14

Garric had hung the oil lamp on the axletree leaning near the stable door; the cartwheels were beside it. An iron tire had come off last winter, and the smith hadn't made his rounds yet through the hamlet to weld another onto the wooden felly.

"Do you need the light anymore?" he called to Tenoctris, making a bed of loose straw at the other end of the stable.

"No, I..." Tenoctris said. In a tone of mild surprise she went on, "That's odd. You—"

Both door leaves lay back against the brick walls; the opening was wide enough to pass a team of horses still hitched. The hermit nevertheless stopped outside the building and slapped the wooden panel with his left hand: a quick rap-rap-rap like a gigantic woodpecker drumming for a mate.

"May I come through?" he asked. His voice sounded harsh, rusty.

"Sure," Garric said. A dozen sailors came out of the inn, making the courtyard echo with laughter. Several of them began to sing chanteys, but they weren't the same chantey. "Ah, there's plenty of room to sleep here if you don't want to go back in the dark."

Nonnus smiled faintly. "I thank you for your offer," he said, "but I find the dark more of a friend than not. Besides, tonight the stars are clear."

He entered the stable, letting his hands relax. He'd been spreading them to prove that he wasn't carrying a weapon, Garric realized. "I thought I'd check on your injuries, both of you. Do you need more ointment, mistress?"

Tenoctris looked at the backs of her hands, then turned them toward the hermit and the light. "There's only a little tenderness now," she said.

Nonnus stepped close and pressed two fingers gently against Tenoctris' cheek. "Pain?" he asked.

"No, though tenderness as I said," Tenoctris said. "Without your help I'd have been in great pain, I realize."

"You've done more to heal yourself than I did," Nonnus said with the same faint smile as before.

"I wouldn't have been able to do that if I'd been out of my head with pain, would I?" she replied.

The hermit turned to Garric. "And you, boy? Let's see the leg."

Garric pivoted and braced his right foot waist-high on the stable wall to show both that the limb was supple and that the wounds were knitting cleanly. The hermit brought the lamp close. The puffy flesh around the fang marks was pink but not red or streaky. When Nonnus prodded the edge of what had been the hole all the way through the leg, Garric felt a localized burning instead of a barbed lance thrusting to his groin.

To cover his wince, Garric bragged, "I've been doing all my normal work. I could carry you around the courtyard if you like."

"And why would I like to do something so silly?" the hermit said with mild amusement. "You don't need to prove you're a fine brave man to me. Or to anybody."

"He'll be older before he learns that," Tenoctris said. "If he ever does."

Nonnus chuckled, the first time Garric had heard such a sound from him. He slapped Garric's knee with a hand like the flat of a wooden shovel. "You're healing," he said. "But I warn you that in ten years or twenty you'll feel every strain you put your body through now."

He looked at Tenoctris and added, "He won't believe that, either."

"Sir?" said Garric, lowering his foot flat. He was embarrassed to have the older people discussing him as though he were a funny cloud formation. "Can't we pay you something? The least you've done is saved my leg and I know it."

"The folk of this borough didn't run me out as others might have when I settled in the woods here," Nonnus said. "There's nothing else I need—"

The smile again, there and gone like a rainbow.

"Nothing material, at least. If I can set a few bones or cool a fever, that's small enough recompense for what the community has given me."

He nodded toward Tenoctris and added, "Besides, she's the one responsible for you being able to walk already. Well, I never denied that wizardry was real. Healing's a better use for it than others I've seen."

"You're from Pewle Island, aren't you?" Tenoctris said. "They hunted seals there in my day."

Nonnus nodded. "They hunted seals in my day too," he said without intonation. "And still do, I hope. It's an honest life."

"The young man with the procurator is a wizard," Tenoctris said without a transition. She glanced toward Garric to include him in the conversation, but it was obviously the hermit's viewpoint that she sought. "He's powerful, and he's frighteningly ignorant of the forces he's working with."

"How do you tell?" Nonnus said. He had the interest of a craftsman for another's specialty. "Has he been working magic here?"

"How do you tell when a seal's about to rise?" Tenoctris replied. "How does Garric tell which way the tree he cut will fall? Power trails after Meder like the hair of a comet filling half the night sky."

"Then he knows you're a wizard too?" Garric said. "Have you talked to him about it?"

A sailor wandered through the courtyard with a pair of villagers. In a loud, slurred voice he said, "—and the folk on that island didn't wear anything but necklaces of bones. They made me a king, like enough, they did, and that only because I'd saved a silver mirror from the wreck."

There was a pause as a bottle gurgled. Villagers murmured respectfully. The voices moved out the gate.

Garric stepped back from the stable doorway, drawing the others with him. The hanging lamp would deter folk looking for privacy to do things they weren't quite drunk enough or desperate enough to do under the eyes of the community.

Nonnus dropped into a squat, his haunches against the brick base of one of the posts. They and the beams they supported were ancient oak, so black with the grime of ages that only touch could tell their grain.

"Meder bor-Mederman thinks I'm somebody's maiden sister if he thinks anything about me," Tenoctris said. Her smile reminded Garric of Nonnus' expression when he was talking as much to the past as to his companions. "He doesn't really see the forces he works with, much less notice that I attract them also. And of course by Meder's standards, I'm not really a wizard at all."

"Mistress..." Garric said. He didn't know how to treat Tenoctris. On the one hand she was a penniless castaway with manners and tastes as simple as those of a Haft shepherd—perfectly willing to sleep in the stable when the inn was full of paying customers. But she was also educated beyond even Reise's standards, a noble and courtier as surely as these two from Valles, and besides that a wizard. The parts were unfamiliar, and the way they fit together was as puzzling to Garric as a river running uphill.

"If you brought yourself here from so far away," he stumbled on, "you're—you must be really powerful. All that kid did"—Meder was some years older than Garric, but he was a wispy fop—"was keep from sinking in a storm. We've fishermen here who could have done that!"

Nonnus grinned. "Spoken like a shepherd, boy," he said. "That storm would have driven under Pewle sealers if it caught them at sea. Don't let the fact you dislike somebody blind you to what he is and what he can do."

Garric blinked as though he'd been struck. He was used to venting his opinions to people who didn't really listen to or think about the statements: Cashel, Sharina, other villagers. It shocked him to have somebody poke holes in his words instead of agreeing and adding some equally empty comment. "Ah, sorry," he said.

"I've only once seen a wizard with such power," Tenoctris said. She twisted a lock of her short gray hair, bringing it around to the side to look at out of the corner of her eye. "That was power enough to sink Yole like a stone in a millpond. And I shouldn't wonder if Meder doesn't manage to do something similar. That train he spreads is almost certain to catch something from a place he really shouldn't disturb."

"Court folk live in a different world, mistress," Nonnus said softly. Like Tenoctris, he was thinking of other times as he spoke, though of the present as well. "They don't understand the world that simple people live in, where life is always on the edge. Better that the two sorts never touch."

"All I wanted was my library and leisure to study the way the forces touched," Tenoctris said. "I wasn't interested in using them. I wasn't very good at that part anyway."

She smiled ruefully at Garric and added, "I could never have summoned the forces I rode to come here. And 'here' was simply where the crest chanced to bring me—I couldn't control that, I couldn't even predict it. The choice was random."

"Or fated," Nonnus said. He was smiling also; but while the hermit wasn't hostile to Tenoctris, it was clear that he disagreed with her basic assumptions. "Or by the Lady's will."

The lamp guttered as it burned down to the last of its oil. Garric would have to fetch more from the kitchen if he wanted to keep it lit.

"I'll go back, then," Nonnus said. "I just wanted to be sure that you both were healing well."

"Are you sure you wouldn't like to sleep in the stable?" Garric asked. "Or at least I can fetch you a torch."

"I appreciate your kindness," the hermit repeated, shaking his head. The lamplight shrank to a yellow glow around the wick, then flared again for a moment.

"When I look at you now, Garric," Tenoctris said, pitching her voice so that Nonnus would be sure to hear also, "I see two people. But that wasn't true yesterday."

"I don't know what you mean," Garric said. "There's just me."

Both of them faced him. Tenoctris had a musing expression, but the hermit showed his usual calm detachment.

"Do you feel different?" Nonnus asked.

"I don't..." Garric said. "I...Everything's changing with the ship and the seawolves. And you, mistress."

He nodded to the wizard. She looked incongruous with her aristocratic delicacy garbed in a worn-out shift, but the silk robe would be out of place in Barca's Hamlet—especially for a castaway sleeping in a stable.

"I don't know how I feel," he concluded, though he was uncomfortably aware of a muscular figure standing somewhere, looking through his eyes and laughing cheerfully.

"True of all of us, I suppose," Tenoctris said. She didn't sound concerned, just curious.

The lamp went out with final certainty. The hermit walked away in the starlight, his footsteps soundless. Straw rustled as Tenoctris settled herself on the nest she'd made, leaving Garric with his thoughts.

But not quite alone.