The child was born just as the first faint rays of dawn made their way through the cracks between the shutters. The lantern-wick burned low. The new father bowed his head over his wife’s hand as the midwife smiled at the mite of humanity in her arms. Black curls framed the tiny face; the child gave a gasp of shock, then filled its lungs for its first cry in this world; but when the little mouth opened, no sound came out. The midwife tightened her hands on the warm wet skin as the baby gave a sudden writhe, and closed its mouth as if it knew that it had failed at something expected of it. Then the eyes stared up into the midwife’s own, black, and clearer than a newborn’s should be, and deep in them such a look of sorrow that tears rose in the midwife’s own eyes.

“The child does not cry,” the mother whispered in terror, and the father’s head snapped up to look at the midwife and the baby cradled in her arms.

The midwife could not fear the sadness in this baby’s eyes; and she said shakily, “No, the baby does not cry, but she is a fine girl nonetheless”; and the baby blinked, and the look was gone. The midwife washed her quickly, and gave her into her mother’s eager, anxious arms, and saw the damp-curled, black-haired head of the young wife bend over the tiny curly head of the daughter. Her smile reminded the midwife of the smiles of many other new mothers, and the midwife smiled herself, and opened a shutter long enough to take a few deep breaths of the new morning air. She closed it again firmly, and chased the father out of the room so that mother and child might be bathed properly, and the bedclothes changed.

They named her Lily. She almost never cried; it was as though she did not want to call attention to what she lacked, and so at most her little face would screw itself into a tiny red knot, and a few tears would creep down her cheeks; but she did not open her mouth. She was her parents’ first child, and her mother hovered over her, and she suffered no neglect for her inability to draw attention to herself.

When Lily was three years old, her mother bore a second child, another daughter; when she was six and a half, a son was born. Both these children came into the world howling mightily. Lily seemed to find their wordless crying more fascinating than the grown-ups’ speech, and when she could she loved to sit beside the new baby and play with it gently, and make it chuckle at her.

By the time her little brother was taking his first wobbly steps it had become apparent that Lily had been granted the healer’s gift. A young cow or skittish mare would foal more quietly with her head in Lily’s lap; children with fever did not toss and turn in their beds if Lily sat beside them; and it was usually in Lily’s presence that the fevers broke, and the way back to health began.

When she was twelve, she was apprenticed to the midwife who had birthed her.

Jolin by then was a strong handsome woman of forty-five or so. Her husband had died when they had had only two years together, and no children; and she had decided that she preferred to live alone as a healer after that. But it was as the midwife she was best known, for her village was a healthy one; hardly anyone ever fell from a horse and broke a leg or caught a fever that her odd-smelling draughts could not bring down.

“I’ll tell you, young one,” she said to Lily, “I’ll teach you everything I know, but if you stay here you won’t be needing it; you’ll spend the time you’re not birthing babies sewing little sacks of herbs for the women to hang in the wardrobes and tuck among the linens. Can you sew properly?” Lily nodded, smiling; but Jolin looked into her black eyes and saw the same sorrow there that she had first seen twelve years ago. She said abruptly, “I’ve heard you whistling. You can whistle more like the birds than the birds do. There’s no reason you can’t talk with those calls; we’ll put meanings to the different ones, and we’ll both learn ’em. Will you do that with me?”

Lily nodded eagerly, but her smile broke, and Jolin looked away.

Five years passed; Jolin had bought her apprentice a horse the year before, because Lily’s fame had begun to spread to neighboring towns, and she often rode a long way to tend the sick. Jolin still birthed babies, but she was happy not to have to tend stomachaches at midnight anymore, and Lily was nearly a woman grown, and had surpassed her old teacher in almost all Jolin had to offer her. Jolin was glad of it, for it still worried her that the sadness stayed deep in Lily’s eyes and would not be lost or buried. The work meant much to each of them; for Jolin it had eased the loss of a husband she loved, and had had for so little time she could not quite let go of his memory; and for Lily, now, she thought it meant that which she had never had.

Of the two of them, Jolin thought, Lily was the more to be pitied. Their village was one of a number of small villages, going about their small concerns, uninterested in anything but the weather and the crops, marriages, births, and deaths. There was no one within three days’ ride who could read or write, for Jolin knew everyone; and the birdcall-speech that she and her apprentice had made was enough for crops and weather, births and deaths, but Jolin saw other things passing swiftly over Lily’s clear face, and wished there were a way to let them free.

At first Jolin had always accompanied Lily on her rounds, but as Lily grew surer of her craft, somehow she also grew able to draw what she needed to know or to borrow from whomever she tended; and Jolin could sit at home and sew her little sacks of herbs and prepare the infusions Lily would need, and tend the several cats that always lived with them, and the goats in the shed and the few chickens in the coop that survived the local foxes.

When Lily was seventeen, Jolin said, “You should be thinking of marrying.” She knew at least two lads who followed Lily with their eyes and were clumsy at their work when she was near, though Lily seemed unaware of them.

Lily frowned and shook her head.

“Why not?” Jolin said. “You can be a healer as well. I was. It takes a certain kind of man”—she sighed—“but there are a few. What about young Armar? He’s a quiet, even-handed sort, who’d be proud to have a wife that was needed by half the countryside. I’ve seen him watching you.” She chuckled. “And I have my heart set on birthing your first baby.”

Lily shook her head more violently, and raised her hands to her throat.

“You can learn to whistle at him as you have me,” Jolin said gently, for she saw how the girl’s hands shook. “Truly, child, it’s not that great a matter; five villages love you and not a person in ’em cares you can’t talk.”

Lily stood up, her eyes full of the bitter fire in her heart, and struck herself on the breast with her fist, and Jolin winced at the weight of the blow; she did not need to hear the words to know that Lily was shouting at her: I do!

Lily reached her twentieth year unmarried, although she had had three offers, Armar among them. The crop of children in her parents’ home had reached seven since she had left them eight years ago; and all her little brothers and sisters whistled birdcalls at her when she whistled to them. Her mother called her children her flock of starlings; but the birds themselves would come and perch on Lily’s outstretched fingers, and on no one else’s.

Lily was riding home from a sprained ankle in a neighboring village, thinking about supper, and wondering if Karla had had her kittens yet when she realized she was overtaking another traveller on the road. She did not recognize the horse, and reined back her own, for she dreaded any contact with strangers; but the rider had already heard her approach and was waiting for her. Reluctantly she rode forward. The rider threw back the hood of his cloak as she approached and smiled at her. She had never seen him before; he had a long narrow face, made longer by lines of sorrow around his mouth. His long hair was blond and grey mixed, and he sat his horse as if he had been sitting on horseback for more years past than he would wish to remember. His eyes were pale, but in the fading twilight she could not see if they were blue or grey.

“Pardon me, lady,” he greeted her, “but I fear I have come wrong somewhere. Would you have the goodness to tell me where I am?”

She shook her head, looking down at the long quiet hands holding his horse’s reins, then forced herself to look up, meeting his eyes. She watched his face for comprehension as she shook her head again, and touched two fingers to her mouth and her throat; and said sadly to herself, I cannot tell you anything, stranger. I cannot talk.

The stranger’s expression changed indeed, but the comprehension she expected was mixed with something else she could not name. Then she heard his words clearly in her mind, although he did not move his lips. Indeed, but I can hear you, lady.

Lily reached out, not knowing that she did so, and her fingers closed on a fold of the man’s cloak. He did not flinch from her touch, and her horse stood patiently still, wanting its warm stall and its oats, but too polite to protest. Who—who are you? she thought frantically. What are you doing to me?

Be easy, lady. I am—here there was an odd flicker—a mage, of sorts; or once I was one. I retain a few powers. I—and his thought went suddenly blank with an emptiness that was much more awful than that of a voice fallen silent—I can mindspeak. You have not met any of … us … before?

She shook her head.

There are not many. He looked down into the white face that looked up at him and felt an odd creaky sensation where once he might have had a heart.

Where are you going? she said at last.

He looked away; she thought he stared at the horizon as if he expected to see something he could hastily describe as his goal.

I do not mean to question you, she said; forgive me, I am not accustomed to … speech … and I forget my manners.

He smiled at her, but the sad lines around his mouth did not change. There is no lack of courtesy, he replied; only that I am a wanderer, and I cannot tell you where I am going. He looked up again, but there was no urgency in his gaze this time. I have not travelled here before, however, and even a … wanderer … has his pride; and so I asked you the name of this place.

She blushed that she had forgotten his question, and replied quickly, the words leaping into her mind. The village where I live lies just there, over the little hill. Its name is Rhungill. That way—she turned in her saddle—is Teskip, where I am returning from; this highway misses it, it lay to your right, beyond the little forest as you rode this way.

He nodded gravely. You have always lived in Rhungill?

She nodded; the gesture felt familiar, but a bubble of joy beat in her throat that she need not halt with the nod. I am the apprentice of our healer.

He was not expecting to hear himself say: Is there an inn in your village, where a wanderer might rest for the night? In the private part of his mind he said to himself: There are three hours till sunset; there is no reason to stop here now. If there are no more villages, I have lain by a fire under a tree more often than I have lain in a bed under a roof for many years past.

Lily frowned a moment and said, No-o, we have no inn; Rhungill is very small. But there is a spare room—it is Jolin’s house, but I live there too—we often put people up, who are passing through and need a place to stay. The villagers often send us folk. And because she was not accustomed to mindspeech, he heard her say to herself what she did not mean for him to hear: Let him stay a little longer.

And so he was less surprised when he heard himself answer: I would be pleased to spend the night at your healer’s house.

A smile, such as had never before been there, bloomed on Lily’s face; her thoughts tumbled over one another and politely he did not listen, or let her know that he might have. She let her patient horse go on again, and the stranger’s horse walked beside.

They did not speak. Lily found that there were so many things she would like to say, to ask, that they overwhelmed her; and then a terrible shyness closed over her, for fear that she would offend the stranger with her eagerness, with the rush of pent-up longing for the particulars of conversation. He held his silence as well, but his reasons stretched back over many wandering years, although once or twice he did look in secret at the bright young face beside him, and again there was the odd, uncomfortable spasm beneath his breastbone.

They rode over the hill and took a narrow, well-worn way off the highway. It wound into a deep cutting, and golden grasses waved above their heads at either side. Then the way rose, or the sides fell away, and the stranger looked around him at pastureland with sheep and cows grazing earnestly and solemnly across it, and then at empty meadows; and then there was a small stand of birch and ash and willow, and a small thatched house with a strictly tended herb garden around it, laid out in a maze of squares and circles and borders and low hedges. Lily swung off her small gelding at the edge of the garden and whistled: a high thin cry that told Jolin she had brought a visitor.

Jolin emerged from the house smiling. Her hair, mostly grey now, with lights of chestnut brown, was in a braid; and tucked into the first twist of the hair at the nape of her neck was a spray of yellow and white flowers. They were almost a halo, nearly a collar.

“Lady,” said the stranger, and dismounted.

This is Jolin, Lily said to him. And you—she stopped, confused, shy again.

“Jolin,” said the stranger, but Jolin did not think it odd that he knew her name, for often the villagers sent visitors on with Lily when they saw her riding by, having supplied both their names first. “I am called Sahath.”

Lily moved restlessly; there was no birdcall available to her for this eventuality. She began the one for talk, and broke off. Jolin glanced at her, aware that something was troubling her.

Sahath, said Lily, tell Jolin—and her thought paused, because she could not decide, even to herself, what the proper words for it were.

But Jolin was looking at their guest more closely, and a tiny frown appeared between her eyes.

Sahath said silently to Lily, She guesses.

Lily looked up at him; standing side by side, he was nearly a head taller than she. She—?

Jolin had spent several years traveling in her youth, travelling far from her native village and even far from her own country; and on her travels she had learned more of the world than most of the other inhabitants of Rhungill, for they were born and bred to live their lives on their small landplots, and any sign of wanderlust was firmly suppressed. Jolin, as a healer and so a little unusual, was permitted wider leeway than any of the rest of Rhungill’s daughters; but her worldly knowledge was something she rarely admitted and still more rarely demonstrated. But one of the things she had learned as she and her mother drifted from town to town, dosing children and heifers, binding the broken limbs of men and pet cats, was to read the mage-mark.

“Sir,” she said now, “what is one such as you doing in our quiet and insignificant part of the world?” Her voice was polite but not cordial, for mages, while necessary for some work beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, often brought with them trouble as well; and an unbidden mage was almost certainly trouble. This too she had learned when she was young.

Sahath smiled sadly. “I carry the mark, lady, it is true, but no mage am I.” Jolin, staring at him, holding her worldly knowledge just behind her eyes where everything he said must be reflected through it, read truth in his eyes. “I was one once, but no longer.”

Jolin relaxed, and if she need not fear this man she could pity him, for to have once been a mage and to have lost that more than mortal strength must be as heavy a blow as any man might receive and yet live; and she saw the lines of sorrow in his face.

Lily stood staring at the man with the sad face, for she knew no more of mages than a child knows of fairy tales; she would as easily have believed in the existence of tigers or of dragons, of chimeras or of elephants; and yet Jolin’s face and voice were serious. A mage. This man was a mage—or had been one—and he could speak to her. It was more wonderful than elephants.

Sahath said, “Some broken pieces of my mage-truth remain to me, and one of these Lily wishes me to tell you: that I can speak to her—mind to mind.”

Lily nodded eagerly, and seized her old friend and mentor’s hands in hers. She smiled, pulled her lips together to whistle, “It is true,” and her lips drew back immediately again to the smile. Jolin tried to smile back into the bright young face before her; there was a glow there which had never been there before, and Jolin’s loving heart turned with jealousy and—fear reawakened. For this man, with his unreasonable skills, even if he were no proper mage, might be anyone in his own heart. Jolin loved Lily as much as any person may love another. What, she asked herself in fear, might this man do to her, in her innocence, her pleasure in the opening of a door so long closed to her, and open now only to this stranger? Mages were not to be trusted on a human scale of right and wrong, reason and unreason. Mages were sworn to other things. Jolin understood that they were sworn to—goodness, to rightness; but often that goodness was of a high, far sort that looked very much like misery to the smaller folk who had to live near it.

As she thought these things, and held her dearer-than-daughter’s hands in hers, she looked again at Sahath. “What do you read in my mind, mage?” she said, and her voice was harsher than she meant to permit it, for Lily’s sake.

Sahath dropped his eyes to his own hands; he spread the long fingers as if remembering what once they had been capable of. “Distrust and fear,” he said after a moment; and Jolin was the more alarmed that she had had no sense of his scrutiny. No mage-skill she had, but as a healer she heard and felt much that common folk had no ken of.

Lily’s eyes widened, and she clutched Jolin’s hands. Sahath felt her mind buck and shudder like a frightened horse, for the old loyalty was very strong. It was terrible to her that she might have to give up this wonderful, impossible thing even sooner than the brief span of an overnight guest’s visit that she had promised herself—or at least freely hoped for. Even his mage’s wisdom was awed by her strength of will, and the strength of her love for the aging, steady-eyed woman who watched him. He felt the girl withdrawing from him, and he did not follow her, though he might have; but he did not want to know what she was thinking. He stood where he was, the two women only a step or two distant from him; and he felt alone, as alone as he had felt once before, on a mountain, looking at a dying army, knowing his mage-strength was dying with them.

“I—” he said, groping, and the same part of his mind that had protested his halting so long before sundown protested again, saying, Why do you defend yourself to an old village woman who shambles among her shrubs and bitter herbs, mouthing superstitions? But the part of his mind that had been moved by Lily’s strength and humility answered: because she is right to question me.

“I am no threat to you in any way I control,” he said to Jolin’s steady gaze, and she thought: Still he talks like a mage, with the mage-logic, to specify that which he controls. Yet perhaps it is not so bad a thing, some other part of her mind said calmly, that any human being, even a mage, should know how little he may control.

“It—it is through no dishonor that I lost the—the rest of my mage-strength.” The last words were pulled out of him, like the last secret drops of the heart’s blood of a dragon, and Jolin heard the pain and pride in his voice, and saw the blankness in his eyes; yet she did not know that he was standing again on a mountain, feeling all that had meant anything to him draining away from him into the earth, drawn by the ebbing life-force of the army he had opposed. One of the man’s long-fingered hands had stretched toward the two women as he spoke; but as he said “mage-strength,” the hand went to his forehead. When it dropped to his side again, there were white marks that stood a moment against the skin, where the fingertips had pressed too hard.

Jolin put one arm around Lily’s shoulders and reached her other hand out delicately, to touch Sahath’s sleeve. He looked up again at the touch of her fingers. “You are welcome to stay with us, Sahath.”

Lily after all spoke to him very little that evening, as if, he thought, she did not trust herself, although she listened eagerly to the harmless stories he told them of other lands and peoples he had visited; and she not infrequently interrupted him to ask for unimportant details. He was careful to answer everything she asked as precisely as he could; once or twice she laughed at his replies, although there was nothing overtly amusing about them.

In the morning when he awoke, only a little past dawn, Lily was already gone. Jolin gave him breakfast and said without looking at him, “Lily has gone gathering wild herbs; dawn is best for some of those she seeks.” Sahath saw in her mind that Lily had gone by her own decision; Jolin had not sent her, or tried to suggest the errand to her.

He felt strangely bereft, and he sat, crumbling a piece of sweet brown bread with his fingers and staring into his cup of herb tea. He recognized the infusion: chintanth for calm, monar for clear-mindedness. He drank what was in the cup and poured himself more. Jolin moved around the kitchen, putting plates and cups back into the cupboard.

He said abruptly, “Is there any work a simple man’s strength might do for you?”

There was a rush of things through Jolin’s mind: her and Lily’s self-sufficiency, and their pleasure in it; another surge of mistrust for mage-cunning—suddenly and ashamedly put down; this surprised him, as he stared into his honey-clouded tea, and it gave him hope. Hope? he thought. He had not known hope since he lost his mage-strength; he had nearly forgotten its name. Jolin stood gazing into the depths of the cupboard, tracing the painted borders of vines and leaves and flowers with her eye; and now her thoughts were of things that it would be good to have done, that she and Lily always meant to see to, and never quite had time for.

When Lily came home in the late morning, a basket over her arm, Sahath was working his slow way with a spade down the square of field that Jolin had long had in her mind as an extension of her herb garden. Lily halted at the edge of the freshly turned earth, and breathed deep of the damp sweet smell of it. Sahath stopped to lean on his spade, and wiped his forehead on one long dark sleeve. It is near dinnertime, said Lily hesitantly, fearful of asking him why he was digging Jolin’s garden; but her heart was beating faster than her swift walking could explain.

He ate with them, a silent meal, for none of the three wished to acknowledge or discuss the new balance that was already growing among them. Then he went back to his spade.

He did a careful, thorough job of the new garden plot; two days it took him. When he finished it, he widened the kitchen garden. Then he built a large new paddock for Lily’s horse—and his own; the two horses had made friends at once, and stood head to tail in the shade at the edge of the tiny turnout that flanked the small barn. When they were first introduced to their new field, they ran like furies around it, squealing and plunging at each other. Jolin came out of the house to see what the uproar was about. Sahath and Lily were leaning side by side on the top rail of the sturdy new fence; Jolin wondered what they might be saying to each other. The horses had enough of being mad things, and ambled quietly over to ask their riders for handouts. Jolin turned and reentered the house.

On the third day after his arrival Jolin gave Sahath a shirt and trousers, lengthened for their new owner: The shirt tail and cuffs were wide red bands sewn neatly onto the original yellow cloth; the trousers were green, and each leg bore a new darker green hem. No mage had ever worn such garb. He put them on. At the end of the week Lily gave him a black and green—the same coarse green of the trouserhems—jacket. He said, Thank you, lady, and she blushed and turned away. Jolin watched them, and wondered if she had done the right thing, not to send him away when she might have; wondered if he knew that Lily was in love with him. She wondered if a mage might know anything of love, anything of a woman’s love for a man.

He propped up the sagging cow shed where the two goats lived, and made the chicken-coop decently foxproof. He built bird-houses and feeders for the many birds that were Lily’s friends; and he watched her when he thought she did not notice, when they came to visit, perching on her hands and shoulders and rubbing their small heads against her face. He listened to their conversations, and knew no more of what passed than Jolin did of his and Lily’s.

He had never been a carpenter, any more than he had been a gardener; but he knew his work was good, and he did not care where the skill came from. He knew he could look at the things he wished to do here and understand how best to do them, and that was enough. He slept the nights through peacefully and dreamlessly.

A few days after the gift of the jacket Jolin said to him, “The leather-worker of our village is a good man and clever. He owes us for his wife’s illness last winter; it would please … us … if you would let him make you a pair of boots.” His old boots, accustomed to nothing more arduous than the chafing of stirrup and stirrup-leather, had never, even in their young days, been intended for the sort of work he was lately requiring of them. He looked at them ruefully, stretched out toward the fire’s flickering light, the dark green cuffs winking above them, and Karla’s long furry red tail curling and uncurling above the cuffs.

He went into the village the next day. He understood, from the careful but polite greetings he received, that the knowledge of Jolin’s new hired man had gone before him; and he also understood that no more than his skill with spade and hammer had gone into the tale. There was no one he met who had the skill to recognize a mage-mark, nor was there any suspicion, besides the wary observation of a stranger expected to prove himself one way or another, that he was anything more or less than an itinerant laborer. The boot-maker quietly took his measurements and asked him to return in a week.

Another week, he thought, and was both glad and afraid. It was during that week that he finished the paddock for the horses. He wanted to build a larger shed to store hay, for there was hay enough in the meadowland around Jolin’s house to keep all the livestock—even a second horse, he thought distantly—all the winter, if there was more room for it than the low loft over the small barn.

In a week he went back to fetch his boots; they were heavy, hard things, a farmer’s boots, and for a moment they appalled him, till he saw the beauty of them. He thanked their maker gravely, and did not know the man was surprised by his tone. Farmers, hired men, took their footgear for granted; he had long since learned to be proud of his craft for its own sake. And so he was the first of the villagers to wonder if perhaps there was more to Jolin’s hired man—other than the fact, well mulled over all through Rhungill, that Jolin had never before in over twenty years been moved to hire anyone for more than a day’s specific job—than met the eye. But he had no guess of the truth.

Sahath asked the boot-maker if there was someone who sold dry planking, for he had all but used Lily and Jolin’s small store of it, till now used only for patching up after storms and hard winter weather. There were several such men, and because the leather-worker was pleased at the compliment Sahath paid him, he recommended one man over the others. Sahath, unknowing, went to that man, who had much fine wood of just the sort Sahath wanted; but when he asked a price, the man looked at him a long moment and said, “No charge, as you do good work for them; you may have as much as you need as you go on for them. There are those of us know what we owe them.” The man’s name was Armar.

Sahath went in his heavy boots to the house he had begun in secret to call home. He let no hint of the cost to his pride his workman’s hire of sturdy boots had commanded; but still Jolin’s quick eyes caught him staring at the calluses on his long-fingered hands, and guessed something of what he was thinking.

A week after he brought his boots home he began the hay shed. He also began to teach Lily and Jolin their letters. He had pen and paper in his saddlebags, and a wax tablet that had once been important in a mage’s work. When he first took it out of its satchel, he had stood long with it in his hands; but it was silent, inert, a tool like a hammer was a tool and nothing more. He brought it downstairs, and whittled three styluses from bits of firewood.

“If you learn to write,” he said, humbly, to Jolin, “Lily may speak to you as well as she may speak to any wandering … mage.” It was all the explanation he gave, laying the pale smooth tablet down on the shining golden wood of the table; and Jolin realized, when he smiled uncertainly at her and then turned to look wistfully at Lily, that he did love her dearer-than-daughter, but that nothing of that love had passed between them. Jolin had grown fond of the quiet, weary man who was proving such a good landsman, fond enough of him that it no longer hurt her to see him wearing her husband’s old clothes which she herself had patched for his longer frame; and so she thought, Why does he not tell her? She looked at them as they looked at each other, and knew why, for the hopelessness was as bright in their eyes as the love. Jolin looked away unhappily, for she understood too that there was no advice she could give them that they would listen to. But she could whisper charms that they permit themselves to see what was, and not blind themselves with blame for what they lacked. Her lips moved.

Each evening after that the two women sat on either side of him and did their lessons as carefully as the students of his mage-master had ever done theirs, although they had been learning words to crack the world and set fire to the seas. Sahath copied the letters of the alphabet out plainly and boldly onto a piece of stiff parchment, and Jolin pinned it to the front of the cupboard, where his two students might look at it often during the day.

Spring turned to summer, and Sahath’s boots were no longer new, and he had three more shirts and another pair of trousers. The last shirt and trousers were made for him, not merely made over; and the first shirt had to be patched at the elbows. The goats produced two pair of kids, which would be sold at the fall auction in Teskip. Summer began to wane, and Sahath began to wander around the house at twilight, after work and before supper, staring at the bottles of herbs, the basket of scraps from which Jolin made her sachets, and outside in the garden, staring at the fading sun and the lengthening shadows.

Jolin thought, with a new fear at her heart, He will be leaving us soon. What of Lily? And even without thought of Lily she felt sorrow.

Lily too watched him pacing, but she said nothing at all; and what her thoughts were neither Jolin nor Sahath wished to guess.

One evening when Lily was gone to attend a sick baby, Sahath said, with the uneasy abruptness Jolin had not heard since he had asked one morning months ago if there was any work for a simple man’s strength: “It is possible that I know someone who could give Lily her voice. Would you let her travel away with me, on my word that I would protect her dearer than my own life?”

Jolin shivered, and laid her sewing down in her lap. “What is this you speak of?”

Sahath was silent a moment, stroking grey tabby Annabelle. “My old master. I have not seen him since I first began … my travels; even now I dread going back.…” So much he could say after several months of farmer’s labor and the companionship of two women. “He is a mage almost beyond the knowing of the rest of us, even his best pupils.” He swallowed, for he had been one of these. “But he knows many things. I—I know Lily, I think, well enough to guess that her voice is something my master should be able to give her.”

Jolin stared unblinking into the fire till the heat of it drew tears. “It is not my decision. We will put it to Lily. If she wishes to go with you, then she shall go.”

Lily did not return till the next morning, and she found her two best friends as tired and sleepless-looking as she felt herself, and she looked at them with surprise. “Sahath said something last night that you need to hear,” said Jolin; but Sahath did not raise his heavy eyes from his tea-cup.

“His … mage-master … may be able to give you your voice. Will you go with him, to seek this wizard?”

Lily’s hands were shaking as she set her basket on the table. She pursed her lips, but no sound emerged. She licked her lips nervously and whistled: “I will go.”

They set out two days later. It was a quiet two days; Lily did not even answer the birds when they spoke to her. They left when dawn was still grey over the trees. Jolin and Lily embraced for a long time before the older woman put the younger one away from her and said, “You go on now. Just don’t forget to come back.”

Lily nodded, then shook her head, then nodded again and smiled tremulously.

“I’ll tell your parents you’ve gone away for a bit, never fear.”

Lily nodded once more, slowly, then turned away to mount her little bay horse. Sahath was astride already, standing a little away from the two women, staring at the yellow fingers of light pushing the grey away; he looked down startled when Jolin touched his knee. She swallowed, tried to speak, but no words came, and her fingers dug into his leg. He covered her hand with his and squeezed; when she looked up at him, he smiled, and finally she smiled back, then turned away and left them. Lily watched the house door close behind her dearest friend, and sat immobile, staring at the place where Jolin had disappeared, till Sahath sent his horse forward. Lily awoke from her reverie, and sent the little bay after the tall black horse. Sahath heard the gentle hoofbeats behind him, and turned to smile encouragement; and Lily, looking into his face, realized that he had not been sure, even until this moment, if she would follow him or not. She smiled in return, a smile of reassurance. Words, loose and filmy as smoke, drifted into Sahath’s mind: I keep my promises. But he did not know what she had read in his face, and he shook his head to clear it of the words that were not meant for him.

No villager would have mistaken Sahath for a workman now, in the dark tunic and cloak he had worn when he first met Lily, riding his tall black horse; the horse alone was too fine a creature for anyone but a man of rank. For all its obvious age, for the bones of its face showed starkly through the skin, it held its crest and tail high, and set its feet down as softly as if its master were made of eggshells. Lily, looking at the man beside her on his fine horse, and looking back to the pricked ears of her sturdy, reliable mount, was almost afraid of her companion, as she had been afraid when he first spoke in her mind, and as she had not been afraid again for many weeks.

Please, Sahath said now. Do not fear me: I am the man who hammered his fingers till they were blue and black, and cursed himself for clumsiness till the birds fled the noise, and stuck his spade into his own foot and yelped with pain. You know me too well to fear me.

Lily laughed, and the silent chime of her laughter rang in his mind as she tipped her chin back and grinned at the sky. And I am the girl who cannot spell.

You do very well.

Not half so well as Jolin.

Jolin is special.

Yes. And their minds fell away from each other, and each disappeared into private thoughts.

They rode south and west. Occasionally they stopped in a town for supplies; but they slept always under the stars, for Lily’s dread of strangers and Sahath’s uneasiness that any suspicion rest on her for travelling thus alone with him, and he a man past his prime and she a beauty. Their pace was set by Lily’s horse, which was willing enough, but unaccustomed to long days of travelling, though it was young and Sahath’s horse was old. But it quickly grew hard, and when they reached the great western mountains, both horses strode up the slopes without trouble.

It grew cold near the peaks, but Sahath had bought them fur cloaks at the last town; no one lived in the mountains. Lily looked at hers uncertainly, and wished to ask how it was Sahath always had money for what he wished to buy. But she did not quite ask, and while he heard the question anyway, he chose not to answer.

They wandered among the mountain crests, and Lily became totally confused, for sometimes they rode west and south and sometimes east and north; and then there was a day of fog, and the earth seemed to spin around her, and even her stolid practical horse had trouble finding its footing. Sahath said, There is only a little more of this until we are clear, and Lily thought he meant something more than the words simply said; but again she did not ask. They dismounted and led the horses, and Lily timidly reached for a fold of Sahath’s sleeve, for the way was wide enough that they might walk abreast. When he felt her fingers, he seized her hand in his, and briefly he raised it to his lips and kissed it, and then they walked on hand in hand.

That night there was no sunset, but when they woke in the morning the sky was blue and cloudless, and they lay in a hollow at the edge of a sandy shore that led to a vast lake; and the mountains were behind them.

They followed the shore around the lake, and Lily whistled to the birds she saw, and a few of them dropped out of the sky to sit on Lily’s head and shoulders and chirp at her.

What do the birds say to you? said Sahath, a little jealously.

Oh—small things, replied Lily, at a loss; she had never tried to translate one friend for another before. It is not easy to say. They say this is a good place, but—she groped for a way to explain—different.

Sahath smiled. I am glad of the good, and I know of the different, for we are almost to the place we seek.

They turned away from the lake at last, onto a narrow track; but they had not gone far when a meadow opened before them. There were cows and horses in the meadow; they raised their heads to eye the strangers as they passed. Lily noticed there was no fence to enclose the beasts, although there was an open stable at the far edge of the field; this they rode past. A little way farther and they came to an immense stone hall with great trees closed around it, except for a beaten space at its front doors. This space was set around with pillars, unlit torches bound to their tops. A man sat alone on one of the stone steps leading to the hall doors; he was staring idly into nothing, but Lily was certain that he knew of their approach—and had known since long before he had seen or heard them—and was awaiting their arrival.

Greetings, said Sahath, as his horse’s feet touched the bare ground.

The man brought his eyes down from the motes of air he had been watching and looked at Sahath and smiled. Greetings, he replied, and his mindspeech sounded in Lily’s head as well as Sahath’s. Lily clung to Sahath’s shadow and said nothing, for the man’s one-word greetings had echoed into immeasurable distances, and she was dizzy with them.

This is my master, Sahath said awkwardly, and Lily ducked her head once and glanced at the man. He caught her reluctant eye and smiled, and Lily freed her mind enough to respond: Greetings.

That’s better, said the man. His eyes were blue, and his hair was blond and curly; if it were not for the aura of power about him that hung shivering like a cloak from his head and shoulders, he would have been an unlikely figure for a mage-master.

What did you expect, came his thought, amused, an ancient with a snowy beard and piercing eyes—in a flowing black shroud and pointed cap?

Lily smiled in spite of herself. Something like that.

The man laughed; it was the first vocal sound any of the three had yet made. He stood up. He was tall and narrow, and he wore a short blue tunic over snug brown trousers and tall boots. Sahath had dismounted, and Lily looked at the two of them standing side by side. For all the grey in Sahath’s hair, and the heavy lines in his face, she could see the other man was much the elder. Sahath was several inches shorter than his master, and he looked worn and ragged from travel, and Lily’s heart went out in a rush to him. The blond man turned to her at once: You do not have to defend him from me; and Sahath looked between them, puzzled. And Lily, looking into their faces, recognized at last the mage-mark, and knew that she would know it again if she ever saw it in another face. And she was surprised that she had not recognized it as such long since in Sahath’s face, and she wondered why; and the blond man flicked another glance at her, and with the glance came a little gust of amusement, but she could not hear any words in it.

After a pause Sahath said, You will know why we have come.

I know. Come; you can turn your horses out with the others; they will not stray. Then we will talk.

The hall was empty but for a few heavy wooden chairs and a tall narrow table at the far end, set around a fireplace. Lily looked around her, tipping her head back till her neck creaked in protest, lagging behind the two men as they went purposefully toward the chairs. She stepped as softly as she might, and her soft-soled boots made no more noise than a cat’s paws; yet as she approached the center of the great hall she stopped and shivered, for the silence pressed in on her as if it were a guardian. What are you doing here? Why have you come to this place? She wrapped her arms around her body, and the silence seized her the more strongly: How dare you walk the hall of the mage-master?

Her head hurt; she turned blindly back toward the open door and daylight, and the blue sky. Almost sobbing, she said to the silence: I came for vanity, for vanity, I should not be here, I have no right to walk in the hall of the mage-master.

But as she stretched out her hands toward the high doors, a bird flew through them: a little brown bird that flew in swoops, his wings closing briefly against his sides after every beat; and he perched on one of her outflung hands. He opened his beak, and three notes fell out; and the guardian silence withdrew slightly, and Lily could breathe again. He jumped from Lily’s one hand to the other, and she, awed, cupped her hands around him. He cocked his head and stared at her with one onyx-chip eye and then the other. The top of his head was rust-colored, and there were short streaks of cinnamon at the corner of each black eye. He offered her the same three notes, and this time she pursed her lips and gently gave them back to him. She had bent her body over her cupped hands, and now she straightened up and, after a pause of one breath, threw her head back, almost as if she expected it to strike against something; but whatever had been there had fled entirely. The bird hopped up her wrist to her arm, to her shoulder; and then he flew up, straight up, without swooping, till he perched on the sill of one of the high windows, and he tossed his three notes back down to her again. Then two more small brown birds flew through the doors, and passed Lily so closely that her hair stirred with the wind of their tiny wings; and they joined their fellow on the windowsill. There were five birds after them, and eight after that; till the narrow sills of the tall windows were full of them and of their quick sharp song. And Lily turned away from the day-filled doorway, back to the dark chairs at the farther end of the hall, where the men awaited her.

The blond man looked long at her as she came up to him, but it was not an unkind look. She smiled timidly at him, and he put out a hand and touched her black hair. There have been those who were invited into my hall who could not pass the door.

Sahath’s face was pale. I did not know that I brought her—

Into danger? finished the mage-master. Then you have forgotten much that you should have remembered.

Sahath’s face had been pale, but at the master’s words it went white, corpse-white, haggard with memory. I have forgotten everything.

The mage-master made a restless gesture. That is not true; it has never been true; and if you wish to indulge in self-pity, you must do it somewhere other than here.

Sahath turned away from the other two, slowly, as if he were an old, old man; and if Lily had had any voice, she would have cried out. But when she stepped forward to go to him, the master’s hand fell on her shoulder, and she stopped where she stood, although she ached with stillness.

Sahath, the master went on more gently, you were among the finest of any of my pupils. There was a light about you that few of the others could even see from their dulness, though those I chose to teach were the very best. Among them you shone like a star.

Lily, the master’s hand still on her shoulder, began to see as he spoke a brightness form about Sahath’s hands, a shiningness, an almost-mist about his feet, that crept up his legs, as if the master’s words lay around him, built themselves into a wall or a ladder to reach him, for the master’s wisdom to climb, and to creep into his ear.

Sahath flung out a hand, and brightness flickered and flaked away from it, and a mote or two drifted to Lily’s feet. She stooped, and touched the tips of two fingers to them, the mage-master’s hand dropping away from her shoulder as she knelt. She raised her hand, and the tips of her first and third fingers glimmered.

I was the best of your pupils once, Sahath said bitterly, and the bitterness rasped at the minds that heard him. But I did not learn what I needed most to learn: my own limits. And I betrayed myself, and your teaching, my master, and I have wandered many years since then, doing little, for little there is that I am able to do. With my mage-strength gone, my learning is of no use, for all that I know is the use of mage-strength. He spread his hands, straightening the fingers violently as though he hated them; and then he made them into fists and shook them as if he held his enemy’s life within them.

And more flakes of light fell from him and scattered, and Lily crept, on hands and knees, nearer him, and picked them up on the tips of her fingers, till all ten fingers glowed; and the knees of her riding dress shone, and when she noticed this, she laid her hands flat on the stone floor, till the palms and the finger-joints gleamed. As she huddled, bent down, her coil of hair escaped its last pins and the long braid of it fell down, and its tip skittered against the stones, and when she raised her head again, the black braid-tip was star-flecked.

The mage-master’s eyes were on the girl as he said, You betrayed nothing, but your own sorrow robbed you by the terrible choice you had to make, standing alone on that mountain. You were too young to have had to make that choice; I would have been there had I known; but I was too far away, and I saw what would happen too late. You saw what had to be done, and you had the strength to do it—that was your curse. And when you had done it, you left your mage-strength where you stood, for the choice had been too hard a one, and you were sickened with it. And you left, and I—I could not find you, for long and long.… There was a weight of sorrow as bitter as Sahath’s in his thought, and Lily sat where she was, cupping her shining hands in her lap and looking up at him, while his eyes still watched her. She thought, but it was a very small thought: The silence was right—I should not be here.

It was a thought not meant to be overheard, but the blond man’s brows snapped together and he shook his head once, fiercely; and she dropped her eyes to her starry palms, and yet she was comforted.

I did not leave my mage-strength, said Sahath, still facing away from his master, and the girl sitting at his feet; but as his arms dropped to his sides, the star-flakes fell down her back and across her spreading skirts.

I am your master still, the blond man said, and his thought was mild and gentle again. And I say to you that you turned your back on it and me and left us. Think you that you could elude me—me?—for so long had you not the wisdom I taught you—and the strength to make yourself invisible to my far-seeing? I have not known what came to you since you left that mountain with the armies dying at its feet, till you spoke of me to two women in a small bright kitchen far from here. In those long years I have known nothing of you but that you lived, for your death you could not have prevented me from seeing.

In the silence nothing moved but the tiny wings of birds.

Sahath turned slowly around.

Think you so little of the art of carpentry that you believe any man who holds a hammer in his hand for the first time may build a shed that does not fall down, however earnest his intentions—and however often he bangs his thumb and curses?

Lily saw Sahath’s feet moving toward her from the corner of her eye, and lifted her face to look at him, and he looked down at her, dazed. Lily—he said, and stooped, but the mage-master was there before him, and took Lily’s hands, and drew her to her feet. Sahath touched the star-flakes on her shoulders, and then looked at his hands, and the floor around them where the star-flakes lay like fine sand. “I—” he said, and his voice broke.

The mage-master held Lily’s hands still, and now he drew them up and placed them, star-palms in, against her own throat; and curled her fingers around her neck, and held them there with his own long-fingered hands. She stared up at him, and his eyes reminded her of the doors of his hall, filled with daylight; and she felt her own pulse beating in her throat against her hands. Then the master drew his hands and hers away, and she saw that the star-glitter was gone from her palms. He dropped her hands, smiling faintly, and stepped back.

The air whistled strangely as she sucked it into her lungs and blew it out again. She opened her mouth and closed it; raised one hand to touch her neck with her fingers, yet she could find nothing wrong. She swallowed, and it made her throat tickle; and then she coughed. As she coughed, she looked down at the dark hem of her riding dress; the star-flakes were gone from it too, and the dust of them had blown away or sunk into the floor. She coughed again, and the force of it shook her whole body, and hurt her throat and lungs; but then she opened her mouth again when the spasm was past and said, “Sahath.” It was more a croak, or a bird’s chirp, than a word; but she looked up, and turned toward him, and said “Sahath” again, and it was a word this time. But as her eyes found him, she saw the tears running down his face.

He came to her, and she raised her arms to him; and the mage-master turned his back on them and busied himself at the small high table before the empty hearth. Lily heard the chink of cups as she stood encircled by Sahath’s arms, her dark head on his dark-cloaked shoulder, and the taste of his tears on her lips. She turned at the sound, and looked over her shoulder; the master held a steaming kettle in his hands, and she could smell the heat of it, although the hearth was as black as before. Sahath looked up at his old teacher when Lily stirred; and the mage-master turned toward them again, a cup in each hand. Sahath laughed.

The mage-master grinned and inclined his head. “Schoolboy stuff, I know,” but he held the cups out toward them nonetheless. Lily reached out her left hand and Sahath his right, so that their other two hands might remain clasped together.

Whatever the steaming stuff was, it cleared their heads and smoothed their faces, and Lily said, “Thank you,” and smiled joyfully. Sahath looked at her and said nothing, and the blond man looked at them both, and then down into his cup.

“You know this place,” the mage-master said presently, raising his eyes again to Sahath’s shining face; “You are as free in it now as you were years ago, when you lived here as my pupil.” And he left them, setting his cup down on the small table and striding away down the hall, out into the sunlight. His figure was silhouetted a moment, framed by the stone doorsill; and then he was gone. The small brown birds sang farewell.

It was three days before Lily and Sahath saw him again. For those three days they wandered together through the deep woods around the master’s hall, feeling the kindly shade curling around them, or lifting their faces to the sun when they walked along the shores of the lake. Lily learned to sing and to shout. She loved to stand at the edge of the lake, her hands cupped around her mouth, that her words might fly as far as they could across the listening water, but though she waited till the last far whisper had gone, she never had an answer. Sahath also taught her to skip small flat stones across the silver surface; she had never seen water wider than a river before, and the rivers of her acquaintance moved on about their business much too swiftly for any such game. She became a champion rock-skipper; anything less than eight skittering steps across the water before the small missile sank, and she would shout and stamp with annoyance, and Sahath would laugh at her. His stones always fled lightly and far across the lake.

“You’re helping them,” she accused him.

“And what if I am?” he teased her, grinning.

“It’s not fair.”

The grin faded, and he looked at her thoughtfully. He picked up another small flat stone and balanced it in his hand. “You want to lift it as you throw it—lift it up again each time it strikes the water.…” He threw, and the rock spun and bounded far out toward the center of the lake; they did not see where it finally disappeared.

Sahath looked at Lily. “You try.”

“I—” But whatever she thought of saying, she changed her mind, found a stone to her liking, tossed it once or twice up and down in her hand, and then flicked it out over the water. They did not notice the green-crested black bird flying low over the lake, for they were counting the stone’s skips; but on the fourteenth skip the bird seized the small spinning stone in its talons, rose high above the water, and set out to cross the lake.

At last the bird’s green crest disappeared, and they could not make out one black speck from the haze that seemed always to muffle the farther shore.

The nights they spent in each other’s arms, sleeping in one of the long low rooms that opened off each side of the mage-master’s hall, where there were beds and blankets as if he had occasion to play host to many guests. But they saw no one but themselves.

The fourth morning they awoke and smelled cooking; instead of the cold food and kindling they had found awaiting their hunger on previous days, the mage-master was there, bent over a tiny red fire glittering fiercely out of the darkness of the enormous hearth at the far end of the great hall. He was toasting three thick slices of bread on two long slender sticks. When they approached him, he gravely handed the stick with two slices on it to Lily. They had stewed fruit with their toast, and milk from one of the master’s cows, with the cream floating in thick whorls on top.

“It is time to decide your future,” said the mage-master, and Lily sighed.

“Is it true that Sahath might have cured me … himself … at any time … without our having come here at all?” Her voice was still low and husky as if with disuse, but the slightly anxious tone of the query removed any rudeness it might have otherwise held.

The blond man smiled. “Yes and no. I think I may claim some credit as an—er—catalyst.”

Sahath stirred in his chair, for they were sitting around the small fire, which snapped and hissed and sent a determined thread of smoke up the vast chimney.

“Sahath always was pig-headed,” the master continued. “It was something of his strength and much of his weakness.”

Sahath said, “And what comes to your pig-headed student now?”

“What does he wish to come to him?” his old teacher responded, and both men’s eyes turned to Lily.

“Jolin is waiting for—us,” Lily said. The “us” had almost been a “me”; both men had seen it quivering on her lips, and both noticed how her voice dropped away to nothing when she said “us” instead.

The mage-master leaned forward and poked the fire thoughtfully with his toasting stick; it snarled and threw a handful of sparks at him. “There is much I could teach you,” he said tentatively. Lily looked up at him, but his eyes were on the fire, which was grumbling to itself; then he looked at Sahath by her side. “No,” said the master. “Not just Sahath; both of you. There is much strength in you, Lily; too much perhaps for the small frame of a baby to hold, and so your voice was left behind. You’ve grown into it since; I can read it in your face.

“And Sahath,” he said, and raised his eyes from the sulky fire to his old pupil’s face. “You have lost nothing but pride and sorrow—and perhaps a little of the obstinacy. I—there is much use for one such as you. There is much use for the two of you.” He looked at them both, and Lily saw the blue eyes again full of daylight, and when they were turned full on her, she blinked.

“I told Jolin I would not forget to come back,” she said, and her voice was barely above a whisper. “I am a healer; there is much use for me at my home.”

“I am a healer too,” said the mage-master, and his eyes held her, till she broke from him by standing up and running from the hall; her feet made no more noise than a bird’s.

Sahath said, “I have become a farmer and a carpenter, and it suits me; I am become a lover, and would have a wife. I have no home but hers, but I have taken hers and want no other. Jolin waits for us, for both of us, and I would we return to her together.” Sahath stood up slowly; the master sat, the stick still in his hands, and watched him till he turned away and slowly followed Lily.

I hold no one against his will, the master said to his retreating back; but your lover does not know what she is refusing, and you do know. You might—some day—tell her why it is possible to make rocks fly.

On the next morning Lily and Sahath departed from the stone hall and the mist-obscured lake. The mage-master saw them off. He and Sahath embraced, and Lily thought, watching, that Sahath looked younger and the master older than either had five days before. The master turned to her, and held out his hands, but uncertainly. She thought he expected her not to touch them, and she stepped forward and seized them strongly, and he smiled down at her, the morning sun blazing in his yellow hair. “I would like to meet your Jolin,” he said; and Lily said impulsively, “Then you must visit us.”

The master blinked; his eyes were as dark as evening, and Lily realized that she had surprised him. “Thank you,” he said.

“You will be welcome in our home,” she replied; and the daylight seeped slowly into his eyes again. “What is your name?” she asked, before her courage failed her.

“Luthe,” he said.

Sahath had mounted already; Lily turned from the mage-master and mounted her horse, which sighed when her light weight settled in the saddle; it had had a pleasant vacation, knee-deep in sweet grass at the banks of the lake. Lily and Sahath both looked down at the man they had come so far to see; he raised a hand in farewell. Silently he said to them: I am glad to have seen you again, Sahath, and glad to have met you, Lily.

Lily said silently back: We shall meet again perhaps.

The mage-master made no immediate answer, and they turned away, and their horses walked down the path that bordered the clearing before the hill; and just as they stepped into the shade of the trees, his words took shape in their minds: I think it very likely. Lily, riding second, turned to look back before the trees hid him from view; his face was unreadable below the burning yellow hair.

They had an easy journey back; no rain fell upon them, and no wind chilled them, and the mountain fog seemed friendly and familiar, with nothing they need fear hidden within it; and the birds still came to Lily when she whistled to them.

They were rested and well, and anxious to be home, and they travelled quickly. It was less than a fortnight after Lily had seen the mage-master standing before his hall to bid them farewell that they turned off the main road from the village of Rhungill into a deep cutting that led into the fields above Jolin’s house. As Lily’s head rose above the tall golden grasses, she could see the speck of color that was Jolin’s red skirt and blue apron, standing quietly on the doorstep of the house, with the white birches at one side, and her herb garden spread out at her feet.

Lily’s horse, pleased to be home at last, responded eagerly to a request for speed, and Sahath’s horse cantered readily at its heels. They drew up at the edge of the garden, where Jolin had run to meet them. Lily dismounted hastily and hugged her.

“You see, we remembered to come back,” she said.