The Ropemaker

6

Ellion’s House

They sat down with their backs against the chill walls. Time passed. Alnor seemed to go to sleep. Meena muttered to herself. Tahl fidgeted. Tilja thought about Woodbourne, trying to imagine, detail by detail, what her family might be doing at each moment. She wondered if they were missing her. Did it feel very strange without her? Were the cedars telling Ma and Anja what was happening to her? Oh, why didn’t she have anything that could tell her about them?

The old bitterness was welling up inside her when Alnor spoke.

“I have a strange feeling,” he said. “Now I think of it, I believe I have had it ever since we landed from the raft, but then I put it down to the sickness. Now the sickness is gone and my mind is clear, yet the feeling is still there, like the pressure one feels before a thunderstorm breaks. I dreamed dreams of water all night. . . .”

“So did I,” said Tahl. “I often do, but these weren’t the usual ones. The water was sort of alive. I was part of it.”

“Me, I dreamed I was a tree,” said Meena. “There’s a lot more to being a tree than you’d think, too. I thought maybe it was reading the spoons so clear for Salata put it into my head.”

“What about you, Til?” said Tahl. “What did you dream about?”

“Nothing,” she answered crossly. “I must have dreamed, I suppose, but I can’t remember what.”

“There’s no need to sound like that, girl,” said Meena. “What’s up with you?”

“Nothing,” said Tilja, almost weeping now, and furious with herself for the unreasonableness of it, as if not having dreams like the others was the same sort of being-left-out as not being able to hear what the cedars were saying or listen to the waters. And then . . . she didn’t know where the idea came from . . .

“I’ll tell you what’s up,” she said slowly. “What you’re feeling is magic. And what you’re dreaming about. There isn’t any magic in the Valley, so you aren’t used to it. But there’s lots of it here and you can feel it because you can do it a bit yourselves. Alnor and Tahl can do stuff with water and Meena can do stuff with trees. I can’t feel it and I don’t have that sort of dream because I can’t do any of that. But you . . . yes, look how it was with your spoons yesterday. You said it was extraordinary. It wasn’t. It’s ordinary here.”

“Yes, I believe you are right, “ said Alnor. “This is the feeling of magic. Perhaps we three are extra sensitive to it, not being used to it.”

“And I’ll tell you something else,” said Tilja. “Magic may be ordinary here, but it’s dangerous too. That’s what Salata was trying to tell you about the spoons last night, Meena.”

“Good thing she didn’t pick on old Axtrig, then,” said Meena.

Time passed. Voices came and went in the little courtyard, speaking with the same twangy accent that Salata used. Occasionally a man coughed close outside the door, and once Tilja heard soft footsteps approaching, a woman’s brief murmur and the man’s reply, and the footsteps receding. It must have been well into the afternoon and she was hungry and thirsty and desperate for a pee before there was more of a stir outside and the bolts were drawn. Two guards led them away to the latrines. They returned to find a woman waiting for them in the center of the room, where the light from the little window fell most strongly. She motioned for them to sit, but herself stayed standing. It didn’t need anyone to tell them that this was somebody of importance.

She was very short, no taller than Tilja, but twice as broad, with a pale, round face and dark hair. Tilja guessed that she might be the same age as Ma, but that could have been only that she wore much the same slight, permanent worry-frown. Otherwise her expression gave nothing away. Her clothes were in the same style as those of all the women Tilja had seen in the fields, but she wore golden earrings, and several rings on her fingers, and a jeweled brooch to pin her scarf in place. This was longer and more elaborate than the ones that the other women had worn, with a lot of gold thread and a double row of tassels. When she spoke her voice was soft, but clear and even, neither warm nor cold. It too gave nothing away.

“I am Lananeth, wife of Ellion, who is Steward of this estate for the Lord Kzuva, Oversecretary of the Northern Roadways. My husband is away, and I hold his ring and seal in his absence. I regret your treatment, but it has been necessary. If I make you welcome and feed you, I am compelled by custom to help you, and I cannot decide on that until I have spoken with you. Meanwhile the fewer people who see you, the better. So, first, will you tell me who you are, how you came here and what you want?”

“Alnor’d better do that,” said Meena.

Alnor didn’t answer at once, and then, speaking even more slowly and carefully than usual, he told the Northbeck half of their story, with his decision to come to the Empire and find someone who could renew the barrier of snow that guarded the Valley from the north. He didn’t mention the name of Faheel, but only explained that the barrier had first been put in place by a magician in a city called Talak, so that had been where he intended to start his search. He said nothing about the Woodbourne end of the story, apart from the fact that there was this strange sickness in the forest, which was why he had come by the river and brought Meena and Tilja to control the raft if he and Tahl passed out.

“My intention was that they should turn back as soon as we were safely through the forest,” he concluded, “but I and my grandson were overcome by the sickness and the women were unable to prevent the raft from being carried on until it grounded on a sandbank. Here at last I woke from my stupor and we came ashore and found Salata, who was kind to us and brought us to you.”

Lananeth said nothing for a while, then turned and nodded to the guard, who went outside and spoke to somebody else out there. Several people came in, two carrying trays of food, which they put on the table, three with large cushions, which they spread around it, and two more bringing the saddlebags and blanket rolls that Calico had carried. One of them lit the lamps. They all kept their eyes on the floor the whole time, not once glancing at the strangers, and left in silence. The guard went with them, closing the door behind him.

“Sit and eat,” said Lananeth. “Look, I eat with you, as a sign that I have taken you into my house and there is trust between us.”

She bent and picked up a little yellow cake and nibbled at it while Tahl and Tilja made their grandparents comfortable at one end of the table and settled themselves either side of them. Lananeth sat facing them.

“I meant what I said just now, “ she said. “There is trust between us, because we all five have need of it. We are in great danger. Mine is different from yours, in part, but you can help me with mine as I can help you with yours. When I first came in I told you that I couldn’t feed you until I had decided whether to help you, but the truth is that I didn’t then know whether I would need to give the order for your throats to be cut and your bodies secretly buried. I would not have given that order easily, but I would have done so rather than simply send you on your way. I couldn’t in any case do that. I will tell you why in a moment.

“I am encouraged to trust you not by what Alnor has said, but by what he has not. You must know more than he has told me about the forest, and the nature of the sickness in it, but you seem to have understood that your danger lies in that very knowledge. It is something the Emperor needs. If your coming is heard of, you will be sent for to Talagh and questioned, and when you have told all you know you will be tortured, in case there is anything you have left unsaid. Nobody comes alive from the torturers’ hands in Talagh.”

She paused, letting what she’d said sink in. Her soft, steady voice had barely changed, but that only made the horrors and dangers she was talking about seem nearer and more real. The silence filled the little room. Footsteps entered the courtyard, crossed it and died away. As they dwindled, Tilja let out a soft sigh, and realized that she had been holding her breath, half certain that the steps had been those of the Emperor’s torturers, coming toward the door.

“There are two reasons why I cannot simply send you on your way,” Lananeth went on. “The first is that you have no way-leaves. Nobody in the Empire may leave the land to which he is assigned without a way-leave, bearing the Emperor’s approval of the journey. If I let you go without them, I would have committed a serious offense. If I gave them to you, which I could do as holder of the Steward’s seal in my husband’s absence, and you were then found and questioned, that would be far worse for me, because you have come from beyond the forest, and I did not send you at once to Talagh.

“This brings me to the second reason. Every new Emperor, when he first ascends the Opal Stair to his throne, turns at each step and repeats one of the oaths and promises he has inherited with the Empire. These are unchangeable and unappealable. So nineteen Emperors have now turned at the third step and sworn that in the course of their reign they will regain the lost province beyond the northern forest.

“Three years ago a new Emperor climbed the Stair. Two years ago an army arrived to fulfill that oath. They quartered in our houses, they pitched their tents in our fields, full on the ripening crops. They emptied our barns and our byres, they robbed and they ravished, and on any that resisted they used their swords. But after many deaths the forest defeated them and they left, taking with them the best of our men to make up for those they had lost, Salata’s husband among them. When they were gone we counted the cost and found that we had less than half of what we had had before they came, and from that less-than-half we still had to send to our Landholder in Talagh all that we would have sent in any other year. None of our people would willingly reawaken the interest of our Lord the Emperor in his lost province. I don’t need to rely on their loyalty to keep your coming secret.

“So you see, I cannot simply send you away from here. You must have a reason to travel, so that I can give you way-leaves, and a story to tell, so that you will not be questioned too closely.”

“My, what a pickle,” said Meena. “Who’d’ve thought we’d be causing this much trouble? Look, why don’t we just go back to the river, and then somehow get our raft off from where it’s stuck, and carry on that way, and all of you can forget you’ve ever seen us?”

Lananeth shook her head, smiling.

“Wherever you landed you would have the same problem,” she said.

“And further from the forest, people wouldn’t have any reason not to send us straight on to Talak,” said Tahl. “And it wouldn’t stop the Emperor sending his armies here again, either.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Lananeth. “But I’ve a third reason why we should all do as I suggest. This is where you can help me. First, you have to understand something that may seem strange to you. I have already told you that we may travel only by the permission of the Emperor, but that is not all. We eat, sleep, breathe by the permission of our Lord the Emperor. We live or die at his will. Those are no mere words. When he reaches the highest step of the Opal Stair each new Emperor places his foot upon the Sapphire Stool and recites his final decree, that all who live in his Empire live by his permission and die by his choice, and for any man or woman to do otherwise is treason, for which the penalty is death. At the start of each reign there is a strict census, and all names missing from the previous census must be accounted for.”

“Am I hearing you right?” said Meena. “Suppose I lived here and I fell out of my apple tree and broke my neck—might happen to anyone—you’re saying I’d be a traitor?”

“Yes, and since you’d be already dead, your heir would either have to pay the penalty in your stead or renounce his inheritance, in which case all your goods would be forfeited to the Emperor. So as soon as they become men or women all who can afford it journey to Talagh and pay the fees and obtain the Emperor’s permission to die, renewable by sending a further fee to Talagh each year. If they can, they take with them on that first journey a child of their household, as a kind of insurance, to be sold into slavery and thus pay the penalty in case they should die on the road. Those who can less afford it often delay, sometimes until they feel their end is almost on them, and so at some risk to their heirs save the permission fees. Those who cannot afford any fees travel to Goloroth in the far south when they feel it is time for them to go, but that need not concern you. You are going to Talagh.

“I can see from your faces that you think what I have told you appalling, and you are right. I am sorry to say that we have lived so long with it that we no longer think it even strange.

“Now, we had two old servants, very dear to us, who when they retired from our service went to live with one of their daughters who is married to a substeward of the estate on an outlying parcel of land. They planned, when their time came, to go to Goloroth, but they seemed well and cheerful, so we did not worry. But then the old man died, suddenly and without warning, and the woman, distraught with grief and the fret about the penalty, and the journey to Goloroth without him, climbed a steep hill nearby and threw herself off a cliff. This was no accidental death, but a deliberate flouting of the Imperial decree, entailing a tenfold penalty, and disgrace for all who might have prevented it.

“Worse yet, the daughter and her husband concealed the deaths for a while, thus involving my husband and with him all his household, since the man had been appointed on my husband’s recommendation and he had not discovered the crime. Everything we possess, including our own lives, would not be enough to pay the various penalties. When we found what had happened we had no recourse but to continue the concealment.

“Yet worse again. As I told you, the Emperor climbed the Opal Stair barely three years ago. The census on his accession has not yet reached this outlying district, but will do so before the year is out. At that point, further concealment will become impossible. My husband has gone to Talagh on our Landholder’s business. While there he hopes to explore what possibilities there are for the purchase of false death permits for the old couple and the insertion of their names in the ledgers. This will be both expensive and dangerous, for he will put our very lives into the hands of unknown officials, who will be in a position to blackmail us for the rest of our days.

“He and I have, of course, often talked the thing through and round and about, and more than once sighed and wished that there were two old people on the estate who had somehow been missed from the last census, who could take the names of Qualif and Qualifa. Now, wonderfully, it is so. You are here.

“It seems to me that neither you nor I have any other choice. What do you think?”

Each waited for the others. Alnor spoke first.

“For me, it is a good offer, and as I told you, the waters of our millstream have said that my grandson should help me.”

“Me too,” said Meena. “There’s got to be two of us, it seems to me, one from Northbeck and one from Woodbourne, like there was when it all started. I don’t know about Tilja. It’s a lot more than she bargained for, and her parents too, seeing what sort of a place this Empire of yours sounds like. It’s all right, girl—you don’t have to come. I daresay Lananeth can find a youngster to go along with me to Talak—Talagh I suppose we ought to be calling it now. You ought to be able to find your way back through the forest, just following up along the river. I can’t see it’s going to be any more dangerous than coming along with Alnor and me, after what Lananeth’s told us.”

Home, thought Tilja. My own bed by the stove. The kitchen I can find my way across in the dark. She pushed the thought away. It wasn’t her home any longer. It was Anja’s.

“No,” she said. “The cedars told me to come. And anyway, I’m the only one who can cope with Calico.”

“Good,” said Lananeth. “Now you must eat, and then I will teach you as much as I can of what you will need to know if you aren’t to betray yourselves on your journey.”

So far, though she had nibbled a couple of morsels, Tilja had barely been aware of the unfamiliar tastes in her mouth. Food in the Valley was always straightforward, however rich the feast. The tenderest, juiciest chicken was still nothing but chicken, with perhaps a few herbs, and though the gravy might be the best gravy in the Valley, it was still just that—gravy, with bread to mop it up and a couple of vegetables on the side. Here there were twenty little dishes and no main dish. Almost the only food she recognized was a bowl of dried fruit, but when she tried a slice of apple it wasn’t only apple; there was a whole mouthful of other tastes mixed in.

Lananeth showed them how the custom was to heap a plate with five or six little piles from the different dishes, and eat a bit of each in turn, trying the different tastes, hot or sweet or acid or meaty, against each other in different combinations. Two of them were so strong that they seemed to burn the tongue, but there was a jug of a wonderful pale rose drink that fizzed in the mouth and cleaned the hotness away, leaving only a pleasant prickling. Lananeth ate companionably with them and told them the names of the dishes and what was in them, and the names of simpler things to ask for on the journey.

“Well, we must get on,” she said at last. “We have only this evening, as I want you to reach Talagh as soon as possible after my husband, so that he can hear of my plan before he risks anything himself. Your task will not be as hard as you might think. There are about four thousand people on this estate, but I doubt if more than twenty of them have ever left it. Your journey will be little stranger to you than it would have been to the real Qualif and Qualifa. Those are your names from now on, Qualif and Qualifa Jaddo, but there’ll be no harm in your calling Meena Meena. Most women stick to their childhood names after they marry. I am Elliona on the census forms. Your grandchildren too can keep their own names, as they wouldn’t have been born at the last census.

“Now, your status. Qualif was a head servant in the household of the steward to a Landholder, so you, Alnor, will wear the hat of a fourteenth-grade subject of our Lord Emperor, and Meena will wear the scarf. I will show them to you in a moment, and how to recognize the grades of those immediately above you, to whom you must show respect. You are unlikely to meet anyone above twelfth grade, and most will be lower than you.”

Hour after hour her quiet voice flowed on, telling them rules and customs and habits and manners and all the ways things were done in the Empire. Tilja listened and struggled to take it in. Their lives might well depend on their knowing these things. But the thought of the Empire itself kept flooding into her mind, and she kept having to push it away. It was all so different from the Valley. That was a place, the place she loved and lived in. But the Empire seemed much more than just a place, more than the hundreds—thousands—of places within its borders. It was a vast, strange creature with a life of its own, unsleeping, suspicious, merciless. And she and the others were going to try to travel along the innards of the monster without its ever once guessing they might be there.

She felt this especially strongly when they were talking about money. Lananeth had brought some coins to show them. Tahl had fetched Alnor’s small hoard from one of the saddlebags and Meena had hauled out her purse from under her skirt, where she kept it alongside the bag of fortune spoons. Tahl picked out the old metal coins, with the heads of forgotten Emperors on them, from among the wooden Valley ones. He showed them to Lananeth.

“Yes, these are still good,” she said. “No one will question them. There are many old coins around. Things do not change much in the Empire.”

Tilja’s skin crawled at the thought. Nineteen generations, and the coins were still the same. The monster wasn’t just huge, it was old, old.

Lananeth leaned forward and picked up one of the wooden Valley coins, the largest kind made, the size of an oxeye daisy. For a moment she stiffened, as if she were listening to a whispered voice, then turned the coin to and fro, studying it carefully.

“This is a strange wood,” she said. “The grain is so marked, and different on each side. It seems almost alive, as if it had been moving until the moment I looked at it.”

“Let’s have a look,” said Meena. “No, don’t let go of it—come over here if you don’t mind—easier than me coming to you. There. Now, let’s see. . . . Well. I’m . . . I don’t know what to say—must be because it’s been lying alongside my spoons these last few days, but even so . . . my, isn’t that interesting—different from how it is on the spoons, mind you. . . . Look, I’ll show you. . . .”

She took the cloth out of her bag, unrolled it, laid two of the spoons down on it, and showed Lananeth the third one.

“You see how it’s cut along the grain,” she said, “so what you’re looking for is lines in the wood. But that coin is cut across the grain, and that gives you circles instead of lines. . . . Let’s have a look at the other side. . . . Yes, you’re right, it’s showing you two different things—you’d never think there was so much going on in just a couple of inches of wood. Look, Lananeth, this is your side, all neat and ordered, and here’s your house in the middle of it; and see these four little dots, looking like they don’t belong somehow, that’s us, me and Alnor and the kids, showing up out of nowhere. But see here, right off by the edge, this messy bit. It looks like there’s something wrong with the wood, doesn’t it, some kind of disease, and it might get bigger and spoil the whole thing—that’s the place where Qualif and Qualifa used to live, and now if it’s found out they’ve gone and died without getting leave you’re in all kinds of trouble. But—just turn it over now—see here, this side is a real tangle. There’s so much going on that you can’t make anything out for sure, except this one little bit here, where there’s nothing going on at all. And look, if you turn back you’ll see that that little bit is straight under this bit your side that’s causing you all this worry, like they’ve both got the wrong side. So I reckon this messy side’s got to be Talagh, and what this is telling us is you’ve got the right idea, Alnor and me being Qualif and Qualifa for a bit, and taking your worries off to Talagh with us. . . . And see now, alongside those four dots I was showing you—wasn’t there last time we looked, not to notice, was it?—this is you, right at the center of everything. . . . Why are you so jaggedy, though? If it was on one of my spoons I’d say you’re really worried about something, only it’s not the old people dying like it was before, it’s something new. . . . I’ve said something wrong, haven’t I?”

For a while Lananeth didn’t answer, but sat staring at the coin, but, Tilja thought, not really seeing it. At length she put it down on the floor and nudged it delicately away from herself with her fingertips.

“I have taken you under my roof,” she said. “I have fed you and eaten with you. If I have brought disaster on myself and my house, so be it. Salata told me that you had a way of telling fortunes, and had promised her husband’s safe return, but I thought this was no more than the small peasant magic that many people pretend to. That is unwise, but not for the most part dangerous. But this is something more than that. And you have brought it here, into my warded room. You should not have been able to do that without my knowing, but only when I picked up the coin did my wards wake and warn me.”

No one spoke for a dozen heartbeats. Then Tahl said, wonderingly, “Yes, I think I’ve felt it too. There’s been a funny itchy feeling in here since then. Why’s magic so dangerous, though? Can’t lots of people do it?”

“Because it is something beyond the control of the Emperor. The Empire is full of magic. It is there, like the sun in the sky, the water in the streams, the trees in the hillsides. Those who are born with the gift could just take it and use it, if they choose. But most are afraid to make that choice. By decree from the Stair, no one may practice magic except in the Emperor’s service, on penalty of death. So those who wish to do so must either serve him or practice in secret. Many serve the Emperor, and for some of them their task is to smell out magicians who practice on their own. The most powerful of these are the twenty known as the Watchers, who reside in the Emperor’s palace in Talagh, all in their own separate towers, keeping constant watch over the whole Empire.

“But all of those who have the gift, as you seem to, even if they do not practice themselves, can tell when they are in the presence of magic, unless the magician is already powerful enough to set wards around him and thus disguise what he is doing. That is far beyond what I can do, but such people are known to exist. Alnor said you are looking for someone like that, but they cannot be found unless they choose to be. You will need, for a start, to know his name.”

“Might as well tell you,” said Meena. “Seeing we’re trusting each other. All right, Alnor? His name is Faheel.”

Tilja didn’t understand what happened next. She wasn’t deliberately looking at the fortune spoons, merely gazing vaguely at them where they lay side by side on their blue cloth, when Meena spoke the name of Faheel.

Something in the room moved. An instant later there was a crash from outside the window.

She glanced up. No, that had been outside and after. It was here in the room that something had moved.

No, it hadn’t, but . . .

When Meena had shown Lananeth the grain of the spoon she had laid it back neatly beside the other two on the blue cloth, but hadn’t rolled them up and put them away. Now the old, paler spoon, Axtrig, was lying at an angle across the other two. Between one moment and the next she had changed. But she hadn’t moved. Tilja was sure of that. She had no idea what it meant, but it was as if Axtrig had all along been lying where she was now.

She stared at the spoons, frowning. It was a while before she became aware of another change. The others were no longer talking. Silence filled the room. She looked up and saw Tahl staring at something on the far wall—no, beyond it, through it. His mouth was open and his face gray in the lamplight. Meena had her eyes shut, but was pale too, and shuddering. Lananeth was no longer sitting stiffly erect, but had her head bowed, as if she’d fallen asleep, and her hands were clenched so tight that her knuckles showed white between the rings. And Alnor was still sitting upright but had his arms stretched out in front of him with his hands spread wide as if he were feeling for something that hung in the air before him.

“What’s up?” asked Tilja.

Her voice woke Tahl from his daze.

“Didn’t you feel it?” he whispered. “It was like a thunderclap.”

“I only saw Axtrig sort of twist round when you started talking about—”

“Do not say his name!” said Alnor, urgently.

Tilja bit the syllables back and waited, bewildered, through another tense silence.

“There, that’s over,” said Meena with a sigh. “I suppose we’d better talk about it. Carefully, mind you. What was that you were saying, girl? Something about old Axtrig?”

“She sort of moved. Only . . .”

She tried to explain, but it seemed to make even less sense when she said it aloud, though she could see Alnor nodding encouragingly as she groped for words.

“Knew the fellow’s name, Axtrig did,” said Meena when she finished. “Think of it! All that time! Nineteen generations, and the peach stone being put into the ground and sending up its shoot and growing into a tree and standing there, season after season, and blowing down at last and the wood being carved into a spoon, and that lying in cupboards and drawers and such a couple of hundred years and more, and her still knowing where she came from, to twitch like that at his name being mentioned.”

“No,” said Alnor. “It was more than a twitch. Even Tilja felt it to be so, and she heard something fall, so the house itself was shaken. I think perhaps Tahl is right. It was like a thunderclap— or rather it was like the bolt that causes the thunder. When Meena spoke the name something was drawn to this room, to the spoon itself, as the lightning is drawn from the clouds.”

“But she must have heard his name before, back in the Valley,” said Tilja. “I mean when people are telling the story, explaining about her, and where she came from.”

“She’s been asleep,” said Tahl. “There isn’t any magic in the Valley. There’s lots here. It’s really woken her up. Don’t you think . . .”

He broke off. Tilja followed his glance and saw that Lananeth didn’t seem to have been listening, didn’t seem to have moved when the others had come out of their daze. She was still sitting with her head bowed over her clenched hands, breathing in slow, heaving lungfuls, like someone deep asleep. Tahl leaned forward and shook her gently by the wrist, but she didn’t stir.

“Hit her worse than us three,” said Meena, “whatever it was.”

“But she is one of us,” said Tahl. “She must be. I mean she was born with the gift, too. Only she doesn’t want anyone to know.”

“No wonder, after what she’s been telling us,” said Meena. “Maybe if I put the spoons away . . .”

As she stretched to pick up the three spoons her hand hesitated for a moment; then she seemed to force it on, but fumbled strangely as she tidied the spoons together and rolled them into the cloth. Tilja saw Alnor relax from his stiff posture, and heard Tahl sigh.

“There now, that’s better,” said Meena. “Didn’t want to come, mind you, Axtrig didn’t. Felt like that was how she wanted to lie, and no way else. I wonder—”

She was interrupted by a violent snort from Lananeth, who shot erect, shook herself and stared round her with a wild look in her eyes, as if still in the grip of a nightmare that had held her, sleeping.

She gave a shuddering sigh and relaxed.

“I thought my walls would have fallen around us,” she gasped.

“Something fell down just outside the window,” said Tilja. “Something heavy.”

Lananeth frowned, concentrated, shook her head.

“There is nothing there to fall,” she said in something like her normal voice. “Only a small tree. But it was in any case nothing of that order. What brought such power here?”

“Meena spoke . . . a name. The name of the man we are looking for,” said Alnor.

“His true name!” Lananeth whispered.

“As far as we know,” said Alnor. “It is in the story we tell in the Valley.”

“I have heard that in the old days, before the Watchers, the names of magicians were openly spoken,” said Lananeth, shaking her head. “Now every little country magician, for safety, is forced to take a true name and tell it to no one. My own is not Lananeth. Still, I would not have thought that even such a name was enough. This room is well warded.”

“We think the power, whatever it was, came to the spoon Axtrig,” said Alnor. “That spoon was carved from the timber of a peach tree that in turn had grown from the stone of a peach given to an ancestress of Meena’s by the man she named.”

“And she moved,” said Meena. “And she didn’t want to shift from where she was when I went to pick her up. I’m thinking she knows where he is and is pointing that way—over toward that corner, about.”

“Southeast, roughly,” said Lananeth. “That way lies Talagh. You said you would look for him there. And you think he still lives—the same man that gave the peach nineteen generations back?”

“So the waters tell me,” said Alnor.

“Then he is powerful indeed,” said Lananeth. “He must hold Time itself in his hand.”

“What did you mean about the room being warded?” said Tahl.

Lananeth hesitated, then smiled her small, tight-lipped smile and shook her head.

“When I said that we must trust each other, I didn’t intend it to go this far,” she said. “I am one of those who can make use of the magic we have around us. Until I married I knew no one but myself that had the gift, and knowing what the penalties were I was greatly afraid of it and did my best to hide that I had it. But my mother-in-law recognized it in me. This was her room. As I told you, those who practice in this way must take measures to hide what they are doing, so she had contrived wards to seal these walls as best she could. She brought me in here and told and showed me what she could do, and encouraged me to try also, and later taught me as much as she knew. Since she died I’ve learned more and so built stronger wards, to make sure that what happens in here is hidden. The power that came smashed through those defenses as if there’d been nothing in them. I felt the very stonework was being torn apart.”

“That’s why it took you worse than it did us,” said Meena. “Breaking up all that stuff you’d done.”

“I expect so,” said Lananeth absently.

She sat in silence for a little while, still breathing deeply, then sighed and shook herself.

“Well, it seems to have left no permanent harm,” she said. “As far as I can tell my wardings are back in place, and at least you have been shown how very careful you’ll need to be. But you have woken the power in your spoons. They’re quieter now, but I can still feel their presence. I’ll do what I can to ward them round for you before you go, so that they don’t betray you on your journey. But unless you can somehow send them to sleep again you will need to leave them outside Talagh. The city is very powerfully warded, and what I can do will be nothing like enough to conceal them.”

“How are we going to find the person we’re looking for if we aren’t allowed to say his name?” asked Tahl.

“There I can’t help you,” said Lananeth.

“You had not heard that name before Meena spoke it?” said Alnor.

“No. I know for sure of no one but myself who practices, but as Meena says, many people must have the gift. If I go up into the hills and look out across the plain I can sometimes feel . . . it’s hard to describe. It’s something like one of the dust devils that we see in the hot season, fierce little eddies of air that suck up loose stuff from the ground and whirl it around as they go. I can feel the loose magic being sucked toward one place and woven into a shape, a shape that has power and purpose, and I’ll know that there is someone there—a child, perhaps, who hasn’t yet been warned of the dangers or else shown how to hide what she’s doing—who is practicing magic in some small way. Sometimes I have sensed something more formidable. When the army was here, some of the Emperor’s magicians came with them. I felt them testing the magical defenses of the forest, and being defeated by it. I didn’t need to go up into the hills to be aware of it. I could feel it from here. But I wouldn’t dare risk making myself known to any of these people, or learning their names, or letting them know mine. What I do is all concerned with the estate, helping the crops to grow, scaring away the wild animals that might eat them, caring for our own beasts. My mother-in-law told me that most of those who practice find that their gift is with one particular aspect of the world. . . .”

“Like mine is with trees, far as I can make out,” said Meena, “and Alnor’s is with water and rivers and such.”

“Our river only, perhaps,” said Alnor. “I do not know.”

“That may well be the case,” said Lananeth. “When I travel beyond the boundaries of this estate I feel my powers diminish. I could do nothing in Talagh, if I were fool enough to risk trying.”

“Perhaps in our case that is just as well,” said Alnor. “We shall not need to be so much on our guard all the time, though I was hoping that we would be able to use the river to travel further.”

“No,” said Lananeth. “All across the North West Plain, right to the Pirrim Hills, it is barred with reed beds. Tomorrow I will set you on your way by road. You have three days to reach Songisu, where you will have to join a convoy, as there are bandits in the hills. There will not be another convoy for nine days, and every day you delay is danger for my husband. So now we must get on. I have much more to tell you, and it’s already late. These are the clothes you will wear. . . .”

To her shame, Tilja was already asleep before Lananeth left. She dreamed not of the dangers of the coming journey, nor of the lost comforts of home, but of a shore where she stood, and an island far out at sea (never before in dreams, and never with her waking eyes, had she seen the sea) and a voice in her head telling her that everything depended on her reaching that island. It must have been sunset in her dream because the whole sky above the island was filled with a glowing cloud that seemed, when she wasn’t looking at it directly, to be forming itself into a great fiery shape, but as soon as she turned to see became shapeless again. Only as she woke did she realize that the shape had been that of a unicorn.