However long the danger might go on, my time of loneliness was at an end. At the supper hour shortly thereafter, I was given a visitors chit. The visitors rooms were off the courtyard, and we might meet there with women relatives or friends. You can imagine my feelings when I found the room occupied by Margaret Foxmitten, her beautiful face glowing in the lamplight, and Sarah Shadowsox, looking up when I entered with her alert, startled expression which always reminded me of some small forest creature. They were there! They had arrived! Little got said and less decided. All they did was hold me, pat my shoulders, and say “There, there.” All the tears I had bottled in half a year came out.
Thereafter we managed much talk. Cat and Tess Tinder-my-hand were on their way to Xammer. It was expected that Murzy and Bets Battereye would manage to get there before the Season of Storms. Margaret and Sarah had already found a house in the town; both had informed Vorbold’s House that they were the servants of Jinian. As such, they could come to me—or I to them under certain circumstances—privately and without trouble. Some such fiction was necessary. Best of all, I was no longer alone.
“Joramal Trandle was furious that Mendost left you to Bloster that way,” said Margaret, her eyes sparkling at the memory. “He said things to Mendost which would have burned your ears to hear. Mendost, of course, was scarcely troubled by it, but it did many of the rest of us good. Joramal has offered us a stipend to stay in Xammer to serve you, and he will visit you in due course to see that all is well with you. And now, you must tell us the truth of how you came to Xammer!”
Which I did. Which they disbelieved.
So I told it again, in exhaustive detail. I don’t think they really believed it then, either, though there was something about the tale that implied something to them it didn’t mean to me. They asked over and over about the giant flitchhawk, and I told them.
“Why?” I said at last. “What do you think it means?”
Margaret shook her head. “Too soon to say, Jinian Footseer. The story of Little Star and the Daylight Bell is a wize-art story, a seven-dam story, passed down and passed down, and to have it come true in that way, well ... Murzy may have some idea about it. If not, we may be told.” But they would not say when, or by whom.
Margaret and Sarah had brought a horse with them, a horse for me. A real horse. A better horse than the one I had borrowed from Porvius Bloster. Joramal Trandle had sent it. It did not trip or stumble, and I immediately named it Surefoot. Having the animal meant I could ride out through the town of Xammer, even into the surrounding area, which was beneath the Game ban. School servants were always within sight whenever the students rode, but they were there for our protection. Dedrina, seeing me enjoying myself, sneered that I must take care: Basilisks were said to frequent the fields where I had been riding. I smiled and thanked her, promptly reporting her remark to Queen Vorbold, together with a quiet comment concerning the School’s negligence in tolerating vermin in the area. She took me to mean Basilisks, which in one sense I did. I had been careful to attribute the rumor to its originator, so for a time after that, Dedrina was quieter, and angrier.
At last, coincident with the first storms of the season, Murzy and Bets arrived, Murzy with her gray hair in tangles and her shawl every which a way, Bets as busy and bustling as ever, and we were seven once more. We celebrated my fifteenth year with a cakes-and-wine party, and Murzy demanded a strict accounting of the year I had been without her. She did not seem displeased when she had heard it.
“Well, chile, we will believe that bit about the flitchhawk until someone proves it not so. I feel it was not a Gamesman in Shifted shape, though we may not discount that idea entirely. Some great Shifter could have done it. I’ve heard of those that could.”
“What about the Schooling?” said Bets. “How does it go?”
So I told her what I had learned, and they made faces at most of it. I told them about Banila’s dream crystals, and they were horrified, so I talked about classes. We did have a good Gamesmistress to teach cartography, mannish and gruff though she was, and I had learned much about the world of the True Game, and even some things—though no one would vouch for their accuracy—of the world beyond. When I spoke of Dedrina, however, Murzy gave the others a cross look and said, “This isn’t necessary, now is it, dams?”
“It’s all right, Murz,” I said. “I can handle her. Truly. I just get quieter and quieter, and she gets madder and madder.”
“I know,” said Murzy, frowning.
“Such increasing anger is dangerous, Jinian,” said Cat. “Dedrina-Lucir comes from a line of Basilisks. The one you saw in the forest was probably near kin. All the females of that line have been Basilisks of great power for seven generations. We have reason to think she has come into her Talent long since.”
I thought it over. She had certainly Beguiled the girls and mistresses in the School. She had not done any Reading of others’ minds that I knew of, but Reading was both forbidden in Xammer and easy to detect, whereas simple Beguilement was often impossible to tell from natural attractiveness. “She warned me to be careful where I ride, for Basilisks roam the fields outside
