Mother of Winter (23 page)

“Yuck! That’s stupid! I won’t do it!”

“Fine.” Rudy took back the book she’d slammed shut, the
Black Book of Lists
for which Ingold had nearly lost his life in the giddily balanced ruin of the Library Tower of Quo. “Don’t. See you.” He turned away.

“You can’t!” She grabbed his arm, twisting his sleeve. He was reminded of a girl he’d been to junior high with, the daughter of the owner of the biggest used-car dealership in San Bernardino. She’d always had the newest clothes, which never fit her, and the reddest lipstick on her pouting mouth.

“Papa says you have to teach me.” There was spiteful pleasure in her voice. “He says the whole Council voted you had to, because I’m a wizard like you. So you have to.”

Anger prickled through him like the heat of fever at the Council’s self-important motion and vote. Rudy had been sorely tempted to tell the lot of them to go to hell—he’d teach whom he pleased. But from Hogshearer’s smug hand-rubbing, he had looked across to Alde’s white-faced grimness, and realized the seriousness of the danger in which Ingold had left them.

This girl was mageborn. The Keep would need her.

One day her magic might very well save Alde’s life.

He still had to fight to keep his voice even and reasonable.
“Great.” He pushed the book back across the workroom table at her. “So learn.”

“I want to learn something real!” She thrust it away again, the overblown rosebud lips puckering with scorn. “I want to learn something I can use.”

“For what?” He was aware that his refusal to rise to her was driving her crazy. “To spy on Lala Tenpelts or Nilette Troop with their boyfriends, so you can tell their parents and get them in trouble again?”

“They were mean to me.”

“Well, that sure justifies your behavior, doesn’t it?”

She threw him a glare of smoldering rage. “They’re selfish. They wouldn’t let me wear their necklaces. And they’re liars. They tell lies about me all the time.” She wasn’t looking at him now, pushing one stubby forefinger back and forth on the waxed wood of the old table. “But I showed them. Nilette’s papa beat her when I told him about what she and Yate Brown were doing. He pulled her dress off her back and beat her with a strap.”

“Spied on that, too, did you?”

She glanced up at him, ugly anger in the small, pouchy dark eyes. Even as a nine-year-old, when he’d first met her, she’d been unpleasant, stealing food from the general stores of the Keep and begging for things other people had, though her father was one of the wealthiest men in the Keep. It was now pretty clear how Hogshearer had learned about that merchant, earlier in the spring. For years the moneylender had been telling everyone that his only child would grow to be not only beautiful but brilliant.

“How’d you do it?” he asked, folding his arms and contemplating her across the table in the glow of the witchlight that he’d called forth to burn on the tips of the metal spikes which had long ago been driven into the walls. “In fire? In water? In a piece of glass?”

She looked as though she was about to say,
Wouldn’t you like to know?
but thought better of it. “In fire,” she said grudgingly. “All I have to do is look into fire, and I can see anybody in the Keep, anybody in the world.”

“Fire’s the easiest,” Rudy said. It was, but he admitted to himself that he wanted to take the wind out of the little bitch’s sails.

“It is not!”

“Okay,” Rudy agreed affably. “I can see you know more about this than I do. But I’m telling you, Scala, learning magic is learning lists. Learning the True Names, the secret names, of everything, everything in the entire world. Every plant and leaf and pebble and animal has its own name, its real name. Learning the essence of these things, learning what they really are, gives you the power to Summon them, the power to command. I still have to memorize lists.
Ingold
still works on his lists. Until you learn that, you’re just like everybody else.”

Only hours after this conversation, Varkis Hogshearer cornered Rudy on one of the minor stairways to the fourth level. “You don’t fool me one bit, Master Wizard!” he rasped, shaking a bony forefinger in Rudy’s face. “You’re prejudiced against my girl because she stands up to you for her rights instead of bowing down and licking your boots and the boots of that sly old man! Well, I’m letting you know right now that I won’t have it! You want to keep all the knowledge to yourself, you and that—”

“Master Hogshearer,” Rudy said tightly. “If I’m prejudiced against Scala—and I admit that I am—it’s because she’s bone lazy, she’s a sneak, and a liar, and a spy; because she likes to get other people into trouble for her own amusement; and because she won’t work. All those things make for a bad student.”

“Don’t think you can say that about my girl!” the merchant roared. “If there was any law in this Keep willing to go up against the likes of you, I’d put an injunction on you for saying that about her! You’re all prejudiced—prejudiced by That Woman who thinks she can keep hold on everything in this community! Prejudiced by sheer jealousy of me! Well, now my daughter’s got what you want, what you need, and I swear you’re not going to keep her down!”

He stormed down the stair without waiting for a reply—back
to the five-cell complex he’d traded and bargained several other families out of, where he and his wife and Scala lived in comfort with all the pots and pans, needles and pins, plowshares and hoe heads, bought from those who needed a little money or food and held until someone in the Keep was desperate enough to pay what he wanted for those unobtainable commodities.

Rudy sighed, leaned his shoulders against the coarse mix of plaster and stone behind him, and knocked the back of his head gently but repeatedly against the wall.
Ingold
, he thought,
you better be saving the world, because this sure ain’t worth it if you’re not
.

Hell, I could be back at Wild David Wilde’s Paint and Body Shop in Fontana. I’d have worked my way clear up to counterman by this time
.

Nah
, he reflected on further thought of that alternate future, that alternate life.
By this time I’d have got some chick pregnant and be married with a coupla kids
.

And wretched, he thought. Wretched beyond contemplation or guessing, with no idea what was wrong—only that there was something that he should be doing that he wasn’t. That there was someone he loved to the marrow of his soul, who had not been born into that world.

Pain tightened hard around his heart at the memory of Minalde’s cold anger—
And rightfully so
, he thought despairingly. Nobody knew better than he—except Alde—what a hell of a situation they were all in, facing starvation, facing the uncertainties of a world growing more hostile by the week with the inexorability of that pearlescent wall of ice creeping toward them down the valley. She must have been counting the weeks till the old boy got back.

And he’d aided and abetted.

But I had to!
he argued silently.
Ingold had to be the one who went
. Somebody
had to go …

Yeah, right. There’s these three old magic guys hiding under a glacier a thousand miles away, see, and they’re gonna destroy the world in four or five years or so if they’re not stopped
.

Even to Rudy it sounded like the kind of logie espoused by those who wore colanders on their heads to stop the Martians from reading their brains.

No wonder Alde was furious.

A soft voice said, “Rudy?”

He opened his eyes. She was standing next to him, blue eyes almost plum-colored in the grubby glare of the pine-knot torch at the head of the stairway. The shawl around her shoulders, which Linnet had knitted for her, made her look as frumpy and unstylish as that hypothetical shotgun bride back in Berdoo.

She was as beautiful as daylight and sun.

She said, “I’m sorry.”

Rudy sighed, feeling as if the weight of the Keep had evaporated off his back. “Naah.” He put his arm gently around her shoulders, and just the movement of her, the thankfulness with which she settled into place against his body, was everything he could have asked for in life, Hogshearers and gaboogoos and the Fimbul Winter notwithstanding. “Christ, you have every right to be sore. It’s your job to take care of everybody, and I helped Ingold screw you big-time. I’m glad you’re not mad at me anymore, but for God’s sake don’t apologize to me for getting mad. I sure deserved it.”

The worry passed from her eyes, and she rested her forehead against his chest. “You didn’t. Even Ingold doesn’t, not really.” The silence of the Keep closed them in; Rudy spared a residual spell to make anyone inclined to take this route from the fourth level urgently recall something they’d left back in their cell.

Her hair smelled of the sandalwood combs she arranged it with and the aromatics Linnet put in her soap.

Her arms tightened around his rib cage. “Those creatures under the ice you spoke of … they’re real.”

“I’ve never known Ingold to be wrong,” Rudy said simply. “I don’t think anybody ever has. It’s in his contract or something.”

The fragile bones of her, the too-thin flesh, rippled with a
snort of laughter. “Eldor said to me once that Ingold got into more trouble with truth than most men did with error,” she said, and after all these years it was possible for her to speak matter-of-factly the name of the man who had been her husband: someone she once knew, respected, and loved. “I didn’t know Ingold in those days. He had a reputation for madness.”

“I gotta admit,” Rudy said, “this one sounds straight out of the supermarket tabloids—our version of street-corner ballads,” he added.

“That’s Ingold.” Alde nodded philosophically. “I heard some of the most astonishing things about him. He’d been at Court three weeks after my marriage before I realized who he was. I talked to him about roses in the gardens—I thought he was the gardener’s uncle from Gettlesand. I expected Ingold Inglorion to be six and a half feet tall with burning red eyes glaring out from the shadows of a black hood.”

She smiled a little, looking back at that timid sixteen-year-old in her sunny rose garden. Rudy took her hand, and they ascended the dark stairs together, their feet creaking hollowly on the rough-chopped planks that were little more than the rungs of a ladder. “I wish … well, I could have sent someone else with him. A party of Guards, not just Gil. She isn’t well, Rudy. You saw that wound she took in Penambra. It shouldn’t look like that.”

I’ll die before I’ll let you come to harm
, Gil had said, in the fawnspot shadows of the alders. Who’d guard Ingold against Gil?

He pushed the thought away. “I get the feeling we’re gonna need everybody here before they get back,” he said quietly.

Garunna Brown bustled past them, the slatternly matriarch of a whole web of kinship ties on fifth north. Rudy reached out a tiny spell to her sister-in-law Melleka, with whom she walked, so that Melleka said suddenly, “By Saint Bounty, I clean forgot to tell you about Treemut Farrier and Old Man Gatson’s stepdaughter …” The two women were
too absorbed in their gossip to even notice Rudy and Alde, much less notice that they were holding hands.

And anyway
, Rudy thought uneasily,
if someone could influence Gil’s mind, why not the Icefalcon’s? Or Melantrys’? Or Seya’s or Yar’s or anybody else’s? A third party wouldn’t have Gil’s love to counter those commands
.

But it was true, he reflected, that a third party would not have all those years of instinctive trust to build on. Ingold would keep one eye on anyone else guarding his back.

“You did what you had to do, babe,” he said softly. “I guess it’s just karma that the kid who turned out to be mageborn is Scala.”

“At least we know it now,” she pointed out. “She isn’t some private little tool of her father’s, like a covered tile in a hand of
pitnak
. Tir asked me to find you.”

Rudy stopped dead in the middle of the corridor. This part of the fourth level south was largely deserted on summer afternoons, its inhabitants working in the fields or scavenging the woods, or occupied in the water gardens in the crypts. To save fuel—even the pine knots that burned in clay or stone holders in the wall—the corridors up here were mostly dark. A whole generation of children lived here, who could run the labyrinthine passageways utterly without light. For Alde’s sake he’d called a little flake of magefire to drift before them; it showed now the marks of strain around her mouth at her son’s name.

Tir had not spoken to Rudy since his return, beyond a polite, “I understand.” The boy would remain in the room with him if held by the dictates of good manners. It was a knife in Rudy’s heart every time Tir wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“He said,” Alde went on, selecting her words with care, “that he has been thinking about these … these earth-apples, these potatoes. He thinks there’s something about the northeast corner of the fifth level north. Far forward, he says, almost to the front wall of the Keep. He says he doesn’t know clearly, but you might want to go there.”

“And he thinks this’ll help?” Rudy shut his mouth hard
the moment the words were out, regretting the anger in his voice.

She averted her face from his shout, her beautiful, tender mouth motionless, trapped between her love for Rudy and her love for her son. At length she said, “Geppy was his friend. Thya was his friend. All the herdkids were.”

“For Chrissake, they were mine, too!” He almost yelled the words at her.

She didn’t answer.

Rudy bowed his head, breathing hard. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. But even if I’d been here, there was nothing I could have done.”

“I know that,” Alde said softly. “But you’re the only father he knows, and a wizard. He feels that if you had been here, you could have done something. I think he’ll realize differently, in time.”

Not if he keeps being looked after by Linnet
, Rudy thought glumly.
Not if he talks to the parents of those kids
. He had seen the way they looked at him when they’d pass in the corridors.

They stood silent for a time in the near-dark, her hands upon his waist and his on her shoulders, his head bowed so that their foreheads touched, not knowing what to say. Knowing there was nothing they could say. Far off someone called out, “Wrynna? Wrynna, are you home?” and rattled the makeshift shutters. Elsewhere a pair of cats snarled and swore at one another in age-old territorial dispute.