Jenny: Sometimes It Takes a Storm

The horses fidgeted a bit, and presently Jason and the Guttersnipe could hear thunder in the distance. In the west the sky was still sunny, flecked with large white clouds; in the east a great tumble of black clouds were gathering, and a wind was beginning to pick up that had an edge to it.

"Kay and Bedwyr are moving into that," Jason said.

"Maybe it will miss them," she said hopefully, "as they go south."

They turned their horses southward themselves with the wind banging hard against them and howling off streams of auburn leaves in a whirl so that moving forward was like riding through a russet rain. Along the hedgerows the robins and rabbits were darting in to get clear of the storm; the birches as they passed creaked mournfully by their streams. It was all lonesome and wild, and she liked it in a curious way that she could not explain. In the last lingering golden light the blowing leaves took on the glow of gems hurtling through air around her; the ends of her hair snapped about like copper wire. The whole blowy world of red fire and driving grey shadow, like being caught between two places at once, stirred up a great longing inside her that hurt for something she did not know.

"Perhaps because, Gaius had said once, you're thinking of the world where gold grows in the crocus-petals, and diamonds tumbled out of the waterfall's spray, and you own them all - not for the sake of being rich, but being enriched by them. You're thinking of that place."

And then she knew what the boy had meant about the Land of Summer, and why he had come up in the starry grass to sit with them when he ought to have been in bed asleep.

By the time they came in sight of the pasture, the mizzle had begun.