Water (35 page)

to the hair behind her ear, or saw a goldy-black glint of eye with her own eye, and she

remembered. She swam through oceans, and through deserts. She was swallowed and vomited

up by a green dragon in a great stinking belch of wet black smoke. She eluded sea serpents by

drifting, for, like sharks, they respond to movement; and water goblins by hiding in mud,

because water goblins, being ugly themselves, are determined to notice only beautiful things,

even if this means missing dinner. She was guided on her way by mer-folk, who have a strong

liking for romance and adventure, and in whose company she sang her first songs, although they

laughed at her for only being able to breathe air, and said that her little gold-eyed friend should

teach her better. She spoke to sand-sprites, who have small hissing voices like draughts under

doors, and she listened to the desert feys, who rarely speak to humans but often talk to the desert.

She was almost trampled by the sand-god’s great armoured horses till her little friend showed her

how to hide in the hollow behind their ears and cling to their manes; but Geljdreth stood between

her and what she sought and longed for, and at last she had to face him with nothing but her own

determination and wit and the strength of her two hands, and a little friend hanging over one ear

like an ear-ring. And, perhaps because she was from Roanshire in the Homeland where there

were no deserts, and she had not lived her life in fear of him, she won out against him, and

loosed his horses, and crippled his power.

At last her head broke the surface in a small calm pool; and there was Zasharan, waiting to pull

her out, and wrap her in a cloak, and give her
tiarhk
to drink, as he had done once before, though

he had wiped her face free of grit then, not of water. She turned to look back into the pool, and

she saw a gold eye looking back at her, and she could not tell if it were a very large eye or a very

small one. “Thank you,” she said. “I thank you.”

Somewhere—not in her ear; in her heart or her belly or the bottoms of her feet—she heard
My

honour is yours.

“Welcome home,” said Zasharan.

Ruth had grown up, married, had two children, and written three best-selling books of popular

science concerning the apparent impossibilities the natural world presents that scientists struggle

for generations to find explanations for, before she found herself one day tapping
the legends of

Damar
on her computer. Her search engine produced few relevant hits; after a brief flurry of

interest for a few years following independence, Damar had again drifted into the backwaters of

international attention.

It only took her a few minutes to find a reference to Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing. It

described her half-brother, her success as an adjudicator, and the sandstorms that particularly

plagued her reign. After a few compact paragraphs the article ended:

One of the most famous Damarian bards also began telling stories during Fortunatar’s reign.

Hetthar is an interesting figure, for part of her personal legend is that she came out of time and

place to marry Fortunatar’s Fourth Sandpale Watcher, Zasharan, and it was said that after she

came, no one was ever again lost to the storms of the Kalarsham, and that the sand-god hated

her for this. But her main fame rests on the cycle of stories she called
The Journeying
, and whose

central character has the strangely un-Damarian name of Ruth.

About the Authors

ROBIN MCKINLEY is the author of the acclaimed novels
The Blue Sword
(a Newbery Honor

Book),
The Hero and the Crown
(Winner of the Newbery Medal), and
Spindle’s End
(a
New

York Times
Best-seller). Her most recent book is a novel for adults,
Sunshine.

PETER DICKINSON’S many books include
The Ropemaker
(a Michael L. Printz Honor Book),

The Kin
,
A Bone from a Dry Sea
,
Eva
, and, most recently,
The Tears of the Salamander
.

Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson live in the South of England. They plan to write three

other books in the “Elementals” sequence.