Forest Mage. Robin Hobb

just the air; it was the reality around me that seemed uneven and fickle. I didn’t think I had the strength to swat a fly. Nonetheless, I moved to stop the boy.

      I must have looked a madman as I lurched and staggered towards the young fool who was whetting his blade on ancient magic. The women had lifted their hands, covering their mouths in horror. The two boys supporting the vandal staggered back, one dropping the leg he had held. One young man stepped forward as if he would protect the boy from me. Only one matron, the one making the rubbing, added her voice to my protest. ‘Stop that, you young hooligan! I brought you here to teach you about primitive culture, not to have you ruin it! Stop defacing these ancient works! Your father will hear of this!’ She dropped her charcoal and advanced on the lad. Behind her, her assistant rolled his eyes wearily.

      With a surly snarl, the boy flung the knife down so hard it bounced. ‘I wasn’t doing anything! Just making my initials to show I’d been here, that was all! What a fuss about a stupid striped rock! What’s it going to do, make it fall down?’ He turned to glare at me. ‘Are you happy, fat man? You’ve got your way! I never even asked to come on this stupid outing to look at a stupid rock!’

      ‘Jard? Where are your manners?’ the matron snapped. ‘Regardless of the man’s mental condition, he is your elder. You should speak to him with respect. And I have warned you before about your endless carving on things. It’s disrespectful. If you cannot behave any better than that, and if Ret and Breg have nothing better to do than assist you in being a fool, then I think it is high time we all left! Boys and girls. Gather your things and follow me. This has not been the outing that I had expected it to be. Perhaps all of you prefer to sit in the classroom and study from a book rather than see the real world. I shall remember that the next time I think of taking you out.’

      There was a chorus of whines and dismayed denial from her students, but she was adamant. The guide shot me a vicious look. Plainly I had ruined his trade for the day. The other tourists were folding sketchbooks and taking down the easel. I caught sideways, uneasy looks from them. They seemed to think I was mad, and the guide apparently shared their opinion. I did not care. The boy stooped to snatch up his knife, and then made a rude hand gesture at me before he followed the others to the top of the winding stair. As before the guide went with them, offering them many warnings about going carefully and staying close to the inner edge of the steps. After a time, I became aware that I was alone on the top of the tower, except for the plainswoman. I felt as if I were caught between dreaming and wakefulness. What had just happened?

      ‘The Spindle does turn,’ I said to her. I wanted her to agree with me.

      Her lip curled in disgust. ‘You are a madman,’ she told me. ‘A fat and stupid madman. You have driven away our customers. Do you think we get tour wagons every day? Once a month, perhaps, they come. And you have spoiled their pleasure with your shouting and your threats. What do you think they will tell their friends? No one will want to come and see the Spindle. You will destroy our livelihood. Go away. Take your madness elsewhere.’

      ‘But… don’t you feel it? The Spindle turns. Lift your hands. You’ll feel the wind of it. Can’t you hear it? Can’t you smell the magic of it?’

      She narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously. She gave a quick, sideways glance at the Spindle and then looked back at me. ‘Do I look like a foolish savage?’ she asked me bitterly. ‘Do you think because I am a plainswoman that I am stupid? The Spindle does not turn. It never turned. From a distance, it tricks the eye. But always, it has been still. Still and dead.’

      ‘No. It turns.’ I wanted someone to confirm what I had experienced. ‘It turns for me, and when I lifted my hands, it happened, as you warned me it might. It lifted me up and—’

      Anger flared in her face and she lifted a hand as if she would slap me. ‘NO! It did not. It has never turned for me, and it could not turn for you, Gernian! It was a legend. That was all. Those who say they see it turning are fools, and those who claim to have been lifted by it are liars! Liars! Go away! Get out of here! How dare you say it turns for you! It never turned for me and I am of the Plains! Liar! Liar!’

      I had never seen a woman become so hysterical. Her hands were clenched in fists and spittle flew from her lips as she shrieked at me.

      ‘I’m going!’ I promised her. ‘I’m leaving now.’

      The clamber down the circling steps seemed endless. My calves screamed with cramp. Twice I nearly fell, and the second time, I bloodied the heels of my hands when I caught myself on the wall. I felt sick and dizzied. I felt angry, too. I was not crazy and I resented how I had been treated. I did not know if I should blame the blindness of the other people or the foreign magic that had polluted me and taken me for its own. What was real? What was illusion?

      For the moment, the battle for control that I’d had with my other self had subsided. There was no comfort in that. When I’d previously confronted him, I’d been able to set him apart from me, to comprehend him as ‘other’ to myself. There was no such separation now. He permeated my being, and I recognized him as comprising the harder parts of my soldier self. Had Tree Woman deliberately chosen those parts when she had seized a lock of my hair and jerked a core out of my awareness? I stole a cautious peek at that part of my self, as if I were peeking at an adder in a box. I was both fascinated and repelled by what I glimpsed. There were the bits of myself that I’d lacked in my first year at the Academy. He was the one who had enabled me to take my petty vengeance on the new noble sons. He had fierce pride and recklessness and daring. He was also ruthless and single-minded in what he would do for his people. The frightening part of that was that it was not to Gernia that he pledged his loyalty, but to the Specks. I’d been imagining that I’d reintegrated him into myself. Now I wondered if the flow were not the other way; was he absorbing my knowledge and memories for his own ends? He’d had a goal, up there near the Spindle, one that I still didn’t grasp.

      I suddenly decided it was time to leave.

      The guide seemed to have calmed his customers on the way down. As I followed the path back through the ancient city, I saw that the teacher and her charges had dispersed throughout the ruins. The easel woman was hard at work again. One of the women with a sketchbook was drawing the other as she sat picturesquely beside a tumbled wall. I passed them all, enduring their glances as I did so. Something nagged at me, some task had been left undone, but I recognized that concern as belonging to my other self. Nevare only wanted to be away from that place.

      As I drew near to the base of the Spindle and the shabby little shack there, I saw the guide again. He leaned in the shade against the wall of his pathetic house and watched me come. I could see him trying to decide if he would say anything to me or would let me pass unchallenged. His furtive glances told me that he both despised and feared me as a madman.

      I heard voices. As I passed the edge of the bowl in which the Spindle rested or spun, I glanced over the rim. The boys were there. This time, his two companions gripped his legs while Jard lay, belly down, in the slanting cup of the bowl. His knife was busy again. Large letters proclaimed that Jard had been there. Ret’s name was in the process of being added. All three were so intent that they didn’t see me staring at them. I looked at the guide and our eyes met across the distance. His face paled with fear. I smiled.

      ‘If my illustrious ancestors had carved this, I’d protect it from young vandals,’ I advised the half-breed sarcastically.

      He narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth to respond. But before he could, one of the boys holding Jard’s legs yelped, ‘It’s that crazy fat man! Get out of there, Jard!’ At the same moment, he helpfully let go of Jard’s leg as he sprang away and fled, intent on saving himself from my supposed insanity. Jard, supported now only by Breg’s grip on his other leg, gave a wild yell as he suddenly slid deeper into the bowl. He flailed his arms wildly, seeking a grip on the smooth surface and finding nothing. Breg, surprised by Ret’s desertion, was himself tugged to his knees at the edge of the bowl. ‘I can’t hold him!’ he wailed. I heard a tearing sound and saw the fabric of Jard’s trousers starting to give way.

      In two steps, I reached the rim