The two wizards looked up from their colloquy. “Perchance I might lend a hand,” Valadrakul said.
* * * *
The animal was a badger, not a woodchuck, and managed to claw Singer’s arm before being clubbed into unconsciousness by the butts of four blasters and a chunk of wood; it was finished off by Wilkins, who cut its throat with his pocket knife.
Pel watched the operation with morbid interest, but did not help beyond lending moral support; he was not yet accustomed to killing his own food. It seemed like a very messy business-not that he saw much of an alternative here.
He did help build the fire, though.
The meat was edible, at least some of it-Raven cut out the portions he said were fit to eat, and left the rest. Even when properly cooked, however, it wasn’t very pleasant eating, and the relatively good parts did not go very far when divided a dozen ways. The smells of blood and dew-wet badger fur lingered, which didn’t help Pel’s appetite any.
For the rest of the meal Taillefer had a pouch of hard biscuits he shared out, while Sawyer and Marks brought water from a nearby spring.
As they ate, Pel kept looking for Stoddard’s return, but there was no sign of the man; when he suggested that a share be set aside for him, Raven simply shook his head.
Amy ate her share quietly, without complaint, and kept it down-she seemed more interested in the biscuits than the meat, however.
The entire party was gathered around the cooking fire in a circle, more or less; the three women were seated together on one side, between Ted Deranian and Albert Singer, while the other men were arranged in no particular order. Pel found himself between Sawyer and Valadrakul; Raven was seated on Sawyer’s other side, Taillefer just beyond Valadrakul.
When everyone had eaten, and had brushed crumbs from their hands and clothes, and Valadrakul had collected the offal and gnawed bones in a heap on the dead animal’s hide for later burial in sacrifice to the Goddess the Faerie folk worshipped, Pel asked loudly, “Should we get down to business now, or should we wait for Stoddard?”
Raven glared silently at him; Valadrakul looked up from the badger skin to say quietly, “Messire Brown, speak you no more of Raven’s man. Stoddard left in the night, whither we know not, without leave nor notice. We can but assume that he has left Raven’s service, as did so many others, and that we’ll not see him more.”
Startled, Pel turned to Raven for confirmation; the nobleman nodded, once.
It had never occurred to Pel, despite Stoddard’s complaints, that Stoddard would really desert.
“Oh,” he said. Then he recovered himself. “Well, then, let’s get on with it!”
“On with what?” Wilkins demanded.
“On with deciding what to do next, of course,” Pel said. “Taillefer says he won’t open the space-warp for us, and we don’t seem to be able to force him-so how do we get home?”
“Maybe we don’t,” Wilkins growled.
“And you’ll all be made welcome by those of us who yet resist Shadow’s foul dominion,” Raven said. “Live you among us, and join our fight!”
“I say we go back to the ship,” Marks said. “Maybe they’ve sent a rescue party. Or maybe the lieutenant’s got some plans of his own.”
“We can check that easily enough,” Susan said. She leaned forward to speak past Amy, to Prossie. “Did they send a rescue party?”
* * * *
Prossie had been sitting quietly, not listening, not thinking, but just being; it was something she had never really done until very recently. All her life, back in the Empire, no matter where she was sent, no matter where she lived, she had had to either listen, or to actively shut out the constant background noise of other minds; she had never, ever been able to sit and to do absolutely nothing, to neither think nor heed the world around her. The Empire did not allow telepaths that sort of isolation; telepaths were watched and guarded, always kept aboard crowded ships or in crowded military installations or in crowded cities. Telepaths, even should one somehow find herself far away from all ordinary minds, were always in contact with the far-flung network of their clan, always open to the common chitchat of their sibs and cousins; even their dreams were shared, built up of the gossip passing back and forth around them and the images that drifted through a shared unconscious.
In Prossie’s brief stay on Earth she had been too frightened by the strangeness of mental silence, too lonely, too worried about what would become of her, to really appreciate the virtues of solitude. A jail cell on an alien world, she thought, was hardly the best place for a young woman to look into herself.
And at first, here in Faerie, she had been too busy worrying about survival, too concerned with the politics of Base One, too involved with events-and she had had Carrie, sending to her, listening to her, keeping her in touch.
But since she had cut herself loose, told Carrie to break off, she had begun to drift inward, to look down into the depths of her own mind, depths that she had never really acknowledged to exist until now.
She knew, of course, that minds all exist on multiple levels, sometimes in parallel and contradictory consciousness-she had seen for herself that people could believe things at the same time they saw them for nonsense, and never notice the discrepancy; she had seen that the same person could feel love, hate, and indifference, all at once, toward something. She had known that there were layers of memory and emotion, piled up upon each other ever since infancy, though she had always been forbidden to dig down into all that accumulated experience.
But she had never, before this, thought that there must be such layers in her own mind. She had never, before this, tried to explore those layers.
But during the walk across the Starlinshire Downs, the wait for Taillefer at the Castle Regisvert, she had begun to wonder. She found herself thinking of things, almost at random, that she had not thought of in months, or years-and for the first time in her life, she couldn’t attribute it to leakage from the thoughts of those around her.
These odd bits of thought, and of memory, must be coming from her.
And when she reached that realization, she began to deliberately look for them, to search her own memories, her own feelings-as she had been forbidden to, back in the Empire, where the government wanted all their telepaths to be nothing more than communication devices, with no thoughts or desires of their own.
She had never thought of that as something bad before. She had been trained to think that the Empire had been merciful and kind in not simply killing all the telepaths, as a danger to the state-or simply allowing hostile mobs to kill them. Everyone she knew had told her that, had believed that, and it was almost impossible for her to disagree when she could see that belief in the minds around her. That the Empire had done so because they found telepaths useful she had always known and accepted; that was the price of survival.
But it wasn’t fair. She had been denied all her own thoughts.
And, she discovered as she slept on the cold stone floor of Regisvert, her own dreams, as well. Her dreams that night were fragmentary and uneasy; her mind was not accustomed to constructing its own, without outside influence.
When she awoke she tried to remember those dreams, and could not; she sat there, groping to recover images, as the soldiers trapped and butchered the badger. She ate silently, letting her own memories drift up from wherever they had been buried, enjoying the sensation of not thinking, not listening, but just being herself.
And then she realized everyone was staring at her, that someone had asked her a question.
Susan repeated, “Did Base One send a rescue party?”
Prossie blinked, and said, “I don’t know.” Recovering quickly, she added, “I’ve been out of touch; should I see if I can make contact and ask?”