At last I had taken up with Jinian, without any intention of loving her at all. And yet I had dreamed about her sometimes. I dreamed she was sitting in a window, leaning down to hand me something marvelous. I dreamed she was in danger and needed me. I could not escape thinking of her. Oh, yes, she irritated me. From the first times we were together, she chivied me this way and that. But it got so I could not think of myself without thinking also of Jinian. I wanted her near. Wanted to argue with her. Wanted to touch her. Wanted to tease her. Wanted to make love to her—wanted to.
And couldn’t, of course, because of that damn oath of hers. I had come close to breaking that oath, telling myself I’d do it by force if necessary, but good sense prevailed. Mavin had said it often enough. A man who forces a woman is no true man. He is only a thing. Without soul, said Mavin. “Without bao,” I said to myself. Jinian would not love one without bao, I supposed. Better wait than woe.
So I thought, half-dreaming, letting the dream come at last. I slept, and when I woke I could not remember what the dream had been.
I came down to sit upon sun-warmed rock thinking of Jinian once more with an accustomed degree of frustration. I would go south because it needed doing, but also because Jinian said go south. I would wait in the Old South Road City because there would be work there to do, but also because Jinian had said she would meet me there. My body did not move, however, and I did not Shift wings, for I was closest to her where I was and did not want to leave her. If this is love, then love is what it is. If love is something worse than this, I do not care to know about it.
The rock wall faced east. It heated quickly under the morning sun. Shaking myself back into a sense of duty, I took that heat to change myself into a flying thing, sleek and shapely, blue below and dark above, like a fish with wings. I had a quick, unreasonable longing for Chance. “Brother Chance,” I would have said, “get yourself on my back and we’ll go find that sportive widow of yours in Mip.” Or had it been Pouws or some other place? “Brother Chance, get yourself on my back and clutch tight with your legs, because I’m scared to death.” Fine thing for a Gamesman, a Shifter, fine thing for the son of a Wizard. I was scared, and it took a bit of time before I realized it wasn’t me—or certainly not only me—I was frightened for.
At last it was the shadows that moved me. I saw them trembling beneath the trees, fluttering as though about to fly. I did not want to encounter them in the air so thrust downward with wings long warmed in the morning sun and launched myself to spiral above the stone, where an updraft lifted me higher and higher.
From above, I could see how the world died. Throughout the Shadowmarches were leprous patches of dead forest. All down the River Haws were mud slides and eruptions of red and yellow smoke, as though great pustules had broken from beneath the skin of the world. So suddenly. So long hidden, and now so suddenly the illness broke forth. And yet it is the way of some sicknesses, so Healer Silkhands used to say, to give no sign while they eat away inside, then break through when it is almost too late to do anything about them.
It was the filthy smokes that had killed the trees. Looking down from my height, I could see creatures fleeing from shadow to light, from dead to living. Tree rats in little bunches, darting like bats across clearings. Bunwits, large and small. A follow of wild fustigars and a prowl of pombis moved into my sight and away again as I circled, and even from the height I could hear the cries of birds driven from their nests by shadows.
“Brother Chance,” I said to my absent friend, “this is a rotten bad place we’ve come to.”
“Then best get out of it, boy,” he absently replied.
Which I did, winging away to the south over the blotched forests and the rising humors of decay. I’d had some practice with wings in that last trip, and a Dragon at the Bright Demesne had given me a few pointers. In my whole life, I’d done wings only briefly once or twice before. I hadn’t really understood the proper proportion of wing to body, the way wings could lift almost by themselves, the length-to-width ratio necessary for endless soaring flight. On the way back from visiting Mertyn, I’d experimented as the Dragon had suggested. This shape was a good one, one that could well have carried me over the Western Sea. Since I was not permitted to be with Jinian anyhow, I might as well have gone over the Western Sea. This thought upset me; I lost the proper structure at the ends of my wings and dropped a
