Robert Asprin - The Dead of Winter

"Leave the picture, artist, and go your way." It was Niko's order, but Torchholder let go of the bandy-legged limner, who hurried off without asking when or if he'd get his artwork back.

"That's my problem ... that picture. Forget you've seen it. Yours, if you want what the god wants, is to get those children schooled where they can be disciplined-by Bandaran adepts."

"What makes you assume I want any such-"

"Torchholder, don't you know what you've got there? More trouble than Sanctuary can handle. Infants-one infant, anyhow-with a god in him. With the power of a god. A Storm God. Can you reason out the rest?"

Torchholder muttered something about things having gone too far.

Niko retorted, "They're not going any further unless and until my partner Randal-who's being held by Roxane, I hear tell-is returned to me unharmed. Then I'll ride up and ask Tempus what he wants to do-if anything-about the matter of the godchild you so cavalierly visited upon a town that had troubles enough without one. But one way or the other, the resolution isn't going to help you one whit. Get my meaning?"

The architect-priest winced and his face screwed up as if he'd tasted something sour. "We can't help you with the witch, fighter-not unless you want simple manpower."

"Good enough. As long as it's priest-power." And Niko began giving orders that Torchholder had no alternative but to obey.

On the dawn of the shortest day of the year, Niko had still not come back to Roxane.

It was time to make an end to Randal, whom she despised enough-almost-to make the slight dealt her by the mortal whom she'd consented to love less stinging.

Almost, but not quite. If witches could cry, Roxane would have shed tears of humiliation and of unrequited love. But a witch shouldn't be crying over mortals, and Roxane was reconstituted from the weakness that had beset her during the Wizard Wars. If Niko wouldn't come to her, she'd make him notorious in hell for all the lonely souls his faithless, feckless self-interest had sent there.

She was just getting the snakes to put aside the card game and fetch the mage when hoofbeats sounded upon her cart-track drive.

Wroth and no longer hopeful, she snatched aside the curtain, though the day was bright and clear as winter days can be, with a sky of powder blue and horsetail clouds. And there, amazingly, was Niko, on a big sable horse of the sort that only Askelon bred in Meridian, his panoply agleam as it came within orb of all her magic.

So she had to shut down her wards and go outside to greet him, leaving Randal half unbound with only the snakes to guard him.

Still, it was sweeter than she'd thought it could be, when anger had consumed her-ecstasy just to see him.

He'd shaved. His boyish face was smiling. He rode up to her and slipped off his horse, cavalry style, and slapped its rump. "Go home, horse, to your stable," he told it, then told her, "I won't need him here, I'm sure."

Here. Then he was staying. He understood. But he'd not done anything she'd asked.

So she said, "And Janni? What of the soul of your poor partner? How can you leave him with Ischade-that whore of darkness? How can you-"

"How can you torture Randal?" Niko said levelly, taking a step closer to Roxane, hands empty and out stretched. "It makes it so hard for me to do this. Can't you-for my sake, won't you let him go? Unharmed. Unensorceled. Free of even the taint of hostile magic."

As he spoke, he pulled her against him gently until she pushed back, fearful of the burns his armor could inflict. "If you'll get rid of that-gear," she bargained, trying to keep her hackles from rising. He should know better than to come to her armored with protections forged by the entelechy of dream. Stupid boy. He was beautiful but dumb, pure, but too innocent to be as canny as his smile portended.

She waved a hand behind her. "Done." And as she spoke, a howl of rage and triumph issued from inside and something, with a crash, came bursting out the window.

Niko gazed after Randal as the mage ran, full-tilt, into the bushes. He nodded. "Now it's just the two of us, is that it?"

"Well ..." she temporized, "there are my snakes, of course." She was primping up her beauty in a way he couldn't see, letting her young and girlish simulacrum come forward, easing the evil and the danger in her face and form. By all she revered, did she love this boy with his hazel eyes so clear and his quiet soul. By all she held sacred, the feel of his hand on her back as he ushered her into her own house in gentlemanly fashion was unlike the touch of any man or mage she'd ever known.

She wanted only to keep him. She sent away the snakes, having to discorporate one who objected that she would then be defenseless, open to attack by man or god.

"Take that silly armor off, beloved, and we'll have a bath together," she murmured, preparing to spell water, hot and steaming, in her gold-footed tub.

And when she turned again, he'd done that and stood before her, hands out to strip her clothes away, and his body announced its intention to make her welcome.

Welcome her he did, in hot water and hot passion, until, amid the moment of her joy and just before she was about to begin a rune to claim his soul forever, a commotion began outside her door.

First it was lightning that rocked her to her foundations, then thunder, then the sound of many running feet and chanting priests as all Vashanka's priesthood came tramping up her cart-track, battle-streamers on their standards and horns to blow the eardrums out of evil to their lips.

He was as nonplussed as she. He held her in his arms and pressed her close, telling her, "Don't worry, I'll take care of them. You stay here, and call back all your minions-not that I don't think I can protect you, but just in case."

She watched him dress hurriedly, strapping on his armor over wet skin, and run outside, his weapons at hand and ready.

No mortal had ever come to her defense before. So when, snakes by her side and undeads rising, she saw them wrestle him to the ground, disarm him, put him in a cage (no doubt the cage they'd meant for her) and drive away with him, she wept for Niko, who loved her but had been taken from her by the hated priesthood.

And she planned revenge-not only upon the priesthood, but upon Ischade, the trickster necromant, and Randal, who should never have been allowed to get away, and on all of Sanctuary-all but Niko, who was innocent of all and who, if only he could have stayed a little longer, would have proclaimed in his own words his love for her and thus become hers forevermore.

As for the rest-now there would be hell to pay.

The veiled lady traveled to Sanctuary with the caravan that originated in Suma and had grown at Aurvesh. She was faceless behind the deeply slate blue arras or veil that backed the white one. It covered her head like a miniature tent, held in place by a cloth chaplet of interwoven white and slate. In her Sumese drover's robe of grayish, off-white woolen homespun, the veiled lady was not quite shapeless; she appeared to be either fat or with child. True, others often scarf-muffled their lower faces against the cold, but the point was that the veiled woman never, never showed her face above the eyebrows and below her large medium-hued eyes.

Naturally the caravanseers and her fellow pilgrims wondered, and speculated, and opined and discussed. An innocent child and a rude adult-or-nearly were actually so crude as to ask her why she was hiding behind a veil and all that loose robe.

"Oh my cute little dear," the veiled lady told the child, cupping its plump dark cheek with a nice and quite pretty hand, "it's the sun. It makes me break out all in green warts. Wouldn't that be awful to have to look at?"