the time she had finished speaking, he was almost sure of it. He had assumed that she and Derithon were adventurers who had somehow stumbled upon, or rather, through, the tapestry, but now he thought otherwise. An adventurer would not consider either castle his own.
And the flying castle had been fallen and empty for centuries.
“Lady Karanissa, excuse me, but how long have you been here?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know!” she replied, annoyed. “Ages, it seems, it can’t really be as long as it’s felt like, locked up here all alone, and there aren’t any days or nights here, so I just don’t know. Why? Do you know how long it’s been?”
“You said that when you came here, Derithon’s other castle was still flying?”
“Yes, of course!” Tobas had startled her again. “You mean it isn’t anymore?” “No, no, it isn’t — and it hasn’t been for a long time — and I’m afraid that Derithon was killed when it fell. At least, I think he must have been; my companion and I found a body near the tapestry that must have been his.”
“Derry’s dead?” She stared at him, open mouthed with shock.
“I think so; I can’t be sure it was he.” Tobas was apologetic.
“What did he look like, this dead person? No, don’t tell me. You said that the castle hadn’t flown in a long time? How long, then, months? Years?”
“Years, at least.”
“Gods, how long have I been here? What’s the date?”
“It’s the... let me see... the fourteenth of Harvest, or maybe the fifteenth by now; I don’t know how long I’ve been here.”
“What year, you idiot?” Karanissa shouted.
“Fifty-two twenty-one, by Ethsharitic reckoning.”
She stared at him, dumbfounded, then demanded, “Is this a joke? Are you playing some sort of trick on me? Is Derry in on this?”
Taken aback, Tobas said, “No, of course not!”
“It was the twenty-seventh of Leafcolor, in the Year of Human Speech four thousand seven hundred and sixty-two, when Derry and I came in here for a private evening together! Are you trying to tell me I’ve been sitting here waiting for that damn wizard to come back for four hundred and fifty-nine years?” With her final words she rose from her chair, shouting directly into Tobas’ face.
Tobas simply stared back, unable to think of any reply.
After a moment the witch sank back into her chair and stared at the ceiling for a long, slow breath. “Derithon of Helde,” she announced, shaking a fist at the air, “if you weren’t already dead, I’d kill you myself for getting me into this!”
CHAPTER 20
As the two sat glaring at each other, a tray appeared through one of the doorways, wafted into the room as if it weighed nothing and were merely drifting on the wind, like a falling leaf in the autumn. Karanissa, thus distracted from her fury, plucked it out of the air and offered it to Tobas.
It held exactly the food and drink she had requested. After a brief hesitation, Tobas helped himself generously; he was just as hungry in this eerie otherworldly castle as he had been back in the mountains of Dwomor.
The wine was not good at all, very acid and laced with gritty sediment, but after four hundred years that was to be expected. Tobas was too polite, and too unsure of his situation, to complain to his hostess. The bread and apples were fresh and tasty, however, and the cheese only slightly overripe.
When both had eaten their fill and calmed down somewhat, it was decided that Karanissa would first tell her story all the way through, and Tobas would then tell his, rather than both of them asking questions back and forth and confusing matters.
Karanissa maintained that her tale was very short and simple. Not long after she had completed her apprenticeship and been drafted into the army as a military witch, she had met Derithon, then two or three hundred years old and semiretired from his duties, but still on call for special missions and still training new combat wizards. They had, as she put it, become very good friends, but had not considered marriage because of the two-century difference in their ages, the gross disparity in their ranks — Derithon a reserve general, she a mere lieutenant — and the usual difficulties attendant upon marriages between magicians of different schools.
Tobas was not aware of any such difficulties, but said nothing.
The two of them had had good times together, Karanissa went on, and Derithon had her transferred from her reconnaissance post to “special duties” under his own command. He had even put a spell of eternal youth on her.
Startled, Tobas interrupted at that point. “Are you serious?” he said. “About what?” she asked, startled.
“That eternal youth spell. Do you mean that spells like that really exist?”
“Certainly they do! How did you expect me to believe that I’ve been here four hundred years if you didn’t know about youth spells?”
“I don’t know; I thought that maybe time was different here. I was always told that eternal youth spells were just pretty stories for children.”
“No, they’re real, all right, and, so far as I know, there isn’t any difference between time here and anywhere else. Youth spells are a military secret, but I thought just about everyone knew about them, all the same. Haven’t you ever met any powerful wizards who look as if they’ve just finished their apprenticeships? It always seemed to me that the military can’t be very serious about keeping these things secret when they let people like that wander around openly.”
Tobas began to explain that he had never had anything to do with the military or any wizards except Roggit, but decided that could wait. The witch was telling her story. He would hear her out first and then worry about details. “All right,” he said. “He put an eternal youth spell on you. Then what?” He wondered for a moment why, if eternal youth spells really did exist, wizards ever allowed themselves to grow old and die, as Roggit had. He immediately realized the answer, though; not all wizards knew the spells. As he had learned himself, wizards did not share spells. Besides, the secret might well have become lost entirely by the time the Great War was over, as the methods for making flying castles had.
Karanissa shifted on her chair, brushed back her hair, and went on with her tale.
She and Derithon had become very close, and finally, one day, after swearing her to secrecy, he had brought her through the tapestry to this castle, his very special, very private retreat of long standing that no one else knew about, where they could be alone together without worrying about gossiping servants or troublesome officers. These were his most prized personal possessions, the tapestry and its castle, and she had felt honored when he chose to share them with her, as he never had with anyone else.
She was a witch and she knew that he was speaking the truth when he told her that and not just giving her a line. Either that, or he had some spell she had never heard of that let him lie so well even a witch couldn’t detect it.
They had come here three or four times for brief visits, when time permitted, and each time, when they felt they ought to, they had then stepped back through the other tapestry to Derithon’s second castle, the flying one in the ordinary World.
Then, one night, at a most inconvenient time, one of the magical emergency alarms Derithon had set back in the real World had been triggered somehow, she didn’t know how, or what the alarm was, or how Derithon had known, since she had seen and heard nothing. Assuring her that it was probably nothing and he’d be right back, or if it was serious he’d be right back to get her to safety, he had left. She had really not felt like going anywhere just then; neither had Derithon, but he had quickly thrown on a tunic and breeches and gone, all the same, leaving her alone in the castle.
And that was the last time she had seen him, or, for that matter, any human being but herself and Tobas, for what Tobas now told her was a few sixnights less than four hundred and fifty-nine years.
