The herd was closer than it had been yesterday. They cocked their ears at the sound of the whistle. They were all different colors, bay, black, grey, and sorrel, none of them red roan. But they had the same light step, the same delicate noses and wide-spaced eyes as Bonfire. When Paul whistled again they turned as one and ran, manes and tails floating behind them.
V
A week passed. The second day the nixie became petulant, and I told her brusquely, “I’m sorry, Lady, but we aren’t interested.”
“Then you’ll have to stay here the rest of your lives,” she said, not smiling at all. I turned my back on her, and in a minute she went away and did not come back.
In the following days, the air seemed less sensuous, still soft and perfumed but without the overwhelming sweetness it had had when we first arrived. Languor seemed to have overtaken Lucas completely. If pressed, he would admit that his ankle was healing, but mostly he slept and ate fruit. Vor too lapsed into inactivity.
Paul and I however remained occupied. Every morning, he determinedly trotted around the grove twenty times. He also continued trying to attract the horses; by the fourth day they approached rather than ran at the sound of his whistle, but they still remained well back, snorting and flicking their tails nervously. And I wrestled with the nixie’s magic.
I felt a desperate urgency to be back home, to stop the renegade wizard from doing what he was planning-or at least to be there when he did it. If he had been at all checked by my presence in the city, he certainly had nothing to fear now. His gorgos had gotten me out of the way almost as surely as if it had killed me.
If Vincent was working with him-maybe having turned against his own brother-I didn’t want to imagine what he might be planning against the queen, though his plots against Paul seemed horribly clear. And I also did not want to imagine why and for what purpose he had captured Theodora, unless it was to silence the only person in the city who seemed able to detect his magic. The gorgos’s attack on the cathedral at the time of the old bishop’s funeral might only be a preparation for a much worse attack when the new bishop was elected. This wizard, apparently much more powerful than I could ever be, had in his control, directly or indirectly, the two women I loved, the dean, and the young man I hoped would become my king.
“Look at the stallion,” said Paul, interrupting my thoughts. I looked out obediently. Only ten yards beyond the invisible barrier, the bay stallion stood watching us, pawing the ground with one foot, shaking the fetlock from his eyes with a proud toss of his head.
I closed my eyes again. I almost thought I understood the structure of the magic barrier now, after a week of studying it. Several times I might have had it, and several times on closer examination I had been wrong. I was having to improvise everything, and I kept having Theodora’s feeling of being almost at the top and yet knowing that this time I would never make it. If I ever saw the school again I would have to relate my experiences to the technical division students as an example of improvised magic.
But this time- Quickly, delicately, I started putting a spell together, one designed specifically to overcome the spells that kept the air solid before us. I said the words of the Hidden Language and confidently reached out my hand.
It struck solidity so hard I bruised my knuckles. I probed again for the structure of the nixie’s magic. The spells had all been changed.
“What’s wrong?” Paul turned as I slumped down.
“She’s changing the magic structure of the barrier. I’d wondered why I wasn’t doing any better overcoming her magic, but now I know. As soon as I work out how to overcome one set of spells, she switches to another.”
“And then can you overcome the new set?”
“Yes, in time-just a few seconds slower than it takes her to change the spells again.”
There was a quick flutter of leaves, and the nixie burst into view. With a tinkling laugh, she planted kisses on Paul’s lips and my own and scampered away again.
“I have an idea,” said Paul with a half smile that made me hope he was not serious. “You and Lucas don’t want anything to do with the nixie, and I can’t say about Vor, but suppose just one of us were able to ‘fully satisfy’ her. Do you think she’d let us go?”
Out of several things I might have said, I chose, “When she was hoping for four men, I don’t think she’d settle for one.”
“Oh, I think I might be able to serve in the place of four men if I wanted to,” said Paul with that same half smile.
“I have a better idea,” I said. “Try to get some of your horses into the grove. They might be able to pass through the barrier the way the birds do, and maybe we could ride them out.”
“Of course,” said Paul in surprise. “What did you think I was doing?”
If the nixie was still nearby and listening to our conversation I had just given away what might have been our last chance. Even now she might be altering her barrier so that horses could not pass through it any more easily than could humans. Our only hope was that the nixie might never have needed spells to imprison horses.
“Quickly!” I said, low and urgently. “Try to lure the stallion in here. We have to go now! I’ll get the others.”
“I’m working as rapidly as I can,” said Paul mildly.
But as I hurried away through the trees he started a different series of whistles, so enticing that even my feet slowed for a second.
Both Vor and Lucas were asleep. I woke them with a quick hand on their shoulders. “Come on,” I said in a low voice. “We may be able to leave.”
I lifted Lucas with magic before he could protest and hurried back through the trees, Vor close behind. Because Lucas was well off the ground, his head some two feet above mine, several times he got a faceful of leaves before he could duck, but I ignored his insults.
We stopped well back in the trees so as not to startle the horses. Paul was talking to them now, softly, alluringly. If the nixie was listening, I thought, she must wish Paul would talk that way to her. The stallion and a black mare were only a few feet beyond the invisible barrier.
A bird shot by suddenly, scolding, and the horses tossed their heads, wheeled, and ran. I tried to swallow bitter disappointment.
But Paul kept on whistling and calling, not at all dismayed. Most of the herd stayed a quarter mile away, but the stallion and the one mare approached again, less cautiously this time. “Come, my beauties, don’t be afraid, we won’t hurt you, come my lovely ones,” Paul was saying.
He held out one of the nixie’s apples. The stallion snorted and stretched his neck forward, still ten yards away. He took one stiff-legged step, then another. And then he was coming through the invisible barrier.
None of us breathed. Very solemnly and deliberately, the stallion took the apple from Paul’s hand and crunched it between powerful teeth. With his other hand, Paul held another apple toward the mare. For a moment she held back, then with a nicker she too stepped into the grove.
My impulse was to leap forward, to seize the horses, but even I knew that would be fatal. Paul was stroking the stallion’s neck, still talking softly and constantly, his voice like a running brook where the words mattered less than the sound. And then abruptly he took a handful of mane and swung up onto the stallion’s back.
The horse jumped, all four feet together, and then whirled and began to run. The prince was almost lying on the horse’s back, his head down and his legs pulled up so that no part of his body touched the nixie’s barrier. It parted and let them through as though it were not there.
And then the two horses were off, racing across the plain, Paul clinging like a burr to the stallion’s mane. “He’s not abandoning us,” said Vor, but his tone made the statement almost a question.