And once that night he opened his eyes to think that a stranger stood near him. He thought it was a woman. He could not say why. He only knew whoever it was, was angry, and looking for someone who was not him.
Whoever it was brushed his hair with its hand and went away. He shivered after that. He had no idea why it had scared him, since none of the anger was aimed at him. But he was afraid, all the same.
The boy was quiet—exhausted, Nikolai could think, except he had the evidence of magic in himself with every breath he took. He kept expecting the pain to come back. The memory of it was so vivid he expected it to return if he so much as shifted his back against the wedge of blankets between him and the corner. And he had never given that much credence to the old man's abilities, true, but he had never forgotten the lady. He had tried to tell himself all his life it had only been a boy's imagination that had tingled through his bones that night and spooked him down the stairs—and that the pain in his arm was fading steadily was all very fine, he supposed, but no one had consulted him in it. It had been his pain and it was still his arm, and he sat there in a witch's ruined hall with the acute feeling he had had something thoroughly unpleasant done to him, but he could not swear to what; and the equally acute feeling that he both knew and had never known the old man across the room.
He watched Karoly throw a log on the fire, watched Karoly press his ear to the stone of the fireplace and shake his head as if he did not like what he had heard. Karoly patted the stone as if it were alive, then pottered about some more, putting their pans away into the packs. Finally he came and sat down on the bench next to the bed. The fire cast a halo around the old man and the shadow fell on Nikolai's face, making him feel, for some reason, cornered.
"How's the arm?" Karoly asked.
"All right," he said. "Twinges." Which was the truth. The old man's magic was not perfect. "—So what do we do about the boy?"
"Nothing we can do." Karoly was still chewing that bit of twig, and made it turn in his mouth. "When magic works it pulls things. If something's going the way its various parts are, it's safer for that particular something, you understand?"
"You mean the boy going with us."
"I mean you going with us. Leave us and you'll be goblin bait by morning. The boy has to go where everything else goes—getting him away from the magic at work in this land would be impossible."
"Impossible! Tell me 'impossible!' " He remembered the boy asleep and dropped his voice. "I can get him home. Trust me!"
"Not a chance. He'd come back, probably because you were dead. You're alive now because of him, and don't ask me why. I don't know everything."
"But you know that, do you? You're so damned sure of that? One of Stani's boys is wandering around the woods—"
"One of Stani's boys is in serious trouble. Shut up and listen, master huntsman. Tomorrow morning, at the crack of dawn or just before, I want you to take the boy and the horse and the dog and get outside the gates. I may join you. If I don't, and you don't like the look of things, head east, bearing along the wall. Krukczy will go with you."
Something about not fighting fair. The skulls in the yard. And not burying his sister.
"What are you up to? What's this—'take the boy'? Where will you be?"
"Tomorrow will tell, won't it? Behind you, in one sense or the other."
He did not like that in the least, either. "Take the boy and do what?"
"Find Tamas. I'll find you, if I can. I think my sister forgave me. We'll find out tomorrow."
"What do you mean—find out? Isn't she dead?"
"Oh, she's dead. Dead without a stroke struck or a goblin suffering for it, and that's not her style, not Ysabel." Karoly took the twig from his mouth and spat a piece at the floor. "Raising a ghost—you never know what you'll get; that's the trouble."
"Is she around here?" The room seemed too full of shadows. "Is she listening to us?" It was deeper into magic and wizards' business than he ever wanted to delve, but Karoly said, so quietly the snap of embers seemed to echo in the halclass="underline"
"I don't get that feeling. That's why I don't know how much of her I can get back. Sometimes it's just a piece or two. That's the danger."
"What's the danger?"
"Of only the anger coming back."
An ember popped. Nikolai jumped, and the shoulder sent a warning ache. Karoly looked about him with an absent stare, and spat another bit of twig.
"Was that her?"
"That's the other problem with ghosts. Ysabel, Ytresse ... I wouldn't put it past any of them."
"Who? Put what past them?"
"The witches. Doing anything. I went to live over-mountain. My sister refused to deal with me after that. But she spent everything to call me home. She deserved her revenge. No one should die like that."
"And you brought the boys into this? You led us down that damned road and you knew all along what was going on here?"
"Keep your voice down. No, I didn't know what was going on here, I dreamed it, and there's a difference."
"What difference? You saw that marker!"
"And what could we do, then? Get back across the pass, with no supplies? Wait for the goblins to invade Maggiar? We were as close to their source as we might ever get—as close to the only place anyone can stop them, and close to the one who might have done it, with my help. But I wasn't in time."
"In time for your sister? What could you have done?"
"That's to be seen. That's still to be seen. —Let me tell you a story, master huntsman, if you care to hear it. Someone but me should know the truth."
He frowned and waited. Anything that made sense of the business, he was willing to hear—but he had limited faith the old man would make any.
"Some hundreds of years ago," Karoly said, "many hundreds of years ago, in fact, before there even was a Maggiar, there was a queen in over-mountain, and a tower at Hasel. The queen in Hasei had a daughter named Ylena. And nothing was good enough for Ylena. In her household, she had golden tables, and silver plates. Even her bed was silver and her washbasin was gold set with jewels ..."
"This sounds like one of those tales," Nikolai muttered.
"Of course, but that's Ylena the tales talk about. They don't know it's Ylena, but I assure you it is. Nothing but the best. And being a princess, as well as a witch—"
"Were all of them witches?" It seemed to him that essential things were being left out. A bard, Karoly was not. "Or was it just Ylena?"
"Oh, mostly they were. The queens of over-mountain all knew the arts to one degree or another. Anyhow, the queen discovered one day what a truly vain and ungrateful princess Ylena was, and she worried and worried about this."
"Too late," Nikolai interjected. "She should have taken a switch to the brat."
"Far too late for that. Ylena would ruin the land when she became queen, and queen Mirela, knowing that ... looked for some magical solution: a failing in lazy witches. So she went to the goblins."
"Just like that? Walked up to the front door and knocked?"
"Oh, being a witch, Mirela rattled a few dark doors at night, some few that wiser witches wouldn't touch. Remember, she wasn't a particularly wise witch. She'd brought up Ylena. But she was a desperate witch, and good-hearted. And the goblin queen, in exchange for a promise of access to the world of men for one night a year, gave queen Mirela a potion that would assure her youth and beauty. The usual bargain. So queen Mirela came back young and beautiful and healthy enough to reign forty years more at least. Ylena was furious."
"Naturally Ylena worked a sped against her."
"No, not immediately. It was a very powerful magic that surrounded her mother, and if you go against something that strong without knowing exactly the terms of it, you can do yourself harm. So Ylena waited a whole year until that night the goblins could come into the land, and approached their queen to ask her how to get the throne. So what was a little treachery against one's mother? And what was murder? Because Mirela had asked for youth and beauty, not a charmed life. So Ylena promised the goblin queen a whole year of access to human lands, when she should rule, in return for that advice. And that let the goblins into human lands again."