The Magician of Hoad (39 page)

“I don’t suppose we’re ever totally free of ourselves,” Heriot said. “But let’s try. Let’s set out together. If you
can
travel, that is.”

Cayley smiled almost shyly down into the leaves and grasses. “You know already, don’t you?” she said. “I was planning to surprise you, but no surprising a Magician, I suppose. Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

“I can’t help knowing. It calls out to me, wanting attention. “Hey, you!” it says. “I’m on my way. Do you want me to tell you who I am?”’

“Not a word! Let it surprise one of us,” Cayley said. “I never dreamed of this for myself, so it’s a surprise already, but I like to think there are still amazements ahead. So let’s walk on!”

***

One fine day, as the sun rose, tranquil but implacable, four different lives—remarkably different lives—began working their way away from one another. They had been such mixed lives it would have seemed impossible that the people living those lives would ever manage to live either together or apart, but a noble girl and a Prince were being drawn together, embraced by a city, commonplace in many ways, yet always mysterious. A Magician and a wild girl set off, walking through a forest with the sun behind them, feeling the endless growth around them, the bursting of seeds, the impulses of nesting birds, feeling the way the world worked, dissolving, always dissolving, yet locking itself together over and over again. On they went, both finding some part of themselves, not only in each other but waiting for them in the world out there. Magician and warrior, they were about to be completed in ways they had never totally anticipated.

A story has to end somewhere. This story ends here.

has lived in New Zealand her entire life. A former children’s librarian, she decided to become a full-time writer in 1980. Ranging from picture books to YA novels, the books she writes vary as much as the characters in her stories. She won the British Library Association’s Carnegie Medal for
The Haunting
and
The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance.
Her other books include
Alchemy
and
Maddigan’s Fantasia
. An author whose books have received many accolades and praise around the world, Mahy was awarded the Order of New Zealand, the highest honor a citizen of that country can receive, and in 2006 she won the Hans Christian Andersen Award, given to a living author whose works have made a lasting contribution to children’s literature.