He dared not call out. He feared she might answer, unaware of the danger. It was not even his intention to find her, only to raise enough noise for her to take some magical precaution—and for him to locate targets at more than arm's length, if the creature had companions slipping through this woods. He had an arrow against the bow. He was ready for treachery.
Then he saw Ela's pale hair past a screen of head-high brush, and stopped and caught himself against a truncated wall, trying to think what to do or whether to go to her—
But she stood so still, so unnaturally still, paying no heed to his footsteps on the stones and his moving in the brush. She was gazing down at her cupped hands—working some magic, he told himself, but nothing evident to him, nothing to his observation that might have dispelled the threat outside.
He glanced back the way he had come, wondering whether to go back and try to lead off the creature rather than disturb her working—but that seemed supremely ill-advised. And if despite all he could do, he was followed, they had already found her.
He came to her and stopped at respectful distance, trying to say calmly, "Ela. Ela, there's a goblin—in our camp—"
She might not have heard him at all. He saw the flash of glass and starlight in her hands, held the bow and the arrow in his left hand, touched her arm ever so slightly, then shook at her, when she remained, statuelike, completely oblivious to his touch. "Ela. A goblin. It's after us."
A flutter of her eyelids then—a moment that she looked straight at him. "No," she said, shaking her head, as if what he said were patently foolish. "No. Not here."
Perhaps, then, the wall did keep something out. Perhaps there was some magical reason the goblin asked him to find her, and perhaps it had been a mistake to come in here and disturb her magic. Maybe that was exactly what the goblin wanted. But there was nothing to do now but make her understand him. "It's out there with the horses. It followed us from the tower." He tried to sound sane and reasonable. Breath failed him. "It spoke to me. It told me to find you. What should I do?"
She seemed to have understood, then. And the amulet in her hands began softly to glow and cast a light on her face— a mirror, it was, a simple mirror. He remembered the goblin saying that her mistress would not touch what she had taken up ... and he thought: This small thing?
Then a feeling of malaise tingled through the air, through the earth, through the soles of his feet and the nape of his neck and the palms of his hands. He heard the trees sighing in the woods and the water of the brook running, and a distant shouting, as if it came out of some hollow hall. Ysabel wouldn't touch what she's taken up, echoed in his ears, like voices from the tower—taken up, taken up, taken up—
The dark around them receded. They stood beneath the ghostly lamps and hangings of a great hall, and all around them men and women fled in fear. The floors and walls Began to crack as light blazed through, brilliant as the sun.
Everything whirled about them. Suddenly a veiled woman stood in this thundering chaos, her cloak and her robes cracking like banners in the winds that swept the hall. She looked full at them, at him, and pointed her finger, crying into the gale—" ... one and the same ... One is all! Remember that, above all! There is always a flaw—"
The image shattered, with a sound of breaking glass. Shocking quiet followed, isolation and dark, ordinary night around them, an ordinary moon above the ruined walls and the brush. He discovered himself breathing, and his heart beating and the sighing of the wind moving without his will.
"Wizard!" Ela cried, tearing her arm free, and hit him with her fist. "Liar! Damned liar, get away from me! You touched it, you changed it—"
"No!" Too many accusations of falsehood had come his way tonight, too many confusions. "Anything that happened, you. did. That thing you have—did." Words were coming too rapidly, and he could not get breath enough, in the sudden stillness of the air. She began to walk away from him and he caught her arm and held her perforce. "I've nothing—nothing to do with magic, or goblins, or this thing of yours! I don't know what you were doing, but there's a goblin the other side of the wall where the horses are, it's looking for you, and it says you've inconvenienced it—that that thing you have, your mistress wouldn't touch! He called her name. Ysabel. And he told me to find you, don't ask me what for—I didn't know anything else to do!"
Light shone through Ela's fingers, reflected on Ela's pale face—the rest was dark, and sighing wind. "My mistress wouldn't touch.it," she echoed. "Then why did she hide it from everyone but me, why did she tell me to use it, did he tell you that? —Let me go! Where do you get the right to shout at me?"
"You said you were a witch!"
" I am!" Light reddened the edges of her fingers and made the illusion of bones within. "I brought us away from the tower, didn't I? I brought us here!"
"Did you rescue me, or was it the troll's idea? This is the second time that creature's let me go!"
"He's not a—"
"I don't care what it is. Karoly is dead\ Your mistress is dead\ Krukczy Tower is full of goblins, and now your mistress' tower is! The one waiting out there—wants you." He struggled to keep his voice down. "It says its name is Az-dra—Zdrajka—something. It says—"
"Azdra'ik!"
Beyond belief. "You know him?"
The glow had all but died within her hand, leaving only night above them, and a plain piece of mirror when she opened her fingers, that reflected nothing but dark and moonlight. "This is mine. I have it! It can show me anywhere in the land. It can open magic to me. It can defeat them!"
"Then begin with the one that's been following us! If it gets the horses, we're afoot here with its friends, with lord Sun knows what next! Send him off, for a start!"
She seemed to have run out of words. The bit of silvered glass flashed in. the moonlight, inert as its delicate chain that sparkled in her fingers. "Let me go," she said. "Let me go! You've already changed something, I don't know what. What more damage can you do?"
He released her arm. She eyed him balefully, then began to walk, back toward the gateway and the horses. He walked with her, with a stitch in his side and with the disquieting understanding that she was going indeed to confront this Zdrajka-goblin with her piece of glass, and he nocked the arrow and had another ready as he walked.
"Let me go first," he said, "and tell him I found nothing." Perhaps after all, he thought, lying was his best talent. But it was not fair tactics he expected, from a goblin; and it was not fair tactics he meant to use, with the advantage all to the goblin.
Ela might have heard him or might not: she kept walking, and he saw her lips moving, shaping words that had no sound. That, he did not like: it might equally well be a magic to deal with him as with the goblin, so far as he knew, or blackest sorcery that might not care where it made its bargains.
But when they came to the gate, the horses were grazing peacefully in the moonlight, as if nothing had ever happened.
"Well?" she asked. "Where is he?"
"He was here," was all he could say—until, outside the gate, walking over the ground he and the goblin had occupied, he saw the glitter of jewels in the moonlight, and gathered up the sheath that belonged to the knife. "It was here," he said, showing it to Ela. "It was here and it left."
Why? was the next obvious question. But Ela only frowned and walked away in silence.
While the horses, that should have been off in the woods and the devil's own work to catch after their fright, might have had second thoughts about the grass growing in this spot, and hunger might have weighed more with them than goblin-smell—they certainly showed no signs of recent panic.