"Don't dare," he said. "Don't you dare. You were left with a weapon, girl, a damned important one, by the commotion everyone's making over it. Azdra'ik wants it. Do you want him to have it? Or what are you going to do with it, now the first try's gone bad?"
"If mistress' brother hadn't gotten killed—if you were any help, but, no, you were off in the woods—if anything mistress told me had worked the way it was supposed to—"
"That's not the point either. What are you going to do to him?"
"You've no right to talk to me that way!"
She was the most maddening creature he had ever met, but the goblin lord himself. He was at the end of reason, and sanity. "Then take the horse," he said, not even angry now, only reckoning what he would be worth, and how long he would last as an obstacle once Azdra'ik caught up, or the patrol did. Longer, he thought, if he could get clear of Ela, by going afoot, and maintain whatever magical echoes Azdra'ik said confused goblin pursuers. "Just take the horse, get out of here, and good luck to you. I'm tired, I'm just very tired, Ela. If you're going to be a fool, go do it by yourself."
"I'm not a fool," she said, her chin trembling. "She didn't tell me how it was going to be, she just said it would work, go and do this and this and this, and if that didn't work—if that didn't work, I had to find a place where magic was . . . and we can't get into the Wood in the right place, I can't find the center of it—I don't know what to do!"
Her mistress was a liar, her witchcraft was a muddle of truth, misinstruction and guesswork, and nothing in her life had prepared Ela to guess for herself. Entirely reasonable that she offered no answers and no reasons, he thought: she had none for herself. And such chances as he had to take, he could not do with a fifteen-year-old girl hanging around his neck.
But another sort of coming-to-senses occurred to him, seeing she wanted to act the child: he pulled her up by the wrist, took her face between his hands and kissed the second pair of lips he had ever kissed, neither kindly nor gently, intending to finish it with a cold Goodbye, I "m leaving—after which, in his fondest and most foolish imagination, she would come running to his heels and ask his help; or at least grow up a week or two.
But came a curious giddy feeling—it might be the mirror or it might be something as mundane as his lack of sleep. He grew short of breath; Ela's arm had arrived somehow about his neck and he found himself doing exactly what the ghost had done—passing on what had happened to him. He began to draw back in dismay, but the look in her eyes was as astonished, as bewildered and as frightened as he had been, and her fingers were knotted into his collar and the fist with the mirror was clenched into his sleeve.
"I'm sorry," he found breath to say—from which beginning he did not know how to get to Goodbye. He blurted out, "I'll get you to your horse," and bundled her downslope where he had left Skory tied.
"I don't know where we're going," she said, putting the chain over her head.
"Where you're going," he said, and untied the reins.
"I am not!"
"Just get on the horse," he said, and faced her toward Skory's saddle. "Don't argue. And be careful. Azdra'ik's out there looking for you."
She had her foot in the stirrup. He shoved at a clinging mass of skirt and cloak, and she landed astride, with a frightened grasp of his hand.
"What have you to do with him?" she demanded. "What happened to you? —Where were you?"
"I met a ghost," he said, and intended to give Skory's rump a whack. But she still held his hand.
"Whose ghost?"
"Ylena. That was what Azdra'ik said. He said she owed him a wish. It was me he asked for, or I don't know what would have happened." Skory's restlessness was pulling at them, scattering shale from underfoot, and he had to move a pace to keep up with her. "Get out of here."
"No. —No, I'm not going without you, I need you!"
"That isn't what you said."
"I never said, I never said that. I tried to bring you back— I did bring you back, and you can't leave!"
"You worked magic on me? You put a spell on me?"
"I brought you back! I brought you out of the woods, I rescued you! You can't leave, I won't let you!"
Wait and see, was on his lips to say. That she had bespelled Him was treachery. But the touch of her mouth was on his lips, and maybe it was a spelclass="underline" he was still moving beside Skory's drift, with her stupidly holding his hand.
"That's why I couldn't stay," Ela protested, "that's why I couldn't find you, I couldn't work in that age of the Wood ... Ylena's the worst ghost we could meet! She's the witch who started the curse! She wants the magic! —Tarn, you can't stay here, you can't stay near this place, neither of us can! She's too powerful in the Wood, mistress didn't know that. She wants the mirror, that's what's gone wrong— She's planned this forever—"
He all but tripped over a bush trying to keep up with the mare, and fell behind, but no longer with the notion of going back and disputing passage with a goblin. He began to follow at Skory's tail, with the deep woods of yesternight too close in memory, and a shadow whispering in the dark, saying that there was no freedom from the magic the witches of the Wood had already made.
"So where else can we go? Do you know?" They were not headed back into the woods, but further along the hillside. "Ela?"
(A place of power, Tamas. My place is strongest, and safest. They dare not kill me, by the spell that binds them here, they dare not—I am your ally, if you would only listen. . . .)
He stumbled, so clear the voice was to him, like a memory of something he had never heard, something that had to do with that place behind his eyelids. He was cold through and through, he was lost in dark—
Azdra'ik! he called in that dark territory, and for a heartbeat believed Azdra'ik his hope and his safety—but that was a fool's thought, a dangerous thought—god, if Azdra'ik should have heard him ... if the witch had ...
God, no, he had escaped that embrace once—he had no desire to court it again, no desire even to think about it. He overtook Skory and limped at Ela's side. The sky had gone to milk and brass. His chest bumed, and from brass the sky went to palest violet against the ragged shadow of the pines. Ela drew Skory to a walk in the slight cover of the trees, and he found a saddle-tie to hold to, half-blind with exhaustion, stumbling on the crumbling shale—while something within him said, dark and cold as night—Tamas. You can trust me. It's my own interest, Tamas, as well as yours, your defeating her is in my interest, and I've no quarrel with the girl-Listen to me, Tamas. . . .
Curse all witches who made this folly, he thought in distraction. Curse the ignorant witch who had taught Ela by guess and by supposition: he had that clear now, too: Ela had had reason to be distraught, realizing of a sudden that all her resources were unreliable—so she looked to him?
Gran, he thought, and could all but see that charm-hung tomb in the rocks of Maggiar: Oh, gran, if spells are at work here—if her mistress has lied—if one ghost can harm us—I know you wouldn't. Can you hear me, gran, where you are? I need you, if you can hear me.
Foolish way of thinking—expecting magic, thinking that gran could possibly hear him ... he was down to such boyish imaginings.
But would not magic work that way? Was that not what a wizard was for—to demand the impossible of the world?
The peasants did—the country-folk came with their barley-straw men and their offerings of food and their requests for children ...
What had gran to do with that? What had gran to do with them?
If gran's ghost could come back, she would stand between him and that apparition of bone and shadow—gran would never abide threats against what she called her own.
But where did he begin thinking such foolish things? As a shield against the dark? As a wizard-wish? Or a boy's longing for gran's stories not to have been lies—when everything around him spoke of desolation and death. Gran's sunlit woods, gran's bright towers and gran's fields and villages and gran's faery. When was it so? Why fill her grandsons' heads with such hopeless, bare-faced fables? Was it an obligation of witches to deceive? Was that all that magic was? He had never felt that in Karoly.