“Oh,” Pel said. The explanation made sense, he supposed.
Or did it?
“Wait a minute,” he said, as they trudged onward. “If Shadow’s linked to all the magical energy in the world, doesn’t it feel something any time any wizard works any magic?”
“A good question,” Valadrakul said. “But alas, we’ve no good answer. It may be that Shadow senses it as we sense the distant hum of insects, as something always there and not worth the trouble to stop. It may be that our spells are so weak that Shadow sees them not at all, as you and I cannot see the stars in the sun’s daylight.” He shrugged. “We know not the truth of the matter.”
“Oh,” Pel said again.
He was hardly satisfied, but how could he demand that Valadrakul tell him something the wizard didn’t know himself? Shadow’s true nature would have to remain a mystery.
* * * *
The idea that she might be several weeks pregnant with Walter’s child was appalling, but somehow it was a relief, too-it was an explanation, and one that fit all the facts. What’s more, it was one that Amy understood, more or less, and one with a definite end in sight. AIDS could take years, other diseases could be sudden or chronic, but pregnancy was nine months, at most, give or take a few weeks.
And it wasn’t a death sentence. Childbirth was dangerous, certainly, especially if she couldn’t get back to Earth, but she wasn’t going to follow Grummetty and Alella and die horribly in a matter of days.
At least for the moment, having an answer, any answer, was better than nothing. And crying all over Susan and Prossie had helped, too.
Perhaps as a result of her lessened worry, perhaps just because her pregnancy was progressing past that point, she was feeling better. She still felt heavy and clumsy in the stronger gravity of Faerie, still tired easily, but her stomach was no longer cramping, and she felt no urge to vomit.
Thank God, she thought, for small blessings.
And being able to think about something other than her own insides and the possibility of imminent death brought her to wondering just what she and the others were doing. Yes, they had to get back to Earth-but were they really just walking right into Shadow’s home territory, marching right up to Shadow’s lair? Wasn’t that, well…suicidal?
Did Pel know what he was doing?
She had voted to do this herself, she knew that, but she was having second thoughts now. At the time of the decision she had been panicky, desperate to do anything that would get her home; now she was thinking a bit more clearly.
Would this get her home, or would it get her killed?
And if it would get her killed, what should she be doing instead?
She glanced at Raven, but he appeared to be lost in thought, and besides, he was a liar and a thief, not to be trusted-she thought he meant well, that he was sincere in thinking that everything he did was justified by the need to defeat Shadow, but still, she couldn’t trust him.
Valadrakul was better, but he was explaining something to Pel. And those two were the only natives of Faerie left in the party-Elani and Squire Donald were dead, Stoddard and Taillefer had abandoned the group.
Raven kept talking about Shadow as if it were some ultimate evil, and Pel always thought he meant it literally, like some monster from the fairy tales, or a movie villain, but Amy didn’t think she believed in stuff like that.
There were real villains, though, lots of them, and if she couldn’t quite believe that Shadow was Evil Incarnate, she could believe that it was the local version of Adolf Hitler, or Stalin or Pol Pot or the Ayatollah Khomeini. The woman in the cottage had told Raven some of Shadow’s rules, and they’d sounded like something Hitler or Stalin might have come up with.
Well, then, what if she thought of herself as having somehow landed in Nazi Germany? What would she have done?
She’d have tried to get out, of course-across the Alps to Switzerland, like the von Trapps, or to England or somewhere.
Except there was no Switzerland or England here. Shadow had won its war and conquered the entire world.
So what then?
There was an underground, of course-Raven was proof of that. She had already seen the underground, by traveling with Raven and Valadrakul, and talking with Taillefer, and they’d made promises to get her home, and then they hadn’t been able to deliver.
Well, to hell with them, then. She wasn’t going to join the underground and become a freedom fighter if they couldn’t keep their promises. And it didn’t look as if they stood any chance of winning the war, anyway.
Undergrounds never won their wars without outside help, anyway-she was pretty sure she’d read that somewhere.
But to return to her analogy, here she was, in the Faerie equivalent of Nazi Germany, with no way to get out of the country to Switzerland or England. She was going to stay in Germany unless Hitler himself decided to send her home, so she was on her way to Berlin to ask.
Was that going to work?
Well, it might; she wasn’t the local equivalent of a Jew, so far as she could tell, or otherwise fodder for the concentration camps. If there was an equivalent to the Jews, from what Valadrakul had said she supposed it was wizards. She certainly wasn’t a wizard.
She was a foreigner, of course, and Hitler had hated foreigners, but he hadn’t just killed them out of hand.
And besides, there was no point in carrying the analogy too far.
So they were going to Berlin to ask a favor of Hitler, more or less-and if that failed, Pel wanted to try to assassinate him.
What were the odds of getting away with that?
Probably nil. She just couldn’t imagine a bunch of lost American tourists walking in and killing Hitler, which would be the equivalent.
And she couldn’t see how they could hope to destroy Shadow, whatever it was, and get away with it; despite what Pel seemed to think, this wasn’t some silly adventure story. Things like that didn’t happen in real life.
But maybe Shadow would send them home.
And what else could she do?
Well, if she were in Germany, she could just settle down somewhere, find work, or someone who would take her in, and just hope nobody reported her to the Gestapo as she got on with her life. She didn’t suppose there’d be much call for an interior decorator in a place like Faerie, but she could find something to do, she was sure. And she wouldn’t even have to learn the language-the people here spoke English.
When they came to a town, she decided, she’d do that, she’d settle down and make the best of things. Not a farm-she wanted nothing to do with rural life. But sooner or later, surely, they’d find a place with shops and some semblance of civilization, and she could stay there. The others could go on to Shadow’s fortress if they wanted, and if Shadow agreed to help they could send for her, but she didn’t want to walk in there with them.
She’d have the baby to worry about, of course, if she settled down and stayed.
Well, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad; she could claim to be widowed, that she’d left her home because she couldn’t manage alone with the baby coming. And just because it was Walter’s child didn’t mean it would be a monster; she could bring it up properly, and it would probably turn out fine.
And it might die, anyway.
That was a horrible thought, she told herself, but she couldn’t help it. Her situation was so awful-trapped in an alien, uncomfortable, hostile world, carrying her rapist’s child-that she thought a little morbid speculation was entirely justified.