IN the dark, cold water of the lake, Yaji's flesh and bones suddenly burned in agony and her breathing became short and labored. She shrieked and chittered, and floundered to shore. Dragging herself up the muddy bank, she collapsed. Her black claws retracted and the fur on her short, twisted limbs thinned. The limbs themselves began to stretch.
Human, she thought. I'm becoming human again.
She watched the wonderful transformation through pain-blurred eyes.
When it was done, she lay drowsy and content for a few minutes. Then her situation made itself apparent to her.
She sat up. "I'm naked," she remarked in a conversational voice to the overhanging woods and the lapping waters of the lake. "I'm naked. I, Yaji Jennedote, have been lying in mud. I am on the far side of the lake, with nothing between me and the University but more mud and woods with thickets and brambles and snakes and gods-only-know-what else in them. And I can't swim!"
"The war is over, Medwind!" Nokar's voice in the room was jubilant.
Medwind Song, lying on the table, did not move.
"Medwind?" His voice dropped a whisper. "Medwind?"
He ran out of the room and grabbed the Healer. "She isn't breathing! Demphrey, godsdammit, she isn't breathing!"
Demphrey said softly, "The war is over, man. It's over."
"Demphrey," he shrieked, "she isn't breathing!"
The words penetrated the Healer's relief, and he snapped into action. They raced back into the room. "Force air into her lungs," Demphrey told Nokar. "Put your mouth on hers, hold her nose closed, and breathe for her."
He watched the old man while his own fingers felt urgently for a pulse. "Yes, that's right. Keep breathing for her." He probed along her neck and at her wrist a moment longer. "Nokar, I can't feel her pulse. I'm going to have to jolt her heart with a lightning sprite. When I tell you to back off, do it, or you and she are both going to end up dead."
Burly, ugly Demphrey rested his hands on Medwind's chest—left hand on the right side above her breast, right hand on her ribs under her left arm. "This trick is as old as any we have—sometimes, though," he confided to the librarian, "it works."
Nokar kept breathing into Medwind's lungs. With every breath, he thought, Live, damn you. Live, Song. Not to marry me. Not because I love you. Just live.
Demphrey readied his firesprite, which hovered above his left hand. "Into the left hand, through the heart, out of the right hand and wait above the bed," he told it. The sprite, blinding blue-white, flickered its comprehension.
"Ready," he said. "Get clear, Nokar! Now!"
The woman's body jolted on the bed, and the firesprite erupted into view again.
Demphrey felt for the pulse. "Keep breathing her, Nokar," he said. After a moment, he shook his head. "Still no pulse. I'm giving the sprite more energy. We'll try again."
He's hands made passes in the air, and the sprite glowed brighter. He then repeated the procedure he tried before. Medwind jolted again as the sprite passed through her, but again there was no pulse.
"I'll try a third time and make the sprite still a bit stronger. If she's too far gone for that, we'll have to quit."
On the third try, there was a faint puff of smoke, and the smell of burnt flesh. Nokar watched with weary eyes as the Healer felt despondently for the pulse.
Demphrey stood a moment, and his eyes widened in surprise. "Damn-all," he whispered. "It worked." Suddenly he was all blurring arms and legs. "Breathe her, breathe her, dammit, or we're going to lose her," he snapped at the old man. He grabbed a box full of dosing tubes and jammed the needle of one into the visibly pulsing artery in Medwind's neck.
"What—you doing?" Nokar asked between breaths.
"Giving her heart a solution of sweet-syrup for energy, and when this is in, some herbals that will strengthen the heartbeat. If you feel her start to breathe on her own, back off."
They worked, old man and young healer, for what seemed forever. When they were able to stand back and watch, Medwind Song lay on the table, breathing shallowly on her own, eyes closed in unconsciousness.
"Now what?" Nokar asked.
"Now we wait."
There was no time to think, no time to return for her things. She had her pack and her dagger and the bloodied and torn clothes on her back. Her erda and her hat, her other clothes, her rede-flute, her books—all were back in the dorm. She did not dare return for them. The angry voices of the frelles were coming closer—and they were screaming "Kill her, kill her!"
They meant Sahedre, but they would not believe that Sahedre was dead, that Faia was innocent. They wanted blood.
Faia wanted no more of killing—not in self-defense, not for any reason. Her soul felt sullied and darkened by Sahedre's actions, by her own stupidity—and the dead who lay in the Greathall, dead because of her ignorance, accused her with their white and staring eyes.
Guilty or innocent, she also had no wish to die.
She ran.
Out through the back of the Greathall, across the yard toward the thronging street beside the University, into the traffic, and across. She ran as far around the wingmount stables as she could. Behind her, voices shouted and pursued. She felt energy being drawn for an attack. She shielded and ran on.
She escaped the campus grounds, still running. People with dazed expressions stared at her as she shot past. One of her pursuers shouted that she was a murderer, and the numbers who pursued increased.
She darted down an alley, twisted into another, narrower alley, and darted down yet a third, that curled around itself and stopped in a blank-faced stone wall. Faia crouched down behind some merchant's empty crates.
Trapped! I wish I were invisible, she thought.
Memory asserted itself. Her nerve endings still remembered the way Sahedre had controlled magic. Her body recalled the steps between calling up energy and making it do what one wanted.
Faia spun a mist around herself—she willed herself to appear to be just another packing crate as the first of her hunters charged into her alley.
"She's in here. I know she is," bellowed one. "I swear I saw her run this way."
"Check the crates," a second woman yelled.
The first woman peered from crate to crate, working her way toward Faia.
A lanky, dirty, half-starved kitten stood up from a pile of refuse, stretched gloriously, ignored the people yelling in the alley, and with great deliberation strolled over to Faia, looked into her eyes, climbed up in her lap, curled up again, and promptly went back to sleep.
The first woman stared right at Faia as she called back to the other woman, "This big crate has a cat in it. Think she might have turned herself into a cat?"
"Not a chance," the other woman called back. "Unless the thing is hill-lion sized. Law of conservation of mass, remember?"
"Forgot. She isn't here, then."
"I didn't think so. Well, let's keep looking. She has to be somewhere."
Faia sat in the alley with the cat on her lap until dark. The merchant stepped out into the alley once, dumped fresh scraps and wasted food onto the top of the refuse pile, and hurried back inside.
Faia and the cat picked through the trash. The hill girl found a sizable quantity of spoiled meat and some rotted apples. She altered both into something she dared eat, then shared her repast with the kitten. When they were finished, she picked the little beast up and put it in her pack. It didn't protest, so she slung cat and pack over her shoulder and trudged into the night.
"I have to get back to Daane."
Those were the first words out of Medwind's mouth when she finally regained consciousness.
Nokar stared at her. "You must be joking. They're still rioting over there—and with you showing up now, they are likely to kill you."
The barbarian grinned at him through smeared and streaked esca. She lay on the hard pallet, pale and weak—her once-glorious Hoos garb stained, muddied, and tattered, the feather crest in her hair bedraggled, every breath still a struggle—and she actually grinned. Nokar felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle to attention.
"No," he said.
Her grin broadened. "You need a little adventure, old man."
"No," he said again.
"Think of it as part of your wedding test—your kikassa mekku."
"You want me to take you over there—"
"Just a quick hop. I have a few things I need to pick up. I need to get my shrine, my skulls, my Hoos things—it won't take long."
"There is nothing in this world that you cannot live without."
Her grin vanished, and for just a moment, Nokar saw the anguish behind her frail good humor. "There is the other thing, too. Rakell is dead. I owe her vha'atta."
"You are crazy. They won't understand—they'll kill us both if we get caught."
"Then we better not get caught. She was my best friend, old man. There are things that honor owes best friends and good warriors."
Nokar nodded. This was Hoos thinking, not Arissonese thinking—and there were plenty of times when he preferred the Hoos. "Very well. As part of my kikassa mekku then."
"If we don't go soon, it will be too late."
His bony hand rested on her shoulder, and the nighttime city of Ariss twisted and re-formed around them.
Nokar took those things that Medwind indicated from her quarters in the tower—the jewelry, the brightly painted human skulls in their oilskin containers, the ceremonial garb, the weapons. When she was sure she had the things she needed, he shifted everything into otherspace, and left it there. "We'll get it all when we've finished," he told her. "It will wait at least that long."
"The stables, then," she whispered.
He took her again through the twists of space and time, and they materialized in the corridor, outside of the room where the Mottemage was murdered.
Medwind went in first. "Wait," she told him, and stumbled alone into the stable. The Mottemage's mangled body had not been moved. It lay exactly as Medwind had seen in her Timeride, Flynn next to her in death as he had been in life. The dead Fendles were gone—Medwind suspected that they had returned to their human form when Sahedre's magic died, and vanished into dust as had the others she had seen.
Morning was coming, and soon, the University would rouse from its exhausted sleep and drag forth to count the cost of its bitter war. The mages would dispose of the other bodies, and they would eventually remember and come for Rakell's. Before then, Medwind had to be done and gone.
The barbarian crouched beside her friend's body and took pouches of red and blue and gold powder from the leather bag that always hung at her side. She dipped the knife's goat-bristle-tipped handle into one pouch, and traced the ancient patterns of vha'atta across Rakell's flayed cheeks and forehead. Tears ran down Medwind's face and salted the corners of her mouth.
"Honored friend," she said in her own tongue, "not Hoos, not Huong, but sister still, I grieve your passing. Warrior, you who fought and died with grace and fairness, you have earned the flowered plains of Yarwalla, but I beg you, do not yet take up your place—your place among—the fighters and—the poets—"
Medwind stopped, unable to continue. "Gods, Rakell—why did you have—to—die?" She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth, silent, tears streaming.
The ringing of first bell, from somewhere far off—not echoed by the bells at Daane—brought Medwind back to the task at hand. She gulped, and continued.
"—But I beg you, do not yet take your place among the fighters and the poets, for I still—need you—greatly." She finished, gently stroking the designs on the Mottemage's face.
The remaining flesh began to hiss and smoke and boil off under the powders. Medwind nodded. "Good," she whispered. "I got here in time."
Medwind sang the ancient ritual song—
"I call you back from Yarwalla/
I claim for you vha'atta/
Because you are strong/
And have gone on/
But I am weak/
And remain."
After the song, she sat a moment. "You would never let me explain to you, dear friend," she whispered. "You would not walk the Hoos Path, so I could not tell you more. I hope this is what you would have wanted."
She unfolded an oilskin bag exactly like the ones that housed her painted skulls, and waited.
When she walked out of the stable to greet Nokar, she carried another.
Faia stole scraps of food from windowsills and trash heaps, ate what little she could stomach, fed the rest to the scrawny kitten, slept in alleys in the daytime hidden behind middens or under boxes, moved at night. North she crept, always north. It took her three days to get out of the city, and then Faia only managed her escape by hiding in a trashwagon overnight, under a load of the city's ubiquitous refuse of fishheads and offal, and being drawn past the searching city guards, who apparently did not consider anyone desperate enough to hide out in that.
The kitten was in ecstasy over the mountains of dead fish—not a point in his favor, she thought. Faia spent a great deal of time fighting off nausea, and doubted that she would ever be able to eat fish again.
The trashman dumped his load into the oily, reeking waters of the bog and drove off without looking back.
The cat shrieked in rage at his sudden soaking.
Faia stoically stood and slogged her way to the road. She had no idea where she was going—only that she was.
Midday heat beat down on the dirt road. Faia, from her resting place under the shade of a massive and gnarled bitterroot, stared down the hill at a spume of dust that roiled up from the stretch of road she'd just traveled. She scratched the kitten behind the ears and murmured, "Let's see if we want company or not." She sent a carefully shielded exploratory tendril toward the dustcloud—and a slow smile spread across her face.
"Friends," she murmured. "How about that?"
Through the dust she began to make out a cart, drawn by two sorry, swaybacked horses.
When it got close enough, she stepped into the middle of the road and waved and yelled, "Medwind Song! Well met on this hot and dusty day."
Medwind Song, in informal Hoos dress, lay on a nest of cloth and pillows and blankets in the back of a cart packed high with provisions and possessions and crates of books that was driven by a saje as ancient as time's father. Her glorious warhorse, coated in road dust, trotted behind; her gear and her muddied and tattered war dress were draped across the great beast's back.
Faia looked down into her instructor's nest at her.
"I am happy to see—you look unwell, Frelle Medwind!" Faia noted. "What happened to you? And what happened to your hair?"
Medwind Song gave her one-time student a tired smile. "It's a long tale. Maybe I'll tell it to you someday. But for now, my husband, Nokar Feldosonne, and I are heading north," Medwind told Faia.
The hill girl was bewildered. "You are to be the next Mottemage. You cannot leave Ariss."
Medwind sighed. "Trust me, I can and I am, and everyone in Mage-Ariss is breathing a sigh of relief. I was given the choice of staying and being tried for treason—for going into Sage-Ariss during a time of war and consorting with the enemy—or leaving Ariss for good. If they had any idea what else I had done, they would have executed me on the spot. Leaving that cloistered, noisy, fish-stinking hell was not the hardest decision I ever made."
Faia laughed dryly. "Nor I."
"No, I imagine not. When I publicly returned to the university, Yaji and I explained to the Magerie what had happened to you—and to all of us—and no one is actively trying to find you to kill you anymore. Still, I don't think you ought to plan any little visits to Daane in this lifetime."
"My heart breaks," Faia told the mage. "How is Yaji?"
"Much nicer," Medwind noted. "Time spent as a Fendle seems to have done her a world of good. I'd almost recommend the treatment for a number of other students I can think of."
"I am sure she is glad to be done with me."
Medwind gave Faia an inscrutable look, then shook her head. "Actually, you were the second friend she ever had. But she got her first friend, her brother, back."
Faia was startled.
Medwind noted her widened eyes and her quick intake of breath. "Things in Ariss are changing because of the war. The mages and sajes have realized, at last, how much their feud cost everyone. And even though they will try to pin the blame on Sahedre and you, they can see that their own ignorance of each other was at the heart of the matter this time. Mage-Ariss and Saje-Ariss aren't one, yet—but even as we left, the first of the walls were coming down."
The hill girl whistled in amazement.
"So—where are you headed?" Nokar asked.
"I know not. I cannot return to Willowlake—though I would love to see Aldar again someday. I dare not try to find Kirgen—I do not even know if he still lives. There is no more Bright. I thought to head north, where it is warmer, so that I will not have such a hard winter while I am great with child."
"Then you really are pregnant?" Medwind asked. "I thought that scream of yours a clever trick you came up with to fool Sahedre."
"You heard?"
"I heard, all right—it nearly became the last thing I ever heard—"
"—And lucky for you it wasn't," Nokar interrupted, "because if I'd had to search through the Hundred Hells to find you—"
"I thought the sajes had seven hells," Faia whispered.
"The sajes can't make up their minds," Medwind answered.
"—I might have been tempted to leave you there," Nokar concluded. "And there are a hundred hells. Those idiots who claim another number ignore the perfect symbology of the number one hundred, which—"
"—Isn't where you would have found me, anyway, idiot. I would have been in the eternally green foothills of Yarwalla, with goats and husbands and children, wearing the necklaces of a thousand victories and reading the lays of Yarwalla's greatest eternal poets."
"Not so! You would have been circling around the Wheel, resting before you chose another life," Faia said.
Medwind snorted and changed the subject. "You were saying you're pregnant."
"Oh. I thought the tale a ruse as well. I did not discover until after I escaped the city that the tale was truth—then only when no food in the world would stay with me."
"An experience I've never had," Medwind said.
Nokar laughed. "But we're doing our best."
Faia looked at the mage, then at the old saje, then at the mage. "Would you like some alsinthe?" she asked. "I found some growing along the road once it was too late to do me any good."
Medwind chuckled. "I'll take my chances. It can't be that bad." At Faia's scowl, she laughed and hurried on. "Come with us. We'd be grateful for the company, and a fellow mage could be quite helpful. We thought to set up shop near the Omwimmee Trade Border."
The old man chuckled. "Medwind thinks she'd like a life as a stay-at-home magic merchant."
Faia gave them both a calculating look, then grinned.
"I'll come. If I can bring my cat."
"Then get the cat and come on."
They were well down the road when the kitten uncurled itself from its perch on a bale of cailtecloth, and began to stalk the sslis in Medwind's nose.
Medwind noted something odd about Faia's kitten. "Where did you get this beast?" she asked, her voice abruptly sharp.
Faia was startled. "The kitten? He found me hiding in an alley, and came along for the company. I imagine he is one of the offspring the Mottemage's cat left behind him."
"He has hands."
"Oh, yes. He uses them quite well, too."
Medwind was silent for a long, disbelieving minute. "By damn, she did it after all, and she never found out," she whispered. "She made a trait that would carry itself on. Not with something useful, like wingmounts. Not with everbearing redfruits. Not even with self-feeding philos plants. But with Flynn! Medwind's voice got louder, and merrier. "Ye gods and spawn of madness, she's gifted the world with a plague of handed cats."
"I think she would be pleased," Faia said, smiling.
"Think? I'd bet anything—and that will be the first thing I tell her." Medwind laughed—her first real bellylaugh in days. "Give the joke that keeps on giving—that always was her philosophy. And Flynn being the randy tomcat that he was, the city must be full of them. I'm happier than ever to be well out of the City of Fogs and Bogs."