“There is a girl here to see you,” he said.
Bremen nodded wordlessly and rose to a sitting position. The night was fading into paler shades of gray, and the sky east was faintly silver along the edge of the horizon. The forest about them felt empty and abandoned, a vast dark labyrinth of shaggy boughs and canopied limbs that enclosed and sealed like a tomb.
“Who is she?” the old man asked.
Kinson shook his head. “She didn’t give her name. She appears to be one of the Druids. She wears their robe and insignia.”
“Well, well,” Bremen mused, rising now to his feet. His muscles ached and his joints felt stiff and unwieldy.
“She offered to wait, but I knew you would be awake already.”
Bremen yawned. “I grow too predictable for my own good. A girl, you say? Not many women, let alone girls, serve with the Druids.”
“I didn’t think they did either. In any case, she seems to offer no threat, and she is quite intent on speaking with you.”
Kinson sounded indifferent to the outcome of the matter, meaning that he thought it was probably a waste of time. Bremen straightened his rumpled robes. They could do with a washing.
For that matter, so could he. “Did you see anything of the winged hunters on your watch?”
Kinson shook his head. “But I felt their presence. They prowl these forests, make no mistake. Will you speak with her?”
Bremen looked at him. “The girl? Of course. Where is she?”
Kinson led him from the shelter of the spruce to a small clearing less than fifty feet away. The girl stood there, a dark and silent presence. She wasn’t very big, rather short and slightly built, wrapped in her robes, the hood pulled up to conceal her face. She didn’t move as he came into view, but stood there waiting for him to approach first.
Bremen slowed. It interested him that she had found them so easily. They had deliberately camped well back in the trees to make it difficult for anyone to discover them while they slept. Yet this girl had done so—at night and without the benefit of any light but that of stars and moon where it penetrated the heavy canopy of limbs. She was either a very good Tracker or she had the use of magic.
“Let me speak with her alone,” he told Kinson.
He crossed the clearing to where she stood, limping slightly as his joints attempted to unlimber. She lowered the hood now so that he could see her. She was very young, but not a girl as Kinson had thought. She had close-cut black hair and enormous dark eyes.
Her features were delicate and her face smooth and guileless. She was indeed dressed in Druid robes, and she wore the raised hand and burning torch of the Eilt Drain sewn on her breast.
“My name is Mareth,” she told him as he came up to her, and she held out her hand.
Bremen took it in his own. Her hand was small, but her grip was strong and the skin of her palm hardened by work. “Mareth,” he greeted.
She took back her hand. Her gaze was steady and held his own, her voice low and compelling. “I am a Druid apprentice, not yet accepted into the order, but allowed to study in the Keep. I came here ten months ago as a Healer. I came from several years of study in the Silver River country, then two years in Storlock. I began my study of healing when I was thirteen. My family lives in the Southland, below Leah.”
Bremen nodded. If she had been allowed to study healing at Storlock, she must have talent. “What do you wish of me, Mareth?” he asked her gently.
The dark eyes blinked. “I want to come with you.”
He smiled faintly. “You don’t even know where I’m going.”
She nodded. “It doesn’t matter. I know what cause you serve. I know that you take the Druids Risca and Tay Trefenwyd with you. I want to be part of your company. Wait. Before you say anything, hear me out. I will leave Paranor whether you take me with you or not. I am in disfavor here, with Athabasca in particular. The reason I am in disfavor is that I choose to pursue the study of magic when it has been forbidden me. I am to be a Healer only, it has been decided. I am to use the skills and learning the Council feels appropriate.”
For a woman, Bremen thought she might add, the phrase hidden in the words she spoke.
“I have learned all that they have to teach me,” she continued. “They will not admit this, but it is so. I need a new teacher. I need you. You know more about the magic than anyone. You understand its nuances and demands, the complications of employing it, the difficulties of assimilating it into your life. No one else has your experience. I would like to study with you.”
He shook his head slowly. “Mareth, where I go, no one who is not experienced should venture.”
“It will be dangerous?” she asked.
“Even for me. Certainly for Risca and Tay, who at least know something of the magic’s use. But especially for you.”
“No,” she said quietly, clearly ready for this argument. “It will not be as dangerous for me as you think. There is something about me that I haven’t told you yet. Something that no one knows here at Paranor, although I think Athabasca suspects. I am not entirely unskilled. I have use of magic beyond that which I would master from study. I have magic born to me.”
Bremen stared. “Innate magic?”
“You do not believe me,” she said at once.
In truth, he did not. Innate magic was unheard of. Magic was acquired through study and practice, not inherited. At least, not in these times. It had been different in the time of faerie, of course, when magic was as much a part of a creature’s inherited character as the makeup of his blood and tissue. But no one in the Four Lands for as long as anyone could remember had been born with magic.
No one human.
He continued to stare at her.
“The difficulty with my magic, you see,” she continued, “is that I cannot always control it. It comes and goes in spurts of emotion, in the rise and fall of my temperature, in the fits and starts of my thinking, and with a dozen other vicissitudes I cannot entirely manage. I can command it to me, but then sometimes it does what it will.”
She hesitated, and for the first time her gaze fell momentarily before lifting again to meet his own. When she spoke, he thought he detected a hint of desperation in her low voice. “I must be wary of everything I do. I am constantly hiding bits and pieces of myself, keeping careful watch over my behavior, my reactions, even my most innocent habits.” She compressed her lips. “I cannot continue to live like this. I came to Paranor for help. I have not found it. Now I am turning to you.”
She paused and then added, “Please.”
There was a poignancy in that single word that surprised him.
For just a moment she lost her composure, the iron-willed, hardened appearance she had perfected in order to protect herself.
He didn’t know yet if he believed her; he thought that maybe he did. But he was certain that her need, whatever its nature, was very real.
“I will bring something useful to your company if you take me with you,” she said quietly. “I will be a faithful ally. I will do what is required of me. If you should be forced to stand against the Warlock Lord or his minions, I will stand with you.” She leaned forward in a barely perceptible morion, little more than an inclining of her dark head. “My magic,” she confided in a small voice, “is very powerful.”
He reached for her hand and held it between his own. “If you will agree to wait until after sunrise, I will give this matter some thought,“ he told her. ”I will have to confer with the others, with Tay and Risca when they arrive.”
She nodded and looked past him. “And your big friend?”
“Yes, with Kinson also.”
“But he has no skill with magic, does he? Like the rest of you?”