Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

His voice broke, a thin treble breathless with remembered pain. "The King's men caught Dare's family down by the river where the Settlements are, and there was a battle. Everybody was killed except Dare and a couple of his men. Dare's wife, and his oldest son, and all them. But if the wizards had gone with him, the Keep wouldn't have been safe for people afterward."

Tir looked up at him, face streaked with tears, eyes desperate with the darkness of the memory he had seen. The woman with the white flowers in her red wig and decades of loving in her eyes. The blood-covered man riding to the Keep at the gates of dawn. "He couldn't save everybody," Tir whispered, and hiccuped. "If the ice-mages live, we'll all die, won't we?" Behind the child's voice was the King, asking an opinion of the colony's only mage, and the mage had to give it. "I think that's right, Ace."

Tir's breath fetched hard, then let out; he stepped back and wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and sniffled.

"Can you turn yourself into a bird?" he asked. "Could you get down there and find Ingold and help him?"

Rudy shivered, remembering yesterday's desire for some definite action, something besides the slow grind of responsibilities for which he wasn't strong enough. "Does your mom know you came here to tell me this?" He remembered her anger at Ingold's departure, the ferocity with which she had fought Barrelstave and Bannerlord Pnak when the question arose of abandoning the Keep.

Tir shook his head. His voice was level now, but very quiet. "She wants to save the people here, to keep everyone here safe," he said softly.

"But it's more than just people here. I'll help you get past the Guards, out of the Keep at night. And after you leave I'll tell her I said it was okay. She'll be mad, but I'll tell her I told you to go."

Rudy sighed, and put his arm around the boy again. "You won't have to do that, Pugsley," he said. "If I turned myself into a bird-if I could manage to turn myself into anything better than a turkey-" Tir giggled at that, the King disappearing into the child. "-I'd probably forget how to turn myself back once I got to Alketch, and get myself eaten for dinner. Birds are pretty stupid. I can't do it, kid. I don't have Ingold's power. You're brave for telling me I should go-braver than me. But you and your mom need me here. You understand?" The boy regarded him for a moment, the elusive quality of ancient memory flickering

in his too-thin face. His father's memories. Dare's memories. The memories of the pestilent brat who'd shot the egret, whoever he had grown up to be. Remembering half-comprehended choices, decisions made on grounds he did not yet understand. Finally he whispered, "Okay. Thank you." He put his arms tightly around Rudy's neck.

Ten years ago, Gil guessed, the audience chamber in the palace of the Prince-Bishop of Alketch would have been an oasis of cool in Khirsrit's semitropical heat. Like most of the rooms Gil had seen in the south, it was nearly bare of furniture, the walls of ornate tile and plasterwork flowing upward into a hanging fantasia of pale-tinted stalactites-free of spiderwebs, a tribute to the palace servants and the fear that kept them at their jobs.

Two walls consisted mostly of windows, latticed with sandalwood and opalescent stone that was just visible past a heavy shroud of oxblood velvet, to hold what heat could be held. The room was icy now.

Govannin Narmenlion folded narrow white hands and regarded the old man who stood before her-ragged, barefoot, in chains, and gray with exhaustion-with speculation in her serpent gaze. "My lady." Ingold inclined his head.

"So." She touched a corner of the square of brown parchment on the granite desk before her, and the dark jewel of her ring glinted like a demon's thoughtful eye. "You have come south, Inglorion. I wondered how long it would be." "Before what, lady?"

Her eyelids lowered, creased with age and chronic insomnia. In the north, after the fall of Gae, Gil had guessed her to be in her fifties, though shaven-headed as she was, after the custom of the Church, it was difficult to tell. She looked older now, more than five years could account for, and there was an edge to her harsh voice. "I'll give the Lady Minalde credit for more intelligence than this. When she sent you here, she can't have known about this idiot Pnak who presented himself at na-Chandros' court the eve of St. Kanne's Day, he and his little band of fools, with their offers to negotiate for lands. Negotiate forsooth. Do they really think na-Chandros would deal in good faith for such lands that will still grow wheat?" She held up the parchment and read, "The Vale of Renweth is useless now. Even the fields along the river will grow no crops to support us, and we must cast ourselves upon the mercy of the Emperor." She opened her fingers. The parchment dropped like a great sere leaf, skated across the polished prairie of the desk, and turned over once in the air before it slid to the floor. "He would be well served if that hook-handed hellspawn bade them all come, with their children and their wives. But it is clear to me now, the direction of my Lady Minalde's pretty blue eyes. And to. Here you stand."

Ingold shook his head. He was struggling to breathe, his face like wax from the effort of simply remaining on his feet; Gil had guessed by this time that the battle with the mages under the ice had badly strained his heart. He stood with arms folded, fingers toying gently with one of the several manacles around his wrists. "This is not why I came south, lady. I knew nothing of this."

"Then the Lady of the Keep is a fool." Her voice was soft and sharp as the scrape of a blade tip on stone. "Why did you come?"

Gil wondered, in Ingold's silence, if he would say, To save humankind, and what Govannin's reply would be then. There were two chairs at the rear of the chamber, behind the PrinceBishop's desk.

In one sat a girl of fifteen or sixteen, with the curious top-heavy look of a fragile-boned girl whose breasts fill out large and early. Her forehead was wide and low-the milky dip of a widow's peak visible even beneath the pearl fringe of her veil-and her eyebrows a single line of white, unpretty against the ebony luster of her skin. In the other chair sat a white man who was probably only a few years older than Ingold, bald with age, who had once been tall but sat hunched, shrunken, as if drained of life and will save for the spite in his dark eyes.

Though his robe was red, like those of the servants of the Church, unlike them he wore a beard, a river of perfumed milk lying on his knees.

It was he who spoke. "They say that the Blind King's Tomb is a place of great magic, my lady." His voice was beautiful, a trained light tenor with an almost theatrical modulation, and as he spoke he straightened somewhat, gesturing with an actor's grace.

"It is a place abrim with strange power, where dreams are dreamed and visions seen. Were I attempting great acts of magic, either to rally local warlords to rebellion against their rightful rulers or to cripple and damage the forces of the Empire by means of spells, it is the place that I would choose to work." "I'm sure you would, Bektis," Ingold said kindly. "Every little bit helps those whose power needs that sort of amplification. I take it you haven't been there yourself? Of course not." He turned back to Govannin, leaving Bektis fuming. "My lady, I came south for reasons which have nothing to do with the fighting among your lords. I came despite Lady Minalde's command, and believe me, I regard Bannerlord Pnak as a fool for even thinking he can negotiate with naChandros or Esbosheth's puppet Yor-Cleos-or with Her Highness here." He bowed his head in the direction of the young girl in the chair beside Bektis, but she only regarded him with silvery eyes, one shade darker than frost and expressionless as a snake's.