“Oh,” he said mildly, “it does, you know. If you examine it. For example, you’ve been doing summons, haven’t you?” Well, I had, of course. A few. I might have called up an occasional water dweller to provide a fish dinner. Or maybe a few flood-chucks, just to help us get through some timber piles on the road. I admitted as much, wondering what he was getting at.
“Well, if you’ve been doing summons, have you ever stopped to think what an unconsidered pregnancy might do to the practice of the art?” An unconsidered pregnancy—or even a considered one—was about the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. But this was something not one of the dams had mentioned to me, not even the midwife, Tess Tinder-my-hand, who would have been the logical one to do so. My jaw dropped and I gave him an idiot look.
“Well, let’s say you’re pregnant and you summon up something obstreperous in the way of a water dweller. Then you go through the constraints and dismissal, but the water dweller considers the child in your belly was part of the summons. That child has neither constrained nor dismissed. So, time comes you give birth to something that looks rather more like a fish than you might think appropriate. Recent research would indicate a good many of the magical races are the results of just such Wize-ardly accidents.”
“Mermaids? Dryads?”
“Among others, and not the most strange, either. Have you ever called up a deep dweller?” I had heard them laugh a few times during bridge magic but had never called them. Murzy had told me to be careful, very careful, with them. I shook my head again.
“I have. Pesky, mischievous creatures, but more than half-manlike, for all that. If it weren’t for their fangy mouths, you’d think them children. I shouldn’t wonder if that race came from some magical accident during pregnancy. Not that deep dwellers are common.” All of which was something to think about. I snapped my mouth shut and thought about it.
I’d never really understood the reason for the oath—three years of celibacy (virginity in my case)—sworn when I was just fifteen. I’d done it, of course, because they wouldn’t let me be in the seven otherwise, and if I weren’t in the seven, I couldn’t go on studying the art.
At that time, the art was just about all I had to care about except for the seven old dams themselves. Well, six and me.
So, I took the oath, and got initiated, and learned some fascinating things, all a good bit of time before Peter came along. When he did come along, however, the oath began to feel like a suit of tight armor. There was it, all hard and smooth outside, and there was me, all sweaty and passionate inside. And that’s the way this trip had gone, with me being hard and cold half the time and hiding in the wagon the rest of the time, afraid of what might happen if I came out. I didn’t wonder that Queynt could see it. No one could have missed it.
Peter came galloping back, head down, looking thoroughly tired and irritable. “More trees down. A real swath cut up ahead. We’ll need to find a way around. No possible way of getting through it.” When we arrived at the tumble, it was obvious he was right. Seven or eight really big trees, fallen into a kind of jackstraw mess, their branches all tangled together. Lesser trees were fallen in the forest, the whole making a deadfall that we could have scrambled through if we’d had a few extra hours with nothing better to do and hadn’t minded leaving the wagon behind.
Off to the right the forest thinned out a little. There were wide-enough spaces between the trees to get down into a meadow, and the meadow looked as though it stretched past the obstruction and back to the road. Chance was at the edge of the open space, beckoning.
Queynt krerked a few syllables to Yittleby and Yattleby, they turning their great beaks in reply. He had said, “Can you handle this?” and they had replied, “Why even ask?” He had picked up a few words of the krylobos language over the years. I wasn’t always sure that he knew what he was saying.
It was first light, still very dim. I got off to walk beside the wagon as it tilted from side to side over the road banks and through the scattered trees. Watching where I was walking had become a habit, and when I saw it I stopped without conscious effort, hollering to Queynt, “Shadow! Stop. Look there.” Unlike the rivers of dark we had seen flowing along the road farther south, this patch was a small one, the size of an outspread cape. It lay under a willow copse, directly in my path, easy to miss in this half-light.
When we’d started this adventure, traveling along the shores of the Glistening Sea among the towns of the Bight, we’d seen shadow piled on shadow. We’d taken refuge in the wagon more than once when we’d encountered great swatches of it creeping and crawling about us in the forests and chasms. In comparison to that, this little patch was almost innocent looking.
“What’s holding you?” asked Peter, riding down behind us.
“Shadow.” Queynt was laconic about it. Though he claimed to have seen it seldom before we started our northern trip, he had accustomed himself to the sight better than I. Shadow never failed to give me a sick emptiness inside, a fading feeling, as though I had become unreal. I had been shadow bit once, in Chimmerdong. As they say, once bit, twice sore.
“Well.” He sat there for a moment, staring at it, shifting from haunch to haunch, looking cross the way he does when he’s hungry. “It doesn’t look any different from any other we’ve seen. Are you going to sit here all
