Mourra answered him quickly, saying, “We were coming back from the picnic, and we got lost.” She nodded toward Schmendrick. “This is our friend. He was helping us.”
The farmer eyed Schmendrick up and down, turned his head and spat to the side. “H’ant done much of a job, got to say. Get y’selves up behind me.” He considered Schmendrick again, at some length, before he nodded. “Him, too.”
Mourra yanked her brother away from feeding handfuls of grass to the old horse, and the children scrambled into the wagon. Schmendrick hesitated, looking as though he would have preferred to walk, and not necessarily in the same direction. But after a moment he sighed briefly, then shrugged and climbed up beside them, doubling his long legs like a grasshopper to leave room. The driver grunted a single word, and the wagon started on.
They had indeed, following Schmendrick, wandered far enough from their road home that it was full twilight by the time the horse halted of its own accord and the farmer pointed down a wildflower slope toward a small, tidy house tucked into a ripple of hillsides. A woman stood in the doorway, shading her eyes, beckoning uncertainly.
Findros was out of the cart and running before the farmer had had a chance to growl, “Figure he’ll likely get you the rest of the way,” jerking his chin at Schmendrick. “Best to your ma.”
The woman was hurrying toward them now, picking up her skirts, as the farm wagon rumbled off. The magician said quietly, “Not much use for finding your way home, are they? Tricks.”
Mourra stood still, peering up into the magician’s green eyes, suddenly so far above her. She said, “We got home. Maybe the wagon…maybe that was the magic. That could be.”
Schmendrick stared at her without replying. She looked away, looked back at him, stood on one foot, scuffling the other in the soft earth, and finally asked, “I know you had all those things in your sleeve — I know that — but…but is there anything in my hair? Like with Findros?”
The magician went on regarding her for a long moment before putting his hand lightly on her head. “Mmm…well, definitely no eggs of any sort…no money, more’s the pity…no pretty shells…hello, hello — now what on earth have we here?”
Mourra found herself holding her breath. Something smooth and cool moved in her hair — don’t let it be a snake, I’ll scream if it’s a snake — and the magician grunted with effort, as though he were hauling an anchor up from the depths of the sea. Then the coolness was fresh dew on her cheek, the smoothness a velvet petal. The magician was holding up a single flower as pale scarlet as the approaching sunset, as golden as a bee. There was nothing else in his hand.
Mourra took the flower from him slowly, without speaking. Sairey was nearing them, her expression a mixture of anger and immense relief, her right arm occupied by a clinging Findros, the left reaching out for her daughter. Mourra put the flower into her hand, saying, “I found this for you. It’s a magic flower.” She closed her eyes then and leaned into her mother.
Sairey was a small, dark, sturdily-made woman, with a quick eye and a disturbingly level glance. She considered the magician briefly, bent her head in acknowledgment, but immediately turned to Mourra and Findros, demanding, “Why are you so late? Where have you been?”
“She got us losted, I told you,” Findros mumbled against her shoulder. “The Gician saved us. His name’s Schmoondrake.”
Mourra was too tired to contradict him. She said only, “I’m sorry. I thought I knew the way home from the picnic.”
Sairey swept her into her free arm before Mourra had finished speaking. “I kept looking for you under the willow.” The magician could hear that her voice was shaking. She waved her hand toward the huge old tree in front of their cottage. “I kept thinking that you might be having a tea party under there, and forgot it was getting dark. The way you do sometimes.”
A child on either hip, she looked up at the magician, smiling slightly. “I thank you for bringing my pair of disasters home to me. Though perhaps you’ll be thanking me now for taking them off your hands.”
Schmendrick bowed more formally than she had done. “A man with a cart’s more to be thanked than I, who only led them more astray than they already were, being lost myself. As I am still.”
“I don’t understand,” she said slowly; and then, “But where are my manners? Will you not come in and sit to dinner with us? It’s the least I can offer you, surely.” She eyed him more critically than she had at first meeting, and could not forbear adding, “And a good meal or two would do you no harm, I’ll say that much.”
The magician hesitated — seemed about to decline the offer — then abruptly smiled and nodded. “My thanks. I do sometimes forget that I am hungry.”
“I, never,” she said; then, quickly, laughing, “As you see, they never let me,” for Mourra and Findros were already tugging her toward the little house. “And getting food ready for them always makes me want to eat something myself, and will end by making me as big as a barn, I know this.” She shooed the children ahead of her, telling them briskly, “There’s lentil soup, and if you don’t wash your hands and your faces, nobody gets any.” They whooped and ran off, and she led the magician into the house, calling after them, “And, Findros, the turtle egg is not coming to dinner.”
There was a vegetable stew as well as the soup, and cold, sweet well water. Dinner was — according to Sairey — a quieter affair than usual, the children both being too weary to squabble. Findros actually fell asleep at the table, but Mourra lingered, fishing sleepily but stubbornly for reasons not to go up to bed. She still avoided sitting close to the magician, nor did she meet his glance often. But the flower that he had taken from her hair reposed precariously in a lopsided clay drinking mug next to her own, and now and then she brushed it against her closed eyes, as though to feel its colors through the lids.
A dog howled, somewhere nearby, and Sairey half-rose from her chair, apologizing as she sat back. “I don’t know why that one always startles me. There’s no harm in him — he’s only an old sheepdog baying at the moon.”
“He sleeps all day,” Mourra muttered scornfully. “The sheep make fun of him.”
Schmendrick asked, “Do you know why dogs do that?” Both mother and daughter stared at him. “Because the moon used to be part of the Earth, and that is the part that all the dogs come from. But the moon wanted to be free, and it struggled and struggled until one night it broke loose from the Earth and sailed right off into the sky, the way it is now. Only all the dogs had their families there, all their mothers and fathers, and their children, their houses and all their buried bones, and their books —”
Mourra giggled. “Not books. Dogs don’t read books —”
“Of course not, because they’re all gone up in the sky, you see. And every night the moon comes out and all the dogs in the world see it, and they cry for their families. That is why they always sound so terribly sad.”
Sairey refilled his cup from the sweating pitcher of well water. She said, “I don’t believe I ever heard that story.”
“It is well-known where I come from.” The magician’s expression was entirely serious.
“And that would be…where?” He was savoring the cold water, and did not appear to have heard her. Sairey said, “Daughter. You are about to fall asleep in your stew. Go to bed.”
Mourra did not protest. Drowsily finding her way to her feet, she asked, “Can I take my flower with me? Just tonight?”
“I thought it was my flower,” her mother teased her. “Very well, I will lend it to you for the night.” She rose herself to give the girl a quick, warm hug; then prodded her gently toward the stair. “But you must not be upset when it dies, in a day or two. Flowers die.”