"I've salve—"
"Not for this you don't," Karoly said. "Move, young fool! We need a fire, and the god knows what it'll bring, but there's no damned choice—don't stand there with your mouth open waiting for flies! Move!"
"Yes, sir," he breathed, and grabbed the pot. Zadny was barking again, waking echoes inside. "Where's the water, sir?"
"In the back of the yard!" Karoly snapped at him. "Where would you expect a well? —And, boy ..."
He stopped and turned on one foot. "Sir?" "—Shut that damned dog up, will you?"
The goblin watched them make a fire, the goblin watched them make breakfast, the goblin watched them eat it, and Tamas glowered at it. His head was throbbing, his eyes felt full of sand, and only motion kept his mind from straying down the same unpleasant and useless paths it had followed all night.
"What do we do about it?" he asked.
Ela merely shrugged, "Let be."
"Are we staying here?"
Ela shook her head.
He kept his temper and asked the next question. "Are we leaving now?"
Well, then, Ela would not talk. He would not talk. He got up on legs that felt wooden, limped over to the horses in a temper and began to saddle them to leave this place, Ela nothing gainsaying.
The goblin turned up next to him, at the edge of the woods, making the horses nervous, watching him as if he were the object of its intention.
"You wanted to see her," he said to it, hauling on Lwi's girth. "All right, you've seen her. She doesn't want to talk to you. Why don't you leave?"
"She's not reasonable," it said. "Or wise."
He leaned on the saddle, looking across it as the goblin stood, arms folded, foot tucked, leaning against a tree. "Not wise—because she won't listen to you?" Humor failed him. "What do you want? Why do you destroy things? Is it just your nature?"
"You mistake us."
"Mistake you! Did I mistake what I saw in the courtyard? Or on the roof of Krukczy Straz?"
"I'm i'bu okhthi. That's itra'hi work."
Goblin babble, to his ears. He glared across Lwi's rump and rested his arm on it. But only a fool turned down knowledge. Master Karoly used to say so. So he overcame bis headache and his temper and advanced a surly, "So?"
"Itra'hi aren't my kind, man."
"Ita sure it made a difference to my brother. I'm sure it made a difference to her mistress. They didn't introduce themselves. They didn't exchange formalities."
"They're not the brightest."
"And you are."
"Are you a horse? I think not. One has four feet. It's easy to tell the difference in your kindreds. Easy in ours, if you have half a wit."
"Are you saying you're something different than these— whatever you call them?"
"Flat-tongued human. Indeed, different as you from your beasts. One sends and they do. One doesn't talk to them. One doesn't deal with them. They're dogs. The i'bu okhthi are clearly civilized."
"God." He turned his back on the creature, turned to Ela, sitting on the margin of the stream, and said, "We're ready."
But when he looked back to the goblin—only trees were there, and not a leaf stirring to mark where it had been.
"Butchers," he said after it, hoping it did hear. "Murderers. You loose your hounds to do your work, what's the difference? What's the damned difference, tell me that!"
"Don't," Ela said, behind him when he had not heard her move. His heart jumped.
"Don't what?" He was still angry—with her, now that Azdra'ik was out of sight. "Don't ask what happened to my brother? Don't ask where we're going?"
"There." She nodded at the gateway she had not been willing to pass a second time last night. She was bringing the packs. Ela—was bringing the packs they had been using, practical girclass="underline" he was astounded.
"Thank you," he said, not with his best grace, and tried it again, with a sketch of a bow, after he had taken them: "Thank you."
"It's not a safe place," she said. "There's a woods past the second gateway. People go in and don't come back. My mistress said she wasn't sure it has another side, or not always the same side, if you can't see the path."
Three thoughts in a row. Twice amazing.
"Can you?"
She lifted her chin slightly, frowning, and said, "Of course. Can't you?"
He did not understand for a moment, or care to: he was exceedingly weary of her moods and her offenses. Then he realized it was the wizard business again, and an accusation of lying.
"No," he said, and then (he could not help it) had a look toward that gateway to see if he could see anything. "There's nothing."
She went on frowning, while he tied the packs to Skory's saddle and gave her a hand up.
He cast a second glance toward the woods as he rose into Lwi's saddle. And there was still nothing that he could see from that vantage.
She started Skory off, and he followed her, thinking that here was one more choice made, that, dangerous as it might be to try to go back from here, it was going to be worse hereafter.
"Where are we going?" he asked. "Are just the two of us going to go up and knock on the queen's gate and say Shame on you, or what are we going to do, for the god's sake?"
"Banish her," Ela said. "Unweave her spells."
We're both mad, he thought. He thought: What if I were Karoly's grandson, and not Ladislaw's? What if, after all, Karoly's gone and her mistress is and we're all that's left for everyone else to rely on?
What if we were? We wouldn't know. We wouldn't know unless we turned around and came back, and then it would be too late, wouldn't it?
They passed beneath the arch. They rode a weaving course through brush, around piles of rubble, past the walls that had been rooms and vaults and hallways. There was still no path, only half-buried paving-stones, through which weeds and brush grew up. There was no magic. He waited to see something happen.
"My mistress' grandmother lived here once," she said, in answer to nothing. Or maybe it was part of her last answer. "She was born here."
"What was this place?"
"Hasel."
"Hasel!" But it was a strong place, a place full of people. His dream of last night came back, when he was wide awake, people and disaster, and stones riven with light.
"Do they know about Hasel, over the mountains?"
"My—" —My grandmother told me about it, he had begun to say. Gran had relatives here. God. What if it were true? And all those people last night. . . they're dead, dead as gran. The stories were yesterday in his mind, forests and fields and villages where people lived and went about their lives.
"Your—?" she prompted him, but he was not ready to talk to her about gran, or to trust her that much.
"What happened to it?" he asked.
"What happened to it? The mistress here died. The people here died. Ages ago. Hundreds of years ago. If they know about Hasel, don't they know that?"
He heard her, and it sank right to the pit of his stomach, refusing reason. Nothing gran knew could be that long ago. It was some other Hasel. Or the things gran had said she had seen were only stories gran told—only lies.
He might be Karoly's grandson. And now for all he knew gran had lied to him about this place. Too many things were shifting, that he had never doubted in his life—while beyond the farther arch he saw a forest that the witchling called dangerous, a gateway that showed only green shadow and the trunks of aged trees.
"What happened here? Was it a war?"
"With the goblins. When the mirror broke."
"That mirror."
"This mirror. Mistress had it in Tajny Tower; and the goblins killed her and killed Pavel but they couldn't find it and they couldn't find me."
"Who was Pavel?"
"Just Pavel. He came from Hasel when it fell. And he was never right after, mistress said. But he would have fought them when they came. He would have." There came just the least wobble to Ela's voice, true distress. But he was thinking more about what she had said, and about finding her in a lie, as they rode through the archway, as the horses' hooves rang on the threshold of the forest, and went thereafter with the soft scuff of fallen leaves. Wind sighed above them, and morning sun dappled the ground. It did not look so terrible a place, not to left nor right nor straight ahead. The horses certainly took no alarm—Skory most irreverently snatched a mouthful from a bush as they passed, and ate as they walked.