The End of the Game Page 3

  Well, listened. It was on a teetery branch of a tall tree outside the tower window, so I guess you couldn’t say “overheard”. I just happened to be there. Looking for birds’ eggs.

  Murzy was saying, “My oldest sister, ma’am. Not much longer in this life, I shouldn’t think, and it would be nice to spend Festival together. So, a couple of the dams and I decided—with your permission, of course, ma’am—we’d go on up to Schooltown and spend a few days with her. I’d be happy to take young Jinian with us, too. Get her off your hands. The girl’s got a good heart, but heaven save us, she’s always into mischief ...”

  Mischief! I was into no such thing, and started to say so, but the branch cracked under me and I decided to be still.

  Mother fingered the crystal she had on a chain around her neck. Mendost had given it to her, and she always wore it. “Children are a trial,” she said. That was nothing new. She often said it, especially to me.

  “They are that, ma’am.” That was new. Murzy always said to me that children are one of life’s great joys, so I knew she was up to something. “I think any conscientious mother needs a rest from time to time.”

  “You’re right.” Mother sighed. You would have thought from that sigh she didn’t have two hundred pawns around to do whatever they were told, plus all the kinfolk, plus Garz and Bram. From that sigh, you’d have thought the whole weight of the Demesne was on her head. “They wanted me to make a Dervish of her, you know, Dam Murzy. I wouldn’t do it to a child of mine, but I’ve wondered since if it wouldn’t have been best for her. With her nature and all.”

  “A Dervish? My, my. What a thing that would have been to be sure.” Murzy’s voice was all choked. She shook her head, and I tried to think what Mother could possibly have meant by that. “Well, taking the child away may relieve your burdens just a little.”

  And, of course, Mother said yes. I so admired the way old Murzy did it, I didn’t even fuss at her about saying I got up to mischief. I hardly ever did. Mischief, 1 mean. I didn’t remember to ask about the Dervish business, either.

  “So why are we really going?” I asked her. “Not just to visit your old sister, I’ll warrant.” .

  “I’m very fond of Kate,” she said, somewhat stiffly. “And we will visit her, you may be sure.”

  “But,” I begged her. “But?”

  “But we’re going, at least partly, to continue tha education. And to amuse ourselves. Now, don’t ask any more questions. Trust old Murzemire. She hasn’t done you wrong yet, has she?”

  She hadn’t. Not once. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know why we were going anywhere. Some of the things I already knew were very heavy in my mind from time to time. Having something else in there even heavier didn’t attract me. Learning more was merely ordinary to me, but traveling—that was a wonderful treat.

  At least so I thought until we had done some of it. Then it turned out that traveling was doing everything one had to do at home with none of the conveniences for doing it. I was kept very busy gathering wood for the cookfire, and checking the horses’ hooves for stones, and rubbing them down and watering them, and arranging the wagon, and washing our clothes in the streams. It is a long way from our Demesne to Schooltown, a long slow way when one travels so as to avoid getting involved in Game on the way. There was nothing interesting on the way but scenery, and by the time we arrived I was heartily surfeited with scenery and very glad to see walls once more. We stayed at an inn, thank the Hundred Devils, one owned by sister Kate. She looked nowhere near to dying to me, and she had her own servants to fetch wood and water. As a child of Gamecaste, I thought I would not have to do anything at all. In which I was mistaken. The day after we arrived, all seven of us were back in the wagon going off through Schooltown and into the countryside to an old, tumbly building with moss all over its rocks and its walls gaping up at the sky like teeth. There was a broken tower and steps that wound up and around onto old roofs and down and around into old dungeons. I looked about me doubtfully while the others unloaded their picnic lunch and their work-baskets and then traipsed up the stairs to a comfortable room in the tower. It had a fire, cushions to sit on, translucent shutters over the windows, and the six of them sat down there like brood hens, Murzy waving me off. “Explore, Jinian. The whole place. Come back when tha feels hungry.”

  So I did. Up to the roofs and down to the cellars, then below the cellars to the dungeons, old and slimy and full of things that squeaked. It wasn’t fearsome, that place, just old. So I wandered it and wandered it, and got tired and went back for a bite of lunch, then wandered it again. Come dark we got in the wagon and went back to the inn. Next day, back to the place again. Murzy and the dams had been teaching me to use my senses, and I used them as best I knew how, but about the third day, I began to be bored with it. “All right,” I said to them all, hands on my hips. “What’s it all about?”

  Murzy put down her needle and pointed to the window in the tower. “There’s bridge magic, Jinian. And window magic.”

  I couldn’t think what she was talking about. I stood there, staring at the window. Then I walked out into the corridor and stared at another window. Then back into the tower room, where the six of them chatted and clucked like hens. And then, quite suddenly, I began to get a glimmer.

  A stone wall: which implied a builder, which implied a closed space, which implied protection from an outer world, or retreat from that world, or hiding from that world. And a window cut through: wide, with a welcoming sill, on which one might curl up on pillows to dream away a morning or long evening, looking out at the light making patterns beneath the trees. A window was a kind of joining, then. A kind of linkage between worlds. And a wind would come in, and light could come in, with tough, translucent shutters standing wide but ready to shut against bitter blast or hard rain. Gray of stone, blue of sky, with the bright green of new leaf blowing against it. Hardness of stone, softness of air. Shadows moving across the window. A memory of firelight, with soft breezes moving from the window to the fire. And in this room, welcome. Murzy nodded to me, picking up her needle again.

  Breathless with what I thought I knew, I left the room and ran away down the stone corridor, finding the hidden entrance to the stair that twisted down inside the tower. At the third curve was a window, a narrow slit cut through the wall to peer down at the castle gate from an unsuspected angle, high and secret, hidden in the shadow of the tower. Suspicion. Fear. Stone within and without, the broken gravel of the hard road making on obdurate angle at the edge of the wall, edged with more stone, the spears of the raised portcullis making fangs at the top of the gate. Not joining, but separation.

  I nodded to myself, fleeing downward once more, through the hidden door at the bottom and then down ancient ways to the empty dungeons at the bottom of the keep. There was one where a slit window at the ceiling fed a narrow beam of pale light reflected from a slimy pond outside. The wall sweated moisture, a dank smell of deep earth and old mold lay in the place, and a green ooze covered the wall. Here the light lay upon the ceiling, reflected upward, wavering, a ghost light, gray and uncertain, lighting only the stone in a ceaseless, agitated motion, without peace.

  I looked at that watery light for a long time before climbing back up to the room where they waited. Murzy nodded to me once more, not failing to notice the stains of slime on my hands, falling into the common folk nursery talk they often used when it suited them.

  “Tha’s been adown the deeps? Nasty down there.”

  “I’ve been discovering window magics, Murzy. It came to me all at once.”

  “Well, if it comes at all, it comes all at once.”

  I sat down at Murzy’s feet, suddenly adrift from the possession of knowing, the certainty of action. I knew, yes, but what was it I knew? “Different,” I said to her, feeling my way. “Different windows. Magic, because they have an out and an in, because they are linkages of different kinds. Because they are built. Because they are dreamed through and looked through. But—something m
ore, I guess ...”

  “Well, there’s actually going through a window, isn’t there? Or calling someone through a window. Or summoning.”

  “Summoning?” I thought about that. Summoning. Through windows. Of course. “If one summoned through a window—if one did—what answered the summons would be different, depending on the window, wouldn’t it?” I wasn’t sure about this, and yet it made a certain kind of sense. I might have summoned something into the dungeon very different from a thing I could summon into this room now.

  “Think of calling to a lover,” said Margaret Foxmitten dreamily, her needle flashing in the sun. “Calling from this room. Think of calling something from the dungeon. Think of summoning a presence. Into this room. Into the dungeon.”

  “Ah,” I said, getting some misty idea of what they were getting at. “If I ... if I wanted to summon something frightening or horrid, I’d call something out of the dungeon through that high, watery window. And I would lead it in again through the open portcullis.”

  “You could do that,” said Bets. “Or you could find the tiny, square window which looks out through an iron grille over the pit where ancient bones were dropped. You might call something in through that window more dreadful still.”

  “But,” said Murzy, ‘suppose you wanted to summon Where Old Gods Are?” Where Old Gods Are was the name of a very powerful spell they had taught me.

  “I would summon through this window, here,” I said, opening the shutters and looking out on the peaceful pastures and the blowing green of leaves.

  “Good,” said Murzy, packing up her work. “Think about that.”

  I thought about it for some time, putting bits and pieces of it in place in my head. Not all of it connected to other things I knew, but some of it did. By that time it was dark, so we returned to Schooltown and the Festival.

  So, came Festival morning and they decked me out like the Festival Horse, all ribbons. Murzy had given me a new blue tunic with a cape to match, and Bets Battereye spent most of the previous evening braiding my hair wet so it would wave. “We want you to be a credit to us,” she said, yanking bits of hair into place. I thought it unlikely I’d be much credit to them bald, which is what it felt like, but I’d learned that uncomplaining silence was best in dealing with the dams. Come morning, the hair was brushed out into a wavy cloud, then they dressed me up and told me to stay in the room and stay clean until they came for me. So I pulled a chair over to the sill, and opened the casements wide. I could see people going by, and it put me in a fever of anticipation, but nothing would hurry them so I spent the time practicing summons and distraints.

  It was a good window for summoning, broad and low, with a wide sill overhanging a fountain-splashed courtyard. Smell of water on the stones—that’s important for some summons. You know the smell? That first smell of water on dry earth or dry stone? That’s the grow smell. Water, earth, and grow smell make one of the major triads of the Primary Extension of the Arcanum. That’s not secret. Everyone knows that. Gardeners use it all the time. Beneath the window was a herb garden with the shatter-grass, bergamot, lady’s bell triad. There were five other triads within sight or smell, too, including two other majors, making seven all together. Not bad for a mere learner, and more than enough to call up something fairly powerful if I’d liked.

  Sarah brought me a hot nutpie. “I know you’re starving, but patience a bit longer, chile. We’ve called the Healer for Tess. Poor thing, she’s no younger than she was yesterday, and it tells upon her. Still, give us a bit and we’ll be ready to go festivate with the rest of the town.”

  At which I fidgeted, sighed, cut a slice of my pie, and laid out the summoning tools once more. Murzy said there was no such thing as practicing too much.

  What would I practice this time? Lovers Come Calling, that’s what. The window was perfect for Lovers Come Calling, so I would have window magic and the summons reinforcing one another. First the Pattern. Two hairs from my head. Mirror. Bell. Coal from the fire. Spidersilk for winding, binding. Spidersilk? Murzy’s sister Kate kept her place entirely too clean.

  Finally I found some at the corner of the chimney. Then lay it all out in proper form. Whisper the words . . . Pause. Ring the bell. Pause. The words again. Pause.

  There was a brown, round little man in a clean cook’s apron passing below the window, herding half a dozen boys before him. He looked up just then and called, “Happy Festival to you, lassy.” And the boys stopped, looking up. Stocky boys. Jeruval and Flot boys. Ordinary boys. Meaning nothing to me at all. They paused and went on incuriously, while one of them remained behind, mouth open, staring up at me. He was small, smaller than I, one of those boys who get their growth late, with his shoulders just beginning to widen. His face was serious and quiet with ruddy hair in one thick wave across his forehead. His eyes dug deep at me, as though he would understand everything they saw by sheer determination. The last of the words of Lovers Come Calling was. still on my lips.

  Only then I realized what I had done. I had called. He had come. There was something else necessary, some final thing. I struggled with it. The spell was not complete until something was given between the two. A token. Something given as a token. Without thinking, I leaned out the window to put the warm slice of nutpie in his hand. He took it, bit it, smiled a small, rather puzzled smile, and then was dragged away by the little brown man.

  And I sat as one lost forever, betrayed by what I had done.

  Margaret Foxmitten came in behind me, stood there. I could feel her eyes examining the Pattern on the sill. “Did I see someone leave?” she asked. “Just now?”

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know,” I croaked. “I don’t know, Margaret.”

  “The more fool you,” she said. “Now you’re trapped and no way out of it. You’ve done Lovers’ Call and someone’s come in answer. Think of that.” She went out into the corridor, calling for Sarah to come hear what Jinian had done. I was too sunk in misery to listen. Misery and delight, of course. I was in love. Only thirteen, but in love. I wondered who he was.

  I wondered if I would ever see him again. For if I did not, likely this love would haunt me until I died. No one could break the call unless we were both present and consenting.

  “Now what’ve you done!” demanded Murzy, bustling into the room. “What’s this?”

  “I was practicing,” I said lamely. “And I practiced Lovers Come Calling. And he came.”

  She just stood there looking at me, a very curious expression on her face, almost as though she had known already what I had done, or perhaps what I was likely to do. “Well,” she said at last. “We’ll go out into the town. If you see him again, tell one of us right away. At least we can find out who he is.”

  But, of course, I didn’t see him again. I don’t remember much about Festival. We had some good food, I do remember, and there were fireworks. Most of the time I spent thinking about the boy, reconsidering his appearance and his smile, wondering what his name was and where he might be found. The morning after, we were in the wagon headed home once more, and I said to Murzy—trying hard to sound plaintive, though I was really put out that so little had been made of the whole thing—“Murzy, why did I do such a silly thing?”

  “Well, chile. You’ve made some difficulty for yourself, truly. Which is something we all do, so no sense fretting overmuch about it. Take it as a lesson and profit therefrom, as Grandma used to say.” She sounded so righteous and solid. It made me angry.

  I fumed about that for a time, deciding at last that it wasn’t worth getting huffy about. As one of Gamesman caste, I ranked the lot of them and could have made their lives miserable when we returned home. I considered doing this, but I knew it would end making mine worse. So, in the end I only asked, “What do I do now?”

  Murzy considered this seriously. “Well, for a few years, nothing much. Keep close to us, Jinian. You’ll go on with your schooling from us this next few years. By
the time you’re grown, we’ll know more. We’ll find something out ...”

  And that was the total I could get out of them on that subject, however much I tried.

  Later, however, as I considered the matter, I realized that when one practices the wize-art, one should stop somewhere short of the last word or phrase. Or something should be mimed rather than done. Or one must use an inert ingredient rather than an active one. It was not the very worst way to learn such a lesson—death would have been that. But it was not a comfortable way, for now I was haunted by the boy, the small, serious boy with the narrow, searching face. When I lay down to sleep, I thought of him. When I woke, I reached for the cool space in the bed as though he should be sleeping there. In the night he touched me, making me flame and start awake. When I looked into the mirror, I saw his face behind my own. We might have been brother and sister, both fair and ruddy-haired, as unlike Mendost and dark-lovely Mother as could be. As time went by, I felt more and more akin to him, to this stranger, this unknown boy, this mysterious, lost boy. Oh, he was my true love, no question about that, but it would have been better not to have known it for some years yet—until I was old enough to do something about it.

  3

  Margaret and I got to talking on the way home. She wasn’t that much older than I, and she seemed more sympathetic than the others, so I had someone to talk to about him. We rode along, me talking, sighing, she nodding. The thing that worried me most was that it would be a love unreturned, for such is the power of Lovers Come Calling that it will summon one who is loved but who has no feeling at all in the matter.

  When Margaret had taught me the spell, she told me she had seen it happen. An Armiger came to a Wize-ard woman in the Northern Marshes—it was Margaret’s kinswoman, and Margaret was there at the time—saying he had found no maid to suit him in all his flights and wanderings, for none was so bright and pure and kind as his dream told him maids should be. So he paid well, in gold, and the Wize-ard laid out the Pattern on the doorstep of her place and summoned up who should come.