Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"You could," Gil agreed softly. She touched her belly again, wonderingly, understanding why Alde made that gesture. There was somebody in there, she thought. Somebody who wasn't her.

"My judgment isn't that good."

She smiled a little. "Whose is?"

"It's your life, Gil." He drew a deep breath. "And you have chosen how you want to live it: as a warrior, as a scholar, as a woman free of any bonds that she cannot lay aside. A child is not what you wanted. I know that."

"No." She shook her head and pulled the leather thongs free that bound her hair, shaking it down to lie loose over her shoulders. She saw for the first time there was gray in it, though she was not thirty. So she hadn't gone completely unchanged after all, she thought, without rancor or annoyance.

But then, who ever did?

She thought about Niniak again, and the Eggplant-and her sister, her professors, her friends.

She went on, "No, it wasn't. But you know... we change. I've never wanted to find myself in bonds that I couldn't lay aside, no, in a situation I couldn't just walk away from. I never wanted to be trapped the way I was trapped by what my family expected of me, the way I was trapped whenever I argued with my father or when my mother started quoting how much things would cost. I was with you because I wanted to be, because I chose to be. If I let the Icefalcon or Melantrys or Janus or the Eggplant beat the hell out of me with a training-sword, it was to get where I was going-like lost sleep or ink stains or a headache from looking in a record crystal too long." She fell silent a moment, turning her hands on the muchworn leather bindings of the sword hilt.

"But what we want changes, too. That's something I never understood before: the kind of love that can come to you when you stick around through really thick and really thin; the kind of love when you put yourself on the line, when you give it time and stay long enough to learn to care. When you make someone-and I don't just mean you, I mean the Keep, and Rudy, and Alde, and even doofs like Enas Barrelstave-when you care enough about people to make them a permanent part of your life. It's different from what I knew before."

"That's what I'm saying," Ingold said. "That I cannot guarantee that I will be a permanent part of your life."

"I can't guarantee that your son will be, either," Gil said softly. "But I'd like to have all the time with him that I can. And this may be the only chance I get."

Minalde's child was born a month later, two weeks before the equinox of fall. Rudy sat on the steps of the Keep watching the coagulating twilight blacken to night, dyeing the glaciers, staining the slunch beds below them, black-veined by dying fruit trees. The glaciers, he supposed, would continue to grow-though from Brycothis he was beginning to learn the spells by which they could be turned aside from Renweth Vale and convinced to flow down the other side of the ridge. With any luck, the slunch would stay pretty much where it was, until a warm year killed it, who knew how far down the road. Gaboogoos still grew out of it, but they didn't attack anybody, just wandered around the woods in their fanciful shapes, weird souvenirs of a forgotten world.

They didn't eat anything or harm anyone, and eventually died of starvation or heat prostration, or gaboogoo distemper, for all he knew. Some animals still ate slunch, but they puffed up and died pretty fast, and most of them avoided it now. After seeing what had happened to the devotees of Saint Bounty, nobody in the Keep could even be brought to touch the carcasses of either gaboogoos or mutants that died in the woods.

Rudy sighed. The surviving members of the Brown, Wicket, and Biggar clans had carved a stone stele to place on the mass grave in which were buried the ashes of Koram Biggar and Varkis Hogshearer and all those others who died screaming when Gil broke the final complex of spells that kept the Mother of Winter in stasis. Maia had spoken a blessing over them, asking God to accept the clean parts of them and to forgive them for what they could not help.

Scala Hogshearer was buried up with the herdkids, in the orchard behind the Keep. Without mentioning it to anyone, Rudy kept an eye on both graves. So far, no slunch had grown on either one.

He leaned his back against the Keep's black wall, let his head tip back to rest on the ensorcelled stone. Alde was all right. The baby was fine. He'd delivered the child himself.

He'd done it himself because neither of the Keep's two new wizards-red-haired, silent Ilae and quiet little Brother Wend-had ever delivered a baby. In the Black Rock Keep, Tomec Tirkenson's hagwife mother-in-law Nan was in charge of that-and virtually everything else. And in any case the newcomers arrived only days ago, escorted by Old George the dooic and his band, stumbling and filthy, exhausted after weeks of flight and hiding from the gaboogoos. Wend was still laid up with fever and fatigue, but Rudy was reasonably sure he'd make it.

It was good, he thought, not to be the only wizard around anymore.

Good to know that Tirkenson, Thoth, and the others at the Black Rock Keep had likewise survived.

He had a daughter.

Blue- eyed, black-haired, and beautiful as a perfectly ripe peach...

He closed his eyes again. He had a child.

Down the valley he heard them singing, in the direction of the pass.

"Yippee- ti-yi-yo, git along, little dogie,

It's your misfortune and none of my own... "

He thought absently, Gil must be in a good mood.

It was as if she'd only been gone a few days. As if Ingold had only been gone a few days.

It would be good, he thought, to have them back.

"Yippee- ti-yi-yo, git along, little dogie,

You know Wyoming will be your new home. "

What they were singing didn't sink in for a minute; only that Gil couldn't carry a tune worth sour apples, and Ingold had a very nice baritone.

Then he opened his eyes.

They were riding across the meadow-riding-he on a bay horse, she on a long-tailed black, driving before them a small, mixed herd of mares, sheep, and a dozen or more scrawny cows.

Four of the mares bore packs on their backs, and from somewhere Ingold had gotten two scraggy yellow dogs, who trotted gamely along through the short, hesitant grass, nipping at the heels of stragglers.

Ingold had told him via crystal that they were coming back. He had neglected to mention this.

"Cool." Rudy got stiffly to his feet and came down the steps of the Keep to greet them, hands in the pockets of his vest. "French fries and burgers."

Gil tossed the reins down, sprang from the saddle; skinnier than ever but somehow better than she'd looked in a long time.

Peaceful, he thought: Something had changed in her eyes. She wore a gaudy-hued silk coat and still had her hair up in a gladiator's topknot.

"Sorry it took us this long, punk," she said, and hugged him, for the first time ever.

"We did hurry. Is Alde okay?"

" Alde's fine," Rudy said, returning the embrace with a slow, tired grin. "You didn't need to rush. Everything, uh-came out okay."

Ingold dropped from the saddle like he'd ridden trail herds all his life; all he needed was a ten-gallon hat to go with his red-and-black Church wizard robes and the bearskin coat that looked like he'd looted it off somebody who'd been dead for a long time.

"Rudy, I congratulate you... I congratulate you deeply."

People were running down the Keep steps around them; the two herd dogs barked furiously, but stilled at a gesture from Ingold, sitting in the grass and watching suspiciously while Bok the Carpenter and Lank Yar and others exclaimed and argued and put ropes around the animals' noses and horns.

"My apologies for not mentioning the herd. Frankly, with the Raiders as thick as they are in the valley, I'm astonished we weren't bushwhacked a dozen times on the way up here. We purchased the cattle along the way-two of those calves are male, by the way, so we really will have a herd again-but the sheep were an entirely fortuitous find."