“Yes,” Blade admitted.
“She watches all her stuff like a hawk as well. I can’t resist. But I’m here with Querida’s permission. If you want a deal to keep your mouth shut, it won’t be worth much,” Reville warned him.
“That depends,” Blade said cunningly. “Do you want me to tell Miss Ledbury who you are?”
Reville winced slightly. “It looks as if I don’t get breakfast today,” he said regretfully, “unless you want something I can—I tell you what! Suppose I offer to pry your bard away from that Geoffrey?”
Blade shook his head, equally regretfully. He knew Shona when she had made up her mind. He was going to leave that to Mum when the party reached her Lair. “No,” he said. “But I won’t say a word to anyone if you can take Sukey off my hands.”
Reville stared at him as if he thought Blade had gone mad. After a moment he said, “Let’s get this straight. Did I hear you correctly? You … don’t … want … Sukey?”
“Yes,” said Blade. “I don’t.”
“But wizards always get themselves the most gorgeous—it’s part of the perks. You should see some of the other wizards!” Reville said distractedly. “Ye gods! Are you sure about this?” Blade nodded vehemently. “This has made my day!” said Reville. “All right. It’s a deal.” He wrung Blade’s hand and, with a beaming smile on his face, set off at a run for where the Pilgrims were gathering around the campfire for breakfast.
Blade followed slowly, slightly bewildered. Reville was probably only about six years older than he was. Did six years really make that much difference to the way someone looked at Sukey? Blade hoped not, or not where he was concerned himself. If it did, then something obviously went seriously wrong with your mind in those six years.
“I can’t eat stew for breakfast, young man,” said Miss Ledbury. “I shall be ill.”
Blade sighed. Back to business. “It’s traditional,” he explained. “Ask the merchant.” Old Professor Ledbury was still in his long wrinkly underpants, he noticed. “I think your brother may have forgotten his trousers, Miss Ledbury.”
He escaped behind one of the merchant’s carts while Miss Ledbury bullyingly dangled the trousers in front of her brother and the professor blinked and said, “What trousers? Whose trousers are those?”
They went on after breakfast. The bandits did not attack that night.
The merchant was very irritated. He took Blade aside the next morning and explained that he was a busy man and, because this was the last tour, he had some real trading fixed up and due to start the following day. “With winter coming on, I can’t hang about here on these bad roads. I’d be mired down until spring. I’ve got to leave today and turn south.”
Blade consulted the black book. “It says ‘within three days’ here. They’re probably going to do it tomorrow morning as a surprise.”
“One more day then,” the merchant agreed grumpily.
The caravan journeyed all that day, into wooded, hillier country. It rained slightly most of the day, which made the merchant grumpier still. It rained again in the night, forcing the Pilgrim Party to sleep under the carts, but there were still no bandits. The Pilgrims got up wet and crotchety, except for the Ledburys in their waterproof bags. In fact, Professor Ledbury was the liveliest of anyone there. He swung his great old sword and invited Reville to a fencing match. Reville looked at the wide, rusty blade wavering in the professor’s hand and said politely, “Perhaps some other time, sir,” and turned back to Sukey. Blade was utterly grateful to Reville. Sukey barely looked at anyone else now and certainly not at Blade.
“What do these bandits think they’re doing?” the merchant hissed, grabbing Blade by the sleeve and pulling him behind one of the carts. “They’re still not here. And they get paid enough.”
“Perhaps they’ve forgotten there was one more tour,” Blade was suggesting when Geoffrey and Shona came in great leaps down the slope at the side of the road. Geoffrey was pale, and Shona was chalky.
“Blade, you’d better come up there and look,” Shona whispered.
“You stay. I’ll go with him,” Geoffrey said quietly. “It’s not nice.”
Puzzled and cross, Blade followed Geoffrey up through damp grass and sopping bushes, into woodland, where he caught hair and beard and robes on low branches while Geoffrey strode irritatingly freely ahead. They went a long way to kiss one another, he thought angrily. Then they came to the place. Blade stopped being annoyed with Geoffrey and was glad he was there.
It had been the bandits’ ambush, certainly, but the bandits had been ambushed themselves. There were nearly thirty people lying in ungraceful attitudes under the trees, with rain trickling on their clothes and pattering upon their white, unfeeling faces. Blade felt sick when he saw the wounds on some of them. The attackers had been brutal.
Geoffrey pointed at a broad trampled swath of grass and bushes, leading away uphill. “Looks as if the attackers were after their horses, whoever they were.”
One of the dead people, and only one, was wearing shiny black armor. Blade knew who the attackers were. They were some more of the escaped soldiers. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said hoarsely.
When he thought about it later, Blade realized that this was the moment when his tour started to go wrong. Entirely wrong. The fact was, he panicked. At the time he thought of himself as behaving rather well. Although the one thing he wanted to do was to translocate far, far away from there at once, he knew he could not either do that alone or try to bring all the Pilgrims and their horses with him if he went. He thought he controlled his panic. He told himself he was quite calm. But he knew what those soldiers were like, and now, looking at the dead bandits, he knew what they could do to people. His one thought was to get everyone as far from those soldiers as possible.
He returned solemnly to the road. He stuck his hands into his sleeves in what he hoped was a mystical posture and cried out in what he hoped was a mystical voice, “Danger! I have foreseen danger! We must leave this place at once.”
The merchant shot him a shrewd look. “Well, in that case I’ll love you and leave you,” he said. “It’s mostly beets and apples at this time of year, but I do have a living to make.” He trotted away to the lead cart, calling orders to his guards and drivers. In less than a minute the train of five carts and six outriders was in motion. In a minute more they had the carts turned around, and in another minute they had gone, hell for leather, back down the road. The Pilgrims watched uncertainly.
“Everyone get on your horses,” Blade called.
“Yes, mount up, all of you,” said Geoffrey, and everybody did, including Shona, who was looking rather the way she had the morning the soldiers broke out of the dome. “I’ll make sure you’re all right, my love,” Geoffrey said to her. “They won’t come near you again. Where to, Wizard?”
It seemed to Blade that the road they were on wound off in the same direction as the trampled track the attackers had made. And the high banks on either side of it made it perfect for an ambush. Blade forgot the road and trusted to the instinct by which he found places when he translocated. He pointed in what he thought of as the right direction. That way was toward the next tour event, which was the attack by avians in two days’ time. Geoffrey nodded and gestured. The Pilgrim Party rode up the bank on the other side of the road, shed Mother Poole at the top, retrieved her, and set off across country.
For the next two days Blade struggled to get to the rendezvous with the avians. It was very confusing country, all ups and downs, and little wooded ravines where deep streams rushed. Blade was so busy trying to get his Pilgrims in the right direction to the right place that he forgot that the black book said he was supposed to be telling the Pilgrims that they faced the menace of the Dark Lord. Shona reminded him once or twice, but Blade was too anxious about the journey to attend.
“But they have to be told, Blade,” Shona protested. “They have to know where to pick up the clues. Where’s the first one?”
“I don’t know.
I’ll look it up tonight,” Blade said.
He had forgotten again by that evening. Everything and everyone was so miserable. It was still raining, and because they had left the proper tour route, they had to make their own camp. There was very little food. According to the black book, the bundles everyone carried behind the saddles were full of food for the horses. Food for the Pilgrims was to be found in the camps along the route, carefully bespelled to keep it fresh, but of course they were not at a proper camp. Luckily most of the Pilgrims had brought some things to eat, filched from the inn, but it was only the sort of thing you could slip into your pocket. That night they had oatcakes, apples, a few lumps of cheese, and a lot of bad temper round a smoky, fizzling fire. Most of the bad temper was directed at Miss Ledbury, who sat with her waterproof hood snugly up around her face, sharing a large slab of chocolate with her brother.
“I haven’t enough to go round,” she stated. “You should have thought of bringing some yourselves.” She fetched a small self-heating kettle from her backpack and rattled her coffee jar at Blade to show him she needed some water.
“I’ll fill it,” said Reville, looking at the kettle even more greedily than he had looked at the chocolate. Blade was surprised when Reville came back with the kettle full. But Reville seemed determined not to leave Sukey. Blade could understand that even less. Among all the Pilgrims’ grumbling voices, Sukey’s was raised highest and loudest and most peevishly—and most often.
“Why can’t we all have some coffee at least?” Sukey demanded.
There was such an outcry of agreement from the other Pilgrims that Shona said hectically, “Listen, and I will tell you the bards’ tale of the menace of the Dark Lord.”
Blade thought she told it much better than he would have done. Shona’s tale was full of spine-shivering phrases and snatches of songs, and her description of the horrors of the Dark Lord’s Citadel was masterly. “But it is said that the Dark Lord has one weakness,” she said, staring meaningly at Blade, “and that there are clues to be found as to what this is.”
Clues! Blade thought. Help! “I must meditate,” he mumbled for the benefit of anyone who was not riveted by Shona’s tale telling, and scrambled away into the wet bushes. There, with rain plopping off his beard and his long hair damply trailing across the pages, he managed to read the dog-eared pamphlet in the last of the daylight.
Shona, still describing the terrible creatures that inhabited the Dark Lord’s Citadel, looked at him expectantly as he came crawling back.
“Mum’s Lair,” Blade mouthed at her.
She nodded. “To go back to the matter of clues to his weakness,” she said, “it is told that an Enchantress holds the secret. If we wish to defeat him, we shall have to brave her clutches.”
The rain stopped during the night. Everyone was a little more cheerful when they set off again. They spent that day ducking under wet trees and splashing through streams, and around sunset, very hungry, they toiled up a rocky rise and did reach a camp of sorts. It did not look as if anyone had used it for some time.
“I think it must be one from last year,” Shona whispered to Blade, pretending to help him with his horse while Geoffrey was organizing people to gather firewood.
Blade thought the same. But he went to the food cache and hopefully took the stasis spell off it. The large cauldron of stew inside it had dried to a sort of cake over the year or so it had been there. Blade thought that they could cut it into lumps and pretend it was steak or something. The bread was awfully stale, but they could toast that. And the cheese was—well, better leave the cheese. He took the rest to Mother Poole.
“Don’t ask me, dear,” she said. “Ask Dad. He’s the cook in our house.”
Dad Poole did his best, but it was not wonderful. Miss Ledbury meaningly fetched out another slab of chocolate. When they had all eaten what they could, Blade stuck his hands mystically in his sleeves again. “I feel danger near,” he said portentously. “I think it best if we build a very large fire tonight.”
“Won’t that attract the attention of this Dark Lord?” someone said anxiously.
“Fire keeps all magical ills away,” Blade said firmly.
“Start gathering more firewood,” Geoffrey commanded. “The wizard knows his job.”
Everyone did so. Blade was annoyed at the way everyone did what Geoffrey said, and he was even more annoyed at having to be grateful to Geoffrey for it, but a large bonfire got built. When it was blazing nicely on top of the rise, Blade stuck his hands in his sleeves again. “I must meditate,” he said. He went downhill to wait for the person who saw the large fire and brought the geese there. He hoped it was Kit. He was missing Kit badly. Kit had so many ideas about what to do, and he organized people even better than Geoffrey did. Blade realized that he had relied on Kit to organize him all his life, and he felt quite lost without him, out here in the middle of nowhere.
But it was Callette who came. She ghosted down about two hours later and wearily thunked a hamper beside Blade’s feet. “Why are you in this place? I’ve been looking all over the hills for you.”
It was so dark by then that all Blade could see of her was a curve of beak, a gleam of eye, and the paleness of the bars on her wings. He was delighted to see even that much. She was Callette. She was family and home. “You wouldn’t believe, Callette!” he said. “We got lost because the bandits were murdered by some escaped soldiers and one of them keeps falling off her horse and one of them isn’t even a Pilgrim!”
“Yes, but I have to get back,” Callette said. “I spent hours looking for you. I’m supposed to be doing the Hunt.”
“Sorry,” Blade said. “Is everyone all right? Kit, Dad, Don?”
“Don nearly lost all the dogs last night,” said Callette. “Even Kit’s tired. He keeps being nice to me. Do you want these geese or not?”
“Yes, I suppose,” said Blade.
He got behind the hamper as Callette tipped it up and opened it. No geese came out. Instead, two large pale pigs, sleepily grunting, stuck their snouts up to stare at Callette. Callette stared back in almost exactly the same surprised posture she had used when she brought Mr. Chesney the barrel of blood, beak poised downward, wings curved up. But Blade could somehow see her surprise was real. “How are they here? What have those geese done now?” she said.
“Translocated two pigs? Callette, they can’t have done!” said Blade.
“They can,” Callette said. “They do all sorts of things at night at home. They got bored being avians. Last night I only managed to get one into the hamper. I put her in, and she pecked me.”
“And now they’re showing you. I see,” Blade said. The pigs recognized him and ambled amiably around to him. They were Ringlet and Bouncer by the feel, he thought.
“Do you want to use the pigs instead?” Callette asked.
Blade, with an arm around each of two warm, tubby, bristled bodies, found himself horrified at what the professor’s whistling sword or Reville’s rapier might do to them. “They’d get killed. Dad would have fits.”
“I suppose I could swoop over your bonfire a bit,” Callette offered.
Blade found himself horrified at that, too. “No, you’d get hurt. Then you couldn’t do the Hunt. Put them back in the hamper and go. I’ll think of an illusion or something.”
“If you’re sure,” Callette said, obviously glad to go.
“I am sure,” Blade said. “You get going.”
Ringlet and Bouncer were only too pleased to resume their interrupted snooze in the hamper. Callette took them up with a jerk and a slight whop of wings and ghosted away. Blade felt sad. Too sad and much too tired to think of illusions. He had no idea how Kit did them, anyway.
“I have averted the evil,” he announced to the Pilgrims. “You may sleep in peace.”
Shona naturally wanted to know what had happened. Blade took her some way down the hill and explained.
“Those geese have funny minds,” she said. “Dad says they always want to fly south
really. Maybe they did.”
“They’d better not fly near me,” Blade said. “I’ll—I’ll—actually it’s hard to think of something to do to geese that are probably wizards, but I’ll do something.”
He took the Pilgrims toward the Wild Hunt the next day. They missed it entirely.
Blade could not understand it. He had led everyone through the confusing hilly landscape, not confused at all and quite confident that he was converging on the place near the river where the Hunt was to find them, and instead they came out above the wide green vale where Mara’s aunt’s house was. Three days early. Blade was almost as astonished to see it as Callette had been to see the pigs.
TWENTY-ONE
BLADE LOOKED AT THE distant clump of trees hiding Aunt’s house, and the inviting spire of smoke rising up from it, and decided that it would be silly not to go down there. Besides, he doubted if the Pilgrims would let him lead them away from it.
Dad Poole said, “Hey, that looks inviting!” and most other people said thankfully, “Civilization at last!” while Sukey said, “I’m cold, I’m hungry, and I’m tired. I’m not going a step further on this stupid tour unless I can have a bath and wash my hair.”
“You shall, you shall, my lady,” Reville assured her. He was looking at the spire of smoke as eagerly as anyone there.
Blade looked them over, uncomfortably. Most had that pinched and withered look you get from being out in all weathers with too little food. The women drooped. The men nearly all had slightly villainous beginnings of beards. They clearly needed a rest. As Blade looked, Miss Ledbury met his eye. For a wonder, she did not say anything, but Blade knew what she meant. They were to go down to that house, or Mr. Chesney would want to know why. Professor Ledbury just smiled. He was the only one who seemed to be thriving on the tour. He actually looked younger than when he had first arrived, sort of boyish, Blade thought.