“I’m going to stay with you, I promise,” she croaked.
“No, you’re not—not if you’re needed here, soon as you’re old enough. I’ve been watching you changing, Til, more than you realize, I daresay. It’s like he was saying about his magic when he started—it was what he was for. It’ll be a waste of you, having something like what you’ve got in the Valley, where there’s nothing for you to do with it. It’ll eat into your heart, knowing what you could be doing. Right, aren’t I—like it would be for you, mister, not being able to do your magic?”
Through her tears Tilja could see the lean face of the Ropemaker watching her. He nodded slowly.
“And you’d like her back, wouldn’t you?” Meena insisted. “She’d be a bit of use to you?”
He nodded again.
“Mind you, if you could do something about this leg of mine I’m going to have when I get home,” she suggested. “And if Alnor could see right . . .”
Oh, yes! Tilja thought. Why hadn’t she . . . but the Ropemaker was shaking his head sadly.
“Not up to it,” he said. “Like to help, but . . . mean messing around with time again. Don’t know enough, not yet. You two, you’re young now—don’t know how he did that—tweaked something, somehow, way beyond me. Be in the rope somewhere— daren’t touch it, not till it’s finished. Tricky, don’t you see?”
“I suppose so,” said Meena with a sigh. “Well, we’ll just have to make the most of what we’ve got, as usual. You’re leaving us, then.”
“Better. Stuff happening in the Pirrim Hills. Pines aren’t holding it—not since what you did at Lord Kzuva’s palace. Gets through, those three ladies are going to have their work cut out. Give ’em a hand, maybe. Got to start somewhere, eh? This bit’s under control—try and keep it that way, then move on. Just do a spot of hunting for you first, right. Back soon.”
With a twist of his wrist he unloosed his turban. His amazing hair shot out round him in a swirling cloud that shrank, thickened, became beast-shaped and solidified into a gaunt angular creature, somewhere between a fox and a wolf, but with a fiery orange hide. It grinned at them, its long tongue lolling from between savage jaws, and loped into the dusk.
While they waited they fetched water from the old cistern and rebuilt the fire. By the time it was truly blazing the creature was back, dragging the body of a small deer over its shoulder. It laid it down, shook itself like a dog shaking water out of itself, but instead of a spatter of droplets it shook out the same swirling cloud as before, which then gathered itself back into the shape of the Ropemaker. He took out a hunting knife and deftly gutted, skinned and jointed his prey, then sliced the liver for Meena and Tilja to roast on pointed sticks while he lashed a spit together so that they could turn the larger pieces over the heat.
When they had eaten, the Ropemaker rose, belched and stood looking down at them. The firelight flickered off his bony features. For once he looked like what he really was, a man with immense, strange powers.
“Needn’t keep watch,” he said. “Put a fence round you. Don’t you touch it, Tilja—won’t stand that. Sleep well. Good luck.”
He vanished.
“And the same to you,” said Meena to the space where he had been.
They woke at first light. Meena rose and groped her way blearily toward the nearest bushes, but stopped in midstride. Tilja saw her push with her hands against empty space.
“Wait a moment,” Tilja said, and walked up beside her, and on, feeling only the slight, indescribable flicker of a piece of structured magic falling apart. Meena, still pressing against the unseen obstacle, almost fell over.
“Might’ve warned me,” she grumbled, and stumbled on. In the early mornings she was always most like old Meena, sulky and hazed with sleep.
The sun had barely risen when they made their way into the forest by the same route as before, and then walked and scrambled and walked all morning. At first it was worryingly slow going. Though Meena could sense the general direction, she didn’t of course know any exact route, in the way that she had known the route from Woodbourne to the lake. Sometimes they could walk side by side over almost level ground, between majestic old trees that soared up, branchless for thirty feet or more, with a leaf canopy above dense enough to inhibit undergrowth. Here they could talk, or sing for the pleasure of it. But then they would reach a place where a patch of even older trees had been struck down by some winter gale, knocking their neighbors over in their fall, leaving an impenetrable barrier of tangled trunks and branches. Or else the ground would become more broken and they would find themselves trapped at the bottom of a narrowing valley ending in crags too steep to climb, and they would have to turn back and look for another route.
Around midday they had just made their way dispiritedly out of such a place when Meena halted and peered at the ground, moved to her left, peered again and knelt.
“See there?” she said, pointing at a patch of bare earth.
Tilja knelt beside her to look. The print was very faint. It was extraordinary that Meena should have noticed it at all. Not slotted, like a deer’s. Too small for a horse. Anyway, a horse here? . . . No.
“A unicorn,” she whispered. “How did you . . . ?”
“Felt something,” said Meena. “They’ve been here—not just once, neither, or I wouldn’t’ve noticed. It’s one of their paths. Must go somewhere. Let’s hope.”
She rose and walked on, slowly at first, but then more confidently. After a while she started to sing, not any known song, such as they had been singing together earlier, but the same almost shapeless, wavering, quiet chant that Tilja had last heard her singing when the raft had been floating down the canyon and Meena had sat with Alnor’s head in her lap and sung to the unseen unicorns among the trees. The invisible path wound to and fro, weaving past the obstacles that had so held them up that morning, but steadily—Meena said—heading toward the lake.
Nothing else happened all day. Tilja found it very wearisome—not the hours of walking—she was used to that after all these weeks—but the endless, dull sameness of trees, the shadowy stillness, with never an open vista, never a glimpse of sky, and besides that an even vaguer oppression which after a while she guessed must be coming from the forest itself. She had never felt it at Woodbourne, but there she had only twice gone deep in among the trees, and both times she had been too taken up with surface events to think about her own feelings. Moreover, since then she herself had changed, grown, become aware of what she was and what she could do, and with that had come a greater awareness of things she might not have noticed before. So, now, just as in the pinewoods in the Pirrim Hills, she knew that she was sensing the magic of the forest itself. This time, though, it was not trying to overwhelm her. It was simply there, pressing in against her, a different kind of magic from any that she could deal with, diffuse and huge.
One of Faheel’s friends, she wondered? She didn’t think so. It didn’t feel like anybody’s friend, and didn’t respond when she tried, in her mind, to tell it about Faheel. It was itself.
She would have liked to talk to Meena about this, but Meena didn’t want to talk. She wanted to sing. She actually said as much when Tilja spoke to her during one of their rests.
“No, leave me be, love. I’m just about getting through to them, maybe.”
She was talking about the unicorns, Tilja guessed, or perhaps the cedars. There was no way she could help with that, except by not interrupting. All she could do was trudge wearily on.
Sleep in a tree, the Ropemaker had suggested. The trees were not of the sort you could climb, but they managed it in another way. Toward dusk they came to a cedar grove where something, lightning, perhaps, had riven one of the old giants apart all down one side but left it standing. The crack was wider and deeper at the base, leaving a small cave in the heart of the trunk. Beasts must have laired in there from time to time. There were a few bears in the forest, and solitary wolves, and other hunters, but none, by the smell, had been there recently. They broke and dragged fallen branches to the place and built a crude barrier across the entrance—nothing that would keep a hungry bear out but enough at least to make it wake them as it demolished the obstacle.