“Maja? What’s up? Are you all right?”
Somewhere outside the struggle her hand made an impatient gesture. But her concentration held. There! Far, far away, and faint at this distance, but still vibrant with the immense energies of its beginning. She had felt that particular queasy resonance three times before—waiting to ford a mountain river, then on the road south of Mord, then at a way station. A Watcher—no, more than one this time—Watchers going about their sinister business. She unfocused slightly and sensed what lay around that center, the unmistakable tremor of human life, but chilled almost into stillness, a press of people, several hundred of them perhaps, all locked into the terror of the moment.
Enough.
She reached into her pouch and closed her hand round the pendant. Instantly the shield renewed itself. Ribek had to hold her from falling from the saddle.
“Are you all right, Maja?” he said again.
“In a minute,” she muttered.
She hunched down, breathing slowly and heavily and clutching the pommel of the saddle to steady herself while her spirit found its way back into her body and limbs where it belonged. After a while she shuddered, straightened and opened her eyes.
They had halted on the hillside, Saranja and Benayu, also on horseback, looking back at her over their shoulders, Ribek standing beside her with his hand on her thigh.
“Are you all right?” he said again.
“Yes…yes…I…”
She was too tired to explain. The world began to go dark. She felt herself swaying.
For several hours Maja slept, only half-waking once or twice to wonder where she was and why she was sitting sideways in the saddle being comfortably held in place by someone’s arm—Ribek’s—round her waist, with her head on his chest. She snuggled herself against him and drifted back into darkness.
They must have stopped for the night, but she was only vaguely aware of it, of having a cup held to her lips so that she could drink a little water before sliding down again into the abyss of sleep. Her bladder roused her sometime in the moonlit night, and she rose and relieved it and slept again and woke at last, ravenously hungry, to a dew-scented morning and the crackle of a small fire, and mutton chops grilling on its embers. Just as she could smell and hear these things before she opened her eyes, so she could feel the presence of her companions, Benayu’s inner turmoil veiled behind the vague buzz of his sleeping power, Saranja’s banked furies, Ribek’s lovely ordinariness…
While they ate she tried to explain to the others more of what had happened to her.
“I asked Jex to stop shielding me. I wanted to see how far I could reach. I could feel everything. It was like…like…”
She struggled to find the words, to help them feel something of the worldwide blizzard of magic that had swept round and through her.
“Anyway,” she finished, “I think there’s one of the big Imperial Highways way over there, a long way off, and some Watchers, two or three, I think, were doing something to a lot of frightened people at a way station.”
“Enspelling them to fight?” said Ribek.
“I don’t know.”
“You look all in,” said Saranja. “You still do.”
“I’m all right now. Just tired.”
“You’ve got to be careful,” said Benayu earnestly. “There’s always a price. Fodaro told you that. The stronger the magic the higher the price. There’ve been beginners who’ve stumbled into something big and come out raving. I don’t think you’re actually doing the magic, but you’re channeling it somehow. And you’re doing it more and more. It’s bound to have an effect.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Well, you’d better not try that again,” said Ribek.
“I think I’ve got to,” she said. “I’ve got to learn about it. I think it’s important. Perhaps it’s why I’m here at all, so that I could do this. I’ve just got to practice, and get used to it, like—like learning to kick-fight, I suppose. You must have had to practice and practice.”
He laughed.
“Still do,” he said. “Start of each season. I’d be stiff as a plank, else. Same with your magic, I expect, Benayu.”
“Same stupid little exercises day after day after day,” said Benayu. “Fodaro kept me at it, no matter how much I bucked. He was right, though. I think Maja’s right now. She’s got to learn. But only a bit at a time, or you’ll wear yourself out. Jex will look after her if she gets into trouble, but he’s going to need to be a lot stronger before he can cope with anything really big.”
“And she’d better have one of us with her, always, when she’s trying anything like this,” said Ribek. “All right, Maja?”
“All right.”
CHAPTER
8
Twelve uneventful days passed. Morning and evening Maja reached back the way they had come, but sensed no tremor of pursuit. The blaze of magic around Tarshu faded into the distance. Or perhaps the ferocity of the battle had dwindled into a kind of stalemate. It seemed barely to matter. Almost, as the miles flowed steadily away beneath the horses’ hooves or their own feet, Maja came to forget the frightening purpose of their journey. The journey became all there was. They would never have to reach its nightmare ending.
She used the long quiet hours to think. Her fantasy life with Ribek at Northbeck mill seemed to recede into the remote, unreachable future and became unsatisfying, so she thought about things more near at hand. At first she was preoccupied with coming to terms with her sense of the magical. When its power and reach had first burst on her it had been almost overwhelming, and, except when she steeled herself to face it, she had needed much of Jex’s full protection to shield her from it. It had been like the first sudden strong spring sunlight that, carelessly faced, peels and blisters the winter-tender skin to an agonizing scarlet rawness. Now she was slowly becoming hardened to it.
Not merely that. Just as the right level of sunlight, sunlight that greets you when you step outside before breakfast with the dew still on the grass and the night chill lingering in the air, makes your skin crawl gently and you sigh with sensual delight, so, she gradually came to find, she relished the magic and mystery of the everyday world streaming round her and through her, the continual half-noticed sense that everything in that world, every pebble, every leaf, every midge, had its own individual purpose and meaning. She did too. She was part of the inward wisdom of the universe.
“You’re living in a dream, aren’t you?” Ribek said, teasing.
“I suppose so. Anyway, you’re part of it.”
“Glad to hear it.”
But how could he not be, when his own Ribek-magic, so confident, brisk, easygoing, tingled continually against her consciousness? She rode pillion with him on Levanter most of the day, and when they walked, both for the exercise and to give the horses a rest, he stayed behind with her for company.
This, of course, suited her very well. One morning several days later she started thinking about him again, not fantasizing about her future with him but soberly considering the nature of her love for him. She knew it wasn’t a childish crush, because she’d already discovered what that was like.
Last summer, her aunt had finally decided that Saranja wasn’t coming back. Or perhaps, Maja now realized, it had been because the unicorn magic was beginning to fail, and it had become urgent that somebody was found who could renew it.
At any rate, a family of second cousins had been invited to stay at Woodbourne—parents, three girls and a boy. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and even Maja had understood that her aunt was hoping that one of the girls might have the gift of hearing what the cedars were saying. The boy had been a friendly, easygoing lad who Maja instantly had decided was the most wonderful person in the world, and had dumbly hung around him at every spare moment she had. Her aunt had noticed, of course, and had told her in front of everyone it was a silly, childish crush, and then shut her in her room without food to cure her of it. Later her Woodbourne cousins had taken the boy behind the barn and beaten him up. The story had got around, and no more families had come visiting. Her aunt had been right about the boy, but Maja’s love for Ribek was not like that.