The Time of the Dark

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Where is he?” Rudy asked.

“With the Guards.” Gil adjusted her sword belt without meeting his eyes. He could see that she had been crying.

Rudy rolled over and found he had to use the wall to climb painfully to his feet. His body ached, and little electric flashes of pain were stabbing every muscle and joint as he tried to move. Lassitude gripped not only his bones but his spirit as well, so that nothing—not last night’s flight, nor the news Gil had wakened him with this afternoon—brought him either sorrow or joy. He recognized this as a symptom of extreme fatigue.

When I get back to California, he vowed tiredly, I am never, ever going to gripe about anything again. I will always know for a sure fact that things could be loads worse.

If I get back to California, he amended, and followed Gil out of the cell.

The cell was one of a warren of partitioned-off cubicles that stretched haphazardly beyond a door to the right of the gate. To get out, he had to pick his way through ill-lit huddles of those who still slept, lying where they’d fallen in blind exhaustion, and step over and around the pitiful little bundles of pots and blankets heaped in the corners of the tiny rooms. Next to a small hearth, a porcelain-headed doll slumped like a dead child against a pair of broken boots. The place stank of unwashed clothes and a child’s neglected diaper. Blinking in the dim light, Rudy stepped out into the central hall of the Keep.

Looking around him at the dark fastnesses of that fortress, he could only wonder at the human powers of recuperation and the human tendency to make oneself at home. Here, in this awesome fortress of stone and steel, after they’d fought their way through peril and death and darkness, people were settling themselves in cozily for the winter. Children—Minalde was right, children were tough little survivors—ran madly up and down that great, echoing hall, their shrill, piercing yells ringing off the unseen vaults. He heard women’s voices, sweet and high, and a man’s genuine laugh of pleasure. Down at one end of that monstrous space, a rectangle of blinding light marked the doors—daylight, filtered with clouds and snow. At the other end of the hall, a couple of monks in patched red robes were putting up a bronze crucifix over a cell doorway otherwise indistinguishable from a hundred small black doorways exactly like it to establish the domain of the Church—Renweth Cathedral and the administrative offices of Bishop Govannin. She was evidently wasting no time. On the narrow catwalk above, he saw Alwir, like Lucifer in his velvet cloak, quietly surveying his dominion.

The Guards had a complex of cells to the immediate right of the great Keep doors. Gil led Rudy through a narrow entrance. By the smoldering light of grease lamps, he saw Janus arguing with a couple of indignant-looking burghers who had the air of having been men of property before the Dark had made hash of wealth and land and prestige.

Janus was saying patiently, “Cell assignments aren’t the province of the Guards, they’re the responsibility of the Lord of the Keep, so I suggest … ” But neither of the men looked as if he were listening.

The room was heaped with provisions and mail, weaponry and kindling. Guards were sleeping in the chaos, with their slack, pinched faces showing the last stages of weariness. In the room beyond, the confusion was worse, for most of the Guards there were sitting around, eating a scratch dinner of bread and cheese, sharpening their swords, and mending their uniforms. The Icefalcon, his white hair unbraided and hanging in a sheet of liquid platinum past his waist, was keeping a pot of water from boiling by watching it impatiently. People looked up and called greetings, cheerful and noisy, which Rudy returned with what bloodless enthusiasm he could conjure. The place stank of filth and grease and smoke. What the hell was it going to be like in a year? Or two years? Or twenty? The thought was nauseating.

A grubby curtain partitioned off a sort of closet, where the Guards had stored their spare provisions in wildest disorder. Stepping through the grimy divider, Rudy blinked at the dimness, for barely any of the greasy yellow illumination managed to leak through from the room beyond; he had the impression of heaped sacks, scarred firkins, a floor mucky with mud and old hay, and an overwhelming smell of dusty cheese and onions. Across the back of that narrow cell somebody had excavated a makeshift bed on the fodder-sacks. On the bed, looking like a dead hobo, lay Ingold.

“You’re crazy, do you know that?” Rudy said.

The blue eyes opened, drugged and dreamy with fatigue. Then the familiar smile lightened the whole face, stripping the age from it and turning it impish and curiously young.

“You could have got killed.”

“You have an overwhelming capacity for the obvious,” Ingold said slowly, but his voice was teasing, and he was obviously pleased to see Gil and Rudy alive and well. The wizard’s hands were bandaged in rags and his face welted and snow-burned, but on the whole, Rudy thought, he looked as if he’d live. He went on. “Thank you for your concern, though the danger was less than it appeared. I was fairly certain I could keep the Dark Ones at bay until I released the spells over the storm. I knew I could escape them under cover of the storm, you see.”

“Yeah?” Rudy asked, sitting down at the foot of the bed. “And just how the hell did you plan to escape the storm?”

“A mere technicality.” Ingold dismissed the subject. “Is it still snowing?”

“It’s coming down pretty heavy,” Gil said, drawing her knees up like a skinny grasshopper and settling herself beside the head of the bed. “But the wind’s stopped. Tomec Tirkenson says this is the coldest it’s been in forty years. The Icefalcon said he’s never seen the snow pile up in the canyons like this so early in winter. You’re gonna have one chilly trek over the Pass.” Barely visible in the smoky darkness, her face looked thin and haggard, but at peace.

“I’ll wait until it actually stops snowing,” Ingold said comfortably, and folded his bandaged bands before him on the moth-eaten wool of the coverlet. Half-hidden in the gloom, he looked white and ill. Rudy didn’t like the dreamy weakness of his voice, nor the way he lay without moving, propped on the sacks of grain. Whatever he said, the old boy had had one hell of a close call. “I can’t delay much longer than that,” the wizard continued. “Things have happened about which it has become imperative that I consult Lohiro, quite apart from the fact that, so far as I know, Alwir still proposes to assemble his Army here, for the invasion of the Nests of the Dark.”

“Look,” Rudy began. “About your going to Quo … “

But before he could finish, the muted voices outside rose to a quick babble, followed by the hasty scuffle of too many people all trying at once to get respectfully to their feet in too small a space. The ragged curtain was thrust aside, and a towering shadow blotted the infalling light. Alwir, Lord of the Keep of Dare, stepped through. At his side, dark and slender as a young apple tree newly come to blossom, was the Lady Minalde.

The Chancellor stood silent for a moment, gravely regarding the old man lying on his bed of sacks. When he spoke, his melodious voice was quiet. “They told me that you were dead.”

“Not much of an exaggeration,” Ingold said pleasantly, “but not strictly accurate, as you see.”

“You could have been,” the Chancellor said. “Without you, we might all have been, back by the river. I have come—” The words seemed to stick in his throat like dry bread. “I have come to say that I have wronged you, and to offer you my hand in friendship again.” He held out his hand, the jewels of his many rings flaming in the shadows.

Ingold stretched out a grubby, bandaged hand to accept, a king’s gesture to an equal. “I only did as I promised Eldor I would,” he said. “I have taken his son and seen him to safety. My promise is fulfilled. As soon as the weather permits, I shall be leaving to seek the Hidden City of Quo.”

“Do you think, then, that it can be found?” Alwir’s frown was one of troubled concern, but his eyes were calculating.

“I can’t know that until I seek it. But the aid of the Council of Wizards is imperative: to your invasion, to the Keep, to all of humankind. Lohiro’s silence troubles me. It has been over a month, without word from him or from any member of the Council. Yet it is impossible that they cannot know what has happened.”

“But you still think Lohiro isn’t dead?”

Ingold shook his head decisively. “I would know it,” he said. “I would feel it. Even with the spells that surround the city like a ring of fire, I would know.”

Minalde spoke for the first tune, her eyes dark with concern. “What do you think has happened, then?”

Ingold shook his head and said simply, “I don’t know.”

She looked down at him for a moment, hearing, as no one else in the room did, the undercurrent in his voice of helplessness and fear—not fear for the world’s wizardry, but for his friends in Quo, the only people in the world to whom the old man truly belonged. She had seen him before only in his strength and command, and sudden sympathy clouded her face. She said, “You would have sought them weeks ago, but for your promise. I’m sorry.”

Ingold smiled at her. “The promise had nothing to do with it, my child.”

She stepped quickly forward and bent to kiss the top of his rough, silvery hair. “God be with you,” she whispered. She turned and fled the room, leaving lover and brother staring after her in bemused surprise.

“You seem to have made a conquest,” Alwir chuckled, though, Rudy thought, he didn’t sound a hundred percent pleased about it. “But she is justified. Your service to the Realm goes beyond any payment we can possibly make.” He looked around him at the grimy, low-ceilinged room with its dirty walls, the smells and steam from the guardroom outside drifting in, along with Gnift’s cracked, tuneless voice singing of love in cornfields. “It certainly deserves better than a back room in the barracks. The Royal Household is a regular warren—we can put you up there in the comfort that befits your state, my lord.”

The wizard smiled and shook his head. “Others could use the space there better than I,” he excused himself. “And in any case, I shall be departing soon. As long as there is a spare bunk in the Guards’ quarters, I shall have a home.”

The Chancellor studied him curiously for a long moment. “You’re an odd bird,” he said finally, without resentment. “But have it as you will. And if you ever get tired of your gypsy existence, the offer will always stand. The quarrel between us has wasted your talents, my lord. I can only ask your leave to make restitution.”

“There is no leave,” Ingold said, “nor restitution. The quarrel is forgotten.”

Chancellor Alwir, Regent of the Realm and Lord of the Keep of Dare, bowed himself from the room.

A moment later the Icefalcon slipped in to give Ingold a cup of the tea he had been brewing. The steam had a curious smell, but it was supposed to prevent colds. It occurred obliquely to Rudy that, although he’d been frozen, wet, half-starved, and nearly dead of exhaustion, at no time had he felt even mildly ill. Probably there was no time for it, he decided. And what I’ve been through would scare any self-respecting bacteria into extinction.

“Ingold,” Gil said quietly after the Guard had left. “About your going to Quo … “

“Yes,” the wizard said. “Yes, we shall have to talk about that.”

Rudy shifted his position at the foot of the bed. “I don’t think you should go alone.”

“No?”

“You say it’s dangerous as hell—okay. But I think you should take me, or Gil, or one of the Guards, or somebody.”

The old man folded his arms and asked detachedly, “You don’t believe I can look after myself?”

“After that stunt you pulled last night?”

“Are you volunteering?”

Rudy stopped short, with a quick intake of breath. “You mean—you’d take me?” He couldn’t keep the eagerness out of his voice or, to judge by Ingold’s expression, off his face. The prospect of going with the old man, no matter what the dangers—of learning from him even the rudiments of wizardry—overshadowed and indeed momentarily obliterated everything he had ever heard or feared regarding White Raiders, ice storms, and the perils of the plains in whiter. “You mean I can go with you?”

“I had already considered asking you,” Ingold said. “Partly because you are my student and partly due to … other considerations. Gil is a Guard—” He reached out to touch her hair in a wordless gesture of affection. “—and the Keep can ill spare any Guard in the months ahead. But you see, Rudy, at the moment you are the only other wizard whom I can trust. Only a wizard can find his way into Quo. If, for some reason, I do not make it as far as Quo, it will be up to you.”

Rudy hesitated, shocked. “You mean—I may end up having to find the Archmage?”

“There is that possibility,” Ingold admitted. “Especially after what I learned last night.”

“But—” He stammered, suddenly awed by that responsibility. The responsibility, he realized, was part of the privilege of being a mage; but still … “Look,” he said quietly. “I do want to go, Ingold, really. But Gil’s right. I am a coward and I am a quitter and if I didn’t screw you up or get you into trouble on the way—if I had to find the Council by myself, I might blow it.”

Ingold smiled pleasantly. “Not as badly as I would already have blown it by getting myself killed. Don’t worry, Rudy. We all do what we must.” He took a sip of his tea. “I take it that’s settled, then. We shall be leaving as soon as the weather breaks, probably within three days.”

Three days, Rudy thought, caught between qualms and excitement. And then, to his horror, he realized that, faced with the chance of continuing his education as a wizard, he had forgotten almost entirely about Minalde.

I can’t leave her! he thought, aghast. Not for the five or six weeks the journey will take! And yet he knew that there had never been any consciousness of a choice. To go with Ingold, to study wizardry under the old man, was what he wanted—in some ways the only thing he wanted. He had known, far down the road when he had first brought fire to his bidding, that it might lose him the woman he loved; even then he had known that there was no possibility of an alternative course. And yet—how could he explain?

Long ago and in another life, he remembered driving through the night with a scholar in a red Volkswagen, speaking of the only thing that someone wanted to have or be or do. He looked across at her now, at the thin, scarred face with pale schoolmarm eyes, the witchlike straggle of sloppily braided hair. It had been hard for her to leave something she disliked for something she loved. Harder still, he thought, was it to leave something you loved for something you loved more.

Sorely trouble in his mind, he returned his thoughts to what Gil was saying. “So you’ll be bunking here until then?”

“I don’t take up much room,” Ingold remarked, “and I far prefer the company. Besides,” he added, picking up his teacup again, “I never have found out who ordered my arrest in Karst. While I don’t believe Alwir would put me out of the way as long as he had a use for me, there are cells deep in the bowels of this Keep that are woven with a magic far deeper and stronger and far, far older than my own, cells that I could never escape. The Rune of the Chain is still somewhere in this Keep—in whose possession I cannot tell. As long as I remain in the Keep of Dare, I would really prefer to sleep among my friends.”

Rudy’s fingers traced idly at the moldy nap of the blanket. “You think it’s like that?”

“I don’t know,” the wizard admitted equably. “And I should hate to find out. The wise man defends himself by never being attacked.”

“You call that business last night not being attacked?”

Ingold smiled ruefully. “That was an exception,” he apologized, “and unavoidable. I knew that I could draw the Dark away from Tir and hold them off long enough to let you get close to the gates. There weren’t very many of them left by that time, too few to split up and still have enough power among themselves to work counterspells against me.”

“I don’t understand,” Gil said, tossing the end of her braid back over her shoulder. “I know there weren’t a lot of them—but why did they let us go? They’ve been following Tir clear the hell down from Karst. They know what the Keep is and they knew last night was their last chance to get at him. But they turned back and went after you. Why?”

He didn’t answer at once. He lay watching the curl of the steam rising from the cup in his bandaged hands, his face in repose suddenly old and tired. Then his dark-circled eyes shifted to meet hers. “Do you remember,” he said slowly, “when I almost became—lost—in the vaults at Gae? When you called me back from the stairways of the Dark?”

Gil nodded soundlessly; it had been the first day, she remembered, that she had held a sword in her hand. The darkness came back to her, the stealthy sense of lurking fear, the old man standing alone on the steps far below her, listening to a sound that she could not hear, the white radiance of his staff illuminating the shadows all around him. It had been the last day she had been a scholar, an outworlder, the person she had once been. The memory of that distant girl, alone and armed with a borrowed sword and a guttering torch against all the armies of the Dark, brought a lump to her throat that she thought would choke her.

He went on. “I guessed, then, what I know now—that Prince Tir is not their first target. Oh, they’ll take him if they can get him—but, given a choice, as I gave them a choice last night, it isn’t Tir they want.

“It’s me.”

“You?” Rudy gasped.

“Yes.” The wizard sipped his tea, then set it aside. From beyond the curtain, Gnift’s voice bitingly informed someone that he had less stance than a wooden-legged ice skater. “I can evidently be of more ultimate harm to them than Tir can. I suspected it before, and after last night there can be no other explanation.”

“But how—I mean—your magic can’t touch them,” Rudy said uneasily. “To them you’re just another guy with a sword. You don’t know any more about the Time of the Dark than anybody else. I mean, Tir’s the one who’ll remember.”

“I’ve wondered about that myself,” Ingold said calmly. “And I can only conclude that I know something that I’m not yet aware that I know—some clue that hasn’t fallen into place. They know what it is, and they’re concerned lest I remember.”

Rudy shuddered wholeheartedly. “So what are you going to do?”

The wizard shrugged. “What can I do? Take elementary precautions. But it might be well for you to reconsider your offer to accompany me to Quo.”

“To hell with that,” Rudy reconsidered. “You’re the one who should reconsider.”

“Who else can go?” Ingold reasoned. “And if I were afraid of getting myself killed, I should never have taken up this business in the first place. I should have stayed in Gettlesand and grown roses and cast horoscopes. No—all that I can do now is stay a few steps ahead of them and hope that I realize what the answer is before they catch me.”

“You’re crazy,” Rudy stated unequivocally.

Ingold smiled. “Really, Rudy, I thought we’d long settled the question of my sanity.”

“You’re all crazy!” Rudy insisted. “You and Gil and Alde and the Guards … How the hell come I always end up completely surrounded by lunatics?”

The old man settled comfortably back among the blankets and picked up his tea again, the steam wreathing his face like smoke from the altar of a battered idol. “The question is the answer, Rudy—always provided you want an answer that badly.”

Considering it in that light, Rudy was not entirely sure that he did.

Alde was waiting for him in the outer room. Most of the Guards had gone. Beyond the black, narrow arch of the doorway, Janus’ voice could be heard in the next room, still arguing with the same merchants. In a corner, the Icefalcon had fallen asleep, relaxed and self-absorbed as a cat. But for him, they were alone.

“Alde … ” Rudy began, and she stood up from the bunk where she had been sitting and put a finger to his lips.

“I heard,” she said softly.

“Listen … ” he tried to explain.

Again she shushed him. “Of course you should go with him.” Her fingers closed, cool and light, over his. “Was there any question of your not going?”

He laughed softly, remembering his own apprehensions. “I guess—not to me. But I sure didn’t think you’d understand.” They stood together, as close as they had on the road when they’d been accustomed to share a cloak on watch at night. The ebbing yellow glow of the fire masked them in dun, pulsing shadow, and he could smell the sweetgrass braided into her hair. “I didn’t think anybody would understand or could understand. Because I sure as hell don’t.”

She chuckled with soft laughter. “He’s your master, Rudy,” she said. “And your need is to learn. Even if I wanted to, I could never stop you from it.” But she moved closer to him in the shadows, belying her own words.

We all have our priorities, Rudy thought, and brushed aside the dark silk of her hair to kiss her lips. If It came to a choice between me and Tir, I know damn well who’d get left out in the cold. She, too, had her choices between loves.

The embers in the hearth whispered a little and collapsed in on themselves, sending up a spurt of yellow flame and almost immediately cloaking them both in deeper shadow. From outside the room, the constant murmur of voices from the hall beyond came to them like the mingling of a stream. Rudy was finding already that he had grown used to the Keep, the noises, the shadows, the smells. He could feel the weight of that mountain of stone pressing down around them, as it had pressed for thousands of years. But as he kissed her again, holding her slenderness tight against him, he reflected that there was a great deal to be said for stillness and silence and love without fear.

Her breath a whisper against his lips, she murmured, “I understand, Rudy—but I will miss you,”

His arm tightened convulsively about her shoulders. Scraps of conversations drifted back to his memory, things said in Karst and in the night camps all down that perilous road. She had lost the world she had known and everyone in it she had loved, except her son. And now he, Rudy, was leaving her, too. Yet she hadn’t said, Don’t go.

What kind of love, he wondered, understood that need and tried to make easier the separation it would cause?

None that he’d ever run into.

Alde, you’re a lady in a million. I wish to hell you weren’t the Queen. I almost wish I weren’t going back, or that I could take you and Tir back with me when I go.

But either course was impossible.

As she slipped away from him, gathering her cloak about her shoulders as she vanished through the darkness of the far doorway, it occurred to him that she hadn’t even asked him that other thing—Will you miss me, too?

Against the blurred gleam that backed the grimy door curtain, Gil watched the shadows of man and woman embrace, meld, and separate. In the stillness of the room, she heard Ingold sigh. “Poor child,” he said softly. “Poor child.”

She glanced across at him, invisible but for the glitter of his eyes In the darkness and his bandaged hands folded on his breast. “Ingold?”

“Yes, my dear?”

“Do you really believe there’s no such thing as coincidence?”

The question didn’t seem to surprise him, but then, few things did. Gil had known people—her mother, for one—who would have replied, “What a question to ask at a time like this!” But it was a question that could be asked only at such times, when all the daylight trivialities had been put aside, and there was only the understanding of people who knew one another well.

Ingold gave it some thought, and said at last, “Yes. I believe that nothing happens randomly, that there is no such thing as chance. How could there be?” There was a faint squeaking rustle as he settled himself back against the sacks of fodder. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, ” Gil said uncertainly. “I think I understand that Rudy came here to—to be a wizard, to find that for himself—because he was born one. But I wasn’t. And if there are no such things as random events, why am I here? Why me and not somebody else? Why was I taken away, why did I lose everything I had—scholarship and friends and—and life, really, the life I had? I don’t understand.”

Ingold’s voice was grave in the darkness, and she saw the faint touch of light on his cheekbone as he turned his head. “You once accused me of dealing, mage-like, in double talk. But truly, Gil, I do not know. I do not understand any more than you do. But I believe there is a purpose to your being here. Believe me, Gil. Please believe me.”

She shrugged, embarrassed as she always was by anyone’s concern. “It’s not important,” she lied, and she knew Ingold heard the lie. “You know, I resented it like hell when you told me Rudy would be a wizard. Not because I wanted to be one, but—it’s as if he’s gained everything and lost nothing, because he really had nothing that he cared about to lose. But I lost everything … ” She broke off, the silence coming between them like the ocean between a swimmer and the shore.

“And gained nothing?” To that she could not reply. “It may be that it is not Rudy’s purposes that are being served at all by his coming here. Rudy is a mage, and the Realm, the world, is suddenly in desperate need of mages. And it may be that in the months to come, the Keep will have as great a need for a woman with the courage of a lion, trained in the use of a sword.”

“Maybe.” Gil rested her chin on her drawn-up knees and stared through the darkness at the dim reflections of the embers on the wall, like a streak of false dawn in the night of the Keep. “But I’m not a warrior, Ingold. I’m a scholar. It’s all I ever have been and all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

“Who can say what you are, my child?” Ingold asked softly. “Or what you may be eventually? Come,” he said, as the voices outside rose in volume. “The Guards are back. Let us go out.”

The Guards were trooping back into the room when Gil and Ingold came quietly through the curtain, the wizard leaning heavily on her shoulder. The Guards greeted him with boisterous delight, Janus all but dragging him off his feet, hauling him into the circle of the new firelight. The rose and topaz hearth-glow picked out the shabbiness of the wizard’s patched robe and the lines and hollows of strain in his face. It flickered in a warm amber radiance over scarred faces, frayed black surcoats with their white quatrefoil emblem, and seedy old blankets making shift as cloaks. The finest fighting corps in the West of this world, she thought, huddling around a scratch fire like tramps in a boxcar. Her brothers in arms. People a month ago she hadn’t even known.

Yet their faces were so familiar. Janus’ blunt, square mug she’d seen, nameless, for the first time by the cold light of a quarter moon in a frightful dream whose memory was clearer to her than the memory of many college parties she’d attended. And those white braids draped over a sleeper’s anonymous shoulders—she remembered them, briefly, from that same dream, remembered wondering if their owner was the foreigner he looked to be. They had been nothing to her then—extras in a drama whose significance she had not grasped. Yet she knew them now better than she had known any of her otherworld lovers—better, with one exception, than she had ever known anyone in her life.

Ingold was sitting near the hearth at the head of the Icefalcon’s bed, the Guards around him, his gestures expansive, relating some story that made Janus throw back his head with laughter.

A voice spoke at Gil’s elbow. “Well, he’s alive, anyway.”

She looked over and saw Rudy leaning against the wall on the other side of the curtained arch. His long hair was tied back, and that and the firelight made his rather aquiline face more hawklike than ever in the dim orange light. He had changed, she thought, since that night he had called the fire. Older, maybe. And not so much different as more like himself than he had been before.

“I’m worried about him, Rudy.”

“He’s tough,” Rudy said, though his tone was uneasy. “He’ll be okay. Hell, he’ll probably outlive thee and me.” But he knew that this was not what she meant.

“What if he gets killed, Rudy?” Gil asked softly. “What happens to us then?”

He had turned his mind away from that thought time and time again, since the night in Karst when Ingold had disappeared, imprisoned by order of the council. He whispered, “Hell, I don’t know.”

“That’s what bothers me,” Gil went on, hooking her bony hands with their nicks and scars and practice-blisters through the beat-up leather of her sword belt. “That’s what’s bothered me all the way along. That maybe there’s no going back.”

The question is the answer, Rudy thought. The question is always the answer. “But there’s no going back from anything we do,” he said. “Not from anything we are. It changes us, good and bad. What it is, we become. If we’re stuck, we’re stuck. Would that be so bad? I’ve found my power here, Gil, what I’ve always been looking for. And a lady in ten million. And you … “

“A home,” Gil said simply, realizing the truth. “What I’ve always been looking for.”

And suddenly, unexpectedly, Gil began to laugh. Not hysterically, or nervously, but with a soft, wholehearted chuckle of genuine amusement. Rudy could not remember ever seeing her laugh. It darkened her frost-gray eyes to blue and softened the bony hardness of her white face.

“And my advisor will love it.” She grinned up at him. “What a Ph.D. thesis! ‘Effects of Subterranean Incursions on Preindustrial Culture.’ ”

“I’m not kidding,” Rudy protested, still astonished at how changed she was, how beautiful, scars and swords and all.

“Neither am I.” And she laughed again.

Rudy shook his head, amazed at the difference in her. “So tell me truthfully,” he said. “Would you go back from this? If it was a choice between the other world and what you have and where you are now, and if this had all never been—would you go back?”

Gil looked at him consideringly for a moment. Then she turned her eyes back to the hearth, to Ingold, his warm, rasping voice holding his listeners enspelled, to the firelight on the faces of the Guards and the blackness of the shadows beyond, and, past that, to the dark weight of the Keep, the night it held within its walls, and the shifting, wind-stirred night that waited outside. “No,” she said finally. “I think I must be crazy to say so, but no, I wouldn’t.”

“Lady.” Rudy grinned, touching the emblem of the Guards she bore on her shoulder. “If you weren’t crazy, you wouldn’t be wearing that.”

Gil looked him speculatively up and down. “You know, for a punk you have a lot of class.”

“For a spook,” Rudy said gravely, “it’s real perceptive of you to notice.”

The two of them went to join Ingold by the fire.