She came back round the corner of the house, and knelt down near the little table where lunch was laid, in a curve of the pond-edge that allowed them their island. She ran her fingertips along the pebbly edge, drew them into the water; then she made a tiny hollow in the pond-bottom—which was no deeper than the length of her fingers—and felt gold flakes swirling up and adhering to her skin; and then she placed one of her stones in it, wriggling it round till she felt it, intangibly heard it, go mmph, like a well-fitted horse-collar settling against the shoulders it was made for. There was a tiny burst of light, and the twinkles of gold on her fingers and on the stone she had chosen disappeared.
Then she did the same to her other stone, and sat back on her heels, and watched as the air and the water around the two stones changed, and she felt the change float and expand, almost like scent, and wreath itself around her, almost like smoke. This was the first magic she’d ever done without the Guardian telling her how. “I—I’ve tried—I’ve done—” she said in a voice rather higher than her usual one. She swallowed. “I’m ready now. I will—I will now stop waiting for you to send me home.”
“Thank you,” said the Guardian, and she moved off her chair, and knelt by Tamia, and put her hands just above the two stones, as if feeling heat rising off them.
Tamia had been with the Guardian nearly a year when the Guardian said one morning, “It’s time you had a look at the sea. The way I want to go, it’s a long walk, we’ll take lunch—and perhaps tea.” She tied up food in two bundles, and they set out, towards the Eagle’s peak behind their small meadow.
They often went for long prowling walks along the shoulders of the mountains, following deer trails when there were deer trails, and even rabbit trails when there were those; the problem with rabbit trails was that they were made by and for creatures no more than a foot tall. On some of their walks there was a good deal of scrambling. But the Guardian showed Tamia what plants had leaves or berries or roots that were good to eat—or at least nourishing; or possessed healing properties. And they always looked out for stones that might fit in the water-garden, though they had to wait for the traders to bring them new supplies of the gold that their magic used. Tamia now knew the name of the trader with the red feather in his cap—Traetu; and his pony, Wheatear, for the long curly hair-whorl on his neck, like a stalk of wheat bent by the wind.
Tamia talked to the traders—and their ponies; she also greeted and was friendly with the deer, and the rabbits, and the foxes, and the hrungus, and the birds that visited their meadow or that they met on their walks; and the Guardian said to her thoughtfully, “If you were not so suited to our work, I would wonder if I had called you to the wrong craft; for the wild creatures love you, and no Guardian in all the long list of our Guardianship has ever had a familiar animal.”
Tamia shook her head. “It is only that my best friend—before you, dear Guardian—was a pony.”
But they had never climbed the peak of the Eagle. Tamia, like many inlanders, had never seen the ocean; and she had been too busy and too happy in the last year to think about it, although in the back of her mind she was aware that what she was here for was to learn to protect her land from the ocean, to become a member of the Guardians, who built and patrolled the boundary that kept the land safe from the water. She had no very good picture of what the ocean might be like; she knew that fishermen travelled upon it in boats, like the inlanders sometimes travelled on their ponds and streams and lakes; but when she thought about it at all, she thought of it as a kind of nightmare thing, perhaps a little like a sky full of storm-clouds.
When, in the early afternoon, they finally stood on the top of the Eagle and looked around them, she was amazed. This great, dazzling, every-colour-and-no-colour expanse was like nothing she had ever imagined, let alone seen; and she thought of the cousin of her mother’s who had married a fisherman, who described the sea with a shrug as “A lot of water you can’t drink,” and she could not understand how anyone could think this way. But then, she had probably never stood on the Eagle’s head with the wind in her face—and the Guardian she was apprenticed to standing at her side. The salt smell of it was very strong. She knew the smell from her village; sometimes on wet, foggy mornings when the wind was coming steadily from the west, a faint tang of it was just noticeable as the fog was pushed farther inland to shred itself on tree-tops. It had never seemed to her any more interesting than any other smell. But where they stood, with the wind bucketing around them, this tallest peak of the Eagle seemed to lean out towards the shore while the Cloudyheads on either side seemed to draw back in alarm, the water was on nearly three sides of them and the land seemed little more than a memory behind them. Here the ocean smell was wild and tantalising and full of mysteries.
This is the best, Tamia thought. There is nothing better than this. Not even doing my first magic by myself—not even meeting Southern Eye and Four Doors when they came to see my Guardian, or talking to the traders when they come here, not even Traetu, who told me my Guardian wanted me and will always be my favourite—this is almost as good as being my Guardian’s friend. She glanced at her Guardian, who looked away from the sea long enough to meet her apprentice’s eyes, and Tamia was sure, as she had been sure many times before, that the Guardian knew exactly what she was thinking.
After a little while, the Guardian said thoughtfully, “This island is a strange place; I believe there is no other place like it in all the wide world, though there must be other places just as strange. It is our strangeness to be a threshold between land and water; and the boundary between us is striven for, and fought over, and it shifts sometimes this way, and sometimes that. Perhaps there are Guardians on the other side of the boundary, as we are the Guardians of this; perhaps it is only on account of our angle of vision that it seems to us that the forces of water desire to overwhelm us. Perhaps whatever lives in the deep of the water does not understand that if it succeeded in bringing the dry lands under its sway, it would kill a great many people and plants and animals who love their lives, for I assume plants and animals love their lives too; perhaps it does understand, and does not care, for we are mere land-dwellers. I do not know. But I do know that it is over this one island that the war is fought, and if once we yielded, then all those lands behind us—farther from the boundary we protect—would immediately come under threat; and they have no Guardians. We are the Guardians, and here we hold the line.”
Tamia listened to her Guardian, because she always did; but she was still in thrall to the great beauty of the ocean, and did not understand. It was not until half way through her second year as the Guardian’s apprentice that she saw her first great storm.