Read The End of the Game for Free Online

almost as though she had known already what I had done, or perhaps what I was likely to do. “Well,” she said at last. “We’ll go out into the town. If you see him again, tell one of us right away. At least we can find out who he is.”
    But, of course, I didn’t see him again. I don’t remember much about Festival. We had some good food, I do remember, and there were fireworks. Most of the time I spent thinking about the boy, reconsidering his appearance and his smile, wondering what his name was and where he might be found. The morning after, we were in the wagon headed home once more, and I said to Murzy—trying hard to sound plaintive, though I was really put out that so little had been made of the whole thing—“Murzy, why did I do such a silly thing?”
    “Well, chile. You’ve made some difficulty for yourself, truly. Which is something we all do, so no sense fretting overmuch about it. Take it as a lesson and profit therefrom, as Grandma used to say.” She sounded so righteous and solid. It made me angry.
    I fumed about that for a time, deciding at last that it wasn’t worth getting huffy about. As one of Gamesman caste, I ranked the lot of them and could have made their lives miserable when we returned home. I considered doing this, but I knew it would end making mine worse. So, in the end I only asked, “What do I do now?”
    Murzy considered this seriously. “Well, for a few years, nothing much. Keep close to us, Jinian. You’ll go on with your schooling from us this next few years. By the time you’re grown, we’ll know more. We’ll find something out ...”
    And that was the total I could get out of them on that subject, however much I tried.
    Later, however, as I considered the matter, I realized that when one practices the wize-art, one should stop somewhere short of the last word or phrase. Or something should be mimed rather than done. Or one must use an inert ingredient rather than an active one. It was not the very worst way to learn such a lesson—death would have been that. But it was not a comfortable way, for now I was haunted by the boy, the small, serious boy with the narrow, searching face. When I lay down to sleep, I thought of him. When I woke, I reached for the cool space in the bed as though he should be sleeping there. In the night he touched me, making me flame and start awake. When I looked into the mirror, I saw his face behind my own. We might have been brother and sister, both fair and ruddy-haired, as unlike Mendost and dark-lovely Mother as could be. As time went by, I felt more and more akin to him, to this stranger, this unknown boy, this mysterious, lost boy. Oh, he was my true love, no question about that, but it would have been better not to have known it for some years yet—until I was old enough to do something about it.
    3
    Margaret and I got to talking on the way home. She wasn’t that much older than I, and she seemed more sympathetic than the others, so I had someone to talk to about him. We rode along, me talking, sighing, she nodding. The thing that worried me most was that it would be a love unreturned, for such is the power of Lovers Come Calling that it will summon one who is loved but who has no feeling at all in the matter.
    When Margaret had taught me the spell, she told me she had seen it happen. An Armiger came to a Wize-ard woman in the Northern Marshes—it was Margaret’s kinswoman, and Margaret was there at the time—saying he had found no maid to suit him in all his flights and wanderings, for none was so bright and pure and kind as his dream told him maids should be. So he paid well, in gold, and the Wize-ard laid out the Pattern on the doorstep of her place and summoned up who should come.
    And there were noises in the wood of a horse, crippled and dragging a foot, and came from the wood a maid leading her mount, pure and pale and kindly as the sun. And it was the true love the Armiger had longed for, so that his heart started out of him