"What are the other reasons?" Jess asked.
Mace's smile flickered again. "Wander and find out."
With that, he marched back toward the library, already lost in thought.
"Do you really trust that guy?" Reive asked, as they watched him vanish through a different door than the one they'd come out of.
"I ... I'm not sure." She hovered on the edge of telling Reive about her maybe-relationship to Mace, but decided not to. Not yet. She wasn't prepared to say it out loud and get her hopes up. "It's just so nice to be able to talk to someone else of my kind. And he's welcomed us into our home and offered us his help."
"Yeah, that's what bothers me. We're complete strangers. Why should he want to help us?"
She gave his arm a little tug, turning them away from the house to walk down into the garden. "Wouldn't you help a strange dragon if they showed up in trouble?"
"What? No! They could be from a rival clan, or allied with enemies. I ..." He trailed off with a soft laugh as Jess looked up at him. "And that probably says more about dragons than I'd like."
"Not everyone treats strangers as the enemy."
"And not all strangers are friendly," Reive said quietly.
With their sides pressed together, she was all too aware of the hitch in his steps as he walked. Yes, he had more reason than most to know that. From the way he was moving, his side was severely affected now, and maybe one of his legs as well.
"Is it making you much worse?" she asked under her breath. "Being here."
There was a brief silence that answered her more eloquently than either a confirmation or a denial.
"Oh Reive," she murmured. "In that case, we should leave."
He shook his head firmly, and pulled her closer against him.
"Yes, it's making me worse, it's true. But I'm going to get worse no matter where we go. And I think you're right. Whether or not Mace is helping us for his own reasons, here is where answers can be found. We certainly aren't going to get a better offer somewhere else."
They wandered through the garden on a gently winding path that looked like it was generally leading downward toward the town. For the most part, it was landscaped with natural plants, although there were also giant cascades of rosebushes. The roses had almost finished blooming this late in the year, but there were still enough blossoms to perfume the air sweetly.
When they turned a corner of the path and came upon the first statue, Jess yelped and Reive swung her behind him. It was a life-sized gargoyle, crouching beside a fountain with one clawed forepaw resting on the fountain's rim. It was gazing down toward the harbor, and when it remained perfectly immobile they both began to relax.
"Hello?" Jess called softly, and then to Reive, she said, "I think it's just another statue."
They went cautiously up to the statue, and Jess worked up her nerve to touch it.
Granite and basalt, her rock sense told her. Local stone, rugged and gray, sculpted with an incredible attention to detail.
But it was just stone, sculpted at a normal human level of skill, even if it was finely done. The statue didn't have the incredible, unreal detail of Reive's stone hand or her own gargoyle form, right down to the tiny hairs on the backs of her hands that would have been impossible to sculpt out of a solid, slabby rock like this one. This was a good statue, but not more than a statue.
Also, there was moss growing on its legs.
She noticed Reive touching the statue with his gloved hand. He shook his head.
"The stone in me doesn't respond to it at all. It's not alive in the slightest. Though ... I guess it might be a stoneskin in some kind of inactive state, like the ones on the house." He gave her a curious look. "I wonder if you can make them come to life too, the way other gargoyles can?"
"I guess we could find out." She laid a hand on the statue's sculpted, muscular arm, and giggled. "Should I? Is it rude to make Mace's statues rampage around his garden?"
"Well, I know I'm curious," Reive said, smiling. "Aren't you?"
She was, actually. Desperately, wildly curious. It was like a whole new, fascinating world had opened up to her. She'd never realized that the gargoyle side of her could do anything other than make her big and ugly and fang-y. But what if she had all kinds of powers that she just hadn't unlocked yet?
She felt silly, standing here like this. What next? She tried to remember what it had felt like to stonewalk, as Mace called it—the shivery and yet somehow pleasant sense of the rock closing around her and spitting her out in a new location. But no, that wasn't what she wanted to do; she didn't want to sink into the stone, and was afraid to do it without Mace's help, for fear she'd never come out again.
No, what she wanted to do was probably more closely akin to shifting into her gargoyle form. It was hard to recreate the feeling consciously, especially knowing Reive was right there. The deep-seated fear of shifting in front of other people shivered through her. No, she didn't want to shift. But maybe if she turned that feeling outward, if she focused on the stone of the statue, rather than her own interior nature ...
Granite and basalt, forged together in the great heat and pressure under the earth, cooling slowly over the millennia. The endless life of rocks, their dark world with its slow, eons-long erosion, their continual breaking and melting and reforming into something new.
No. Look closer. Look nearer ...
There was a crack deep in the statue, invisible from the outside, a fault that might someday cause it to break through the endless freezing-warming cycles of the harsh Newfoundland winter.
A seam of quartz ran through the rock, a hidden treasure only visible to those who had the eyes to see. Had Mace or one of his ancestors chosen the rock for that purpose, knowing that only gargoyles would be able to sense the beauty in its depths?
There was a soft gasp from Reive. Jess's eyes flew open.
Her hand was sticking into the statue up to the wrist.
Jess yelped and yanked it out. She shook her fingers automatically, as if she'd burned them, although actually they felt fine, not even the least bit tingly. Cautiously she prodded at the statue with her fingertip to make sure it hadn't gone melty or something, but it was still completely hard and cool, indistinguishable from normal stone.
"That's not what I was trying to do," she said.
"I could tell." The corners of Reive's mouth twitched. He reached out and put a hand on her arm, and then he stopped looking amused. "Jess, you're shaking. Are you okay?"
"I—I just ..." She put her hand to her mouth. She couldn't explain; she could barely even begin to explain it to herself.
It felt as if she was poised on the edge of something so huge she could barely comprehend it. She wasn't the only gargoyle in the world, and she might have all these powers she was barely beginning to understand. And yet, in order to use those powers, she was going to have to embrace the gargoyle side of herself and accept that she could never change it, never get rid of it. How could she ever bear to do that?
"Jess?" Reive put an arm around her. She leaned into his comforting warmth for a moment and then pushed away.
"Come on, let's go find this village Mace told us about."