Ah, so and so she would release me. At the point of a knife, perhaps, or in the new heart of a fire, or only to bind me again in some new and more stringent chains. I begged silently that Jinian would not listen to this Sending, this screaming ghost that fled upward now into the sky, a streak of bloody gray, leaving the two hags behind to stare after it.
“I thank you for your cooperation,” the Basilisk was saying. “So we will be alike in vengeance. For your son, Mandor. For my daughter, Dedrina-Lucir. What avengement is in your mind?”
“I had thought to freeze him yet alive in the ice of the caverns where we go. It can be done with an ensorcellment to leave him alive and thinking for every moment of a thousand years. We will leave him so and seal the caverns behind him. Let him lie there and think of Mandor, and of Huld, my brother-husband, whom he also killed. Let him think of them until he dies at last, after a millennium, in the lonely cold.”
“This seems good to me.” The Basilisk stretched, talons forming at the ends of her fingers, scrabbling at the ground on which she sat to leave long furrows there. “As with him, so with Jinian also. Let them both lie a thousand years in the ice before they die,” and she began to laugh, choking herself with her mirth. “Except that I will scratch her first, only a little.”
In a moment the Witch summoned someone to drag Sylbie’s body away.
The day wore on. I heard the cries of carrion birds and knew they feasted upon Sylbie’s flesh. A servant came in to press bites of food into my mouth, food that I chewed and swallowed stubbornly, keeping my strength for the moment in which it might do me some good. Huldra did not come to gloat over my captivity, unusual for her family. Both Mandor and Huld had been gloaters.
Late in the evening we began to move once more, leaving the road to wend our way north and west across the fertile valley toward the mountain wall to the west. If we kept on in this same direction, we would come to Bannerwell, and from Bannerwell we could drop westward to the River Haws. North along that river would bring us to Cagihiggy Creek, and upward along that creek would bring us eventually to the ruins of the Blot and the Ice Caverns. How many days? Ten or twelve at the least. With wagons, probably longer than many days? And Jinian, alone there in the north, traveling to that place. For she would. I knew she would. ‘Though she feared Huldra and Dedrina Dreadeye, still she would come for me.
And for the first time in years, I gave way to slow, impotent tears, unable to hold them back.
It was then Huldra came to punish me for the fact that Mandor had died.
9
JINIAN’S STORY: THE SEVEN
I greeted the seven with a good deal of grabbing and squeezing and exclamations of joy. Cat shook me, wagging her head from side to side. “You’re all bones, girl! What’ve you been up to?” Then hugged me when I tried to tell her.
We went no farther than a few hundred paces to a grassy hollow among a dozen great trees, there to build a fire for the making of tea while the words poured out of me like wine from a cask, bubbling and frothing and spilling somewhat as I tried to make sense of it all. Ganver and the Great Maze and everything that had gone before.
“And I have failed,” I cried. “Ganver tried to teach me the meaning of star-eye, but I have not learned it.”
Five of them drew in their breath, in awe, their eyes wide. Dodie did not know enough to do it, but she watched them with her mouth open. “What does that mean?” she whispered to them, to me.
“To have been taught by an Eesty!” Murzv marveled. “Why, if you could learn it,” she said, “you could do the final couplet. It is said no Wize-ard has done so since the time of Trindel the Marvelous.”
“The final couplet?” Dodie asked.
“Eye of the Star, Where Old Gods Are,” I told her. “To summon up the old gods, one and all. I have used Eye of the Star to fasten the Dervishes down while I spoke to them. They did not like it much. I wonder if the old gods would like it at all, being summoned up.”
“That spell would be worth having, considering what we are facing,”said Cat. “Can you tell us of the lessons? Or did you take an oath of secrecy?”
“No oath, no nothing,” I told her. “And I’ll tell you everything. Perhaps you can make more sense of it than I. But let me tell you as we go. We must move ourselves. We must go to the Old South Road City and build it up again.”
They looked at one another, like so many owls. “Build it up again?” asked Sarah Shadowsox at last. “That seems rather a large job for one seven, Jinian.”
“Of course,” I cried. “Of course it’s too large for us alone. There must be more. Other sevens beside us. And Dervishes. The Immutables. All the Great Gamesmen from the Ice Caverns. The hundred thousand.”
“There should be,” murmured Murzy, shaking her head. “Indeed there should be, Jinian. The question is, can there be? Can there be any at all?”
“I don’t understand,” I faltered, afraid that I understood all too well.
“Shadow,” said Bets. “Murzemire Hornloss, Seer that she is, has done a bit of
