“I don’t know,” Cashel said. “I’ve been wondering if we wound up underground when I went through that wall. But there’s light enough to get along by, even if it never gets brighter.”
“No,” Tilphosa said, the tension gone from her voice. “Things growing in a cave don’t have leaves and all these trees do. But you’re right, Cashel, we have plenty of light now. I’m sorry to have been…”
She didn’t finish the sentence. If the word she’d swallowed was “worried,” then Cashel didn’t see it was anything to have been ashamed of.
The bright blur was close now and the size of a house, but the edges were just as fuzzy as they’d been when Cashel first saw it. It wasn’t in a clearing, exactly. The light took the place of trees that should’ve been there, even though the roots and upper branches showed outside the glowing field.
“Something’s moving in the light,” Cashel said, speaking a little quieter than he might normally have done. “I don’t think it’s just the trees.”
“Cashel, I see Metra,” Tilphosa said. Her voice was calm, but she gripped his arms fiercely. “If you look—”
“Right, I see her,” Cashel said.
It was funny: when he squinted just right, it all fell into place. After that he could see the wizard even if he straightened and opened his eyes wide.
She knelt holding her athame on the porch of the temple which Cashel had defended not long ago. She’d spread one of her silk figures on the stones. The scene was washed out and ripply, like Cashel was watching her on the bottom of a pond, but it was Metra all right. Around her stood—
“By the Sister, you fool!” Captain Mounix squealed. “You and the bitch’ve led us straight back to those monsters!”
Hook took one look at the light and another at Cashel’s face as he shifted and brought his staff up. The carpenter grabbed Mounix by the shoulder and clamped the other hand across his mouth.
“Shut up, will you!” he screamed at the captain. “Did you doubt what he told us? I didn’t! He don’t need monsters to finish us if he wants to!”
Ousseau, looking misshapen in the dimness because of his bandaged chest, was still stumbling along after them. His head was lowered; he probably didn’t know what was going on.
Mounix’s eyes widened. He tried to scramble back. Hook twisted the sword out of his hand and let him go.
Cashel relaxed, taking a couple of deep breaths. He nodded to Hook, and said, “Yeah, she’s there with the Archai, just like we left ’em.”
“I don’t think she can see us,” Tilphosa said. She put her hand on Cashel’s shoulder the way he himself might’ve calmed a plow ox who’d startled a wildcat in the stubble.
The thought made him chuckle. “I don’t guess they can or they’d be trying to do something about us,” Cashel said. “But there’s no reason for us to hang around here regardless.”
He nodded in the direction they’d been going thus far. “It looks like there’s another light up there,” he said. “Maybe if we keep going, we’ll find a place we want to be, huh?”
“Yes, let’s go,” Tilphosa said with a grateful smile. The hazy globe didn’t make the woods around it any brighter, but Cashel wasn’t having any difficulty seeing things by the light of the sky or roof or whatever it was.
Cashel held a hand up to stop her, then called into the darkness, “Hey, Mounix! Give Ousseau here a hand, will you? We’re not leaving anybody behind unless they want to stay, got that?”
They started forward. Tilphosa said very softly, “You’re a remarkably gentle man, Master Cashel.”
He snorted, but he was more pleased than not by the comment. “When you’re my size, you better be,” he said. “Otherwise, you break things.”
The second blur of light was much the same as the first, though this one appeared in a clump of saw-edged grass that Cashel wouldn’t have tried to fight through. He cocked his head slightly; the shadows condensed into the image of a man in a green robe, seated on a couch spread with the lush, dappled pelt of some animal. Curtains hung on the wall behind him; the embroidered figures of strange beasts cavorted on the cloth, tossing six-horned heads or screeching from bird beaks on antelope bodies.
Guards stood with their backs to the man on the couch. He stared at the bowl of water on the table before him, his expression cold and angry.
“Do you know him?” Cashel said. “I don’t.”
“I’ve never seen him before,” Tilphosa said. “That’s a scrying bowl, so he must be a wizard.”
After a further moment’s consideration, she added, “Is he a eunuch, do you suppose? The way his flesh hangs looks like he is.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Cashel said shortly. They didn’t geld men in Barca’s Hamlet. Cashel had learned things were different in some other parts of the world, but that wasn’t knowledge that pleased him.
He frowned at the man in the watery image. “He looks like a guy I saw once,” he said. The fellow who’d been talking to Garric on the bridge when he fell over and Cashel jumped in to save him…“But it’s not the same guy. He’s too young, and the fellow I saw was thinner by a lot.”
“Are we stopping here, Master Cashel?” Hook asked with nervous politeness.
Cashel turned. Captain Mounix was holding Ousseau. The wounded man looked rather better than he had when Cashel last noticed him. The captain flinched, shifting to put Ousseau’s body between him and Cashel.
Cashel nodded. “No,” he said, “there’s nothing here to hold us.”
A fairy glow showed in the farther distance, and just maybe another hung at a slightly higher level beyond that, though the second could’ve been a patch of the sky itself. The ground was rising, though gradually enough that nobody who hadn’t followed sheep for a living would’ve noticed it. Sheep can find a slope where a drop of water’d hesitate.
Cashel started on. Tilphosa walked with him—the forest was open enough for two side by side most places—and the sailors followed. Cashel smiled. They followed at a respectful distance.
“I’ve never read about this place,” Tilphosa said, picking her words carefully to seem, well, not worried. “Have you, Cashel?”
He smiled. “Mistress, I can’t read,” he said. “I can spell out my name with a little time, that’s all.”
“Ah!” said Tilphosa. She probably hadn’t thought about that sort of thing. Well, she wouldn’t, being a lady and all.
“I wasn’t educated as a wizard, of course,” she said. Cashel wasn’t sure if she was changing the subject or if she just needed to talk. “I haven’t any talent for it. Some of those who came to the temple did, and they were trained to be Children of the Mistress. They had much reading to do for what they had to learn.”
She linked her fingers and clutched them over her stomach, the way she’d have done if she was cold. Cashel didn’t think she could be. The air was warm; besides, they’d been walking at a good pace, and there wasn’t a breeze.
Cashel saw what she was hinting at. He swallowed and said, “Mistress—”
“Tilphosa,” she corrected him.
“Tilphosa,” he said, “I’m not a wizard like you think. I can do things, sure, but I don’t know how it happens. I just do them.”
She gave a little laugh. It didn’t sound forced. “I’m told that Metra is very skilled, very powerful,” she said. “As a wizard. That’s why the Council chose her to accompany me. And you freed us from her enchantment, Cashel.”
He smiled. “It looked like a wall,” he said. “Sometimes you can break a wall down if you hit it hard enough.”
They were close to the light by now. This one seemed to have color, or anyway a different color: a hint of red instead of blue to its silvery grayness. Ilna would be able to say for sure; there was nothing about shape or color that she didn’t see.
In the light a man knelt before a pentagram scratched on the narrow deck of a galley. Cashel could see a few of the rowers on the benches beyond the fellow. They leaned into the oarlooms with faces set in a fierce determination not to watch what the wizard was doing.