Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Govannin's eyes blazed. "Not at the cost of-"

"Don't be a pair of fools." The words were spoken quietly as the white embroidery of the tent-curtains rippled, and a girl stood framed in gleaming silk against the shadows of the room beyond. Minalde's face was very white against the raven blackness of her unbound hair. She was wrapped for warmth in a star-decorated quilt, holding Tir against her under its folds. The child's eyes, wide and wandering in fascination over the lamplit ulterior of the tent, were a jewel-blue echo of his mother's and of Alwir's own.

"You are both acting like fools," she went on in a low voice. "The tide is rising, and you are arguing about who will be the first one into the boat."

Alwir's aristocratic nostrils flared in annoyance, but he only said, "Minalde, go back to your room."

"I will not," she replied in that same quiet voice.

"This is none of your affair." His was the voice of a man to a recalcitrant child.

"It is my affair." She kept her words soft, but Alwir and Rudy both stared at her, more astonished than if she had burst forth into colorful profanity. All the breath went out of Alwir as if she'd kicked him; he had obviously never even considered that his gentle and acquiescent little sister would defy him. Rudy, who remembered how she'd shoved a torch into his face on the haunted stairs at Karst, was less surprised.

"Tir is my son," she continued. "Your stubbornness could get him killed."

The Chancellor's impassive face flushed; he looked ready to tell her to mind her tongue before her elders and betters. But she was, after all, Queen of Darwath.

"If what my lord Ingold says is true," he said.

"I believe him," she said. "And I trust him. And I will go on with him to the Keep tonight, if I go alone."

From where she stood in Ingold's shadow by the corner of the tent, Gil could see that this girl, wrapped in stars and darkness, was trembling. It couldn't have been easy to defy a man who, by all accounts, had run her life for years; Gil's respect for Minalde, who had been up to this moment merely a name and a silhouette in the darkness, increased.

"Thank you for your trust, my lady," Ingold said quietly, and their eyes met for a moment. Gil knew from experience that the wizard's gaze could strip the spirit bare and defenseless; but whatever Alde saw in his eyes, it must have reassured her, for she turned away with a straight back and an air of resolution.

Alwir caught her arm, drew her to him, and said something that none of them could catch, but his face was intent and angry. Alde pulled her arm from his grip and went inside without a word. It was just as well that she did, for she did not see her brother's face, transformed by cold rage into the mask Gil had seen when first she'd entered the tent, a mask all the more inhuman because it was so impersonal. But when he turned back to them, his smile was deprecating. "It appears," he said, "that we are moving on tonight after all."

It was clear that this was the opening line to something else, but the Bishop cut him off so smoothly that the interruption had every appearance of being accidental. "If that is so," she said in her slow, dry voice, "I must go and make ready the wagons of the Church." And she was gone, far more quickly than anyone would have believed possible, before he could speak any command.

It was almost fully dark by the time the camp broke. Snow was coming down harder now, the wind whirling little flurries of grainy flakes into the ashes of the stamped-out fires and coating the churned mud in a thin layer of white. Word had been carried across the river over the makeshift bridge, and families were crossing slowly, men and women balancing precariously on the shaky spiderweb of rope and cottonwood poles, with their bundles on their shoulders. Oddly enough, when Rudy walked down to the jerry-built bridgehead with Ingold and Gil to see about the single wagon Alwir had negotiated from one of his merchant friends, he found that a spirit of optimism seemed to have seized the train, grossly at odds with the circumstances. The grumbling wasn't any less prevalent, and the curses were just as loud and vivid. Men and women packed up their few belongings, rubbing chapped hands in the flaying cold, snapping, bickering, and fighting among themselves-but something had changed. The bitter desperation of the early part of the march was gone. An aliveness crackled through the blinding air that had not been felt before-a hope. This was the last march, if they could make it. They were within striking distance of the Keep.

"That should do," Ingold remarked, watching Guards and Alwir's private troops dragging the half-disassembled wagon box up the crooked trail. "Granted, it should make Minalde and Tir a target, but in this case that's better than risking losing them in the snow. As for you two... " He turned to them and laid a hand on each of their shoulders. "Whatever you do, stay close to that wagon; it's your best hope of reaching the Keep alive. I'm going to be up and down the train; I may not see you. I realize none of this is any of your business-that you were hauled into it against your will, and neither of you owes me anything. But please, see that Alde and the child reach the Keep in safety."

"Won't you be there?" Gil asked uneasily.

"I don't know where I'll be," the wizard said. Snow lodged in his beard and on his cloak. In the failing light Gil thought he looked worn out. Not surprising, she thought. She herself was operating on nervous energy alone. "Take care of yourselves, my children. I'll get you safely out of this yet."

He turned and was gone, the stray ends of his muffler whipping like banners in the wind.

"He looks bad," Rudy said quietly, leaning on his staff as the snowy twilight swallowed the old man. "You guys must have had one hell of a trip."

Gil chuckled dryly. "Never doubt he's a wizard, Rudy. He has to be, to get people to follow him on crazy stunts like that."

Rudy gave her a sidelong, thoughtful glance. "Well, you know, even back in California I thought the setup was crazy, but I just about believed him. You do. You have to."

And Gil understood. Ingold had a way of making anything seem possible, even feasible-that an aimless motorcycle drifter could call forth fire from darkness, or that a mild-mannered and acrophobic Ph.D. candidate would follow him over the perilous roof of creation to do battle with bodiless, unspeakable foes.

Or that a ragged train of fugitives, split by dissensions, frozen half to death and at the end of their strength, could make a fifteen-mile forced march through storm and darkness to find at last a refuge they had never seen.

She sighed and hitched her too-large cloak over her narrow shoulders. The wind still bit through, as it had torn at her all day. She felt tired to the bones. The night, she knew, would be terrible beyond thinking. She started to move off, seeking the Guards, then paused in her steps. "Hey, Rudy?"

"Yeah?"

"Take care of Minalde. She's a good lady."

Rudy stared at her in surprise, for he had not thought she had known, much less that she would understand. Rudy still had much to learn about coldhearted women with pale schoolmarm eyes. "Thanks," he said, unaccountably touched by her concern. "You ain't so bad yourself. For a spook," he added with a grin, which she returned wickedly.

"Well, it beats me why she'd hang out with a punk airbrush-jockey, but that's her business. I'll see you at the Keep."

Rudy found Alde where the few remaining servants of the House of Bes were packing the single wagon. She herself was loading bedrolls into it; Medda, if she had still been alive, would have expired from indignation at the sight. He kissed her gently in greeting. "Hey, you were dynamite."

"Dynamite?"

"You were great," he amended. "Really. I didn't think Alwir would go along with it."