Dusk rose from the narrow streets of the city, punctuated only at intervals by the yellow gleam of lanterns, even while the sky above us was still pale blue. Laden with two princes, a wizard, a construction foreman, and a transformed monster, the air cart rose gracefully, spun around twice, and headed north. Though it flew no faster than I normally could, in my present exhausted state I could never have made the trip unaided, especially carrying a monstrous frog.
As the city dropped away behind us I leaned on the edge of the cart, looking back as intently as though I might be able to see Theodora from this height. I had not seen her for forty-eight hours.
If she had not been kidnapped, she must be hiding from me deliberately. But how would she have been so warm one day and flee me the next? Her reserve, the private inner thoughts to which I had only sometimes felt admitted, now took on an ominous interpretation. She was, after all, a witch. Had she never loved me at all, only set out to distract me while her partner in evil, the hidden wizard, brought his gorgos to Caelrhon?
I gritted my teeth until my jaw ached. I could have sworn she loved me as much as I loved her.
“So you’ve got the gorgos in the box,” said the foreman, leaning next to me, his long fingers folded over each other. I forced myself to stop thinking of Theodora. Cool air streamed by our faces. Everyone was avoiding the black box; Lucas especially made sure to stay on the far side of the air cart from it.
“That’s right, and I hope I can keep it there until we reach somewhere I dare let it free. You know, I’m afraid I don’t even know your name.”
“Call me Vor,” he said with a quick, sideways look that made me wonder if this really was his name.
“All right, Vor, maybe you can give me some suggestions what to do with an indestructible gorgos.”
“First you have to decide,” he said slowly, “whether you particularly want it dead.”
I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. “I would have killed it if I could,” I said, “to keep it from attacking the people in the city, but I don’t think I can. That’s why I’m taking it north. If I let it go, do you think it will return to its gorgos shape and come back to Caelrhon again?”
“But you don’t want to kill it out of revenge for nearly killing you?”
I looked at the motionless black box, a more solid piece of darkness inside the dark air cart, and wondered hopefully if the monster had suffocated. But Vor seemed to be asking something more. “No, I’m not interested in revenge.”
Vor nodded as though I had clarified an important point. Below us dim hills and valleys streamed by. The air cart was high enough that it only had to rise for the steepest hills. Tiny figures of men and horses were coming in from the fields to villages where firelight welcomed them. No one looked up to see us.
“You can’t actually kill a gorgos,” Vor said at last. “Or, if you do, they’re even worse dead than they are alive. I knew a man once who decided to kill one out of vengeance. Once it was dead it took possession of him, mind and body.”
He fell silent then. I decided that I was happier not knowing the details and started putting together the spell to slow the flight of the air cart. “We must have come over fifty miles already,” I told the two princes. “We’ll camp in a field tonight and fly on in the morning.”
It took us over a week of flying to reach the borderlands of the land of magic. The air cart did much of the flying on its own, needing only a steady low-level attention from my own spells to keep its flight smooth and on course. At first much of the land we crossed was rolling hills and farmland, similar to that of the kingdoms of Yurt and Caelrhon, but as we went north the season seemed to retreat, so that we started seeing again flowers that had already passed in the fields outside the cathedral city. Then we began to cross dense forests, where only occasionally we saw a track that might have been made by humans, and rocky, barren stretches where there were very few farms.
For most of the trip the weather was fair, and we flew during the day with the wind in our hair and slept under the sky at night. The stars were much brighter in the thin northern air, away from the smoke of the city, than I ever remembered seeing them. But one day it rained steadily for nearly twenty-four hours. I was able to rig a spell to keep us dry while the air cart flew on, but that night we had to overturn the cart in a partially successful attempt to keep the rain off, and all of us slept uneasily.
Being cramped in a small space all day was especially hard for Paul. Every evening, as soon as the cart touched down, he was off running, sometimes for as much as an hour. Prince Lucas, gathering fuel the first night for a fire to try to stew up some of the dried beef he had brought along, grumbled that the other prince was deliberately shirking his responsibilities, until Paul came back with fresh bread and lettuce bought from a farm house over the hill.
Vor exercised by walking on his hands, doing bends and twists of which I would not have thought the human body capable. Prince Lucas practiced swordplay against his shadow. I, still recovering from my wounds, mostly worried about the gorgos frog.
Paul and I sat by a small fire one evening, watching the sun set behind the graceful branches of an oak. He was back from his run but the others were still gone. The heir to the throne of Yurt pulled off his boots, stretched, scratched, and flopped back cheerfully on the grass. I found myself imagining that if I had met the queen on one of her trips to the City, back when I was a wizardry student and she still only a castellan’s daughter, he might have been our son.
A stream gurgled nearby, and the grass on which we sat was intertwined with wild flowers. “You know,” I said to Paul, “we’ll probably never see this spot again.”
This didn’t seem to bother him. “There are a lot of nice places,” he said lazily, “many of them in Yurt. But traveling like this has made me want to travel more, to see all the beautiful spots in the world. Mother makes a good regent; maybe I’ll just let her rule Yurt a few years more.”
I did not like at all the idea of him taking off across the western kingdoms, but I let this pass in silence, hoping he would forget it as quickly as he had forgotten wanting to become a wizard.
“This is silly,” Paul added after a moment, abruptly serious and looking off into the distance. “I’m going to be king very soon. I know I don’t have the wisdom Father had, and I don’t think I have the courage of Uncle Dominic, who loved Yurt more than his own life. He might even in other circumstances have become king instead of me. What do you think, Wizard, do I want to travel only because I’m afraid I won’t be an adequate king? But then you’ve probably never known what it’s like to feel unworthy of your position.”
There was no possible way to answer this. I watched the flickering of our fire for a minute, feeling the evening air grow chill around us. “We’ve come so far and so fast,” I said, “over land that none of us know. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever find our way home again.”
But this didn’t bother Paul. “Of course we will,” he said, cheerful again, lying on his back, supporting his hips on his hands and kicking long legs into the darkening sky. “If we get lost, all we have to do is go west until we reach the ocean, and then follow the coast south to the great City. It’s easy enough to get home to Yurt from there.”
He was right, of course, but as the days went by I kept feeling that I was astray in a strange world, with no landmarks and no way to find my way back to the world I had always taken for granted.
After a week the land below us began to rise sharply and all signs of human habitation disappeared. Soon we were crossing a jumble of sharp peaks, topped with snow.
“Wild magic starts not long after the mountains,” Vor told me, looking down at the air cart’s shadow far below us, darting wildly up and down the steep mountain sides.
“So you came south through the mountains?”
He nodded. “Years ago. That’s why I want to go back now.” He paused, then pointed down. “See that river?” A thin, dark line cut a twisting slice through the mountains. “There’s a track that follows it all the way through.”
At least one person, then, had known where we were going. The laconic suggestions he had made on our route in the previous days now made more sense. A cloud came toward us, looking, as always, incredibly soft, as though one could sink with delight into its feathery blue shadows. As always, when the air cart plunged into it the cloud proved to be nothing more than fog, blocking out the sun and putting drops of water on our hair and clothes.
“I know a good place to get rid of the gorgos,” Vor said suddenly. But he turned away from me as he spoke, discouraging questions. I wondered uneasily if he had a plan of his own for the monster.
If only, I thought, I were more confident of my magic. So far every spell I had needed on the trip had worked. But I had the disconcerting feeling that I had, before the bishop’s funeral, known more magic, and that not only the spells themselves but the knowledge that the spells existed had been wiped from my mind.
The teachers at the school had warned us against summoning as the greatest sin a wizard could commit, because it violated the integrity of the human mind. But, I thought now to myself, reckless summoning, practiced by someone remembering something he had learned twenty years earlier, might also destroy the person who practiced that spell. In summoning the monster, I might somehow have intermingled a part of its mind with my own.
“Did you ever decide where the fairy lights came from on the new cathedral tower?” asked Vor. “They weren’t caused by the gorgos, were they?”
“No,” I said slowly, “nor by one of your Little People. They were caused by a witch.”
He nodded as though he had expected as much. “Down in your part of the world, if it’s not a wizard with a heavy dose of formal magic it’s probably a witch.”
“Do you know anything about the witch?” I asked at once, trying to keep the eagerness out of my voice. But he shook his head.
I looked down at the trackless snowfields below and wondered if I would ever see Theodora again.