She wasn’t scared, hardly even nervous. In fact she was looking forward to the adventure. What had become of the terrified, tongue-tied child cowering in her lair under the barn at Woodbourne? Gone, gone, vanished like a dream, vanished like the old nightmares of pursuit. When had she last had one? They were gone, along with the Watchers. In the moment she had made up her mind and rushed out from her hiding place crying “Take me too!” she must have left them behind. And even when the pursuing monster had at last caught up with her on Angel Isle and shown her its true, terrible reality, she hadn’t tried to hide or run away but had fought back with all her small strength beside her friends, and between them they had given Benayu time to destroy the demon.
How much she had changed since Woodbourne! From time to time on the journey she had considered the way her extra sense was growing and strengthening. But the changes in herself had passed unnoticed. Where had her self-confidence come from, her readiness to speak and act? From her friends, of course. They had needed her for her gift—they couldn’t have found the Ropemaker without her—but they had valued her for what she was, encouraged her, trusted her, worried desperately for her when she had driven herself to the edge of darkness, so much so that both Ribek and Benayu had almost died to save her….
All right, so they had needed her for her gift, but how much she had needed them for everything else! Always on the move, they couldn’t give her a place to belong, like Northbeck in her fantasy—and Northbeck in her real future, if all went well—but they were people to belong with, sharing trust and purpose in the same spirit as they shared their evening meals. Ribek most of all. She had loved him, she now discovered, not for his sake but because she needed somebody to love. Now, of course, it was impossible to imagine that anyone else might have done, but still, there had been a sort of selfishness in her love. She had attached herself to him like a mistletoe to a tree, feeding her need. It wasn’t enough. She guessed he knew that too.
Now they were going to spend six years apart, and that was all right. It was fine, in fact, better like this, and she could do it because she didn’t need him any more. Not in the way she had done so far. But there was another kind of need, the need that Saranja and Striclan had for each other. She had felt an inkling of it only a little while ago, waking on the hillside under the stars. In six years’ time, if she and Ribek both felt like that, perhaps…
If. Perhaps.
Mentally she released herself from her unspoken vows, and felt a sudden, marvelous lightness of heart. She had trapped them both somehow in a room, locking the door and dropping the key out of the window, and now, by pure luck she had found a spare key and unlocked the door and set them free. Free to choose when the time came.
As soon as he woke, here on the neutral hillside, she would tell Ribek she was going back to Lady Kzuva and tell him why.
As it turned out, she slept longer than he did.
The sun was just beginning to slide above the far horizon when she heaved herself into a sitting position and looked around. His bedding was empty. Saranja and Striclan were already up. She was oiling his back for him, ready for the exercises he did, and she did too now, every morning. Benayu seemed to be fast asleep. He’d be tired after yesterday, of course. If they had to wait for him it might be a long time till breakfast, but Striclan kept the saddlebags well stocked. No Ribek. Probably in the woods somewhere, easing his bowels, which was just as regular a morning need for him as Striclan’s exercises.
No, there he was, further up the slope by the whispering cedar, staring at something in the sky above the forest on their left. She followed his gaze. The landscape below the pasture was scarfed with early mist, but the sky was a clear pale blue. Only one thing marked it, a single bird, circling slowly on motionless wings. With nothing at all to judge its distance by it was hard to tell how large it might be. Big, she guessed. She wriggled the rest of her body out of her bedding and climbed barefoot toward him.
“Is it an eagle?” she said.
“That’s right. A blue-shank, by the look at it. Marvelous great birds. They nest in the cliffs above Northbeck, you know. I’ll show you.”
“I’m not coming to Northbeck with you. I’m going to ask Benayu to send me straight back to Lady Kzuva.”
“Ah,” he said slowly, still watching the eagle.
“Do you want to know why?”
“I think I know….”
“Not all of it, you don’t.”
“All right. Tell me.”
She did so, all of it, feelings and thoughts, without shame or shyness. He listened gravely and nodded when she’d finished.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’m afraid I have to tell you that I still think it will be an impossibility. Even supposing both of us are still unattached at that point. Perhaps you’ll meet some courtier….”
“You might fall for one of those farmers’ daughters you told us about.”
She didn’t mention the jewel dealer at Mord. That would have been mean.
“True,” he said. “But supposing we both escape those fates, and I’m not already in my dotage…”
“I don’t want to hear any of that nonsense. The Ropemaker gave you ten years more than he borrowed from you. Interest, he called it. You actually said you felt ten years younger. And you told me when I was a rag doll that that’d be enough.”
His laughter cracked the morning stillness. Pogo stopped grazing, raised his head and whickered, evidently thinking there might be horses who made a noise like that.
“So that’s it,” he said. “I knew something had happened, but hadn’t realized you were such a scheming, colluding minx. You’re going to be in your element in the middle of court intrigues.”
“It was his idea. Promise. But in six years’ time…”
“I thought we agreed eight.”
“We didn’t finish bargaining. Anyway, that was in another universe. Time’s different there. It’s six here. Five and a half, actually.”
“All right, clever clogs, we’ll see what we both think.”
“Feel, you mean. That’s what matters. We don’t owe each other anything. We haven’t promised anything. If we don’t both really feel we want to more than anything in the world, then we’ll marry someone else.”
“And we won’t even see each other till then?”
“If Lady K’s at Kzuva, Saranja can fly two of the horses over and bring you back for my birthdays. And you can read all about hawking in the library. And if you’ve got married you’ll have to bring her too.”
He stopped watching the eagle, turned to her and grinned. She flung her arms around him and laid her head against his chest. He rumpled her hair, a carefully adult gesture, made to maintain the tricky balance to the end.
“Breakfast,” called Saranja from below.
They walked down the slope together, not even holding hands.
APPENDIX
Fodaro’s Equations
According to Big Bang theory, in the very early stages of the formation of our universe there were more than the four dimensions we are familiar with. String theory, for instance, involves tiny strings of energy vibrating in ten dimensions of space time. Thirteen also seems to be a popular number. Anyway, once the first few microseconds of the explosion were over, the unwanted dimensions were “folded up and tucked away,” whatever that may mean.
These conclusions were arrived at by applying complex mathematical processes to the observed behavior of sub-atomic particles—quarks and so on—in gigantic particle colliders, and of light arriving from the most distant reaches of the universe.
Fodaro came to his rather different conclusions by very similar means. He was able to observe such things as the formation of stars and the outermost limits of the universe through a very powerful telescope—Benayu’s pool—and the behavior of sub-atomic particles in the form of magical impulses. He was also a mathematical genius. He wasn’t, incidentally, an untaught genius. Before he abandoned his career and took up shepherding he was Imperial Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Balin-Balan—the youngest ever to hold that prestigious post.*1 He continued his work in his spare time after his retirement and made his breakthrough when his observations of certain magical anomalies led him to the discovery of a place where our four-dimensional universe comes almost, but not quite, into contact with Jex’s seven-dimensional one. He called such places “touching points.”