The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

“She learned of it at the Lake of Faces. Actually, I already knew of Lake Yost. A marvelous location but it was held by a troop of idiots, True Game fanatics, wanting only to challenge and play, come what might of it. They called Great Game a season ago, a Game so large we haven’t seen its like in a decade. With the unlimited power of the place, they succeeded in killing all the players, every Gamesman. The place is emptied and dead, ready for my taking.”

  “And will Mavin go with you?”

  “Of course! We can’t lose one another now, not after all this time.”

  Windlow went to the tower window, stood there watching the clouds move slowly over the long meadows to the west. There were shadows beneath them on the grasses, and he wondered if the shadows hid in these harmless places unseen, when they did not wish to be seen. “Have you thought she might have something else she would like to do?”

  “Ah, but what could be more important than this, old teacher? Eh? A place where your ideas can be taught? A place where we can bring together Gamesmen who believe in those words of yours, where we can work together! Wouldn’t anyone want to be part of that?”

  “Not everyone, my boy. No. There are many who would not want to be part of that, and that doesn’t make them villains, either.”

  “Mavin will want to come with me,” he said with satisfaction. “Windlow, we are so in love. I imagined it, all those years, but I could not imagine even a fraction of it. She wouldn’t lose that anymore than I would.”

  “You’ve asked her, I presume.”

  “Of course I have! What do you take me for, old teacher? Some kind of barbarian? Kings and other Beguilers may hold unwilling followers – or followers who would be unwilling if they were in their own minds – but Wizards do not. At least this Wizard does not.”

  “I just wondered if it had occurred to you – a thought I’ve had from time to time, a passing thing, you know – that love behaves much as Beguilement does. Mertyn, for example. Do you remember him at all?”

  “Mavin’s brother. Surely I remember him. A nice child. Boldery’s friend. Of course, he was only eleven or twelve when I left the School, so I don’t remember him well…”

  “Mertyn had the Talent of Beguilement, you know. Had it early, as a fifteen-season child, I think. And it was Mertyn who kept Mavin’s sister from leaving the place they lived, not a very pleasant place for women to hear Mertyn tell of it. He blamed himself, you know, crying over it in the night sometimes. And I asked him if his sister loved him, even without the Beguilement, and he told me yes, she did. So – mostly to relieve the child’s mind, you understand – I said it could have been love did it just as well. And he was not responsible for that. We may be responsible for those we love, but hardly ever for those who love us. Takes a saint to do that.” He turned from this slow, ruminative speech to find Himaggery’s eyes fixed on some point in space. “Himaggery?”

  “Um? Oh, sorry. I was thinking about Lake Yost. There’s a perfect site for a community, as I recall, near the place the hot springs come up. I was trying to remember whether there was a little bay there. It seems to me there was, but it’s not clear. You were saying?” He turned his smiling face toward the old man, eyes alight but already shifting again toward that distant focus.

  “Nothing,” Windlow sighed. “Nothing, Himaggery. Perhaps we’ll talk about it some other time.”

  ‘I wanted you to have this account of the Eesties,” said Mavin, handing the sheets of parchment to the old man. “Foolishly, I betrayed myself into giving one such account to the false Chamferton. He was very excited over it. I think he would have tried to hold me in some dungeon or other if I hadn’t cooperated with him so willingly.”

  She sat upon the windowsill of the tower room, waiting while he read them over, hearing his soft exclamations of delighted interest, far different from Chamferton’s crow of victory when he received his copy. The washerwomen were working at the long trough beside the well, and a fat, half-naked baby staggered among them, dabbling in the spilled water. She considered this mite, half in wonder, half in apprehension.

  “And you can’t speak of this at all?” Windlow asked at last.

  “Not at all,” she said. “And yet nothing prevents my writing it down.”

  “Let’s see,” he murmured. “You went to Ganver’s Grave and … ahau, ghaaa…” He choked, coughed, grasped at his throat as though something were caught there, panted, glared around himself in panic. Mavin darted to him, held him up and quiet as the attack passed. He sat down, put his head upon his folded arms. “Frightening,” he whispered. “Utterly frightening. The geas is laid not only upon you, then, but upon anyone?”

  “ To speak of it, yes. But not to write of it. That fact makes me wonder strangely.”

  “For a start, it makes me wonder if the … they do not choose to be spoken of by the ignorant. They don’t mind being read of by literate people, however. Remarkable.”

  “I thought so, too,” she agreed. “Except that the pawns have a thousand fables about the Rolling Stars and the Old Ones and the Eesties. Nothing stops their throats. Nothing stopped old Rose-love when she told me the story of Weetzie and the daylight bell.”

  “Because fables are fables.” He nodded, ticking the points off to himself. “And facts are facts. You could probably tell the story of your own meeting with them, Mavin, if you fabulized it.”

  “Girl-shifter and the Crimson Egg,” she laughed. “The story of fustigar-woman and the shadowpeople.”

  “Quite wonderful. Are you going back there? Seeking the Eesties again?”

  “Of course,” she cried in unconscious delight of which Windlow was altogether conscious. “Who could not? Oh, Windlow, you would like that place. As full of marvels as a shell is full of egg. And there are other things, things having nothing to do with the Eesties. There’s a place below the ridge by Schlaizy Noithn like nothing you have ever seen. I call it the Blot. Traders come there – traders some say. I think them false gifters, myself – and I want to explore it one day. And I left a girl-child friend across the sea. Her I would see again, before I am old, her and her children.”

  “And what about your child?” he asked, head cocked to one side, gentle as the wind as he said it.

  “How did you know?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, I’m a Seer, Mavin. Of one thing and another. In this case, however, it was a case of using my mind and my heart, nothing more. Himaggery doesn’t know, does he?”

  “Anyone might know,” she replied in a sober voice. “Anyone who used mind or heart. Throsset knew.”

  “You won’t allow that he’s simply afire to get on with his life, so much of it having been spent in a kind of sleep?”

  “Why, of course!” she answered in exasperation. “Why, of course I’ll allow it. Do I constrain him to do other than he will? He lost eight years in that valley. Should I demand he turn from his life to look at me? Or listen to me? Windlow. That’s not the question to ask, and you know it.”

  He nodded, rather sadly, getting up with a groan and a thud of his stick upon the floor. “Surely, Mavin. Surely. Well. Since it seems you’ll not be Shifting for a time – do I have it right? That is the custom? More than custom, perhaps? – call upon me for whatever you need. Midwives perhaps, when the time comes? I have little power but many good friends.”

  “I do not know yet what I will need, old sir. Midwives, I guess, though whether here or elsewhere, I cannot say.”

  “You’ll risk that, will you?”

  “Risk Midwives? I would not do other. It is a very good thing the Midwives do, to look into the future of each child to see whether it will gain a soul or not. The great houses may scoff at Midwives if they will, caring not that their soulless children make wreck and ruin upon the earth. Of such houses are Ghouls born, Gamesmen like Blourbast and Huld the Demon.” She did not mention Huld’s son, Mandor. Years later, deep in the caves beneath Bannerwell, she was to curse herself for that omission. If Windlow had known of Mandor … if Mertyn had known of Mandor…
“Of course I will risk Midwives, and count the risk well taken to know I have born no soulless wight who may grow to scourge the earth and the company of men.”

  He smiled then, taking her hand in his own and leaning to kiss her on the cheek, a sweet, old man’s kiss with much kindness in it. “Mavin, perhaps I erred when I had that vision of you and Himaggery in Pfarb Durim. It seems to me that in that vision your hair was gray. Perhaps it was meant to be later, that’s all.” He sighed. “Whatever you need, Mavin. Tell me.” Then they left the place and went to their lunch, spread on a table in the courtyard among the herb pots and the garden flowers. For a quiet time in that garden, Mavin told herself she would stay where she was, for the peace of it was pleasant and as kindly as old Windlow’s kiss.

  “You might remember that he’s eight years younger than he seems,” commented Throsset. “All that time in the valley. He didn’t live then, really. In fact, he may have gone backwards…”

  “To become what?” Mavin asked, examining her face in the mirror. She had never before been very interested in her own face, but now it fascinated her. One of Windlow’s servant girls had asked if she could arrange Mavin’s hair, and the piled, sculptured wealth of it made her look unlike herself. “Become a child, you mean?”

  Throsset swung her feet, banging her heels cheerfully against the wall below the windowsill where she sat, half over the courtyard, defying gravity and dignity at once as she tempted the laundress’s boy-child with a perfect target for his peashooter. “Children are very self-centered, Mavin. They are so busy learning about themselves, you know, that they have no time for anything else. You were like that, I’m sure. I know I was. Himaggery, on the other hand, went straight from his family Demesne into Windlow’s school, and straight from that into continuous study – books, collections. Not Gaming. Not paying attention to other people, you know.”

  “‘Among,’ but not ‘of,’” commented Mavin, touching the corner of her eyes with a finger dipped in dust-of-blue. She turned. “Do you like that? It’s interesting.”

  “I like the brown better,” Throsset advised. “Better with your skin. What are you up to with these pawn tricks, anyhow?”

  Mavin turned back to the mirror, wiping away the blue stain to replace it with dust-of-brown. She had bought the tiny cosmetic jars from a traveling trader and was being self-consciously experimental with them. “I’m finding out whether I can get him to look at me.”

  “He looks at you all the time. He’s in love with you.”

  “I mean see me. He doesn’t care whether I’m Mavin the woman, a fustigar hunting bunwits, or a Singlehorn. He’s in love with his idea of me.” She applied a bit more of the brown shadow, then picked up the tiny brush to blind herself painting her lashes.

  “Your eyelashes are all right!” Throsset thumped down from the window, brushing at her seat, not seeing the pea which shot through the opening behind her. “When are you going to tell him?”

  “I’m not.” She was definite about this. “And you’re not to tell him either.”

  “Oh, Mavin, by all the Hundred Devils but you’re difficult. Why not?”

  “Because, dear Fairy Godmother” – The proper designation for one with both Shifting and Sorcery was “Fairy Godmother”. Mavin had looked it up in the Index and had been perversely waiting for an occasion to use it. Now she took wicked pleasure in Throsset’s discomfiture – “dear Fairy Godmother, what you saw and what Windlow saw you saw by observation. Himaggery is not innocent. He knows where babies come from. He does know we were together in the Valley. It is a kind of test, my dear, which may be unfair, but it is nonetheless a test I am determined to use.”

  “And if he passes it?”

  “If he passes it, with no advice from either you or Windlow – whom I have been at some pains to silence – then I will go with him to Lake Yost, and see what it is he plans to do there with his thousand good Gamesmen. And I will not Mavin at him, will not flee from him, will not distress him.”

  “And if he fails…”

  “Then, Throsset of Dowes, I will know that it really does not matter to him much. He is in love with the idea of me, and that idea will content him. He will be reasonably satisfied with memory and hope and a brave resolution to find me once again – which he will put off from season to season, since there will always be other things to do.” She looked up at Throsset with a quirk of the eyebrows. “Listen to me, Throsset, for I have made a discovery. It may be that Himaggery will prefer the idea of me to the reality – prefer to remember me with much romantic, sentimental recollection, at his convenience, as when a sweetly painted sky seems to call for such feelings of gentle melancholy. In the evenings, perhaps, when the sun is dropping among long shadows and the air breathes sadness. On moonlit nights, with the trees all silvered…

  “A remembered love, Throsset of Dowes, does not interfere with one’s work! A lovely, lost romance is a convenience for any busy man!”

  “You’re cynical. And footloose. You simply don’t want to sit still long enough to rear this child.”

  “I’ll sit still, Throsset! Where I will and when I will, and for as long as is necessary. And if Himaggery sees the meaning behind this paint on my face or realizes I am carrying his child, well then I will become dutiful, Throsset. So dutiful, even Danderbat keep would have been pleased.” She made a face, then rummaged in her jewel box for some sparkling something to put in her hair. “I have discovered something else, Throsset of Dowes. And that is that men give women jewels when they have absolutely no idea what might please them and are not willing to take time to think about it.”

  They sat beside the fountain beneath the stars. Out in the meadow other stars bobbled and danced, lantern bugs dizzying among the grasses.

  “I used to imagine this,” said Himaggery. She lay half in his lap, against his chest, watching the lights, half asleep after a long, warm and lazy day.

  “What did you imagine? Sitting under the sky watching bugs dance?”

  “No, silly. I imagined you. And me. Together. Here or somewhere like here. I knew how it would be.”

  “This isn’t how it would be,” she said, the words flowing out before she could stop them. “This is an interlude, a sweet season. It’s no more real than … than we were before, in the valley.”

  “How can you say that?” He laughed, somewhat uneasily. “You’re real. I’m real. In our own shapes, our own minds.”

  She shook her head. Now that she had started, she had to go on. “No, love. I’m in a shape, a courtyard shape, a lover’s shape, a pretty girl shape, a romantic evening shape. I have other shapes for other times. With those other shapes, it would be a different thing…”

  “Not at all. No matter what shape it might be, it would always be you inside it!” His vehemence hid apprehension. She could smell it.

  She soothed him. “Himaggery, let me tell you a story.

  “Far on the western edge of the land, there’s a town I visited once. Pleasant people there. One charming girl-child I fell in love with. About nine years old, I suppose, full of joy and bounce and love. She was killed by a man of the town, a Wolf. Everyone knew it. They couldn’t prove it. They had locked him up for such things before, but had always let him go. It was expensive to keep him locked up and guarded, and fed and warm. It took bread from their own mouths to keep him locked away…”

  “What has this to do with…” he began. She shushed him.

  “So, though everyone knew he had done it, no one did anything except walk fearfully and lock up their children. I was not satisfied with that. I took the shape of one of his intended victims, Himaggery, and I ended the matter.”

  There was a long pause. She heard him swallow, sigh. “As I would have done, too, Mavin, had I the Talent. I do not dispute your judgment.”

  “You don’t. Well, the people of the town suspected I might have had something to do with it, and one of them came to remonstrate with me that such a course of action was improper. So I asked why they had not ke
pt him locked up, or killed him the first time they had proof, and they told me it would have been cruel to do so. And I asked then if it were not cruel to their children to let the Wolf run loose among them. They did not answer me.

  “So then, Himaggery, I took their children away from them. All. Far to the places of the True Game. For at least in the lands of the True Game people are not such hypocrites. I thought better those children chance a hazardous life knowing who their enemies were than to live in that town where their own people conspired with their butchers.”

  There was another long silence. “You were very upset at the child’s death,” he said at last.

  “Yes. Very.”

  “So you were not yourself. If you had had time to think, to reflect, you would not have acted so.”

  Then she was silent. At last she said with a sigh, “No, Himaggery, I was myself. Completely myself. And if I’d had longer to think on it, I would have done worse.”

  He tried to tell her she was merely tired, but she changed the subject to something light and laugh-filled. Later they made love under the stars. It was the last conversation they had together.

  Mid-morning of the following day, Throsset of Dowes rode with Mavin northward along the meadow edge. They had brought some food and wine with them, intending to take a meal upon the grassy summit which overlooked the canyon lands before Throsset left for the south. Throsset had decided to go visiting her children soon, away in the Sealands. It was a sudden decision.

  “I decided they would scarcely remember me unless I went soon. I haven’t gone before because I feared they would reject me, a Shifter. But if I don’t go, then I have rejected them. So better let the fault lie upon their heads if it must lie anywhere. I will go south tomorrow. I have not run in fustigar shape for a season and a half, not since I met you outside Pfarb Durim. I am getting fat and lazy.”

  Mavin hugged her. “You will be here tonight then? Good. You will be able to tell them that I have gone.”

  “Ah,” said Throsset, a little sadly. “Well. So you have made up your mind.”