Water

The Guardian’s choice was surprising in more ways than one. Everyone in Tamia’s inland village paid the Guardians’ token as all the islanders did, and “please the Guardians” and “as the Guardians hold back the sea” were sayings as common there as anywhere. But Guardians’ apprentices came from the fishing villages, or at least from the villages that lay near the shore, outside the ragged ring of the Cloudyhead Mountains, with a view of the sea. Many inlanders never saw the sea at all; “Mountains are the right horizon for me” was a common inlander remark.

Every islander, inland and seaward, had heard that the Guardian of Western Mouth was growing old, and that she still had taken no apprentice. Although of course the Guardians always knew what they were doing (it was one of the things they learned in the process of becoming Guardians), still, it was very odd, how long Western Mouth had put off taking an apprentice. Some of the voices saying this rang and echoed on the phrase very odd, with a curious, intent, almost greedy intonation. But no one in Tamia’s village had been interested in contemplating who might finally be chosen, as it would not be one of them.

Tamia was her mother’s eldest child, and the only one by her first husband, who had died in a hunting accident. Her second husband, Tamia’s stepfather, tolerated Tamia’s presence in his household because she was quiet and useful. Tamia had never asked her mother what she thought about her husband’s attitude towards his stepdaughter. She had been afraid to ask since she had seen the look on her mother’s face when the midwife put her second husband’s first child in her arms. Tamia had been six. She had spent the year since her mother remarried trying to be helpful. She had known that her stepfather didn’t want her, but she had hoped he might change his mind. After Dorlan’s birth—followed by Coth, Sammy, Tinsh, Issy and Miz—she grew accustomed to the idea that he would not. At least, with so many little ones to look after, there was never any shortage of work for Tamia to do.

Tamia was happiest looking after her family’s animals. They had two cows, one to provide milk for themselves, and the second for her mother to make cheeses to sell; and six sheep, whose fleeces they sold to the weaver and whose lambs they sold to the butcher. As soon as Tamia was tall enough to steady the most phlegmatic of the ewes between her legs, she began learning to shear; but her stepfather took the lambs to the butcher. They also had a small flock of chickens, and only when Tamia was collecting the eggs were none of them missed.

And, until Tamia was twelve, they had had a pony, Columbine, who pulled a plough over their little quarter-hectare of cropland, and who was hired out, with her plough, to other farmers of smallholdings. Columbine had been bought and trained to her work by Tamia’s father, but it was the money on Columbine’s hiring that enabled Tamia’s stepfather to spend so much of his time arguing with the local council over how the town should be run, and how much the Guardians’ token should be. “I feed and house seven children on the tiniest fraction of what we pay one Guardian every year! Magic is magic! It has no mouth to put food into, no back to be sheltered from storms!” was one of his favourite protests.

But Columbine had been old when Tamia’s mother had remarried, and one cold winter morning when Tamia was twelve, the pony had lain down in the shed she shared with the cows, and refused to get up again. She died that night, with Tamia’s tears wet on her neck, because Tamia had refused to leave her. Tamia caught a severe head-cold as a result, and had to go to bed for a sennight, and her stepfather was very angry. But Tamia had lost her best friend, even if she had been only a pony. It had been Tamia who fed and brushed her, and tended her tack, and led her to her other jobs, and fetched her home again. Columbine settled down as soon as she saw her work ahead of her, but she could be positively balky if anyone but Tamia tried to lead her through street traffic.

When Tamia had been a little girl, she had thought the Guardians must be gods, or at least like gods; by the time she entered her teens, she knew they were enough like ordinary people to need to eat and sleep and protect themselves against the winter, and that certain traders brought them what they needed, paid for by the token levied against every islander from birth. (The Guardians had simple tastes—so went the stories—in food and clothing; in everything, in fact, except their desire for gold; but it was considered bad luck to discuss this. Even Tamia’s stepfather was carefully unspecific about where most of the yearly token went.) She also knew that occasionally some Guardian descended from the mountains to one or another of the seaside villages and wandered among its inhabitants for a day, for reasons known only to themselves, frightening everyone they said “Good morrow” to, even members of the local council. Tamia wondered how you recognised a Guardian. She had seen Guardians’ traders occasionally, had seen how they seemed to carry silence and mystery with them; but then, in a village as small as hers, every stranger was recognisable as a stranger, and treated as such.

But Tamia hadn’t liked listening to her stepfather speak against the Guardians’ token, nor to her neighbours debating when Western Mouth would choose an apprentice. It seemed to her rude. So she stopped listening. She had almost forgotten about Western Mouth’s apprentice when the trader came to their door one evening.

Tamia knew him and his pony by sight, but she had never exchanged words with him—though she had, once or twice, with the pony. He knocked on their door at twilight, when Tamia and her mother had their hands fullest, putting children to bed. Tamia heard her stepfather open the door, and speak sharply to whoever stood there, and spared a fragment of her attention to wonder who it was, as she sought night-gowns crushed into dark corners, faced torn-to-bits beds, and grabbed small shrieking bodies attempting to flee the inevitable. Her stepfather would welcome any of his friends, and her mother’s friends knew better than to stop by at this time of day. Who could it be?

Her stepfather had to say her name twice before it registered, and then Tamia found she had no voice to respond with. “Yes, Stepfather?” she managed at last; and the child in her arms stopped struggling in surprise. Everyone in the family, even the littlest, knew that Tamia was of no importance.

Tamia set Miz on her own legs, and stepped timidly forward. “Good evening,” said the trader. “I beg pardon for disturbing you. I have a message for you from the Guardian of Western Mouth: that if you are willing, she would have you to apprentice. She would be glad to see you as soon as you are able to come.”

The trader paused, but Tamia was having trouble taking it in. Her fourteenth birthday had been last week, but little attention had been paid to it; her mother had wished her happy birthday, and given her a kiss. Fourteen was traditionally the age that Guardians took their apprentices. She stared at the trader’s hat, and the long curling red feather that hung down from it. His pack leaned against the door-post, and she could see the pony in the door-yard. Its ears were pricked towards her, as if waiting for her to speak. The trader went on, gently, softly, as if his words were only for her, and it did not matter if any of the rest of her family heard him or not. “Do you know the way to Western Mouth?”

Tamia’s village lay at the edge of the foothills of the Cloudyheads. It was the last village on one of the main traffic routes from the centre of the island to the sea, reached through a narrow gap in the mountains about half a day’s brisk walk distant. It was not a very promising gap—there were better routes both north and south, but they were much farther away—and it was passable enough that Tamia’s village had a good trade in dried ocean-fish and seaweed for finished lumber and hides, and what surplus crops the steep flinty farmland produced, and that Tamia’s mother’s cousin, who had married a fisherman, could come for a visit now and again.

A little north of that route was a narrow path that broke off from the main way and darted fiercely uphill, joining the long trail or series of trails that finally linked all the mountains in a ragged circle, but here made its way along the eastern edge of the Flock of Crows towards the Eagle, the tallest of the western Cloudyheads. Tamia had never seen anyone use that track, nor did she remember anyone telling her where it went, but she knew that it would lead to Western Mouth the way she knew that cheese was good to eat, or that the old man who lived at the edge of town and raised spotted ponies could give you a love-charm if you asked, and if he felt like it. It was just something everyone knew. “I—I think so,” she said to the trader, although her voice did not sound like her own. “It is the path running up towards the Eagle, is it not?”

“Yes,” replied the trader, and nodded his head to her respectfully, making his red feather gambol across his forehead. “At the last turn you must make to reach the Eagle, there is a trader’s sign”—and here he took a bit of wood out of his pocket and showed her the sign scratched on it. And then he turned and picked up his pack and left them. That brief nod of his head seemed to hang in the air of the cottage after the man had left, as if a pole had been stuck in the floor at that place, and a banner tied to its top, declaring Tamia’s emancipation. Tamia ducked round that place, as if something there blocked her way; she half-imagined the sparkle of a tiny pennoncel there, out of the corner of her eye. It was long and curly and red. In the silence she returned to Miz, who had stood staring, mouth open, one arm half in its sleeve and the other hand caught under her chin by her nightgown’s collar, and began to pull her straight. The other children sighed and moved; there was a wail from Issy, who often wailed. “When will you go?” were her mother’s first words. “Tomorrow is washing-day.”

She hugged the cows and sheep good-bye; they looked at her in mild surprise, and carried on eating. The chickens would be glad to be rid of her, because they would be able to keep more of their eggs to themselves. She said good-bye politely to her mother and her half-siblings; her stepfather had left unusually early that morning to bother the councillors. Then she set off towards the Eagle. The journey would take her a day and a half, and her stepfather had complained so much about the necessity of letting her have a blanket to sleep on that she had promised to send it back again with the first trader who visited Western Mouth after her arrival.

She made good time on the first day, and was well up into the lower slopes of the mountains by the time she had to stop because it was too dark to see her way. She had nothing to make a fire with, and ate a little cold food, and wrapped herself in the thin blanket, and leaned back against a tree, reminding herself firmly that bears never came this far west, and wolves were only dangerous to humans in the hardest winters. She found a few gaps in the leaves to look up at the stars through. She thought she would not be able to sleep—at this time of night she was usually trying to put children to bed—it was all too strange; but she was tired, and even the tree-roots couldn’t keep her awake, although her dreams were uncanny, and full of water and wind.

She was very stiff in the morning, and cold, and for the first hour or two she walked on with the blanket still wrapped round her shoulders. But she warmed up at last, and began to step out more freely; and it was before noon that she turned off the track that ambled round the inner edge of the Cloudyheads and struck upward towards the Eagle, according to the little trader’s sign scratched by the way. The slope was even worse than it looked, and she had been climbing steadily for over a day already. Soon her lungs felt as if they might burst, and her thundering heart beat against her ribs as if it would break out. She couldn’t imagine how a trader might walk up this path, carrying a heavy pack, nor his pony, carrying even more, toil behind him. She kept her head down, both to watch her footing and to prevent herself from seeing how much too slowly the crest of this hill came towards her; but she did not see any boot- or iron-shod hoof-marks.

She wondered whether her heart pounded so only on account of the steepness of the path, and if some of it were not her fear of the Guardian. She wished she’d thought to ask what the Guardian of Western Mouth was like. But she had had no opportunity; it was not a question she could have asked with her stepfather standing beside her, and by the next morning the trader had gone.

At the point just before most of the side of the mountain sheared away in a deep dangerous cleft, and when you had passed it, you had left the Flock of Crows and now stood upon the Eagle, she stopped, and leant against a tree, and looked back the way she had come. She knew about this place, where one mountain became another, although she had never been here before. It was spectacular, and more than a little frightening, even though the path that bit into the mountainside to run over its head was wide enough to be reassuring in anything but the worst of storms. She thought that the forest she could see at the Eagle’s foot was the far side of the forest her village lay against. The village sat in the bottom of a little valley surrounded by foothills; there were other little valleys north and south and east over the foothills, where there were other villages—it was said that at the centre of the island was some truly flat land several leagues across, but Tamia didn’t know anyone who had been there—and west, still invisible around a swell of mountain, the route to the great and dangerous sea, which the Guardians protected everyone from.

When her heartbeat stopped banging in her ears as if her heart were trying to escape her body, she pushed herself away from her tree with a sigh, and walked on. The last bit, up the Eagle’s side, was much the steepest. Her tiny bundle of personal belongings weighed on her shoulder like a stone, and the roughness of the folded blanket now chafed her where it touched her damp skin; her head ached as much as her legs did; and sweat ran down her forehead and into her eyes, although the day was not warm.

Tamia knew the words were merely courtesy. Only someone invited by a Guardian would dare visit a Guardian; Tamia was now near the top of the Eagle, where Western Mouth lived, and Guardians—except for their apprentices—lived alone, so this person must be the Guardian she had come to meet; and while she had never met this or any other Guardian, this one must have known who she was, to have asked her to come . . . her thoughts tailed away in a muddle. There was that inconvenient question again, pressing up to the front of her mind and making her stupid, making her incapable of so much as saying “Good day” in return: Why had the Guardian chosen her?

She had not expected the Guardian to be small and round—a full half-head shorter than Tamia, who was not yet grown to her full height—nor to have short charcoal-and-chalk-white-striped hair that flew wildly round her head like the clouds Tamia knew as mares’-tails, and black eyes bright as a bird’s. But she knew at the same time, without any doubt, once she had looked into those eyes, that this woman was Western Mouth, the Guardian who had called Tamia to apprentice, and that she had been waiting for her.

The woman smiled—a smile just for Tamia, as the trader’s nod had been just for her—and Tamia, not accustomed to smiling, smiled back. “Since you want to know so badly, my dear,” the Guardian said, “it is for many of those things you are worrying about that I chose you. I want someone whose worth is plain to me, but not to everyone else, so she will not pine for what she has lost; and I want someone who has your cleverness, and deftness, and perception, and who is accustomed to looking around for things to do, and finding them.” She said this half-laughing, as if it were a joke of no importance, or as if it were so obvious it did not need repeating, like that cheese was good to eat or the man who raised spotted ponies could also make love-charms. She added more seriously, “Perhaps you would like to sit down and rest, and have a cup of tea and look around you, and we could have the rest of this conversation later.”

Tamia barely heard the end of this. Of course she could not sit down and rest, and drink the Guardian’s tea, on false pretences, when the Guardian—for some reason—thought she was welcoming her new apprentice, and Tamia knew she was not. Tamia thought, The things I am accustomed to looking for are floor-sweeping and child-minding and animal-tending things. Not Guardian things. And no one has ever called me clever, or deft, or perceptive.

Perhaps the Guardian saw some of this in her face, for after it seemed that Tamia would make no answer, the Guardian went on: “I have been here alone for a long time, and I have forgotten that some of the things I know not everyone knows. Oh, the high, grand Guardiany things—I know you don’t know them yet. But you will have to notice the other things for me, because I will not, and tell me to teach them to you. My first command to you is that you must tell me when you don’t know something. There is no shame to not knowing something—no, not even after the fifth time of asking and being told! There are many things much too hard to learn in one telling, or in five. Even in the beginning. And even the easiest of the easy ones, there are so many easy ones, you will forget some of them sometimes too. You won’t be able to help it. But you are to learn to be Guardian after me. You do understand that, do you not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, I would like you to find out, and give me a date. Because it is very tedious to me, and I can’t imagine it is giving you much pleasure either. Try assuming that you belong here—just as an exercise, if you like. Like making rainbows or slowing down every thousandth rain-drop or turning clouds into horse-shapes is an exercise.”

Tamia grinned involuntarily at this last reference to her new favourite game. She glanced over at the water-garden that lay around the house and the old yew. It was a beautiful bright day, and warm in the little pocket of valley where the Guardian’s house stood, although there were mare’s-tail wisps blowing overhead, and the tree-tops were singing in the wind. The Guardian and her apprentice were having their lunch outdoors. Ordinary flat grey stepping-stones led through the water from the foot of the house-stairs, and next to the yew tree stood a tiny table and two chairs. Making rainbows and tweaking rain-drops and doing things with clouds began with rearranging the stones in the water-garden, in their shining bed of gold grains, fine as sand, and strangely shaped gold pebbles.

Tamia stood up slowly, and walked to the edge of the pool. There were a lot of stones she still did not know the uses of, but she was beginning to develop a feel for the ones that had uses; it wasn’t quite a hum, like a noise you heard in your ears, and it wasn’t quite a touch or vibration you felt against your hand when you held it near them, but it was a little like both together. She walked slowly round the edge of the water-garden, looking at various stones, and the way the tiny irregular fragments of their bed caught the shadows and turned them golden. Near the corner of the house she came to an area where there was no pressure at all against her ears or her skin or her thought from any of the stones. She knelt down and, after a moment of holding her open hands above the surface of the water, picked up two. The water was cool, as it always was, although the sun had been on the water-garden most of the morning. She held the two stones quietly for a moment. These would do. No, better than that. These were good ones. They gleamed with atoms of gold too small to see; only their twinkle gave them away.

She came back round the corner of the house, and knelt down near the little table where lunch was laid, in a curve of the pond-edge that allowed them their island. She ran her fingertips along the pebbly edge, drew them into the water; then she made a tiny hollow in the pond-bottom—which was no deeper than the length of her fingers—and felt gold flakes swirling up and adhering to her skin; and then she placed one of her stones in it, wriggling it round till she felt it, intangibly heard it, go mmph, like a well-fitted horse-collar settling against the shoulders it was made for. There was a tiny burst of light, and the twinkles of gold on her fingers and on the stone she had chosen disappeared.

Then she did the same to her other stone, and sat back on her heels, and watched as the air and the water around the two stones changed, and she felt the change float and expand, almost like scent, and wreath itself around her, almost like smoke. This was the first magic she’d ever done without the Guardian telling her how. “I—I’ve tried—I’ve done—” she said in a voice rather higher than her usual one. She swallowed. “I’m ready now. I will—I will now stop waiting for you to send me home.”

Tamia had been with the Guardian nearly a year when the Guardian said one morning, “It’s time you had a look at the sea. The way I want to go, it’s a long walk, we’ll take lunch—and perhaps tea.” She tied up food in two bundles, and they set out, towards the Eagle’s peak behind their small meadow.

They often went for long prowling walks along the shoulders of the mountains, following deer trails when there were deer trails, and even rabbit trails when there were those; the problem with rabbit trails was that they were made by and for creatures no more than a foot tall. On some of their walks there was a good deal of scrambling. But the Guardian showed Tamia what plants had leaves or berries or roots that were good to eat—or at least nourishing; or possessed healing properties. And they always looked out for stones that might fit in the water-garden, though they had to wait for the traders to bring them new supplies of the gold that their magic used. Tamia now knew the name of the trader with the red feather in his cap—Traetu; and his pony, Wheatear, for the long curly hair-whorl on his neck, like a stalk of wheat bent by the wind.

Tamia talked to the traders—and their ponies; she also greeted and was friendly with the deer, and the rabbits, and the foxes, and the hrungus, and the birds that visited their meadow or that they met on their walks; and the Guardian said to her thoughtfully, “If you were not so suited to our work, I would wonder if I had called you to the wrong craft; for the wild creatures love you, and no Guardian in all the long list of our Guardianship has ever had a familiar animal.”

But they had never climbed the peak of the Eagle. Tamia, like many inlanders, had never seen the ocean; and she had been too busy and too happy in the last year to think about it, although in the back of her mind she was aware that what she was here for was to learn to protect her land from the ocean, to become a member of the Guardians, who built and patrolled the boundary that kept the land safe from the water. She had no very good picture of what the ocean might be like; she knew that fishermen travelled upon it in boats, like the inlanders sometimes travelled on their ponds and streams and lakes; but when she thought about it at all, she thought of it as a kind of nightmare thing, perhaps a little like a sky full of storm-clouds.

When, in the early afternoon, they finally stood on the top of the Eagle and looked around them, she was amazed. This great, dazzling, every-colour-and-no-colour expanse was like nothing she had ever imagined, let alone seen; and she thought of the cousin of her mother’s who had married a fisherman, who described the sea with a shrug as “A lot of water you can’t drink,” and she could not understand how anyone could think this way. But then, she had probably never stood on the Eagle’s head with the wind in her face—and the Guardian she was apprenticed to standing at her side. The salt smell of it was very strong. She knew the smell from her village; sometimes on wet, foggy mornings when the wind was coming steadily from the west, a faint tang of it was just noticeable as the fog was pushed farther inland to shred itself on tree-tops. It had never seemed to her any more interesting than any other smell. But where they stood, with the wind bucketing around them, this tallest peak of the Eagle seemed to lean out towards the shore while the Cloudyheads on either side seemed to draw back in alarm, the water was on nearly three sides of them and the land seemed little more than a memory behind them. Here the ocean smell was wild and tantalising and full of mysteries.

This is the best, Tamia thought. There is nothing better than this. Not even doing my first magic by myself—not even meeting Southern Eye and Four Doors when they came to see my Guardian, or talking to the traders when they come here, not even Traetu, who told me my Guardian wanted me and will always be my favourite—this is almost as good as being my Guardian’s friend. She glanced at her Guardian, who looked away from the sea long enough to meet her apprentice’s eyes, and Tamia was sure, as she had been sure many times before, that the Guardian knew exactly what she was thinking.

After a little while, the Guardian said thoughtfully, “This island is a strange place; I believe there is no other place like it in all the wide world, though there must be other places just as strange. It is our strangeness to be a threshold between land and water; and the boundary between us is striven for, and fought over, and it shifts sometimes this way, and sometimes that. Perhaps there are Guardians on the other side of the boundary, as we are the Guardians of this; perhaps it is only on account of our angle of vision that it seems to us that the forces of water desire to overwhelm us. Perhaps whatever lives in the deep of the water does not understand that if it succeeded in bringing the dry lands under its sway, it would kill a great many people and plants and animals who love their lives, for I assume plants and animals love their lives too; perhaps it does understand, and does not care, for we are mere land-dwellers. I do not know. But I do know that it is over this one island that the war is fought, and if once we yielded, then all those lands behind us—farther from the boundary we protect—would immediately come under threat; and they have no Guardians. We are the Guardians, and here we hold the line.”

Tamia listened to her Guardian, because she always did; but she was still in thrall to the great beauty of the ocean, and did not understand. It was not until half way through her second year as the Guardian’s apprentice that she saw her first great storm.

There were dangerous storms every winter, storms where people and animals might be lost, if they were unlucky. But she had only seen one or two storms as great as this one when she lived in the valley, storms that uprooted trees and drowned sheep in the fields, that levelled houses, and might occasionally do the same to whole villages. “Island weather,” everyone called it, and the old people nodded sardonically after it was all over and the losses were never as great as first they appeared, and said to people like Tamia’s stepfather, “Are you so sure the Guardians do not earn their tokens?”

But she could not have guessed how much wilder and more fearful such a storm would be near the crest of the Eagle, and, as a Guardian’s apprentice, what it would be like to be one of the people trying to help throw back the deluge that threatened to drown their land like a fishing-boat in a sudden squall. She knew about rain and wind, about the prying fingers of storm under the eaves, the whiplash of sleet and the terrifying lift of a strong wind, if you were so unfortunate as to be caught outdoors in it; she did not know, when she lived in the valley, about the high mad voices in it, and the faces that almost shaped themselves from the roiling mists, nor the clinging of wetness that looked like rain, and first ran down your body like rain, but then seemed to wrap itself about you like a bolt of heavy cloth, and pull you under.

She did not know that the stones in their own water-garden would hide in the cloud- and fog-shadows scudding across on the pool’s surface, would elude them by the rain in their eyes and the pounding of the wind against their bodies, by the sudden inexplicable water-spouts in the garden itself, which created deep scoured trenches in the sandy floor of the pool, where the stones they had so painstakingly placed then rolled and tumbled. She did not know that the flakes of gold that lay in the sand or floated in the water would become sharp as flints, and cut at her, that the golden pebbles would become dazzling, dizzying, vertiginous, that the rainbows that often hung round the water-garden would turn a muddy, treacherous brown, and twist around her, hampering her, tangible as vines. Tamia knelt and crawled at her Guardian’s side, straining to hear her Guardian’s shouted words through the shriek of the wind, knowing without being told that the water was being called to rebel, to rise up in mastery and dominion over the land, and that while the stones in their own garden dodged away from them, shifted in their places and slid into unexpected holes, that the water was winning.

Several hours they waded and crept and floundered through the water-garden, the gritty stones slipping through Tamia’s cold fingers, her forearms and forehead sore from sand rubbing against skin when she tried, uselessly, again and again, to wipe the wet from her eyes, while she expected at any moment to discover that she had become the tiny gap in the wall through which the conquering water would at first seep, and then trickle, and then blast and roar.

But storms like these were very rare. And Tamia, who had nightmares for months after this one, was glad of it; because for the first time since she had made her first magic in the water-garden, she wondered again if perhaps her Guardian had made a mistake about her after all, that she was not strong enough to be a Guardian. But there were no more savage storms, and Tamia’s other lessons went well, for she was not, as her Guardian had said on their first meeting, afraid of hard work.

The second year passed more quickly than the first, and the third quicker yet. She saw Southern Gate again, and Four Doors several times—“Four Doors is always a wanderer, whoever it is; the Four Doors when I was an apprentice was just the same, and my Guardian told me that the two she could remember before that one were wanderers too”—and White North once took Tamia away for three days, on one of those Guardians’ walks through the villages of more ordinary folk. “I should take you myself,” said Tamia’s Guardian, “but I told you I’d grown too old for mountain-climbing. White North will look after you. You should see the people you guard occasionally, and remind yourself of what their lives are like, especially when you’re still young and unused to this work; it makes what we do here more real.” Tamia hadn’t liked being away from her Guardian—and had not enjoyed the looks on the faces of the villagers they met—but White North was a pleasant travelling companion, and her Guardian was right, the experience had made her feel for the water-garden much keener. She had gone walking once more, this time with Four Doors, early in her fourth year as apprentice.

But some time during that fourth year Tamia began to notice, although she fought against noticing, that her Guardian was slowing down. She went to bed earlier in the evenings, and while she rose as early as she had when Tamia first came, it seemed to take her longer to wake up, and Tamia took over more of the ordinary checks and guards and sightings and alignings of the Guardian’s tasks, and she bid the old yew good-day and good-evening, and when she went for walks—or rather, when she was sent on them, for she would not voluntarily leave her Guardian alone—she went by herself. But when the Guardian spoke, she was the same Guardian she had always been, and so Tamia tried to ignore the rest.

Tamia found her, one afternoon, returning from gathering mushrooms on the gentle slopes of the Dove, slumped by the water-garden. She had fallen into the edge of the pond, and the first, horrifying thing Tamia noticed was that she had fallen with her cheek propped against one of the stones Tamia had placed during the first magic she had ever done by herself; and because of this, her Guardian’s nose and mouth had been held just clear of the surface of the water.

Tamia did not allow herself to think about this for long. Her Guardian’s face was a strange, chalky-grey colour, her breath rasped, and her body lay in a twisted huddle. Furthermore, the wind down the mountain was cold today, and her left side lay in the pond. Tamia had dropped her basket halfway across the meadow, and had run to her Guardian; but even when she raised her head and shoulders onto her own lap, she could not waken her; and the sound of her breathing was dreadful.

Tamia did not remember how she got her up the house-steps and indoors, but she managed it somehow. She pulled her Guardian’s wet clothes off, and towelled her dry, and wrapped her in her warmest dressing-gown, trying to be as gentle as possible with the heavy inert weight of her beloved mentor, trying to fight against the battering strength of her own fear. She noticed that the left side of her Guardian’s body was chilly and stiffer than her right, but she thought this was only on account of her having lain in the water. She lit a great fire in the hearth, and made up a bed for her Guardian near it, and then sat by her side, holding her hand, trying to make her own mind less blank, less frozen with dread and grief, more able to think what she must do.

At last, near dawn, it seemed to Tamia that her Guardian’s sleep shifted a little, and became more like normal sleep. She put an arm round her shoulders and raised her up, and tried to make her drink a little water; and her Guardian seemed to half-rouse, and her lips closed on the rim of the cup. When Tamia held it up higher, the liquid trickled out of the left corner of her Guardian’s mouth; but Tamia saw her Guardian’s throat move in a swallow, and for the first time since Tamia had found her lying in the pool, her own mind came out from under the deep shadow where it had lain.

There were ways for the Guardians to send messages among themselves, but Tamia did not yet know them, for messages were tricky, and ill-handled could disturb or confuse the intricate network of protection which was the Guardians’ chief task. No trader was due to visit them for weeks, and in her Guardian’s present condition, Tamia could not leave her long enough to look for help. The first day passed while Tamia continued to sit at her Guardian’s bedside, and fed her water and broth when she could, and cleaned her up when her body failed her in other ways, and spoke softly to her so that her mind, if it had been cast adrift by whatever had seized her body, might hear her voice and find its way home.

Another day passed, and another. Tamia had to leave her Guardian’s bedside to brew more broth, to dip up more water from the well; even to sleep, and eat, and wash herself, and to do the laundry, that the Guardian might always have clean sheets to lie on. But Tamia was not without hope, for while the Guardian had still not opened her eyes and recognised her, sometimes her right hand moved towards the cup that Tamia was holding, and sometimes, while she drank, she was almost sitting on her own.

On the fourth morning, Tamia went outside, down the house-steps to the water-garden, and paused there, for the first time since she had found her Guardian stretched out at its edge. The last few days she had crossed the stepping-stones quickly, intent on some errand. The water-garden had had to look after itself in the much greater need to look after her Guardian; Tamia had barely remembered to wish the yew tree good-day and good-evening. But the water-garden could not look after itself; and besides, Tamia had thought of something she might try—a message she might be able to send.

This was much harder than that first solitary magic she had done—lifetimes ago, it seemed now. But that had not been truly solitary, any more than any of the other magics she had done since had been, because her Guardian had been there. Even if she was indoors or on the other side of the meadow and could not see what Tamia was doing, she was always there if Tamia needed help. And what Tamia was doing now was something new, something she had not been trained to do.

She walked three times round the house before she felt the presence of any stones that might do for her purpose. When she knelt beside them, their presence seemed to waver, like the reflection of a disturbed pool; she had to wait till everything—including her anxious breath—had calmed. Yes, these would do. She chose one, two, three—oh dear—four, five, six and seven—this was too many. She sat with her stones in her lap and looked at them; the gold flecks blinked at her hopefully. Well, it was the best she could do. A real Guardian could do new things with her water-garden, things she hadn’t been trained for, because she felt its water like a part of the tidal rhythm in her own body, the individual stones as thoughts she had thought or might one day think. But Tamia was only an apprentice. An apprentice’s standard service to a Guardian was twenty years—and Four Doors, who liked to talk, had told Tamia stories of apprenticeships that had been thirty or fifty years. Tamia had had only five years. She would have to create a rough, clumsy magic because she could not create a subtle one.

The golden flash, when it came, was blinding. When her vision cleared, her seven stones lay in a sandy-grey bed, and the golden glitter even on the far side of the water-garden seemed muted. She swallowed with a suddenly dry mouth; but it was done, and she had done it.

It was her first deep sleep in days, and she was woken out of it by a sense of uneasiness. It seemed to her that she heard her name being called, very softly, but over and over again, and that she should recognise the voice that spoke it, but she did not; and that there was something wrong with her name as it was spoken. . . .

She woke up, and found that her Guardian was holding her hand firmly enough to be giving her tiny squeezes as she repeated her name—“Tamia, Tamia”—but why did it sound so strange? Tamia said, or half-groaned, “Oh, I am so glad you are awake!” and bent towards her and kissed her, and then as she turned away from her to look for the tinder-box and kindle the lamp, she saw the rain streaming in through the open shutters on the far side of the Guardian’s bed.

She lit the lamp first, and saw the pools of water the rain had left, and had a nasty, sick feeling in her stomach that the pools were too regularly shaped, and looked rather too much like the shape her seven stones made in the water-garden. She closed the shutters and then flung all the rags she could find in the pools of rain-water, just to disturb their shape, till she had time to go round them one by one and mop them up properly. She blew on the red heart of the drowsy fire, and stirred it, and fed the tiny flame that wavered into being (rain stung her face like embers, hissing down the chimney); and then she went to the water-ewer, and was glad to find that it was still half-full, because it was now quite dark out, and drawing water in darkness and heavy rain would have been unpleasant.

She brought the lamp nearer the bed, so she could see her Guardian’s face; and reassured herself with the warmth of her hand that the Guardian had taken no chill from Tamia having let the fire almost go out. “Guardian, you’re better!”—and a little joy and relief slipped out in her words; but she knew there was still something badly wrong. “Guardian—”

“Tamia,” her Guardian said again, and now, in the lamplight, Tamia saw that her mouth was not working the way it should, and that one whole side of her face looked slack and limp. The Guardian saw the shock register in Tamia’s face, and patted her hand with her own good hand; for the weakness extended all down one side of her body. Trying to speak very carefully, she said, “I know—a little—about what has happened. Something that happens sometimes to old people.”

But Tamia put her hand over her mouth and said, “Don’t talk. You must eat something, now that you’re awake. You must get stronger. And then—then we’ll know better what to do.” She turned away before she could read the expression on her Guardian’s face, and when she sat down again with some hastily reheated porridge, her Guardian allowed herself to be fed like a little child, and Tamia learned quickly to slip the spoon in the side of her mouth where it wouldn’t all helplessly dribble out again.

The rain continued over the next several days. It was early autumn, when the change of weather often comes quickly and strongly, and when storms are common. The winds that caromed around their little meadow seemed wilder and more directionless than usual, even for autumn; but Tamia deliberately did not think about this. She had mopped up the rain-water pools, and while she opened the shutters as often as she could for daylight, however grey, and fresh air, however damp, she kept sentry-watch against the rain spotting the floor. Her Guardian drifted in and out of sleep, but Tamia hoped it was only sleep now. She ate obediently, and tried to help when Tamia washed and turned her, so she would not grow sore from lying in the same position too long; and she regained control over her body functions. And she allowed—because she was given no choice—her apprentice to rub the dead side of her body, and to move that leg and foot, and bend the arm, and curl and uncurl the fingers.

As the days passed, the rain fell harder and the wind blew stronger, till Tamia could rarely open the shutters at all, and during the days as well as the nights the world seemed very dark. Even with the shutters closed the house rattled and creaked, and the wind and rain battered the walls like fists, and little draughts crept in and played with the lamplight. The cloud-cover hung low and thick and menacing over their meadow, and Tamia only went outdoors long enough to draw water from the well, and to greet the yew tree, and ran back in again. She began to wonder if she might not be able to collect enough water by setting bowls and basins on the stepping-stones, and then she would not have to linger so long beneath this bleak and accusing sky. When she had lived in the valley she had hated stormy weather, when she could not go outdoors; but now the pressure of the gloomy hostile weather seemed the proper backdrop to her fears. The water-garden throbbed like a bruise.

Tamia frowned a little at the foot she was holding. The seven stones meant that the rest of the garden felt so different, she had not dared touch anything else; but she was determined that her Guardian should know nothing that might trouble her, if it could be done by Tamia not telling her about it. She had been sure that her seven stones would be noticed by some other Guardian. Well; apparently she had guessed wrong. It had been almost a fortnight. Perhaps she should remove them; the bruise feeling was growing stronger, and every time she walked across the stepping-stones now, she got a headache as well.

She had been sitting, as she sat every evening, by her Guardian’s bed, holding her hand. It was nearly time for her to go to her own bed, dragged out from her own little room to the other side of the hearth, so that she could hear her Guardian easily in the night. The bellow of the storm tonight was curiously soporific; and she had been thinking about nothing in particular for some time when the door was flung open, and a wave of water hurled the tall figure in upon them. The water, as it fell on the floor, arranged itself into seven small pools like seven stones in a water-garden.

Tamia sat where she was, open-mouthed in shock; barely she felt her Guardian stir herself for a great effort, and sit up, leaning on her good arm. The force of the man’s gaze held Tamia motionless; she felt it burning through her, and she thought, When it reaches my heart, I will die.

Tamia was released so suddenly, she fell off her low stool and onto the floor. Dimly she heard the conversation over her head, her Guardian’s exhausted voice, speaking in broken phrases now, and the slurring, which Tamia had grown accustomed to, so strong, she could hardly make out the words; and the man her Guardian had called Water Gate, his voice dropping down in sorrow and grief as he understood what had happened. And then they talked of other things, but Tamia did not listen, drifting in and out of some cold grey place where the wind howled.

At last Tamia felt Water Gate’s hard strong hands, under her arms, pulling her gently but irresistably upright. He did not put her on her backless stool, but leant her against the edge of the Guardian’s mattress; and he brought her a cup of her own broth, and wrapped her hands round it, and held them so while she drank. And then he said to her: “I beg your pardon most humbly, and I am ashamed, as Western Mouth has told me clearly I should be. It is true that I should have known that what Western Mouth’s apprentice has done was through desperate need.

“But you see, apprentice of Western Mouth, you have torn a hole in the close-woven fabric that divides the earth of our world from the water of the next; and through that rent the water is pouring through. And you, apprentice of Western Mouth, are the only person who can stitch it up again—if it can be stitched.”

She paused, but Tamia was still too shaken by Water Gate’s greeting to stir or speak. Rest, rest, she wanted to say to her Guardian, I know it cannot be good for you to talk so much. But she looked at her Guardian, and saw Water Gate move to sit next to her, one arm round her shoulders, holding her good hand in his other hand, and realised that he was giving her his strength somehow; and a little, feeble hope stirred in her, and she thought: I will not care that I have drowned the world, if he will help my Guardian.

“Listen, my dear,” whispered her Guardian. “It is almost dawn. There will be a lull soon—Water Gate has arranged that. And when there is, you will take the bowl on the top shelf, the one at the back behind all the other bowls, and fill it with water from the well; and you will bring it to me here. Fill it as full as you can carry it; and then do not spill it. Not a drop.” And then Water Gate let her lie down, but still he sat beside her, where Tamia had sat for over a fortnight, and looked into her face, and held her hand. Tamia told herself that he was doing for her what she could not do, but still a lonely and hurt little voice inside her said, He is a Guardian, a real Guardian, not a five-years’ apprentice, why cannot he do it, and leave me with my Guardian? It is not he who should sit there. But her Guardian had given the order, and so she did not say it aloud.

She heard the storm die away, and she opened one shutter cautiously and saw dawn struggling to penetrate the clouds. She took down the bowl—she had never seen this bowl before, though she thought she knew every bowl on the shelf, for the Guardians often used bowls in their work—this one tingled against her skin like the stones in the water-garden. She went outdoors to the well. The ground of their meadow was an ocean of mud; tufts of broken grass crowned the crests of the waves. She tried to pick her way carefully, but there was nowhere to put her feet that was any better than any other. She was muddy to mid-shin by the time she returned to the house, and she was so anxious not to spill a drop that she did not dare kick off her shoes before she went indoors.

“The storm will not return today,” said Water Gate. “Go outdoors, and remove your seven stones. Take them out of the water-garden entirely, take them away. And then spend time setting the water-garden to rights; it will tell you how, for Western Mouth has told me you are a good pupil. I will finish the work for you later—if this world is still above water—but for now Western Mouth and I have other work.”

Tamia listened to him, expressionless and unblinking; and then she looked at her Guardian for confirmation before she did his bidding. And she looked back at him, after she had looked at her Guardian, to be sure that he understood that she did what he said only because her Guardian told her to.

Tamia gathered the seven stones from the water-garden, and while she had put them in uncertainly, she picked them up now knowing that they had done what she asked, and that there was no fault in them, only in her not knowing how and what to do. She fondled them gently, as she had used to stroke Columbine, telling them thank-you, telling them that they were her friends. She thought about Water Gate telling her to take them away; and she piled six of them together in a little heap in the heart of the old yew. The seventh, which was slightly kidney-shaped while the others were round, she slipped into her pocket.

She spent the rest of the morning doing what she could with the water-garden. She found that she could do more than she had expected, for now suddenly she began to see the ribbons of energy that ran between the stones. Like ribbons, they were different colours and different sizes, and some of them were taut and some were slack and some were tangled, and it was her work to make them all smooth, and woven equally together. When she put her fingers in the water, the shining flecks of gold swam to her till her hands gleamed like candle-flames; and yet, as she worked, the golden flashes were small and gentle, and seemed to ride briefly on the surface of the water like sweet oil before they dissolved and disappeared. Tamia almost thought they had a faint tranquil smell, like salve on a bruise, and in some wonder she understood that the ache of the bruise-feeling she had had since she placed her message-stones was the source of her new understanding, and she began to think that she would mind if she had drowned the world, even if Water Gate could save her Guardian.

The bowl of water now lay on the table in front of the hearth. Tamia’s eyes were drawn to it at once, though it looked no different than it had done that morning. But she had little more than a glance at it, because she went at once to her Guardian’s bedside, and took her hand, and asked how she was. “I am sure you have worked too hard,” said Tamia. “Have you eaten anything? Let me get you some supper.”

Tamia looked over her shoulder in surprise, and saw Water Gate holding a frying-pan in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other. He laid them down, opened the food-cupboard, and with a meticulous care Tamia had to acknowledge, began to look through their stores. He had a long, lean face and heavy lines down his cheeks and around his mouth, and shaggy black hair. He was not so old as her Guardian. She could see no trace of the wild anger he had almost killed her with the evening before, but what she saw instead was despair, and when he turned briefly and met her eyes, his eyes agreed that what she saw in his face was the truth, though he would have hidden it from her if he could.

“Listen to me,” said her Guardian, and Tamia turned back to her. “There is a new sea-magic. A Horse of Water has come ashore, and gallops up and down the countryside, destroying whatever her hoofs touch, and when she shakes her head, the water-drops that fly out of her mane are sharp as arrows, and kill what they strike. White North, Standing Stone, Four Doors, Southern Eye, and Water Gate have all tried to stop her, and they have all failed. We are the last . . .” Her Guardian stopped, and seemed to consider, and sighed. “Water Gate advised me not to tell you, but I cannot think that is right. It is Water Gate who finally discovered how the Water Horse had entered. It was not your seven stones, little one. It was my weakness. Your stones only marked the entryway; and, my dear, it was the best you could have done as well as the worst, or Water Gate might not have come here in time—in time for our last effort, our last chance.

“The other Guardians have tried, and failed, to curb the Water Horse, to dissolve her, or to send her back into the sea from which she came, as she trampled across each of their lands in turn. But she broke White North’s water rope, and drank up Standing Stone’s pool, and Four Doors’ mire did not stop her, nor Southern Eye’s maze, nor Water Gate’s . . . well, Water Gate did not succeed either, it does not matter how.

Her Guardian fell silent for so long, Tamia thought she would say no more, and was about to slip away and offer to peel the grads, so she could keep an eye on Water Gate; but then her Guardian’s hand gripped hers more strongly, and she said, “Water Gate, in his effort to find out why the Horse had been released upon us, went through your village. Do you remember, on your first day here, when you did not want to tell me that your family would be glad to be rid of you? Water Gate says that your stepfather has taken to telling everyone that it was a tremendous sacrifice to lose you and he only did it because it was what was best for everyone, and that not only is his voice no longer heard raised against the Guardians’ token, but your family are the only ones in all the lowlands Water Gate visited who are not terrified by the storms and the Water Horse, because they believe that Western Mouth’s apprentice will save them.

“So perhaps they are right, and us Guardians all wrong. Listen. You will take this bowl of water, and do not spill a drop. You will have to walk slowly, for the bowl is brimful, but walk as quickly as you may, for the Water Horse is not far away. You will wait for her at the deep crack of valley where the Eagle meets the Flock of Crows. You will see her come striding towards you. Wait; and wait; and wait again; and wait still longer. Wait till she is upon you, till you see her shining blue eyes and feel her cold watery breath. When—and not till then—she would crush you with her next step, then throw the bowl of water over her.

Her Guardian closed her eyes, and again Tamia turned to creep away, but her Guardian said, “You want to be there a little after dawn. It will be a clear night, and the horizon will grow light enough for you to walk by well before dawn—if you are careful, and you know the way—tonight you must eat the supper Water Gate prepares for us, and then you must sleep.” Her Guardian’s eyes opened. “That, at least, I can still give you. I can give you a good night’s sleep.”

Tamia said, “I would rather spend the night here, watching, by your bed.” She did not say “this last night” but she did not have to; if the bowl of water did not work, they would not see each other again. Tamia was still too young and healthy for her own death to seem real to her; but she could just imagine never seeing her Guardian again, and that seemed more terrible than death.

“No,” said her Guardian, simultaneously with Water Gate, stepping silently up behind them, carrying plates in one hand and a bowl of steaming food in the other, saying also, “No.” Tamia turned and glared at him, and his mouth turned in the faintest, ironic smile, as he accepted that his “No” was nothing to her.

Tamia did not know what woke her, but she woke suddenly and completely. She raised herself on one elbow, and looked through the crack in the shutters; she could just see the outline of the trees and the Eagle against the sky. “It is time to go,” said her Guardian, calmly, from the darkness.

Tamia dressed quickly, and found a chunk of bread by feel for her breakfast. By then the light had increased enough, and her eyes had adjusted enough, that she had no difficulty seeing the stone bowl on the table, and the gleam of the water it contained. She stooped over her Guardian, and kissed her, and said, only a little breathlessly, “I will be back in time for tea,” and then she opened the door and turned back to pick up the bowl.

The need to walk so carefully that the water in the bowl never quivered, that no drop was ever at risk of sliding over the edge and being lost, was a useful focus for Tamia’s thoughts. She could not afford to think about how frightened she was, because it might make her feet clumsy or her hands shake; and so she did not think about it. She had her mouth a little open, so she could catch her breath more quickly, for the way was steep, but she was careful even so not to breathe too hard, for her own breath might disturb the surface of the water she carried.

It was still some minutes before dawn when she arrived at the deep narrow ravine between the Eagle and the Flock of Crows. She looked down the stony chasm and thought of a great Water Horse so vast and powerful that she could run up that slope; and then she had to remind herself again that she could not let her hands tremble. She put the bowl down, and then sat down beside it, and rested her head in her hands. She wished she had thought to bring herself something more to eat; and then she realised she was too tensely expectant to be hungry.

And so she sat, and waited for dawn, but as she waited, she began to be aware of a curious noise, a little behind and below her. It was a low, rhythmic noise, with a kind of gasp or grunt in it. At first she had thought it was the pre-dawn breeze, moving suspiciously up and down the crags and disliking what it found, but it was too regular for that; nor was it like any birdsong she had ever heard, not even the korac, whose family groups all talking together sounded like tiny axes chipping rock. At the same time it reminded her of something—some memory of the time before she had lived with her Guardian. Just to give herself something to do for the last few appalling moments before dawn and doom, she went to investigate.

The moment before she saw the mare, she knew what she was hearing. She was accustomed to watching over, and occasionally helping, her stepfather’s sheep birth, though only once had she watched a foal being born, at a farm next to one of the smallholdings that hired Columbine. That mare had made this same noise.

But it wasn’t the same noise. The farm birth had gone just as it was supposed to, and the foal had been born in one long slippery rush after the mare had lain and shoved and strained and grunted for not more than half an hour. Tamia knew, without ever having seen or heard it before, that this mare had been trying to push her foal out into the world for a long, long time, and was very near the end of her strength.

The mare’s eye was glazed, and her neck and sides were black with matted dirt and sweat; but even Tamia’s untutored gaze took in that she was a valuable animal who had been well cared for. “My poor lovely,” murmured Tamia, kneeling beside her head, “why are you here, in the wild, instead of at home being tended to? Did the Water Horse break your fence, your wall, and drive you away, up into the mountains where you could not find your way home?” It was unlikely there was anything Tamia could do, now, and alone, but seeing the painful, waning struggle of this gallant animal troubled Tamia deeply, even though the end of the world would come striding up the steep crag in another moment. Tamia forgot all that, and searched in her memory of lamb midwifery.

She moved round behind the labouring mare. She could see one little hoof sticking out of the mare’s vagina; it appeared and disappeared in rhythm to the mare’s weakening thrusts. Tamia knew what she would have done with a ewe, although she had never had to do it without someone else nearby who knew much more than she did; and she wouldn’t even know that much, except that sheep tend all to lamb at once, and sometimes the only extra pair of hands belongs to a little girl.

There was not even any water to wash in first. She knelt down, and slowly began to thrust her arm and hand up inside the mare’s body, feeling along the slender foreleg of the foal, till she found the second, bent leg, the knee shoved implacably against the wall of the mare’s birth canal. Slowly she shoved the foal back towards the womb again—the mare tried to resist her, but she was too weak. Slowly, slowly, slowly, her arm very nearly not long enough, trying to guess at what she could only erratically and incompletely feel, she rearranged the foal’s legs, felt that its little head was still pointed in the right direction, and began to drag it towards air and daylight and life. The mare’s contractions were only sporadic now; Tamia could no longer hear her groan through the noise of her own rasping breath.

Tamia was covered in blood and slime and mud; it was hard to keep a grip on the foal’s forelegs, and her knees and her other hand kept losing their purchase on the muddy ground; there was a stinging cut on the palm of her other hand where she had slipped on a sharp rock. Her neck and shoulder and back were on fire with cramp. She had stopped thinking about what she was doing, merely automatically pulling harder when the mare’s muscles helped her, pulling and pulling, awkwardly jammed against the mare’s hip, her other hand at first scrabbling for a better hold on the unsympathetic ground, and then, as the foal’s two forelegs emerged together, pulling with the hand that had been inside the mare. She had first knelt down trying to be aware of where the mare’s potentially lethal hind legs were; she remembered nothing now but pull—pull—pull.

The foal was out. She looked at it numbly, briefly unable to recall that this was what she had been fighting for. The second sac had broken some time before; now she wiped its nose and mouth free of mucus, but it lay unmoving. I knew—I knew— said Tamia to herself, but she took her skirt off, for lack of anything better, and began to rub the foal dry. She knelt over it, and rubbed it as if it were a bit of dirty laundry on a washboard; only to dirty laundry she had never whispered, “Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.”

The foal gave a little gasp and choke, and then a long shudder. Its head came up off the ground, and then fell back with a thud, as if dropped. Tamia held her own breath; it could still have been too exhausted—or too injured—by its long struggle for what it needed to do next; and she was at the end of her own dubious expertise. It thrashed a bit with its legs, and stopped. And then suddenly, with a surprising, almost violent energy, it half-rolled up on its side, looking wildly around, as if it couldn’t imagine what had happened to it. Shakily it extended a foreleg; had a quick heave and flounder, and fell down. It lay gasping; and then rolled up again, and began to rearrange its forelegs. Tamia took a long breath . . . and thought to look at the mare.

The mare was still breathing, but only just. Her dim eye looked blind when Tamia bent over her; the spume around her lips and tongue had dried and was beginning to crack. Tamia cautiously stroked her rough neck; there was no quiver of skin, no flick of ear, no roll of eye—nothing. “Oh, no, not you!” said Tamia. “You’ve had a fine foal! You must wake up now and see him. You must lick him all over, so that you know you belong to each other, and then show him how to nurse. Oh, mare, don’t leave him!”

And then the dawn came up over the rim of the mountains, and as the first rays of the sun struck her face, Tamia heard the great challenging bell of the Water Horse’s neigh, and felt the earth shake underfoot with her hoofs. Tamia stood at the head of the narrow cleft in the mountains, with the tears streaming down her face, because she had thrown away her world’s last chance of survival against the sea on account of her inability to let one ordinary mortal mare die, who would probably now die under the Water Horse’s trampling hoofs, even as Tamia herself was going to die.

She waited, holding her bowl. The absence of the few drops she had wasted on the mare was not even visible; the bowl still looked full to the brim. But then again, perhaps it was not, because Tamia’s arms were so tired and strained that she could not quite keep her hands steady, and the surface of the water peaked in many tiny wrinkles which moved and ran in all directions, and yet no drop fell over its edge.

She could see the Water Horse now, see the great, glorious, shining silver cloud of her, for she was very beautiful, even more beautiful than she was terrible. Rocks cracked under her great strides; trees split and fell when she lashed her tail; her hoofs were as big as boulders, her belly as tall as a roof-top, her tail as long as the road to the sea. She moved almost as quickly as thinking; almost Tamia did not have time to raise her bowl as the Water Horse ran up the valley towards her, her tail streaming rainbows behind her. Tamia clutched her bowl to her breast, to hold it level, and she loosed one hand from it, and felt in her pocket for the seventh stone she had placed and then removed from her Guardian’s water-garden, the one that was slightly kidney-shaped; one of the stones that had, perhaps, invited the Water Horse into the world. Tamia slipped the small stone into the bowl of water, and the water’s surface bulged up to meet perfectly the brim of the bowl.

There was a crash like thunder, and a wind came from nowhere and struck Tamia so hard that she staggered, dropped the bowl into the chasm, and almost fell after it. On hands and knees, she began to crawl away from the edge; and then the rain began, and drenched her in a moment. When she found herself unable to go any farther, pressed up against a shoulder of rock some distance from the cliff-edge, she merely hunkered down where she was, and waited. I thought it would be all over at once, she thought. I didn’t realise I would have to be drowned by inches. Never mind. In the roar of the wind and under the burden of her own exhaustion and despair, as she waited, she fell asleep.

She woke to blue skies and birdsong. At first she thought she had already died, and that by some mistake she had been sent to the Place of Joy—for surely people who fail at some great task entrusted to them are sent to live cold below ground forever. But she sat up, and discovered that this hurt so much she hardly could, and thought perhaps this meant she was still alive after all. She used the rock she was next to to help lever herself to her feet. Then she heard the whinny, and looked down at herself, and saw that she was only dressed in her sodden shirt and petticoat. As she stood up, there was a tiny pattering shower of water around her feet. She sneezed.

There was her mare—she didn’t mean to think of her as hers, the possessive just slipped into her mind—and a beautiful black colt with a few grey hairs around his eyes and muzzle peeked round his mother’s rain-soaked rump at the strange object that had just turned itself from a rock into a something else. But his mother whinnied at it again, and walked towards it, so he decided to come along too, trying to prance, and very nearly falling down for his pains. He was still only a few hours old; all legs with a bony, bulgy little head at one end and a miniature-besom tail at the other, and a few knobbly ribs to bind them all together. The mare came straight up to Tamia, and pushed her face into Tamia’s breast; and Tamia laid her forehead against the mare’s poll, and cradled her nose in her hands, and burst into tears.

It was only after this that Tamia thought to look into the abyss where the Water Horse had raced up towards them, neighing challenge and destruction. A great long ribbon of water shone there, arched and sparkling like the gay silky threads of a grey mare’s tail, and rainbows played beneath it, and the rocks on either side of the valley were green with moss, and there was a great pool at the foot of the cataract which was very slightly kidney-shaped, from which a stream ran singing along the bottom of the valley. The water sprang out of a cleft in the rock at the very peak of the crag, where the Flock of Crows became the Eagle; where Tamia had stood with her bowl pressed against her breast to keep it steady, and had wept, knowing that what she was about to do was no use, because she had disobeyed her Guardian, and spoilt everything.

Tamia turned slowly away from the valley, back towards the meadow where her Guardian waited. The mare turned too, and fell in behind her. It was not a long journey, but the way was steep, and all three were still very, very tired. All of them stumbled, and Tamia and the mare leant on each other, and the foal took turns leaning on first the one and then the other, although when he leant against Tamia, he tended to step on her feet, and then he didn’t seem so little after all.

It was nearer sunset than tea-time when they reached the Guardian’s meadow, but Tamia saw the little hummock that the teapot in its tea-cosy made, sitting on the table in front of the house, between the water-garden and the old yew. And then she saw her Guardian emerging from the shadow of the yew, limping heavily and leaning on a stick, but coming straight and steadily towards them.

“Yes, you did do it all wrong,” agreed her Guardian, with great self-restraint, saying nothing about the odd-smelling dampness of Tamia’s shirt-front now transferred to her own, “and I don’t know why either of us is still here either. Perhaps because I am the one who gave you the water, and I would have done exactly the same in your position—except that I would not have known how to birth a foal.” And in her Guardian’s eyes Tamia saw what she had known for a long time, although she had not let herself know she knew it: that part of the reason her Guardian had chosen her as apprentice was because she would make just that sort of wrong decision, and if it lost them the world, then so it did. “We can only do what we can do,” said her Guardian softly. “Sometimes it is enough, despite all.” More briskly she added: “And that valley needed a waterfall, don’t you think? Although I hadn’t realised it till you did it. The Grey Mare’s Tail. There will be stories about it, you know.”

“Water Gate has gone, back to his home,” said her Guardian. “He left a message for you: well done.” She laughed at the expression on Tamia’s face. “He was particularly impressed by your use of the seventh stone—although he would have made you put it with the others if he had known, and none of them in the yew either. He said to tell you, Not even Guardians know everything—and that Western Mouth had chosen better than he could have guessed. He added some rather unflattering things about me, but you don’t have to hear them.”

Tamia scowled, because no one was allowed to say unflattering things about her Guardian. But she was distracted by a grey nose thrust under her arm. She stroked it, and said sadly, “I suppose, if we tell the story, we shall be able to find out who she—they—belong to.”

“They belong to you,” said her Guardian. “Do you think any islander would deny a Guardian’s token so chosen? Nor do I think these two would cooperate about being given back. We can find out who they used to belong to, if you would like to learn the mare’s name, and your foal’s daddy.”

“Then that is what we will do,” said her Guardian. The foal was sucking interestedly at her sleeve. “I have told you before that Guardians have never had familiar animals; I believe you are about to begin a new tradition.” She removed her sleeve from the foal’s mouth; he gave her a wounded look, and stepped on her foot as he turned away towards his mother, and milk. “Ouch. I hope I am not too set in my ways to adjust.”