Mother of Winter (48 page)

“Gone?” Cush made a noise in the back of his throat that could have been a gag or a bitter chuckle. “Like sayin’ a chap with the yellows is poorly, friend. They’re as gone as it gets in this world.”

He led them out. During the battle with the ice-mages, more—and larger—gaboogoos had attacked the tomb, and either lay in pieces or wandered aimlessly about below the steps. Only a few of the mutant dooic were still alive, the ones who had been least changed, and they were clearly in extremis, lying in the corrosive goo underfoot with blood slowly leaking from their mouths as the slunch-permeated organs of their bodies dissolved. Ingold shivered in the lurid gold of the slanted evening light, grief and pity in his eyes.

Gil turned her own hands over. They were perfectly normal. She put her fingers to her face. The scars were only scars, healing, and rather small.

Her veins no longer itched. The constant backtaste of metallic sweetness was gone from her sinuses. With the enchanted diamond, the poison had been drawn from her, cast back to its originator. Her flesh was free. The silence within her mind was like winter morning, with all the world wakening to peace.

“The gaboogoos themselves just wandered off,” the Eggplant reported, scratching his bead-braided head. “Like they just got word nobody was payin’ ’em. You all right, Gilly?”

“Fine,” she said, meaning it, and the big lunk’s eyes warmed as he pulled her to him in a hug.

“And speakin’ of pay …” Cush took Ingold’s arm in one huge hand, Gil’s in the other, and led them down the foulness of the tomb’s steps, picking their way through the filthy zone of burned slunch and vitriol, to the great rocks that half hid the tomb from travelers in the canyon below. Among the blue shadows of the more open ground behind them, the Empress’ guards were fetching the horses back from their place of safety, their voices low and distant, the only sound in all that dreadful, wasted place.

Cush lowered his voice to exclude the others. “It true what you said? Now it’ll get warm again, and the rains’ll be back, and famine and plague’ll go away?” His sharp, pale gold eyes flickered back toward the guards where they gingerly inspected the decayed and blackening gaboogoos, the dead mutants, with gestures and cries and demon-signs drawn in the air, and he chewed quicker on his gum. “I don’t hold with magic, of course, but … can you tell me who’s going to take power then? Which way it would pay a man to jump?”

Ingold sighed and shook his head. “That I cannot,” he said softly. “I only said that if we accomplished what we set out to accomplish, the weather would grow no worse, or in any case not much. Slowly, things may improve, or they may not. There’s no way of knowing.”

“Hm.” The director of training surveyed the ruin behind them, the smoke drifting from the chemical-blackened doorway of the tomb, the strained and blood-streaked faces of the old man and the girl. “You did all that for ‘no way of knowing’? You need a good manager, you do, my friend.”

The wizard smiled slowly and scratched a corner of his beard. “Well, I’ve been told that before.”

Cush shrugged. “Hardly worth your trouble, seems to me. Still … that saint-kisser Pra-Sia he tells me we’re to bring you back to Her Highness when you’re done here. Somethin’ tells me …” He lowered his voice. “Somethin’ tells me she ain’t one to take ‘no way of knowing’ for an answer.”

“No,” Ingold sighed. “No, and since she didn’t send enchanted spancels along, I suspect she may be counting on me to do exactly what I’m going to do.”

“And that is?”

“Not come back to her for a reward.” Ingold closed his eyes for a moment, visibly gathering his depleted strength, then made a small sign with his fingers. Almost in the same movement he stepped forward, uninjured arm held out, and caught Sergeant Cush as he fell, easing him unconscious to the ground. Past them, Gil saw every guard and gladiator simultaneously collapse, leaving Bektis, who had been haranguing
Pra-Sia, standing by the horses with an expression of offended shock on his narrow face. “Well, really, Inglorion!”

“Don’t.” Ingold raised his bandaged hand to stop the bishop’s mage as Bektis prepared to gesture the men awake again. “Think about it, Bektis.” He strode down the sloping ground from the rocks where he’d left Cush, hands tucked in his sword belt, as if the deed to the entire mountain and half the plain of Hathyobar were sticking out of his pocket.

“I have no idea what Her Highness intended for us once she got us back into her power—neither us, nor you. She’s a calculating woman, and a ruthless one; Govannin’s pupil, and like Govannin, not averse to using forbidden magic for her own ends. Nor averse to lying to her preceptress. She may consider having a tame wizard at her beck an advantage when she raises an army against her husband.”

He stepped over Lieutenant Pra-Sia and came to a halt, surveying the field of battle as Gil neatly hitched the reins of all the horses to the pack-mare’s lead.

“Now, I can assure you she won’t have me.” He hesitated for a moment, then asked gently, “Will you come with us, Bektis? I understand why you remain …”

Bektis’ handsome face worked at his words, and he backed away, trembling. “You understand nothing!” he hissed. “Nothing!”

Ingold only looked at him, sadness in his face. “It isn’t worth it, you know. You have your chance now to leave her, maybe the best you will ever have.”

Bektis turned white with rage. “You, Ingold Inglorion, are an unscrupulous scoundrel!”

Ingold’s eyes changed—resigned, Gil thought. Whatever hold Govannin Narmenlion had on the wizard was beyond Ingold’s power to break.

“But in need of a manager,” Ingold sighed, shaking his head and casting a regretful glance back at the peacefully sleeping Sergeant Cush. “I suppose he’s right. Is there any vitriol left in those tanks, my dear?”

“Not a drop.” Gil unhitched the last one from the pack-mare
and dropped it to the ground. “But we’re in luck. Every one of the guards’ horses is a mare. I knew Cushie rode a stallion, and the Gray Cat, but …”

“Why do you think I asked the Gray Cat to be part of our party?” Ingold caught the rein of Cush’s stallion and swung lightly into the saddle. “As for the mares, luck had nothing to do with that. I told Her Highness that it was part of the spell. And Govannin’s seedling roses, of course, which are in my saddlebags. Give the Eggplant’s gelding to Bektis—we’ll trade the other two for cattle on the way north.” He held out a folded and sealed scrap of papyrus. “Would you be so good as to tuck that into the good sergeant’s tunic, my dear?”

“What is it?”

“Instructions for removing the Wards around the Penambra treasure. We’ll stop by and load up on the rest of the books and enough silver to replenish our supplies, and to remove the really magical parts of the Wards, but I think our friends deserve some remuneration for what is, I fear, a rather scurvy trick. Bektis …”

He turned back to his sputtering colleague and raised his hand in blessing. “If you will not come, I can only say, may the shades conceal you from your foes and the stars lead you home.”

“And may you break your leg the moment you step off that horse!”

Gil came running back from her errand, her whole body light, as though she could run for days untiring. Every muscle in her ached as if she’d been beaten with chains, but the pain within was gone. “You can’t leave the geldings for Cush and the boys?” She cast a guilty eye on the sleeping gladiators. The Eggplant had been a good man to work with and had had, she suspected, a little bit of a crush on her. The Gray Cat had taught her how to use a net and trident.

“Pra-Sia’s guards would only take them and leave our friends to walk in any case. A poor reward for Gush’s warning, but we’ve given them all the best possible excuse. I think he’ll understand.”

He wheeled Cush’s big bay stallion as if he’d ridden in the
cavalry for years. “If we ride fast, my dear, we should make the other side of the hills by morning.”

They camped toward the end of the short summer night in a burnt-out hill-fort in the southern spur of the old volcanic wall. Through the tail end of the predawn light, Ingold labored to obscure their tracks and hide the horses, and Gil realized only then that the old man had spent the last of his magic putting the sleep-spell on the Empress’ guards. It would be hours, perhaps days, before he could protect them with illusion against bandits, warlords, and the vengeance of the Church.

Until then they would have to ride carefully, by night.

She hoped to hell Niniak’s rumor had drawn the warlords away from their route.

She thought about the little thief as she assembled a meal from the contents of the saddlebags, while the dove-blue air of the east stained pink, then apricot, swelling to white with the growing overture of the sun. A little throwaway, she thought, as likely as not to die in the next plague or be killed in the next food riot … wicked and bright and angry for her sake that Ingold had deserted her because she had a scar on her face.

Pain tightened hard in her chest. She’d known him four days and would never see him again.

Or the Eggplant, big and inarticulate, with little jeweled chains decorating his ankles.

Or Sergeant Cush. Or even the formidable and terrible Yori-Ezrikos.

She leaned her back against the broken stone wall behind her and let the sorrow rise through her, telling their names over to herself, as if they died the minute she’d ridden away out of their lives.

She missed them. She would always miss them.

“Gil?” Ingold was standing in the doorway, a sackful of wild corn and beans and a few tomatoes slung over his shoulder, white hair bright in the rising of the sun. “Are you all right?”

She nodded. It had been a long time since she’d thought about her mother, or her sister, or the few friends she’d had in
the history department of UCLA. She wondered if any of them were still trying to find her.

The incredible disappearing woman
, she thought.
Step through the wall of fire—the wall of magic—the wall of Somewhere Else to Go—and you’re gone
.

He knelt beside her, and she reached out blindly and took his hand.

After a time he asked her softly, “What do you want to do about the child?”

She didn’t know why she understood so immediately what he was asking, but she did. She raised her head, looking into his face; it was carefully blanked, but there was deep concern and a haunted doubt in his eyes.

She realized she’d only known she was pregnant for three or four days. And hadn’t had two spare minutes together, with her mind clear, to truly consider the thought,
I’m going to have a child
.

I’m going to have a child. I’m going to be pregnant for nine months—well, more like seven, now—and at the end of it I’ll have this … this little peep in my arms, like Tir when I first saw him. Like my sister’s kid
.

She didn’t know what she felt, a hot strange tightness in her chest, an overwhelming desire to cry.

But she didn’t want to confuse the issue with tears. Didn’t want to hurt him with them.

Carefully, she asked, “Is there a law about it? I know they frown on wizards marrying, but Church law is pretty iffy at the Keep these days. What do you want to do?”

“The Church frowns on wizards marrying,” Ingold said slowly. “This is partly for the sake of its own power, but partly out of consideration for the woman and the child. Wizards … don’t make particularly good parents.”

Gil folded her hands over her knees and smiled. “You mean they head off to parts unknown to save the world because of weird visions they have in caves?”

“Er … precisely.” He scratched at a corner of his beard. “I would not … harm you for the world, Gil.” The words came carefully, picked and chosen from all possible words, and it
came to Gil for the first time that for all his glibness, Ingold was terrified of speaking about the things that meant the most to him. Like her, she thought, he feared that he would say something wrong, something that would lose him the single thing he most needed in the world. And it would be all his fault.

“I would not … ask you to do anything you would regret, or … or be angry with me for, later. With me, or with my memory. For I could have been killed today, Gil. I could have gotten us both killed, without compunction and without regret, doing what needed to be done or what I perceived needed to be done. Today, or any day in the past five years.”

“You could,” Gil agreed softly. She touched her belly again, wonderingly, understanding why Alde made that gesture. There was somebody in there, she thought. Somebody who wasn’t her.

“My judgment isn’t that good.”

She smiled a little. “Whose is?”

“It’s your life, Gil.” He drew a deep breath. “And you have chosen how you want to live it: as a warrior, as a scholar, as a woman free of any bonds that she cannot lay aside. A child is not what you wanted. I know that.”

“No.” She shook her head and pulled the leather thongs free that bound her hair, shaking it down to lie loose over her shoulders. She saw for the first time there was gray in it, though she was not thirty. So she hadn’t gone completely unchanged after all, she thought, without rancor or annoyance.

But then, who ever did?

She thought about Niniak again, and the Eggplant—and her sister, her professors, her friends.

She went on, “No, it wasn’t. But you know … we change. I’ve never wanted to find myself in bonds that I couldn’t lay aside, no; in a situation I couldn’t just walk away from. I never wanted to be trapped the way I was trapped by what my family expected of me, the way I was trapped whenever I argued with my father or when my mother started quoting how much things would cost. I was with you because I wanted to be, because I chose to be. If I let the Icefalcon or Melantrys or Janus or the
Eggplant beat the hell out of me with a training-sword, it was to get where I was going—like lost sleep or ink stains or a headache from looking in a record crystal too long.”

She fell silent a moment, turning her hands on the much-worn leather bindings of the sword hilt.

“But what we want changes, too. That’s something I never understood before: the kind of love that can come to you when you stick around through really thick and really thin; the kind of love when you put yourself on the line, when you give it time and stay long enough to learn to care. When you make someone—and I don’t just mean you, I mean the Keep, and Rudy, and Alde, and even doofs like Enas Barrelstave—when you care enough about people to make them a permanent part of your life. It’s different from what I knew before.”