Karanissa maintained that her tale was very short and simple. Not long after she had completed her apprenticeship and been drafted into the army as a military witch, she had met Derithon, then two or three hundred years old and semiretired from his duties, but still on call for special missions and still training new combat wizards. They had, as she put it, become very good friends, but had not considered marriage because of the two-century difference in their ages, the gross disparity in their ranks — Derithon a reserve general, she a mere lieutenant — and the usual difficulties attendant upon marriages between magicians of different schools.
Tobas was not aware of any such difficulties, but said nothing.
The two of them had had good times together, Karanissa went on, and Derithon had her transferred from her reconnaissance post to “special duties” under his own command. He had even put a spell of eternal youth on her.
Startled, Tobas interrupted at that point. “Are you serious?” he said. “About what?” she asked, startled.
“That eternal youth spell. Do you mean that spells like that really exist?”
“Certainly they do! How did you expect me to believe that I’ve been here four hundred years if you didn’t know about youth spells?”
“I don’t know; I thought that maybe time was different here. I was always told that eternal youth spells were just pretty stories for children.”
“No, they’re real, all right, and, so far as I know, there isn’t any difference between time here and anywhere else. Youth spells are a military secret, but I thought just about everyone knew about them, all the same. Haven’t you ever met any powerful wizards who look as if they’ve just finished their apprenticeships? It always seemed to me that the military can’t be very serious about keeping these things secret when they let people like that wander around openly.”
Tobas began to explain that he had never had anything to do with the military or any wizards except Roggit, but decided that could wait. The witch was telling her story. He would hear her out first and then worry about details. “All right,” he said. “He put an eternal youth spell on you. Then what?” He wondered for a moment why, if eternal youth spells really did exist, wizards ever allowed themselves to grow old and die, as Roggit had. He immediately realized the answer, though; not all wizards knew the spells. As he had learned himself, wizards did not share spells. Besides, the secret might well have become lost entirely by the time the Great War was over, as the methods for making flying castles had.
Karanissa shifted on her chair, brushed back her hair, and went on with her tale.
She and Derithon had become very close, and finally, one day, after swearing her to secrecy, he had brought her through the tapestry to this castle, his very special, very private retreat of long standing that no one else knew about, where they could be alone together without worrying about gossiping servants or troublesome officers. These were his most prized personal possessions, the tapestry and its castle, and she had felt honored when he chose to share them with her, as he never had with anyone else.
She was a witch and she knew that he was speaking the truth when he told her that and not just giving her a line. Either that, or he had some spell she had never heard of that let him lie so well even a witch couldn’t detect it.
They had come here three or four times for brief visits, when time permitted, and each time, when they felt they ought to, they had then stepped back through the other tapestry to Derithon’s second castle, the flying one in the ordinary World.
Then, one night, at a most inconvenient time, one of the magical emergency alarms Derithon had set back in the real World had been triggered somehow, she didn’t know how, or what the alarm was, or how Derithon had known, since she had seen and heard nothing. Assuring her that it was probably nothing and he’d be right back, or if it was serious he’d be right back to get her to safety, he had left. She had really not felt like going anywhere just then; neither had Derithon, but he had quickly thrown on a tunic and breeches and gone, all the same, leaving her alone in the castle.
And that was the last time she had seen him, or, for that matter, any human being but herself and Tobas, for what Tobas now told her was a few sixnights less than four hundred and fifty-nine years.
“He tried to get back to you,” Tobas said when she began crying. “He was reaching for the tapestry when he died; that was how we found him.”
She glared at him through her tears. “How could you have found him,” she demanded, “if he was dead four hundred years ago?”
“We found his skeleton, at least, somebody’s skeleton, with a silver dagger and several rings, wearing an embroidered tunic. That was him, wasn’t it?”
“Aaagh!” She burst out in renewed weeping, and Tobas realized that he had been tactless. He waited for her hysterics to subside. She seemed to be struggling to control her reactions, and Tobas had enough sense to see that his arrival and the news he brought must have come as quite a shock; after centuries of isolation he could not fault her for her display of emotion. He thought no less of her for it. In fact, he was quite impressed by her; not only was she beautiful, but she spoke well and had already begun adjusting her accent so that it was closer to his own, making her speech more easily understood. Furthermore, if her story was true, and he had no reason to doubt it, she had lived here alone for centuries without losing her sanity or otherwise visibly degenerating. He was unsure he could have done that.
When she had at last regained control of herself, she went on with her story.
At first she had simply stayed in bed, waiting for Derithon to return. When she was quite certain that several hours had passed, she had gotten up, gotten dressed, and puttered about the castle, tidying up and poking around, waiting for Derithon to return.
Eventually she had gotten worried and had tried to use her witchcraft to establish contact with him, but without success. She had put that down to being in an entirely separate reality.
Finally, she had decided to go and see for herself just what had happened and had gone to the tapestry that was supposed to lead back to the flying castle. Then she had discovered that it did not work. She was unable to step through it.
This was something of a shock; up until then, returning to the World had simply been a matter of walking right through the tapestry into the private chamber of Derithon’s flying castle. The thought that she might be trapped in this strange other world had never occurred to her.
However, it became quite clear that she was, indeed, trapped.
Eventually, she had gotten up her nerve to consult Derithon’s great Book of Spells to see if she could get the tapestry to function again. She had found the spell that created it but had been unable to use it to get the tapestry to work. She had then experimented with other spells, right down to the elementary little training exercises for beginners, and had not yet found any that she was sure she could use. There were one or two that might work, but required items she did not have in order to be sure — such as living subjects. A hypnotic spell she had attempted had given her an eerie feeling that something was happening; but without someone to test it on, she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t simply imagining things.
And nothing she had tried with wizardry, witchcraft, or sheer random experimentation had gotten her back to Ethshar. She had simply lived on, waiting, talking to the invisible servants Derithon had left to take care of her, even though they could not speak to answer her, tending the magical garden that provided her food, and trying to keep from going mad with loneliness. She had taken to sleeping for days at a time; she knew spells that allowed her to do that without harming her health. Several times she had tried putting herself in a trance that would last until Derithon returned or until her body needed food desperately, and each time she had awoken on the verge of starvation, with Derithon still absent.