“If I am rash, who will set me on the right path?”

“I,” she said, “if you permit.”

“I permit,” I said. “How do I recompense you?”

“Lie with me,” she said.

“In order that you may make your brother burn? In order that you may pretend I am he? Oh, no, blue-eyed witch. I am not for that game.”

“Trust me,” she whispered, bending near. “It is you I crave. Though you are white, you are handsome and lusty.”

“I have been sung that song before, and by women who believed it. As for you, little witch, you are half white yourself, under your black silk skin.”

“Lie with me,” she moaned, melting my ear with her tongue.

But I pushed her off, maddening though it was for me to do it.

She stamped her foot, and ran away deeper into the wood, and presently I made out a reddish cat’s tail going after her through the tall grasses.

When I returned to the black tent at sunup, Qwef was already gone. My teacher-temptress and I remained alone.

There followed two or three peculiar days, during which I found out for sure that Hwenit-Uasti was two persons, as her two namings implied.

Uasti, witch and healer, a woman indubitably honored and respected among her people, wise though young, patient and of infinite sympathy, materialized between the hours of sunrise and sunset. This being instructed me in the shade-walks of my own brain. Her fabulous knowledge, garnered from generation upon generation of priests—those poet-physicians and sorcerer-philosophers of the black tribes—was delivered to me simply and directly. I have met few others since who could compare with, or better, this mentor, a girl more youthful than I, slight as a sapling and mercurial to a fault. I think, too, that she was the superior teacher because she had not the mastery of these “arts” herself, while being fully cognizant of them. She gave me, at any rate, the key to doors, both to unlock and to seal them. A paradoxical key, simple but perverse. You must get it right before you tried the turn, or bring the house down. As to method and logic, to explain that would be to sit ranting in a jar for seven years, as the Moi say. You cannot truly define power, or why power will come. A child will learn to walk, but you must persuade him not to put his hands in the fire.

That, then, was my psychic guide, Uasti, the composed and the humane.

The other Uasti usually usurped her when school was done, first sparking up in her oceanic eyes when the fire was banked in preparation for the evening meal. This, in fact, was not Uasti but Hwenit the witch, the one I had met to begin with.

She was all the other was not, skittish, heady, sharp as cat’s claws, and bent on seduction. A sore trial to me was Hwenit. I felt like a man being coaxed to steal his brother’s riches, and the brother off at the wars—yet Qwef was her kin, not mine. I resolved I would not be party to her snares and plots.