Mother of Winter (27 page)

Her hands pressed over his. “Thank God. They’ve been talking about leaving the Keep, you know. In Council. Bannerlord Pnak and his people, mostly …”

“Leaving the Keep?” Rudy half made a move to sit, and
immediately gave up the idea. “For where? Escorted by what army?”

“For the Alketch.” Minalde’s voice was shaky. “Enas Barrelstave wants us to throw ourselves on the mercy of the Emperor.”

“Alketch is a war zone, and anybody who heads down there is just asking to end up dead or a slave.”

“Master Barrelstave says our only source of that information is Ingold, who might very well be a lunatic. He says, why send someone with whatever wealth can be scraped up, to buy cattle and run the risk of being robbed, when we can go there …”

“Like we’re not gonna be robbed wandering around in the wilderness on foot? We’re fine here.”

“That’s what Lord Ankres said,” Minalde sighed, and moved her shoulders, as if glad to be rid of some heavy yoke. “It was … ugly. And difficult. Koram Biggar said that as long as we’ve the wizards, we should be fine.”

“As long as we’ve the wizards.”
Rudy sighed and rubbed his temples. “Great. Thanks, Koram. Stick a target on my back, why don’t you. When did he say this?”

“This morning,” Alde said. Then she smiled and rubbed her hand gently across his chest, as if stroking a dog. “But if you think Enas Barrelstave would have you assassinated just to convince people of his opinion …”

“Naah.” Rudy sighed. “Although, come to think of it, they’d have to dump me before they reached the Alketch because—according to Ingold, at least—they take a damn dim view of magic down there.”

“It wasn’t the gaboogoos, was it?” Her voice was a whisper.

Rudy shook his head. “Nope. It was definitely Our Side.”

He slept, and woke, and slept again, and, waking sometime in the deeps of the night, tried to contact Ingold, to no avail. Whether this was the effect of the ice-mages’ enchantments or a holdover from the poison, he wasn’t sure—he could light a fire and summon illusion, but wouldn’t have
liked to bet his own or Alde’s life on his ability to do more than that. He couldn’t reach Thoth, either, nor Wend and Ilae. Wend’s hushed, half-whispering voice echoed in his troubled dreams, and the way the little priest had kept looking over his shoulder as he’d said,
Something is there
.

Philonis Weaver returned to him in the morning with more draughts and commented on how well his side was healing, but the effects of the poison were slow to disperse. He would doze, waking sometimes to find Alde sitting quietly beside him holding his hand. Sometimes he would hear the soft tread of a Guard outside his door. She brought him books from Ingold’s library, old scrolls and a whole sheaf of Gil’s notes, and for hours he searched, looking for some mention of the power that had come to him on fifth north, or the spells by which he had called lightning, or the name Brycothis.

A day or two later the Icefalcon came in with the news that Bannerlord Pnak and about thirty-five of his adherents had departed, clandestinely and after helping themselves to considerably more meat and grain than the Keep could afford to lose. “By the look of things, it seems they attempted to take Yoshabel the mule as well,” the White Raider added, setting down a fresh pitcher of water beside Rudy’s bed. “An unwise decision, and in the event she is still with us. You should know, too, that Lady Sketh is much taken up with Varkis Hogshearer and his daughter, and has graciously deigned to receive them in her enclave.”

“That’s a change of heart,” Rudy remarked. He folded together Ingold’s oldest manuscript on Time and the alteration of States of Being, which he had propped against the wall beside him, and brightened the witchlight over his head for his visitor’s sake, though in his heart he doubted that the Icefalcon really needed it. “I thought she didn’t even speak to anybody who had less than eight different kinds of gingerbread on their House Emblem.”

“You underestimate the ennobling qualities of a mage in the family,” the Icefalcon replied. He’d just come from training, fingers bruised and bandaged and pale hair dark
with sweat. “Master Hogshearer is received in many places in the Keep these days. I understand he’s taken to promising his daughter’s services, ‘When my little Princess is the mage of this Keep.’ I think only his knowledge that his little Princess hasn’t actually learned a thing keeps him from putting a pillow over your face.”

“I’m gonna friggin’ kill the bastard,” Rudy muttered savagely. “No wonder he and Scala have been in here twice a day asking me how I’m feeling and when can she start lessons again.”

“You thought it was out of care for your health?”

“Yeah,” Rudy snarled sarcastically. “And now you’ve broken my heart and I feel a setback coming on.”

“I shall commit suicide from remorse.”

“Your mother.”

The Icefalcon bowed gravely. “Your horse.” And departed.

That was annoying. But in the days that followed, various of the Guards and of Rudy’s other friends in the Keep brought him news still more disquieting, news of rumor, of gossip, of whispers. “They’re saying you should have refused to go down to the Settlements that day,” Lord Brig informed him, leaning in the doorway of the cell with the dirt of the fields thick on his heavy sheepskin boots. “That you should have known, should have sensed danger coming …”

“Who’s saying?” Rudy demanded, trying to sit up in the welter of notes and scrolls and codexes scattered over the counterpane, and His Lordship shook his head.

“Some laundresses, who heard it from one of the potters … The usual latrine chat. It’s absurd, I know.” He ran a hand over his dark tousle of hair. “Just thought you ought to know.”

“I can see the argument with Ingold,” Rudy said to Minalde when she came in later, exhausted and speechless with exasperation after a particularly contentious meeting of the Council. “Yeah, maybe he shouldn’t go off scavenging every summer like he does, though if he hadn’t, we’d never have gotten that oil of vitriol to experiment with for killing slunch. But why they should extend that to me …”

“Because you’re here,” Minalde said softly. “Because you’re one of the things that keeps me in power. Because without you, an alliance between Lady Sketh and Lord Ankres might just prove strong enough to take control of Tir away from me.”

She rested a hand on her belly protectively, and Rudy saw how thin it was, its rings abandoned when they no longer fit. He reached out and laid his own on hers.

“Lord Sketh is a cousin of mine, you know. He’s started calling Tir ‘cousin,’ and telling him how he has to learn to be a man. If he can get Lord Ankres on his side, he has the position to step into regency, and control of the Keep.”

“He can’t do that, can he?” Rudy asked uneasily. “What’s Lord Ankres got against you?”

Her hand moved gently over the child within her. “That I’ve given myself to a wizard. That I’ve violated Church law. It’s one reason I’ve been so careful with you, Rudy. The child could be anyone’s; no one can prove who the father is. Yes, everyone knows—but most people don’t want to. Ankres has a very strong sense of what’s proper. It’s what has kept him loyal to me, but this has put his loyalty to the test. And now Lady Sketh is working on having an alternative mage, should anything happen to you.”

But with all that, Rudy knew in his heart he couldn’t stop teaching Scala whatever the girl could learn. He put her to memorizing the less devastating of the Runes—though they were all pretty dangerous—and noted uneasily that she’d acquired a string of what looked like real pearls around her unwashed neck, pearls he’d last seen on Lady Sketh.

“I can’t learn these,” Scala whined.

He set the notes aside, almost subconsciously putting them between his own body and the wall.

Scala threw the wax tablet down on the bed. “They’re too hard.”

Rudy opened his mouth to say,
Tough noogie, kid
, but something in those puffy, defiant eyes stopped him.
Cripes, old Varkis is probably all over her butt to learn something he can trade on
, he thought.

His voice was gentle when he said, “Magic’s hard, Scala. It’s hard for me. It makes me nuts when Ingold tells me to figure out something for myself.” He reached out, trying not to wince at the pain in his side, and picked up the tablet from the faded quilt. “You know how he taught me the Runes? We were camped out one night in the desert—” And Ingold had been in the midst of his black depression after the destruction of Quo, but Rudy suspected that hadn’t affected his teaching style all that much. “—and he wrote out the whole cycle of them, all forty-seven, in a circle around the campfire. He didn’t tell me what they were for and he didn’t tell me to memorize them. He just assumed from then on that I knew them, and when he told me how to use one or another, I’d damn well better know what it looked like.”

“Well, what if you didn’t?” Scala demanded, fleshy mouth pursing into a pout. “What if you forgot? You can’t help it if you forgot.”

“Then I wouldn’t know that piece of magic,” Rudy said. “And I wanted to learn magic more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my whole life, except maybe …” He shook his head and let the sentence die.

“Except maybe for Queen Minalde to fall in love with you?” Her tone was juicy with spite, gossip glittering in her eye. Whatever he said, he guessed, would be spread to whoever she could tattle to in the morning.

He said simply, “Yes.”

It was she who looked away, ashamed. “You’re in love with her?” she mumbled at last.

“Scala,” Rudy said, and she looked up at the sound of her name spoken in friendliness, “I didn’t even know what love was until I saw her. C’mere.”

He reached carefully to the little shelf above his bed and took from it one of the porcelain bowls that Ingold had brought back from one of his scrounging trips to Gae—with some trepidation, for there were very few of them in the Keep, and after the
Black Book
incident, he didn’t trust her for a moment. “Here’s something you can do with those words you have to memorize.”

He taught her the True Name of Water and the simplest of Summonings. She had an attention span that would have embarrassed an eight-year-old, and her sweaty skin had an odd smell to it, unpleasant and yet vaguely familiar.

“You speak in your heart the True Name of Water, and at the same time you draw this triangle in the air over the bowl.” The gesture was a simple focusing tool, but Rudy had needed such tools himself for nearly a year. Within the bowl, water beaded on the jadelike glaze. Eyes half closed in concentration, Rudy spoke the True Name again, reaching through the curtain of reality to the place where such things dwelt, scooping up a handful of water in his mind. The beads on the glaze turned to droplets and trickled to form a little pool at the bottom. Rudy doubted the girl was aware of the slight dryness of the air as moisture condensed out of it, though he felt his own sinuses prick.

Ingold had shown him how to separate water from wood, and from blood and milk as well.

It took about ten minutes for the bowl to fill to the brim. Scala breathed, “Wow.”

“It’s gonna be real slow at first,” Rudy cautioned. He emptied the water into his bedside pitcher, wiped out the bowl with a corner of the sheet. “But if you practice the meditation every day, for as long as it takes a tallow candle to burn this far—” He nicked the one with which he’d demonstrated meditation and held her knuckles against it to make sure she had the measure correct. “—then in a couple of days you’ll be able to make the water come faster.”

“Meditate two knuckles’ worth,” Scala repeated faithfully, her brown eyes wide, and picked up the rune tablet and put it in the pocket of her woolen gown. It was new wool—an incredible luxury now that they had no sheep—and dyed a rather expensive shade of red.

That ought to keep the little sneak busy
, Rudy thought.
And please Dear Old Dad and his new pals
. He wondered how long she’d stay interested.

The following day Rudy was on his feet, owing mostly to
the importunities of Lapith Hornbeam, whose mother’s vaunted idea for acquiring livestock turned out to be far from stupid. It was her suggestion to use a Summoning-spell. When Rudy explained that he’d already scried the Vale, and the pass, and the river valleys below for anything resembling stock, Hornbeam said, “Mother wondered if it were possible to somehow increase the range of your spells? Summon wild cattle or horses from Gae, for instance, or from downriver as far as Willowchild.”

“I dunno,” Rudy said. “Won’t hurt to try. If any show up, we can feed ’em on local graze till we can get up a hay expedition downriver.”

There was the usual fluster from Enas Barrelstave about “letting a wizard leave the Keep …”
Does he think I’m gonna abandon Alde to run after Pnak and his gang?
Rudy wondered. Meanwhile, Hogshearer assured everyone in sight that Rudy’s departure didn’t matter.

Rudy set out with Hornbeam and Hornbeam’s mother and sister and brother-in-law—one of the Weffs from fourth south—and Lord Brig, with what passed these days in the Keep for a picnic lunch. He had just laid out the biggest circle he’d ever attempted, still shaky from exhaustion, when Thoth’s voice rang clear and harsh in his mind:

Look into your crystal, you stupid boy!

His concentration on the circle shattered. Muttering, Rudy made his excuses and retired to the gray-silver aspen grove, plunked himself down cross-legged by the picnic hamper and pulled the scrying stone from his pocket. “What?” And then, “Christ, you okay, man?”

“I am alive,” Thoth said. Blood streaked half his face, making his amber eyes stand out horribly from the bony shadow of brow ridge. “I suppose this qualifies as your okay.” He put the inflection on the first syllable of the word, in the fashion of the north provinces of Alketch.

It would be barely light in Gettlesand. Behind the Serpentmage, Rudy glimpsed stone arches and a smoky brume of torchlight; the wizard stood in one of the rooms carved out of the original Aisle of Tomec Tirkenson’s keep.
Shadows milled, and balls of witchlight drifted overhead or clung to the metal points of the wall spikes, casting eerie reflections over strange murals that sprawled over every surface and pillar and flaring in the old man’s eyes. Now and then Rudy saw the flash of weapons, or a banner of whiter, denser smoke.