A Sudden Wild Magic

This, he thought ruefully, could almost be true. Whatever peculiar magecraft it was that Zillah possessed, he sensed it was very strong indeed. He was glad that she chose to exercise it so seldom. And anyone would defend Zillah from a lad like Rax. But he sometimes wondered why he held the rest off her. It was pure dog in the manger. That first afternoon when Zillah had been so pleased to see him, Tod had had great hopes. Then, the next day, he had come upon her sitting in a blue window embrasure, looking out into Arth’s blue empty sky, and realized that his hopes were just wistful phantoms. One glance at her sad profile, and he had known there was a wall around Zillah and that someone else was inside the wall with her.

“Did you come here to get away from — someone?” he had asked her, almost literally out of the blue.

“Yes,” said Zillah. The sadness of that one word was terrible.

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” Tod answered cheerfully, watching his hopes swirl away down an imaginary plughole. “You’ve got Josh and Philo and me to take your mind off it.”

He did wish she had not given him that particular grateful, friendly smile.

All the same, he and Philo and Josh spent every available spare minute with Zillah. When Marcus was not too restless, she sat in on classes with them, despite Brother Wilfrid’s sour looks, and seemed surprised at how much she learned even when she had to carry Marcus out halfway through most of the time. This was another thing about Zillah that irritated Tod. She was so plumb ignorant of magework. It was almost as if she refused to learn on purpose, and possibly encouraged Marcus to make a noise so that she could leave. He allowed that this was partly due to lack of confidence — someone, way back in Zillah’s history, had evidently sapped her confidence pretty badly — but he also suspected it was due to arrogance. In some secret place in her mind, Zillah felt she had no need to learn.

Josh had detected this too. Centaurs had somewhat the same arrogance. “Come on. Admit it. You’re proud of not knowing,” Josh said to her. And Zillah laughed guiltily, proving Josh right.

Tod knew he was finding faults in Zillah as a defense against falling in love with her. It was not only her looks. She was such good company too. They wandered about the citadel, talking of everything under three suns, and Tod found himself prattling to her as he had not found himself able to prattle since he left home.

“What is passet?” Zillah asked.

All three of them groaned. “A grain, lady,” Philo told her. “I’m told the centaurs used to live on it.”

“Only when desperate,” Josh protested.

“It grows dreadfully easily, particularly in the north of the Pentarchy,” Tod prattled. “It used to be what poor folk had to eat. When there was a passet famine, that was real famine. So the government tried to prevent famines by putting up a reward for growing passet — that was a few hundred years ago, and naturally no one ever remembered to repeal the law. There’s always a huge passet mountain. They make a lethal spirit out of it in Trenjen. But until I got to Arth, I always wondered what they did with the rest of it. Now I know. They just send it all here.”

“There are grain cellars full of it,” Josh said, pointing downward.

“We’ll show you if you like,” Philo offered.

“Oh, would you?” Zillah said. Her delight at the thought of going into the bowels of the citadel was so sincere that Philo wrapped his arms around her. Philo was one of those who was always embracing people he liked. This was what had caused him such trouble with the Brotherhood. But Tod suspected, from the look on Philo’s face, that it was not just friendship where Zillah was concerned; and he had a notion that Philo had discovered, like himself, that Zillah was only open to friendship.

No one else in the citadel believed it was just friendship. Philo and Josh were petitioned as often as Tod was for Zillah’s favors. Arth was filling with rumors and randy stories. Chief among them was one — which Tod thought might be fact — that the woman in boots had slept with every soul in Observer Horn and was open to any other offers. There was known to be some kind of bet on over the black girl in Calculus, and though the stories varied about the small, lively woman, there were jokes about the way Ritual Horn literally danced attendance upon her. Meanwhile Maintenance had opened a book upon the virtue of Brother Milo and the High Head. You could only get 2–1 on the chances of Brother Milo, but they were offering 100-1 that the High Head would not keep his Oath until the end of the week. There was some bitterness about the way the High Head seemed to exploit his position. He kept calling the women to his room. Zillah confirmed that she had been called in twice, and she confessed to Tod that High Horns terrified her.