Barbara Hambly - Icefalcon’s Quest

She’d have to face Alde, too.

The Lady of the Keep awaited them on the shallow steps of the black fortress, wrapped thick in the faded rainbow of her coat of quilted silk scraps. Like a crooked scarecrow, the Bishop Maia of Renweth stood beside her, and on her other side her friend and maidservant Linnet unobtrusively held her hand. There were other people as well – the Keep Lords, and Ilae, and the entrepreneurs who functioned more or less as neighborhood bosses – but as she walked beside Rudy’s litter with the scrag-end of the storm winds lashing at her face, Alde was all Gil saw.

The younger woman’s jaw set, body stiffening, drawing in on itself for protection, when it was clear to her that Tir wasn’t among the returning Guards.

“Rudy’s alive,” Gil called, as they came near enough for her voice to be heard without shouting. “The Icefalcon’s gone after Bektis and Tir. Tir seems to be all right.”

“Thank you.” Gil could only guess at Alde’s reply by the movement of her lips. Wind lifted the Lady’s hair, a shroud of night, as she descended the steps to grasp and kiss Rudy’s nerveless hand.

Undemonstrative herself, Gil did the only thing she could think of to do to help her friend through the hours of the evening and the night. She stayed beside her in the cell to which they brought Rudy, a chamber in the Royal Sector whose round tiled heating stove and larger bed made it more comfortable than the young mage’s narrow quarters off the wizards’ workroom on first level south. Neither Ilae nor Wend had had early training in their craft, both having denied or neglected their talents in the days before the coming of the Dark Ones. But Wend had, through the years of his priesthood, practiced surreptitiously the healing magic on those members of the small western community who had been in his care, and both he and the red-haired girl had seven years of formal teaching. Together they worked spells of strength and stability on Rudy’s heart and nervous system, and of healing on his flesh, drew runes and circles of power around the herbs they prepared to combat infection.

Through the night Minalde stayed quietly in a corner of the room, fetching water or lint, feeding the fire or holding the knots on bandages when such things were called for. Linnet disappeared to look after Gisa, the daughter Alde had borne Rudy in the Summerless Year, who at eighteen months was old enough to know something was desperately wrong, and to care for Gil’s son Mithrys; Gil remained at Alde’s side. She didn’t say much – she had never known what to say to someone in grief or pain – but once Alde reached out and took her hand and squeezed it hard enough to hurt.

Later she asked, “Did you see Tir?” and Gil shook her head.

“I heard him call out Rudy’s name,” she said. In the soft double glow of lampflame and witchlight. Alde’s face seemed thin and old, an echo of the old woman she would one day be. A woman who had lost the husband she adored and feared and had seen the brother she had worshipped turn tyrant and monster, who had survived the crumbling of her world and found in its wreck a love like the rising of the stars.

“We saw his tracks a couple of times, when they let him off the donkey. I think that Hethya woman must have gotten him out of the Keep to look at the caves along the north side of the Vale, and Bektis put a glamour on one of those warriors he had with him to make Tir think it was Rudy.”

Alde only nodded, her face an ivory death mask.

“I never thought Bektis would possess the power to hold storms so long after he had gone.” Brother Wend turned on his three-legged stool, drying his hands on a coarse hempcloth towel, a dark-haired little man whose priestly tonsure had grown in when he left the Church, only to be replaced by his hairline’s early retreat. “Of course, he will always be a greater wizard than I, but …” He shook his head.

“He had a … a device of some kind,” said Gil. “This kind of crystal thing strapped on his hand. It may just have been reflection, but it looked like it lit up when Bektis threw lightning or defended himself against Rudy’s spells. He’s a stronger wizard than Rudy is anyway, but if it was a magnifier or amplifier of some kind …”

Ilae looked up from grinding dried purple-bead roots in the mortar. “Does such a thing exist?”

“Who knows?” Gil replied. “We don’t know what’s been stashed away all these years, left over from the Times Before. Ingold is always finding references to stuff the Church confiscated and hid and never talked about.”

“And with good reason, if legend is anything to go by.” Maia stood in the doorway, his long face lined with concern. “How is he?”

“About the same.” Gil shrugged, hiding fear and anxiety, as the Icefalcon did. “Maybe other people hid stuff, too, out of fear of the Church or of their neighbors. Now those places have been broken open, and nobody’s keeping an eye on them anymore.” She glanced sidelong at Maia. “Why do you think Ingold’s been in such a panic to find books and implements and whatever other apparatus he can?”

“There were certainly records in my episcopal palace of things I did not understand, hidden in places lost to anyone’s memory,” the tall Bishop agreed. “We do not even know what may still be hidden in this Keep, untouched since the Dark’s first rising.”

“And it’s a good guess Govannin had a couple of secrets on hand. For all she carried on about mages being soulless tools of Evil, she was quick enough to use black magic in anything she considered a good cause. If Bektis ever did manage to break her hold on him, you can bet your best fur booties he’d help himself to whatever he could stick in his pockets.”

“How soon will the storm clear?” Alde, who had sat all this while with bowed head in silence, now looked up at Wend. “How soon can a party go over the pass in pursuit?”

“I’ll go out there in the morning,” the physician promised. “Even the strongest spells disperse, if their maker is not there renewing them. I’m not the weather-witch Bektis is, but I should be able to hasten their breaking.”

“How soon?” Her eyes were like the heart of the night, her voice porcelain, cold and friable, as if it would shatter at a touch.

“Tomorrow afternoon?”

She whispered again, “Thank you.” Her small hands closed around Rudy’s brown, cold fingers, seeking reassurance, perhaps hoping to hold his spirit to his flesh. She hadn’t touched the tisane Linnet had brought, or the supper, either. Gil knew better than to think that she would unless forced.

I’d better get some sleep, thought Gil. And pack. She remembered the three identical warriors. Were others waiting to join Bektis once he got over the pass? A dozen or a hundred, cookie-cuttered out of some unguessable spell? Ingold had never mentioned such a thing to her, nor Bektis’ jeweled weapon, either.

How could she, and the Guards, and a novice like Wend cope with those and whatever else the sorcerer had up his fur-lined sleeves?

But the concern turned out to be moot. An hour or so later Ilae put down her herbs and sat up straight, her hand going to her temple, her eyes suddenly flaring wide. “Damn,” she said.

Alde, her hand still locked around Rudy’s where she sat on the floor, a pillow at her back, looked up sharply at the note in the girl’s voice. “What is it?”

“I …” Ilae hesitated, frowning, listening hard to sounds only she could hear. Then the witchlight brightened behind her head as she dug in the purse at her belt for a scrying stone, a ruby Ingold had found in the ruins of Penambra, which she turned and maneuvered in the sharp glint of the light. “Damn,” she said again, more forcefully, and pushed her rusty hair out of her eyes. “There’re men coming up the road from the river valley, my Lady. Lots of men – horses – spears glittering in the moonlight …”