“Let’s get moving, anyway,” said Saranja. “I’ll explain on the way.”
“Tell her to be careful,” Maja muttered as Ribek helped her onto Levanter’s back. “That night in the desert, when you told us ‘The Miller’s Daughter’—just before that, you and Saranja were starting to talk about something, and I said don’t. Don’t even think about it. It’s still like that. And I can’t tell you whether we’ve been noticed all over again after what Benayu’s been doing—not with him so close. He’s changed.”
“I’ll tell her,” said Ribek, smiling. “Then we’ll drop back and you can see if that makes enough difference. If all’s well I’ll wave to Saranja and you can have a nap. You’re dead beat. All right?”
It came in her dream—one of those ones that you know are a dream because you know you’re lying in your own bed and you’re having a dream there, but at the same time you’re in that dream and somewhere else, walking, talking, listening. So Maja knew she was half-lying face down on Levanter’s back, with a strap round her to keep her from falling, but at the same time she was sitting upright in the saddle in the Council Chamber at Larg, watching Ribek explaining something to the Proctors behind the long table, only when she looked at them again she saw that they weren’t the real Proctors, though they wore the Proctors’ gowns and hats, but they all had the same expressionless smooth ivory face or mask that the Watcher had worn when he came to the way station all those weeks ago.
She was aware of an odd little buzzy feeling at the back of her mind. She couldn’t hear what Ribek was saying, but when he pointed at the corner of the room that held the hidden door to Zara’s chamber, the buzz instantly became louder, closer…
“Stop!” she shouted, shoving herself violently up. The strap bit into her shoulders. She wriggled herself out of it, sat up and stared round. Ribek had halted and was looking at her. The sun was high. They were alone on the Highway. There was a way station a little further on. The others were nowhere to be seen.
“Where are they all?”
Ribek gestured toward the way station.
“Gone on ahead to get some food ready. I was just about to wake you to see if it made any difference not having Benayu around. Well?”
“I don’t know…. Yes, I think so…. I had a dream…. Wait.”
She concentrated, focused back to that moment in her dream, the sinister buzz. She grasped it with her mind, let the real world expand around her, followed it as it faded off to the south. It didn’t dwindle completely away, but stayed faintly there, in the far distance, like the quiet tick of a clock somewhere in a house, a sound you’ve grown so used to that you never notice it. Only when you think about it, there it is, ticking endlessly away.
“I don’t think they’re actually looking for us now,” she said. “It’s like…sometimes when I went fishing with my cousins there’d be a man there. He used to have three or four rods sticking out over the pool. He didn’t hold any of them in his hands, but he watched the floats and the moment one of them bobbled a bit he’d know there might be a fish nibbling the bait. He just waited and watched until the float bobbled a bit more and then he’d know the fish had taken the bait and he’d grab that rod and strike. I don’t know, of course, but I’m scared that that’s what we’re doing when we start talking about…”
Even to name the city where Zara lay sleeping now seemed charged with danger. She jerked her head round toward her shoulder, indicating something behind them. Ribek nodded understanding.
“We’re nibbling the bait when we do that,” she said. “If we do it for more than a moment, they’ll start watching, ready, and as soon as we actually start talking about it seriously they’ll know where we are, and strike.”
CHAPTER
14
Once again, day followed day and week followed week as they had on the way south. The season changed as the world started to tilt toward winter. And it seemed to change faster than it would have if they had been staying in one place instead of traveling north, away from the sun. The grapes had already been beginning to ripen on the vines around Farfar. Now the vineyards were rare, and cattle grazed in kempt pastures, and the streams and rivers they crossed were already, to Ribek’s delight, beginning to foam and roar as the autumn rains that had fallen on the inland hills flooded back toward the ocean. Though they were still far south of the Valley, Maja began to sense, as she lay in the dark at the way stations, that she could smell the mountains.
Vaguely she wondered what was happening there. Had the horsemen burnt or smashed or killed or stolen everything they could find and then melted away through the northern passes? Had the people of the Valley driven them off? No knowing. She realized she was strangely uninterested. She had never been happy in the Valley. Almost the only happiness she had known in her life had been on this journey, despite all its terrors and hardships. The reason the Valley mattered to her was that one day she was going to live there with Ribek, in peace at Northbeck mill. That made it worth saving. Apart from that, she would almost have liked the journey to last for ever.
But Saranja boiled with impatience to press forward and her mood infected them all. They were reluctant to leave Striclan behind, but there was no way his mule could have kept up if Benayu hadn’t endowed it with extra speed and energy, just as Chanad had done for the horses. It must have been almost as ingratiating an animal as Striclan was a person, for it soon struck up an unlikely friendship with Pogo, which seemed to have a calming effect on him.
The pattern of their lives changed in other, less tangible ways. They had become more unsettled, less easy with each other. Even when Benayu had been at his most moody and difficult there had from the start been a unity of purpose between the four of them, an immediate friendship, though they had been strangers to each other only a few days earlier. This did not now sit so easily around them.
At first Maja thought it was something to do with Striclan. Not with the traveling scholar they had met after their encounter with the demon north of Larg—they had all liked him then. Saranja had actually said so. They no longer had to pretend they didn’t know he was a Sheep-face spy, and that should have made things easier, but it didn’t seem to. He still didn’t share their purpose. He didn’t even know about it. The barrier of secrecy and deceit had altered, but it was still there.
Later she decided that there was more to it than that, and they would have changed anyway. Maja herself was certainly changing, since Saranja had told her who her father was. It was surprisingly difficult to get used to the idea that everything wasn’t her fault. That had been such a habit of thought she couldn’t suddenly start thinking differently. She ought to have felt newborn, freed from the mysterious prison of guilt and shame, ready to start her life all over afresh, with Woodbourne only a hazily remembered dream, but she didn’t. There was old Maja and there was new Maja, and one was the shadow of the other, but which was which? They kept switching places, and this made her moody and jumpy in ways that she hadn’t been before.
Benayu had changed even more. They were all aware of it to some extent. To Ribek and Saranja there probably seemed now to be two Benayus. One was the boyish, confident young magician, delighting in his own powers, whom they had first met with Fodaro on that mountain pasture. In this mood some evenings he would chat happily about magic to Striclan, to Saranja’s undisguised irritation, while Striclan filled page after page of his notebooks in his private unreadable code. It was mainly gossip and anecdote, and always couched in the language of levels and powers—no hint of Fodaro’s equations, or the possibility of other dimensions, other universes.