Legends Read online

  She could see his mind dance ahead of hers, taking up and playing with ideas, transforming them as he had transformed brick into butterfly. She could not dance with him, she could not play with him, but she watched him in wonder.

  “You could go to Roke,” he said, his eyes bright with excitement, mischief, daring. Meeting her almost pleading, incredulous silence, he insisted—“You could. A woman you are, but there are ways to change your seeming. You have the heart, the courage, the will of a man. You could enter the Great House. I know it.”

  “And what would I do there?”

  “What all the students do. Live alone in a stone cell and learn to be wise! It might not be what you dream it to be, but that, too, you’d learn.”

  “I couldn’t. They’d know. I couldn’t even get in. There’s the Doorkeeper, you said. I don’t know the word to say to him.”

  “The password, yes. But I can teach it to you.”

  “You can? Is it allowed?”

  “I don’t care what’s ‘allowed,’” he said, with a frown she had never seen on his face. “The Archmage himself said, Rules are made to be broken. Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them. I have the courage, if you do!”

  She looked at him. She could not speak. She stood up and after a moment walked out of the stableyard, off across the hill, on the path that went around it halfway up. One of the dogs, her favorite, a big, ugly, heavy-headed hound, followed her. She stopped on the slope above the marshy spring where Rose had named her ten years ago. She stood there; the dog sat down beside her and looked up at her face. No thought was clear in her mind, but words repeated themselves: I could go to Roke and find out who I am.

  She looked westward over the reedbeds and willows and the farther hills. The whole western sky was empty, clear. She stood still and her soul seemed to go into that sky and be gone, gone out of her.

  There was a little noise, the soft clipclop of the black mare’s hoofs, coming along the lane. Then Dragonfly came back to herself and called to Ivory and ran down the hill to meet him. “I will go,” she said.

  He had not planned or intended any such adventure, but crazy as it .was, it suited him better the more he thought about it. The prospect of spending the long grey winter at Westpool sank his spirits like a stone. There was nothing here for him except the girl Dragonfly, who had come to fill his thoughts. Her massive, innocent strength had defeated him absolutely so far, but he did what she pleased in order to have her do at last what he pleased, and the game, he thought, was worth playing. If she ran away with him, the game was as good as won. As for the joke of it, the notion of actually getting her into the School on Roke disguised as a man, there was little chance of pulling it off, but it pleased him as a gesture of disrespect to all the piety and pomposity of the Masters and their toadies. And if somehow it succeeded, if he could actually get a woman through that door, even for a moment, what a sweet revenge it would be!

  Money was a problem. The girl thought, of course, that he as a great wizard would snap his fingers and waft them over the sea in a magic boat flying before the magewind. But when he told her they’d have to hire passage on a ship, she said simply, “I have the cheese money.”

  He treasured her rustic sayings of that kind. Sometimes she frightened him, and he resented it. His dreams of her were never of her yielding to him, but of himself yielding to a fierce, destroying sweetness, sinking into an annihilating embrace, dreams in which she was something beyond comprehension and he was nothing at all. He woke from those dreams shaken and shamed. In daylight, when he saw her big, dirty hands, when she talked like a yokel, a simpleton, he regained his superiority. He only wished there were someone to repeat her sayings to, one of his old friends in the Great Port who would find them amusing. “‘I have the cheese money,’” he repeated to himself, riding back to Westpool, and laughed. “I do indeed,” he said aloud. The black mare flicked her ear.

  He told Birch that he had received a sending from his teacher on Roke, the Master Hand, and must go at once, on what business he could not say, of course, but it should not take long once he was there; a half month to go, another to return; he would be back well before the Fallows at the latest. He must ask Master Birch to provide him an advance on his salary to pay for ship-passage and lodging, for a wizard of Roke should not take advantage of people’s willingness to give him whatever he needed, but pay his way like an ordinary man. As Birch agreed with this, he had to give Ivory a purse for his journey. It was the first real money he had had in his pocket for years: ten ivory counters carved with the Otter of Shelieth on one side and the Rune of Peace on the other in honor of King Lebannen. “Hello, little namesakes,” he told them when he was alone with them. “You and the cheese money will get along nicely.”

  He told Dragonfly very little of his plans, largely because he made few, trusting to chance and his own wits, which seldom let him down if he was given a fair chance to use them. The girl asked almost no questions. “Will I go as a man all the way?” was one. “Yes,” he said, “but only disguised. I won’t put a semblance-spell on you till we’re on Roke Island.”

  “I thought it would be a spell of Change,” she said.

  “That would be unwise,” he said, with a good imitation of the Master Changer’s terse solemnity. “If need be, I’ll do it, of course. But you’ll find wizards very sparing of the great spells. For good reason.”

  “The Equilibrium,” she said, accepting all he said in its simplest sense, as always.

  “And perhaps because such arts have not the power they once had,” he said. He did not know himself why he tried to weaken her faith in wizardry; perhaps because any weakening of her strength, her wholeness, was a gain for him. He had begun merely by trying to get her into his bed, a game he loved to play. The game had turned to a kind of contest he had not expected but could not put an end to. He was determined now not to win her, but to defeat her. He could not let her defeat him. He must prove to her and himself that his dreams were meaningless.

  Quite early on, impatient with wooing her massive physical indifference, he had worked up a charm, a sorcerer’s seduction-spell of which he was contemptuous even as he made it, though he knew it was effective. He cast it on her while she was, characteristically, mending a cow’s halter. The result had not been the melting eagerness it had produced in girls he had used it on in Havnor and Thwil. Dragonfly had gradually become silent and sullen. She ceased asking her endless questions about Roke and did not answer when he spoke. When he very tentatively approached her, taking her hand, she struck him away with a blow to the head that left him dizzy. He saw her stand up and stride out of the stableyard without a word, the ugly hound she favored trotting after her. It looked back at him with a grin.

  She took the path to the old house. When his ears stopped ringing he stole after her, hoping the charm was working and that this was only her particularly uncouth way of leading him at last to her bed. Nearing the house, he heard crockery breaking. The father, the drunkard, came wobbling out looking scared and confused, followed by Dragonfly’s loud, harsh voice—“Out of the house, you drunken, crawling traitor! You foul, shameless lecher!”

  “She took my cup away,” the Master of Iria said to the stranger, whining like a puppy, while his dogs yammered around him. “She broke it.”

  Ivory departed. He did not return for two days. On the third day he rode experimentally past Old Iria, and she came striding down to meet him. “I’m sorry, Ivory,” she said, looking up at him with her smoky orange eyes. “I don’t know what came over me the other day. I was angry. But not at you. I beg your pardon.”

  He forgave her gracefully. He did not try a love-charm on her again.

  Soon, he thought now, he would not need one. He would have real power over her. He had finally seen how to get it. She had given it into his hands. Her strength and her willpower were tremendous, but fortunately she was stupid, and he was not.

  Birch was sending a carter down to Kembermouth with six barrels of t
en-year-old Fanian ordered by the wine merchant there. He was glad to send his wizard along as bodyguard, for the wine was valuable, and though the young king was putting things to rights as fast as he could, there were still gangs of robbers on the roads. So Ivory left Westpool on the big wagon pulled by four big carthorses, jolting slowly along, his legs dangling. Down by Jackass Hill an uncouth figure rose up from the wayside and asked the carter for a lift. “I don’t know you,” the carter said, lifting his whip to warn the stranger off, but Ivory came round the wagon and said, “Let the lad ride, my good man. He’ll do no harm while I’m with you.”

  “Keep an eye on him then, master,” said the carter.

  “I will,” said Ivory, with a wink at Dragonfly. She, well disguised in dirt and a farmhand’s old smock and leggings and a loathsome felt hat, did not wink back. She played her part even while they sat side by side dangling their legs over the tailgate, with six great halftuns of wine jolting between them and the drowsy carter, and the drowsy summer hills and fields slipping slowly, slowly past. Ivory tried to tease her, but she only shook her head. Maybe she was scared by this wild scheme, now she was embarked on it. There was no telling. She was solemnly, heavily silent. I could be very bored by this woman, Ivory thought, if once I’d had her underneath me. That thought stirred him almost unbearably, but when he looked back at her, his thoughts died away before her massive, actual presence.

  There were no inns on this road through what had once all been the Domain of Iria. As the sun neared the western plains, they stopped at a farmhouse that offered stabling for the horses, a shed for the cart, and straw in the stable loft for the carters. The loft was dark and stuffy and the straw musty. Ivory felt no lust at all, though Dragonfly lay not three feet from him. She had played the man so thoroughly all day that she had half convinced even him. Maybe she’ll fool the old men after all! he thought, and grinned at the thought, and slept.

  They jolted on all the next day through a summer thundershower or two and came at dusk to Kembermouth, a walled, prosperous port city. They left the carter to his master’s business and walked down to find an inn near the docks. Dragonfly looked about at the sights of the city in a silence that might have been awe or disapproval or mere stolidity. “This is a nice little town,” Ivory said, “but the only city in the world is Havnor.” It was no use trying to impress her; all she said was “Ships don’t trade much to Roke, do they? Will it take a long time to find one to take us, do you think?”

  “Not if I carry a staff,” he said.

  She stopped looking about and strode along in thought for a while. She was beautiful in movement, bold and graceful, her head carried high.

  “You mean they’ll oblige a wizard? But you aren’t a wizard.”

  “That’s a formality. We senior sorcerers may carry a staff when we’re on Roke’s business. Which I am.”

  “Taking me there?”

  “Bringing them a student—yes. A student of great gifts!”

  She asked no more questions. She never argued; it was one of her virtues.

  That night, over supper at the waterfront inn, she asked with unusual timidity in her voice, “Do I have great gifts?”

  “In my judgment, you do,” he said.

  She pondered—conversation with her was often a slow business—and said, “Rose always said I had power, but she didn’t know what kind. And I … I know I do, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “You’re going to Roke to find out,” he said, raising his glass to her. After a moment she raised hers and smiled at him, a smile so tender and radiant that he said spontaneously, “And may what you find be all you seek!”

  “If I do, it will be thanks to you,” she said. In that moment he loved her for her true heart, and would have forsworn any thought of her but as his companion in a bold adventure, a gallant joke.

  They had to share a room at the crowded inn with two other travelers, but Ivory’s thoughts were perfectly chaste, though he laughed at himself a little for it.

  Next morning he picked a sprig of an herb from the kitchen garden of the inn and spelled it into the semblance of a fine staff, coppershod and his own height exactly. “What is the wood?” Dragonfly asked, fascinated, when she saw it, and when he answered with a laugh, “Rosemary,” she laughed too. They set off along the wharves, asking for a ship bound south that might take a wizard and his Prentice to the Isle of the Wise, and soon enough they found a heavy trader bound for Wathort, whose master would carry the wizard for goodwill and the Prentice for half price. Even half price was half the cheese money, but they would have the luxury of a cabin, for Sea Otter was a decked, two-masted ship.

  As they were talking with her master a wagon drew up on the dock and began to unload six familiar halftun barrels. “That’s ours,” Ivory said, and the ship’s master said, “Bound for Hort Town,” and Dragonfly said softly, “From Iria.”

  She glanced back at the land then. It was the only time he ever saw her look back.

  The ship’s weatherworker came aboard just before they sailed, no Roke wizard but a weatherbeaten fellow in a worn sea-cloak. Ivory flourished his staff a little in greeting him. The sorcerer looked him up and down and said, “One man works weather on this ship. If it’s not me, I’m off.”

  “I’m a mere passenger, Master Bagman. I gladly leave the winds in your hands.”

  The sorcerer looked at Dragonfly, who stood straight as a tree and said nothing.

  “Good,” he said, and that was the last word he spoke to Ivory.

  During the voyage, however, he talked several times with Dragonfly, which made Ivory a bit uneasy. Her ignorance and trustfulness could endanger her and therefore him. What did she and the bagman talk about? he asked, and she answered, “What is to become of us.”

  He stared.

  “Of all of us. Of Way, and Felkway, and Havnor, and Wathort, and Roke. All the people of the islands. He says that when King Lebannen was to be crowned, last autumn, he sent to Gont for the old Archmage to come crown him, and he wouldn’t come. And there was no new archmage. So he took the crown himself. And some say that’s wrong, and he doesn’t rightly hold the throne. But others say the king himself is the new archmage. But he isn’t a wizard, only a king. So others say the dark years will come again, when there was no rule of justice, and wizardry was used for evil ends.”

  After a pause Ivory said, “That old weatherworker says all this?”

  “It’s common talk, I think,” said Dragonfly, with her grave simplicity.

  The weatherworker knew his trade, at least. Sea Otter sped south; they met summer squalls and choppy seas, but never a storm or a troublesome wind. They put off and took on cargo at ports on the north shore of O, at Ilien, Leng, Kamery, and O Port, and then headed west to carry the passengers to Roke. And facing the west Ivory felt a little hollow at the pit of his stomach, for he knew all too well how Roke was guarded. He knew neither he nor the weatherworker could do anything at all to turn the Roke-wind if it blew against them. And if it did, Dragonfly would ask why? Why did it blow against them?

  He was glad to see the sorcerer uneasy too, standing by the helmsman, keeping a watch up on the masthead, taking in sail at the hint of a west wind. But the wind held steady from the north. A thunder-squall came pelting on that wind, and Ivory went down to the cabin, but Dragonfly stayed up on deck. She was afraid of the water, she had told him. She could not swim; she said, “Drowning must be a horrible thing—Not to breathe the air—” She had shuddered at the thought. It was the only fear she had ever shown of anything. But she disliked the low, cramped cabin, and had stayed on deck every day and slept there on the warm nights. Ivory had not tried to coax her into the cabin. He knew now that coaxing was no good. To have her he must master her; and that he would do, if only they could come to Roke.

  He came up on deck again. It was clearing, and as the sun set the clouds broke all across the west, showing a golden sky behind the high dark curve of a hill.

  Ivory looked at that hill wit
h a kind of longing hatred.

  “That’s Roke Knoll, lad,” the weatherworker said to Dragonfly, who stood beside him at the rail. “We’re coming into Thwil Bay now. Where there’s no wind but the wind they want.”

  By the time they were well into the bay and had let down the anchor it was dark, and Ivory said to the ship’s master, “I’ll go ashore in the morning.”

  Down in their tiny cabin Dragonfly sat waiting for him, solemn as ever but her eyes blazing with excitement. “We’ll go ashore in the morning,” he repeated to her, and she nodded, acceptant. She said, “Do I look all right?”

  He sat down on his narrow bunk and looked at her sitting on her narrow bunk; they could not face each other directly, as there was no room for their knees. At O Port she had bought herself a decent shirt and breeches, at his suggestion, so as to look a more probable candidate for the School. Her face was windburned and scrubbed clean. Her hair was braided and the braid clubbed, like Ivory’s. She had got her hands clean, too, and they lay flat on her thighs, long strong hands, like a man’s.

  “You don’t look like a man,” he said. Her face fell. “Not to me. You’ll never look like a man to me. But don’t worry. You will to them.”

  She nodded, with an anxious face.

  “The first test is the great test, Dragonfly,” he said. Every night as he lay alone in this cabin he had planned this conversation. “To enter the Great House: to go through that door.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, hurried and earnest. “Couldn’t I just tell them who I am? With you there to vouch for me—to say even if I am a woman, I have some gift—and I’d promise to take the vow and make the spell of celibacy, and live apart if they wanted me to—”