He considered whether to challenge Ela. And decided. "You said Hasel fell a hundred years ago."
"Hundreds."
"So how could this servant of your mistress' be from Hasel? That can't be true."
She frowned and seemed to think about that a moment. "I don't know, that's what she said."
"Hundreds of years ago?"
"Witches—can be that old. I think she was."
"How old are you?"
"I'm not sure ... I think, I think maybe fifteen."
God, she was hardly older than Yuri. Than Yuri, for the god's sake. And had this laid on her?
"Where did you come from?"
"From Albaz. I think from Albaz. Mistress got me when I was very small. I thought she was my mother when I was a baby. But she wasn't."
After silence it was a torrent, in a silence so profound the whispering of the leaves and the horses' movements were the only sound. He thought it sad she had mistaken something as vital as that, and not been sure even where she had been born. At least, with all the confusion she had set in him . . . he knew who his parents were, and what his home was.
"Or maybe I was hers," Ela said, after a moment more of riding, in the whisper of leaves under the horses' feet. "It wouldn't matter. — Who was your mother, if she wasn't a witch? —And how old are you?"
"Seventeen. And my mother isn't a witch. She wouldn't approve of witches."
"Why?"
"She just wouldn't. She's very much on things being-solid. She wouldn't want to think about goblins. She—" —never liked gran's stories, he thought to himself. She was afraid of gran.
Gran wasn't like everybody else, was she? Nobody did say no to her.
God, maybe nobody could.
Maybe, he thought, maybe I could have learned magic from master Karoly, if he had wanted to teach me— but if he could have taught me ... why didn't he?
"Ela. Why didn't Karoly stop the goblins from attacking us?"
She looked at him, across the distance between their horses. "What?"
"The goblins that attacked us. Why didn't master Karoly stop them? He was with us, he saw the warnings. Why didn't he stop us? "
Ela cast a look ahead, as if she were looking at something a thousand miles away.
"Ela. Why. Didn't. He?"
"Pardon?"
"Why didn't master Karoly stop us from that road? Why didn't he work magic and protect us?"
"Because I'm not— because I couldn't. Whatever I am, I never learned, because he never taught me. Why can't you answer a plain question? You were there, weren't you? Why didn't you warn us?"
She shook her head. The air around them seemed unnaturally still and heavy. He had thought the frowns were arrogance. Or anger. But he felt uneasy now. It seemed the sunlight was less ahead. And if there was a path here he could not discern it.
"Ela?" he asked, because the spookiness of the place made him think about that road. Or maybe thinking about the road made him remember ambush too vividly. "How did Karoly do nothing to warn us?"
"Because—because the magic wanted it."
"Whose magic? Goblin magic?"
A shake of her head. "No one can know. No one can know, when magic fights magic. It could have been anyone, it could have been my mistress. It always could be anyone. Contrary magic can go anywhere. You can't tell what will happen."
'It always could be anyone.' It sounded like Karoly.
"Sometimes," Ela said, "sometimes you can't avoid things because you don't even know if you did them. Sometimes you're afraid not to do something. My mistress said-said Karoly might make things worse, she wasn't sure he should come at all, but she couldn't wait any longer. You don't know whose idea it was—her magic or the queen's. She called him, all the same. And it turned out—it turned out the way it did."
"And our going now? We don't know where, or why, but we're just going?"
"To find the center of the woods," she said, "but I don't know whose magic is leading us. I don't know who's stronger."
That was not at all a comforting thing to hear. "We're going against the queen of all the goblins and you wonder whose magic is stronger? Ela, you're not—" —Not as damned good as you think, he thought, in Nikolai's way of saying.
But was not he going where she led? And had he not reasoned half a score of times that if he had any good sense he would have gone home? And where was he now?
Looking about him at the trees, at a woods pathless to his eyes—where, indeed, was he?
"Not just me," she said faintly, "it's all the witches of the Wood. I may be the only chance they have. And I think we should go and try—because I think that, that's all. Everything they've done and everything she's done, I'm what it comes down to—so I am the greatest witch in Tajny Wood, do you understand? And I don't know whose magic brought you, but neither can the queen. Neither of us can know whose magic is working."
"Then what good is it, if no one can tell what will happen?"
"But things change. And if you do something small, it could be because of something large—and if you do something very large, you'd better know what you're doing, that's what my mistress said."
How do you do something very large? was the question that leapt to mind. If he were Karoly's working, if what she said was at all true or sane, then he wanted to challenge the situation and do something magical—please the god, that could fail outright; or prove whether he had any magic at all in him. If he was at all a wizard he could magic up an incontrovertible proof, could he not?
But then—if magic worked the way she said—one could never know. Was that not what she had just said—in all her reasoning: there's never a way to know?
Where had the damned goblin gone, and what was it up to? Bearing messages to its queen?
And why had Karoly never told him, if he was a wizard? And why had Ela said what she had said, when all this time . . . she would or could say nothing?
Has something happened? he wondered. Has something somewhere changed? And is it our magic or theirs that's brought us into this place?
Hell of a wakening. Dark and fire and something clanking in his ear. Shadows on stone ceiling. Dull pain. And that damned dog. Nikolai put up the hand that worked and shoved it away. Karoly leaned over him. For a moment he had trouble sorting it out. But the images lingered in his vision.
"Well, well," Karoly said. "Good afternoon, master huntsman."
"Damn you," he murmured. "Where were you? "
"Afoot, as happens. While you had a horse to ride on. At least a pony. Followed the dog, young Yuri says. And doesn't know where his brothers are, except he hopes they got away, he was following them in company with a troll, and he hopes they aren't the skulls in the courtyard." Karoly slipped a hand under his head and stuffed a wad of blanket behind him, then went to the fireside and poured something, which he brought back. "Drink this."
"It smells like stable sweepings."
"It's been a little through the damp, just drink it and stop complaining. You're alive. That's more than some of us can say, isn't it?"
He drank it, sip by nauseating sip. The dog had gone somewhere—where the boy was, he hoped. "Where's Yuri?"
"Asleep," Karoly was putting jars in a sack, scores of little jars, all over the table. And scattered powders and leaves and herbs. Nikolai finished the cup and set it on his chest, looking at the ceiling of what he supposed was the hall in the tower he had fainted in front of, and a fire that was not a good idea, if there were goblins about.