11

The hedges lining this stretch of road chirped and cheeped with birds complaining at the familiar intrusion or gobbling insects stirred by the travelers' feet. Far back at the rear of the flock Cashel called, "Come along, Ginger, you've eaten all you'll be able to digest. Tsk tsk tsk!"

Liane turned to Ilna and said, "Your brother seems very cheerful this morning, mistress."

She sounded friendly; she always did when speaking to Ilna. In Ilna's heart she felt as if Liane was secretly mocking her for being less beautiful, less wealthy, and less well educated; but Ilna also knew that others didn't read the sneer beneath the smile. She'd look a fool if she reacted openly to it.

"Yes, he is, isn't he?" Ilna said with a smile of her own. "Well, it's a lovely day, and maybe he's just happy to be alive after last night's attack. How about you, Garric?"

Garric walked beside the gelding which Tenoctris rode today in Liane's place. Benlo had started to protest, but his daughter's cold glance had silenced him. Tenoctris had protested also; Liane said simply that she needed the exercise and that the older woman needed the rest. It would be very easy, even for Ilna, to see only the kindly surface of Liane's behavior and miss the fact that underneath the rich girl was a scheming bitch.

"Well, I don't know about happy," he said, grinning over his shoulder at the girls. There'd been no pretense of Garric driving the sheep this morning. The wonder was that he'd been able to walk unaided. "I'm sure I'm alive because dead men don't hurt this much."

He stumbled and had to catch himself on Tenoctris' stirrup; he dabbed down with the bow he carried unstrung in his left hand. "You see?" he added in half-mocking despair. "I'm a cripple. Come on up with us so we can talk."

The road from the Stroma River to Carcosa was paved, though a thousand years of use had worn ankle-deep ruts in the stone. Benlo's entourage shared the route with much other traffic: pedestrians, riders and pack animals, and even some wheeled traffic which would be unthinkable on the narrow tracks farther east. Ilna had seen a carriage for the first time. Its windows were shuttered, and the four black horses pulling it had plumes wobbling from their brow harness.

Benlo was at the head of the line with his four surviving guards clustered close about him. Liane had with apparent deliberation kept Garric and Tenoctris between her and her father. Ilna had thought at first that this was the girl's clever ploy to walk with Garric, but Liane had remained several paces behind the boy for all the first hour of the journey.

Ilna marched along beside her watchfully nonetheless.

Cashel drove the flock from the rear, whistling and calling the sheep by their individual names. He did seem remarkably happy, happier than Ilna could remember him being while at home. Maybe he was just glad to have seen the world beyond Barca's Hamlet—and there was the wage he was earning besides, though she knew her brother didn't share her concern about money. Because Cashel had Ilna to take care of him, he didn't need to worry about finances himself.

"Well, come on," Garric repeated. "I may need the pair of you to carry me the rest of the way."

Liane looked a question at Ilna. Ilna suppressed a scowl. "Yes, we're coming," she said. Liane lengthened her pace slightly to come abreast of Tenoctris on the right side, putting the gelding between her and Garric.

"Holding up well on the trip?" Garric said as Ilna reached him. He shifted the bow from his left shoulder to his right so that it wasn't a symbolic barrier between the two of them.

Ilna had known Garric all their lives; she could see that he winced every time his right leg took a step and that the skin was drawn close over the strong, high bones of his cheeks. For all that, Garric was in almost as bright a mood as Cashel. After the night's battle he'd been wrung out so completely that she'd been afraid he'd take days to recover.

"I hope I'll always be able to walk at the speed of a ewe, Garric," Ilna said. "Washing sheets is more effort—and more excitement as well."

Garric laughed merrily. His laughter was louder recently than she remembered it being in the past. He'd gained self-assurance. He seemed to have decided that being cheerful was nothing to be ashamed of and that if other people had a problem with it—so much the worse for them.

"I was just saying to Tenoctris," he said, "that ancient poets didn't write about badgering sheep to market—or shearing them, for that matter. It's all about sitting under a holly oak watching the lambs gambol among the flowers. Isn't that so, Liane?"

He wasn't quite the boy Ilna had grown up with. Garric had always been intelligent, friendly, and as hard a worker as anyone in the hamlet. Now he had spine as well; something he certainly hadn't gotten from his father, and a very different thing to his mother's spiteful bitterness as well.

"I had the impression that shepherding involved more crystal springs and song contests than I've seen on Haft, yes," Liane agreed. Deliberately changing the subject she went on, "Mistress Tenoctris, I apologize for mistaking you for a conjuror the other day. May I ask how you came to be a m-ma—"

She paused, obviously afraid that "magician" would be taken as an insult. Ilna wondered if the other girl was blushing; the horse and rider concealed her from those on Tenoctris' other side.

"To study the art?" Liane finished, apparently doubtful about the word "wizard" as well. Someone must have explained to her who Tenoctris really was.

"Someone" was almost certainly Garric, at the times when Ilna worked her score at the inn because she didn't have a rich father to pay her way.

Liane lowered her voice as she asked the question, though her father and the guards were for the present well ahead. The leaders moved faster than the flock and had to halt every ten or twenty minutes to wait. Garric was used to moving at a sheep's pace and held back those with him.

Tenoctris was an awkward rider; she kept one hand on the reins while clinging to the saddlehorn with the other. "There's little enough art in the way most in this age practice wizardry," she said with a grim smile. "Just as it was in my own day, I suppose."

She turned her head toward Garric and Ilna to clearly include them in the conversation, then looked back at Liane and continued, "I had a talent for visualizing forces, Liane. My family had a title but very little money; I was the third daughter, and I think my father would have supported anything I proposed that didn't involve him finding a dowry for me. I studied in the university on Notisson, and after that I took positions all over the Isles in houses where there was a notable library. At the end I was in Yole; by coincidence, perhaps."

"But were you taught by a wizard?" Garric asked. "Were you apprenticed, I mean?"

"There was a healer named Kaeri in Notisson—in the city, not the university—who had great power," Tenoctris said. "I learned a great deal from her in one fashion, but . . ."

She was frowning, obviously bothered by what she was about to say. "Kaeri turned toward the sun, don't mistake me. She wanted nothing but to help others. But it frightened me to watch because she didn't begin to understand the forces she worked with. She was almost illiterate but that wasn't really the problem. The problem was her own strength."

Tenoctris chuckled wryly. "Not a problem I had, I assure you."

"Was the, the Hooded One," Garric said. He paused to swallow and his eyes were on the ground in front of him. "That way too?"

"If you mean was he illiterate," Tenoctris said in a decisive tone, "no, not at all. It was my assumption that he came from the same sort of family that I did—minor nobility, and very possibly not minor at all. I can't say that for sure because quite frankly I had almost no contact with him. Whatever his background, we had nothing that was important to either of us in common."

She turned her head and looked down—at Liane, to Ilna's surprise, not Garric. "The other difference between the Hooded One and my friend Kaeri is that his whole focus was Malkar."

"Evil," Liane said in a clear, emotionless tone. "His focus was on evil."

"In human terms," Tenoctris said/agreed. "He even claimed to be Malkar, a transparent lie that proved he was a fool as well as a fool dedicated to darkness. But he was an extremely powerful wizard and it's that rather than the direction in which he turned his power that made him so dangerous. He destroyed our world, his world and mine, through a mistake rather than as an act of will."

She smiled wistfully. "I'd thought he'd destroyed himself as well, Garric," she said, "until you told me about your dreams."

"I haven't had that dream for, you know . . ." Garric said. "Since my father gave me the good-luck piece."

"Yes, well," Tenoctris said. "More may have survived of my age than one would assume. Persons of great power . . ."

She shook her head with another faint smile. "And myself as well, through the workings of what I suppose was chance."

The old wizard's face changed—grew even more contemplative than usual. Tenoctris at her most animated projected an aura of detached calm; Ilna marveled at a mind so different from her own, where anger seethed under an icy surface, though an outsider might have mistaken the two of them for emotional sisters.

Tenoctris eyed Benlo and his companions, halted fifty feet ahead to wait. "Forces wax and wane, but knowledge takes the same amount of effort in every age," she said in a slightly quieter voice. "My friend in Notisson was very powerful. The Hooded One was very powerful. And your father, Mistress Liane, I'm afraid that he's very powerful as well—and equally ungoverned."