His breathing steadied and slowed. She counted fifty breaths. Now.
She started carefully.
“Ribek.”
“Maja? I was dreaming about you.”
“Good, we can hear each other when you’re asleep. We couldn’t before. It was maddening. I kept yelling to you to turn me round when the dragon was chasing us so I could see what was happening, and sometimes you did, so I wasn’t sure you couldn’t hear me some of the time.”
“No. I just had a sudden feeling you’d have wanted to watch if you’d been able to. I suppose I did it for luck, as much as anything. You’ve brought us luck so far. I don’t know….”
“Perhaps you just somehow felt what I wanted. Anyway I saw almost everything. Benayu was wonderful. And Sponge. Tell me what I look like. I’ve seen my legs, so I know I’m a rag doll.”
“Cute. No substitute for the real thing, mind you, but nice and light and easy to carry around. You look reasonably like yourself too, apart from the blue eyes.”
Now or never. No way I’d be able to do it when I’m back in my own shape, speaking the words out aloud. Don’t rush it. Start gently, somewhere else.
“What happened back at the oyster pond? I was in the water. I think you got hold of my wrist and were helping me down, but I couldn’t see anything or feel anything except the fire-line I was following. Then everything went black.”
“Like I said. We’d reached the bottom but your hand was like a dog pulling on a leash. You weren’t doing it yourself. Your arm would’ve been completely limp, except that it was being dragged on down by your hand. It pushed on down between the oysters into the gravelly stuff and then—you saw me trying to touch Benayu’s eggshell earlier?”
“Yes.”
“It was like what happened to me, only a hundred times more so. My own arm went numb. I saw the breath bursting out of your mouth so I had a quick grope with my other hand and found the bit of rope and hauled you up to the surface. I was desperate to get you ashore and tip the water out of you, but the moment I broke the surface I was snatched into the air and deposited on Levanter’s back. I seemed to have lost you somehow. So I started yelling to Benayu to turn back and find you, but then I realized I was holding something and got the water out of my eyes and saw what it was.
“You looked absolutely pitiful and my heart sank but I just hoped that Benayu and Jex had got it right between them. I stuffed you into my shirt for the moment—I was sopping wet too, remember—and looked to see what we’d found. I hadn’t given it a thought till that moment. I could perfectly easily have dropped it in the excitement. My heart sank all over again, but all I could do was shove it into a saddlebag and sort myself out, get hold of the reins, sit properly and so on.
“As soon as I got the chance I looked behind us, but there wasn’t anything to see at first because Benayu had made a dense fog over the whole area. It wasn’t anything to bother the Watchers, really, he says, though it gave us a few more seconds to get us further out over the sea before they swept it away, but that wasn’t the point.
“I saw that happen. One moment the fog was there, the next it was thin mist, except for a dense patch over the harbor. Benayu had made that to be still there when the fog was gone. There was a screen round us, he says, but of course I couldn’t see that. And down at the harbor he’d built a good strong ward round a flock of sheep waiting to be shipped, and then ‘sent’ them—that’s the opposite of fetching—somewhere up the coast. And he’d put it into the poor old Magister’s head that he’d seen us heading off in that direction. That was part of the false trail, like the extra bit of fog.
“Anyway, what I saw looked like a ripple of sunlight sweeping up from the south and rolling the mist away in front of it. A bit of the mist seemed to stay round us, enough to hide us from the shore, I guess, but I could just make out the Magister standing by the oyster pond staring back toward Barda. Six or seven Watchers appeared out of nowhere—they all looked exactly like that one who came to the way station. The oyster pool exploded. The Magister fell flat on his face. Everything in the pool fountained up into the air and rained down through a glittering net, which I guessed was there to sieve out anything magical in the pool.
“Then the Magister was stood up like a doll—sorry about that—no offense meant—and just dropped after a couple of moments, and the Watchers disappeared. They must have gone down to the harbor because there was a colossal explosion and a swirling dark cloud which was sucked up into the sky and just vanished.
“By this time I was absolutely shuddering with cold. I was still wearing my wet clothes, and the wind was whistling past at the speed Levanter was going. The only thing that stopped me freezing solid was a bit of warmth coming up from him through my legs. Having you dangling against my chest, sodden as a sponge, wasn’t helping, so I fished you out and squeezed the water out of you best I could and cleaned you up with a dry shirt out of my saddlebag and hung you round my neck….”
Now!
“Before you did that you kissed me, didn’t you? Not on my forehead, like last night. In the middle of my face. On my mouth.”
“Well…I just felt like it. I’m fond of you. I didn’t realize you’d notice. Your face is a small target and there was a lot going on. I didn’t take careful aim. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not, except that I couldn’t feel it. I want to marry you when I’m old enough. What do you think?”
Long pause. She’d got it all wrong, and plunged right in. If she’d been in her own body she’d have been plum-red with embarrassment. Poor Ribek.
“You don’t have to answer. It probably isn’t a fair question.”
“I was thinking how to put it. The answer is no, but isn’t as simple as that.”
“No’s all right. You don’t have to explain.”
“I want to. I’ve been thinking about it, because I was aware you might have feelings like this. Nothing to be ashamed about. It happens. But if I had the same feelings about someone your age…I knew a chap once, farmer, used to bring his wheat to the mill…”
Another pause.
“Go on.”
“All I’ll tell you is that when I found out what had happened I told him he was sick in his head and he could take his wheat somewhere else to be ground. He would have been better dead.”
“I wasn’t talking about me now. I said ‘when I’m old enough.’ Suppose I was six years older…”
“Make it eight. I’d be fifty-two.”
“I don’t mind how old you are.”
“I do. I’ve seen what can happen. When I was sixteen my sister married a farmer from down the valley. She was three years older than me, and he was a bit past fifty. That’s about two years more than the gap between you and me. He was a big, strong, friendly man—we all liked him. Five years later he had a stroke. The worst of it was that he lived for another twenty-two years, an almost helpless wreck of what he’d been. My sister had the farm to manage, three children to raise, and him to look after night and day. You’ll meet her one day and you’ll see she looks a good twenty years older than I do. Two of the three girls don’t want anything to do with her. They feel that between them their parents managed to blight their own childhoods…. Oh, my dear. All that good young life my sister should have had, wasted and blasted! I’m not going to do that to you. Or to me. Do you see that? I think it was even worse for my brother-in-law than it was for my sister.”