Nita looked up at him, the crimson and emerald and golden splendour of his clothing, the impossible handsomeness of his face, and she felt dingy and shopworn by comparison. Her heart ached in her with pity for the wretched ordinariness of life, seen next to this awful, assured beauty.
But she said, 'Yes, thank you. Thank you.very much.'
'I would have saved the favour, myself,' said the black-haired rider, 'for you'll need it more later. But what's done, is done. And now get up and ride, for the Queen desires to speak with you.' Ronan put his eyebrows up at that. 'Which queen?'
'Not any mortal one,' said the young rider on the horse, looking at him with mild amusement. 'The Queen whom it is unwise to refuse. as it is unwise to refuse her Fool.' 'The Amadaunl' Ronan said, his eyes going wide. 'Do what he says,' he said to Nita. And she caught a flash of unnerved thought from him: he can kill with a look or a touch, this one, if offended.
'No problem with that,' Nita said, at the moment having no time for Ronan's nervousness. 'But one thing first.' She looked around her with distress: the cars stopped or crashed in the street, the shattered glass, the stunned townspeople standing around. She beckoned Kit and Ronan off to one side a little, and said, 'We can't leave the place this way. Little hiccups in daily reality, people can deal with — but this? They'll never be able to explain it to themselves. .'
'Or their insurance companies,' Kit muttered.
Nita shook her head. 'They'll lose their grip. .'
Ronan looked at them curiously. 'What are you thinking of doing?'
Kit looked thoughtfully at Nita. 'Patch it?'
Nita nodded. Ronan stared at her. ' 'Patch it?' Patch what'? With what?'
Nita bit her lip. 'Time,' she said. 'With a spare piece. It's basic alternate-universe theory; Johnny mentioned patching in the pub. Somewhere parallel to our universe, where this happened, there has to be one where this didn't. where the drows never popped out, where this damage wasn't done. You patch this timeline with an equivalent piece of that one.' She looked around her, considering. 'The area and the timespan's small enough not to have to get an authorization, like you would for a full timeslide. And the reason's good, which is the whole point.' 'But the overlays. .'
'Ronan,' Kit said, holding his voice very steady in a way that Nita knew meant he was fighting not to lose his temper, 'we can't sit around arguing about this all day. A few minutes more, and what's happened will have printed itself too strongly on these people's minds to be patched over. We'll be careful of the overlays. You in, or what?'
Ronan looked from him to Nita. She shrugged, nodded.
'All right. .'
'Here it is,' Kit said, riffling through his manual. 'We're inside the time limit, we can do the short form. Ronan?' He offered him the manual.
'No,' he said, looking slightly off to one side like someone having an idea, 'I see it. You start.' Kit and Nita started reading together: Ronan joined them. It was a little odd to hear the Speech for the first time in an Irish accent, but Nita didn't let that distract her, concentrating instead on the part of the spell that located and verified the piece of alternate spacetime they needed, 'copied' it into the spell buffer prepared for it, and held it ready. Then came the second part of the spell, which bilocated the copied spacetime with the one presently proceeding locally. Kit looked up after a moment, breathing hard. Everything around them suddenly looked a little peculiar, as if every object had two sets of outlines, which were vibrating, jarring against one another. 'Come on,' he said to Nita and Ronan, 'let's get out of here and drop it in place.' 'How are we going?' Nita said, glancing up at the Amadaun.
There were abruptly three more horses beside him; bridled and saddled, ready to go. 'Can you ride?'
'I can be carried,' Nita said, utterly unhappy about the idea. 'Up, then.'
Kit helped her up. 'Where is the Queen?' she said to the Amadaun. 'Did she come out with you?' 'She did not: she goes not foraying any more,' the Amadaun said. 'Though because of you, that may change.'
Nita thought about that one for a minute. Ronan meanwhile swung up in his saddle with perfect ease, gathered up the reins and sat there like a lord. Kit clambered up into his saddle, clutching the pommel of it.
'Don't fear,' the Amadaun said. 'You won't fall.'
Nita desperately hoped that was true. 'OK,' she said to Kit. 'As soon as we're clear, let it drop.' The Amadaun turned his mount and led them at a walk up Herbert Road. By the entrance to the church parking lot Kit paused, looked over his shoulder, said one word. Looking back towards the main street with Ronan, Nita saw the outlines of everything tremble, then suddenly solidify. With that, the glitter of broken glass in the road was gone, and a sudden confused silence fell over the shouting that had started in the street. 'Good enough,' Kit said. 'It took, nice and solid. Let's go.'
And they rode. Nita knew these horses from old stories, but she still was not prepared for how fast they went. One moment she was trying to find a way to sit so that she wouldn't slip sideways: the next, she was galloping. Though it physically felt as if she was trapped in a dream sequence in a film, the horse moving in slow motion, everything else blurred past her with such speed that she could hardly tell which way they were going. Apparently the Good People's horses didn't care about roads; rough or smooth was all one to them, for they ran 'sideways', across water, or fetlock- deep through a hillside in their path. The country around them now appeared as it had — how many hundreds of years ago? — before there were roads, or people, or anything else to trouble the serenity of the world. It was an Ireland of apple trees in flower, of long hillsides green with flowery meadows, deep forests, thickets of hazel and rowan. They rode westward out of Bray, and made for Great Sugarloaf.
In the sideways world it was no mountain, but a city that stood up huge and golden, the towers lancing up as Nita had seen them from a distance that afternoon, back in Kilquade. The rider alongside them looked at Nita, and at the view ahead, and smiled slightly. 'It is the chief of our duns in these parts,' he said. 'And the fairest. Other mountains are higher, but none was so well shaped, we thought.' 'I saw.'
'So you did. You have the gift; it comes of the blood, I suppose.' The Fool looked at her. 'Not a safe gift, though.'
'Neither is wizardry,' Nita said.
The Fool nodded. 'As you will no doubt keep discovering, before the end. No matter. We're here.' They dismounted before the great gates. The horses tossed their heads, somehow losing their saddles and tack at the same time, and wandered off into the surrounding meadows. 'Come then,' said the Fool. 'The Queen holds summer court.'
They did not go through the gates. The Fool led them instead a short distance around the high shining walls, to where an open pavilion of white silk was pitched in the meadow. Inside it was a simple chair, and several young women standing around it; in the chair sat another woman, who watched them come.
The Fool led them just inside the pavilion, before the lady in the chair. Afterwards Nita had some trouble remembering her face; what chiefly struck her was the woman's hair, masses of it, a beautiful mellow gold like the wheat ripening in Aunt Annie's third field over. The thick plaits of it that hung down reached almost to the ground; the rest was coiled up, braided and wound around her head, the only crown she wore. She was dressed all in a white silk much finer than that of the pavilion, and she held something wrapped in more silk in her lap. 'The greeting of gods and man to you, wizards,' she said.
They all bowed. 'And to you, madam,' Ronan said, 'our greeting and the One's.'
She bowed her head in return. 'I may not keep you long here,' she said; 'you are on errantry, and we respect that. But word has come to us of what the wizards are doing. We know a little of draoiceacht ourselves, and we have something here that may be of use to you.' She turned her attention to the bundle in her lap.
'Madam,' Kit said, 'may I ask a question?'
She looked up, and her eyes glinted a little with merriment. 'Could I stop you?' 'Who are you, please?'
She sat back in the chair at that. 'Bold one,' she said. 'But the stranger in the gate has a right to ask. I am one who 'died into the hills'.' Ronan turned his face away. 'Feel no shame,' she said. 'The name is long given to us by humans, and we are used to it. The first of us who lived here after the Making, and could not bear to leave, slipped sideways here, by what art you know; it is part of wizardry. We took ourselves to live outside of the world's time, and exiled ourselves as a result; we cannot go back except for a little while, every now and then. A night of moon to dance in; a morning, or an afternoon, on each of the four great turning-days of the year, when the hills stand open, and there is some commerce between this world and yours. We are near one of them now, which is
