“And what about your child?” he asked, head cocked to one side, gentle as the wind as he said it.
“How did you know?”
He shrugged. “Oh, I’m a Seer, Mavin. Of one thing and another. In this case, however, it was a case of using my mind and my heart, nothing more. Himaggery doesn’t know, does he?”
“Anyone might know,” she replied in a sober voice. “Anyone who used mind or heart. Throsset knew.”
“You won’t allow that he’s simply afire to get on with his life, so much of it having been spent in a kind of sleep?”
“Why, of course!” she answered in exasperation. “Why, of course I’ll allow it. Do I constrain him to do other than he will? He lost eight years in that valley. Should I demand he turn from his life to look at me? Or listen to me? Windlow. That’s not the question to ask, and you know it.”
He nodded, rather sadly, getting up with a groan and a thud of his stick upon the floor. “Surely, Mavin. Surely. Well. Since it seems you’ll not be Shifting for a time—do I have it right? That is the custom? More than custom, perhaps?—call upon me for whatever you need. Midwives perhaps, when the time comes? I have little power but many good friends.”
“I do not know yet what I will need, old sir. Midwives, I guess, though whether here or elsewhere, I cannot say.”
“You’ll risk that, will you?”
“Risk Midwives? I would not do other. It is a very good thing the Midwives do, to look into the future of each child to see whether it will gain a soul or not. The great houses may scoff at Midwives if they will, caring not that their soulless children make wreck and ruin upon the earth. Of such houses are Ghouls born, Gamesmen like Blourbast and Huld the Demon.” She did not mention Huld’s son, Mandor. Years later, deep in the caves beneath Bannerwell, she was to curse herself for that omission. If Windlow had known of Mandor ... if Mertyn had known of Mandor ... “Of course I will risk Midwives, and count the risk well taken to know I have born no soulless wight who may grow to scourge the earth and the company of men.”
He smiled then, taking her hand in his own and leaning to kiss her on the cheek, a sweet, old man’s kiss with much kindness in it. “Mavin, perhaps I erred when I had that vision of you and Himaggery in Pfarb Durim. It seems to me that in that vision your hair was gray. Perhaps it was meant to be later, that’s all.” He sighed. “Whatever you need, Mavin. Tell me.” Then they left the place and went to their lunch, spread on a table in the courtyard among the herb pots and the garden flowers. For a quiet time in that garden, Mavin told herself she would stay where she was, for the peace of it was pleasant and as kindly as old Windlow’s kiss.
“You might remember that he’s eight years younger than he seems,” commented Throsset. “All that time in the valley. He didn’t live then, really. In fact, he may have gone backwards ...”
“To become what?” Mavin asked, examining her face in the mirror. She had never before been very interested in her own face, but now it fascinated her. One of Windlow’s servant girls had asked if she could arrange Mavin’s hair, and the piled, sculptured wealth of it made her look unlike herself. “Become a child, you mean?”
Throsset swung her feet, banging her heels cheerfully against the wall below the windowsill where she sat, half over the courtyard, defying gravity and dignity at once as she tempted the laundress’s boy-child with a perfect target for his peashooter. “Children are very self-centered, Mavin. They are so busy learning about themselves, you know, that they have no time for anything else. You were like that, I’m sure. I know I was. Himaggery, on the other hand, went straight from his family demesne into Windlow’s school, and straight from that into continuous study—books, collections. Not Gaming. Not paying attention to other people, you know.”
“ ‘Among,’ but not ‘of,’ “ commented Mavin, touching the corner of her eyes with a finger dipped in dust-of-blue. She turned. “Do you like that? It’s interesting.”
“I like the brown better,” Throsset advised. “Better with your skin. What are you up to with these pawn tricks, anyhow?”
Mavin turned back to the mirror, wiping away the blue stain to replace it with dust-of-brown. She had bought the tiny cosmetic jars from a traveling Trader and was being self-consciously experimental with them. “I’m finding out whether I can get him to look at me.”
“He looks at you all the time. He’s in love with you.”
“I mean see me. He doesn’t care whether I’m Mavin the woman, a fustigar hunting bunwits, or a Singlehorn. He’s in love with his idea of me.” She applied a bit more of the brown shadow, then picked up the tiny brush to blind herself painting her lashes.
“Your eyelashes are all right!” Throsset thumped down from the window, brushing at her seat, not seeing the pea which shot through the opening behind her. “When are you going to tell him?”
“I’m not.” She was definite about this. “And you’re not to tell him either.”
“Oh, Mavin, by all the hundred devils but you’re difficult. Why not?”
“Because, dear Fairy Godmother”—The proper designation for one with both Shifting and Sorcery was “Fairy Godmother.” Mavin had looked it up in the Index and had been perversely waiting for an occasion to use it. Now she took wicked pleasure in Throsset’s discomfiture—“dear Fairy Godmother, what you saw and what Windlow saw you saw by observation. Himaggery is not innocent. He knows where babies come from. He does know we were together in the Valley. It is a kind of test, my dear, which may be unfair, but it is nonetheless a test I am determined to use.”
“And if he passes it?”
“If he passes it, with no advice from either you or Windlow—whom I have been at some pains to silence—then I will go with him to Lake Yost, and see what it is he plans to do there with his thousand good Gamesmen. And I will not Mavin at him, will not flee from him, will not distress him.”
“And if he fails ...”
“Then, Throsset of Dowes, I will know that it really does not matter to him much. He is in love with the idea of me, and that idea will content him. He will be reasonably satisfied with memory and hope and a brave resolution to find me once again—which he will put off from season to season, since there will always be other things to do.” She looked up at Throsset with a quirk of the eyebrows. “Listen to me, Throsset, for I have made a discovery. It may be that Himaggery will prefer the idea of me to the reality—prefer to remember me with much romantic, sentimental recollection, at his convenience, as when a sweetly painted sky seems to call for such feelings of gentle melancholy. In the evenings, perhaps, when the sun is dropping among long shadows and the air breathes sadness. On moonlit nights, with the trees all silvered ...
“A remembered love, Throsset of Dowes, does not interfere with one’s work! A lovely, lost romance is a convenience for any busy man!”
“You’re cynical. And footloose. You simply don’t want to sit still long enough to rear this child.”
“I’ll sit still, Throsset! Where I will and when I will, and for as long as is necessary. And if Himaggery sees the meaning behind this paint on my face or realizes I am carrying his child, well then I will become dutiful, Throsset. So dutiful, even Danderbat Keep would have been pleased.” She made a face, then rummaged in her jewel box for some sparkling something to put in her hair. “I have discovered something else, Throsset of Dowes. And that is that men give women jewels when they have absolutely no idea what might please them and are not willing to take time to think about it.”
They sat beside the fountain beneath the stars. Out in the meadow other stars bobbled and danced, lantern bugs dizzying among the grasses.
“I used to imagine this,” said Himaggery. She lay half in his lap, against his chest, watching the lights, half asleep after a long, warm and lazy day.
“What did you imagine? Sitting under the sky watching bugs dance?”
“No, silly. I imagined you. And me. Together. Here or somewhere like here. I knew how it would be.”
“This isn’t how it would be,” she said, the words flowing out before she could stop them. “This is an interlude, a sweet season. It’s no more real than ... than we were before, in the valley.”
“How can you say that?” He laughed, somewhat uneasily. “You’re real. I’m real. In our own shapes, our own minds.”
She shook her head. Now that she had started, she had to go on. “No, love. I’m in a shape, a courtyard shape, a lover’s shape, a pretty girl shape, a romantic evening shape. I have other shapes for other times. With those other shapes, it would be a different thing ...”
“Not at all. No matter what shape it might be, it would always be you inside it!” His vehemence hid apprehension. She could smell it.
She soothed him. “Himaggery, let me tell you a story.
“Far on the western edge of the land, there’s a town I visited once. Pleasant people there. One charming girl-child I fell in love with. About nine years old, I suppose, full of joy and bounce and love. She was killed by a man of the town, a Wolf. Everyone knew it. They couldn’t prove it. They had locked him up for such things before, but had always let him go. It was expensive to keep him locked up and guarded, and fed and warm. It took bread from their own mouths to keep him locked away ...”
“What has this to do with ...” he began. She shushed him.
“So, though everyone knew he had done it, no one did anything except walk fearfully and lock up their children. I was not satisfied with that. I took the shape of one of his intended victims, Himaggery, and I ended the matter.”
There was a long pause. She heard him swallow, sigh. “As I would have done, too, Mavin, had I the Talent. I do not dispute your judgment.”
“You don’t. Well, the people of the town suspected I might have had something to do with it, and one of them came to remonstrate with me that such a course of action was improper. So I asked why they had not kept him locked up, or killed him the first time they had proof, and they told me it would have been cruel to do so. And I asked then if it were not cruel to their children to let the Wolf run loose among them. They did not answer me.
“So then, Himaggery, I took their children away from them. All. Far to the places of the True Game. For at least in the lands of the True Game people are not such hypocrites. I thought better those children chance a hazardous life knowing who their enemies were than to live in that town where their own people conspired with their butchers.”
There was another long silence. “You were very upset at the child’s death,” he said at last.
“Yes. Very.”
“So you were not yourself. If you had had time to think, to reflect, you would not have acted so.”
Then she was silent. At last she said with a sigh, “No, Himaggery, I was myself. Completely myself. And if I’d had longer to think on it, I would have done worse.”
He tried to tell her she was merely tired, but she changed the subject to something light and laugh-filled. Later they made love under the stars. It was the last conversation they had together.
Midmorning of the following day, Throsset of Dowes rode with Mavin northward along the meadow edge. They had brought some food and wine with them, intending to take a meal upon the grassy summit which overlooked the canyon lands before Throsset left for the south. Throsset had decided to go visiting her children soon, away in the Sealands. It was a sudden decision.
“I decided they would scarcely remember me unless I went soon. I haven’t gone before because I feared they would reject me, a Shifter. But if I don’t go, then I have rejected them. So better let the fault lie upon their heads if it must lie anywhere. I will go south tomorrow. I have not run in fustigar shape for a season and a half, not since I met you outside Pfarb Durim. I am getting fat and lazy.”
Mavin hugged her. “You will be here tonight then? Good. You will be able to tell them that I have gone.”
“Ah,” said Throsset, a little sadly. “Well. So you have made up your mind.”
“When we have had our lunch, you will ride back and I will ride on. Tell Windlow I will repay him for the horse sometime.”
“Windlow would have given you the horse. Where are you going? Why are you going?”
“I am going because I do not want this child to be born here, or at Lake Yost, to serve as a halter strap between me and Himaggery. I am going because Himaggery does not see me as I am, and I cannot be what he thinks I am. I am going because there is much distraction here, of a wondrous kind, and I want two years, or three, to give to the child without distractions.
“As to where. Well. North. Somewhere. I have friends there. I will find Midwives there. And when the time is right, I may see Himaggery again. Windlow now thinks his vision was of a later time. We may yet come together in Pfarb Durim.”
“What am I to tell them?”
“That I became restless. That I have gone on a journey. Don’t say much more than that. Himaggery will be quite happy with that. Each day he will think of going off to find me. Each day he will put it off for a while. Each night he will dream romantic dreams of me, and each morning he will resolve again—quite contentedly.
“Don’t tell him I’m expecting a child. If he knew, he would first have to decide how to feel about it, and then what actions such a feeling should create. Better leave him as he is. After all, the Midwives may not let the child live. So don’t take his smile from him, Throsset. Strangely though I seem to show it, I do love him.”
They drank the wine. When they had done, Throsset threw the jug against a stone, shattering it into pieces. She wrote her name upon a shard and gave it to Mavin, accepting a similar one in return. So were meetings and partings memorialized among their people, without tears.
After Mavin rode down into the canyon lands, Throsset sat for a long time staring after her. She was not sad, not gay, not grieving or rejoicing. She went boneless and did the quick wriggle which passed for comment in Danderbat Keep; Mavin could not Shift for a time, but she was still Mavin Manyshaped, and Throsset did not doubt she would return.
“Good chance to you,” she whispered toward the north. “And to your child, Mavin.” Nothing answered but the wind. Putting the shard into her pocket as one of the few things she would always carry, she went to tell them that Mavin Manyshaped had gone.