Alea simply held her and let her weep, now and again making soothing noises. Finally the storm passed and Mira leaned back and away a little, dashing the tears from her eyes. Over Alea’s shoulder she could see the giant tying the unconscious riders over the horses’ backs and shooing them away. Then he turned to frown at the wall of fire. Slowly the flames died, and the night was still.
Mira began to tremble again. “You are a magician.” She turned to Alea, wide-eyed. “Both of you!”
“If this is what passes for a magician in this land, I suppose we are.” The woman spoke angrily. “How foul is the man who would use such power to terrify a poor helpless girl! Tell us his name, damsel, so we will know him for a villain if we should be so unlucky as to meet him!”
“He—he is the lord of our village and fifty more like it, with all their acres.” She clasped Alea’s hands between her own. “But, oh, good people, I beg you not to go near him! Roketh is a magician of fearful power—a ghost leader and fire-hurler both! He can persuade any ghost to do his bidding, even a wild almost ghost who has no form yet hungers for a human spirit to devour so it can steal its shape! None can threaten him and live! He has slain six other magicians in combat and swallowed their lands and people!”
“Then perhaps he should disgorge them,” Gar said heavily, coming to sit cross-legged near them.
“You must not attempt it! He would slay you!” Mira looked wide-eyed from the woman to the man and back, tense with fright at the thought. “None can stand against Roketh!”
“He may not be quite so invincible as he seems,” Alea told her, “but we would certainly be fools if we rushed in to confront him without learning a great deal more about him. Don’t worry, lass, we won’t attack him out of hand. If nothing else, we must stay a while to travel with you and make sure you come to no harm.”
“But Roketh will send soldiers after you! He will send ghosts, he will send apprentice magicians to hurl fire!”
“Why then, we must make sure they can’t find us,” Gar said easily.
Mira stared from one to the other as though they were crazed. “I hid my trail from the dogs, but the hunting-ghosts found me. How can you hide your mind from the specters?”
“So they follow your thoughts, do they?” Alea asked. “Don’t worry, then, lass—we can shield our thoughts quite well, and yours, too.” She glanced up at Gar. “Isn’t that true?”
“Very,” Gar confirmed. “More to the point, now that we know what they are, we should be able to tell when they’re coming.”
Mira thought of evading the ghosts and the despair of utter weariness overwhelmed her; she crumpled to the ground.
“What use is it to hide or flee? If Roketh does not find me again, some other magician will, and will claim me for his own for the same use Roketh intended, for there is no patch of ground in all this land that isn’t the demesne of one magician or another!”
“Well, then, we must keep moving,” Alea said with great practicality. “On the road or off it, we must keep marching until we find a place the magicians can’t reach.”
“There is no such place!”
“Then we’ll have to make one,” Gar said matter-of-factly. Mira stared from one to the other. “You must be powerful magicians indeed, to speak so lightly of building what cannot be made!”
“We don’t really think of it as magic,” Gar protested.
Alea gave him a withering glance. “Speak for yourself, long thinker.” She turned back to Mira. “Magic or not, he’ll make it work. You’ll be safe so long as you travel with us, lass. Come now, we’ve proved ourselves friendly and told you our names—what is your own?”
Mira looked from one to the other yet again. Somehow both she and the man seemed to be smaller, human rather than gigantic, though still very tall. She felt the tension begin to go out of her. “Mira. My name is Mira.”
“Very well, then: Mira, Alea, and Gar.” Alea nodded. “Can you tell us, lass, what you did that was so outrageous that Roketh would send these ghosts and riders after you?”
“I—I tried to escape,” Mira admitted, lowering her gaze. “Escape?” Alea’s voice hardened. “By what right did he hold you in bondage?”
“Why, by his right as my lord.” Mira looked up at Alea wide-eyed. “It was wrong of me to flee, for a serf must work for her lord, no matter who he is.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” Alea snapped. “You belong to no one but yourself, lass, and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise!”
“True,” Gar said, “but it must have taken a powerful threat to make you leave your home and family.”
“It did, sir.” Mira lowered her gaze again. “Roketh sent … he sent his soldiers to bring me to his castle, and I have seen what happened to other girls who answered that summons—so I fled.”
“As indeed you should!” Alea cried indignantly. “He had no business summoning you only for his own depraved pleasure, and you had every right to refuse—even if the only way to do that was to flee!”
She said it with so much heat that Mira wondered if she had a similar story to tell, but that heat warmed Mira’s heart and made her think that perhaps she had done the right thing after all.
“These other women who had obeyed and gone to Roketh’s castle,” Gar reminded her. “What did happen to them?”
“Their eyes … their slumping shoulders … their…” Suddenly the horror of it overwhelmed her again, and Mira burst into tears once more.
Alea folded the young woman in her arms, murmuring, “Hush, dear, it’s over, and he can’t reach you now. Don’t worry, whatever happened to those others won’t happen to you. There, now, it will be all right.”
Gar turned his face away, gazing down the road, then glancing at the forest to either side, then behind them. He seemed rather grim, as though this were an old and far too familiar tale.
Mira’s sobs finally eased; she drew a little away from Alea and wiped her eyes on her sleeve, summoning the remnants of poise. “They … they will seek us here…”
“Yes, but not back at our camp,” Alea said. “Come, dear, we have a stew to heat.”
Mira hung back. “The ghosts … they can find us by our thoughts…”
“I don’t think any of those specters are going to be terribly anxious to renew our acquaintance,” Gar said with gentle amusement. “Let’s go—we left the stew over the fire.”
Alea cast him a sharp glance—she knew very well that he had damped the flames before he followed her. Still, what he had said was literally true—the stewpot was hanging over the campfire. It was simply not lit.
When they reached the campsite, though, she saw that the fire was lit, and the stew simmering gently. She cast a suspicious look at Gar, but he was all innocence. She grumbled under her breath about long-distance fire-lighting show-offs, then hastened to make Mira feel welcome. “Come now, dear, sit close to the flames—that’s right. You’ll feel better with a bit of stew in you. Where’s that third bowl … ah, there.” She pulled a wooden bowl out of her pack and ladled stew into it, then handed it to Mira and filled two more. “Gar, take the stewpot off the fire, will you? We have to boil water for tea.”
Gar switched pots before he settled down with his own bowl and round of hard bread.
As they ate, Alea and Gar took turns asking questions, then answering her answers with little tales of their own, about the villages in which they had grown and the neighbors’ eccentricities. Mira actually found herself laughing, though she would have sworn the last three days had made her forget how.
Before she knew it, she was talking like a waterfall, explaining to Gar and Alea what life was like in her village: the daily round of cleaning and tilling and mending and cooking; about Roketh and his guardsmen; about the cures he had performed when an epidemic seemed about to sweep the village and the punishments he had inflicted for disobedience.