“You opened the barrier, boy? Lan, are you sure?”
The Master Watcher nodded, and Nell thought that if his shoulders went any higher, they’d be at his ears.
Max stammered, “I — it wasn’t me, it was —”
Again the younger man interrupted him. “The boy was confused by what he’d done. It was almost instinct. But I saw it with my own eyes.”
The old man raised a hand and pressed his palm to his mouth. He sat that way for a long silent moment, considering Max with those fiery, searching eyes.
“This changes things,” he said. He looked away from them a second, and Nell had the uncomfortable feeling that his eyes were moist.
“Boy,” he continued, “you come at a propitious moment. We have much to offer you, and you, in turn, have much to offer us.” He leaned toward Max, who stood, suddenly still, staring back at him. “You have questions,” he said. “You’ve come full of them.”
Max nodded. “How did you know?”
The man sat back, and his smile was easy now, comfortable. “They brought you here,” he said. “No one comes without them. I can answer them for you, if you’ll let me.”
Max grinned suddenly and looked back, trying to catch Susan’s eye. But Susan again had gone somewhere inside her own head, and he saw that at the same time Nell did. So he looked at her instead and nodded, eyebrows raised.
Nell flushed. Was he asking her permission? Permission to do what he wanted, and what Susan had said they had to? She’d wanted to be asked, and now, for a fraction of an instant, Max was asking. Ever so slightly, she nodded back, feeling a warm pleasure spreading up her cheeks.
He had asked.
“Master Watcher,” the old man said, “tell the council I have found my student.”
Nell had been asked, but she began to regret her answer on the spot when the Guide announced lessons would begin immediately. The Master Watcher took that as a cue to try to hustle the rest of them out the door, possibly by force, as necessary. The girls were saved the indignity of actually being shoved through only by Jean. Suddenly understanding that they were, in fact, being separated from Max, Jean got a familiar look on her face — the one that said she’d be getting painfully loud in under thirty seconds if somebody didn’t do something quick. Max headed her off by begging for a minute to say good-bye to his sisters. So as the Master Watcher tapped his foot, looking like he’d just sucked a lemon, Max joined them in the hall.
He glanced down at his feet, and Nell saw in the polished tiles the faint reflection of the five of them, bulky, blurry shapes, one of which was fidgeting. That was Max. He leaned toward Jean and lowered his voice.
“It’ll be all right, Jean. You’ll see. I’m going to learn things here. Things that will get us home. Tell her, Susan.”
Kate had taken Susan’s hand and was hanging on for dear life. Nell watched her tug at it now, just to make sure Susan was listening, but she needn’t have worried, because Susan’s expression had sharpened. She looked from Max to the old man through the door, then back at Jean.
“He will,” she said. “This is the place to do it, right? Look at all those books!”
“And I’ll write you a letter!” Max added in a sudden fit of inspiration. “A real one this time. I’ll tell you all about it — I promise.”
“And he’ll visit,” Nell said, thinking she ought to get at least a word in. “A lot. Right, Max?”
Jean, who had perked up at the promise of a letter, nodded vigorously. “Letters,” she said. “And visiting every day, right?”
Max glanced uneasily back at the Master Watcher, waiting none too patiently in the room with the old man. “As much as I can,” he said. “It’ll be great. I promise.”
And so they left, but if Max’s promise referred to general greatness, Nell thought, it was broken before they were halfway across the second garden, when the Master Watcher deposited them in the care of a florid-faced woman who smelled faintly of boiled carrots.
He called her Shepherdess, though she didn’t look to Nell like she spent much time outside with the sheep. She wore her graying hair in a loose bun that bobbed at the back of her head when she spoke, and her spotless, sand-colored dress, which just brushed the tops of her shoes, billowed when she walked.
“You’ve brought me girls!” she said delightedly when she met them near the artisan booths. “And so changed already! Wonders!”
She was so enthusiastic that Nell took an instant dislike to her.
“Mistress Meva will show you your places,” the Master Watcher said by way of good-bye. Nell watched him go with rising impatience, wishing he were more like the old man, who seemed so delighted with questions.
Mistress Meva took Kate’s hand and then Jean’s, without asking.
“Such small things!” she said. “Wonders, really!”
Kate looked mildly scandalized, and Jean pulled her hand away, but the Shepherdess didn’t seem affronted. She laughed and pinched Jean gently on the cheek.
“It’s all right,” she said. “We’ll be friends soon. Now, come and I’ll get you ready to start school.”
Following as the woman hurried the girls along, Nell whispered bitterly to Susan that the Shepherdess was the kind of adult who treated little kids like puppies. Susan, distracted again, said nothing.
“You act like you’re sleepwalking,” Nell complained. “Will you pay attention at least?”
Susan looked up, frowning. “I am paying attention,” she said. But her voice didn’t sound right.
It was only when they reached the first band that Susan woke up. Following Mistress Meva, they crossed through the first garden, skirting fruit trees and jumping over flower beds in their haste to keep up. Unlike the Master Watcher, the Shepherdess, despite her speedy pace, said hello to everyone and waved at the ones too far to speak to. Nell wondered why she wasn’t out of breath by the time they reached a wide set of double doors in the inner wall of the first band, but she never slowed as she beckoned them into a long passage that smelled invitingly like breakfast and hurried them toward a second set of doors.
“You’re in for a treat now!” she said to them as she pushed through.
They came to a dead stop on the other side. Susan’s head snapped up, and Nell grinned.
“It’s a library,” Susan whispered.
Nell breathed in the scent of old paper and warm dust and the lemony aroma of polished wood and thought that if it was, it was one that had swallowed a pill and become a giant. They stood beneath great cliffs of books, walls like mountainsides made of volume after volume without end. The books soared toward distant ceilings, where skylights poured sunlight onto the gleaming tiles, and stretched out of sight to right and left, following the great line of the first band into a dusty, sunlit haze.
Like clinging vines, ornately fenced walkways marked the levels, and Nell could see figures moving along them. Across the open space above, narrow bridges met like the spokes of a wheel, converging on twisting staircases.
She had the urge to shout, just to hear the echo of her voice in this huge place.
Mistress Meva beamed at them. “Impressive, isn’t it?”
Susan nodded. “How many books do you have here? Where did they all come from?”
The woman raised a hand, indicating the shelves.
“Would you believe me if I told you this is only a fraction of what once was? These are the books saved from the study halls of Ganbihar, before the destruction.”
“Destruction?” Nell asked her. “Are you talking about the change?”
She nodded. “You’re a clever one! I’m going to have to tell Mistress Leeta to put you in the front seat in history.”
Nell wanted to ask more, but the Shepherdess was already walking again. “The library’s open at all hours,” she was saying in answer to a question of Susan’s. “You’re free to come here day or night.”
Susan looked like someone had just handed her a million dollars. And a pony.
“Do you
see that?” she said to Nell as they followed the Shepherdess past oak tables piled with books. “There are at least six stories of books here! Maybe seven!”
The Shepherdess led them from the library to a hall on the third floor and into a large room with four beds, a wardrobe, and a desk. Unlit lanterns hung in brackets on the walls. Above the desk, a scene of a man emerging from a pool, glowing with light, had been rendered in fine needlework, with threads of gold and yellow and orange woven atop the green of a wood and the blue of the water. On the other side of the room, a wide window looked out on the valley. Nell went to it and peered up past the orchards and fields to see if she could make out the mist. She couldn’t. In the distance, the tops of the trees on the edge of the wood stood etched into the skyline, deep greens and browns catching the sunlight as it inched westward.
Clothes had been laid out for them, clean light-colored dresses of the same long style the Shepherdess wore. To Nell’s relief, there was a bathroom across the hall, complete with running water and something that looked wonderfully like a toilet.
“Now, that’s civilization,” she said, thinking of Max. She sighed. She’d have to tell him later.
When they’d washed and changed, the Shepherdess returned to tell them how wonderful they’d find their education. Nell was in too good a mood from finally being clean to resent her tone. Then the woman ruined it with her first question.
“Can you read, too?” she asked Nell.
Susan looked up at that, and she and Nell exchanged a glance.
“We all can,” Susan said hastily.
Mistress Meva’s eyebrows shot up. “Really! Even the little ones? How unusual!”
She clearly didn’t believe them, though, until she’d had them each read something. The woman reached a new peak of excitement when she found that Jean could read a sentence.
“Now, don’t show off too much,” she grinned, when she’d summoned a younger woman to take Kate and Jean to join the primary classes.
“You two will be in the upper levels,” she told Susan and Nell. “Expect to work hard. Even if you’ve been to school in the city, which it appears you have, you’ll find things quite different here. We expect you to learn to use your mind. You’ll need every bit of effort you can muster to keep the change at bay, especially in these first days.”
Nell felt her spirits lift. She saw that Susan, too, seemed happier. They both knew what that meant. Max isn’t the only one who’s going to learn something here, Nell told herself with satisfaction. The Shepherdess isn’t half bad, even if she does smile too much.
Anticipation shivered in her stomach. Susan had made the wind blow, and Max had made peaches. Now it would be her turn. She intended to be good at it.
Four gates to the valley, four ways home.
It was an old saying. Wanderers and wise men, seekers and the bereft, carried the phrase with them, passing it, one to the next, as a cherished, free-given gift. And so for a century those who broke away, the unwanted or the far-seeing, were led to one of the gates or another, to find in the valley welcome, and shelter.
To these gates the exile returned now, to the clearings that overlooked the valley, to the place where the mist simmered, cold, beneath the heat of the day.
The first three, rarely traveled by any but watchers in these late years, lay undisturbed, the mist beneath them a dull, leaden cloud.
In the last, the grass was pressed to earth, and the mist rolled beneath the rise, angry. The exile searched the ground, counting signs: the broken stem of a wildflower, a trampled path, a second, a third. A curled hair, caught in a patch of onion grass and waving like a thin flag. More than one traveler had been here; more than two.
The mist crept toward the clearing, and the noise of it rose, a static, crackling sound of warning and hunger, of rage. Still the exile searched. Who had come? Who had waited upon this hill?
The cloud seeped upward, muttering and reaching, when at last the exile found a single clear footprint engraved in a bald circle of dirt, in a spot where the clearing began to slide toward the valley below. The perfect outline of a small shoe with a strange, lined sole. Too small, this, for a man or even a woman.
It was the print of a child.
Nell had once been told, by a teacher whom she had undoubtedly annoyed, that her impatience would be the undoing of her. Perversely, she embraced the image, seeing herself wrapped in a snarl of thread, feverishly — because of her much-declared impatience — working her way to her own undoing.
The little motor of her impatience revved now as Nell surveyed the school that the Shepherdess had heralded with such enthusiasm. She took note of the ways it failed to live up to expectation. First and most important, it was not in the small upper room in the third band, where even now Max studied under the warm gaze of the honey-voiced old man. It was not in the third band at all, but mostly set in a series of rooms off the great library, two floors up from the dining halls and kitchens and overlooking the first garden. It did carry a pleasing whiff of the old books that permeated the entire first band, but then, so did her bedroom.
Second was the dismaying realization that the Shepherdess took frequent charge of Nell’s level, and so accompanied her into the room, fairly bouncing, to introduce her to the ten other girls of her group. Third, and worst of all, was the lesson itself. Mistress Meva spent the hour or so before dinner telling them stories of mothers who made scholars of their sons when they were but infants, and tracing the routes of young men who said good-bye to their brides to travel to the great academies of Ganbihar from across the sea. The final moments of the day were spent reciting the chant of seeds aloud, a pretty but meaningless poem as far as Nell could see. By the time they were released to sit in the first garden beneath a wide willow, Nell felt frayed and edgy, wishing she could find the loose end of the thread that wound around her so tight she thought she’d burst.
The only thing of real interest in that first hour of school had been two girls her age — Wista and Zirri — who didn’t look like the others. They seemed neither city nor sanctuary, for in their faces the ferocious profile of the Domain had softened — their jaws were narrower, their eyes wider set. But while parts of their skin were as smooth as her own, along the ridge of forehead and cheekbone, Nell could see a thin coat of hair, so light it was shadow.
She stared at the girls too long. Wista’s light-brown hair lay in wisps that puffed out on either side of her round face, and her skin was freckling beneath the disappearing growth. Between her thick fingers, she twisted a copper pendant she wore around her neck, and she gazed at Nell longingly. Nell flushed in sympathy. The other girl, black-haired Zirri, regarded her out of dark-gray eyes with a look that made the hair on Nell’s neck stand up.
On their way out to the garden, Minna, a vivid redhead whose nose was liberally peeling from a sunburn, explained quietly that Wista and Zirri were halfway through “the return” — the process by which newcomers shed the change after they’d come from the outside.
“Where’d you wait yours out?” Minna asked her, rubbing her nose so vigorously a little snow shower of peeling skin flew from it. “Never seen anybody come like you. I heard the Master Watcher himself brought you in. Did he stay with you out there? Help you for a long time?”
Minna claimed a prime spot for her beneath the willow, pulled a sandwich left over from lunch out of her pocket, and offered to share. Wista accepted half gratefully. From where they sat, the group of them had a good view of the younger girls trooping along the paths behind their pretty teachers, or playing in the flower beds. The air was thick and smelled of roses, some of which climbed the wall of the first band and wound themselves around the edges of the white stones. Nell noticed that anyone over the age of ten was happy to sprawl lazily on benches or grass, breathing in the evening’s perfume. She wished fleetingly that she felt like joining them, but at mention of the Master Watcher, the thread of impatience snagged inside Nell, and she shook her head.
“No, we just met
him.”
The others stared at her.
“But you’re changed!” Wista said. “How else?”
Nell realized her mistake a moment too late. She shrugged. “Oh. We spent some time in the woods.”
Zirri glanced at her out of the corner of her storm cloud eyes. “We all did that,” she said. “But without the training, you don’t start until you get here.”
“The training?”
Wista motioned to the first band. “School.”
Nell wondered how school could change anything. Besides, they had schools in the city, and that didn’t seem to help.
“What does school have to do with it?” she asked.
Zirri snorted. “What do you think makes the change? I don’t see how you look like you do without knowing that.”
Nell caught the words before they were out of her mouth this time. In the silence that followed, two white moths fluttered down from the willow leaves, a handful of sparrows landed to gather the crumbs of Wista’s sandwich, and some distance away, a group of girls that included Jean moved among the flowers, singing.
Wista said, “I think she means that it’s different here, the way they teach us. I’m not sure how, exactly, but they say that the longer you’re here, the more it sticks.”
Nell wondered what other nonsense they taught in this school.
“That’s nice,” she said, trying to be diplomatic. “But when do we learn to do things?”
“Do things?” Wista asked.
“You know. Make things. Like the mist up there.”
They stared at her, and Zirri broke out laughing, sending the sparrows into flight.
“Who do you think you are?” she laughed. “The Guide himself?”
Nell flushed. She wasn’t sure what mistake she’d made now, but she could tell by the looks on their faces that it was a good-sized one.
“Is that very advanced?” she asked carefully.
Zirri laughed louder this time, and Nell narrowed her eyes, but Wista smiled sympathetically.
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