"What about a witch?"
"Young witch. Belongs here."
"Her apprentice," Karoly said, and got up and paced as far as the door to the outside. "Damn! her apprentice ... that's who. That's who! I couldn't see her!"
Who what? Yuri wondered, but it was Nikolai who dared ask it.
"Who are you talking about?"
Master Karoly turned about, and it was a frighteningly different old man, it was not the amiable master Karoly who had shown him the weather-glass, it was an angry man whose sister was dead outside, who had seen friends struck from ambush, and who had walked for days to get here.
"A young and desperate fool," he said, and cast himself down again by the fire. "God, god—she might have taken it. I'd forgotten all about her."
"Taken what?" Nikolai asked.
"What she has no business on earth to have in her hands. But if I weren't here, if she did survive ..."
"What?" Nikolai asked, but Karoly shushed him and stared into the fire and thought and thought.
Yuri ate a cold bit of fish. And another. The troll said that one of his brothers was alive. And the way Zadny was after the trail, it might be Tamas—he hoped it was Tamas. He did not know if that was wicked or not, but he liked Tamas better. »
But if it was Bogdan, he was still not going back without him. He watched Karoly, and waited, and so did Nikolai, uncommonly patient with master Karoly.
Yuri sucked his fingers clean of fish, and held the bones in a napkin on his lap, waiting; but finally he saw master Nikolai lean his back against the wall, seeming in pain; and he said, very so quietly, "You should go to bed, sir, I'll wait up. I need to talk to master Karoly anyway. I'm not going back."
Nikolai frowned darkly at him, cradling his wounded arm.
"It's my brother, sir."
"My god, your father should take a stick to your backside!"
"The boy belongs here," Karoly said.
"What do you mean he belongs here?" Nikolai cried, and winced. "Lord Sun, Karoly, your wits are addled."
"My wits are in excellent form, master huntsman." Master Karoly had pulled a twig from the bit of wood he added to the fire, and he stripped bark from it with his thumbnail. "If the boy went back now, he would be in worse danger. There are things abroad that would smell him out in a moment."
"We're not safe company," Nikolai said.
"No. Nor is he. Nor is my sister's apprentice." Master Karoly's mouth made a tight line as he tied the bit of cedar in a cross, and split it further. It made, Yuri realized of a sudden, the shape of a man.
Karoly cast it into the fire.
"Why did you do that?" Yuri asked.
"One pays," Karoly said. "One at least acknowledges the obligation to pay. Be polite with the gods. These are dangerous places."
"No riddles," Nikolai said. "I'm full to the teeth with riddles, master trickster. No more flummery. Where is Tamas, what did the apprentice take, and where are they going?"
"In over his head, a bit of mirror, and the heart of hell. Now do you know what I'm talking about?"
Two grown men were about to argue and nothing was going to get done. "Please," Yuri said. "What about mirrors, master Karoly?"
Karoly looked him in the eyes so long he felt the silence grow, but Krukczy the troll rumbled,
"Mirror of the goblin queen."
"A fragment of it," Karoly said. He had pulled another twig and peeled it, turning it in his fingers. "A fragment of the goblin queen's mirror. It has the power of delusion, the power of bewitchment. . . the power of misleading and confusion and seeming."
"Where is it?"
"It used to be here. Since it isn't, I can only hope the apprentice has it. I can only hope my sister warned the girl what it is, and most of ail what it isn't."
"For the god's sake," Nikolai said, "in words without their tails in their mouths—what does the thing do? Or what doesn't it?"
"It doesn't make clever out of foolish, it doesn't rescue lambs from the slaughter, and it doesn't help a mouse catch a cat."
"What can it do?"
"Too damned much to have it wandering the countryside. When the mirror cracked, a goblin carried one shard to the upper world, so I had the story. That was a long, long time ago."
"Young mistress got it," Krukczy said.
"Did she, now?" Master Karoly lifted his brows and stared at the troll,
"Young mistress took it from the goblin. A present. A long, long time ago."
"What does he mean?" Nikolai asked.
"It means I know now how it came to my sister. Urzula never said. Damn."
"Urzula never said?" Nikolai asked.
Gran? Yuri wondered. Our gran? Meanwhile Karoly nodded to Nikolai's question and chewed on the twig, staring into the fire. "I wish the girl had waited. I do wish shahad waited."
"Young witch came to my tower," Krukczy said, "to find brothers. One fell to the river, down with rocks. I give him to her."
"ItwTamas," Nikolai said.' (He and his horse went down the slide."
Yuri drew in a breath. He remembered the road and those sharp rocks from the bottom side, as it slanted down and down toward the stream that flowed past Krukczy Straz. But Tamas was alive, even Nikolai believed it, now! He rested his arm on his knee and his fist against his mouth, trying not to ask silly questions while his elders were thinking, which they clearly were,
"I don't like this," Karoly said. "It doesn't have a good feeling at all. That fragment is moving."
"Moving where?" Nikolai asked.
"Toward its owner. It's been in a safe place all these years. The goblins were no present threat. Now the girl's missed me and gotten Tamas, and they've taken the piece and gone east, no question but what it's east ..."
"Goblin follows them," Krukczy said. "I smell him in this room."
"Ng'Saeich," Karoly murmured, or something like that, and Karoly's jaw stayed open, twig and all. "God. That scoundrel! Of course he is!"
"Who?" Yuri asked, he could not help it.
"The thief, of course, the thief, damn him! The fools murdered her and they probably didn't even know who she was. They didn't care. But he knew. He knew, damn him, he felt it the same as I, and he beat me here!"
"I need to speak with you," Nikolai said to Karoly, in that way grown-ups had when they wanted boys out of earshot.
Karoly said, "The boy is going with us. There's no choice now."
"How far is he going to make it? To a den of goblins? To what the rest of us made it to? What they did to your sister and her servant. . . god, they probably ate them, man, this is not an enemy who'll fight fair."
"Neither do I," Karoty said, and spat a bit of the twig, that hissed in the fire. "Neither would my sister. That's why I won't bury her. Go to bed. Both of you. You'll not dream tonight."
"I thought we were going after my brother!" Yuri protested. He did not understand what Nikolai and Karoly were arguing about. He did understand Tamas and a witch's apprentice being somewhere in the forest and someone named ng'Saeich looking for the piece of mirror they were carrying. Most of all he understood what he had seen in the yard, and that goblins had done it. "What about Bogdan? What about Jerzy and Zev and Filip? What about. . . ?"
"In the morning," Karoly said. "In the morning we'll go, and go quickly. Don't wake for any sound you hear. —Master Krukczy. Watch the deep ways. And take the dog. He'd be better with you tonight."
"Master Karoly," Yuri protested, upset and angry. But Karoly got up, making a shadow above him, and caught his face painfully in his hand, after which Yuri found his eyes closing.
"There's too much, too much to explain. Go to bed, boy."
Yuri found himself doing that without knowing why or remembering quite what they had been saying. He only remembered Zadny after he had gotten to the pallet master Karoly had made him in the wreckage of the hall.