Robin McKinley - Water

Tamia gulped, and nodded.

The Guardian looked away from Tamia for a moment, and Tamia thought sadly, Now it comes. Now she will tell me the thing that I know I cannot do, and I will have to tell her so. But the Guardian only said: “And—are you willing?” The woman seemed suddenly smaller, and less round, and her eyes were not so bright, and her hair fell against her skull, like ordinary hair. “I will not keep you against your will. If you would prefer to return to your village, you may go—and with my thanks for making this long walk to speak to me yourself, instead of sending your answer with the trader. I might have come to you, but I have never liked mountain-climbing, and I’m getting old for it besides; and I did want to see you face-to-face—even if your decision went against me.”

Tamia blinked, and listened to the woman’s words again in her head, cautiously, and realised she meant them, meant just what she had said. “Oh, no! No, I do not want to go back.” She did not mean to add, “They are glad to be rid of me! Especially since I have been called to the Guardian, which is a great thing for them to be able to say,” but she did, because there seemed to be no way not to tell this woman the whole truth.

The woman was looking at her thoughtfully, the faintest line of a frown between her eyes. “I could send you to another village—I could send you with enough of a dowry, a dowry from a Guardian, that you would be able to marry comfortably.”

Involuntarily Tamia heard her stepfather saying, Magic does not have a mouth to put food into, a back to shelter from storms! She shook her head to clear it of her stepfather, and looked around. There were trees surrounding the meadow, and the final peak of the Eagle rose above them, and the clouds overhead looked like galloping horses, as clouds often did to Tamia, and what Tamia had left yesterday was lost behind the many windings of the narrow path. She thought about what the Guardian was offering her—she stopped herself wondering why she was offering it to her, or she would stick there and never go any further in her thinking. She raised her hand and tapped herself on the breast, feeling the solidity of her own body, the faint hollow echo when she struck high on her breastbone; and she thought, No, I am not dreaming. The sweat of her climb still prickled down her back, and stuck her hair to her forehead.

She thought of being able to marry someone like Bjet, or Grouher; of having a house of her own; she thought about having yelling babies of her own; she thought about washing-day in her mother’s home. She thought about having her own smallholding, and a pony to plough it that did not have to be hired out to other farmers for the money it would bring.

It would be a great thing, to come from somewhere else with a dowry a Guardian had given her. It would be a great thing, and perhaps, if she were lucky, it would make her great with it. But she would never belong to the place that took her in. Better, perhaps, to be a Guardian; and for the first time since the trader had brought the news to her stepfather’s door, her heart lifted a little, and her mind sat up and looked around and thought, Hmm, to be a Guardian, how interesting. How . . . exciting.

Something odd was happening to her face; her mouth couldn’t seem to decide whether to turn up or turn down. The small round woman was smiling at her quite steadily. “It’s beginning to sink in, is it, my dear? You bring it all back to me, looking at your bright young face—I was where you were once, you know. I couldn’t begin to imagine why the Guardian had chosen me, and I thought it must be some mistake. It isn’t, you know. We Guardians make mistakes—are you too young to remember what happened to poor White North and Stone Gate?—but we don’t make mistakes about picking apprentices. You might say we can’t, any more than you can wake up in the morning without having a yawn and a stretch and going to look for breakfast. Which isn’t to say that you can always demand or predict what breakfast is going to be. Will you tell me what you are thinking, my dear? I might be able to help.”

Tamia looked round again, and this time she saw the little house with a peaked roof close to the edge of the clearing nearest the Eagle’s final summit; a great hollow yew twisted around one corner of the house, cradling a dark invisible haven in its bent limbs; and there were stones of various sizes laid out in a pattern in a wide, shallow pool of water that lay round both it and the house. The water glittered, and something like tiny stars twinkled on the biggest stones. “I am frightened,” Tamia said to the Guardian. “But I would rather stay here, with you.”

The Guardian’s smile turned a little wistful. “It is wise of you to be frightened. Being a Guardian is . . . well, it is hard work, but you are not afraid of hard work. It is things other than hard work too, and you will learn them; and some of them are frightening.” She patted Tamia’s shoulder. “That’s a hard thing to hear right off, isn’t it? But it’s as well you should know at once. Mind you, many more things are not frightening, and I’m afraid I must tell you that very many of these are no more—and no less—than boring. Appallingly, gruesomely boring. As boring as washing-day, and cleaning out chicken-houses.

“But oh! I am glad you have chosen to stay. It does not happen often that an apprentice refuses the position, but it has happened. Four Doors, who is the oldest of us, remembers it happening once when he was an apprentice. It has taken me a long search—and fourteen years’ further waiting—to find one someone who would suit me. I am grateful not to have to begin the search again.” She laughed at the blank look on Tamia’s face, and took her arm. “Come see the house. I have your room half-ready; I thought you would like to do the other half yourself. And perhaps you will finally let me make you that cup of tea? It is true that I have forgotten much of what it is like to be fourteen, but I think you need a rest.”

Weeks passed in a kind of enchanted blur. Tamia had never worked so hard in her life—but she had never eaten so well, dressed so well, slept so well—been so interested in everything—nor so noticed in her life either. The good food and the clothing, and the knowledge that she could go to bed early any evening she was too tired to stay awake—and in her very own room, shared with no one!—were merely glorious; the being noticed was rather odd, and unsettling. She wasn’t used to it; and then, to be noticed by a Guardian . . .

She loved the Guardian almost at once; but that also meant she wanted, that much more than if she had only liked or admired her, to please her, and so she went in terrible fear of doing something wrong, of making her unhappy—it was too hard to imagine her angry to fear making her angry. And she couldn’t believe that she didn’t daily, hourly, prove to the Guardian that she was not as clever or as quick or as hard-working as the Guardian needed her apprentice to be.

“How long, d’you think,” the Guardian said matter-of-factly one day at lunch, “before you will stop waiting for me to realise I’ve made a dreadful mistake and send you away? I told you that first afternoon that this is not the sort of mistake Guardians make, and I have seen nothing since to make me suspect that I’ve just erred in a new, tradition-confounding way, and will go down in the annals of history as the only—well, the first, anyway—Guardian to have made a mistake in choosing her apprentice.”

Tamia kept her eyes on her plate.

“Eh?” said the Guardian. “How long?”

Tamia raised her eyes slowly, but kept her face tipped down. She knew that tone of voice; it meant the Guardian wasn’t just talking to make conversation. She was really waiting for an answer. Tamia didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know,” she said, very quietly, to her plate.