Enopp gave that more thought than Danny had expected. “I don’t know. I have only been free of my prison for a few weeks.”
“We’d better watch carefully then,” said Danny, “so we don’t get taken by surprise when the pranks start.”
They kept milking till the job was done. Only then did Danny take Enopp by the hand and walk with him across the yard to the house.
In the kitchen, Leslie had the table spread with small plates and a big platter of warmed-up sliced bread and an array of butter, jams, and honey. Everyone was eating. Enopp ran right to the table beside his brother and started jabbering to him. Danny saw that Eluik did not answer him, or even show a sign of listening. But Enopp was undiscouraged by this; and it wasn’t as if Eluik were inert, for he was eating steadily, though without any visible pleasure in the food, which Danny knew from experience was extraordinarily good.
“Did my son bore you?” asked Anonoei. “He chatters as if he thought himself a great philosopher or statesman, with the world eager to hear his words.”
“I could not have been more eager,” said Danny, adopting the arch-formal tones he had only overheard when spying on the adults meeting in the library of the old house in the North Family compound. “Your son is surprisingly happy for one so recently a prisoner.”
“He is resilient,” said Anonoei.
Danny could not help glancing at Eluik, but then looked at Loki, as if he had only chanced to look at Eluik as his gaze passed from Anonoei to the Gate Thief.
“You have achieved your first purpose,” Danny said to Loki. “You have passed through a Great Gate.”
“My first purpose was to see that no such gate existed,” said Loki. “But having failed in that, it is true that I thought it wise to refresh such small powers as are left to me.”
“You know more than I about how these powers work,” said Danny, “but it seems to me that while our brute force depends on the number of our gates, our dexterity depends on knowledge and experience. I have the brute force, it’s true, but you have the deftness of long practice.”
“Long practice followed by far longer disuse,” said Loki. “I have spent fourteen centuries and more drifting upward through a tree, aware of little but occasional flashes of gatemaking, which I quickly extinguished.”
“Yet you did come out of the tree,” said Danny, “and apparently some time before I attempted a Great Gate.”
“But not before you made your first few dozen gates,” said Loki. “Your first few hundred, I should say.”
It was the Gate Thief’s admission that he had been aware of Danny for some time. That he had sensed, however dimly, that Danny was alive, a great mage in potential if not in accomplishment.
“I didn’t even know I was making the gates,” Danny admitted.
“Be careful what you say,” said Marion.
“He knows,” said Danny. “He has been watching me even before he knew that it was I whom he watched.”
“Aren’t we the lofty speakers now,” said Leslie. “I feel as if I’m in a school, studying Westilian style.”
“These gatemages and their linguistic show-offery,” said Marion in English.
“I am learning your English a little,” said Loki, and while his words were slow and stilted, his Ohio accent was nearly perfect.
“How?” demanded Leslie in English. “Who in Westil could possibly teach you? Do you have spies here?”
“He does,” said Danny, also in English.
Leslie stood up and paced to the kitchen counter, then turned around, as if somehow the sink had been besieged, and she were its sole defender.
“Me,” said Danny. “His spies are inside me-the gates I took from him. Thousands of them, and through them he can glimpse a little. He can hear.”
“How much?” demanded Marion. “What does he know?”
“I don’t know,” said Danny. “All his gates ever do that I know of is demand that any working gate be eaten up. If he had succeeded in swallowing my gates, then I could tell you just how much a mage can learn through his captive gates. But I’d rather have my ignorance than his knowledge.”
“If I could hear more, I’d speak better,” said Loki, reverting to Westilian. “In truth, I see nothing. I hear nothing. I am inside the womb of his mind. But there is where his language dwells, and his memory. I cannot search at will; but I can overhear his thoughts, when he makes them into language. I can see his memories, when he concentrates on them. I am not spying. Where he has imprisoned my outself, I have no choice but to see and hear what he shows me.”
But Danny didn’t believe Loki. The trouble was he didn’t know in which direction the lie was leaning: Did Loki see and hear far more than he admitted? Or had he seen and heard nothing at all until he passed through the Wild Gate, enhancing his powers and coming so much nearer to Danny himself?
“What did you come here for?” asked Danny. “You came with these three, so your purpose was more than your own enhancement.”
“Their lives are in danger,” said Loki. “Here they will be safe.”
“That’s absurdly false,” said Marion. “All the mages of the world would be assaulting us, if they knew this Wild Gate existed in our barn. There’s no more dangerous place on Earth.”
“But who would tell them?” asked Loki. Then he raised a hand. “That was not a threat.”
Marion did not relax, his posture even more alert. “How else can we hear that statement?”
“An observation,” said Loki. “This Wild Gate has existed for days now, and yet they leave you alone. If your secret were out, they would not wait.”
“They’re afraid of our power of defense,” said Leslie. “Marion and I have passed through a gate. No beastmage can hold on to his heartbound, if they come against us. The ground surrounding us is under Marion’s control. Danny could gate them away, even if they got past our defense.”
“So you think they do know, and bide their time?” asked Loki.
“What do you want,” demanded Marion. “I don’t believe you brought this woman here for her protection. I feel a great power in her.”
“I felt it first,” said Leslie. “She’s a mage in her own right, and passing through the Great Gate made her dangerous.”
“It did,” said Anonoei. “But the very fact that you mistrust me shows that I have used none of my power on you.”
It took only a moment for the implications of her remark to sink in. Marion rose to his feet and joined Leslie by the sink. “Danny, she’s a manmage,” Marion said in English.
“I got it,” said Danny. “But as she said, she hasn’t used it.”
“Or she’s so powerful that we can’t feel that she used it on us.”
“So you think she’s making you so suspicious of her?” asked Danny.
“If she tried to use it I would gate her away myself,” said Loki. “I gain nothing if she irritates you, and neither does she. We face a deadly enemy on Westil, a Firemaster at least, if not a Lightrider.”
“Queen Bexoi,” added Enopp helpfully. “Our father’s true wife.”
Danny looked from Loki to Anonoei, and saw that Bexoi was, indeed, Anonoei’s objective here. The grim determination in her face, the hand that rested on Enopp’s nape, the little toss of her head, all these testified to Enopp’s having said the truth.
But Loki was another matter. His approval had come a fraction of a second late, and looked too much like an imitation of Anonoei’s. He had a very different goal.
“You want Anonoei empowered,” said Danny. “You want her battling this Bexoi. But that’s not why you’ve come.”
“Ced,” Leslie suggested. “That windmage who stayed on Westil.”
“I’ve befriended him and stopped his storming all over Westwold,” said Loki. “I have him studying with a treemage to learn how to still his inself so he can control his powers and use them with finesse.”
Still only a partial truth, Danny saw. “Do we have to talk alone?” he asked Loki.
Loki studied Danny for only a few moments, but in those moments Danny felt the Gate Thief’s gates stir within him. “You have something that I need,” said Loki.