Sheri Tepper - Wizard’s Eleven

“Find me a place they are said not to dwell,” she replied. “They live in the far north and west, in the southern mountains below the High Demesne, in the lands around the Great Dragon purlieu far east of here. No, that is no help to you, Gamesman. Give me a bit of time and I will find it for you. The name Bleer echoes in my mind. I have seen it on a chart before.” It echoed in my mind, too, but I could not remember where I had heard of it. Had I asked the right question, I would have had quicker answers.

As it was, Gamesmistress Joumerie returned to me that evening to say she had found the place.

“The Wastes of Bleer,” she informed me, licking her lips at the taste of the place, “lie to the north. A highland, the canyons of the Graywater to the west, the vast valley of the River Reave to the east where lies Learner or Learners, called variously. If you intend to go there, I could recommend the road to Betand and the eastern route from there over Graywater. There is a high bridge there at Kiquo, the only one for many leagues. Or, River Reave is navigable as far as Reavebridge, or even Learner in season. There are trails into the high country from there.”

“What Games, Gamesmistress?” I asked her. “Is there any troubling there? What Demesnes are active?”

She snorted. “Wary are you? You are young to be so wary. My latest charts show little enough. The Dragon’s Fire purlieu lies north on River Reave, but there is no Game there currently or presently expected. Who knows what hidden Games may be toward? Or games of intrigue or desperation?” She fixed me with an eye yellow as a flitchhawk’s. “If you are that wary, lad, best enter my School House here and learn to dissemble as these girls do.”

I flushed at that. She went stalking away to the door, making the floor shake. In the doorway she stopped to speak more kindly, seeing she had hit me fair. “There is a cartographer in Xammer, in Artists’ Street, by name one Yggery. He is honest, so far as that goes, by which I mean he will not put anything in a map he knows to be false nor leave out anything he knows to be true. This means his maps are rather more blank than most. Still, if you have treasure enough, buy a map from him before you go north. And if you take Silkhands with you (for I can see the tip of my nose in a mirror in a good light), care for her. She has had more of Gaming than many of us, and has burned herself in caring for others.”

I had not honestly thought of taking Silkhands with me until that moment. I had not thought she would want to leave Vorbold’s House. Testing this notion, I asked her and was surprised to hear her say she would have made a trip north in any event.

“I go north to escort Jinian, my student,” she said. “I need a time away from Vorbold’s House. There are some here who turn their eyes from the students to the Gamesmistresses, and I am … weary of that.”

“Have you been molested?” I was angry and therefore blunt. I should have known better, for she laughed at me.

“In Vorbold’s House? Don’t be silly. Of course not. I have been sent proposals at intervals, and I have had to listen to a few representatives for the sake of … diplomacy. The offers have not been … unflattering.” She fell silent, thinking of something she did not share with me, then.

“Save to those like us who do not value flattery. I know I do not, and I presume you have not changed.”

The expression on her face as she uttered this last was one I knew she used in the classroom, alert, polite, both encouraging and cautionary. I could hear her speaking thus to her students, “Now, young ladies. We do not value flattery…” I giggled at the thought.

She stared at me for a moment as though I had lost my wits, then giggled with me. We ended up rolling onto the carpet to end in front of the fire, heads pillowed on various parts of our anatomies as we talked it over.

“I did sound properly Schoolhousy, didn’t l?” she asked. “Well, being Gamesmistress does that to you. Perhaps I am too young for it. I am only twenty-one after all. Many of the students are older than I.” She did not consider this remark at all important, but to me it came as a revelation. Only twenty-one. I was seventeen, almost eighteen, and she was only four years older? I had thought of her as … as … well, older-sisterly at least. I was suddenly aware of her thigh beneath my head and of a quickening pulse in my ears. I sat up too hastily, dumping her.

“Come now,” I said overheartily, trying to hide the fact that my hands were trembling. “We must make plans. I am going from here to the ruins where I first met you because the men who attacked me on the road would have taken me there.”

“Dindindaroo,” she said, blinking in the firelight like an owl. “That’s the name of the place, or once was. Dindindaroo, the cry of the fustigar. It is said the place was once a main habitation of Immutables.”

“Truly? Why was it abandoned?”

“A flood, I think. And a great wind which laid waste to the land about there. At any rate, it was abandoned some three generations ago, perhaps eighty or a hundred years. We used to find old carvings and books when we were there. Himaggery spoke of sending a party of Rancelmen to explore, but he never did.”

“So the Immutables once occupied this place, Dindindaroo. Well, some villainy is centered upon it now, and I must go there in the guise of the Pursuivant to see what I can find. After that, however, if no sign of Quench has been found, why should I not go with you to the northlands? Windlow’s vision sees us there together, and the song directs us there. Let us go.”

She agreed hesitantly. “I must take Jinian to the court of the Dragon King at the Dragon’s Fire purlieu. He and another Ruler, Queen someone — I’ve forgotten her name — set up a Rulership there, a kind of King-Demesne. Having no sisters, he chose to build his strategy around sons rather than upon thalani, but all his sons save one were eaten in Game over the years. He has only one left, at school in Schooltown, Havad’s House, I believe. He is desirous of children to replace those lost.”

I remembered out of dim mists having heard that name. “Ah. So the Queen died. Or was lost in Game?”

“Died. Of too much childbearing to too little purpose, some say. Now he desires a strong young Gameswoman to bear him sons.”

“Who will also die of too many babies?”

She smiled a secret smile at me. “No. Our students learn better than that. We may teach them covert game, Peter, but we teach them to survive at it and their children as well. Jinian will not over-bear.”

I did not pursue the matter, though I thought with a pang of the girl who had given me that long, level, understanding look at the dinner. She had not looked like one who would go uncomplaining into such a life. Well. Who could say.

Silkhands went on: “It will be a few days before we are ready to leave. You have your own trip to make. How shall we combine our journeys later?” She looked at me, hopeful and luminous in the firelight. I would have promised to combine a journey with her to the stars, and she seemed to know that, making a pretty mouth at me in mockery. I gestured hopeless and resigned acquiescence, and we spent the remainder of the evening talking of other things. I think both of us thought then that we would become lovers. No. I think she thought it and I hoped it. We did nothing about it except stargazing. There seemed to be time, and no reason occurred to either of us to think time would run out. I can still remember the shape of her in firelight, half of her lit with a soft melon-colored light, the other half in darkness.

So the morning after that found me back in the inn with Chance. The Invigilator had come around to some extent. He would sit up when told, and walk, and eat, and relieve himself. He would do nothing at all unless told to do so, and the strange cap had been on him only one full day. When Didir looked into his head she found an emptiness. “As though untenanted,” she said. I was sorry then that we had put the thing on him. “Perhaps if it had not been on him so long,” whispered Didir, “the effect would have been less.”