"I didn't know I was coming," Rod muttered.
"Be assured that we did." The youth grinned. "Molly foresaw it; but she said you would be here half an hour agone."
"Sorry." Rod's eyes were a trifle glazed. "Ran into a couple delays…"
"Eh, think naught of it. 'Twas her miscalling, not yours; the wine, no doubt. Yet we have expected you since you set foot in the castle; the elves told us last night you were a warlock."
Rod's mind snapped clear. "Baloney! I'm no more a warlock than you… I mean…"
"Oh, thou art a warlock." The boy nodded sagely. "A warlock, and a most puissant one. Did you not come in a falling star?"
"That's science, not magic! And I'm not a warlock!"
The youth smiled roguishly. "Knowing or not, thou'rt most surely a warlock." He saluted Rod with the mug. "And therefore one of us."
"Uh… well, thanks." Rod returned the salute and took a draft from the mug. It was mulled wine, hot and spicy.
He looked around the room, trying to grow accustomed to the constant clamor and the flagrant violations of Newton's Laws.
His eyes lit on a couple seated under one of the windows, deep in conversation, which is to say, she was talking and he was listening. She was a looker, fairly bursting her bodice; he was thin and intent, eyes burning as he watched her.
Rod smiled cynically and wondered about the boy's motives for such steadfast devotion.
The girl gasped and spun around to glare outraged at Rod.
Rod's mouth sagged open. Then he began to stammer an apology; but before it reached his lips, the girl smiled, mollified, bowed her head graciously at him, and turned back to her one-man audience.
Rod's mouth sagged again. Then he reached out, groping for the tapster's arm, his eyes fixed on the girl.
The boy threw an arm around his shoulders, his voice worried. "What troubles thee, friend?"
"That—that girl," Rod stammered. "Can she read my mind?"
"Oh, aye! We all can, somewhat; though she is better than most."
Rod put a hand to his head to stop it from spinning. Telepaths. A whole room full of them. There were supposed to be about ten proven telepaths in the whole of the known galaxy.
He looked up again. It was a mutation, or genetic drift, or something.
He drew himself up and cleared his throat. " Say, pal… uh, what's your name, anyway?"
"Ay de mi!" The boy struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. "A pox upon my lacking courtesy. I am Tobias, Master Gallowglass; and thou must needs meet us all."
He whirled Rod away toward the nearest group.
"But—but I just wanted to ask—"
"This is Nell, this is Andreyev, this Brian, this Dorothy…"
A half hour and fifty-three introductions later, Rod collapsed on a wooden bench. He swung his tankard up and swallowed the dregs. "Now," he said, slamming it down on his knee, "we're both drained."
"Ah, let me fetch you another!" Toby snatched the mug from his hand and flew away.
Literally.
Rod watched him drift across the room, ten feet off the floor, and shook his head. He was beyond astonishment now.
It seemed what he had on his hands was a budding colony of espers—levitative, precognitive, and telepathic.
But if they could all teleport, how come the girls all rode broomsticks?
Toby appeared at Rod's elbow, with a slight poof! of displaced air. Rod goggled at him, then accepted the refilled mug. "Uh, thanks. Say, you can, uh, levitate and teleport?"
"Pardon?" Toby frowned, not understanding.
"You can-uh-fly? And, uh-wish yourself from one place to another?"
"Oh, aye!" Toby grinned. "We all can do that."
"What? Fly?"
"Nay; we all can wish ourselves to places that we know. All the boys can fly; the girls cannot."
Sex-linked gene, Rod thought. Aloud, he said, "That's why they ride broomsticks?"
"Aye. Theirs is the power to make lifeless objects do their bidding. We males cannot."
Aha! Another linkage. Telekinesis went with the Y-chromosomes, levitation with theX.
But they could all teleport. And read minds.
A priceless colony of espers. And, if their lives were anything like those of the rare telepaths outside the planet…
"And the common people hate you for this?"
Toby's young face sobered to the point of gloom. "Aye, and the nobles too. They say we are leagued with the Devil. 'Twas the trial by water, or a most thorough roasting for us, till our good Queen Catharine came to reign." Turning away, he shouted, "Ho, Bridget!"
A young girl, thirteen at the most, spun away from her dance partner and appeared at Toby's side.
"Friend Gallowglass would know how the people do like us," Toby informed her.
All the joy went out of the child's face; her eyes went wide and round; she caught her lower lip between her teeth.
She unbuttoned the back of her blouse from neck to bodice and turned away. Her back was a crisscross of scars, a webbing of welts—the sign of the cat-o'-ninetails.
She turned back to Rod as Toby buttoned her blouse again, her eyes still round and tragic. "That," she whispered, "for naught but suspicion; and I but a child of ten years at the time."
Rod's stomach tried to turn itself inside out and climb out through his esophagus. He reprimanded it sternly, and it sank back to its ordinary place in the alimentary tract. Bile soured the back of Rod's tongue.
Bridgett spun and disappeared; a nano-second later she was back with her partner, giddy and exuberant again.
Rod frowned after her, brooding.
"So you may see," said Toby, "that we are most truly grateful to our good Queen."
"She did away with the fire and/or water bit?"
"Oh, she revoked the law; but the witch-burnings went on, in secret. There was only one way'to protect us, and that she chose: to give sanctuary to any of us who would come here and claim it."
Rod nodded, slowly. "She's not without wisdom, after all."
His eyes wandered back to Bridgett where she danced on the ceiling.
"What troubles you, friend Gallowglass?"
"She doesn't hate them," Rod growled. "She has every reason in the world to hate the normal folk, but she doesn't."
Toby shook his head, smiling warmly. "Not she, nor any of us. All who come to shelter in the Queen's Coven swear first to live by Christ's Law."
Slowly, Rod turned to look at him. "I see," he said after a moment. "A coven of white witches."
Toby nodded.
"Are all the witches of Gramarye white?"
"Shame to say it, they are not. Some there are who, embittered through greater suffering than ours—the loss of an ear or an eye, or a loved one, or all—have hidden themselves away in the Wild Lands of the mountains, and there pursue their vengeance on all mankind."
Rod's mouth pulled back into a thin, grim line, turned down at the corners.
"They number scarce more than a score," Toby went on. "There are three in the prime of life; all the rest are withered crones and shrunken men."
"The fairy-tale witches," Rod growled.
"Of a truth, they are; and their works are noised about just sufficient to cover report of any good works that we may deal."
"So there are two kinds of witches in Gramarye: the old and evil ones, up in the mountains; and the young white ones in the Queen's castle."
Toby shook his head and smiled, his eyes lighting once again. "Nay, there are near threescore white witches beside us, who would not trust to the Queen's promise of sanctuary. They are thirty and forty years aged, good folk all, but slow indeed to be trusting."
Understanding struck with all the power of Revelation. Rod leaned back, his mouth forming a silent O; then nodding rapidly, he leaned forward and said, "That's why you're all so young! Only the witches who still had some trust and recklessness left in them took the Queen's invitation! So she got a flock of teenagers!"
Toby grinned from ear to ear, nodding quick with excitement.
"So the mature witches," Rod went on, "are very good people, but they're also very cautious!"