Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"Papa says you have to teach me." There was spiteful pleasure in her voice. "He says the whole Council voted you had to, because I'm a wizard like you. So you have to." Anger prickled through him like the heat of fever at the Council's self-important motion and vote. Rudy had been sorely tempted to tell the lot of them to go to hell-he'd teach whom he pleased. But from Hogshearer's smug handrubbing, he had looked across to Alde's white-faced grimness, and realized the seriousness of the danger in which Ingold had left them.

This girl was mageborn. The Keep would need her. One day her magic might very well save Alde's life. He still had to fight to keep his voice even and reasonable. "Great." He pushed the book back across the workroom table at her. "So learn." "I want to learn something real!" She thrust it away again, the overblown rosebud lips puckering with scorn. "I want to learn something I can use." "For what?" He was aware that his refusal to rise to her was driving her crazy. "To spy on Lala Tenpelts or Nilette Troop with their boyfriends, so you can tell their parents and get them in trouble again?" "They were mean to me."

"Well, that sure justifies your behavior, doesn't it?"

She threw him a glare of smoldering rage. "They're selfish. They wouldn't let me wear their necklaces. And they're liars. They tell lies about me all the time." She wasn't looking at him now, pushing one stubby forefinger back and forth on the waxed wood of the old table. "But I showed them. Nilette's papa beat her when I told him about what she and Yate Brown were doing. He pulled her dress off her back and beat her with a strap."

"Spied on that, too, did you?"

She glanced up at him, ugly anger in the small, pouchy dark eyes. Even as a nine-year-old, when he'd first met her, she'd been unpleasant, stealing food from the general stores of the Keep and begging for things other people had, though her father was one of the wealthiest men in the Keep.

It was now pretty clear how Hogshearer had learned about that merchant, earlier in the spring. For years the moneylender had been telling everyone that his only child would grow to be not only beautiful but brilliant.

"How'd you do it?" he asked, folding his arms and contemplating her across the table in the glow of the witchlight that he'd called forth to burn on the tips of the metal spikes which had long ago been driven into the walls. "In fire? In water? In a piece of glass?"

She looked as though she was about to say, Wouldn't you like to know? but thought better of it. "In fire," she said grudgingly. "All I have to do is look into fire, and I can see anybody in the Keep, anybody in the world."

"Fire's the easiest," Rudy said. It was, but he admitted to himself that he wanted to take the wind out of the little bitch's sails.

"It is not!"

"Okay," Rudy agreed affably. "I can see you know more about this than I do. But I'm telling you, Scala, learning magic is learning lists. Learning the True Names, the secret names, of everything, everything in the entire world. Every plant and leaf and pebble and animal has its own name, its real name. Learning the essence of these things, learning what they really are, gives you the power to Summon them, the power to command. I still have to memorize lists. Ingold still works on his lists. Until you learn that, you're just like everybody else."

Only hours after this conversation, Varkis Hogshearer cornered Rudy on one of the minor stairways to the fourth level.

"You don't fool me one bit, Master Wizard!" he rasped, shaking a bony forefinger in Rudy's face. "You're prejudiced against my girl because she stands up to you for her rights instead of bowing down and licking your boots and the boots of that sly old man! Well, I'm letting you know right now that I won't have it! You want to keep all the knowledge to yourself, you and that-"

"Master Hogshearer," Rudy said tightly. "If I'm prejudiced against Scala-and I admit that I am-it's because she's bone lazy, she's a sneak, and a liar, and a spy; because she likes to get other people into trouble for her own amusement; and because she won't work. All those things make her a bad student."

"Don't think you can say that about my girl!" the merchant roared. "If there was any law in this Keep willing to go up against the likes of you, I'd put an injunction on you for saying that about her! You're all prejudiced-prejudiced by that Woman who thinks she can keep hold on everything in this community! Prejudiced by sheer jealousy of me! Well, now my daughter's got what you want, what you need, and I swear you're not going to keep her down!"

He stormed down the stair without waiting for a reply-back to the five-cell complex he'd traded and bargained several other families out of, where he and his wife and Scala lived in comfort with all the pots and pans, needles and pins, plowshares and hoe heads, bought from those who needed a little money or food and held until someone in the Keep was desperate enough to pay what he wanted for those unobtainable commodities.

Rudy sighed, leaned his shoulders against the coarse mix of plaster and stone behind him, and knocked the back of his head gently but repeatedly against the wall. Ingold, he thought, you better be saving the world, because this sure ain't worth it if you're not.

Hell, I could be back at Wild David Wilde's Paint and Body Shop in Fontana. I'd have worked my way clear up to counterman by this time.

Nah, he reflected on further thought of that alternate future, that alternate life. By this time I'd have got some chick pregnant and be married with a coupla kids.

And wretched, he thought. Wretched beyond contemplation or guessing, with no idea what was wrong-only that there was something that he should be doing that he wasn't. That there was someone he loved to the marrow of his soul, who had not been born into that world.

Pain tightened hard around his heart at the memory of Minalde's cold anger-And rightfully so, he thought despairingly. Nobody knew better than he-except Alde-what a hell of a situation they were all in, facing starvation, facing the uncertainties of a world growing more hostile by the week with the inexorability of that pearlescent wall of ice creeping toward them down the valley. She must have been counting the weeks till the old boy got back. And he'd aided and abetted.

But I had to! he argued silently. Ingold had to be the one who went. Somebody had to go...

Yeah, right. There's these three old magic guys hiding under a glacier a thousand miles away, see, and they're gonna destroy the world in four or five years or so if they're not stopped.

Even to Rudy it sounded like the kind of logic espoused by those who wore colanders on their heads to stop the Martians from reading their brains. No wonder Alde was furious. A soft voice said, "Rudy?"

He opened his eyes. She was standing next to him, blue eyes almost plum-colored in the grubby glare of the pineknot torch at the head of the stairway. The shawl around her shoulders, which Linnet had knitted for her, made her look as frumpy and unstylish as that hypothetical shotgun bride back in Berdoo. She was as beautiful as daylight and sun. She said, "I'm sorry." Rudy sighed, feeling as if the weight of the Keep had evaporated off his back. "Naah." He put his arm gently around her shoulders, and just the movement of her, the thankfulness with which she settled into place against his body, was everything he could have asked for in life, Hogshearers and gaboogoos and the Fimbul Winter notwithstanding.

"Christ, you have every right to be sore. It's your job to take care of everybody, and I helped Ingold screw you big-time. I'm glad you're not mad at me anymore, but for God's sake don't apologize to me for getting mad. I sure deserved it." The worry passed from her eyes, and she rested her forehead against his chest. "You didn't. Even Ingold doesn't, not really."