“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.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Ingold said. “That I cannot guarantee that I will be a permanent part of your life.”
“I can’t guarantee that your son will be, either,” Gil said softly. “But I’d like to have all the time with him that I can. And this may be the only chance I get.”
Minalde’s child was born a month later, two weeks before the equinox of fall.
Rudy sat on the steps of the Keep watching the coagulating twilight blacken to night, dyeing the glaciers, staining the slunch beds below them, black-veined by dying fruit trees. The glaciers, he supposed, would continue to grow—though from Brycothis he was beginning to learn the spells by which they could be turned aside from Renweth Vale and convinced to flow down the other side of the ridge. With any luck, the slunch would stay pretty much where it was, until a warm year killed it, who knew how far down the road. Gaboogoos still grew out of it, but they didn’t attack anybody, just wandered around the woods in their fanciful shapes, weird souvenirs of a forgotten world. They didn’t eat anything or ha
rm anyone, and eventually died of starvation or heat prostration, or gaboogoo distemper, for all he knew. Some animals still ate slunch, but they puffed up and died pretty fast, and most of them avoided it now. After seeing what had happened to the devotees of Saint Bounty, nobody in the Keep could even be brought to touch the carcasses of either gaboogoos or mutants that died in the woods.
Rudy sighed. The surviving members of the Brown, Wicket, and Biggar clans had carved a stone stele to place on the mass grave in which were buried the ashes of Koram Biggar and Varkis Hogshearer and all those others who died screaming when Gil broke the final complex of spells that kept the Mother of Winter in stasis. Maia had spoken a blessing over them, asking God to accept the clean parts of them and to forgive them for what they could not help.
Scala Hogshearer was buried up with the herdkids, in the orchard behind the Keep.
Without mentioning it to anyone, Rudy kept an eye on both graves. So far, no slunch had grown on either one.
He leaned his back against the Keep’s black wall, let his head tip back to rest on the ensorcelled stone. Alde was all right. The baby was fine.
He’d delivered the child himself.
He’d done it himself because neither of the Keep’s two new wizards—red-haired, silent Ilae and quiet little Brother Wend—had ever delivered a baby. In the Black Rock Keep, Tomec Tirkenson’s hagwife mother-in-law Nan was in charge of that—and virtually everything else. And in any case the newcomers arrived only days ago, escorted by Old George the dooic and his band, stumbling and filthy, exhausted after weeks of flight and hiding from the gaboogoos. Wend was still laid up with fever and fatigue, but Rudy was reasonably sure he’d make it.
It was good, he thought, not to be the only wizard around anymore.
Good to know that Tirkenson, Thoth, and the others at the Black Rock Keep had likewise survived. He had a daughter.
Blue-eyed, black-haired, and beautiful as a perfectly ripe peach …
He closed his eyes again. He had a child.
Down the valley he heard them singing, in the direction of the pass.
“Yippee-ti-yi-yo, git along, little dogie,
It’s your misfortune and none of my own …”
He thought absently, Gil must be in a good mood.
It was as if she’d only been gone a few days. As if Ingold had only been gone a few days.
It would be good, he thought, to have them back.
“Yippee-ti-yi-yo, git along, little dogie,
You know Wyoming will be your new home.”
What they were singing didn’t sink in for a minute; only that Gil couldn’t carry a tune worth sour apples, and Ingold had a very nice baritone.
Then he opened his eyes.
They were riding across the meadow—riding—he on a bay horse, she on a long-tailed black, driving before them a small, mixed herd of mares, sheep, and a dozen or more scrawny cows. Four of the mares bore packs on their backs, and from somewhere Ingold had gotten two scraggy yellow dogs, who trotted gamely along through the short, hesitant grass, nipping at the heels of stragglers.
Ingold had told him via crystal that they were coming back. He had neglected to mention this.
“Cool.” Rudy got stiffly to his feet and came down the steps of the Keep to greet them, hands in the pockets of his vest. “French fries and burgers.”
Gil tossed the reins down, sprang from the saddle; skinnier than ever but somehow better than she’d looked in a long time. Peaceful, he thought. Something had changed in her eyes. She wore a gaudy-hued silk coat and still had her hair up in a gladiator’s topknot. “Sorry it took us this long, punk,” she said, and hugged him, for the first time ever. “We did hurry. Is Alde okay?”
“Alde’s fine,” Rudy said, returning the embrace with a slow, tired grin. “You didn’t need to rush. Everything, uh—came out okay.”
Ingold dropped from the saddle like he’d ridden trail herds all his life; all he needed was a ten-gallon hat to go with his red-and-black Church wizard robes and the bearskin coat that looked like he’d looted it off somebody who’d been dead for a long time.
“Rudy, I congratulate you … I congratulate you deeply.” People were running down the Keep steps around them; the two herd dogs barked furiously, but stilled at a gesture from Ingold, sitting in the grass and watching suspiciously while Bok the Carpenter and Lank Yar and others exclaimed and argued and put ropes around the animals’ noses and horns.
“My apologies for not mentioning the herd. Frankly, with the Raiders as thick as they are in the valley, I’m astonished we weren’t bushwhacked a dozen times on the way up here. We purchased the cattle along the way—two of those calves are male, by the way, so we really will have a herd again—but the sheep were an entirely fortuitous find.”
“They were on the road up here,” Gil said. “Look at ’em—they look like they’ve been wandering around in the wilderness for years. What they were doing up here …”
Rudy laughed. “Well, I’ll be buggered. Nedra Hornbeam’s idea worked after all. I’ve been trudging out to that frigging circle at the Tall Gates every day and Summoning All Useful Animals. I never thought it’d pay off.”
“I thought they seemed in an unlikely hurry to get up here.” Ingold scratched the corner of his mustache, which looked as usual as if he trimmed it with a sword and no mirror. “It will be good to sleep in a bed again, not to mention speaking to one of the wizards from the Times Before. And I’m delighted you were able to make the roses viable—there’ve been no single-petal white roses in the world for centuries. Really, Rudy, you—”
He was stopped on the steps by Enas Barrelstave, who bustled out and caught his arm in an eager grip. “Inglorion!” He shook his finger in remonstrance, stepping out of the way of cattle, sheep, and horses being led up the steps around them and into makeshift byres in the Aisle. “Now, it’s all very well of you to disappear on a cattle-buying trip, but you really should have consulted the Council about it before you left. It’s not that we don’t respect and value your services, but you can’t simply …”
“You okay, spook?” Rudy slung his arm around Gil’s shoulders as they mounted the steps in the wake of the chattering mob.
She glanced sidelong at him and smiled again. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay.” The scar seemed a part of her features, as if she’d always had it, like the dark smoke-rings around the pupils of her eyes.
“I guess you won’t be training with the Guards for a while.”
“The hell I won’t,” Gil said. “There’s no reason a woman can’t train up until the month before she delivers—though I’m not going to get into any death-fights unless I have to. You think I can’t deal with it, punk?” She gave him her old cold stare, and Rudy dropped his arm and backed hastily away.
“No—I just meant … I know you can deal with it.” Between Ingold and Gil, he thought, that was gonna be one tough kid.
Cold wind blew across them from the glaciers above; in the doors of the Keep the Guards beckoned, wanting to lock up for the night, black forms silhouetted against the gold lamplight inside. “There gonna be much of a harvest?” Gil asked.
“Some. We’ll send out an expedition to the marshes down by Willowchild for hay. But we’ve got the hydroponics tanks up and running the way they were originally designed, so even if we get thwacked by another ice storm, we should be fine. I don’t think we’ll have any problem talking Barrelstave and Company into okaying some kind of underground stables. It might be that until the weather evens out we have to give up outside farming completely, except for things like the orchard. Even at that, we got more apples than we thought we would, growing in late …”
They paused on the steps, looking back at the bleak landscape. Somewhere down the valley a mammoth hooted; a small herd of squidlike gaboogoos flapped slowly from the slunch beds, palely glowing like otherworldly birds. Rudy shook his head at the alienness of the scene.
Until the weather evens out. However many centuries that might
take.
But they had food. And they had books. And they had roses, for when the weather warmed up again.
“So what’d you name her?” Gil asked. “Your daughter?” My daughter.
“Gisa,” Rudy said softly. “That was the name of Dare of Renweth’s wife, who died on the way up to the Keep … died because Dare wouldn’t pull the wizards off raising the walls. Gisa of the Flowering Hands. She’s been a long time on her way here.”
“Gisa,” Gil said softly, turning over the word in the tongue of the Wathe, and Rudy nodded. “The old word for spring.”
About the Author
At various times in her life Barbara Hambly has been a high school teacher, a model, a waitress, a technical editor, a professional graduate student, an all-night clerk at a liquor store, and a karate instructor. Born in San Diego, she grew up in southern California, with the exception of one high-school semester spent in New South Wales, Australia. Her interest in fantasy began with reading The Wizard of Oz at an early age, and it has continued ever since.
She attended the Universty of California, Riverside, specializing in medieval history. In connection with this, she spent a year at the University of Bordeaux in the south of France and worked as a teaching and research assistant at UC Riverside, eventually earning a master’s degree in that subject. At the university she also became involved in karate, making black belt in 1978 and competing in several national-level tournaments. She now lives in Los Angeles.
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