“Ah.” He drew a long, gnarly hand across his face, seeming to be in some confusion. “After all this time, who can say, person? Does it matter? I am here. The garden is my task. To grow and hybridize and combine. To seek out new things and try them. To set out into the world those things which seem advantageous. To destroy the others.”
“And the turnips? Are they advantageous?”
He was given no time to reply. A tumult broke out among the turnips as one called, “Shadow. Shadow by the fruit trees!”
We looked up to see several questing flakes settling along the wall, around the roots of the trees there. A mob of turnips began to rush toward them. Once at the shadow’s edge, they dug themselves in, roots flipping soil like some digger-toads I have seen, squirming into the dirt like little corkscrews. Soon nothing was to be seen except the tufts of leaves, and every inch of the shadow perimeter had a turnip planted adjacent.
“By Towering Tamor,” whispered Bets. “The shadow’s shrinking.” So it was. Fading. Shrinking. Dwindling. Within moments it was gone and the turnips began to uproot themselves once more with an air of complete though somewhat petulant satisfaction.
The Gardener had regarded this display with no change of expression. Now he reverted to Murzy’s earlier question. “Advantageous? I really don’t know. They are company, of a sort.”
“Would you mind dreadfully if we borrowed some of them?” I asked. “We would find them most advantageous. There is rather more of the shadow about than is generally considered useful.”
The Gardener seemed puzzled by this. “There has seemed to be more than usual. However, that may be only a local phenomenon. The Shadow Tower is close by. I had wondered if perhaps there were a leak.”
Cat, with her usual passion for both getting and giving information, set about bringing the Gardener up to date while I wandered off among the turnips, recruiting several hundred of them with ridiculous ease. They tumbled over one another in their eagerness, and I had some trouble choosing the stoutest and strongest as those best suited to the trip. Since their power of locomotion was not of a protracted or speedy kind, we considered how to get them where we were going and decided on a kind of narrow-wheeled vehicle halfway between a barrow and a cart. The Gardener very kindly helped us build two of these—which I resolved to exchange for a well-built wagon and some wateroxen at the earliest opportunity—and helped load the volunteer turnips into these conveyances.
“Would you mind,” he asked when we were ready to depart, “if I came with you? I haven’t been outside for some time. If there is indeed an imbalance, as your teacher person suggests, I should be aware of it.”
I thought “imbalance” was rather a slight word for the threat that hovered over us all but could see no reason why this strange being should not come with us. Soon we were returning the way we had come, with the turnips riding at ease in the barrows, exclaiming shrilly at every turn in the trail. When we rested for the night, it was in a circle of them with still others dotted among us, ready to suck up any shadow that came upon us in the night. And so our travels went, with us staying to the sunny valleys where we could for the turnips’ sake, stopping at every streamlet for a good drink, and making more progress than one might suppose, given the awkward nature of the barrows.
Two nights later, the Sending came.
We heard it casting about in the sky, crying my name like a lost child, high and far in the star-pierced dark, “Jinian, Jinian.” I knew it was Sylbie’s voice almost immediately, though the timbre was nothing like. Something in the intonation, perhaps. I told the others who it was, and their faces turned cold and stern. We gathered ourselves promptly, setting up Wize-ardly defenses and protections. The turnips were planted away from us, the Gardener set to stand among the trees. The rest of us set ourselves in a fire-centered circle with seven little fires burning around us, waiting what would come.
`Jinian,” it called, still casting east and west, high above us in the northern air. It had gone far to the north in seeking me and was now on our trail of return. “Jinian.”
“Only a girl, isn’t that what you said?” Margaret asked. “Little more than a child herself?”
“A year younger than I,” I answered. “She bore Peter’s baby in Betand, a Shifter baby who had been haunting the town. Bryan is the baby’s name.”
“Bryan is now a motherless child,” whispered Murzy. “No live creature casts about so among the clouds, riding the moonlight in that way. No, she is dead, poor Sylbie, sent by an evil creature to find you, Jinian.”
“I know who is responsible for this Sending,” I told them. “Huldra, the witch. More than a Witch, however. One who has studied the art.” They shivered, as I had known they would. There are things the sevens hate, among them those who study the art for evil’s sake, spilling blood as if by right.
“She is more Peter’s enemy than mine, but Dedrina Dreadeye is mine, and she stands beside Huldra,” I went on.
At this there was general consternation, for it was the seven who had captured the daughter, Dedrina-Lucir, the one I killed with the Dagger of Daggerhawk. We had no further time to think about it. High above, the Sending called out triumphantly, ` Jinian,” and plummeted down upon us only to recoil from the circle of fire and land wearily outside it on the meadow grass.
“Jinian Footseer,” it cried in a high, inhuman voice. “I bring word from Huldra, sister-wife of Huld, mother of Mandor. Peter is held fast and will shortly begin to die a long death if you
