She was convinced that the Master knew something of the existence of the gate. Perhaps he knew much more than that; though she did not admit it quite clearly to herself she believed that in fact he knew much more than she did and would, when he chose, explain it all to her. But she dared not ask him. It was not yet time. She knew so little, even yet, of the ain country, except for the south road, and the town itself, the people of the town and their trades and feuds and jokes and crafts and gossip and manners, which she never tired of learning, and their language, which she could chatter away in and yet sometimes did not understand at all. Always outside the benign hearth-center lay the twilight and the silence, the unexplained, the unexplored. She had been content that it was so. She had wished that nothing here be changed. But this time, even the first night, at the first hearthfire, she felt the circle broken. It was no longer safe. Though she might wish it, and they might wish it, she was not a child any more.
After breakfast she went for a visit with Trijiat, and then walked Aduvan and her little brother to the cobbler’s, at the other end of town, to leave their mother’s good shoes to be resoled. The little girl talked all the way and the little boy chirped like a cricket. Their heads were full of some ghost story or tall tale they had been told, and they kept asking Irene if she wasn’t scared when she walked on the mountain. Virti ran ahead, hid behind a porch, leapt out at her making terrifying roars like a cricket gone hysterical, and she performed suitable cries of terror and dismay. “You have to fall down!” Virti said, but she declined to fall down. The errand done, she left the children with their grandmother, and turned from the town’s main street to the steepest of the narrow cobbled ways going up the hillside, so steep that at intervals the street broke into steps, like a person breaking into giggles or hiccups, and then resumed its sober climb, until it had another fit of steps. At the top of it stood the wall of the garden of the manor, the arched stone gate beautiful against the clear sky. Turning to the right before she reached that gate Irene halted for a moment, and looked up at the Master’s house.
A dozen gables and dormers broke dark, sharp angles on the sky; the windows, bay and bow, many-paned, lay no two on one level, so that there was no counting the stories of the house except on the evidence of three great beams across the front. The door was massive, twelve-paneled. As she lifted the brass knocker ring and struck it on the polished disc of brass, it came into Irene’s mind that she had dreamed of this door many times, on the other side.
Fimol the housekeeper, erect and imperturbable in high-necked, long-sleeved, long-skirted grey, opened the heavy door and greeted the visitor to the Master’s house. Fimol never smiled, and Irene had always been in awe of her. She noticed with a sense almost of disloyalty, as she followed her, that Fimol’s hair had gone white and that her stiff figure was thin, the body of a frail, aging woman. They came into the hall of the house.
This was the center of it all, this high room. Facing the long wall of paneled oak were twelve high, leaded windows looking out upon the terraced garden. The sparse furniture was carved oak, the carpets of local weave, crimson, orange, and brown, warming the room even when the candles were not lit and there was only the clear constant twilight from the windows. In each end wall was a huge stone chimney-piece, and on each of these, high over the wide hearth and the mantel, hung a portrait: a stiff, melancholy lady stared with round black eyes down the length of the room at her lord, who concealed the hand of a crippled right arm inside his coat and scowled blackly back at her.
To the right of that farther hearth, near the door to his offices, the Master stood in conversation with the stonecutter Gahiar. Seeing Irene enter with the housekeeper he stared with that black ancestral scowl; then his face changed; he turned from Gahiar and strode down the long room to her, his hands held out. “Irena! You have come!”—such welcome as she had imagined from him, in daydream, often, but not in expectation, and not wondering what came next.
The Master or mayor of Tembreabrezi was a spare, swarthy man with a hawk nose and dark eyes. He wore black, rusty, neatly-mended, homespun black trousers, vest, and jacket. A harsh man, a dark man. She had loved him since she first saw his face.
He brought her out of the hall into his offices, where a fire burned and the curtains were drawn as if against the grey of a day of winter. He set her a chair, and aided by the dignity of her clothing, the dark-red skirt and homespun blouse that Palizot kept for her, she sat down without awkwardness. He stood beside the high desk where he worked standing—he was a man one seldom saw sitting down—and turned his intense look on her. She drew a deep breath and held herself quiet, her hands in her lap.
“It has been a long time, Irena.”
“I could not come.”
“The way—?”
“I could not—find—” Nor could she find the words she needed. “The place,” she said, and then remembering what they called the stone arch in the wall of the manor, “The gateway. It was shut.”
“You could not walk on the road,” he said, not impatient with her stumbling, but dauntingly intent.
“When I—when I could come to the road, I could walk on it. But at the beginning—” She stuck again.
“You were afraid.”
His voice was gentle; she had never heard him speak so gently.
“When I came through the gateway. It had been so long. And there, at the beginning place, beside the river, there was—”
He said a word, almost in a whisper. It was the word little Virti had shouted when he was playing monster and she would not fall down, and Aduvan had scolded him, Shut up, don’t say that, both children over-excited, near tears. A huge, pale, deformed arm groping out across the grass—
“A man,” she said. “A stranger.”
The Master listened, intent, alert.
“A stranger, like me. Not like me, but—” She knew no other way to say it. The Master, evidently understanding, nodded once.
“Did you speak with him?”
“No. He was asleep. I came on. I didn’t want—I was afraid—” She stuck again. She could not explain her first panic. Surely he would see why a woman alone might have reason to be afraid of a strange man. But she could not express the rage she felt now recalling her fear and recalling the stranger, the gross sleeper, the litter of plastic trash: the sense of desecration and of danger. She clasped her hands hard in her lap and struggled again for the words she wanted, forcing herself to speak. “If he found the gateway, maybe others will find it. There are—there are so many, many people there—”
If the Master understood what she meant by “there,” his only response was a black frown.
“You must guard your walls, Master!” she said desperately. She would have said “borders” but knew no such word in his language, nor any word for boundary or fence but the word that meant a wall of wood or stone.
He nodded. But he said, “There are no walls, Irena. And now, for us, no ways.”
The tone of his voice held her silent. He turned to his desk and went on presently with the same forced quietness, “We can’t go on the roads. They are closed. You know that some have been closed to us for a long time. The south road, your road—you know that we don’t use that.” She had not known it, and stared uncomprehending. “But we had the summer pastures and the High Step, and all the eastern ways, and the north road. Now we have none of them. Nobody comes from Three Fountains, or the foothill villages. No traders or merchants. Nothing from the plains. No news from the City of the King. For a while we could go westward, up the mountain, on the paths; but not now. All the gates of Tembreabrezi are locked.”