Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

Why did she feel that the matter had been arranged?

The blanket slid from her as she rose to hands and knees, knife tucked against her side. In her bones, in her heart, with the same awareness by which she knew the hapless ghoul was being killed for her benefit, she also knew herself to be invisible to the stretched-out fibers of Ingold's senses, invisible to his magic. If she kept low, practiced those rites of silence the Guards had taught, she could sever his spine as easily as she'd severed that of the thing that had torn open her face.

His fault, too, she thought bitterly, surveying the thin fringe of white hair beneath the close- fit lambskin cap. His doing. His summoning, if the truth be known.

I beautiful before...

She knew that wasn't true. Thin-faced, sharp-featured, with a great witchy cloud of black hair that never would do what she wanted of it, she had never been more than passsably pretty, a foil for the glamour of a mother and a sister whose goals had been as alien to her shcolarly pursuits as a politician's or a religious fanatic's might have been.

The awareness of the lie pulled her back-pulled her fully awake-and she looked down at the knife in her hand.

Jesus, she thought. Oh, Jesus...

''Ingold..."

He moved his head a little, but did not take his eyes from the dark, of the court. "Yes,

child?"

"I've had a dream," she said. "I want to kill you."

"Once upon a time there was a boy..." Rudy Solis began. "Once upon a time there was a boy." Altir Endorion, Lord of the Keep of Dare, wriggled his back against the side of the big chest-bed to get comfortable and folded his small hands, the low glare of the hearth's embers shining in his speedwellblue eyes.

"And he lived in a great big palace..." "And he lived in a great big palace."

"With lots of servants to wait on him and do whatever he asked." The blue eyes closed. Tir was thinking about that one. He had long black lashes, almost straight, and his black forelock, escaping from the embroidered sheepskin cap he wore, made a diacritical squiggle between cap rim and the drawn-down strokes of his brows. In thought like this he seemed older than five years. "He went riding every morning on horses by the river and all his servants had to go with him," Tir went on after a moment. "They'd all carry bows and arrows, except the boy's servants had to carry the boy's bows and arrows for him. They'd shoot birds by the river..."

His frown deepened, distressed. "They shot birds that were pretty, not because they wanted to eat them. There was a black bird with long legs wading in the river, and it had a little crown of white feathers on its head, and the boy shot at it with his arrows. When it flew away, the boy told his servants, 'I would that you take this creature with net and line,' '' his voice stumbled over unfamiliar words, an antique inflection, " 'and bring it to me, for I will not be robbed of my... my quarry...' What's quarry, Rudy?" He opened his eyes.

"Quarry is what you catch when you go hunting." Rudy gazed into the hearth, wondering how long it had been since black egrets had haunted the marshlands below the royal city of Gae. A hundred years? Two hundred? It was part of his wizardry to know, but at the moment he couldn't remember.

Ingold could have provided the information out of his head, along with a mild remark about junior mages who needed their notes about such things tattooed on their arms-along with their own names-for lagniappe. "Sounds like a mean boy to me, Pugsley."

"He was." Tir's eyes slipped shut again, but his face was troubled now, as he picked and teased at the knot of deep buried memories, the recollections of another life. "He was mean because he was scared all the time. He was scared... he was scared..." He groped for the thought. "He thought everybody was going to try to hurt him, so they could make somebody else king and not him. His daddy's brothers, and their children. His daddy told him that. His daddy was mean, too." He looked up at Rudy, who had an arm around his shoulders where they sat side by side on the sheepskin rugs of the cell floor. Even the royal chambers of the Keep of Dare were mostly small and furnished simply with ancient pieces found in the Keep, or with what had been hewn or whittled since the coming of the remnant of the Realm's people.

The journey down the Great South Road, and up the pass to the Vale of Renweth at the foot of the still higher peaks, had been a harsh one. Those who'd gone back along the route the following spring in quest of furnishings thrown aside to lighten the wagons had found them not improved by a season under mud and snow. "But why would being scared all the time make him be mean?" Tir wanted to know. "Wouldn't people be nastier to him if he was mean?"

"If they were his daddy's servants, they couldn't be mean back," pointed out Rudy, who'd learned a good deal about customary behavior in monarchies since abandoning his career as a motorcycle painter and freelance screw-up in Southern California. "And maybe when he was mean he was less scared."

Tir nodded, seeing the truth of that but still bothered. As far as Rudy could ascertain, Tir didn't have a mean bone in his body. "And why would his daddy's brothers want to be king instead of the boy? Being king is awful." "Maybe they didn't know that." Tir looked unconvinced.

As well he might, Rudy thought. Tir remembered being king. Over, and over, and over.

Most of what he recalled today would be of more interest to Gil than to himself, Rudy reflected. She was the one who was engaged-between relentless training with the Guards and her duties on patrol and watching the Keep's single pair of metal doors-in piecing together the vast histories of the realms of Darwath and its tributary lands; its relationships with the wizards, with the great noble Houses, with the Church of the Straight God, with the southern empires and the small states of the Felwood and the distant seaboard to the east.

She could probably figure out which king this mean boy who shot at netted birds had grown up to be, and who his daddy was, and what politics exactly had caused his uncles to want to snuff the little bastard- - -no loss, by the sound of it. Except that if that boy had not grown up and married, he would not have passed down his memories with his bloodline and eventually have created the child Tir. And that would have been tragedy.

The wizard in Rudy noted the details remembered about the palace, identifying flowers in the garden, birds and beasts glimpsed in the trees, picturing clearly the place that he himself had only seen in ruins.

But mostly what fascinated him were the workings of that far-off child's life and family, how cruelty had meshed with cruelty, how anger had answered angers formed by fathers and grandfathers; how constant suspicion and unlimited power had resulted in a damn unpleasant little brat who quite clearly worked hard to make everyone around him as miserable as he possibly could. No wonder Tir's eyes were a thousand years old.

"Rudy?" A tousled blond head appeared around the doorway after a perfunctory knock. "M'lord Rudy," the boy hastily amended, and added with a grin, "Hi, Tir. M' lord Rudy, Her Majesty asks if you'd come to the Doors, please. Fargin Graw's giving her a bad time," he added as Rudy reached for his staff and started to rise. "Oh, great." Fargin Graw was someone whose nose Rudy had considered breaking for years. "Thanks, Geppy." "May I go play with Geppy, Rudy?"

"Yeah, go ahead, Ace. If I know Graw, this'll take a while." With Geppy and Tir pelting on ahead of him, Rudy walked down the broad main corridor of the royal enclave-one of the few wide halls in the Keep not to have been narrowed millennia ago by the owners of cells breaking walls to cadge space from the right of way-and down the Royal Stair.