No wonder Saranja had run away. But it had been too late. That rage was already there, inside her, like a family illness. She’d taken it into exile with her, and brought it back fiercer than before.
And there was something else about her, strange, different. A sort of inaudible hum, rather like the odd, buzzing sensation that Maja picked up from Rocky when he was wearing his wings but not when he wasn’t. Except that that had been part of Rocky, coming from inside him. This was much fainter, and it wasn’t part of Saranja. It came from something she was wearing or carrying. And it was doing something to her, something magical…
How did Maja know all this anyway? She had no idea, but she did.
Ribek shifted a little way up the bank and caught another fish, and then another. Maja knew what to do from tagging along on her boy cousins’ fishing expeditions, and had them gutted and spitted by the time the fire was hot enough to roast them. Saranja disappeared into the wood to look for healing herbs and didn’t find any, but came back with a pouchful of sweet wild yellow raspberries instead.
Ribek unpacked one of the saddlebags and produced fresh brown bread from the mill, and butter churned from the rich milk of mountain pasturage. Maja ate purring inwardly, like the old farm cat over its bowl of scraps. She’d never in her life felt so happy. Perhaps she never would again. She’d like to have stayed here for ever. But of course she couldn’t. The other two weren’t just escaping. They were going to look for the Ropemaker. They wouldn’t want her with them for that, she’d only be in the way, no help at all. They’d find someone to leave her with on the journey. And then it would all be over, probably.
“How far is it still?” she said.
“Where to this time?” said Ribek.
“To find the Ropemaker. You were getting ready to go and do that when the Sheep-faces came and we had to run away, weren’t you?”
“Not really,” said Saranja. “We were being got ready for this, I suppose you could say. All my life I was being got ready, I’m beginning to think. All my life I’ve been fighting against it, without realizing, and in the end I ran away from it, but it brought me back when the time came, or that’s how it feels. I still don’t like it. I still don’t want to believe it. Why me? It makes me mad. But I’ve got to start believing it now. I’m stuck with it.
“The snows failed last winter so the glaciers melted and that let the horsemen through from the northern plains. I don’t love the Valley the way everyone else seems to, but I’m not going to stand for Valley people being raped and murdered year after year by those savages. Somebody’s got to go and look for a magician to renew the magic, so that Ribek can sing to the snows and bring the Ice-dragon back to block the passes; and so that someone from Woodbourne who can listen to the cedars can feed the unicorns in the forest so they’ll keep the sickness there and stop the Emperor’s armies coming through and taxing everyone of all they’ve got. The Ropemaker’s the obvious person. He put the magic there in the first place, so I suppose we’re starting with him.”
“That reminds me,” said Ribek. “What about the forest? Did your aunt say anything, Maja?”
“Who to? She didn’t tell anyone anything, except when they’d done wrong. Um, I suppose she’d been in a bad temper all the time, not just some of the time, like she used to be.”
“You can’t know everything,” said Ribek. “We’ll just have to assume it’s happening. And I’m no keener than Saranja is on the idea of coming haring off to look for the Ropemaker. I’ve got work to do.”
“You should have seen him last night,” said Saranja. “He’s wonderfully proud of that mill of his, aren’t you?”
“Well, I’ve never asked for anything better,” said Ribek. “It’s a good life. If a farmer wants to send his prettiest daughter up with his grain, because he thinks I’ll give him a better deal, why should I discourage him?”
“Only you always knew this might happen, because you believed the stupid story,” said Saranja. “I didn’t. And you didn’t either, Maja, because there’s no one like you in the story.”
“Me!” said Maja.
“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?” said Saranja. “I don’t believe you would be if you weren’t wanted. Same with Rocky. He looked like a completely useless old nag when he started tagging along after me. Nobody could possibly have wanted him for anything. But there had to be a horse for me to put the wings onto, so there he was, and here we are, the four of us, setting out together at the start of another stupid story. We’re going to find the Ropemaker, wherever he is, so that he can seal the Valley off for another twenty generations, and I expect there’ll be all sorts of adventures on the way for you to enjoy.”
“I…I don’t think I’ll be very good at that sort of thing.”
Ribek laughed aloud.
“Do you imagine I do? Or Rocky? I don’t know about Saranja—she’s obviously made for it. You know the story, don’t you? Do you imagine Tilja thought she’d be good at that sort of thing when she set out with the others to find Faheel? But in the end they couldn’t have done it without her. No, kid, you’d better face it. You’re going to have to dare and adventure with the rest of us, and Rocky’s going to take us wherever we’re supposed to be, and that’s all any of us knows, and Rocky doesn’t even know that. He’ll just find himself doing it.”
“Oh.”
CHAPTER
2
At the top of a long mountain meadow, with the morning sun full in their faces, sat a man and a boy. Between them on a boulder crouched a squat blue and yellow lizard about the size of the man’s shoe. A huge old cedar rose close behind them, and below, scattered across the bright upland turf, a small flock of sheep grazed, watched by a neat black-and-white sheepdog.
The man was talking to the lizard.
“I think we may have made a breakthrough—or rather Benayu may have.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” said the boy. “I just thought I’d give it a go, running my spell backward through the screen—not exactly backward, more inside out, if you see what I mean.”
“What he did, in effect, was to set up an exact counter-resonance to the active resonances of the spell so that on reaching the screen they canceled each other out. He was lucky, of course, in that the spell was ideally suited to the treatment, but all the same it was a whole level more powerful than anything we’ve managed to screen before.”
The lizard’s voice answered in both their minds. If granite could speak it would do so in such a voice.
“Yes, it will not always be so easy. Each screen must be custom-made to what it screens. But the principle…Wait. A thing of power is coming. You may have brought it here. Hide yourselves.”
Man and boy rose and stood for a moment, staring north, and saw a dark fleck in the pale blue sky above a massive snow-streaked ridge. Tension swept up the hillside. It was as if the placid turf had been the nape of a giant neck, every grass-blade prickling with sudden apprehension. Quietly they walked toward the cedar, laid a hand on its bark and disappeared.
By now the stone where the lizard had been was mottled with blue and yellow lichen, and the place was empty apart from the sheep and the dog, and the small creatures that clicked and chirruped in the sun-warmed turf. The tension remained, electric.
Rocky circled down toward the mountain meadow, apparently empty apart from a flock of sheep and a sheepdog.
“I think this may be where we’re going,” called Saranja over her shoulder. “To start with, anyway. I didn’t ask him to land, and he can’t be hungry yet. There’s got to be a shepherd somewhere around. Perhaps he’ll tell us what happens next.”