One of the girls who had been collecting toys nodded and handed the bag into Marcus’s eager fists. She even gave him a pleasant smile as she did so. She and the other older woman, together with one of the better-dressed men, set off toward the grove, calling out, “What if he won’t come out?”
“Besiege him,” said Herrel and leaped across the stream.
The woman called Ligny immediately flounced around and marched away along the path. From the way Herrel leered derisively at her stiff satin back, Zillah suspected that Herrel had got rid of her on purpose.
She became sure if it when they all moved off downstream and Herrel contrived to walk beside her, so near that she could catch the faint characteristic smell of him — Mark’s smell. It made her shake all over. She could scarcely carry Marcus, who was anyway writhing violently about in her arms to embrace his rescued toys.
“I’ll carry him if you like,” Herrel said. “Will he come to me?”
Feeling as if she could barely move, so conscious was she of Herrel beside her, Zillah twisted her head to look at Marcus. Some of his writhings, she found, had been in order to get himself into a position from which he could perform a grave inspection of Herrel. “Ike bad,” he remarked to her. “Airy bay.”
“Yes, I think so,” she said, and was surprised that her voice came out cool and normal.
“Here, then, fellow.” Herrel took Marcus out of her arms, making a somewhat clumsy job of the transfer. She could feel him shaking too. Under cover of their maneuverings, he whispered, “What in hellspoke’s name made you come here? You were safe. You’d left me — him.”
It was in a way incredible, that this man she had never met should whisper to her in Mark’s voice of things that had happened in another world. But even while she was feeling this amazement, Zillah was whispering back, “Because I couldn’t help it, as soon as I knew. I had to. Fetch Mark back. You need him.”
Herrel all but lost the bag of toys, but rescued it with a raised yellow satin knee, while he whispered, “I don’t know how to! For the gods’ sake, don’t say a word to my mother! She’d kill!” After which he contrived to gather up both Marcus and the bag and hoist them to his shoulder, remarking in a normal speaking voice, “So you think I’m a nice man, do you fellow, hairy face and all?”
“He must be the only person in the Pentarchy who thinks that then,” observed one of the women coming behind.
It showed Zillah that they could easily have been overheard. Herrel had taken a great risk. She blazed with joy that it was this important to him — still, after she had walked out on Mark that way, without even a word — and this joy mixed and warred confusingly with fear and dismay, and her guilt at bringing Josh and Philo into this. It was her fault. She was sure of that. In some way, getting them all out of Arth, she had been homing on Herrel, instinctively. She had only to think of the woman Marceny to see that this had been a disastrous thing to do. Yet for a short while this was less to her than the mere fact of being here, walking beside Herrel under the blue sky on the path beside the stream.
Nobody said anything much as they walked. From time to time the path crossed irrigation — or drainage — ditches leading from locks in the stream. Then they walked over carefully made plank bridges where everyone’s feet thundered, and, it seemed to Zillah, any amount of whispering could have been hidden in the noise. But Herrel did not say another word to her. The confusion of Zillah’s feelings began to sort itself out — as she told herself wryly, the confusion at least was familiar, since it was the way her mother worked, both on her and on Amanda — and she began to have suspicions.
She looked at Herrel frequently, pretending to be anxious about Marcus, who was placidly fingering Herrel’s beard as he rode in Herrel’s arms. The few words Herrel said were all to Marcus. “Don’t pull it out, fellow — it’s not grass, it’s hair.” He smiled as he said it with a sort of inane, contemptuous hilarity, as if life were to him nothing but a continuing silly joke. It was not a reassuring smile. It was possibly not quite sane. Zillah saw that Herrel’s face around the smile was even paler than Mark’s, and full of habitual creases of strain that had nothing to do with the smile. He looked deeply diseased. It began to be borne in upon Zillah that this fag-end left of Mark was not a man you could trust. Perhaps he had even intended someone to overhear him whispering to her — or at any rate, he had not cared.
But Marcus liked him. Zillah clung to that. Just as Marcus had taken to Tam Fairbrother and then Tod, he had taken one of his calm fancies to Herrel. Perhaps all was not lost.
They approached a stand of tall evergreen oaks. The path led around the trees to a shallow flight of steps, really a set of terraces climbing to a lawn. At the back of the lawn, bowered in the trees, was a mansion. It was built in a style so foreign to Zillah that the most she could have said of it was that it was gracious, and probably a good deal bigger than it looked. Palladian was the word that came to her, but she knew that was quite wrong. It was elegant, reposeful, and breathed out a menace so total that she gasped. Something crouched inside there that was implacably hungry and full of hatred. Marcus felt it too. He turned and looked at the building with his lower lip stuck out. But to everybody else it was obviously just the house. Their pace quickened and they crossed the lawn in a businesslike huddle, sweeping Zillah, Marcus, and Philo with them. Philo was carrying his arm and looking as scared as Zillah felt.
Up more shallow steps, among pillars and along a cloisterlike passage, they were swept, and finally into a small, lofty room paneled in some strange greenish wood. There was a dais at one end where Marceny was sitting, strumming at a small, painted harpsichord. As the double doors opened to let the party through, she smiled, nodded, and swung around on her stool to face them.
“Oh, good,” she said. “I’ll talk to the gualdian first.”
While Philo was being pushed toward her, Herrel quietly dumped Marcus on the floor beside Zillah and moved away to sit on the edge of the dais at his mother’s feet. Just the position, Zillah thought, that went with his jester’s clothing. Marcus leant against Zillah’s legs, thoroughly and unusually subdued.
“What’s your name, my boy?” Marceny asked Philo in a clear, kindly voice.
“Amphetron,” Philo said. Zillah tried not to let her surprise show. Philo knew this world and its dangers, and she did not. She realized she had better watch Philo’s responses closely and take her lead from him.
“And how did you come to be trespassing in my Goddess grove, Amphetron?” Marceny asked.
“I’ve no idea,” Philo answered. “We simply all found ourselves there.”
“You should call me ‘my lady’ or ‘Lady Marceny’ when you speak to me, you know,” Marceny pointed out, still in the kind and reasonable manner one might use to a small child. “And I really don’t think you should tell me naughty stories either, Amphetron. We all felt you coming for hours and hours before you arrived. One of you was using quite terrific power in order to get here.”
“And I suppose that gave you time to set up magework to disguise yourself — that, if you don’t mind my saying so, was a low trick,” Philo said. Zillah had not realized he could be so bold.
Marceny smiled. “Oh, I don’t mind your saying so if you feel the need. It was thoroughly simple mental magecraft, purely designed to fetch you all out of the grove, and it took me no time at all — nothing like the power you people were squandering. I notice you haven’t somehow confessed about that yet.”