Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Rudy caught her firmly under the chin, forced her head up, and kissed her gently on the mouth. Her lips tasted of salt. "I can't believe that," he murmured.

She sniffled and swiped at her eyes with her arm in a child's gesture. "It's true."

Rudy's voice was soft. "What about Eldor?"

At that her eyes filled again, the tears making them seem fever-brilliant in the soft, glowing light of the watch fire. For a moment she could only gaze helplessly at him, unable to speak.

"I'm sorry," Rudy said. So much had happened, he had forgotten how short a time it had been.

She sighed and relaxed in his hold, as if something had gone out of her, a tension whose very pain had kept her strong. "No," she said softly. "No, it's all right. I loved Eldor. I loved him from the time I was a little girl. He had a magic that drew people, a vitality, a splendor. You noticed even the simplest things he did, as if they had a kind of significance that no one else could match. He became King when I was ten." She bowed her head, as if under the weight of memories impossible either to accept or to withstand. Wordlessly, Rudy took her back into the circle of his arm and drew the cloak up over her shoulders to cut out the icy air of the night. In those black cliffs above the road, the wolves were howling again, the full-throated chorus of the pack at the kill, distant and faint in the darkness.

"I remember standing on the balcony of our townhouse in Gae, the day he rode to his coronation." The murmur of her voice was hardly louder than the soughing of the pines above the road and the crackle of the fire. She was a dreamer reliving a dream. "He'd been in exile-he was always in and out of favor with his father. It was a hot day in full summer, and the cheering in the streets was so loud you could barely hear the music of the procession. He was like a god, like a shining knight out of a legend, a royal prince of flame and darkness. Later he came to our house to go hunting with Alwir or to see him on some matters of the Realm, and I was so afraid of him I could barely speak. I think I would have died for him, if he had asked."

Rudy saw her, a shy, skinny little girl, all dark-blue eyes and black pigtails, in the crimson gown of a daughter of the House of Bes, hiding behind the curtains in the hall to watch her tall, suave brother and that dark, brilliant King walk by. He was barely aware that he spoke aloud. "So you always loved him."

That same small smile of self-mockery folded into the corner of her mouth. "Oh, I was always falling in and out of love in those days. For six months I had a terrible crush on Janus of Weg. But this was-different. Yes, I always loved him. But when Alwir finally arranged the marriage, I found out that-that loving someone desperately doesn't always mean that he'll love you back."

And Rudy said again, "I'm sorry." He meant it, though he saw now that the dead King's ghost would always be his rival. She had loved so much, it was monstrous that she should be hurt by not having that love returned.

Silently the pressure of her hand in his thanked him, "He was so-distant," she said after a time, when she had regained control of her voice. "So cold. After we were married, I seldom saw him-not because he hated me, I think, but because-for weeks at a time I don't think he even remembered he was married. Looking back, I suppose I should have seen that that brilliance of his was so impersonal, but-it was too late, anyway." She shrugged, the gesture belied by the quaver in her voice, and she wiped her eyes again. "And the worst of it is that I still love him."

To that there was no possible reply. There was only physical tenderness, the closeness of another human being, and the reassurance that he was there and would not leave her. Against him, he felt her struggle to control her sobs and eventually grow still, forcing living grief back into its proper sphere of memory. He asked, "So Alwir arranged your marriage, too?"

"Oh, yes," she replied, in a small but perfectly steady voice. "Alwir knew I loved him, but I don't think that was the reason. He wanted the House of Bes allied to the Royal House; he wanted his nephew to be High King. I don't think he'd have forced me into it if there had been someone else, but since there wasn't-Alwir is like that; he's very calculating. He knew he would be made Chancellor after we were married. He's always doing things with two intentions."

You're telling me, sweetheart.

"But for all that," she went on, "he's been very, very good to me. Underneath that gleaming edifice of sartorial splendor," she declaimed, half-jestingly, "there really does lurk a great deal of love."

Oh, yeah? Love of what?

He had realized that in Alwir's case, there was no such thing as Love of whom.

From her watch fire in the darkness, Gil saw Alde stand up, wrap the soft bulk of her black fur cloak tighter around her, and make her way cautiously down the stony ridge of land back toward the dark silhouette of her wagon against the lighted camp. Gil was apprehensive, for the night seemed to her to prickle with evil, and she wondered how the silly girl could ever have left her child, even with the camp guards there, to go play pattyfingers in the dark with Rudy Solis. Gil was a woman who did not love, and her feelings toward those who did were a mixture of sympathy, curiosity, and occasionally a longing that she would not admit to. Ordinarily she would not have cared whether Rudy and the widowed Queen held hands and talked or engaged in al fresco orgies. But tonight was different-tonight she felt the presence of the Dark, that watchful malice she had fell lurking in the stygian mazes of the vaults at Gae, that chaotic, abhuman intelligence, so close to her that, despite the fire at her back, she was always turning her head to see if it were standing at her elbow.

At midnight one of Alwir's troopers relieved her, a big, solid young man in a red uniform much patched and stained. She saw Rudy turn his post over to one of the Red Monks and descend the ridge toward the camp. From the darkness where she stood, halfway between camp and ridge, Gil watched him double back through the shadows of the wagons and slip quietly over the tailboard of the one that bore the banners of the House of Dare.

Gil sighed and started back for the campfire of the Guards. But, like a dog, she scented wrongness in the windshifting darkness. She kept looking out into the night that lay beyond the amber glow of the camp lights, feeling, like a cold and heavy hand, the threat of impending doom.

Most of the Guards were already asleep when she returned to their camp, rolled in their blankets and lost in the swift, hard sleep of physical exhaustion. Only one man was awake, sitting by the small glow of the fire like a weathered rock, somehow giving the impression that he had been there from the beginning of time. She'd seen him sitting thus night after night, when he wasn't patrolling the perimeters of the camp. She could not remember when she had last seen him sleep.

Gil hunkered quietly down at his side. "What do you see?"

The wizard shifted his eyes from the blaze, light catching in the shadowy seams of his face as he smiled. "Nothing of any moment." The small motion of his fingers took in the louring silence of the night. "Nothing to explain-this."

"You feel it, too," she said softly, and he nodded.

"We should reach the Keep in as little as three days," he said. "Last night I felt this, dimly and far off. Tonight it's much worse. Yet for three nights now there has been no report of the Dark anywhere along the line of march."

Gil locked her hands around her drawn-up knees and looked at the muted light flickering over her bruised and swollen fingers, reddened with cold. "Is there a Nest in this part of the mountains?" she asked.

"Only the one I spoke of once to Janus. It's an old Nest, long ago blocked. Night after night, I've sought it in the fire and seen no sign that it has ever been touched. Yet night after night I look again." He nodded toward the small fire. "I can see it now. It lies in a broad, shallow-sided valley, maybe twenty miles from here. I can see the foundation lying at the very back of the vale, slanting upward against the cliffs; the valley itself is crowded with foliage; filled with heat and darkness." A log broke in the fire and the scattering embers threaded his face with light.