Looking down on him from a window, I could almost tell what he was dreaming of, as though I could read his mind. I frowned and bit my lips. There were only two seasons of my oath to run, but while I had kept that oath to the letter, the spirit of it had been lost long since. It was impossible to concentrate on the art—or on anything else—with Peter around. The more casual I tried to be, the closer he came. There were a dozen things one might do; putting a spell on him came first to mind. A distraint. That same spell I had used on Brom, Dream Chains. I still had the frog. It would do Peter no harm. He wouldn’t even be aware of it.
No! I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t compel him to do anything, or not do anything. Not ever. I would rather have lost him, or so I thought then, than do anything to put him under compulsion. No matter how tempting it might be.
And it was very tempting. I could only distrain his touching me. Nothing else. And only for a short time. I could still allow affectionate speech, companionship.
And yet—if he couldn’t touch me when he willed, something would have been taken from him. As something must have been taken from Queynt when he was given the blue dream crystal by the Shadowpeople.
Though he denied it, I thought it must be so. It was unlikely he had not been changed by it. So he was compelled, whether he knew it or not, by something or someone outside himself.
And yet, being honest about it, I’d met him after he’d tasted the thing, not before. So how could I say whether he was changed by it or not?
I sat upon the windowsill, looking out over the town with its crumbling towers, its moldy roofs, the streets clean swept and shining for festival, the lower walls painted and gleaming, and all above the street level falling to dust and decay. The vibration of the mill shook the stone I was sitting on, a ceaseless quivering, a gentle dust of mortar from between the stones, a constant reminder the mill was there. The people of Bloome had made an uneasy peace with the mill, but I was going to change all that. Compellingly. But that was Game, of a sort. Compulsion was allowed, in Game.
Barish, for example! He had arranged for himself to be put to sleep, to sleep for a thousand years or so. And while he slept, one hundred thousand great Gamesmen were to be abducted and frozen into sleep like his own.
Compelled. For some misty idea he had about a better future world. An idea so misty that he and Himaggery had done nothing but argue about it constantly before we left and were probably still arguing about it. Meantime the hundred thousand rested beneath the mountain, still frozen. Compelled.
Everyone else did it! So why did it bother me so?
Besides, there were situations when it seemed right.
If I had come upon that man and woman outside Bloome, for instance, sucking upon their piss-yellow crystals and lying there in their own stink. If I had compelled them, even against their wills, to give up the crystals and live again, wouldn’t I have been their friend?
A better friend, perhaps, than their own inner spirits, who had let them die? Or was the right to die part of one’s own right? If so, was it everyone’s right, or only the right of some? A child, for example. If a child risked its life foolishly, without knowing what it was doing, shouldn’t one save that child by compelling it to forgo the risk? Or a stupid man, perhaps one besotted?
Though if one were to follow that argument, it was probable the besotted one got that way of his own will and had been told often enough the dangers of it. Or true naifs, simpletons, those who would never learn the ways of the world, the eternally surprised, the perpetually astonished? Should they not be compelled, for their own good?
When one played Game, there were rules—oh, often disobeyed, but still acknowledged. If one compelled outside of Game, then what was it one was doing? If one seduced, which was another kind of compulsion?
“Saving one’s life, perhaps,” I mumbled, remembering too well what I had had to do to the centipig in the Forest of Chimmerdong. “Saving someone else’s life.” Or, said some deep voice, saving something more important than life itself.
I remember putting my head down on the stone, wishing Murzy were there to give me some advice. It would be so easy to hold Peter at a comfortable distance, just for a time. Surely there were rules! Surely there were answers!
Well, Murzy wasn’t there, so it did no good to wish it. I gave up the whole matter and went to find myself some breakfast.
The delegation from the Cloth Merchants’ Council arrived a little after noon bearing Queynt on their shoulders and hailing him as the new Merchant’s man.
He already wore the sparkling seal of office, the letters “DM” entwined in gems upon jet. Brom, sneaking along behind so as not to draw any attention to himself, stayed only long enough to divest himself of the pink vertical and get his horse out of the stable. It seemed he had been packed long since, for the merchants had scarcely begun advising Queynt of his future duties before the titty-tup of Brom’s horse’s hooves was fading down Sheel Street.
“The garbage schedule tomorrow,” Madame Browl was saying in a firm voice. “First thing tomorrow!”
“Not tomorrow,” said Queynt. “Tomorrow the Merchant’s man is summoned to Fangel. Brom told me so. I leave tonight.” The council members scowled at one another, robbed of their opportunity to show authority immediately and thus, some seemed to feel, robbed of it perpetually.
“Well then, when you return. As soon as you return.”
Queynt had
