"Are you a witch?" he asked, he hoped without a tremor in his voice.

"Of course," it said. It was behind him again. He turned back the way he had been facing and saw a shadow between the trees, a woman, he thought, with a cloak drawn tight about her. "Where are you going, Tamas?"

"Out of this woods," he said, and decided that if it was her woods, disrespect to her domain would never help his case. "I'm only going through, good lady. If you know the way out I'd be grateful."

"Why so anxious? Are you afraid?"

"I've no reason to be. I haven't taken anything, or touched anything." Those were the magical rules as gran's stories had them. He pulled Lwi to the side and took another direction. Or perhaps he dreamed he did. She appeared in front of him again, saying:

"But what's that at your side, Tamas? Is that yours?"

A chill went through him. He reached blindly toward the goblin sword, and pricked his finger on its spines. "I didn't think it was stealing."

"But this is my woods, Tamas. Everything in it is mine."

"I beg your pardon," he said. Breath came short, shameful panic. "I didn't think there was anyone to—" He drew Lwi in the other direction, and caught his foot painfully on a tree root. He recovered his balance and she was still in front of him.

"—anyone to care?" she mocked him.

"Are you a goblin?"

"Do I look like one?"

"I've only seen one, face to face. You don't look like him. But how should I know?"

She laughed softly, and beckoned him toward her. "Come inside. I'm not so stingy as that. And you don't look like a goblin, either. You look like a young man who's far from home."

For the first time he saw the dim outlines of a doorway behind her. Perhaps he had been looking so hard at her he had seen nothing else. But gran's stories had never encouraged him to accept such offers and he shook his head no. "Thank you, no, madam, I'm looking for someone."

"Have you lost someone? I can help you. There's little goes on in this woods that I don't know. —Oh, come in, come in, no sense to stand outside. The horse will be safe. Nothing harmful comes here."

It was dark, beyond that doorway. Everything about it seemed untrustworthy. "You can just tell me the shortest way out," he said, but she stooped and ducked inside— perhaps, he reasoned with himself, only to light a lamp or poke up a slumbering fire, and he might be foolish to object—but Ela had told him nothing of houses or cottages in this woods, especially not ones lit by a moon that, by his reckoning, ought not to have reached mid sky yet, a waning crescent by now, and not so bright as the light that filled this grove.

He did not want to go into that place—but what else might he do but wander on in the dark? he asked himself. Her invitation was the only choice he saw.

Much against his better judgment, he lapped Lwi's reins about a low live branch and went as far as the entrance, with no intention whatsoever of going inside until there was a lamp lit or a fire to show him what he was walking into. The air that wafted out to him had the chill and damp of a cave, but it looked on the outside like a peasant's cottage. He touched the rough stonework and it felt real enough, down to the grit of old mortar.

"Will you help me?" she asked from out of the dark.

"Madam, I would, but I'm sure you know your shelves better than I do. I'd only be in the way."

"Cautious boy." He heard further small movements within. "Afraid of me, are you?"

Less and less trustworthy. "Madam," he said uneasily, "I've seen nothing in this whole land but trouble." He heard Lwi tearing at the leaves behind him, and thought that if he had the sense his father hoped for in his sons he would walk away now, take Lwi in hand and keep going in his own slow and uncertain way, in hope of sunrise, eventually.

But of things he had met in this land, witches seemed thus far a power opposing the goblins—and light did spring up inside, a golden and comforting light, that cast a warm glow over an interior of curtains and shelves and domestic clutter—just the sort of things a woodland wise-woman might collect, birds' wings and branches and jars and jars of herbs and such. It reminded him acutely and painfully of master Karoly's study.

"Well?" she asked, from inside, and beckoned to him. "Oh, come, come, boy, I don't bite."

He could see all the inside from the door. He entered cautiously. She was standing at her table, pouring from a pitcher into two wooden cups.

"I don't really think I need anything," he protested, because he had no desire whatsoever to eat anything or acquire any obligations of hospitality with a witch. But she set one cup into his hand and waved him toward a cushioned ledge, settling herself at the far end of that small nook, a very proper witch, very—beautiful, he decided, which bore not at all on whether he should trust her, of course, but she did not look wicked. She had put off the dark cloak, that was not black, but deep, deep red. Her gown was embroidered and fringed and corded and tasseled with intricate work of black and colors, of a fashion both foreign and strange—in fascination with which, he took a larger sip than he had planned, and felt the liquid go down like fire.

"Are you honestly a witch, lady?"

"Honest people have certainly called me that. And for your question, my question: What are you doing in my woods? Was it a way out you wanted—or were you looking for someone? Have you decided which?"

Perhaps she had the power to help them. Perhaps he had grown confused in his wandering. "Looking for someone. Who probably found the way out." Perhaps witches all knew one another. The tower was not that far away. He took the chance. "Do you know a girl named Ela? She came from Tajny Straz."

"From Tajny Straz. And don't you know these hills are a dangerous place?"

"Madam—" Words failed him. Everything he had seen came tumbling about him, with too much vividness and too little reason. "Are you at all acquainted with Ela's mistress? You are neighbors. And I know it's a dangerous place. The goblins killed her."

"A sad business. Yes, I'm aware. But that still doesn't answer why a young man is wandering these hills looking for a young lady from the perilous tower. I could wonder why I should answer his questions or tell him what I know—which might be something useful to him or not. How could I tea, if he won't tell me what he has to do with Tajny Straz and if he won't tell me the truth of what he's seeking?"

"We came to stop the goblins. They drove the deer and they burned the woods and when we came to see why, they ambushed us..."

"Did they? Why would they do that?"

"I've no idea." He held the cup locked between his fingers and wanted no more of what it held. His head was spinning and his thoughts fell over one another. "A girl is lost somewhere in this woods. I have to find her ..."

"Poor boy." She got up with a whispering rustle of cloth and taking the cup from his fingers, set both cups on the table nearby. "Poor boy, you've hurt your hand—you've bled all over the cup."

"I'm dreadfully sorry. ..."

"Oh, let me see." She began searching among the jars on the shelves, when he was only thinking how he could gracefully retreat. She found something, brought it back and reached for his hand. "Come, come," she said, and he felt like a fool, hesitating like a child with a cut finger—he truly did not want her to touch his hand, but she insisted.

"The sword did this. A wicked thing, and maybe poisoned." She carried his finger to her mouth while he was too confused to pull back or to protest her licking the blood off— quite, quite muddle-headed, then, and a little dizzy, as the pain stopped, and nothing seemed so comforting as her lips against his hand. "There," she said, edging closer, pressing his hand in hers, "isn't that better? Perhaps I can help you find your young lady. I do have my ways. And I can show you so many things, if you only pay some little token—the magic needs that, it always needs that, if someone asks a question."

He had not remembered about witches and payments. He regretted coming inside in the first place, or drinking anything, or letting her lips touch his hand. "I think—I think you never answered me—who you are, whether you know where Ela went.

"I don't. I can learn, ever so easily. Only I have to have something from you to make it happen. And you don't look to have any gold about you. What if my price were a kiss? Would that be too much to ask?"

He had never—never kissed any woman but his mother and his cousins: the truth was, he had never had the remotest chance, and her offer flung him into confusion. He was not courting some maid in Maggiar, he was sitting on a ledge in a strange little shelter with a witch who, he suddenly feared, was edging her way to more than a kiss. She might ask things he by no means wanted to do with a witch and a stranger. But he might be wrong about her intentions, and others were relying on him for their lives. So he leaned forward—it was not far—and paid her what she asked.

Her arms slipped about him. She held him that way and looked him closely in the eyes, laughing gently. "Oh, come, come now, was that a kiss?"

He had to allow it was not the way Bogdan would have done it. Certainly not Jerzy, or Nikolai. So he made a more honest try, but that did not satisfy her either: she made that kiss linger into two, and three, wandering from his lips to his neck, at which point he grew confused, what he should do, what he should agree to, what was right or wise to agree to or whether help that might be bought with dishonor could be relied on at all.

But what honor was it, if it let Ela go lost or goblins come at his land or his brother die without any justice for it?

She undid a buckle at his collar. He tried to think what to do, but when he shut his eyes to think he saw a dark tower, surrounded by goblin armies, saw war, men and goblins, a queen against a queen, not knowing how he knew that. He saw the great mirror cracked, and all the world rippled and changed like a reflection in water. Images flitted by, true or false, or what had been or what would be, he had no comprehension. What was happening in this world and the other tumbled event over event in confusion: he saw Lady Moon, in thinnest crescent, shimmering on a mountain lake. A goblin warrior stood on its dark and reedy shore, a knight whose countenance changed from fair to foul with the waxing and waning of the moon's reflection, with never a sun between.

That goblin figure turned and stared at him, the image of the goblin in the cellar, a hoped-for rescue turned to threat. Fair turned foul and fair again, not a human beauty, but beauty all the same, constantly changing with the reelings of the moon across the night.

But the shadow came across that goblin face and that armored body like the passing of a cloud across the moon, and when that shadow was full the body seemed broader, more familiar to him. The whole attitude was an echo of someone he knew—god, he knew with a pang at his heart, even before the cloud drifted on and the moon showed him Bogdan's pale face, remote, as a stranger to him. Slowly Bogdan began to turn his head, the very image of that creature in the cellar. He sought to escape that moment that their eyes should meet—but he could not turn away, not though his brother's eyes were dead and dark; and after that single glance Bogdan began to walk away, along the shore, into the dark.

"Wait!" he cried, and his voice echoed in vast halls that were suddenly about him, a structure of palest green stone and deepest black—he saw goblins standing about him, tall and grim, in the vaulted hall where the goblin queen issued her decrees. He saw her dusky face, dreadful and beautiful at once, with eyes of murky gold. Her braids were bound with silver, her necklaces were silver and gold, her long-nailed fingers were ringed and jeweled, and her arms were braceleted from wrist to elbow. "Well," she said, with that lisp that fangs made in a voice, and stared right into his soul. "Well, well, a venture against me. How nice."

"No," he cried, as she lifted a long-nailed hand and beckoned him closer, closer, with the force of magic. His body longed to go. He saw that Bogdan already stood there, among the dead-eyed courtiers. "It's all right," Bogdan said. "You've nothing to fear."

For a moment he looked at Bogdan, wanting desperately to believe in his safety—but it was shameful, it was horrid, Bogdan believed in no one's promises, and Bogdan was saying trust and believe that the queen had no wicked purposes.

"This is only the beginning," the witch in the wood said, standing beside him. "Is this someone you love? She'll find them, every one. She'll take them all from you, if you stand in her way. Believe what I say, believe what / say, and lend me your strength, boy, and there's nothing we can't do."

But nothing else had proven what it ought. And he felt cold in her touch, he saw shadow about him, and edged away.

"Not wise," she said.

He turned away and flung himself desperately at hall doors that shut in front of him—turned to run and found himself in the witch's forest cottage again, caught in an embrace that clung with frightening strength, arms with nothing of softness or flesh about them. Everything was lies—he had not seen his brother in that place, it could not have been Bogdan, no more than he had stood just now in the goblin hall. He began to push away with all his might, tore from the witch's embrace and caught himself against the table, the wall, the draperies. The door was shut. The bolt was shot. When had that happened?

"Tamas," the witch reproved him, as his cold fingers struggled with the bolt. He heard the rustle of her garments behind him and he could only move in nightmare slowness.

"Are you afraid, Tamas? Look at me. Look at me, Tamas. I showed you a symbol of things as they are. But will you run away now, and be blind to what will be? Do you want the truth, Tamas? Have you no courage for the truth?"

He shot the bolt back. The door resisted like heavy iron. He scraped through the slight opening he forced and caught a breath of cold clean air as he fled, stumbling over the uneven ground on legs numb as whiter chill. He met a shadowed trunk, clung to it and struck out for a further one as his knees went to water. Lwi was standing where he had left him, and he flung himself in that direction, but the empty space was too wide. His knees gave way beneath him and sent him sprawling in the damp leaves.

"Well, well," a deep voice said, a voice that made his heart jump—but he could not recall if that voice belonged here, with a witch in this woods. He lifted his face from the leaves and rubbed the grit from his eyes . . . saw Azdra'ik standing among the trees.

They're in league, he thought. The witch and the goblins, all of them—

With a dry rattling and a whisper of cloth and leaves, the witch arrived beside him, her skirts in tatters, her feet—her feet beneath that hem were a pale assemblage of bone, which moved as if flesh contained it.

Azdra'ik sauntered closer. "Three wishes, mistress, wasn't that the term? I think I do remember your swearing it once upon a time, in exchange for my services." Three long-nailed fingers ticked off the items. "My first wish, I recall, was that you have no further power over me. My second ... that you never oppose my purpose. And the thud ... the third, I fear, must be this wretched, foolish boy."

"Damn you," the witch whispered.

"Oh, I've served you more faithfully than you know-certainly more faithfully than you deserve. Now he's mine. By the terms you yourself proposed, he's mine. So begone, Ylena!"

A sound of breath, or angry wind. A soft and bitter laugh. "Cheaply bought, that third wish of yours. I feared so many worse things. But they're done. You can't banish me hereafter, ng'Saeich. I never need fear you again!"

"Begone, I say!" The goblin stood up tall and flung up his arm, and for a moment there was a dreadful feeling in the air. Lwi whinnied as a gust of wind blew decayed leaves and grit into Tamas' face, chilling him to the bone. He ducked his face within the protection of his arm, and hoped only for a cessation of the wind that turned his flesh to ice.

But in the ebbing of that gale an armored boot disturbed the ground near his head. A strong hand dragged him to his knees, up and up toward Azdra'ik's very face. He tried to get his feet under him, and Azdra'ik struck him across the mouth, bringing the taste of blood.

"You are an expensive bit of baggage, man. Shall I begin by breaking your littlest finger, and work up to your neck? I would do that ever so gladly." A second blow, harder than the last. "Stand up, damn you!"

He tried. Azdra'ik seized him by the hair and by that and a grip on his belt, half-dragged, half-carried him as far as Lwi. He staggered against Lwi's yielding body and groped after the saddle with the desperate notion of breaking for freedom, if he could only get a foot in the stirrup, if he could only find the reins, if Lwi could do more than stagger away from this cursed place.

Azdra'ik grabbed his shoulder and faced him toward him, his back against Lwi's shoulder. "You," Azdra'ik said, "you can walk, man. You richly deserve to walk."

"Where's Ela?"

"Oh, where is Ela? Where is Ela? Now we're concerned, are we?" The goblin flung him away and took Lwi's reins in hand as he staggered for balance.

"Tool," Azdra'ik called after him, and somehow he found the strength to walk, shaky as his ankles were. Azdra'ik had neglected even to disarm him. So had the witch, that was how much threat he was to them. He might draw the sword now and offer argument—he might die on the spot instead of later, less quickly. He was no match for Azdra'ik as he was: he suspected that not on his best day was he a match for a goblin lord—foolish Tamas, Tamas who had no natural talent with the sword, Tamas who was scarcely able to keep his feet under him at the moment, who needed all his effort to set one ahead of the other—he was cold, cold as if no sun would ever warm him. When he faltered, whenever Azdra'ik overtook him, Azdra'ik struck him and made him walk, but that he felt anything at all began to be welcome—anything to keep him awake and moving and on his feet.

"You cost too much," the goblin said again, hauling him up by the scruff when he had fallen. Azdra'ik struck him hard across the face and cried, in this space distant from the witch, "Do you know what you've done, man? Do you remotely comprehend what I paid for you?"

"A wish," he murmured through bloody lips, the only answer he understood; and Azdra'ik shook him.

"A wish. A wish. —She ruled this land when these trees were acorns, and she's not all dead, do you understand me? Wizards can be trouble that way, and among witches in this wood it's a plague! Didn't you see the warning in the forest? Didn't you apprehend there's something wrong in this place, before you went guesting in strange houses?"

Curiosity stirred, not for Azdra'ik's question, but for his own: incongruous curiosity, held eye to eye with an angry goblin, but pain seemed quite ordinary by now. "Why?" he asked Azdra'ik. "Why pay so much? What am I worth to you?"

A long-nailed finger jabbed his chest. "Because, thou innocent boy, if she had had the rest of you she would have gained you, and gaining you—gained substance in this world, among other things neither you nor I would care to see. But thou'rt mine, thou art mine, man—she can't touch the horse while I hold him nor touch me or thee by the terms we agreed to. So walk! You're bound to the witchling by magic nor she nor we can mend, and, by the Moon, you're going to find her!"

He did not understand. Bound? By magic? He stared stupidly at Azdra'ik, until Azdra'ik flung him loose, with:

"Walk, man, or fall down that hill, I care nothing which, but find her you will, so long as you have breath in you— don't look back, don't look back now!"

It was his worst failing, curiosity: the moment Azdra'ik said that, he could not but look back—and he saw the witch as if she were very far away, in the dark between the trees. Faster and faster she came as he watched—

"Fool!" Azdra'ik shook him and spun him about to face him. "Don't go back, you've no right to go back now, don't think of her!"

"I don't want to," he stammered, shaking with cold. It seemed when he shut his eyes she was there and he was not free ...

"She can't claim you again unless you will it, man, don't think of her!"

"I'm not," he said, and it was the truth—he had rather Azdra'ik's company than the ghost's, for ghost she must be: Azdra'ik at least was living, and solid, and where he had been and what he had let touch him he wanted not even to think about now that he was clear of it.

"Then keep walking!" Azdra'ik shoved him and he walked. But constantly he had a compulsion to look back, or to shut his eyes to see whether or not she was there—but it was not her, it was the goblin lord behind him, he convinced himself of that without looking back; he heard the constant meeting of metal and Lwi's four-footed stride in the leaves. He did not need to look over his shoulder, or even to blink so long as he could resist it—because at every blink of his eyes that place was waiting and at every weakening of his will that ghostly touch was brushing at his shoulder.

A light glowed through the trees, with a source beyond the next hill. The witch again, lamas thought, reeling blindly through the dark—it seemed to him in his despair that they must only have gone in circles or that the witch had won and Azdra'ik was defeated, finally, fatally for both of them.

But the forest seemed to grow thinner as he went. Thorns and brambles grew more frequent. It was the east, he began to hope at last, the east, and the edge of the forest, and the faintest of rising suns.

He lost his footing in his anxiousness to reach it, skidded and fell—the second time, the third, he was not sure, a slide over dry and rotting leaves. He made it to his knees, hearing Azdra'ik behind him as sound and sense spun and whirled through his wits. He reached his feet, and Azdra'ik had not struck him. His next reeling steps carried him to a massive rock, from which he could see a dim gray dawn, a last fringe of trees, a vast and open valley: he launched himself down slope for that light and glorious sky with a first real belief he might escape.

An iron grip spun him about and slammed him back against the stone. Azdra'ik's hand smothered his outcry, Azdra'ik's whole armored weight crushed him against the stone, and for a desperate, bewildered moment he fought to get Jjee, expecting the god knew what betrayal.

Then he caught from the tail of his eye a chain of dark figures crossing the open hillside below them.

Azdra'ik's enemies might well be his allies; that was his first thought. If he might free himself if only for a moment and attract their attention—but the least small doubt held him hushed and still. Hefeltashort, sharp movement as Azdra'ik jerked Lwi's reins, warning the horse to be still—and in only that small interval he saw more and more amiss in those figures down the hill, a foreignness in gait and armor.

Not men, he began to be sure now: they were goblin-kind, broader and smaller than Azdra'ik, like bears walking on two legs, armored and bristling with weapons.

"Those," Azdra'ik whispered, the merest breath stirring against his ear, "those are itra'hi, man, do you see the difference now?"

He tried to speak. Azdra'ik lifted his hand a little.

"No noise," he managed to whisper.

"Wise of you."

"Where are they going?"

"To mischief, always. Be still."

He was still. He watched until the goblins passed out of sight around the rock, and for a time after. Then Azdra'ik seized his arm and led him, Lwi's reins in his other hand, down a stony flat somewhat back of the track the goblins had crossed, and for the first time under the open sky.

Wooded hills rose on every side of them: huge boulders tended down to a straggle of grass and a dizzying prospect over a dawn-shadowed valley. It seemed to him that smoke stained the sky. Fires glowed within that smoke, hundreds of them, in a distance so far the eye refused the reckoning.

"Burdigen," Azdra'ik said. "Albaz."

"There's fire," he said faintly. "Why?"

"Have you never seen war, man? This is war."

"Against whom? Why?"

"Need there be a reason? That men exist. That the queen wants the land. That was the betrayal the witches of the Wood made inevitable."

"Why?"

"You do love that question. How can I know a human's thinking? Greed, perhaps. Or merely whim. A foolish witch wanted all that the queen had, and she tried to take it. While I—"

There was long silence. "What would you?" Tamas asked.

"I wanted what was ours," Azdra'ik said bitterly. "I wanted what was ours from time past. I thought there was a hope in humankind."

"Of what?"

"Of common sense." Azdra'ik seized his arm and shoved him along, and he saw no choice but walk—in a place made for ambushes, and not for silent passage with a shod horse.

The rising sun picked out the faintest of colors, warning them they were vulnerable; but if he were free this moment he could not face that woods now, or bear its shadow. The witch began to seem to him a recent dream, a nightmare in which he had not acquitted himself with any dignity or sense ... but the consequence of it was with him, in the cut finger, the chill in his bones, the vision of the dark and that cottage at any moment he shut his eyes.

"I'll walk," he protested faintly, trying to free his arm. But he stumbled in the next step and Azdra'ik jerked him hard upright and marched him a hard course downslope and among the rocks.

"It's where they went," Tamas objected, and jerked at Azdra'ik's hold a second time. "Where are we going?"

"To our little would-be witch. The fool's using the mirror."

"How do you know that?"

"Does the sun shine? How do you not know? Are you numb as well as stupid?"

He did not know. He did not know how the goblin knew, except by smelling it or hearing it in some way human folk could not. "Why?" he began to ask, hauled breathless along the slope in the wake of what he had no wish to overtake, and with the vision of smoke and distant fires hazy beneath them. "Inside or outside the woods? What do you—?"

Another jerk at his arm, that all but lifted him off his feet. "Quiet!" Azdra'ik whispered, and led him down and down the hillside, all the time holding Lwi's reins in his other hand. On a steep, gravelly stretch Lwi slid past diem and all but broke free. But Azdra'ik held on, the reins wrapped about his fist, and meanwhile gripped his arm so hard the feeling left his hand—stronger than a man, Azdra'ik was; but what Azdra'ik proposed to do on the track of a dozen of his enemies Tamas had no idea: no idea what Azdra'ik intended and no idea whether he was not better off drawing the weapons he still carried and trying the small chance they offered—

Were they going down there? he wondered. Were they going into war and siege? Nikolai's tales had seemed adventurous, distant, long-ago—but facing the fires in the haze across the plain, he found such destruction not romantic at all, rather a promise of terrors, in a land where goblins were the rule and humans were the prey. The fete of this valley might next spring be Maggiar's and the people suffering next year might be his own—while a goblin hauled him willy-nilly along the hill with what purpose he could not decide.

"I'll walk" he protested again, hoarsely, and jerked his arm to make the point. Azdra'ik did not let him go, but he kept his feet under him for the next dozen steps without wincing and Azdra'ik eased his hold.

Then without his asking or expecting it, the creature let him free.

He had thought he understood goblins, since Krukczy Straz—until this one, damn the creature, twice spared his life, and rescued him, and kept him on his feet last night, when sleep would have left him prey to ... whatever he had dealt with in the deep woods. Did one stab in the back a creature who had thus far led him nowhere he would not go?

Not when he was doing very well to keep his feet under him, and skirting hill after hill in the very footprints of a goblin patrol, above a smoke-hazed overlook of cities under siege.

It was scarcely light outside when master Nikolai roused them out of sleep, gathered up all the things they could use and ordered Yuri to take Gracja's tack and get out of the hall— Karoly, poking up the fire in the fireplace, with no evidence whatsoever of breakfast in preparation, said he would follow, go on, get out, go with Nikolai and Krukczy as far as the gate: he had something yet to do and, no, he did not need help and he did not need boys' stupid questions this morning.

"What's the matter?" Yuri asked Nikolai while they were saddling Gracja. "Are goblins coming? Does he know where Tamas is?"

Master Nikolai said, "Does any wizard make sense, ever?" and ordered him to stop asking questions and go.

So they led Gracja out as far as the gate in the shivery half-light of morning, with Krukczy stumping along like a moving rag-heap, Zadny loping from one to the other of them and around and around Gracja's legs. Yuri found his teeth chattering, and told himself it was not fear that did that, he always did that when he slipped out in the morning cold without breakfast.

But what master Karoly was doing in there must be serious, the way he had snapped at them and wanted them out the doors before he started.

Maybe he was burning the tower down, so the goblins could not use it. He had heard that a general should do that, if a tower was likely to give an enemy a place to hold. But there was all of the forest around the tower, that could catch fire if that was the case, and burn all of them with it.

Surely he's thought of that, Yuri thought to himself, but one never knew about Karoly—sometimes he was fearfully absent-minded.

Maybe instead the old master was laying a curse of demons on the doors and locking the goblins out. Karoly was certainly a stronger wizard than they had ever believed in Mag-giar: Yuri was in retrospect chagrined and on best behavior, thinking he and his friends at home had been lucky Karoly liked them.

"He's taking a long time, isn't he?" Yuri asked. But Nikolai gave him no answer and neither did Krukczy, who was sitting like a brown lump among the vines. Zadny whined and pressed close against his legs, nosing his restraining hands. Zadny was shivering, too, feeling the uneasiness, Yuri thought, the way he felt Nikolai's anxiety.

"Master Nikolai, what's he doing in there?"

"Wizard-work," Nikolai said, his jaw clamped so tight the muscles stood out.

Zadny whined. A wind began to rise. Brush crackled near them—that was Krukczy, heading away from them in a great hurry.

"Troll!" Nikolai said, and made a grab for him. "Krukczy! Troll! Come back here!"

But Krukczy was through the vines and out of their reach.

Came a sudden blast of wind and leaves began to fly and vines to whip about the wall like snakes, blowing loose around the open gateway. Came a dreadful wailing inside the yard, loose boards or something—Tamas had always said that was what made sounds like that in the night. It was loose boards.

Or owls. It might be owls.

Gracja tried suddenly to bolt. Nikolai hung on to her reins as she rolled her eyes and tried to stand on her hind legs. Then light burst inside the gates, light bright as noonday flooding out over the paving stones, casting the skulls and the poles into eerie shadow, as if the sun had invaded the tower. Wind shrieked. Dust flew into their faces and stung their eyes. It wasn't owls. It wasn't boards creaking. It was the shriek of iron bending, it was a roaring like flood coming down, it was cold, and the thump of loose shutters and banging pails and the gate hitting the wall.

"Come on," Nikolai shouted, starting to lead Gracja away. Gracja was more than willing to go, to run over him if she had her way—but, Yuri thought in dismay, they were deserting master Karoly, leaving him in that place with that banging and shrieking going on: and Nikolai would not do that. "Wait!" Yuri cried, "wait! He said—"

Nikolai only grabbed him by the arm, holding Gracja with his other hand, and yelled, above the wind, "Get on the horse!"

"We can't leave him!" he cried, but Nikolai yelled louder: "Get on the damn horse, boy, it's Karoly's business in there-he told me he'll follow us!"

He was used to moving when Nikolai yelled at him in that tone—his feet began to move, without his even thinking; and then he drew another breath to argue right and wrong. But whatever-it-was shrieked around the walls, scattering gravel from the crest, and Gracja was struggling to break away from them.

"It's wizard's business!" Nikolai yelled into his ear. "Get up on the horse and stay out of it!"

He found the stirrup and got on, while Nikolai held her—

Nikolai did not give him the reins; he began to lead her instead, while she was trying to get free and ran. Bits of twigs and leaves were flying around them, Nikolai was hurting himself trying to run and hold on against Gracja's wild-eyed fright, and he could only duck down and try not to let a branch rake him off.

He hoped master Karoly was all right, he hoped Nikolai knew where he was going, he hoped—

He hoped they would only get to somewhere quiet and warm, because the wind was more than cold, it had the chill of earth and stone and it cut to the bone.

"He's in trouble in there!" he objected to Nikolai: if Nikolai had more confidence than that in master Karoly, he did not. But Nikolai kept them moving until they had left the stone wall behind. Then he gave up running, only limped along at Gracja's head in a wind-tossed dawn.

Zadny was still with them, Gracja had run her fright out, but anything could scare her into another panic; and Yuri had a cold lump of guilt lying at the pit of his stomach because he had been a boy and a burden. Nikolai had had to protect him, instead of helping master Karoly, Krukczy had run off from them, and Nikolai was doing the best he knew to get them somewhere—he began to understand that master Karoly had given Nikolai orders: Get the fool boy to safety, was probably what Karoly had said.

He slid off Gracja's back as she was still moving, hit the ground at Nikolai's heels. "Master Nikolai. You ride. You shouldn't have been running ..."

Nikolai gave him a look in the cold daylight, a drawn and dreadful glare—'run' was a sore word with Nikolai right now, he realized that the instant it was too late to swallow it.

He amended it, with a knot in his throat, "I know you'd have stayed if I wasn't there."

Nikolai kept walking, all the while casting him foul looks. "Maybe I wouldn't," Nikolai said. "Damned wizards shove you here and there and don't ask your leave ... Who's got a choice? Who's got a bloody choice, lately?"

"He magicked us to go?"

"He did or common sense did," Nikolai said. "Get back on that horse, boy. Get on!"

Nikolai made Gracja stop. Nikolai's pride was sorer right now than his arm was and it was not a good time to argue the point: Yuri scrambled back into the saddle and shut up, but it grew clear in his head that Nikolai had all along been put to bad choices. Nikolai would have gone after Tamas to the ends of the earth, if he could have, but he could never have made it alone.

And if wizards and witches were at work, it was a good job that Zadny had broken that rope, because otherwise Nikolai would be dead on the hill at Krukczy Tower, and Tamas would not have any help at all, that was the way he added it up—so he was not all to blame for things.

And, more to the point, Zadny had found a trail, running along with his nose to the ground, blundering into this thicket and that bramble, as if the wind, gentler once they were past the walls, were playing him tricks, but he was clearly onto something.

"He's following them," he said to Nikolai. "Tamas went this way—Zadny wouldn't follow, else."

"Good," Nikolai panted, not in good humor.

And finally: "Maybe we should slow down for Karoly," Yuri said, when Nikolai was well out of breath. "You said he was going to follow us. ..."

"I don't know what the hell's following us! —No. We don't slow down. Damn that troll. It'll help you,' Karoly says; 'It'll go with you,' Karoly says ... Til follow you one way or another,' he says. Probably as right about the one as the other."

"There's tracks."

"I'm not blind. —Dammit!" Nikolai was in a great deal of pain, and Zadny crossed his path and bothered Gracja; but Nikolai would not agree to take his turn riding, not even after they stopped for rest and water.

So there was nothing to say—Zadny came back from an inspection of the area and tried to climb into Yuri's lap, whining and clawing at him, wanting to go on, and Yuri wrapped his arms around him to keep him out of mischief while they sat and rested. Nikolai's face was white and he was sweating, but he was clearly not going to listen to advice, or reason. In a moment more Nikolai got up, took Gracja's reins and told him to get on, and they waded the stream, where the horse tracks were clear—two sets of tracks, Nikolai had spared breath to tell him, which confirmed what he thought he saw; and on the other side they found horsehair snagged on thorn-bushes, where horses had climbed the bank.

"One white," Nikolai said, and added, short of breath, "It's the same ones we've been following."

But why was Tamas even going this way, instead of home, Yuri wondered, once they had found Karoly's sister dead?

And what had master Karoly said last night about a piece of mirror and the heart of hell? Everything he had overheard jumbled in his head. He had not understood all of it at the time, and now it slipped away from him in bits and pieces—

But Zadny was smelling something else as they went, shying back with his nose wrinkled and his hackles raised, and Nikolai squatted over the prints a second time. "What is it?" Yuri asked, about to get down to see for himself, but Nikolai shoved Zadny out of his way and got up.

"Someone wearing boots, moving at a fair pace. Someone a little taller than I am."

His heart sank. "That's not Tamas."

"No," Nikolai said, and led Gracja further down the bank, to thoroughly trampled ground. Horses had been back and forth here, had drunk, perhaps, had torn up the earth in deep, water-standing prints.

"That goblin Krukczy smelled?"

"Very probably. It's a narrow foot. And long."

He did not want to think about dial, he did not want to wonder and to worry when he could not help—but there were other prints, and Zadny stayed bristled up and uneasy as they went.

But toward afternoon, and still following those tracks, they came to an old foundation, a well, overgrown with vines. People of some sort had lived near here, unless goblins had, and if Tamas and the witch were going anywhere looking for somewhere, this certainly began to look like more of a somewhere than the forest was. He began to imagine riding just around the bend of me water, finding another ancient tower, and a white and a black-tailed horse waiting safely in the yard.

What are you doing here? Tamas would say, all upset with him; and he would answer shortly that it was a very good thing he was, and they should go back and get Karoly: a witch and Karoly together ought to be able to deal with the goblins and they could all go home.

But he could not help thinking of Tajny Straz, and the skulls and the poles; and about that light and the wind that had broken out around the tower. When he thought about that, the whole forest seemed cold and menacing, and he began to hear every rustling of the leaves.

Something suddenly bubbled in the stream beside them, rose up with a rush of water and scared an oath out of Nikolai. It looked like a mass of water-weed, or a huge mop upside down.

Krukczy.

"Damn you, get up here!" Nikolai said. "What's happened to Karoly? What happened back there?"

Krukczy ducked under again and resurfaced somewhat downstream in a reedy area, just his eyes above water, his snaky tail making nervous ripples along the surface.

"I don't trust that thing," Nikolai muttered. "I don't trust it."

And just beyond where Krukczy was—

"There's two of them," Yuri exclaimed, and pointed, seeing a second lump in the water, another snaky ripple just beyond.

It vanished just as Krukczy did.

"Dammit!" Nikolai cried.

But Krukczy was not running away from them. He came squishing and dripping out on the shore further along beside a ruined wall, and a gateless gate. Before they reached him, Krukczy had shaken himself off and sat down to rest on one of the old stones; and Zadny had raced ahead of them and leapt all over Krukczy, getting wet as Krukczy patted him with huge hairy hands and tacked him into his lap, in curtains of dripping fur.

Then the second troll came out of the stream, shook itself, and came and sat down by the one they had now to guess was Krukczy.

"Well," Nikolai panted, leaning on Gracja's shoulder, next to his leg. "Well, now, we've got two trolls—they've sat down, and I suppose we wait here and hope Karoly makes it. Or we think of something. Or the goblins find us—in which case—" Nikolai caught a breath and looked about them, at their grassy space between the woods, the stream, and the ruined wall. "In which case I want us solid cover and a place to hide the horse. —Is that bow of yours any good, boy?"

"Yes, sir." He took it for leave to slide down, with the bow in hand. "It's Tamas' old one." He did not like this planning for goblins, as if they were a certainty. There was no tower beyond that wall that he could see, no door that they could bar, just the sky and the woods and the old stones around them. And he was tired, and scared, and cold, and there was no sign of Tamas but the tracks and a bit of horsehair on a thornbush.

"Goblin was here," Krukczy said, holding Zadny in his arms. "I can smell him. Smell him lots."

"The same one?" Nikolai asked him.

"Followed them," Krukczy said, and the other troll bobbed its head in agreement.