A Knot in the Grain (2 page)

Be easy, lady. I am
—here there was an odd flicker—
a mage, of sorts; or once I was one. I retain a few powers. I
—and his thought went suddenly blank with an emptiness that was much more awful than that of a voice fallen silent—
I can mindspeak. You have not met any
of …
us
…
before
?

She shook her head.

There are not many
. He looked down into the white face that looked up at him and felt an odd creaky sensation where once he might have had a heart.

Where are you going?
she said at last.

He looked away; she thought he stared at the horizon as if he expected to see something he could hastily describe as his goal.

I do not mean to question you
, she said;
forgive me, I am not accustomed to
…
speech
…
and I forget my manners
.

He smiled at her, but the sad lines around his mouth did not change.
There is no lack of courtesy
, he replied;
only that I am a wanderer, and I cannot tell you where I am going
. He looked up again, but there was no urgency in his gaze this time.
I have not travelled here before, however, and even a … wanderer … has his pride; and so I asked you the name of this place
.

She blushed that she had forgotten his question, and replied quickly, the words leaping into her mind.
The village where I live lies just there, over the little hill. Its name is Rhungill. That way
—she turned in her saddle—
is Teskip, where I am returning from; this highway misses it, it lay to your right, beyond the little forest as you rode this way
.

He nodded gravely.
You have always lived in Rhungill?

She nodded; the gesture felt familiar, but a bubble of joy beat in her throat that she need not halt with the nod.
I am the apprentice of our healer
.

He was not expecting to hear himself say:
Is there an inn in your village, where a wanderer might rest for the night?
In the private part of his mind he said to himself: There are three hours till sunset; there is no reason to stop here now. If there are no more villages, I have lain by a fire under a tree more often than I have lain in a bed under a roof for many years past.

Lily frowned a moment and said,
No-o, we have no inn;
Rhungill is very small. But there is a spare room
—
it is Jolin's house, but I live there too
—
we often put people up, who are passing through and need a place to stay. The villagers often send us folk
. And because she was not accustomed to mindspeech, he heard her say to herself what she did not mean for him to hear:
Let him stay a little longer
.

And so he was less surprised when he heard himself answer:
I would be pleased to spend the night at your healer's house
.

A smile, such as had never before been there, bloomed on Lily's face; her thoughts tumbled over one another and politely he did not listen, or let her know that he might have. She let her patient horse go on again, and the stranger's horse walked beside.

They did not speak. Lily found that there were so many things she would like to say, to ask, that they overwhelmed her; and then a terrible shyness closed over her, for fear that she would offend the stranger with her eagerness, with the rush of pent-up longing for the particulars of conversation. He held his silence as well, but his reasons stretched back over many wandering years, although once or twice he did look in secret at the bright young face beside him, and again there was the odd, uncomfortable spasm beneath his breastbone.

They rode over the hill and took a narrow, well-worn way off the highway. It wound into a deep cutting, and golden grasses waved above their heads at either side. Then the way rose, or the sides fell away, and the stranger looked around him at pastureland with sheep and cows grazing earnestly and solemnly across it, and then at empty meadows; and then there was a small stand of birch and ash and willow, and a small thatched house with a strictly tended herb garden around it, laid out in a maze of squares and circles and borders and low hedges. Lily swung off her small gelding at the edge of the garden and whistled: a high thin cry that told Jolin she had brought a visitor.

Jolin emerged from the house smiling. Her hair, mostly grey now, with lights of chestnut brown, was in a braid; and tucked into the first twist of the hair at the nape of her neck was a spray of yellow and white flowers. They were almost a halo, nearly a collar.

“Lady,” said the stranger, and dismounted.

This is Jolin
, Lily said to him.
And you
—she stopped, confused, shy again.

“Jolin,” said the stranger, but Jolin did not think it odd that he knew her name, for often the villagers sent visitors on with Lily when they saw her riding by, having supplied both their names first. “I am called Sahath.”

Lily moved restlessly; there was no birdcall available to her for this eventuality. She began the one for
talk
, and broke off. Jolin glanced at her, aware that something was troubling her.

Sahath
, said Lily,
tell Jolin
—and her thought paused, because she could not decide, even to herself, what the proper words for it were.

But Jolin was looking at their guest more closely, and a tiny frown appeared between her eyes.

Sahath said silently to Lily,
She guesses
.

Lily looked up at him; standing side by side, he was nearly a head taller than she.
She
—?

Jolin had spent several years traveling in her youth, travelling far from her native village and even far from her own country; and on her travels she had learned more of the world than most of the other inhabitants of Rhungill, for they were born and bred to live their lives on their small landplots, and any sign of wanderlust was firmly suppressed. Jolin, as a healer and so a little unusual, was permitted wider leeway than any of the rest of Rhungill's daughters; but her worldly knowledge was something she rarely admitted and still more rarely demonstrated. But one of the things she had learned as she and her mother drifted from town to town, dosing children and heifers, binding the broken limbs of men and pet cats, was to read the mage-mark.

“Sir,” she said now, “what is one such as you doing in our quiet and insignificant part of the world?” Her voice was polite but not cordial, for mages, while necessary for some work beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, often brought with them trouble as well; and an unbidden mage was almost certainly trouble. This too she had learned when she was young.

Sahath smiled sadly. “I carry the mark, lady, it is true, but no mage am I.” Jolin, staring at him, holding her worldly knowledge just behind her eyes where everything he said must be reflected through it, read truth in his eyes. “I was one once, but no longer.”

Jolin relaxed, and if she need not fear this man she could pity him, for to have once been a mage and to have lost that more than mortal strength must be as heavy a blow as any man might receive and yet live; and she saw the lines of sorrow in his face.

Lily stood staring at the man with the sad face, for she knew no more of mages than a child knows of fairy tales; she would as easily have believed in the existence of tigers or of dragons, of chimeras or of elephants; and yet Jolin's face and voice were serious. A mage. This man was a mage—or had been one—and he could speak to her. It was more wonderful than elephants.

Sahath said, “Some broken pieces of my mage-truth remain to me, and one of these Lily wishes me to tell you: that I can speak to her—mind to mind.”

Lily nodded eagerly, and seized her old friend and mentor's hands in hers. She smiled, pulled her lips together to whistle, “It is true,” and her lips drew back immediately again to the smile. Jolin tried to smile back into the bright young face before her; there was a glow there which had never been there before, and Jolin's loving heart turned with jealousy and—fear reawakened. For this man, with his unreasonable skills, even if he were no proper mage, might be anyone in his own heart. Jolin loved Lily as much as any person may love another. What, she asked herself in fear, might this man do to her, in her innocence, her pleasure in the opening of a door so long closed to her, and open now only to this stranger? Mages were not to be trusted on a human scale of right and wrong, reason and unreason. Mages were sworn to other things. Jolin understood that they were sworn to—goodness, to rightness; but often that goodness was of a high, far sort that looked very much like misery to the smaller folk who had to live near it.

As she thought these things, and held her dearer-than-daughter's hands in hers, she looked again at Sahath. “What do you read in my mind, mage?” she said, and her voice was harsher than she meant to permit it, for Lily's sake.

Sahath dropped his eyes to his own hands; he spread the long fingers as if remembering what once they had been capable of. “Distrust and fear,” he said after a moment; and Jolin was the more alarmed that she had had no sense of his scrutiny. No mage-skill she had, but as a healer she heard and felt much that common folk had no ken of.

Lily's eyes widened, and she clutched Jolin's hands. Sahath felt her mind buck and shudder like a frightened horse, for the old loyalty was very strong. It was terrible to her that she might have to give up this wonderful, impossible thing even sooner than the brief span of an overnight guest's visit that she had promised herself—or at least freely hoped for. Even his mage's wisdom was awed by her strength of will, and the strength of her love for the aging, steady-eyed woman who watched him. He felt the girl withdrawing from him, and he did not follow her, though he might have; but he did not want to know what she was thinking. He stood where he was, the two women only a step or two distant from him; and he felt alone, as alone as he had felt once before, on a mountain, looking at a dying army, knowing his mage-strength was dying with them.

“I—” he said, groping, and the same part of his mind that had protested his halting so long before sundown protested again, saying, Why do you defend yourself to an old village woman who shambles among her shrubs and bitter herbs, mouthing superstitions? But the part of his mind that had been moved by Lily's strength and humility answered: because she is right to question me.

“I am no threat to you in any way I control,” he said to Jolin's steady gaze, and she thought: Still he talks like a mage, with the mage-logic, to specify that which he controls. Yet perhaps it is not so bad a thing, some other part of her mind said calmly, that any human being, even a mage, should know how little he may control.

“It—it is through no dishonor that I lost the—the rest of my mage-strength.” The last words were pulled out of him, like the last secret drops of the heart's blood of a dragon, and Jolin heard the pain and pride in his voice, and saw the blankness in his eyes; yet she did not know that he was standing again on a mountain, feeling all that had meant anything to him draining away from him into the earth, drawn by the ebbing life-force of the army he had opposed. One of the man's long-fingered hands had stretched toward the two women as he spoke; but as he said “mage-strength,” the hand went to his forehead. When it dropped to his side again, there were white marks that stood a moment against the skin, where the fingertips had pressed too hard.

Jolin put one arm around Lily's shoulders and reached her other hand out delicately, to touch Sahath's sleeve. He looked up again at the touch of her fingers. “You are welcome to stay with us, Sahath.”

Lily after all spoke to him very little that evening, as if, he thought, she did not trust herself, although she listened eagerly to the harmless stories he told them of other lands and peoples he had visited; and she not infrequently interrupted him to ask for unimportant details. He was careful to answer everything she asked as precisely as he could; once or twice she laughed at his replies, although there was nothing overtly amusing about them.

In the morning when he awoke, only a little past dawn, Lily was already gone. Jolin gave him breakfast and said without looking at him, “Lily has gone gathering wild herbs; dawn is best for some of those she seeks.” Sahath saw in her mind that Lily had gone by her own decision; Jolin had not sent her, or tried to suggest the errand to her.

He felt strangely bereft, and he sat, crumbling a piece of sweet brown bread with his fingers and staring into his cup of herb tea. He recognized the infusion: chintanth for calm, monar for clear-mindedness. He drank what was in the cup and poured himself more. Jolin moved around the kitchen, putting plates and cups back into the cupboard.

He said abruptly, “Is there any work a simple man's strength might do for you?”

There was a rush of things through Jolin's mind: her and Lily's self-sufficiency, and their pleasure in it; another surge of mistrust for mage-cunning—suddenly and ashamedly put down; this surprised him, as he stared into his honey-clouded tea, and it gave him hope. Hope? he thought. He had not known hope since he lost his mage-strength; he had nearly forgotten its name. Jolin stood gazing into the depths of the cupboard, tracing the painted borders of vines and leaves and flowers with her eye; and now her thoughts were of things that it would be good to have done, that she and Lily always meant to see to, and never quite had time for.

When Lily came home in the late morning, a basket over her arm, Sahath was working his slow way with a spade down the square of field that Jolin had long had in her mind as an extension of her herb garden. Lily halted at the edge of the freshly turned earth, and breathed deep of the damp sweet smell of it. Sahath stopped to lean on his spade, and wiped his forehead on one long dark sleeve.
It is near dinnertime
, said Lily hesitantly, fearful of asking him why he was digging Jolin's garden; but her heart was beating faster than her swift walking could explain.