A week passed. The second day the nixie became petulant, and I told her brusquely, “I’m sorry, Lady, but we aren’t interested.”
“Then you’ll have to stay here the rest of your lives,” she said, not smiling at all. I turned my back on her, and in a minute she went away and did not come back.
In the following days, the air seemed less sensuous, still soft and perfumed but without the overwhelming sweetness it had had when we first arrived. Languor seemed to have overtaken Lucas completely. If pressed, he would admit that his ankle was healing, but mostly he slept and ate fruit. Vor too lapsed into inactivity.
Paul and I however remained occupied. Every morning, he determinedly trotted around the grove twenty times. He also continued trying to attract the horses; by the fourth day they approached rather than ran at the sound of his whistle, but they still remained well back, snorting and flicking their tails nervously. And I wrestled with the nixie’s magic.
I felt a desperate urgency to be back home, to stop the renegade wizard from doing what he was planning-or at least to be there when he did it. If he had been at all checked by my presence in the city, he certainly had nothing to fear now. His gorgos had gotten me out of the way almost as surely as if it had killed me.
If Vincent was working with him-maybe having turned against his own brother-I didn’t want to imagine what he might be planning against the queen, though his plots against Paul seemed horribly clear. And I also did not want to imagine why and for what purpose he had captured Theodora, unless it was to silence the only person in the city who seemed able to detect his magic. The gorgos’s attack on the cathedral at the time of the old bishop’s funeral might only be a preparation for a much worse attack when the new bishop was elected. This wizard, apparently much more powerful than I could ever be, had in his control, directly or indirectly, the two women I loved, the dean, and the young man I hoped would become my king.
“Look at the stallion,” said Paul, interrupting my thoughts. I looked out obediently. Only ten yards beyond the invisible barrier, the bay stallion stood watching us, pawing the ground with one foot, shaking the fetlock from his eyes with a proud toss of his head.
I closed my eyes again. I almost thought I understood the structure of the magic barrier now, after a week of studying it. Several times I might have had it, and several times on closer examination I had been wrong. I was having to improvise everything, and I kept having Theodora’s feeling of being almost at the top and yet knowing that this time I would never make it. If I ever saw the school again I would have to relate my experiences to the technical division students as an example of improvised magic.
But this time- Quickly, delicately, I started putting a spell together, one designed specifically to overcome the spells that kept the air solid before us. I said the words of the Hidden Language and confidently reached out my hand.
It struck solidity so hard I bruised my knuckles. I probed again for the structure of the nixie’s magic. The spells had all been changed.
“What’s wrong?” Paul turned as I slumped down.
“She’s changing the magic structure of the barrier. I’d wondered why I wasn’t doing any better overcoming her magic, but now I know. As soon as I work out how to overcome one set of spells, she switches to another.”
“And then can you overcome the new set?”
“Yes, in time-just a few seconds slower than it takes her to change the spells again.”
There was a quick flutter of leaves, and the nixie burst into view. With a tinkling laugh, she planted kisses on Paul’s lips and my own and scampered away again.
“I have an idea,” said Paul with a half smile that made me hope he was not serious. “You and Lucas don’t want anything to do with the nixie, and I can’t say about Vor, but suppose just one of us were able to ‘fully satisfy’ her. Do you think she’d let us go?”
Out of several things I might have said, I chose, “When she was hoping for four men, I don’t think she’d settle for one.”
“Oh, I think I might be able to serve in the place of four men if I wanted to,” said Paul with that same half smile.
“I have a better idea,” I said. “Try to get some of your horses into the grove. They might be able to pass through the barrier the way the birds do, and maybe we could ride them out.”
“Of course,” said Paul in surprise. “What did you think I was doing?”
If the nixie was still nearby and listening to our conversation I had just given away what might have been our last chance. Even now she might be altering her barrier so that horses could not pass through it any more easily than could humans. Our only hope was that the nixie might never have needed spells to imprison horses.
“Quickly!” I said, low and urgently. “Try to lure the stallion in here. We have to go now! I’ll get the others.”
“I’m working as rapidly as I can,” said Paul mildly.
But as I hurried away through the trees he started a different series of whistles, so enticing that even my feet slowed for a second.
Both Vor and Lucas were asleep. I woke them with a quick hand on their shoulders. “Come on,” I said in a low voice. “We may be able to leave.”
I lifted Lucas with magic before he could protest and hurried back through the trees, Vor close behind. Because Lucas was well off the ground, his head some two feet above mine, several times he got a faceful of leaves before he could duck, but I ignored his insults.
We stopped well back in the trees so as not to startle the horses. Paul was talking to them now, softly, alluringly. If the nixie was listening, I thought, she must wish Paul would talk that way to her. The stallion and a black mare were only a few feet beyond the invisible barrier.
A bird shot by suddenly, scolding, and the horses tossed their heads, wheeled, and ran. I tried to swallow bitter disappointment.
But Paul kept on whistling and calling, not at all dismayed. Most of the herd stayed a quarter mile away, but the stallion and the one mare approached again, less cautiously this time. “Come, my beauties, don’t be afraid, we won’t hurt you, come my lovely ones,” Paul was saying.
He held out one of the nixie’s apples. The stallion snorted and stretched his neck forward, still ten yards away. He took one stiff-legged step, then another. And then he was coming through the invisible barrier.
None of us breathed. Very solemnly and deliberately, the stallion took the apple from Paul’s hand and crunched it between powerful teeth. With his other hand, Paul held another apple toward the mare. For a moment she held back, then with a nicker she too stepped into the grove.
My impulse was to leap forward, to seize the horses, but even I knew that would be fatal. Paul was stroking the stallion’s neck, still talking softly and constantly, his voice like a running brook where the words mattered less than the sound. And then abruptly he took a handful of mane and swung up onto the stallion’s back.
The horse jumped, all four feet together, and then whirled and began to run. The prince was almost lying on the horse’s back, his head down and his legs pulled up so that no part of his body touched the nixie’s barrier. It parted and let them through as though it were not there.
And then the two horses were off, racing across the plain, Paul clinging like a burr to the stallion’s mane. “He’s not abandoning us,” said Vor, but his tone made the statement almost a question.
“No, he’s not,” said Lucas before I could answer. “He has to accustom the horse to being ridden before anyone else can even try.”
The stallion reared, trying to shake Paul off. There was nothing I could do but watch; my magic could not penetrate the nixie’s barrier. The stallion came down again, Paul still firmly on his back. The whole herd swept off, galloping across the plain, and disappeared from our view.
“The nixie’s not going to wait passively for two hours or two days or whatever it takes Paul to calm down that stallion,” said Lucas. I thought this one of his more intelligent recent observations.
Vor seemed to think so too. “There’s only one thing to do,” he said with his quick, fleeting smile. “I’ll try to keep her occupied.”
Lucas and I both turned to stare at him. “Oh, I’ll readily admit I’m not in the right mood right now,” he said playfully. “But nixies, happy nixies, can put one in the mood very easily. They do say that, if you live through the experience, satisfying a nixie is something you never forget.”
Lucas cleared his throat as though about to speak but changed his mind.
“The two of you are bound by oaths of marriage and of wizardry,” Vor continued, “but as long as I’m back home in the borderlands, I might as well take advantage of an opportunity I’m not likely to be offered down in the cathedral city among all the priests. With a little conversation, a little wine, and a few games, I should be able to stretch it out for several hours.”
Lucas and I had nothing to say. “Oh, Lady!” Vor called, moving back toward the center of the grove. “Where are you? Could you bring your delightful form closer to mine?”
He was gone. Lucas and I looked at each other. I arranged him as well as I could, his leg propped up before him, and sat down to wait.
An hour passed, and the horses reappeared in the distance. I thought I spotted a dark shape still clinging to the stallion’s neck. The stallion was not running now but walking.
“It looks like he may be taming that stallion,” said Lucas with reluctant admiration. “Look at how easily he’s sitting now.”
Paul slipped down from the horse’s back, a hand still in the mane, then leapt back up again. The stallion jumped, but this time only a small jump, and Paul guided an incipient gallop back into a trot.
Then he was off the stallion’s back again and moving toward the black mare. I could see him stroking her, talking to her, and then suddenly he was on her back and she was running, and the entire process started over again.
The whole herd disappeared around the far side of the grove. I thought of following them but was afraid of doing anything that might startle the horses. Paul was going to need absolute concentration to try to tame two wild beasts that galloped like something out of legend.
I wondered again where Bonfire had really come from. Having seen the bay stallion and the black mare up close, I was now certain that Paul’s red roan stallion had come from these borderlands. If the renegade wizard had been up here to find a gorgos, he might have taken back a horse for Prince Vincent at the same time. I was even more convinced that that horse was a trap.
Another hour passed. I was so tense that the very tension made me yawn with exhaustion.
And then Paul was back, appearing abruptly before us, riding the stallion and leading the mare with a hand on her mane. Both kept taking nervous little steps and jerking their heads up, but they kept coming. They passed without difficulty through the nixie’s barrier. Extreme fatigue and delighted pride were both on Paul’s face, but all he said was, “Where’s Vor?”
I let my mind slip away through the trees until I found him. Standing in the flow of magic by the edge of his mind, I called softly. “Vor. Paul’s back. We’re going now.”
Very few people not trained in magic can hear a wizard speaking to them directly, mind to mind. But there was an abrupt stir and I returned to myself, knowing he had heard. “He’s coming,” I said.
“The mare’s a little gentler,” said Paul. “You and Lucas try mounting.”
I rose up in the air, bringing Lucas with me, and set us down on the mare’s back as gently as I could. Vor came out of the trees, his face ashen and running with sweat but giving us a complacent smile. Paul reached out a hand, and Vor scrambled up behind him.
“Hold onto my waist,” said Paul. “All of you, keep your heads down and tuck up your feet. Let’s go!”
Paul urged the stallion forward, and the mare followed. The stallion was out in the plain again in a second, but Lucas’s wounded leg stuck out sideways from the mare’s back, and it hung up on the nixie’s barrier.
Lucas grunted with pain, and I caught him just before he was dragged backwards off the horse, just before the mare bolted out from under both of us. With a firm hand on her mane and my best imitation of Paul’s voice in her ears, I turned her in a tight circle and tried again.
And this time we went through, free of our leafy prison. “Run!” cried Paul. “Here comes the nixie!”