“I’ll go,” I said, “if you can keep the road open.”
It was what I had been aching to do anyway. I could barely credit it when Will and Zinka both sternly shook their heads. “It was your working, Rupert,” Zinka said, and Will added, “You can’t start a working on the outside and then go inside, Rupe. You must remember Stan telling you that. It’s basic.”
“Magids have been lost that way,” Zinka said.
Will said, “But Rob says he’ll go. He was wanting to go back with Nick anyway. I was trying to tell him how dangerous it is to alter a working halfway through when those damn chicks got out.”
“It’s altered anyway!” I snapped, and flung inside the room.
And here was further trouble.
In the odd-shaped space left between the roadway of candles and my bed, Rob was half on his feet, supporting himself painfully on the bedside table with one hand. His other hand was pointing to the road itself. “I couldn’t stop them! I was too slow!” he said.
I followed his pointing finger. And I saw the two quack chicks scurrying between the only two lighted candles, off the carpet and on to the hillside beyond. I confess my first thought was, Good riddance! My second was to wonder anxiously what damage this would do to the working. Will and Zinka crowded into the room behind me, just in time to see the chicks scuttle down over the shadowy brow of the hill and disappear.
“Oh no!” said Will.
Zinka’s eyes scanned the dark landscape lying at such a queer angle to the rest of my room. I could see she was awed. But she said drily, “Our Mr White has done even better than he expected, hasn’t he? I don’t think you should fet
ch them back now. What do you want to do, Rupert?”
“We carry on regardless,” I said. “Maree’s out there waiting.”
“In that case,” Rob said, “I have to go, don’t I?”
Will and Zinka edged down beside the frilly chair by the bathroom. I shut the door of my room and we all looked at Rob. Zinka looked at him with frank lascivious admiration. You could see why. Even ill and pale, with his horse-coat dull and staring, Rob was a magnificent sight.
He stood himself cautiously on all four hooves. “I do owe Maree,” he said. “She can’t manage alone. And you made me see… I see I’ve done a lot of damage and I ought to try to put it right.”
“He is mage-trained,” Will said.
“But you’re ill!” I objected. Besides, I still wanted to go myself.
“I can manage,” Rob said. His beautiful features twisted a little. “If it hurts, it probably serves me right, doesn’t it?”
“I think you’ll have to send him,” Zinka said decisively. “It fits.”
After that, I couldn’t argue any more. The two candles burning on the edge of the dark landscape were each nearly a third gone. We had wasted enough time. “What does he need to take?” I asked Zinka.
“Water’s easy,” she said. “I see you’ve got four little empty bottles. Now, for wool…”
“I’ve got a cashmere sweater,” I offered.
“Then you’d better get it unravelled,” Zinka said.
“What?” I said.
“The feel of the verse is for raw wool,” she explained. “In a hank. You know.”
Will stood in the bathroom doorway with a fistful of little bottles, laughing at the look on my face. “Not to worry,” he said. He fished in the pocket of his coat and came up with a big handful of fluffy white goat’s hair. “This do?” he asked Zinka.
“Perfect,” she said.
The last of our hasty preparations had to be done with the door of my room open, mostly in the passage outside. Rob, being so much longer than a human, could not fit into the space in front of the road when the door was closed. He was forced to hop, wincing at the jolt, across the first pair of candles, then out through the doorway and on into the corridor, where he turned himself to face into my room. There Zinka handed him a candle and Will’s belt pouch, with the four little bottles of water chinking in it despite being packed round with the goat’s wool.
“There you go,” she said, lovingly fastening the belt around Rob’s muscular waist-parts, while I stood waiting impatiently with my lighter and the plastic bags of grain and salt. “There. Do try to come back, Rob. You’re too stunning to lose.”
Rob had been looking ahead, very tense and determined, but at this, he flung back his sheet of black hair and turned his face down to Zinka’s. “You think so?” he said. His whole pose turned amorous. So did Zinka’s.