10

"You should get some sleep too," Mellie said. She lay on her back on Cashel's knee and looked up at him with a worried expression, her fingers laced behind her neck.

"I'll be all right," Cashel said. "The flock's still nervous. They'll settle down better if they know I'm up and watching."

Cashel sat on the wagon tongue, his face toward the paddock. He ran his right hand up and down the quarterstaff. He'd combed loose a handful of lanolin-rich wool from the flock, mixed in a pinch of sand, and used the wad as a gentle abrasive to smooth out the nicks and splinters from the fight.

When he reached Carcosa—or if he met a tinker at the next halt—he'd replace the staff's ferrules. One had a deep cut across it from when Cashel rammed through the sword and arm of the attacking lich; the other iron cap was battered out of shape on the skull of the creature slashing at Ilna when the first blow landed. One stroke with Cashel's full strength would have been enough. The sixth time he hit the creature, he stirred only dust because the bones had been utterly pulverized.

"Still, you should sleep," the sprite said. "I'll warn you if there's danger, you know."

Cashel smiled. It had only been a few days, but he'd already gotten used to talking to a beautiful naked woman the size of his finger. "I'll be all right," he repeated. "I need to calm down too; and my staff needs work."

One cut in the wood was fairly deep, but Cashel was sure he could buff it into nothing worse than a blemish. He couldn't imagine replacing the quarterstaff. He'd been nine years old the day he took the perfect, straight-grained branch as his price for felling the hickory for Taron, its owner. Cashel had seasoned the wood himself, shaped it, and buffed it to a wax-smooth finish. Only the ferrules had been stranger's work, and they'd been replaced three times already during the time he'd used the staff.

Mellie raised one slim leg and sighted along it toward the north star, then giggled. "Benlo is strong, isn't he?" she said.

Cashel frowned, though he continued to rub the wood with long, even strokes. "Benlo?" he repeated. "I wouldn't have said that, no."

Rald, the drover's chief guard, was built like an oak stump and looked about as tough. Sarhad, another of the guards, might well have been even stronger but a lich's axe had cleft him from shoulder to midchest. Benlo, though—

Mellie giggled again and did a backflip onto her feet. "Not strong compared to you, silly!" she said. "But pretty strong."

Mellie glanced toward the inn building. A puff of breeze fluffed her radiant hair; she was so utterly real that Cashel couldn't believe other folks didn't see her just as he did.

"It was people like Benlo who twisted the path from this plane to mine," she said. She didn't put any particular emotional weight on the words; but then, she'd sounded much the same when she discussed the possibility of the vixen tearing its way into the fencepost and eating her.

Cashel's mind worked over Mellie's words. When she said "strong" she meant a powerful wizard. He didn't doubt that; he'd seen Benlo raise the glamour to point out Garric.

"Maybe they'll open it this time," he said, speaking to be companionable.

Mellie wrinkled her nose and stuck her tongue out at him. "If you drop an egg on the ground," she said tartly, "it breaks. If you drop it again, do the pieces fly together again?"

"I usually think before I speak," Cashel said. That was half true; the whole truth was that he usually thought instead of speaking. "Sorry, Mellie."

She hopped into a handstand, scissoring her legs, and then lifted one arm to support herself entirely on the other. During the midwinter festivities some men in the borough danced and tumbled with curved ram's horns strapped to their feet; Garric was pretty good at it himself. The sprite's acrobatics were like nothing Cashel had ever seen before, though.

"I'd open the path for you if I could, Mellie," he said awkwardly. He held the quarterstaff out at arm's length and rotated it slowly, letting the gleam of starlight show him where he needed to work more on the polish.

A quarterstaff was a dynamic weapon; it didn't have a point or edge to do the wielder's work for him. The hickory had to slip like glass through Cashel's hands; he couldn't afford to have his palm catch on a rough spot when Garric's life or Ilna's might depend on it.

Their lives and now maybe Mellie's.

"Cashel?" the sprite said, on her back again and watching him. "Where are you going to go after we reach Carcosa? Do you plan to stay with Benlo?"

"No," Cashel said. "No, not with him. And not back to Barca's Hamlet either."

He rubbed the hickory with a second handful of wool, this time without adding sand. He hoped never to replace the quarterstaff. It was more than a tool: it was the only real link Cashel would keep with what had been his whole existence all the years till now.

"Away, that's all I meant to do," he continued. He thought of mentioning Sharina, then decided against it. Mellie was easy to talk to—the first time Cashel had felt that way about another person; the sprite wasn't a person, of course—but he really didn't know what to say. "Is there somewhere you want to go?"

"The things I've seen on your plane since the path closed," Mellie said, "have mostly involved cats and foxes. I've never taken a sea voyage because of the rats. If I'm traveling with a friend like you, well, it's all new. New since a thousand years, at least."

"I'll try to keep you safe, Mellie," Cashel said. He resumed polishing his quarterstaff. It had to slip like glass . . .