The evening was spent thinking before the fire, pulling the shreds of evidence together. I stared for a long time at the blue crystal. I didn’t taste it, just stared at it. There was no one near to make demands upon me. No rescuing to be done, no sneaking or slying. No great white roads to be repaired. Merely quiet in the evening with the fire making small scrolls of smoke, ephemeral writing upon the slate of the sky, meaning flowing into meaning and mystery into mystery.
And, on thinking it over, I decided I had been right.
Right all along. Everything I had told Peter was true. All the evidence pointed in one way and one way only. I felt as I had felt so long ago, traveling toward Bleer with Peter, when he put the clues to a mystery in my hands and asked me to make sense of it. Now, as then, all the pieces were in my hands, or in my head. The great flitchhawk who had granted me a boon in Chimmerdong, and the d/bor wife, and the gobblemole. The story of Little Star and the Daylight Bell. The Oracle.
The Eesties. Yellow crystals and blue, separated by a thousand years of time, more or less. What was a thousand years, after all? Even to Vitior Vulpas Queynt it was a mere lifetime. My illness in Chimmerdong. The diagnoses of Bartelmy of the Ban, the Dervish, my mother. All these. And they did make a kind of horrible sense. No matter how I turned them, there was no other explanation. Only this one.
So. Could anything be done?
If anything could be done, who would do it? Not one young Wize-ard alone, surely. It was all very well for Bartelmy of the Ban, my mother, to set me a gigantic task in Chimmerdong, saying it was mine and none other’s. No one’s life had hung on that. Had seemed to hang on that, I amended. If I had failed, things were no worse. Though I had succeeded, were they any better?
But this. This meant an ending. For all of us. For everything. Tree and flower, hill and road, sea and shore, man, woman, child, all beasts, all birds, all fishes.
And though I might do what I could alone, surely it would be better if a disciplined body of persons were to work at it as well.
So. I thought about that for some time. Finally, I resolved upon a sending. Not an eater of blood, like Huldra’s, but a seeker of persons. It did not take a blood sacrifice, at least not much of one. A few drops of my own, was all. I sent it out into the world to seek Bartelmy of the Ban. She had said we would meet again. Why not now? Now, when I needed her. The sending pulled at me. I was like the reel on a fishing pole; it was the line with the hook; and it pulled at me, reeling out and out and out until there was nothing left of me at all. Only the line, spun into the world, far, far beyond any place I could see. I lay upon the ground, close-wrapped in my cloak, and let the line spin out.
For a very long time, I knew nothing. Then the line reeled in, restoring me to myself. The hook had caught something. I lay on a long bank above a length of flat that could only be a buried stretch of road. Down this flat the Dervish came, a whirling silver cone balanced on its tip, blurring with motion, settling before me into a still column of fringed quiet.
“Jinian, Dervish daughter,” it said.
“Bartelmy?” I replied from the ground. It had not sounded exactly like Bartelmy and yet almost like.
“No. She is not far from here. I was closer, however. I am one of her near kindred, alerted to expect your coming.”
“Even I did not know I would be coming this way.”
“Still, Bartelmy had thought it likely. When your sending came, we were not surprised. A Seer’s vision, perhaps.” Murzemire Hornless, I thought. Who had not been distressed at my going into the north. Was it because she had known what would happen? Had she known why I would leave the others?
“You say you expected my coming. Have you plans concerning me?”
“Not plans precisely, since we do not know why you have come. Provisions, certainly, for one not exactly a Dervish. A rare thing among us to provide for one outside our company.” The Dervish gestured off down the flat stretch. “If you are strong enough to rise and walk?” I struggled to my feet. The line had been reeled in, but I was still weak enough to stagger.
“Heat food for yourself. I can wait.” The Dervish not only waited, but helped me by gathering sticks for the fire and talking gently about trees and clouds while I ate. Much refreshed, I buried the fire and stood ready to walk beside the Dervish, who surprised me by walking beside me, stride on stride. It noticed my surprise. “We walk, sometimes. Sometimes we eat, drink. Rarely, we sleep.” It made a sound, almost like a chuckle.
“You astonish me,” I murmured. “That sounded almost like laughter.”
“We even laugh, sometimes. Bartelmy is among the most serious of us. She finds little to laugh about. I can find it amusing to walk beside a Dervish daughter who is no Dervish, who is a Beast-talker, so I am told. Speak to that owl yonder and tell me what it says.” The Dervish gestured and I saw a tiny dot upon a branch, so far at the limit of vision it could scarcely be seen at all.
It was too far to speak in its language, so I spoke to it silently and it replied in muted tones which floated toward us on the wind. “It says, “Good day,”“ I said. “As would any polite and sensible beast.” The Dervish laughed again, a very small sound,
