So Yuri straightened around and kept a calm face, watching his brother betray Tamas, and Maggiar, and everything and everyone he knew.
Which hurt—hurt worse than anything anybody had ever done to him. It was not a thing boys did. It was something a man did, and that man was a brother of his—which made him somehow dirty, too, and responsible, and completely desperate to find a way out of this trap to warn the people he cared about.
Like finding Tamas, he thought. Tamas was older. Tamas would know what to do first and where to go.
He stood there in a goblin's keeping until Bogdan decided to take him back. Bogdan took him down the hall, past the fantastical lilies and the carved fish and the monsters that lurked in the stone, while a trail of excited lights tried to keep up with them.
"We've got to find Tamas before he undoes everything," Bogdan said as they went. "He's around here somewhere. Come on! Fool!"
They walked a corridor of strange watery darkness, and Tamas asked himself, alone with goblins and the consequences of his confusion, whether he was entirely sane. The ghost had ceased to trouble him, inside, for the moment—Ylena was visible now, apart from him, walking ahead of them— at least he fancied he could see her from time to time, at the instant the eye had to blink: most horrible in aspect, a tattered figure of a woman, all bones and gauze.
"Ylena," he said to Azdra'ik, as the only one who might understand his distress. "I can't be rid of her."
"I see her," Azdra'ik said. "The pretentious baggage. A tag-along."
"More than that, damn it." Azdra'ik had a way of provoking the ghost, and he flinched, expecting its spite.
Azdra'ik said, close by his ear, grasping his arm. "She fears dying—and die she will, if ever goblins leave the earth again. That was the term of her long life. You should be wary of that. Promise her you don't intend to banish us."
He heard that, and his heart gave a thump, as if he were being threatened into an agreement more important than his distracted wits could surround at the moment.
What does he want of me?
"Ask that favor of Eia," he said. "What have I to do with it?"
"As the residence of a power that can damn us? As Ylena's means into the queen's hall? A great deal. I gave her the secret of the mirror and the woman blames me that she was a fool—not my fault, I say."
He was trying to understand Azdra'ik's position. But the witch hovered near him, there at the edge of every blink, a shadowy swirl of living anger. "Let be. Don't quarrel with her."
"Oh, not with her, man, with her successors. Given the choice, your young witch out there—"
A shiver went through the floor—but the tremor was more than in the earth, it was a shock within his heart. A desire that was Ela's. A solitude that was Ela's, overwhelming the ghost's faded spite. This was now. This was imminent danger.
"Someone," Azdra'ik said, "just gained the queen's attention."
"Ela!" He jerked his arm away from Azdra'ik's grip and at once felt an edge near his foot.
"Fool!" Azdra'ik caught him as another tremor ran through the tunnel, making the reflections shimmer—and he did not fall, only by the intervention of Azdra'ik's hand.
And the silence that followed the shaking was smothering. He tried to free himself.
"Be calm, be calm." Azdra'ik released his arm slowly. "You can so easily fall here, man, you can fall to something like death—you can drown in the queen's imagination. Or in the queen's all-demanding will, which I personally count worse."
"Ela's under attack."
"Did you expect not? I asked you—take the mirror. I pleaded with you, take the mirror. Now—now you have second thoughts. The war is launched, man. There is no disengagement. And for good or ill, the mirror shard belongs to the fledgling."
"The witch with a wizard consort," another said, close at hand—which startled him: few of the goblins seemed to have human speech.
"With a wizard consort," Azdra'ik agreed. "That's true. That's never been. It may make a difference, that she wants him more than the queen does."
"She has no consort! Don't assume—"
"Man, you echo of it. The whole mirror does. Do you think we're deaf?"
He was surrounded by goblins, and Ela's presence ran through him like hammer-blows, shock after shock to his bones. He saw only fierce, expectant faces in the dim, watery light, and suddenly—suddenly a sense of that presence so vivid there was no difference between him and her, no housing left for the ghost that clamored outside. He saw into somewhere he could not see with his eyes, into a hall . . . but he could not make it clear. It shimmered—
The lake ... god, the kike, Ela!
One thing touches everything. One thing affects everything. They wanted the lake, Ela, everything for the lake— that is the mirror, in our realm—
"Man!" Azdra'ik cautioned him. "Man, listen to me."
There was light, watery reflections glancing and bouncing off the floor. The way ahead looked like a bubble in the sun. He rubbed his eyes, and started walking with Azdra'ik and his companions about him.
Came a cold touch at his shoulder. Too late for recriminations, he said to the ghost's nagging at him. We're here, madam. We've no chance to be anywhere else. Shut up!
It did not like to be addressed that way. He felt its anger.
And will you die? he flung back at it. We all can die. Easier than not, at this point.
It did not want to be here. The queen wanted it to be here, it believed that beyond a doubt, now. It had touched him, it had tried to hold him and it had gotten swept up in the current of spells—
—of spells ages old and more powerful than she understood. The ghost had kissed an innocent to steal his life and found something far from innocent; she blamed him for that, she railed on him for that, she suspected him of wizardly complicities she could not find ...
Consort, the goblins had said. The witches of the Wood had no such thing. There had been no wizards in Ylena's time ...
But in gran's, he thought distractedly, there was Karoly ...
Fear broke forth in Ela, then a regathered collectedness, as the air in their very faces began to shimmer like the air above a forge: the water-patterns shimmered violently, and then stopped. They faced a man and a band of goblins that reached instantly for swords.
But it was himself, his own startlement, their own reflections, that dissolved into ripples of light and pattern, as if someone had cast a stone into water.
"Tamas?" a boy's voice called out—a boy's shape was the new image it was taking. Yuri's image looked out at him— touched the invisible surface, and made it ripple, but no more than that, and, for a boy Tamas knew beyond a doubt was home and safe—lord Sun, it looked and sounded so very real.
"Tamas!"
"Is it a lie?" he asked Azdra'ik. "He's not here! He's safe over-mountain!"
Yuri's reflection shook its head, remarkable in the likeness that pulled at his heart. "Zadny got away. I followed him and I got here—Bogdan's here. —But don't believe—"
The mirror shimmered violently and something snatched Yuri out of his sight.
Goblin hands snatched Tamas back, on his side, or he would have followed.
"Let me go!"
"Don't," Azdra'ik said, "don't be a fool. It's the mirror that governs such things. Make it give the vision back!"
"I don't know if I want it!"
"Then know!" Azdra'ik shouted at him. "Know once and for all, man, you've few other chances. Will you race it? Yes or no!"
"I want it back!" he cried.
The shimmering steadied, and Yuri came bursting through it, sprawled flat and looked up, still as a fawn before the hunters, his expression all dismay and desperation.