“Mavin Manyshaped?” the woman said, beating the dust from her trousers. “I am Throsset of Dowes, and I come from the Seer Windlow.”
Mavin’s mouth dropped open. Throsset of Dowes? From Danderbat Keep? Mavin’s own childhood home? Such as it had been. Well and well.
“Throsset of Dowes?” she asked wonderingly. “Would you remember Handbright of Danderbat Keep?”
The woman grinned. She was a stocky person with short, graying hair, bushy dark brows and eyes which protruded a little, giving her the look of a curious frog. Her shoulders were broad and square, and she shrugged them now, making an equivocal gesture. “Your sister, Handbright! Of course. She was younger than I. I tried to convince her to come with me, when I left the keep. She would not leave Danderbat the Old Shuffle.”
“They said you were in love with a Demon, that you went across the seas with your lover.”
The woman frowned, her face becoming suddenly distrustful. “The Danderbats said that, did they? Well, they’ll say anything, those old ones. Likely Gormier said that. Or old Halfmad. Or others like them. I left, girl. So did you. It’s likely we left for the same reasons, and lovers had no part in it.”
“It was Handbright told me, not the old ones.” Mavin felt an old anger, for Handbright, for herself.
“Ah.” Throsset’s voice turned cold, but her mouth looked tired. “She had to believe something, Mavin. She couldn’t allow herself to believe that I simply went, that I got fed up with it and left. Girls of the Xhindi aren’t supposed to do that, you know. We’re supposed to be biddable—at least until we’ve had three or four childer to strengthen the keep. Well, it would be better to say the truth. I am not only Shifter, Mavin. When I was sixteen or so, one of the old ones tried something I didn’t care for, and I found a new Talent. It seems I had Shifter and Sorcerer Talent both, and the Danderbats didn’t know how to handle that. One Talent more and I’d have been a Dervish, and time was I longed for it, just to teach them a lesson. Still, there’s no basket discipline will hold a wary Sorcerer, though they tried it, surely enough. I burst the basket and the room, and then I left. I’m sorry Handbright didn’t go with me. How is she now?”
“Dead,” said Mavin flatly, not caring to soften it.
“Dead!” The woman slapped at her legs, hands going on of themselves, without thought, as though they might brush the years away with the dust. “I hadn’t heard. But then, I haven’t been back to Danderbat Keep.”
“They wouldn’t have been able to tell you had you gone there. She died far away, across the western sea. She was mad—until the very end. She had two sons, twins. They’re fifteen-season childer now, five years old, at Battlefox Demesne, with Handbright’s thalan and mine, Plandybast Ogbone.”
“So she did leave Danderbat at last. Ah, girl, believe me, I did try to get her to go with me. She said she stayed for your sake, and for Mertyn’s. She loved him more than most sisters love their boy-kin. I could not break her loose.”
Seeing the distress in the woman’s face, Mavin tried to set aside her own remembered anger and to dissipate the chilliness which was growing between them. Handbright’s servitude and abuse had not been Mavin’s fault, or Throsset’s. “Mertyn made her stay,” she said sadly. “He had Beguilement Talent even then, and he used it to keep her there because he was afraid she would leave him. He was only a child. He did not know what pain it cost her. Well. That is all long gone, Throsset. Long gone. Done. Mertyn is a man now. Though his Talent was early, it has continued to grow. He is a King, I hear. Lately appointed Gamesmaster in some school or other.”
“Windlow said to tell you he is in Schooltown.” The woman stopped brushing dust and frowned. “Look, Mavin, I have traveled a distance and this is a high cold hill. There is threat of rain. I have not eaten today and the city lies close below ...”
“We need not go so far as the city. There’s an inn at the fork of the road, called The Arches. I have a room there.” She lifted herself into the saddle. “Come up with me. This twitchy horse can carry double the short way.” The woman grasped her arm and swung up behind her, the horse shying as he felt two sets of knees Shift tight around him. Deciding that obedience would be the most sensible thing, he turned quietly toward the road, going peaceably beneath each of the arches as he came to it with only a tiny twitch of skin along his flanks. The women rode in silence, both of them distressed at the meeting, for it raised old hurts and doubts to confront them.
It was not until they were seated before a small fire in a side room at the inn, cups of hot tea laced with wineghost half empty before them, that old sorrow gave way to new curiosity. Then they began to talk more freely, and Mavin found herself warming to the woman as she had not done to many others.
“How come you to be messenger for Windlow? A Shifter? He was Gamesmaster of the school at Tarnoch, under the protection of the High King. I would have thought he would send a Herald.”
“I doubt he could have found a Herald to act for him. Windlow has little authority in the Demesne of the High King Prionde. Did you know the High King’s son? Valdon?” Mavin shuddered. Memories of that time—particularly of Valdon or Huld or Blourbast—still had the power to terrify her, if only for the moment.
“I met him, yes. It was long ago. He was little more than a boy. About nineteen? Full of vicious temper and arrogance. Yes. And his little brother, Boldery, who was a little older than Mertyn.”
“Then if you met him it will not surprise you to know that Valdon refused to be schooled by Windlow. His pride would not allow him to be corrected, so says Windlow, and he could not bear restraint. He announced as much to the King, his father, and was allowed license to remain untaught.”
Mavin had observed much of Valdon’s prideful hostility when she had been in Pfarb Durim before. “But he wasn’t the only student!” she objected. “Windlow had set up the school under the patronage of King Prionde, true, but there were many other boys involved. Some were thalans of most powerful Gamesmen.”
“Exactly. You have hit upon the situation. Prionde could not destroy the school without hurting his own reputation. He could let it dwindle, however, and so he has done. Windlow is now alone in the school except for the servants and two or three boys, none of them of important families. Since Himaggery left, his only source of succor is through Boldery, for the child grew to love him and remains faithful, despite all Valdon’s fulminations. Valdon is a Prince of easy hatreds and casual vengeance. A dangerous man.”
Mavin twisted her mouth into a sceptical line. “Fellow Shifter, I sorrow to hear that the old man is not honored as he should be, and I am confirmed in my former opinion of Valdon, but Windlow has not sent you all this way from the high lakes at Tarnoch to tell me of such things.”
Throsset gulped a mouthful of cooling tea and shook her head. “Of course not. I owed the old man many things. He asked me to come to you as a favor, because I am Shifter from Danderbat Keep, and you are Shifter from Danderbat Keep, and he believed you would trust my word ...”
“Trust you because we are both from Danderbat Keep!” Mavin could not keep the astonishment from her voice.
Throsset made a grimace. “Unless you told him, what would he know about the lack of trust and affection in Danderbat Keep? That wasn’t what he was thinking of, in any case. He asked me because we were both women there. That old man understands much, Mavin. I think you may have told him more about yourself than you realized, and I certainly told him more than I have told anyone else. He senses things, too. Things that most Gamesmen simply ignore. No, Windlow didn’t send me to tell you of his own misfortune. He sent me to bring to you everything he knows about Himaggery—where he went, where he might be.”
“But he is dead!” Mavin cried, her voice breaking.
“Hush your shouting,” commanded Throsset in a hissing whisper. “It is your business, perhaps our business, but not the business of the innkeeper and every traveler on the road. He is not dead. Windlow says no!”
“Not dead? And yet gone for eight years, and I only hear of it now!”
“Of course now. How could you have heard of it earlier? Did Windlow know where you were? Did you send regular messengers to inform him?” Throsset was good-natured but scornful. “Of course, now.”
“He is a Seer,” Marvin said sullenly, aware of her lack of logic.
“Poof. Seers. Sometimes they know everything about something no one cares about. Often they know nothing about something important. Windlow himself says that. He knows where Himaggery set out to go eight years ago; he Sees very little about where he may be now.”
“Eight years!”
“It seems a long time to me, too.”
“Eight years. Eight years ago—I was ... where was I?” She fell silent, thinking, then flushed a brilliant red which went unnoticed in the rosy firelight. Eight years ago she had wandered near the shadowmarches, had found herself in a pool-laced forest so perfect that it had summoned her to take a certain shape within it, the shape of a slender, single-horned beast with golden hooves. And then there had been another of the same kind, a male. And they two ... they two ... Ah. It was only a romantic, erotic memory, an experience so glorious that she had refused to have any other such for fear it would fail in comparison. Whenever she remembered it, she grieved anew at the loss, and even now she grieved to remember what had been then and was no more. She shook her head, tried to clear it, to think only of this new hope that perhaps Himaggery still lived. “Eight years. Where did he set out for, that long ago?”
“He set out to meet with the High Wizard Chamferton.”
“I know that much; his letter said that much. But why? Himmagery was Wizard himself. Why would he seek another?”
Throsset rose to sidle through the narrow door into the commons room in the inn where she ordered another pot of tea. She came into the room carrying a second flask of wineghost, peeling at the wax on the cork with her teeth. “Two more cups of this and I’ll be past the need for food and fit only for bed. Don’t you every get hungry?”
Mavin made an irritated gesture. It was no time to think of food, but her stomach gurgled in that instant, brought to full attention by Throsset’s words. The woman laughed. When the boy came in with the tea, Throsset ordered food to be prepared, then settled before the fire once more.
“You asked why he sought another Wizard. I asked the same question of Windlow. He told me a tale of old Monuments that danced, of ancient things which stir and rumble at the edges of the lands of the True Game. He told me of a time, perhaps sixty years ago or so, when great destruction was wrought upon the lands, and he said it was not the first time. He had very ancient books which spoke of another time, so long ago it is past all memory, when people were driven from one place to another, when the beasts of this world assembled against them. He spoke of roads and towers and bells, of shadows and rolling stars. Mysteries, he said, which intrigued Himaggery and sent him seeking. Old Chamferton was said to know something about these ancient mysteries.”
Mavin tilted her head, considering this. “I have heard of at least one such time,” she said. “Across the seas there is a land which suffered such a cataclysm a thousand years ago. The people were driven down into a great chasm by beasts which came suddenly, from nowhere.”
“Stories of that kind fascinated Himaggery,” Throsset mused, “as they do me. Oh, we heard them as children, Mavin! Talking animals and magical rings. Swords and jewels and enchanted maidens. Himaggery collected such tales, says Windlow. He traveled all about the countryside staying in old inns, asking old pawnish granddads what stories they remembered from the time before our ancestors came from the north.”
“You say our ancestors came from the north? In Schlaizy Noithnj I have heard it rumored we came from beneath the mountains! And across the seas, in the chasm of which I spoke earlier, the priests say the Boundless—that being their name for their god—set them in their chasm.”
Throsset turned up her hands, broadening the gesture to embrace the space near the table as the boy came into the room with their food. “Ah. Set it here, boy, and bring another dish of that sauce. This isn’t enough for two! Good. Smell that, Mavin? Cookery like this always reminds me of Assembly time at Danderbat Keep.”
Mavin did not want to remember Assembly time at Danderbat Keep. “The food was the best part of it,” she remarked in a dry tone of recollection.
“It was that,” Throsset agreed around a mouthful. “But we have enough sad memories between us without dragging them out into the light. They do not grow in the dark, I think, so much as they do when well aired and fertilized with tears.”
Mavin agreed. “Very well, Kinswoman, I will not dwell on old troubles. We are here now, not at the Keep, and it is here we will think of. Now, you tell me Himaggery had heard all these tales of ancient things. I can tell you, for you are in Windlow’s confidence, that Himaggery himself saw those arches dance, those Monuments where we met today; and so did I—Yes! If you could see your face, Throsset. You obviously disbelieve me. You don’t trust my account for a moment, but it’s true nonetheless. Some future time, I’ll tell you all about it if you like—Well, I saw the arches dance, but afterward I was willing to leave it at that, perhaps to remember it from time to time, but not to tease at it and tear at it. Not Himaggery! Himaggery had a mind full of little tentacles and claws, reaching, always reaching. He was never willing to leave anything alone until he understood it.
“Strange are the Talents of Wizards, so it’s said, and strange are the ways they think. Once he had seen, he couldn’t have left it alone, not for a moment. He’d have been after it like a gobble-mole with a worm, holding on, stretching it out longer and longer until it popped out of its hole. And if he heard the High Wizard Chamferton knew anything—well then, off he’d go, I suppose.” She felt uneasy tears welling up.
Throsset confirmed this. “Yes, he heard it said that Chamferton knew about the mysteries of our past and the past of the world and ancient things in general. So. He went off to see Chamferton, and he did not come back.”