A Sudden Wild Magic

The rest seemed to relax a little as soon as she was gone. Two of the men got Philo to his feet, and — Zillah could not help noticing — they handled him carefully and tenderly, as if they had more than a notion of how he was feeling. Philo was still very pale, and he did not seem to be able to use his right arm.

“You may as well pick those up,” Herrel said to one of the girls, pointing to the toys strewn in the path.

“Why?” she said irritably, glancing at Marcus. “It’s only a boy child.” But she and another woman got down among their billowing satins and started collecting toys.

Two other women, both older, took Zillah’s elbows and urged her along the path. Zillah resisted. Marcus was leaning over her shoulder reaching for his toys. “Doy!” he said urgently.

“And someone had better go and see if they can tempt that centaur out from under the Goddess’s skirts,” Herrel said. “You — Ladny and Sigry— you’d be best at it.”

Zillah felt both the women holding her stiffen. One said acidly, “Don’t you speak to me like that. I don’t take my orders from you.”

“Don’t you indeed?” said Herrel. “How shocking of me to suggest you might! All right. Sigry, take Andred and our sweet Aliky and see what you can do about my mother’s orders.”

One of the girls who had been collecting toys nodded and handed the bag into Marcus’s eager fists. She even gave him a pleasant smile as she did so. She and the other older woman, together with one of the better- dressed men, set off toward the grove, calling out, “What if he won’t come out?”

“Besiege him,” said Herrel and leaped across the stream.

The woman called Ligny immediately flounced around and marched away along the path. From the way Herrel leered derisively at her stiff satin back, Zillah suspected that Herrel had got rid of her on purpose.

She became sure if it when they all moved off downstream and Herrel contrived to walk beside her, so near that she could catch the faint characteristic smell of him — Mark’s smell. It made her shake all over. She could scarcely carry Marcus, who was anyway writhing violently about in her arms to embrace his rescued toys.

“I’ll carry him if you like,” Herrel said. “Will he come to me?”

Feeling as if she could barely move, so conscious was she of Herrel beside her, Zillah twisted her head to look at Marcus. Some of his writhings, she found, had been in order to get himself into a position from which he could perform a grave inspection of Herrel. “Ike bad,” he remarked to her. “Airy bay.”

“Yes, I think so,” she said, and was surprised that her voice came out cool and normal.

“Here, then, fellow.” Herrel took Marcus out of her arms, making a somewhat clumsy job of the transfer. She could feel him shaking too. Under cover of their maneuverings, he whispered, “What in hellspoke’s name made you come here? You were safe. You’d left me — him.”

It was in a way incredible, that this man she had never met should whisper to her in Mark’s voice of things that had happened in another world. But even while she was feeling this amazement, Zillah was whispering back, “Because I couldn’t help it, as soon as I knew. I had to. Fetch Mark back. You need him.”

Herrel all but lost the bag of toys, but rescued it with a raised yellow satin knee, while he whispered, “I don’t know how to! For the gods’ sake, don’t say a word to my mother! She’d kill!” After which he contrived to gather up both Marcus and the bag and hoist them to his shoulder, remarking in a normal speaking voice, “So you think I’m a nice man, do you fellow, hairy face and all?”

“He must be the only person in the Pentarchy who thinks that then,” observed one of the women coming behind.

It showed Zillah that they could easily have been overheard. Herrel had taken a great risk. She blazed with joy that it was this important to him — still, after she had walked out on Mark that way, without even a word — and this joy mixed and warred confusingly with fear and dismay, and her guilt at bringing Josh and Philo into this. It was her fault. She was sure of that. In some way, getting them all out of Arth, she had been homing on Herrel, instinctively. She had only to think of the woman Marceny to see that this had been a disastrous thing to do. Yet for a short while this was less to her than the mere fact of being here, walking beside Herrel under the blue sky on the path beside the stream.

Nobody said anything much as they walked. From time to time the path crossed irrigation — or drainage — ditches leading from locks in the stream. Then they walked over carefully made plank bridges where everyone’s feet thundered, and, it seemed to Zillah, any amount of whispering could have been hidden in the noise. But Herrel did not say another word to her. The confusion of Zillah’s feelings began to sort itself out — as she told herself wryly, the confusion at least was familiar, since it was the way her mother worked, both on her and on Amanda — and she began to have suspicions.