The Legend Begins Read Online Free PDF Page A

and snap, and all at once the air was filled with the strange and mysterious scents of the world outside the wilderness.
    Little Fur caught a flutter of movement on a ledge jutting out from the wall above her.
    â€œPigeon,” she called softly. She smelled that the bird did not want to answer her, but it could not ignore her since she had called it by kind. At last it came out and she saw that it was a young pigeon with pretty pink-and-gray speckled feathers and a bright gaze.
    â€œCrooo! Who is calling pigeon?” asked the pigeon. Its words had the same scrambled quality that Little Fur found in all bird minds, but unlike Crow’s voice, there were no shadings to suggest a deeper intelligence.
    â€œI call,” Little Fur said slowly. “I have come far to ask the advice of the Sett Owl. Do you know where she roosts?”
    â€œCrooo! What being important to you may not being so to Sett Owl,” the pigeon warned. “What question would you asking?”
    Little Fur answered politely that her question could only be told to the Sett Owl because it was so difficult and complicated. She crossed her fingers, hoping that this pigeon would be as scatterminded as those she had healed in the wilderness.
    â€œComplicatings,” sighed the pigeon. “Crooo! What is pointiness of making things so?”
    â€œSome things just
are
complicated without anyone making them so.”
    â€œThat being truthfulness,” the pigeon admitted. It puffed out its chest in sudden decision. “Above great doors is round hole with torn metal web. There can you getting in to see Herness.”
    â€œThe Sett Owl roosts
inside
the beaked house?” Little Fur was dismayed, for how could she get to the Sett Owl without losing touch with the flow of earth magic?
    The pigeon smelled her disappointment and misunderstood it. “Crooo! You are having winglessness. Very inconvenient. But there being another way into beaked house for creeping things.”
    Little Fur did not much like being called a creeping thing, though perhaps it was a fair description from a bird’s point of view. She doubted that she would be able to use this other entrance either, but she might as well go and look at it.
    It did not take her long to find the opening, which was a square of darkness at the base of the stone wall bathed in moonlight. To her delight, it was the mouth of a tunnel that ran under the wall, so its base was made of good earth. Her moon shadow knelt beside her on the wall as she sniffed. The smell of the strange magic was much stronger here. As Little Fur crawled into the opening, she shivered, wondering if she would see the source of the still magic.

    The tunnel was long because the walls of the beaked house were thick, but there was little to see other than mouse droppings and a few leaves caught in a tattered spider’s web. As she came closer to the end, Little Fur began to smell human feelings all muddled together—weariness and sadness, despair and longing—but her nose also told her that there were no humans inside. It was as if they had found some way of leaving their feelings in a place even after they had left it. Brownie had never spoken of that, so perhaps it had something to do with the magic in the beaked house.
    She poked her head out of the tunnel and it was like dipping into water, only it was not water but magic that lapped about her. Sitting back, Little Fur rubbed her tingling cheeks. There was just one great chamber in the beaked house. Long wooden benches faced a raised part of the floor at one end, where there was a table draped with a rich, sinuous cloth. Metal objects sat on it, gleaming in a false, red-tinged light. Huge stone vessels of cut lilies stood on either side of the table, filling the air with the melancholy scent of their dying. Little Fur was so lost in wonder at the queerness of it all that it was some time before she remembered to look for the Sett Owl.
    Her troll