Automatically her hand had moved, brushing her skirt to get rid of it. The buzzing shifted but continued. She patted around. It was coming from inside her pocket. She felt and found her hair tie, and the buzzing stopped.
Her first thought was that the two things had nothing to do with each other—her movement had driven the buzzing thing away and her touch had emptied the hair tie of its magic, but it hadn’t. Not quite. A trickle of numbness seeped out of the hair tie into her palm. She stood and stared at the trivial little object, and for the first time realized how strange it was that her hair had stayed in place, without one strand drifting free, ever since Tahl had last put it up for her while they were waiting for darkness before they could find their way into Goloroth. It had stayed in place in the heart of the warded city, and through the turmoil of the breaking of those wards, and again through the long journey out across the magicless ocean, until she had woken that morning and found her hair tumbling down to her shoulders and the hair tie wedged between two of the timbers of the raft. Tahl had been deep in his tranced sleep and there’d been no point in her trying to tie it herself, so she’d slipped it into her pocket.
She gazed at it, puzzled. Morning after morning she had held it, ready for Tahl to finish braiding and coiling her hair, so that he could then tie it into place, but had felt nothing in it but the feel of any other hair tie. Now, though, as it lay cupped in her hand, the unmistakable numbness in her palm told her that it was very, very different, a tiny magic object, even smaller, even more everyday-seeming, than a wooden spoon. But still full of its magic, on this island where no magic came.
Close ahead of her a voice spoke, softly creaking, and seeming to share something of her own bewilderment.
“So who are you . . . ? And what brought you here?”
She looked up, unalarmed, still sure that nothing bad could happen to her in this place. A grassy path stretched in front of her, and a short way down it an old man had emerged from between two rows of vines. He wasn’t dressed in any of the fashions of the Empire, but wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, a plain unbleached-linen garment that fell from his shoulders to below his knees, sandals, and a brown apron with pockets for garden tools. He might once have been tall but was now stooped. His face was lined with innumerable wrinkles, but his white beard was combed and clean and his pale, yellowish eyes were much clearer than they should have been at his age and barely blinked at all.
“I’m looking for a man,” she said.
“You must answer my questions first,” he reproved her.
“I’m sorry. My name’s Tilja Urlasdaughter and I came here on a raft from Goloroth.”
“Alone?”
“No, but my friends—the magic was too strong for them, and—”
“What magic is this? There is no magic here but mine.”
“It happened yesterday evening. It was something to do with Axtrig.”
“Axtrig?”
“She’s just a wooden spoon, but—”
“You have it? Show me.”
Tilja rolled her sleeve up, untied Axtrig and held her out toward him. He peered at her.
“Just a wooden spoon,” he said, nodding his head, as if amused by a puzzle. “I have been wondering . . . from time to time, you see, something that I made long ago still finds its way home to me. Last evening I felt this thing coming, but did not know what it was, and now I see it I still do not remember it. Indeed, it seems to me to have no magic in it.”
“That’s because I’m touching it.”
He peered at her with sudden intensity, his face unreadable.
“You had better tell me about it,” he said quietly. “Where did it come from?”
“From the Valley, in the far North. I’m afraid it’s a long story, but ages ago two people came from the Valley to get help from a magician. He did what they asked, and gave them peaches from his garden. When they got back the woman planted the stone from hers at the farm where I live, and it grew into a tree, and years later when it blew down they used the wood to carve things from. Axtrig is one of them. We didn’t know how magical she was, because there isn’t any real magic in the Valley. She just told fortunes.”
“Yes, I see. The Northern Valley. The Lost Province, beyond the forest . . . And now, what you said about yourself. The spoon has no magic when you are touching it. That is why you had it tied to your arm?”
“We met a magician who told us it was a good idea, because otherwise people might sense we’d got her, and we’d be in trouble. I don’t really understand, but magic doesn’t seem to do anything to me—in fact I sort of undo it some of the time. Mostly I don’t do that on purpose—it just happens—it’s something about me. I didn’t even realize how tiring it was until we were out in the middle of the sea, where there isn’t any magic.”
He stood looking at her for what seemed a long while, but perhaps not really seeing her. Then he sighed.
“Yes,” he said. “Tiring. Tiring beyond belief . . . Will you please let me hold the spoon for a little?”
The numbness shot up Tilja’s arm as he reached forward. Axtrig seemed to leap from her hand into his. For some while he stood silent, holding the shaft between his clasped palms with his head bowed over them and his lips lightly touching the bowl. Then he straightened and handed the spoon back to Tilja. The moment she took it Tilja knew that the magic was gone. The shaft was still wonderfully carved, the grain of the bowl still intricately beautiful, but it was all just dead wood. Axtrig was “her” no longer, only “it.” With a pang of loss she slid it into her pocket and without thought dropped the hair tie in beside it.
She stared at the man. He seemed to be standing a little taller now, and when he spoke his voice was stronger than it had been before.
“I have taken back some of my powers from your spoon,” he said, smiling at her surprise. “It is remarkable how they have grown over the years. . . . Well, I think I am the man you are looking for. My name is Faheel.”
Already, with a sinking heart, Tilja had guessed this was so. So old, so feeble and unsure of himself. So quiet and peaceful too. How could he wield powers enough to hold back the might of the Empire from the Valley for twenty more generations? Was all their long and dangerous journey for nothing?
“Th-that’s wonderful,” she managed to stammer. “We hoped you’d let us find you, somehow. . . . Can you do anything about the others? They’re asleep on the raft on the beach. I couldn’t wake them up. Strong magic does that to them, but I’ve taken Axtrig away and it feels as if there isn’t any other magic here. Anyway, Meena and Alnor are the ones who want to talk to you. Tahl and I just came to help them.”
He shook his head, smiling as if he knew her thoughts.
“Best let them sleep,” he said. “Nothing will harm them. And you are both right and wrong. There is no magic here, except one, and that prevents all the others. And it is very strong. Your friends could not endure it, waking. In spite of what you say, it is still astonishing to me that you are able to. Well, you must come in and tell me the rest of your story, and then we can decide what to do.”
He turned and started to lead the way along the path, but then stopped and turned back, frowning.
“I think you are carrying something else besides the spoon,” he said. “The force of the spoon hid it earlier. What is it?”
In the astonishment, relief and dismay of meeting Faheel, Tilja had forgotten about the hair tie, though it was still producing that faint, insectlike buzz beside her right thigh. She fished it out of her pocket and showed it to him.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “It’s just something a traveling magician gave me to keep my hair up. Somebody else had to do that for me. If I touched it the magic didn’t work. But since I came here something seems to have woken up, and it’s much stronger than the plain hair-tie magic. I can feel it even when it’s me holding it.”
He took a pair of spectacles from one of his pockets, put them on and bent over her hand, peering at the hair tie. He straightened. There was a different kind of interest in his voice when he spoke.
“I shall need to know about this magician. What is his name?”
“I don’t know. He told us to call him the Ropemaker.”
“Ah . . . time is a great rope,” he whispered.
He removed his spectacles and smiled at her.
“Indeed you must tell me your story,” he said. “You may have brought me more than you had thought.”
Again he turned and led the way through the garden. Tilja looked around her with surprise as she walked beside him. Like Faheel himself, this was not at all what she had expected. A magician’s garden should have been extraordinary, surely—extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily neat, every plant not only wonderfully strange but doing precisely what it was supposed to. Instead, Faheel’s garden, though certainly beautiful, was beautiful only with a kind of heightened ordinariness. There were gardens almost like this in the Valley, despite the harsher climate, gardens crammed with all the various plants their fanatical owners could fit in. Here were fruit trees and vegetables in straight rows, healthy and strong, though some of the rows needed hoeing, and there were masses of different flowers, and marvelous wafts of their scent floating in the mild, warm breeze, but often they sprawled among each other and some could have done with deadheading, and a few weeds poked up among them, and there were even patches that seemed to have been let go wild.
They came to a sheep, cunningly tethered so that it could nibble the grass on the path without getting into the beds. Faheel patted it as they passed.
“My garden has become rather more than I can now manage,” he said, pausing to wipe greenfly from a rose shoot with his thumb. “But I do what I can.”
His house, when they came to it, was like the garden, ordinary. Tilja had seen dozens just like it on the journey south, larger and better built than the hovels of the peasants, but very far from grand. A low white building with a vine-shaded terrace; small square windows with green shutters, mostly closed; large, curved, loose-looking orange red tiles; beyond it, the empty sea.
The door was covered with a bead hanging to keep out the flies. Inside was a low, tiled room, cool and dark, with a few coarse wooden cupboards and chests, a low table with two unlit lamps on it, and a pile of large cushions in one corner.
“You will be hungry and thirsty,” said Faheel, “and I may as well eat with you.”
Out of cupboards he fetched common pottery mugs and platters, dark bread, sheep cheese, oil, honey, fruits both dried and fresh, and a pitcher of water from a corner. Cross-legged on one of the cushions, Tilja told her story, pausing to collect her thoughts while she chewed or drank. Faheel, half lying on one elbow on the other side of the table, ate slowly and didn’t interrupt at all. When she finished he shook his head and sighed.
“Well,” he said, “you bring me both news I had long been hoping for and news I had long feared. I will explain later, but let me for the moment be sure about this. Apart from when your grandmother used the spoon to point the way, the only time any of you spoke my name, once you were in the Empire, was when your grandmother named me in Lananeth’s warded room?”
“Yes.”
“And you had not then met or seen this Ropemaker?”
“No.”
“You saw him only between the time when you were in the robbers’ cave and when he left you at the end of the road through the hills?”
“Yes. And we’d have spotted him at once if he’d been there— he looked so odd.”
Faheel took a cloth and carefully wiped his lips and beard.
“Still, I think you may be mistaken,” he said, rising. “We have work to do. You say it is not your mere presence that is destructive of magic? Your physical touch is needed?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Good. Then come with me. Bring the hair tie, and keep good hold of it.”
He led the way into the next room and with some difficulty, making Tilja even more aware of his great age, climbed a fixed ladder into the attic. This had one large window facing out over the sea, and was full of light. The light showed up the dust, covering everything in a fine, even layer, undisturbed for months, perhaps for years. Faheel stood and looked round while Tilja climbed up beside him. He shook his head, ruefully.
“Well, it is time,” he sighed. “You have been disappointed in me, I think, Tilja. I was not what you expected. As you see, I have had to lay my powers aside. The powers themselves are no less. They do not age. It is I myself, in the end, who am mortal. I could not afford to wear this body out any further, if I was to accomplish what I must before I go. I did not even dare use my powers to find out how long I must wait. Instead I withdrew to this island and nursed my strength, using little more than ordinary country magics to support my needs.
“But now, unmistakably, this is the moment. As I say, you bring me bad news as well as good. The whole of the next age is poised in the balance. So if you are not the one I have hoped for, then all is lost. Now, stand where you are, and do not move.”
He went to a shelf, opened a small black box and took out a ring. As he carried it between fingertip and thumbtip to the center of the room Tilja saw it clearly—a simple gold circle engraved to look like fine cord. When he stopped, the dust around his sandaled feet slid gently away and she saw that the floor was polished wood, dark green, inlaid with a pattern of red and black. Faheel stood exactly at the center of the pattern, with two twined serpents, one red, one black, ringing his feet.
He turned toward the window and bowed his head. Tilja could feel his concentration. With a slow, ritual movement he slid the ring onto the middle finger of his right hand, and Tilja sensed the pulse of magic around her, instant and immense, drawn from great distances into the silent room. It didn’t touch her, didn’t swirl round her in a storming chaos, but spiraled smoothly into the center where Faheel stood waiting to receive it. For a moment everything vanished in a blinding whiteness, then returned, changed.
The window was the same, with the same sea beyond it, but the room itself seemed larger, and the dust was gone, and every surface shone or glittered with jewels or glowed with intense color. It wasn’t, Tilja realized, that everything had been magically swept and dusted in that dazzling instant—no, the space between these four walls was now ageless, outside time. No dust would settle in
this
room, ever.