Indeed she was right. A little effort, and he began to feel once more the old sense that the union of hand and eye could carry him to a place where time had no meaning and all of space became a single infinite point. The Skandars, though they must surely have known that juggling had once been Valentine’s profession, were plainly astounded at seeing a Coronal do any such thing, and gaped in undisguised curiosity and awe as Valentine and Carabella tossed a motley galaxy of objects back and forth to one another.
“Hoy!” she cried, and “Hoy!” and “Hoy!” as she led him on to ever more complex feats. They were nothing compared with the tricks she had routinely performed in the old days, for her skill had been great indeed, and they were trivial even in comparison with the level of technique that Valentine, never Carabella’s equal as a juggler, once had mastered. But it was fair going, he thought, for someone who had not juggled seriously in close to a decade. Within an hour, rain soaked and sweat soaked though he was, he felt better than he had in months.
Sleet appeared and, watching them, seemed to draw out of his anxiety and gloom; after a while he moved closer, and Carabella tossed a knife and a club and a hatchet to him, and he caught them casually and began to weave them into a lofty playful cascade to which he added three more things that Valentine sent his way. There was perhaps a shade of strain visible on Sleet’s face that would not have been there a decade ago—except when he was doing his famous routine of juggling blindfolded, maybe—but in no other way did he betray any lessening of his great skill. “Hoy!” he cried, sending the club and the hatchet back toward Valentine, and remorselessly sending other things Valentine’s way before the Coronal had caught the first. Then he and Valentine and Carabella went at it with very great seriousness indeed, as though they were wandering jugglers once more, and were rehearsing for a performance before the royal court.
Sleet’s display of virtuosity inspired Carabella to some intricate feats of her own, which led Sleet to call for some even more difficult maneuvers, and before long Valentine was totally out of his depth. All the same he attempted to keep up with them as long as he could, and did a creditable job at it, only dropping an occasional thing—until he found himself bombarded from both sides at once by a laughing Carabella and a cool, intense Sleet: and he found himself suddenly all elbows and no fingers, and allowed everything to go tumbling from his grasp.
“Ah, my lord, that’s no way to do it!” boomed a harsh and wonderfully familiar voice.”
“Zalzan Kavol?” Valentine cried in amazement and glee.
The huge Skandar came bounding toward him, quickly making the starburst salute and then scooping up all the things that Valentine had dropped; and with a manic delight he began to toss them at Sleet and Carabella in that wild four-armed way of his that could push any human juggler, no matter how skilled, to the limits of his ability.
Valentine looked deeper into the jungle and saw the others running through the rain: Lisamon Hultin, with the Vroon perched on her shoulder, Tunigorn, Tisana, Ermanar, Shanamir, and still more, erupting one after another from a battered and mud-splattered floater parked not far away. All of them had come, Valentine realized—everyone whom he had left behind in Gihorna, the entire party reunited at last. “Get out the wine!” he cried. “This calls for celebration!” He rushed among them, embracing this one and that, straining upward to throw his arms about the giantess, pummeling Shanamir joyfully, clasping hands solemnly with the dignified Ermanar, seizing Tunigorn in a hug that might have throttled a weaker man.
“My lord,” shouted Lisamon, “you will never go off by yourself again, so long as I live! With all respects, my lord. Never again! Never!”
“If I had known, my lord,” said Zalzan Kavol, “that when you said you would travel a day’s journey ahead of us to the Steiche, that there was going to be a storm of such force, and that we would not see you again for this many weeks—ah, my lord, what kind of guardians do you think we are, to let you escape from us this way? When Tunigorn said you had survived the storm, but had gone chasing off into Piurifayne without waiting for us—ah, my lord, my lord, if you were not my lord I would have wanted to commit treason upon you when I caught up with you again, believe me, my lord!”
“And will you forgive me this escapade?” Valentine asked.
“My lord, my lord!”
“You know it was never my intention to separate myself from you this long. That was why I sent Tunigorn back, to find you and have you come after me. And each night I sent messages to you—I put the circlet on, I strived with all my mind’s strength to reach out and touch you—you, Deliamber, and you, Tisana—”
“Those messages reached us, my lord,” said Deliamber.
“They did?”
“Night after night. It gave us much joy, knowing that you were alive.”
“And you made no reply?” Valentine asked.
“Ah, my lord, we replied every time,” the Vroon said. “But we knew we were not getting through, that my power was not strong enough over such a distance. We longed to tell you to stay where you were, and let us come to you; but every day you were farther into the jungle, and there was no holding you back, and we were unable to overtake you, and I could not reach your mind, my lord. I could not reach your mind.”
“But finally you did get through.”
“With the help of your mother the Lady,” said Deliamber. “Tisana went to her in sleep, and won from her a sending, and the Lady understood; and she made of her own mind the courier for mine, carrying me where I could not go myself. And that was how we spoke to you at last. My lord, there is so much to tell you, now!”
“Indeed,” said Tunigorn. “You’ll be astonished, Valentine. I pledge you that.”
“Astonish me, then,” Valentine said.
Deliamber said, “Tunigorn has told you, I think, that we discovered the agricultural expert Y-Uulisaan to be a Shapeshifter spy?”
“So he has told me, yes. But how was this discovered?”
“The day you set out for the Steiche, my lord, we came upon Y-Uulisaan deep in the communion of minds with some far-off person. I felt his mind reaching forth; I felt the force of the communion. And immediately I asked Zalzan Kavol and Lisamon to apprehend him.”
Valentine blinked. “How could Y-Uulisaan possibly have had such a power?”
“Because he was a Shapeshifter, my lord,” said Tisana, “and the Shapeshifters have a way of linking mind to mind using the great sea-dragon kings as their joining-place.”
Like a man who has been attacked from two sides at once, Valentine glanced from Tisana to Deliamber, and back at the old dream-speaker again. He struggled to absorb the meaning of the things they had said, but there was so much in them that was strange, that was entirely bewildering, that he could at first grasp very little. “It baffles me,” he said, “to hear of Metamorphs speaking to one another through sea dragons. Who could have supposed the dragons had any such power of mind?”
“Water-kings, my lord, is what they call them,” Tisana said. “And it appears that the water-kings have very powerful minds indeed. Which enabled the spy to file his reports with great ease.”
“Reports on what?” said Valentine uneasily. “And to whom?”
“When we found Y-Uulisaan in this communion,” said Deliamber, “Lisamon and Zalzan Kavol seized him, and he at once began to change his shape. We would have brought him to you for interrogation, but you had gone ahead to the river, and then the storm began and we could not follow. So we interrogated him ourselves. He admitted that he was a spy, my lord, who would help you to formulate the government’s response to the plagues and blights, and then immediately send word of what that response would be. Which was of great aid to the Metamorphs as they went about the business of causing and spreading those plagues.”