Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

Rudy shrugged. "Maybe because if I said, 'Abracadabra, turn that jerk into a good man,' there'd be no change." He shook his head. "Sheesh. I've been around Ingold too long."

She laughed and touched his hand. His fingers fitted with hers as if designed to do so at the beginning of time. The farms-which, contrary to Graw's assertions, were in fact the chief business of the Keep, and always had been-were far enough from the walls that wizard and lady could walk handfast without exacerbating the sensibilities of the conservative.

Everyone knew that the Keep wizard's pupil was the lady's lover and the father of the child she carried, but it was a matter seldom mentioned; the religious teachings of a less desperate age died hard.

"You're going to have to go down there, you know," Alde said in time. "Now?"

Their eyes met, and she rested her free hand briefly on the swell beneath her gown. "I think so," she said matter-of- factly. "It's the second or third time he's been up here, demanding that something be done about slunch. He has a lot of influence in the Settlements, not with the nobles, but with the hunters, and some of the farmers. If he broke away from Keep rule, he'd probably turn bandit himself. The child isn't due for another two months, you know."

Rudy knew. Though he'd helped to birth dozens of babies in the five years he'd been Ingold's pupil, the thought of Alde being brought to bed while the master wizard was still on the road somewhere terrified him. With Alde, it was different.

The Lady of the Keep. The widow of the last High King. Tir's mother. The mother of the child that would be his.

The thought made him shiver inside, with longing and joy and a strange disbelief. He'd be a father. That child inside her-inside the person he most loved in the whole of his life, the whole of two universes-was a part of him.

Involuntarily-half kiddingly, but half not-he thought, Poor kid. Some gene pool. And yet...

Under the all-enveloping bulk of her quilted silk coat she barely showed, even this far along. But she had the glowing beauty he'd seen in those of his sisters who'd married happily and carried children by the men who brought them joy. Ingold had early taught him the spells that wizards lay upon their consorts to keep them from conceiving, but she had pleaded with him not to use them. Nobody in the Keep talked about their lady carrying a wizard's child, but even Bishop Maia, usually tolerant despite the Church's official rulings, had his misgivings. "It can't wait till Ingold gets back?"

"It's only a day's journey." He could hear the uneasiness in her voice, see it in the set of her shoulders and the way she released his hand to fold her arms around herself as she walked.

"Much as I hate to agree with anything that man says, he's right about slunch destroying crops. Unless the harvest is better this year than last, our stores will barely get us through next winter."

"It was a bad year." Rudy shifted his grip uneasily on the hand-worn smoothness of his staff. "Last winter was rough, and if Gil was right about the world getting colder, we're in for a lot more of them."

Beyond the shaggy curtain of pines, the Snowy Mountains lifted to the west, towering above the narrow valley, the glittering cliff of the Sarda Glacier overhanging the black rock. Far up the valley, St. Prathhes' Glacier had moved down from the peaks of the spur range called the Ramparts, a tsunami of frozen diamond above the high pastures.

Edged wind brought the scent of sterile ice and scraped rock with the spice of the spruce and new grass. It wailed a little in the trees, counterpoint to the squeak of Alde's sheepskin boots in the mud and the purl of the stream that bordered the fields. The mountains may have been safer from the Dark, Rudy thought, but they sure didn't make good farmland.

Cows regarding them over the pasture fences moved aside at Rudy's wave. He clambered over the split rails and helped Alde after, not liking the lightness of her frame within its faded patchwork of quilting and fur. Spring was a time of short rations.

Even with last year's stored grain and the small surplus sent up from the Settlements, everyone in the Keep had been on short commons for months.

Crypt after crypt of hydroponics tanks lay in the foundations deep beneath the Keep, but Rudy didn't have to be a technician to know they weren't operating as effectively as they could be. In any case, grain and corn had to be grown outdoors, and in the thin soil of the mountain valley, good arable was short.

The withy fences around the slunch in the west pasture had been moved again. The stuff had almost reached the stream. Past the line of the fences the grass was dying; the fences would have to be moved farther still.

Three years ago, when slunch first started growing near the Keep, he and Ingold had agreed that neither humans nor animals should be allowed to eat it until they knew exactly what it was.

And that was something neither of them had figured out yet.

Short meadow grasses stirred around his feet, speckled bright with cow-lilies and lupine. There were fewer snakes this year, he noted, and almost no frogs. The herdkids waved to him from the other side of the pasture fence and chased the Settlements' tribute sheep into the main flock.

He spotted Tir's bright blue cap among them, beside Geppy Nool's blond curls. Geppy's promotion to herdkid-with the privilege of sleeping in the byres and smelling permanently of dung-had consumed the smaller boy's soul with envy, and for several days Tir seriously considered abdicating as High King of Darwath in favor of a career in livestock supervision.

"Damn crazy stuff." Rudy waved back, then ducked through the hurdles that made up the fence. Alde followed more clumsily, but kept pace with him as he walked the perimeter of the rolling, thick, wrinkled plant-if plant it was. Sometimes Rudy wasn't sure. He'd never found anything that looked like seeds, spores, roots, or shoots. Slunch didn't appear to require either water or light to grow. It just spread, some six inches high in the middle of the bed, down to an inch or so at the edges, where wormlike whitish fingers projected into the soil bared by the dying grass.

Rudy knelt and pulled up one of the tendrils, like a very fat ribbon stood on its edge.

He hated the touch of it, cold and dry, like a mushroom. By the tracks all around it there were animals that ate it, and so far neither the Guards nor the Keep hunters had reported finding dead critters in the woods...

But Rudy's instincts shrank from the touch of it. Deep inside he knew the stuff was dangerous. He just didn't know how. He squeezed it, flinching a little at the rubbery pop it gave before it crumbled, then wiped his hands on his soft deerhide trousers. With great effort Ingold had acquired enough sulfur from a dyer's works in Gae to manufacture oil of vitriol-sulfuric acid-and had tried pouring that on slunch. It killed it but rendered the ground unfit for further use. And the slunch grew back within three or four weeks. It was scarcely worth the risk and hardship of another trip to the ruins of Gae for that.

"Do you think that thing Maia described to Ingold-the Cylinder he found in the vaults at Penambra- might hold some clue about the slunch?"

Alde kept her distance. The dark fur of her collar riffled gently around her face, and the tail of her hair made a thick sable streak in the colors of old gowns, old curtains, and old hangings that had gone into her coat.

"It might." Rudy came back to her, uneasily dusting the sides of his breeches and boots. "Ingold and Gil haven't found zip about slunch in any archive they've searched so far, but for all we know it may have been common as daisies back before the first rising of the Dark. One day Pugsley's going to look up at me and say, 'Oh, we always dumped apple juice on it-shriveled it right up.' And that'll be that." Alde laughed, and Rudy glanced back at the cold, thick mass behind them, inert and flaccid and yet not dead. He said, "But we better not count on it."