Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

The silence of the Keep closed them in; Rudy spared a residual spell to make anyone inclined to take this route from the fourth level urgently recall something they'd left back in their cell.

Her hair smelled of the sandalwood combs she arranged it with and the aromatics Linnet put in her soap.

Her arms tightened around his rib cage. "Those creatures under the ice you spoke of... they're real."

"I've never known Ingold to be wrong," Rudy said simply. "I don't think anybody ever has. It's in his contract or something."

The fragile bones of her, the too-thin flesh, rippled with a snort of laughter. "Eldor said to me once that Ingold got into more trouble with truth than most men did with error," she said, and after all these years it was possible for her to speak matter-of-factly the name of the man who had been her husband: someone she once knew, respected, and loved. "I didn't know Ingold in those days. He had a reputation for madness."

"I gotta admit," Rudy said, "this one sounds straight out of the supermarket tabloids-our version of street-corner ballads," he added.

"That's Ingold." Alde nodded philosophically. "I heard some of the most astonishing things about him. He'd been at Court three weeks after my marriage before I realized who he was. I talked to him about roses in the gardens-I thought he was the gardener's uncle from Gettlesand. I expected Ingold Inglorion to be six and a half feet tall with burning red eyes glaring out from the shadows of a black hood." She smiled a little, looking back at that timid sixteen year-old in her sunny rose garden. Rudy took her hand, and they ascended the dark stairs together, their feet creaking hollowly on the rough-chopped planks that were little more than the rungs of a ladder, "I wish... well, I could have sent someone else with him. A party of Guards,

not just Gil. She isn't well, Rudy. You saw that wound she took in Penambra. It shouldn't look like that."

I'll die before I'll let you come to harm, Gil had said, in the fawnspot shadows of the alders. Who'd guard Ingold against Gil?

He pushed the thought away. "I get the feeling we're gonna need everybody here before they get back," he said quietly.

Garunna Brown bustled past them, the slatternly matriarch of a whole web of kinship ties on fifth north. Rudy reached out a tiny spell to her sister-in-law Melleka, with whom she walked, so that Melleka said suddenly, "By Saint Bounty, I clean forgot to tell you about Treemut Farrier and Old Man Gatson's stepdaughter..." The two women were too absorbed in their gossip to even notice Rudy and Alde, much less notice that they were holding hands.

And anyway, Rudy thought uneasily, if someone could influence Gil's mind, why not the Icefalcon's? Or Melantrys'? Or Seya's or Yar's or anybody else's? A third party wouldn't have Gil's love to counter those commands.

But it was true, he reflected, that a third party would not have all those years of instinctive trust to build on. Ingold would keep one eye on anyone else guarding his back.

"You did what you had to do, babe," he said softly. "I guess it's just karma that the kid who turned out to be mageborn is Scala."

"At least we know it now," she pointed out. "She isn't some private little tool of her father's, like a covered tile in a hand of pitnak. Tir asked me to find you." Rudy stopped dead in the middle of the corridor. This part of the fourth level south was largely deserted on summer afternoons, its inhabitants working in the fields or scavenging the woods, or occupied in the water gardens in the crypts. To save fuel-even the pine knots that burned in clay or stone holders in the wall-the corridors up here were mostly dark. A whole generation of children lived here, who could run the labyrinthine passageways utterly without light. For Alde's sake he'd called a little flake of magefire to drift before them; it showed now the marks of strain around her mouth at her son's name. Tir had not spoken to Rudy since his return, beyond a polite, "I understand." The boy would remain in the room with him if held by the dictates of good manners. It was a knife in Rudy's heart every time Tir wouldn't meet his eyes. "He said," Alde went on, selecting her words with care, "that he has been thinking about these... these earthapples, these potatoes. He thinks there's something about the northeast corner of the fifth level north. Far forward, he says, almost to the front wall of the Keep. He says he doesn't know clearly, but you might want to go there." "And he thinks this'll help?" Rudy shut his mouth hard the moment the words were out, regretting the anger in his voice.

She averted her face from his shout, her beautiful, tender mouth motionless, trapped between her love for Rudy and her love for her son. At length she said, "Geppy was his friend. Thya was his friend. All the herdkids were." "For Chrissake, they were mine, too!" He almost yelled the words at her. She didn't answer.

Rudy bowed his head, breathing hard. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. But even if I'd been here, there was nothing I could have done."

"I know that," Alde said softly. "But you're the only father he knows, and a wizard. He feels that if you had been here, you could have done something. I think he'll realize differently, in time."

Not if he keeps being looked after by Linnet, Rudy thought glumly. Not if he talks to the parents of those kids. He had seen the way they looked at him when they'd pass in

the corridors.

They stood silent for a time in the near-dark, her hands upon his waist and his on her shoulders, his head bowed so that their foreheads touched, not knowing what to say. Knowing there was nothing they could say. Far off someone called out, "Wrynna? Wrynna, are you home?" and rattled the makeshift shutters. Elsewhere a pair of cats snarled and swore at one another in age-old territorial dispute. Rudy sighed and pulled Alde close, tasting the tang of betony tisane on her lips as he kissed her. "So," he said, "you wanna go hunt for spuds?"

Whichever of Tir's remote ancestors had seen or known anything about the western end of the fifth level north, he, and thus Tir-would not have recognized the place now. At some point in the Keep's long history, the place had become a tight-congested slum, cells subdivided off cells, corridors cut into rooms, minor rights-of-way carved through corners of other cells.

Walls of dirty, desiccated wood or insufficiently plastered lath at once blocked and guided the way; pipes and conduits ran along the floors, or overhead, where water had been pirated from fountains. The place stank to heaven of rats and guano and abounded in statues of the smiling and ubiquitous Saint Bounty, adorned with stolen glowstones.

Rudy removed the glowstone from before a particularly refulgent image-there were limited quantities of the magic lights, far too few to let them be used as votives-and by its moony radiance studied the beneficent face, the tiny representations of woolpacks, fruits, hams, cheeses, eggs. "There anything wrong with that that you can see, babe?"

"Are you speaking theologically or aesthetically?" She considered it, tilting her head, her dark, heavy hair catching blue glints in the light. "I've never heard of Saint Bounty before this year-I mean, he's not a real saint-and Tir could model a better figure than that and has better taste in colors."

The foodstuffs represented were certainly garish, pinks and greens and reds and golds, like a lush photograph in a cookbook, and above the collar of his curiously chalky robe, Saint Bounty's round, beaming countenance looked rouged. Rudy wondered if that was what Gil had meant. "Maybe he's the patron saint of makeup? Like St. Maybelline in my world? Is that supposed to be a sheepskin he's sitting on?" "It has to be," Alde said. "No one would portray a Holy One perched on a plate of pig entrails."