A Sudden Wild Magic

The marshes were crossed by a myriad drainage cuts, each of them with its several humpback bridges. Tod took the bridges at speed, so that the big car almost jumped, while he tried to calculate just how many hours he had lived through since he got out of bed in Arth. And it was still only late afternoon here. The sun hung quite high behind him in the west. The car seemed to tread on its own shadow at every bridge. But he was nearly there. There was the stand of mighty old willows in the distance, all a vivid new green, and among them the great peeling yellow manor Michael had inherited. The large new sheds stood out to one side among younger willows. These were where Michael designed and built boats — most of them out of a new and wondrous fabric called fiberglass, the formula for which had been sent down from Arth.

Tod had an uneasy thought here. If some of the things he had half caught from what the Great Centaur was telling Gladys were true, then Arth could be destroying the Pentarchy by milking otherworld for things like fiberglass. It could be that he was speeding toward Riverwell to put an end to his cousin’s livelihood. The barony was not rich. He could see the sea now, flat beyond the flat marshes, and a distant golden hump that was the seacoast of Leathe. As always, he wondered how anyone could live somewhere so flat and damp and so infested with Leathe and mosquitoes, and as always, as he whomped over the last bridge and swept in under the willows through Michael’s ever-open gates, his heart lifted. Amanda lived here.

Around the corner of the drive, he had to brake hard. The place was full of centaurs. There were crowds of them, milling across the drive and the lawns and seemingly surrounding the house. Tod had not known there were so many centaurs in Riverwell. None of them looked happy. It was clear that something was going on that made fiberglass, at least for Tod, a side issue. It was quite a relief. He turned off the engine and shouted to know what was happening.

The centaurs seemed altogether too anxious to notice him, but the nearest somehow crowded aside to let a worried black-haired woman fight her way to the car.

To Tod she looked more glorious than Asphorael. She was — though he could not know the irony of it — wearing blue-gray like Lady Marceny, but her dress was linen and loose, with the merest sketch of the fashionable panniers in the form of flying panels which streamed behind her as she ran toward the car.

Tod gave a great shout of “Amanda!” and sprang down to hug her.

She was taller than him — many women were. “Oh, Tod!” she said. “I’m so glad you’ve got here! I knew you would.”

She was, Tod discovered with a quite irrational touch of jealousy, pregnant. After all, it was a year since she remarried. He found tears in his eyes. He was always ashamed of how easily he cried. “What’s going on here? Why all the centaurs?”

“They’re all terribly worried,” she said. “There’s been a ghost centaur haunting our grove all day, and it’s obviously in trouble, but none of us know it, so we can’t hear it speak. Our centaurs keep sending for more and more distant cousins, hoping that one of them will know who it is, and none of them do. But I knew you were coming, and I thought that with your birthright—”

She was interrupted by Tod’s cousin Michael trudging through the centaurs in big rubber boots, grinning all over his white, freckled face. Michael was tall and rodlike and had shaggy red curls. From head to toe he took after his mother’s gualdian family, with none of the Gordano chunkiness. Seeing him now, Tod was struck by how like Philo he was. He might have been Philo with red hair. “Tod!” Michael yelled, and beat Tod affectionately on the shoulder. Again Tod nearly cried. He had missed this. “Mother told you about our ghost?” Michael said.

“Yes, but I don’t understand,” Tod said. “My birthright doesn’t make me a medium—”

“It may not be a ghost—” Michael started to say, and was interrupted in turn by Paul, Amanda’s new husband, as tall nearly as the centaurs who moved to let him pass. Tod had a moment of jealous dislike, which dissipated as Paul’s big, warm hand grasped his and Paul smiled down into his face, slow and kind. Paul was a good man — a good sailor and boatbuilder too, by all accounts.

“They’ve told you?” Paul asked. “I don’t think it’s a ghost. It looks more to me like a sending from someone in really bad trouble, but it can’t seem to talk.”

“Oh, I see!” said Tod. “In that case—”

“I’ll take you,” Michael said. “Come on.” He seized Tod’s arm and dragged him among the great, hairy centaur bodies, shouting above the deep clamor of centaur voices, “Let us through, please. My cousin’s here. He’ll take care of it.”