"/ am the witch in Tajny Wood. Am I not, Azdra'ik ng'Saeich?"
"You. Are."
A silence, then. Tamas dared not turn to look. He felt ants walking up and down his spine and on his arms and felt his heart beating fit to burst. The creature would spring. He raised the bow, gauged the gusting wind.
But the goblin shrugged a shoulder into a spin half about and a mocking flip of the hand. "Ah, well, a new witch in Tajny Wood and a bit of broken glass. And what do you propose to do with it, pray tell? To order me about? Does that amuse you?"
The feeling was dreadful then. Tamas drew the bow.
"Put it away!" Azdra'ik exclaimed, his voice trembling, and turned full about, holding up his arm. "Put it away, young fool, do you even know what you're dealing with?"
The mirror, the goblin meant. And the goblin took no step closer—took two away, in fact, and turned full about a second time, pointing with a dark-nailed hand.
"That—fragment—is not a toy for your amusement, girl! That is nothing for a human whelp to handle in ignorance! Give it to me! Give it to me before you destroy yourself."
"Leave us alone!"
"Man. Tamas . . . this thing she holds—the witches of Tajny Wood have feared to use, and this underling proposes to make herself a power with it."
"You seem not to like that."
"Listen to me, fool! A mirror stands in the queen's hall beneath the lake, a glass taller than the queen is tall; and in it she sees what is and what may be, and she shapes what she wishes and deludes those that will believe. That is that shard and the magic of it, a shard from its edge, against that and against the queen. That is the power your young mistress proposes to oppose. A gnat, man, a gnat proposes to assail the queen of hell—and for her right hand, lo! Tamas, with his bow and his dreadful knife! Tell me—what will you do first, young witch?"
It was laughing at them, this creature, as it sauntered away toward the wall, the dark, and the brush. It vanished.
"I'm not sure it's gone," he said.
"He's not," Ela said. He looked at her, seeing anger, and fear. Her hands shone like candlewax in the fire they covered. "But he won't do anything. He daren't. He can't."
He let the bow relax, caught the arrow in his finger along the grip. "It doesn't dare the gateway. I'd rather we moved there tonight."
She gave a furious shake of her head. "We daren't go back in there. Not tonight. No."
"Then why did we come here in the first place? What are we doing here?"
Her eyes slid away, toward dark, and nowhere.
"Is it because of the mirror? Is it something it can tell you—or something you don't want to meet?"
A frown touched her brow, as if he had said something curious.
"The mirror called me a wizard," he pursued the point, "and it was wrong about that. Did it show you the goblin?"
"No," she said, and walked away from him, a deliberate turning of her back. "But why should it?" floated back to him, supremely cold and disinterested in his challenge.
Maybe it was a spell that made her deaf to him. Maybe it was sheer arrogance. He inclined now to the latter estimation, thought: Be damned to her—and went to see whether the horses had come back unscathed.
Liar, she had called him. She and the goblin were evidently agreed on that point.
Well, then, admittedly he had not been scrupulous with the truth, with witches or goblins. Or trolls. He saw no obligation to have his throat cut. Or to have his land invaded and his kinfolk murdered by goblins. Or to die for nothing because some self-righteous slip of a girl was too cocksure stupid to take anyone's advice.
He found no harm with the horses, at least. He thought again of taking Lwi in the morning and riding west, just blindly westward, until he found the mountains to which these hills were the foothills; and he thought how Karoly had not been able to do what was right or sane either. Maybe his own hesitation was a spell; or only his good sense at war with his upbringing, that said girls were not safe wandering the wilds alone: for her part, of course, she would very surely hold him by magic or by any other rotten trick, because she would not saddle the horses. She was too fine to soil her hands, and she was too delicate to lift the tack about, but forget any other use he was—she was too wise to need what he knew.
He gave Skory's neck a pat and walked around her, with suddenly a most unpleasant notion he saw something in the tail of his eye. He walked behind her and around to Lwi's side, to steal a glance toward the wall without betraying that he had seen anything.
The goblin was back, sitting in the shadow, simply watching.
Damn, he thought, and turned his back on it, at wits' end, exhausted, robbed of appetite and, as seemed likely tonight, of sleep, by a goblin who made no more sense than Ela did. At Krukczy Straz he had known where home was. The troll had not even been that bad a fellow, give or take the want of regular meals—
But the memory of that roof-top brought a haze between him and the world and he was too tired to dwell on horrors.
They twisted and became ordinary in his mind, an unavoidable condition of this land; and he found himself a place at the foot of a tree with his bow across his knees and his eyes shut, refusing to care what the witchling thought. She was awake. Let her watch. Let her worry.
But he had not succeeded in sleeping when Ela came back and made a stir near him, getting into the packs. He tried to ignore her, but what she unwrapped smelled of spice and sausage, and it was impossible to rest with that wafting past his nose: he gathered up his bow and, with a glance at the goblin still sitting in the shadows, he served himself a stale biscuit and a bit of sausage and sat down.
"Was Karoly your father?" she asked straightway.
"No." Appalling question. With Aw mother? The girl could have no idea. So much for witchcraft and farseeing.
"Someone in your house was a wizard."
"Karoly—just Karoly. And he's no kin."
"Or a witch," Ela said.
"No."
But gran leapt into his mind, gran, whose grave—
"There had to be someone," Ela persisted. "A cousin? An uncle?"
"There wasn't," he lied: god, he was growing inured to lies. He was surrounded with them. He had the most disquieting feeling if he looked toward the wall this moment, he would find the goblin staring back at him—
—mirror image, down to the arm on the knee. He shifted his posture, suspecting mockery in its attitude, and fearing suddenly that its sharp ears might gather every word they spoke.
"I'm no wizard," he muttered, lowering his voice to the limit of hearing. "Master Karoly taught me, just simple things. Maybe he taught me a deal too much, maybe that was what you saw. ..."
But gran was from over-mountain, from these very hills.
Gran had shown them little tricks, move the shell, find the coin—two young boys had been oh, so gullible, once, and gran had laughed in her solemn way, and said there was always a deceit, gran had called it. —Always look for the deceit, even in real magic.
Please the god, there was a deceit.
But the only deceit he could see was over there, by the wall, staring back at him.
"You were Karoly's student?" Now, now the girl wanted to talk, suddenly she was brimming with questions, worse, she had made up her mind to what she thought and there was no shaking it.
"He taught me letters. And how to name birds and trees. That was all. —It's listening to us, you know that."
"It doesn't matter. What you are, his kind can tell without your saying."
He muttered: "I'm the lord in Maggiar's second son. And my brother is his heir, if he's still alive. I'm not a wizard, none of our family have ever been."
"I felt what the mirror was doing. It answers you. It won't do that except for wizards."
"Well, it makes mistakes, doesn't it? It didn't see him— and is he there, or isn't he?"