Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"I've told Lord Sketh I'm remaining to help with the butchering for another day or two, until my powers return to what they were. Yar would send someone after me if he knew I was leaving, and aside from the nuisance of evading them in the woods, I know they can't spare the workers. I trust the two of you to lend what verisimilitude you can to my story."

"The two of us?" Rudy said, surprised, and glanced over at Gil. He saw her gaze cross Ingold's and lock. Her eyes held a shuttered expression; Ingold's, a shadow of deepest concern. It was almost unheard of for the wizard to go into any kind of danger without Gil watching his back, and traveling with his magic only the bruised shadow of its former strength certainly qualified.

Gil only said, "I don't think it would be a good idea right now for me to go with him," and looked away.

Ingold touched her chin, drew her face around so that his eyes met hers. After a moment she stepped close to him, pressed her uninjured cheek to his shoulder while he folded her in his arms. Rudy heard him whisper, "All will be well, Gilly, my love. All will be well."

Her face was like stone, but after a moment her body relaxed and she nodded. They kissed, like a spell against darkness. Then he gave Rudy a breathtaking bear hug, kissed Gil again, and melted into the dark like a great, battered brown owl. Gil shook her head and said, "If there were a war, Ingold would blame himself for the invention of gunpowder. Or swords, in this case. Let's go, punk. It's a long way up the mountain tomorrow."

Only a small crowd was gathered on the steps of the Keep when the second party of foragers from the Settlements came into sight from among the trees, but they set up a ragged cheer nevertheless. The watchers permanently posted on the Tall Gates, the ruined towers at the head of the pass to the Arrow River gorge, must have signaled the Keep that they were coming.

Even at that distance, Rudy identified Minalde, small and slim in her many-colored cotehardie; the black-uniformed cluster of Guards and the crimson scarecrow that was Bishop Maia; the Lords Ankres and Pnak-and Lord Brig Canthorion, who still retained his title and honors in spite of the fact that with the collapse of civilization, he'd cheerfully abandoned his position as scion of the highest family in the land to become a farmer and move in with Nedra Hornbeam. That would be Lady Sketh on the end there, in her gown of very expensive crimson wool, and Lady Ulas Canthorion...

And that small, dark form clinging to Alde's side would be Tir.

The smell of wood smoke hung over the whole of the valley, blue and heavy. Beyond the Keep, in the fields where the early wheat lay withered now on the turned black soil, long rows of wooden racks had been set up over snaky mounds of wood, and most of the population of the Keep could be seen, butchering the carcasses of the herds as they thawed.

Farther up the Vale, beneath the blue scarf of the mountain shadows, Rudy could see a small party emerging from the woods carrying bundles that he knew were the hacked- up quarters of something they'd found, and baskets of dead foxes, rabbits, birds.

Lord Sketh lifted his hand in a wave and pointed to Rudythere was another cheer. As they came close to the steps, Rudy met Minalde's eyes and saw them filled with tears, relief, the ache to run down the steps and into his arms...

She compromised by walking down, holding out both her hands for him to clasp. Someone in the crowd yelled "Kiss her!" and was shushed by a shocked murmur from the religious conservatives; the look in her eyes, raised to his, was almost as good. She said softly, "When we opened the doors of the Keep-when we found the children frozen, the world dead..."

The harrowing work, the horror and grief of the past four days, were marked on her face in the chalky pallor of fatigue and the black-circled redness of her swollen eyes. Her hair was still braided up for work. Looking down, he saw her hands were blistered.

"God, the herdkids," Rudy whispered, sickened again with the grief he had felt pulling the child Reppitep's body out of the snow, with the hammerblow of realization he had felt in the dooic cave. "Was Geppy...?"

She nodded quickly, and wiped her eyes. In a soft voice, still excluding those gathered on the steps, she said, "And Linnet's daughter Thya."

"Thya?" The child had been barely Tir's age. "What the hell was Thya doing...?" Linnet was standing among the Guards, at Tir's side, holding his hand. Her face was like something cut out of stone, grief gouged into it as with acid. She saw Rudy's eyes come to her, and she stared at him, cold, bitter, hating.

"She sneaked out to spend the night with the herdkids," Alde whispered. "You know they all did, all the children in the Keep, one time or another. Linnet knew. She said it wouldn't do any harm." She forced her voice steady with an effort. "Rudy-" "How's Tir taking it?"

In her eyes he saw that she'd feared all along the moment he'd ask this; her silence hit him in the pit of his belly and the way she avoided his glance. Quickly, almost involuntarily, he raised his head in time to see the child turn and disappear between the legs of the Guards, into the dark of the keep's great doors.

Tir came to the meeting of the Keep Council, held once it grew too dark outside for those butchering and hanging the meat to smoke to see what they were doing. He sat beside his mother wearing a face like a little ivory mask, saying nothing; his eyes were dry but haunted by loss and uncomprehending grief.

It was one thing, Rudy thought, to remember deaths of other friends, in other lifetimes, that whole succession of "little boys" whose awareness he sometimes shared. It was another to wake up one morning and find all your friends dead. Tir would not meet his eyes.

"The first thing that needs to be done is to take an inventory of what we have," said Nedra Hornbeam briskly. "That way we'll know-''

"And why is this the first thing?" Lord Ankres demanded. "My goats presumably remain my goats, in death or in life, to dispose of as I please." Hornbeam's son Lapith, a young man of startling good looks and unsurpassed conversational dullness, spoke up. He and close to two dozen other non-Council members had crowded into the Council chamber to speak for their segments of the Keep, their families, their neighbors.

"And I suppose all those people out there helping you smoke the remains of your goats are doing so out of the goodness of their hearts?"

"Of course we must pool our resources." Maia of Thran, like an ugly but amiable scarecrow in badly dyed ecclesiastical red, raised one crippled hand. "In the face of this catastrophe-"

"There's no 'of course' about it," retorted Varkis Hogshearer, one of the gate-crashers, a pale-faced, rather stoopshouldered man who seemed, to Rudy's eye, to be a whole lot cleaner than anybody else in the room, and didn't walk as if he ached in every joint of his body from working-which, to do him justice, Lord Ankres did. "We have rights to our property..."

And you'd just as soon nobody searched your cells, Rudy thought, recalling the man's propensity for buying up anything he could from anyone who was in need. He was also fairly certain that the moneylender was one of the several, like Koram Biggar of the grubby tribe in fifth north, who had for years been keeping chickens illegally in the Keep. I can see my request to shake down the upper levels for gaboogoos is going to go over like an ejector seat on a roller coaster.

"Our first concern," put in Enas Barrelstave pompously, "is the whereabouts of Lord Ingold. Saving your presence, Master Rudy, you and not he should have been the one to stay at the Settlements with Master Yar. I must say that he has demonstrated throughout a complete lack of responsibility-"

"Ingold stayed in the Settlements because trying to get back in time to warn them about the ice storm wiped every gram of magic out of his body," snapped Rudy, who had had just about enough of the squabbling of the Council for one day. Between his return to the Keep just before sunset, and this Council, he had spent weary hours, first calling up the magic from his own heart and bones to lay spells of preservation and Bugs-Go-Away on the vast piles of thawing meat-the first flies had arrived that afternoon-and then awkwardly skinning the hunks and quarters to be smoked.