He had a tenuous awareness of Ela riding beside him. Ela was not thinking about home. Ela was thinking about the dark, and the hills, and the lake in his dreams, the same lake, that had been the bargain, and the point of treachery, and the home of the goblins for hundreds of years.
There was the place where wizardry lay veined in the rocks and sown into the soil and mingled with the water and the air. And in that place there was all the magic and more that a mortal could draw on and use. That was where they were going. Ela believed in evil and believed that that evil was on the side of the possessor of that lake, in a long, long series of deceptions, goblins against the witches of the Wood, and in that place, with all of that to draw on, and the mirror in her hand, what was just and right had to count for something ...
He wished it were so clear to him: evil and good had seemed so much more definable when he had thought all the evil came from goblins, and the ghost had done its best to urge that on him, but its reasoning was increasingly suspect; he wished he could recall something master Karoly had said on the matter of wickedness, but in all the years of teaching them, for the life of him, this dark morning, he could not recall a thing master Karoly had said on the subject, except that silly business of the frogs in the tackle-basket: It was not kind to them, boy. His mind fell into that memory for some reason he could not fathom. It was not kind to them.
And how did a man find his way on such thin and long-ago advice?
And what about the fish, that they had caught that very day for their supper?
Something about necessity, and doing what had to be done, and using no more of the earth than one needed ...
Spookier and spookier, Yuri thought, worse than the troll's tunnel before he had known the troll. It was not a hallway, it was not a tunnel, it was just a place he could not get out of. There was the shimmer of water on the ground, everywhere the sound of water, and the chill and the smell of water. He had never imagined such a peculiar kind of tunnel, and as for trolls, he would give a great deal for the sight of Krukczy just now. But Zadny had run past him in such a terror he could not catch him.
All of which ought to tell a boy to go back—immediately. But when he had tried that, he had found himself up against a wall of—just nothing, that felt like an edge of some kind, where you could fall and fall forever if you got overbalanced; and Zadny might have run right off it, for all he knew. He hoped not. He hoped there was not another such edge ahead—though he thought not, because the trolls seemed to have gone on through; or they had just fallen off into the dark one after the other without a yell or a protest or anything, and that was not like trolls.
But he was truly scared, now, if anyone had asked him — and ever so glad when he suddenly saw a light ahead, a hazy glow toward which he was walking.
And brighten, the pathway did, until there was a ceiling and there were walls as well as a floor—all rippling with water-patterns, and light beyond that watery surface, the way a pond might look if he was walking along the bottom, in some great bubble, and looking up at me sun.
It was water when he looked back, and when he went near the walls, they shimmered as if the bubble he was in might collapse. That scared him.
But he did not see any way to go but straight ahead, and if somebody like the goblin queen was doing this he did not want to give her any ideas about collapsing the bubble around him. And thinking about it might make it happen, if this place was like dreams, as it seemed to be. So he walked, quickly as he could.
Then—he could not be sure at first—there seemed to be someone standing in the watery uncertainties of the hallway, a long, long distance in front of him. He wondered if it was his own reflection he was seeing. Or it might be a goblin. But even when he stopped walking that figure looked as if it was moving closer. And when he blinked to be sure he saw it, it had moved closer still, seeming like someone he knew very well, who just should not be here. Whether he walked toward it or not, it just kept coming; and looked more and more like Bogdan. It did look exactly like Bogdan; and he should have been ever, ever so glad—he would have been; but Bogdan did not smile, Bogdan did not meet him with open arms like a brother, or act astonished to see him, or even ask him how he had come here.
Bogdan only said, as if he were mildly disappointed:
"I expected Tamas."
Hour upon hour the stars stayed overhead, the same stars that shone down on Maggiar, as far as Tamas could tell; and the pole stars had not moved in all the time they had been riding. But he did not know how that could possibly be—unless the very sky was standing still even in Maggiar, and unless lord Sun himself had no power to break the witch's hold—in which case his own family and every farmer in Maggiar and lands clear to the great sea must have wakened in confusion this morning, must be huddling together, hour by hour of this darkness, looking up at the stars and wondering at the meaning of it and whether there would be another sunrise.
But Ela commented quietly, as they rode side by side among the goblins: "Nothing changes here. The stars don't move. It's the same hour. It's always the same hour. That's the spell she's cast. Until that changes, nothing can."
She need not have spoken aloud. He was hearing her thinking just then, and wishing he did not, because in her thoughts was something about this not being a part of the present world they were traveling in, and it not having b«en a part of the present world ever since they had entered the Wood.
He was not sure of that. He thought about what master Karoly had said, how one thing touches everything—and recalled the deer ravaging the woods, and the store rooms piled high with furs, and the spring failing to come ... all this silent colloquy, while they rode above the fires in the valley, all this, while they rode in a serene high hills quiet. He thought, All this is there. What we do here, reflects there. Like the mirror ... it's all one mirror, and which side is the reflection, and which is true?
Riders burst past, with that strange thump of pads and scraping of their horses' claws. The last reined back to ride by them, to Lwi's offense. "Itra'hi are out there," Azdra'ik said out of the shadows. "Sniffing around the hills. I don't think they'll dare come at us. We're going right where their mistress would have us. I don't know what she has to complain of."
Disquieting thought.
"Unless you'd like to change your minds," Azdra'ik added. "We can still retreat."
"I don't see we'd gain anything." Tamas felt constrained to give a civil answer while the ghost or his own fear clamored otherwise; and he had lost a thought, confound the creature, but for some reason he found himself adding: "Possibly the queen can make a mistake."
"Oh, the queen makes many mistakes. But so few can take advantage of them."
"Maybe we will."
"The night the mirror failed," Azdra'ik said lightly, "the morning failed. And for two days thereafter. Witches and wizards knew. But the world never did. Did it? Do your old men say?"
It cast his calculations into disorder and agreed with Ela's way of thinking. "You mean no one elsewhere even noticed?"
"Except within her power—as we clearly are. This is a night of her making. This is the goblin night. This is the goblin realm you've crossed into. And she rules it absolutely. To do other than she wills is a difficult matter. Will you still challenge her? "