“I’m looking for someone who knows Querida’s healer,” Derk explained.
“I am Querida’s healer,” the lady said majestically. “Is there a problem?”
“Well, she seems to be asleep—” Derk began.
“Of course she is,” said the majestic lady. “Querida reacts very badly to pain, so I have, at her own request, put her into a healing coma until the pain has gone.”
“Oh,” said Derk. “But I need to speak to her urgently. Is there any chance—?”
“No chance at all,” said the lady. “Come back in—” She passed the bolsterlike bag to the nearest waiting person, nearly choking Derk with the intense whiff of herbs from it, and counted on her fingers. “Come back in a week.”
“A week!” Derk cried out.
“Or ten days,” said the lady.
“But it’s only four days now until the tours start!” Derk protested desperately.
“Precisely,” said the lady. “This is why I am in the middle of outfitting my healers. Now do you mind going away? It is most important that every healer is in place, with the correct remedies, before the first offworlders come through.”
“Yes, yes of course,” Derk found himself saying humbly. She was so majestic that it never even occurred to him to suggest that the Dark Lord might be important too. He backed sadly away to a clear space and tried to translocate to the place where he had left Beauty.
To his disgust, he fell short by nearly two miles. It took him most of the rest of that day to find the field where Beauty was grazing. And he had been relying on Querida’s help. While he searched, he had to keep his mind on the mermaid-daughter in order not to feel sick with worry. She was going to have to have her own pool. It would be quite difficult bringing up a child that had to be kept wet at all times. Mara and he would have to spend a lot of time in the pool with her. They would have to buy a cart in order to take her to the sea …
In spite of this, they arrived home with Beauty bright-eyed and well rested and Derk grey with worry.
“What’s the matter, Dad?” asked Shona.
Derk groaned. “Querida’s going to be asleep for the next ten days. I think she insisted on it. I’d forgotten what she was like. But the trouble is she promised to help me over the god manifesting and raise me a demon. I don’t know what to do!”
“Ask Barnabas?” Lydda suggested, shuffling in with a plate of buttery biscuits.
“He’s busy making camps for the Dark Lord’s army,” Derk said, absently taking four biscuits and not tasting one of them. “That’s quite as urgent. They have to be ready before the Pilgrims come through. They send the soldiers in early.”
“You’d better not try raising demons by yourself,” Shona said anxiously.
“Or gods,” said Lydda. “And Elda wants to know when you can look at the new story she’s written.”
“Tomorrow night,” Derk said. “I think I’ll go and see Umru tomorrow. Perhaps he can persuade his god Anscher to manifest – I told Umru I’d visit him anyway. But what I’m going to do about a demon, I can’t think!”
“Why not ask Mum?” Shona suggested. “She said she’d be in for supper.”
Derk could not see Mara helping him in her present frame of mind, but he said, “Good idea,” in order not to hurt Shona’s feelings. Perhaps if he were very careful speaking to Mara, and particularly careful not to mention the mermaid idea yet …
But Mara arrived late for supper, with two little creases full of her own worries above her pretty nose. She had gone very thin, and her hair had come down to hang in a fat fair plait over one shoulder. “Sorry. I can’t stay long,” she said. “Now Querida’s had herself put to sleep, I have hundreds of things to do for her tomorrow at the latest. I’ll have to get back and start moving people from the village tonight.”
“From the village? Whatever for?” said Derk.
“Didn’t Shona tell you?” Mara asked, and Shona looked down at her plate, not wanting to say that Derk had been too worried for her to want to tell him anything. “Well, you know I never liked the idea of them sitting right in the path of the final confrontation,” Mara said. “You might be careful, Derk, but Pilgrims never are, and the village people could be hurt even in those pits. So I solved the problem by hiring them all as servants to the Enchantress.”
Derk gave her an appalled look. “What with?”
Mara frowned the two little creases tighter yet. “What do you mean, what with?”
Derk swallowed and remembered he was meaning to be very careful and tactful tonight. She’s borrowed a lot of money from someone, he thought. I have to go even more carefully. “Mara,” he said, “you aren’t being paid for being the Enchantress. And I’ve been fined a hundred gold before we even start. We haven’t any money to hire a whole village.”
Mara gave an odd little smile. “Oh, I think I can manage.”
She’s borrowed a massive amount! Derk thought. Dear gods! “Have you hired Fran Taylor and Old George as well? I went to a lot of trouble emaciating them.”
Mara chuckled. “Fran wants to stay picking about in the ruins, but I love Old George! He’s far too good to waste on the village. I want him to be my former lover that I’ve drained to skin and bone. The Pilgrims should be really impressed.”
Derk watched all his plans for a mermaid daughter dwindle into unimportance and then to nothing. His chest hurt. Mara’s going to leave me, he thought. She’s going to leave me for this person she’s borrowed money from. What shall I do? He had always been afraid of this. Wizards’ marriages almost never lasted. Nearly every wizard he knew had one broken marriage, and some had more. That young Finn was on his second marriage; Barnabas’s wife had walked out years ago; even Querida had been married once. Derk miserably supposed he should consider himself lucky that he and Mara had lasted eighteen years.
Mara meanwhile had turned to Shona. “Shona, darling, have you made up your mind yet? I want your help over at Aunt’s house more than ever now, with Querida out of action. I’m going to need lots of silly fashionable clothes – the kind you and Callette are both so good at inventing. What does Callette say?”
“Callette’s on her hundred and nineteenth gizmo,” Shona said. “She’ll need another day at least to do the rest. She says she might come over then. But—” She shot a look at the brooding Derk. “Mum, I don’t think I can come. There’d be no one but Lydda to look after things here.”
“I’ve said I can manage,” Lydda said with her beak full.
“I can help here too,” Elda muttered into a pile of fruit. “Everyone thinks I’m too small.”
“Not so much small as young,” Mara told Elda. “You are only ten, love, and I want you to come over to me with Callette. And why should Lydda do everything here? What’s wrong with you, Don, or you, Blade?”
Don sat with a raw chop halfway to his beak, Blade sat with a cooked one on the end of his fork. They exchanged looks of panic and consternation.
“Or Kit?” added Mara.
“May I consider?” Shona asked rather hectically. “Perhaps I’ll come when Callette’s finished