The goblin warrior followed the blade about, full turn, that was how it had its arm in his way, and him pinned against the great pillar of the core, staring at it face to face. Its iron-hard arms were on either side, and the carelessly held sword leant against his neck as it shook its head slowly. "Not justified," it concluded, and grinned at him, a showing of fangs, a glitter of shadowed eyes behind a disordered fringe of mane—such details stood clear as his heart pounded away and he wondered could he duck down quickly enough, or dared he move—considering the cold blade beneath his chin.
"Lost its tongue?" it asked him. "Fellow thief?"
He had. And his breath. He brought a knee up- The goblin knocked his head against the wall, not grinning now. He made a second try—but the goblin was too tall, and breath was too short. It said, hissing into his face with that lisp the jutting fangs made,
"I want the witch, man."
"What witch?" he asked. "Which witch?" Light-headedness suggested rhymes. It could not be more annoyed, and he was out of strategies. He tried to pry its hand loose. As well dispute a stone statue. "I think you ate the last one—hereabouts ..."
"Liar," it said, and tightened its grip. "Are you a liar?"
"Of course not," he had wind to say. It slacked its hold ever so little.
"A conundrum. How clever." Unexpectedly it let go entirely, and gave him room on the stairs, "Run, man. Run."
He did not believe it, not even when it dropped the sword point and gave him room. He drew a shaky breath, made a gesture downward, giddily, toward the stairs. "You first." If one was about to be beaten anyway, he had learned that from Bogdan—if one was about to be stabbed from behind, as seemed now, then play the game for pride, if that was all he had left. And to his own light-headed amazement he was not tongue-tied or wool-gathering. Bogdan would approve, if Bogdan were here, but this creature and his kind had—
He could not think about that rooftop. He refused to think about it now.
The goblin stepped higher on the stairs, trading places with him on the narrow steps, and tapped the side of his leg with the sword blade as they passed each other. "I'm letting you go, man. Go. Next time—find a sword."
It was going on upstairs. It was searching for Ela. It would come back for him, or others were below to deal with him. He contemplated attacking it as it turned its back on him in contempt and kept climbing—the troll had inured him to terrors, for days now, and he wanted to go for it bare-handed as he was. But that served nothing. In the hall below he might find a weapon, a fallen board, anything to throw a pennyworth weight onto his side of the balance and do it harm it might feel, if it followed him. Or get to the courtyard and his bow if it did not.
He sped down the steps, angry, desperate, blind in the winding dark below, expecting to run headlong into more of them at any turn. He saw the faint twilight from the doorway and bolted down the last turns into the entry, where his dark-accustomed eyes picked out cloth in the shadow, a cloaked figure that accosted him with:
"Shh!"
Ela's whisper—while his fist was knotted up to strike and his legs were shaking under him. "What were you doing up there?"
"There's a goblin," he stammered. The fury ran out of him, and he set his shoulder to the wall for support to his shaking knees. Hardly a hero, he: he had fled pell-mell down the stairs, and the goblin could come back down or call to its friends from the window at any moment.
"Then get out of here! There's a place I haven't looked—"
"Ela, give it up! Everyone's dead! The horses are out there. They know there's two of us! They'll find us. —Lord Sun—"
"I have to!" she whispered, and tore away from him.
"Ela!" he whispered furiously, but she was a wisp of cloak and shadows, headed for a door, another stairway, he had no idea. He took her advice and ran out the open door to the yard, where the horses were grazing on the grass that had sprung up in the half-buried cobbles.
"Aha!" rang out from some window, from the roof, he had no idea, nor waited to see in his reach after Lwi's saddle. A knife thumped into the ground beside his boot, stuck upright in the weed patch beside the cobbles. He jumped—he could not help it, and Lwi shied as he grabbed the reins. The bow was not strung. He snatched up the knife as his only gesture of defiance and looked up at the tower.
"Ah. Do you take my gift?" the goblin warrior called down. My gift, my gift, my gift, echoed off all the walls, loud as Lwi's hooves clattering on the pavings. Skory danced away, out of his reach, and he had visions of the goblin coming down the stairs and cutting off Ela's retreat. "And are you a thief, too?"
Thief, thief, thief, the echoes said.
"What harm have we ever done to you?" he shouted up through the echoes. "What do you want?"
Want, want, want, the echoes gave back, as Ela came flying from out the door.
"Ho!" the goblin shouted; "Witchling!" But Ela never stopped. She caught Skory's trailing reins as the goblin disappeared from the window, downward bound without a doubt. He drew Lwi after him, held Skory's reins while Ela climbed up to the saddle, and without a second glance over his shoulder, flung himself for Lwi's saddle.
"Witchling, witchling, witchling," the echoes were still saying, as they rode past the grisly warning on the poles, through the gateway and into the tangle of the woods again, where the horses had to strike a slower pace.
Then he cast an anxious glance over his shoulder, and saw Ela's face as she looked back at the vine-shrouded gates. It was not grief, not a child's bewilderment, but a cold, white-lipped fury.
"What can we do?" he asked. "How can we fight them?" He was willing to hear anything but pointless defeat, nothing done, nothing even learned about their enemy, and their enemy in control of the place they had come to find and despising all they could do.
She laid a hand on her breast, and said only, "It's mine, it's mine, and he knows it."
"What, the tower?"
"This." The hand was pressed to something beneath her collar, and she looked at him with a set face and a defiance that challenged him along with the goblin as she rode past him.
So it was not for her mistress she had been searching the tower. Karoly's sister was dead, if those skulls could tell the story. And he—
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"To make them regret it," was all she would say.
7
THEIR GOING WAS A HASTY CONFUSION OF DARK AND branches by starlight. Leaves raked Tamas' shoulders as the horses struck out on a downhill and up again, on a ride in which any stir of brush might be goblin ambush, any twitch of the horses' ears might be the only alarm they would have. The witchling told him nothing—but, Tamas thought, nothing he had done back at the tower had deserved her confidence. The goblin had let him go: she might have bewitched the creature, or not, for all he knew—she might not know what had happened up there on the stairs and might ask herself how he had escaped, weaponless.
But it was not an hour to plead for trust. And counting her reticence and the fury he had felt in her glance, he began to ask himself whether she was in fact a white witch, whether in feet she needed help in which a fool would do very well-he had heard about that kind of sorcerer in gran's stories, too.
But how did one know the good witches from the bad? Ela moved by dark, in shadows, and by moonlight, and if that had not been a curse she had loosed against the goblin he never hoped to feel one. The horses' mad steadiness, jolting his exhausted, spinning senses, the goblin saying, "Run," as if it were a choice he had ... its eyes looking into his, mad and malicious and amused with him and his plight. . .