She was wearing Jex with the cord looped round her neck and the pendant tucked into the pocket of her blouse, and enjoying whatever he let pass of the gentle, almost unnoticeable, magical essences in everything around her—an effect like birdsong in woodland, she thought; after a while you don’t notice it, unless a pigeon coos right overhead, but it’s there, all the time. They were walking along a deep-cut lane, steep banks with walls atop, and approaching a bend. Beyond it, still out of sight, were three people, two men and a boy. She could sense and distinguish their separate essences, even their mood. The men were laughing and the boy wasn’t happy.
She rounded the bend with the others and there they were, in a gateway a little distance further on. The boy, about nine years old, must have fallen in a cowpat or something, because one of the men was crouching beside him trying to clean him up with handfuls of grass from the roadside. Both men obviously thought it a good joke. The boy did not.
Ribek, typically, stopped to chat, offering them his water flask to help with the clean-up. He caught up at a trot a couple of bends further on.
“Nothing new,” he said, panting slightly. “They keep pretty well up to date. The Highway’s only a couple of valleys away over there. They hadn’t heard about the Watchers taking men away and enspelling them to fight the Sheep-faces. Perhaps it’s only a rumor that fellow we met had picked up. You probably get a lot of that sort of thing in wartime. You should have heard some of the stories that came up to the mill when the horsemen first attacked.”
“If it’s only a rumor we’d be better off on the Highway,” said Benayu. “We’d get on twice as fast. Three times. Saranja?”
“Maja, would you be able to tell from here if a Watcher came to the Highway?” said Saranja.
The moment she concentrated, the Highway was there, laid out in her mind as if she’d been standing on a hillside looking down on it. Over to the left a way station, almost empty at this time of day. There was some kind of minor hedge magic being practiced there. On either side of that a ribbon of slowly drifting pulses, travelers on the Highway unconsciously beaming out their individual signals, the natural magic that they had brought into the world with them when they were born and that would leave them only when they died. That was what she had picked up a little while ago when they had been approaching the bend and, before she saw them, she’d known about the three people they’d meet as soon as they were round it. She couldn’t have done that before Tarshu.
Yes, Tarshu had changed her.
“I’d know,” she said confidently.
“Let’s go on as we are, then, for the moment,” said Saranja, “and Maja can tell us if anything like that starts happening. We haven’t been doing too badly. These valleys all seem to run roughly north-south, so the lanes do too, mostly. If we get to a point where Benayu can’t find a good way ahead for us we can go back on the Highway for a bit.”
All the rest of that day Maja walked or rode in silence, thinking. Her companions seemed to recognize her need and let her be. No, it hadn’t been only Tarshu that had changed her. Perhaps the overwhelming blast of the moment when the speaking of the Ropemaker’s name had summoned Jex back across the universes had begun the change, but the real work had been done three days further north, by the old sheep-fold, when she had laid one strand of his hair out on the rock beside her and let the whisper of his name blast her into a kind of elsewhere. The journey had finished somewhere in the Empire—she was sure of that—but it hadn’t gone through the Empire to reach it. It had gone through some other kind of space. Unimaginable. For a moment she stood on the hillside of her dream staring through the magical doorway at—at but not into—the unimaginable universe beyond.
Whatever else had happened, that was the moment that had finally changed her. She had come into her own, an inheritance that had been waiting, perhaps through many generations, for her to discover and use.
A troublesome gift. In a way she had known that all along, ever since, hiding under the barn at Woodbourne, she had first been overwhelmed by the shock-wave of magic when Saranja had given Rocky his wings. Even before they had reached Tarshu, without her amulet to protect her she would have been lost. The same now, if they ran into any more serious magic, without Jex.
Without Jex? She looked around.
For some time they had been climbing in single file up a narrow path, little more than a sheep track, that slanted up the side of a hill with the valley beneath them on their right, seeming to stretch further and further into the distance as they climbed. Maja was riding Levanter, with Ribek striding just ahead of her. If they continued on this line they would reach the crest and look down on the Imperial Highway. There was a small town there, not unlike Mord. If she concentrated her whole attention on it she could feel the buzz of its comings and goings, with bits and pieces of hedge magic, and a sort of numb spot, perhaps where something more serious was being warded. She could even feel the endless small fidgetings of the magical trinkets in its market. Deliberately she unlooped the stone pendant from her neck and put it in her pouch.
She reeled. Automatically she flung up her right arm to shield her face. All the world’s magic seemed to be battering against her. She was crammed into a tiny cell with Ribek and Saranja, Benayu and Sponge and the horses, all bellowing their separate magics into her ears. She was stripped naked on the hillside with the hailstorm of minor magics of grass and shrub, gravel and boulder and soil, ant and grasshopper and fly, lizard and snail, streaming against her too-tender skin, while her whole body vibrated to the deep, slow pulse of the centuries-enduring hills.
Her hand was already reaching into her pouch. Not yet, she thought. I must learn about this. It is part of my gift. I can use it.
Slowly she mastered herself, forced herself to ignore the immediate intense assault. To reach out into it, through it and see what she could find. It was like a winter morning once at Woodbourne when she had woken early to look for a hen. It had been missing the night before though she had searched and searched until it was time for her to come in and set the table for supper. It would have meant a word as bitter as a blow from her aunt if she’d been late for that. The hen would have been no excuse—less than no excuse, as it would have been her carelessness to lose it—so she hadn’t dared tell anyone.
But it had come to her in the night where the bird might be. So, in the faintest of faint hopes, she had risen and dressed and slipped down the stair in the dark and lit a lantern and opened the door, into a blizzard.
She had heard the wind in the dark and expected storm weather. But not this. These sudden buffeting gusts from every which-where, almost solid in their strength and from the thick, swirling white flakes they bore, hurling into the tiny globe of light from the fluttering lantern flame and on into the dark. Again and again she had to force her eyelids up as they tried to close themselves against the slashing icy particles that whipped into her face, so that she could peer one pace ahead. Almost she had turned back, but she had battled on, mastering her fear, mastering her weakness, mastering the storm, finding the stupid hen cowering in its nook, carrying it back, and releasing it clucking into the coop. She had told no one. So now.
Except that there was no hen to look for, no purpose in her struggle against that blizzard of magic except to learn how to survive it. First simply that, and then to have something to spare from the struggle, so that she could actually use this dangerous, terrifying aspect of her gift. She hunched into herself, trying to choose what and what not to feel, to ignore the bellowing voices in the cramped cell, the myriad hurtling fragments in the naked hillside, the deep engrossing vibrations of the underlying hills, to feel through them, and beyond them…