Night Gate by Isobelle Carmody Page B

had the impression he was being careful rather than truthful. She wondered suddenly if, like the baker’s sister and the centaur, he suspected them of being keeper spies.
    “Then what happened?” Billy asked. “Girls started being forced to come to Fork?”
    The ferryman looked at him. “Are you not bringing this young lady to the city for banding of her own free will?”
    Billy looked taken aback, and Rage could tell that he had become so interested, he had forgotten their ruse. “Of course I am,” he said boldly. “But in the outer villages we never hear much of how things come about. We were told girls had to come to the city and stay until they were too old to have babies. That it was now keeper law.”
    “Well, it is,” the ferryman said, apparently mollified. Maybe he had decided they were not spies, for now he said, “The keepers had cause to clamp down hard on the witch women, what with them draining the wild side of the river of magic. Folk supported the laws, which said they must come to the city and give up magic, but the witch women refused to leave Wildwood. So the keepers formed the blackshirt brigade and set them to hunt down the witch women and bring them in to be banded. But of course they still had woodcraft enough to evade their followers. All but a few escaped, but they have a price on their heads.”
    “How exactly does banding stop the witch women doing magic?” Billy asked lightly. “I’ve always wondered.”
    The ferryman shrugged. “Don’t rightly know myself. It’s something about iron. Once a girl’s hands are banded, she can’t draw the magic up into her mind for the working of it. Welded on, they are, and there’s no way of removing them, save with the same heat that sealed them. The first couple of bands are only lightly welded because they have to be replaced as the wrists grow. But once girls become women, the weldings are made to last.”
    Rage felt sickened at the thought of the heavy bands she had seen on the arms of the baker’s sister being welded onto the arms of the little girls in the cart. “If all the magic is gone from the wild side of Valley, I don’t suppose the witches will bother the keepers for much longer.”
    The ferryman shrugged. “There are still a few pockets of magic left, but the fact that the witch women have begun sending the wild things to beg for keeper mercy tells how desperate they have become. Mercy is as scarce in Fork as magic is on the wild side of the river. The keepers won’t stop until all wild things have faded and all witch women are dead or in chains. That female wild thing and her faunish friend we’ve got aboard don’t look too bad, but most of the creatures that come over the river to plead are pale and hunched in their bits of rag, and near faded away.”
    Despite her own worries, Rage’s heart went out to the wild creatures she had met—the centaur, the laughing sprite, and the winged lions. All her life she had loved to read of such fabulous things, and here she was in a world where they existed, only to discover they were dying. Not that they had looked sick to her, but perhaps she had been too dazzled by their beauty to notice. She felt a surge of anger. Her desire to find the wizard had been for her own reasons, but now she thought that she would ask him why he did not help the wild things, since it was his magic that had made Valley and everything that lived in it.
    “You can’t help but pity the poor things,” the ferryman said. “But cold as the keepers are, I don’t see they have any choice. If the witch women were allowed to use up the magic on the tame side of the river to feed their pets, they’d die soon enough anyway, along with the rest of us.”
    “Die?” Billy echoed, sounding as confounded by this as Rage felt.
    The ferryman gave a great snort. “That village leader of yours ought to be whipped for your ignorance, lad. Of course all of us. What do you think holds Valley together but magic? What