“However,” my witch added, “I have a secret name that you may use. That is: Hwenit.”

Then it came to me, and for the first, that she spoke a language I had never heard in my life—yet I recognized and could speak it with her.

At that I stopped dead in my tracks.

I had uncannily mastered city speech, laying the ability, with childish complaisance, at my father’s door. This, however, I could find no excuse for. I marveled at it and it shivered my neck. Each fresh revelation of Power—the killing light, my healing skin, this gift of tongues—had staggered me, but not sufficiently. This made me half crazy, afraid of what was in me. It appeared I had been growing since infancy into some fabulous denizen of a myth.

“Hwenit,” I shouted, “you are a witch and can bring demons. Bring one, or I shall have you here and now.”

Her pale gaze turned to knives and she showed her teeth.

“Don’t think I cannot,” she cried, “but the cat will gouge out your eyes before I need to work magic.”

“Show me this sorcery,” I said, lunging at her. “I am a sorcerer, too. Subdue me.”

She eluded me, and the red cat raked my forearm with its daggered paw. Somehow, I knew I could make the scratches heal faster than any wound, small or deep, had healed on me before. I held out my arm to Hwenit-Uasti, where she could observe the blood. I did not watch the scratches close, only her face.

Presently she said in a small, thin voice, “I have seen a priest do this, once, when he had been in the place of the Book. I cannot do this thing. If you are a healer, you will not hurt me.”

“Don’t be positive, morsel of witch.”

“I wish I had not summoned you now,” she said, fidgety as an autumn wasp. “You are too big and too clever. I should have left well alone.”

“So you should. Why do it? And do you suppose such a powerful magician as I have turned out to be has no free will, but must appear at a snap of your black-jade fingers?”

“Well,” she said slyly, recovering herself somewhat. “You are here.”

Then she turned and ran away, looking back once to see if I followed, and hesitating when she saw I had not.

“Come,” she cried. “Make the Summer Dance with me. Come, Mordrak; catch me and I will let you in my door,” and she ran along the edge of the headland through the brown dusk, the cat around her neck howling like a furious ghost.

Her village lay half a mile off, in a thatch of flinty meadow on the bony cliff-top, which crumbled down to a beach of mingled pebble and ocean-folded sand. Other cliffs of the range jerked from the coast to left and right of it. Tall grasses rattled in the wind, and the sea groaned as the tide pulled it from the shore, then dragged it back, an ever-unwilling slave.