Kyle, too, was less than content with her progress. “If you'd open yourself to it more,” he complained once, “and let it flow through you, you'd be really good.” Frustrated, he ran a hand through his blond hair. “It's all that magic you're fooling with. It closes you off, poisons you for honest things. It isn't natural, you know, Heather. You should lead a normal life, with music, a family, pleasant things. A pretty young woman like you shouldn't darken herself with magic.”
“I'm not a pretty woman, Kyle O'Mara! And magic isn't dark. It's just difficult, like music. I'm not sure I'm meant for either.”
Whatever spare moments Heather had left, Welly slipped into with weapons instruction. Overweight and nearsighted, he had not been good at weapons in school. But in these last two years, he'd become quite skilled with the sword, though his spear aim wasn't what it could be. At least, he thought, his martial name of Wellington no longer seemed quite so ludicrous.
And what he learned, he wanted to share with Heather, his companion in a good many adventures already. Admittedly he had heard people say that Heather McKenna was getting of an age to stop adventuring and think about marriage. She was, after all, fourteen, and with the difficulties women had bearing live healthy children, girls were encouraged to marry and start becoming mothers as soon as possible. But Welly cringed at the thought of independent Heather's reaction to that idea were it ever mentioned to her.
Welly was surprised to discover that one of the cook's helpers had such thoughts about him—the marriageable part, anyway. Of course, the idea was absurd. He wanted to stay as he was, with a few girls as friends only. Still, it puffed him up a little to know that a pretty thing like the cook's assistant should think of him as a good catch.
At long last, even in Cumbria, winter began losing its hold. Heather, as anxious as anyone to ride on the first sortie, was even happier that her three-part tutoring was tapering off.
One morning, John Wesley ran to her to say that the herd's first foal had been born. He still treated her as an old friend and was not put off by rumors of her odd powers. Grateful always for that, she followed him eagerly to the enclosure. The air held a thawing mildness. It carried the sound of trickling meltwater mixed with the pawing and snorting of horses restive at the promise of spring.
The new foal was small and dark, but already it was up on its spindly legs, butting its head under its mother's shaggy belly and gulping down milk. Heather watched the scene with lazy contentment. She could reach out and feel the foal's warmth and security, its simple pleasure in the milk and in the presence of its mother. And she felt the dam's love, pride, and happy surprise. Heather refused to look at this awareness as magic.
She spent the day helping John Wesley fork hay or shovel horse droppings into drying pans. Soon she smelled of horse and sweat. Her thin hair, wisping free of its braids, was studded with bits of hay. She was thoroughly happy. No dark musty halls, no conflicting voices inside and out. Just a job to do and the freedom to do it.
In midafternoon, she was scouring a stone trough. Raising her head to shove back a strand of hair, she caught sight of Merlin walking down from the hall. Almost at the same moment, she saw Kyle heading up the road from town.
A wave of guilt at having avoided their tutoring was swiftly followed by anger. What right had those two to make her feel guilty about what she did with herself? If she never hummed another tune or gave another thought to magic, it was her life!
Angrily she threw down her tools and, crouching low, scuttled along a wall, almost colliding with John Wesley as he limped around a corner with an armload of rope.
“If anyone asks about me,” she hissed, “I haven't been here for ages. And tell them it's none of their business anyway!”
Sprinting off behind cover of outbuildings, she cut into town, then took the back way up to the manor. Feelings of triumph were muddled with disgust—disgust that even this petty evasion should give her such a sense of freedom.
Dirty, disheveled, and angry, she crept into the lower garden to find Welly hurling spears at a straw target. He turned and smiled at her, his plump open face showing no signs of inner turmoil.
“Heather, why don't you come here and try—”
“No! I'm not going to. I want to do something of my own for a change!”
“Huh?”
“I'm getting fed up with you people! Earl wants me to become a sorceress and a hermit, Kyle wants me to stay away from magic and be a singer, and you want me to be some sort of Amazon warrior!”
“Hey, I never said anything like that. You can just be what you want, as far as I'm concerned.”
“Oh? Then what should I be? With everyone after me, I can't think. What's your advice?”
“I don't know, Heather. Just go your own way.”
She stamped her foot. “Welly, I asked for advice, not wishy-washy philosophy. Why are you always so middle-of-the-road?”
“The middle of the road's often the safest place to be.”
“Bah! You're no help. All right. I'll go my own way. I'll do exactly that!”
She stalked off toward the hall. Bewildered, Welly looked after her. What had gotten into her lately? He'd heard Cook say, after watching her fly into another such rage, that Heather was just growing up. It looked more like blowing up to him. And it worried him. He didn't want her to do anything stupid.
He picked up another spear and threw, missing again.
Heather did not go down to supper that evening. She said she had a headache. But actually she felt calm with resolve. She was sorry, though, that she'd lost her temper with Welly. It wasn't his fault. It wasn't even Earl's or Kyle's. It was hers.
Everyone was making demands on her. But she couldn't even try to answer them because she didn't know what she was anymore, or what she wanted or needed. All right, she would find out.
The first step had to be the magic. She couldn't deny it any longer. Whether she wanted it or not, it was hers. Maybe, though, she could control it, channel it into ways that wouldn't ruin her life. But she couldn't do that until she knew its strength. And Earl couldn't seem to discover that. All right, if he couldn't, she would have to. And she'd do it tomorrow.
DISCOVERIES ON A MOUNTAIN
The sky was just pearling with gray when Heather, dressed in fleece-lined trousers and jacket, slipped out to the royal stables. The guard gave her a surprised nod but said nothing. She was one of the royal household and was free to come and go as she wished. If the hour was odd, it was no more so than the girl's reputation of late.
Heather ignored him and the sleepy stableboy. She could no longer doubt that a strained distance had sprung up around her as word of her powers had spread. The answer, she'd decided, was to pretend she didn't care. That's what Earl did, though she suspected it was more pretense than he'd care to admit.
Feeling bitterly alone, she swung onto her sturdy little horse. The misty predawn silence was broken as she clattered through the courtyard and out past the gatehouse. Turning right, she rode down into the sleeping town and out to the lake.
The air was cold and needle sharp. Her breath and the breath of her horse rose about them in white plumes. But signs of thaw were already around. The snow on the road had melted and refrozen into a slippery crust. On Derwentwater, the imprisoning ice was beginning to break up. Cracks and dark patches spread over the surface, and mists rose from them, veiling the far shore and the lake's shadowy islands. Along the beach, sheets of broken ice had been thrown up by the waves, looking in this uncertain light like jagged teeth tearing at the mists.
As the road climbed above the east shore, Heather looked over the misty expanse of water toward a distant valley, the “Jaws of Borrowdale.” Her goal lay there, among the dark, hunched shapes. She hoped some answers lay there as well.
Her power, Earl said, was something she would understand in time. But she didn't have time. Too much was tearing at her now. Was hers the power of a garden-variety witch, meant for healing and foretelling storms? Or was it someth
ing more? She hardly cared which; she just needed to know so she could start taking control of her life.
As she rode on, the shape of Castle Crag, dark against the graying sky, loomed more and more forbidding. Yet it was the best place she could think of to go. Earl had said that the ancients built in places of power, and from a shepherd she'd learned that this spot held one of the oldest sites around.
The lake came to an end, and on both sides the fells crowded into a narrow valley. Ahead of her, the crag loomed like a supernatural watchtower guarding the route to Borrowdale and beyond.
She stopped at a crossroads, trying to recall the old map she had studied. The best route should be to the right. She urged her horse across a humpbacked bridge into the tumbled stone ruins of an abandoned village. Turning south, she headed along the River Derwent, still shrouded in its icy winter silence. It seemed that the only sound in the whole world was what she brought with her, the jingle of bridle and the steady clop of horse hooves on frozen ground.
In the deep, sheltered valley, rare trees grew—a grove, almost a forest, like those in ancient tales. Wind moaned coldly in the branches, and the dark, towering pines seemed alive with the hostile spirits of those same tales. She was relieved when her trail began rising again, leaving the trees for the open fells.
The path, steep and rocky now, cut along the base of bare cliffs, their surfaces scarred with the white of frozen waterfalls. As she looked up, one ice cascade seemed to shimmer and flow with fire. Over the eastern fells, a huge reddened sun broke free and sent a tide of ruddy light down the opposite cliffs.
Her horse plodded on, bringing her closer and closer to the pass. Perplexed, she reined in. The map had shown the ascent striking off before the pass. Of course, it was an old map, pre-Devastation, but surely the landscape hadn't changed that much.
Standing in her stirrups, she looked around. Then she saw it. The distinctive pattern of sheep walls lay behind her in a hidden side valley. Feeling like a successful explorer, she headed the horse back until the narrow valley floor ended in a tumbled wall. Beyond it, the crag rose sharply. With a pang, she realized she would have to leave her horse here. Even his throwback three-toed agility couldn't manage this trail.
Dismounting, she tied the reins to a rock and patted his shaggy flank. He was uneasy; she could feel it. He didn't like being away from his fellows. Suddenly she wasn't sure she did either. This idea had seemed fine in Keswick. Now she was less enthusiastic. True, the people and pressures she sought to escape crowded her like this horse's stablemates, but they were protective, too. And familiar.
She looked up at the starkly unfamiliar mountainside, then frowned angrily. She was never going to learn about herself if she huddled in a herd! Scrambling over the wall, she began climbing.
On the crag's face, wind had scoured away most of the snow, exposing bare earth and rock. It was the rock that proved difficult. In times past, this place had been used to quarry slate, and the tailings from the quarries now spilled down this whole side of the mountain.
The slate scree ranged from blue-gray slabs to tiny chips, all shifting and clattering under her as she climbed. It was a nightmare climb. For every two feet she advanced, she slipped back one. The rattling, tumbling noise of her passage seemed an outrage in the icy morning stillness.
Finally, panting for breath, she reached a plateau. Below her, cupped in its mountains as if in the palm of a hand, lay Borrowdale. Stone walls veined the snowy fields and led to a distant cluster of farm buildings. It all seemed safe and familiar and infinitely more rational than this scarred, windswept crag.
Pulling her hood tighter around her face, she looked up and groaned. There was still farther to go to the summit. But at least she had reached the level of the quarries. The hillside above would have proper rocks set in soil. Wearily she continued climbing. If there was a place of power anywhere here, surely it would be on the highest spot.
Finally she staggered out onto the summit, then looked around in confusion. There were no signs of ancient fortifications here. To one side was a cairn of piled stones, but that was the type left by climbers in pre-Devastation times, when people did this sort of thing for fun.
Discouraged, she sat beside the scant shelter of the rocky mound. The wind sang mournfully over the cold, bare rocks. Behind her, Borrowdale was obscured by the shoulder of the hill, but to the north, Derwentwater stretched beneath its fells like a shattered mirror. At the lake's north edge, light from the rising sun was finally sliding over Keswick. Above the huddled gray buildings, smoke from cookfires blended with the fading mist.
In the great airy gulf between her and her home, a single bird soared. She smiled with delight. Birds were so beautiful, with their grace and their achingly precious freedom. How wonderful if the air and hillsides were filled with them! Earl had told her that once summer days had danced with their song. She longed to reach out and touch that bird, to share its soaring flight, to … No. She hadn't come here for that, but to touch whatever ancient power still ran in this hill.
With a businesslike frown, she looked around the summit again and noticed that there was something unnatural about it. The surface had been flattened and was cupped up evenly at the edges. It was a perfect circle, except where quarries had chewed into the hilltop. Standing up, she walked to where the slope dropped steeply from the built-up rim.
So this had been an ancient site, though she hardly felt it bubbling with power. But then, she instructed herself firmly, she was not really trying. She walked to the center of the hilltop, thought a moment, then moved farther west to what would have been the center before the quarries left a gap, like a wedge cut from a cake.
Bracing her feet apart, she closed her eyes, spread out her hands, and tried to think of nothing. Earl had repeatedly showed her how. But it was so hard. Stupid little thoughts kept sliding in, silly phrases people had said yesterday or pictures of meaningless, ordinary things. Closing her eyes tighter, she tried to drive these fragments away. But the more she fought, the more willfully they sidled in.
She simply had to succeed! Maybe if she tried to stay cool, cool like the snow around her. Cool, pure, untouched. Slowly she relaxed. Coolness and rest spread through her body. She could feel a faint tingling, a faint distant movement like blood throbbing through arteries far, far below her. It was so far, so faint, and other things kept coming in the way.
Ants moved in the darkness, feeling and smelling the earth, grain by grain moving and shaping it, clearing tunnels in age-old patterns of comfort and purpose. They tunneled and crawled past the den of a sleeping mouse, its pulse slowed, its furry chest scarcely rising and falling, its mind drifting in a single summer thought.
Little things, little lives. Heather felt them first with pleasure, then with annoyance. Where was the power? Where was the power they hid? Eyes clenched shut, she wrenched her body forward to another, perhaps better, spot and threw open her mind. This deeper power—when would it find her?
Wildly she flung back her arms, tilting her head to the sky. Suddenly she was slipping, arms flailing like bird wings. Her eyes flew open to see the snow-mantled rock at the quarry's edge buckling and sliding beneath her feet. Her mind screamed. Blue slate and white snow spun past her and up to meet her. A rumbling avalanche of snow and rock poured into the quarry. Then mindless silence settled over the hillside.
Wellington Jones never claimed to have a magical bone in his body. But he was certainly good at worrying. He woke up just as worried as he'd been the night before. Heather was his best friend, and it worried him that she'd blown up at him like that. It worried him even more the way she'd stomped off threatening … what? He didn't know, but she was always one for madcap schemes.
When she hadn't come down to dinner, he had been really worried. To anyone who enjoyed food as much as he did, missing a meal meant a monumental crisis. Her not appearing for breakfast was the last straw. She was being ridiculous now.
He stormed upstairs to her little room in the west en
d of the building. One of the few girls in Arthur's “court,” Heather had a room of her own, whereas Welly slept in one of the men's common rooms. He hammered at the door. No answer.
“Come on, Heather, open up! I'm sorry if you're mad at me, but at least you could tell me why.”
Still no answer. Hesitantly he turned the knob and pushed. The door opened onto a small, silent, and very empty room. He looked at the rumpled bed. It had been slept in, but on the wall behind it, the peg that usually held her outdoor jacket was empty. “Little silly,” Welly muttered. “She's off doing something crazy—and without me!”
In moments, he was down the stairs and running toward the stables. Heather's horse was gone. The stableboy reported she had saddled it before dawn but hadn't said where she was going. Useless lump, Welly thought, not even to ask her. But then, he reflected, if Heather had been in the same mood as yesterday, the stableboy had been well advised to lie low.
A thought struck Welly as he was saddling his horse. He hadn't paid much attention to something Heather said the other day. But was it true? Were people really avoiding her because she had some sort of magical powers? The idea boiled into anger. His two best friends, and people treated them like muties!
As Welly trotted across the courtyard, Otto called out from a doorway, “What you up to, Welly?”
“Important business,” the boy answered, throwing him a serious frown. He didn't want to draw any attention to Heather until he learned exactly what craziness she was up to. That could just make things worse.
The guard at the gatehouse remembered Heather heading down into town. Welly did the same. Threading through the narrow twisting streets, he bashfully nodded at occasional smiles and waves. All the people of Keswick knew the plump, bespectacled boy and the skinny, intense girl as being Arthur and Merlin's first two companions. They'd become something of folk heroes, and that made Welly acutely embarrassed. Fame sounded all right in theory but was proving surprisingly silly in fact.
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