When the thing had vanished again, Karanissa stared for a long moment, then burst out laughing. “That,” she gasped, “is the silliest thing I ever saw!”
Tobas smiled. “I hoped you’d like it,” he said.
“I never saw Derry use that one!” she wheezed, trying to catch her breath.
“I’m not surprised,” he replied. “According to the book, all this spell does is open jars and bottles and the like, and there are easier, quieter methods.”
In control of herself once more, the witch asked thoughtfully, “Do you think it might open the tapestry somehow?”
He considered that seriously, then shook his head. “I don’t think I want to risk it,” he said. “At least, not yet. I’m afraid it would rip the tapestry apart instead, and we’d have to make an entirely new one from scratch. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that for a long, long time, even if we have the materials, and I don’t think we do. I didn’t see any roses or pines in the garden. And, unless there’s a treasury you haven’t mentioned, we can’t get the gold or silver, either, except by melting down the old one.”
“There’s no treasury; we never kept any money at all in here. There was never any reason to. The roses died long ago, and we never had any pines.”
“I thought that might be the case. We can’t make a new tapestry, then; we need to make the old one work again.”
“And you haven’t figured out what’s wrong with it?”
“No. I’ve read through the spell a hundred times and I don’t see why it would stop working. I’ve inspected the tapestry as closely as I can. If there’s a cut or a tear or an unraveling anywhere, I can’t find it. I have this feeling I should know what’s wrong, that I’ll feel stupid when I do realize what it is, but I can’t think of what it could be.”
“Well, I don’t have any idea,” she said. “You keep working on it; I’m sure you’ll get us out of here eventually.” She stood, then impulsively leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “And thank you for trying.”
“Hey, I’m stuck here, too, remember!”
“I know, and thank you for coming.” She turned and left before he could think of anything to say in reply.
He watched her go, unsure of his own feelings toward her, then turned pages to the spell of the Transporting Tapestry and read through it again.
CHAPTER 23
Karanissa did not come to the study again for some time after that; she ate her meals with him in one of the lesser halls and spoke civilly when she encountered him here or there about the castle, but she carefully avoided the study and his bedchamber.
He noticed this quickly enough, but it was several sleeps before he worked up the nerve to ask about it.
Finally, though, as they ate a meal of baked chicken — picked from the last little bush in the garden and prepared by one of Karanissa’s two airy servants — but indistinguishable from any fowl raised in a barnyard and cooked by an ordinary mortal, he asked, “Have you been avoiding me?”
She looked down at the table, then paid careful attention to buttering a roll for a moment before answering.
“Yes, I suppose I have,” she said.
“Why?” He could think of no tactful way of phrasing his question.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “It’s just that I’m afraid I might become too attached to you.”
He had hoped for that answer. “Why shouldn’t you become attached to me, if you like?”
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “It’s just that it seems unfair. I’m waiting for Derry; I shouldn’t...” Her voice trailed off. Collecting herself again, she continued, “Besides, it’s not fair to you, either. I’ve been alone here for so long, four hundred years, you tell me, that probably I’d fall half in love with any man who turned up. Once we’re out in the World again, it might not last. You seem wonderful now, brave and sweet and clever, but I’m not sure whether that’s because you really are, or just because you’re here. Besides, you’re just a boy, still in your teens.”
He nodded. “I think I understand,” he said. “You’ve been avoiding me so you wouldn’t get carried away, then?”
“Yes, exactly,” she said.
“Well,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, “I haven’t been alone for four hundred years, and I know that I wouldn’t mind a bit if you were to allow yourself to be carried away, and I’d do my best to keep your interest once we’re out, but if you don’t want to risk it, I understand.”
“You are sweet,” she said. “You remind me so much of Derry sometimes!”
He was unsure how to answer that and, following her example, concentrated intently on buttering a roll.
After the meal, while the servants were clearing away the dishes, he rose and announced, “I’ll go get back to work.”
“I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I love watching a wizard at work.”
Surprised, he smiled and said, “I’d be glad of the company.”
It seemed perfectly natural to both of them when his arm went around her waist as they walked down the corridor. Discussing her reasons for avoiding him seemed almost to negate them.
When they reached the study, she looked around in surprise. “It’s different,” she said.
“Well, yes, a little,” he admitted. He had rearranged things somewhat to make room for his experiments and to keep his more frequently used materials close at hand and had cleared out a great many containers that were either empty or held things that had not survived the centuries of neglect unscathed. A distressing variety of common ingredients had suffered, severely limiting what magic he could attempt.
“What’s this doing here?” she asked, reaching out and lightly tapping an astonishingly ugly statuette that stood on a corner of the worktable. “Wasn’t it down in the green gallery before?”
Before Tobas could reply the figure began singing, loudly and off-key but in a pleasant enough baritone. “The Sorrows of Sarai the Fickle.”
Embarrassed, Tobas reached over and tapped it again before it could get past the opening lines. Those lines, describing Sarai’s anatomy with succinct obscenity, were quite enough without letting it go on to detail her nocturnal activities.
The music stopped the instant his finger touched stone.
“Galger’s Singing Spell,” he explained sheepishly in the sudden silence. “It works better with rowdy drinking songs.”
“Oh,” Karanissa said, smothering a smile. “What’s that?” This time she pointed.
Tobas explained each of the half dozen or so relics of his recent spell-casting.
“There are some in the book that I’d love to try,” he said when he had finished his explanations. “But even when I have all the ingredients, I don’t always have any way of knowing if a spell actually works when I try it. Some of them need a subject. This one, for example.” He turned to the page he wanted. “It’s called the Lesser Spell of Invaded Dreams. If I could be sure it worked, I might be able to use this to send a message to someone back in the outside world and get him to come help us.”
She looked at the brief description. “You could try it on me,” she pointed out.
“Oh,” Tobas said, feeling foolish. “Yes, I could, couldn’t I? I hadn’t thought of that, since we usually sleep at the same time.”
“I don’t know what good it would be though,” she said. “What could someone outside do?”
“I don’t really know,” Tobas confessed. “I was thinking that perhaps a rope could be thrown through the tapestry that still works, so that we could be pulled out.”