Mother of Winter (20 page)

“I take it they didn’t think much of letting Ingold go south.” Gil kept close to his side, sheltered by the umbrella of his illusions. They crossed through the white splotches of glowstone light and through inky shadow where those with business in the Keep jostled shoulders with them, unseeing.

“They’re idiots!” Rudy remembered to keep his voice to a whisper, but his gesture nearly took the hat off Treemut Farrier, passing along the corridor with a basket of eggs. The Council had spent all day yesterday arguing about whether to expropriate and socialize all the illegal chickens that had survived the storm—eggs were being traded for everything from better-situated cells to sexual favors—and in the meantime the Wickets and Gatsons and Biggars had hidden their hens all over fifth level north. “If Ingold doesn’t stop Los Tres Geezers down south from screwing with the weather, they’ll lose everything to the next ice storm and we’re gonna be under six feet of slunch by this time next year!”

“If Lord Sketh, or Barrelstave, can manage to turn the Guards or any sizable percentage of the Keep against Minalde while Ingold is away,” Gil remarked, “you’re going to be in trouble a lot sooner than that.” She shifted the bundle under her cloak, heavier this time than last night—Rudy didn’t want to know about how she’d gotten hold of that much food. “You’ve heard what they’re whispering to the Guards—that Ingold could have stopped the storm if he’d wanted to. Or could have
saved those kids. God knows what idiots like Biggar are putting around on fifth north.”

The haunted look that had been in her eyes was more pronounced now, and she’d acquired a trick of looking at her hands, of feeling her wrist and elbow joints nervously, as if seeking something she didn’t want to find. “It’s easy now, because people are scared. Hell, I’m scared.”

And she sounded scared, he thought. But not of the Fimbul Winter or the mages under the ice.

On the steps of the Keep they stepped aside in time to avoid being knocked over by Scala Hogshearer, storming away from an altercation with a couple of the other girls of the Keep. One of them was holding her wrist and shouting furiously, “She bit me! She bit me!” and the other collecting broken beads scattered on the steps; Rudy could only guess what that was all about. The day was a bright one, thin warmth returning to the shards of the spring. Nearly everyone was clearing the ruined wheat from the fields, preparing for a second sowing—late, but still just feasible in these upland fields.

That had been the topic for another heated discussion in Council—whether to sow the seed or hold it to feed the population through autumn and winter to come.

“And they’ve got no guarantee Ingold is right.”

“Whaddaya mean?” Rudy demanded, furious: “Ingold saw that stuff!”

“Ingold
says
he saw it,” Gil pointed out. “If you weren’t a wizard yourself, would you believe him?”

“Hell yes!”

He said it because he had to, even though he knew he was wrong and dumb as the words came out of his mouth. She cocked a brow at him and said nothing. The bitten side of her face was toward him; he couldn’t see whether the other side smiled.

Ingold was waiting in a copse of hemlocks just out of sight of the watchtowers at the Tall Gates. He looked better than he had last night, as if he’d gotten some sleep and the food had helped. “You were right,” Rudy said as the old man sorted through the packs they’d brought: blankets, as much food as
they could collect, a minimum of spare clothing, a few medical supplies. “Those yammerheads were talking about locking you up when you got back, trying to figure out goddamn ‘securities’ to make sure you didn’t run off again.”

“Precisely what I am doing.” He straightened up and turned his head to survey the glassy black monolith of the Keep, visible through the trees. Men and women toiled in the fields, the lack of draft animals painfully evident. Apportionment of Yoshabel the Only Mule in the Vale was another matter much discussed in Council. Blue haze still hung heavy around the walls, from the smoking fires—even half-spoiled meat was still being brought up from Wormswell and Manse by the exhausted scavenging crews.

“Deserting them … for what could very well be a madman’s fancy. Just because I’m able to work magic doesn’t mean I’m not subject to hallucinations, you know,” he added, seeing the look of uncertainty on Rudy’s face. “Or deception by the Dark.”

“Uh …”

“Somebody concerted those attacks on me,” Gil said quietly. “And on you. Somebody is … talking to me. Whispering in my head.”

Rudy saw between them that understanding again, blue gaze meeting blue, seeing the same thing. Silence hung on the air, deepening with unsaid words.

At last Ingold broke it, softly. “My child, were there a way I could … do without you on this journey … I would. As it is …”

“You can tell,” she said, inaudible, her face like marble. “Can’t you?” If it hadn’t been Gil, Rudy would have sworn that tears silvered her eyes. “You can see it.”

He looked away and nodded. “Yes. I—”

She went on, reaching out to touch his hand, her voice very low. “If I knew how to fight it, I would, Ingold. I swear I would. But the dream comes back to me, telling me to kill you.”

Rudy gulped, shocked, and Ingold raised his head quickly, looking again into her face, almost as if he had expected her to
say something different. She didn’t see, for her own attention seemed to be fixed suddenly on her hands where they laced over the hilt of her killing-sword.

She only went on, her fingers probing at her wrist bones again, “I swear it won’t happen. If it gets too bad, I’ll let you know, so you can tie my hands at night. I’m all right in the daytime. But I’ve looked at it six ways from Tuesday and I think I need to be with you.”

Still she didn’t meet his eyes, and her voice was quick and a little breathless, as if this were something she’d memorized beforehand. “I’d stay here if I could. It’s going to be hard, and sometimes I wonder if I’m this sure you’ll need me because They want me to be. Because They want me to be the one standing behind you with a sword in my hand. But I swear to you I’ll die before I’ll let you come to harm.”

Ingold was silent for a long time, studying her—two or three times Rudy saw him draw in breath to speak, but in the end he did not. At length he put a hand under her chin and turned her eyes to meet his. “No, my dear,” he said softly. “I will always need you.” He started to say something else; again Rudy had the sense of words stopped on his lips, and when he went on again, it was very different from the original. “Do you feel able to make the journey?”

Gil drew a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. Rudy saw suddenly by the tight lines around her lips that she was far from well. “I don’t think either of us has a choice about that.”

“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think we do. Rudy …”

He turned to clasp Rudy’s hands, the warm, rough strength of his grip reassuring. “I wish I could help you,” he said quietly. “Even if I’m not insane—and I have no assurance that the visions I’ve seen and those that plague Gil’s dreams have the slightest connection with the truth—I’m aware that I’m doing you perhaps the greatest disservice of my life, but … as Gil says, I don’t think any of us has any choice.”

Rudy sighed. “And I wish I didn’t agree with you, pal, but I do. And anyway, you know the spook’s right more times than either of us.”

Gil gave him the finger; Ingold smiled. The pain in his eyes
did not lessen, and Rudy wondered suddenly what other vision might have come to the old man in the Nest of the Dark, what other truth he had learned that had fallen into place—Rudy could swear had fallen into place—when he touched Gil’s hand.

“Two things are vital,” Ingold said. “First, that you find these seeds, these earth-apples, that Tir spoke of.”

“Hell, yes.” Gil swiped at her eye with quick fingers bruised from sword practice, all her scholastic coldness upon her like armor again. “Potatoes completely revolutionized food production in the seventeenth century when they hit Ireland and Germany from the New World. If we can get hold of them—we’ll be home free.”

“More important even than that,” Ingold went on, “is that you learn, as soon as possible, how the gaboogoos have gotten—or are getting—into the Keep. Even if I’m not mad, I’m not sure that I’m leaving you the easier task. Whatever waits for me in the ice beneath the Mother of Winter holds the key to what’s happening here at the Keep. Of that I’m certain. But whether you’ll be able to survive, whether you’ll be able to protect the Keep and its people …”

“We’ll get along,” Rudy promised with an optimism he did not feel, and in Ingold’s returning smile he saw that the old man wasn’t fooled one bit. “Maybe things’ll be tough here, but we’ll kluge something together somehow. If you and I swapped places, I’d be sushi.”

Ingold stepped close and embraced him as the son he had almost become, and Rudy had to fight not to think about what the hell would happen if the old man bought it down south.

“You watch your butt, man,” he said again as they stepped apart. “With any luck, by the time you get back the whole Keep’ll be ass-deep in french fries.”

If Tir ever speaks to me again
, he thought bitterly, remembering how Alde’s maid Linnet had clung to Tir’s hand, had glared her hatred at Rudy for not being there to somehow save her child.

He watched the sturdy old vagabond, the thin ramshackle woman, hoist their packs to their backs and move like wraiths
into the twilight flutter of aspen-shadow that surrounded the rocks of the Tall Gates, and followed them with a spell of inconspicuousness. There was a faint oath as the watcher on the gates dropped his spear and bent down to pick it up while they crossed open ground; then Rudy turned back toward the black-walled fortress shining in the midst of the brown meadows, the only place he had ever really felt was his home.

What if Alde goes into labor before he gets back?
he wondered desperately.
What if there’s another ice storm? Or some other cockamamie thing I don’t have the experience to watch out for? What if the gaboogoos turn out to be way weirder than even Ingold thinks? What do I do then?

It was true Thoth had said that Brother Wend and Ilae—who must be nineteen or twenty by now, and Rudy shook his head at the thought: the girl he remembered was a child of fourteen—were on their way, but what if something went wrong?

All I got to say is, there better be some kid in the Keep I can start teaching, because if anything happens, we’re toast
.

He turned and looked back toward the crowding, gray-yellow shoulders of rock that guarded the pass, the crumbling stone watchtowers and remnants of wall visible among the trees. There was no sign of the old wizard or of the woman who would follow him, Rudy knew, to the end of creation.

He was almost at the Keep when a spate of people poured out of its great doors, as if the Keep Council had collected all its family members and minor supporters for a rally: Barrelstave and the Skeths, Koram Biggar and his squad of grubby fifth-level chicken farmers, Maia and Hogshearer and a lot of Hornbeams and Ankres’ men-at-arms, all shouting, all waving their fists, all furious about something …

Screw this
, Rudy thought and stopped in his tracks, deepening the cloak of illusion that had drifted around him and Gil all the way across the valley. I
don’t need this now. Have your agent call my agent
.

But instead of parting to swarm past on either side, the mob stopped, too, and a shrill voice from within it screamed, “There he is!” Varkis Hogshearer’s daughter Scala lumbered
up to him, heavy chin jutting and malice in her squinty dark eyes. She yelled over her shoulder to her father, “I saw him meet old Ingold! I saw Ingold and Gil-Shalos run away down the pass together with a lot of food, like a couple of thieves …”

She should talk
, Rudy thought—anybody that stout these days had to be a food-thief herself.

And then, as Minalde strode out of the group with genuine fury in her eyes, he thought,
Oh, crikey
. Shocked, he met the big teenager’s red-faced gaze and realized what it meant, that she’d seen him through illusion and stealth. That she’d seen Ingold.

This is who we’ve been watching for, these past five years
.

This is the next mageborn in the Keep
.

Rudy saw the Bald Lady again, the night after Ingold left the Keep.

Her face was clearer to him in this dream, perhaps because he’d gazed into the crystal heart of the scrying table with his hand on one of the two record stones that held her images. Like all those forgotten mages—the Guy with the Cats; the Dwarf whose stubby fingers sparkled with a festival of jewels as she worked her incomprehensible cantrips with water and flowers; Black Bart, solemn and wise with a twinkle in his golden eyes—Rudy had come to know her well, and he wasn’t surprised to find himself dreaming about her again.

In the earlier of the several crystal images, she was young, and in the others, only middle aged. It was strange to see her now so old. It was like viewing all the films of Katharine Hepburn, assuming that there were no changes in hairstyle to contend with, and that somewhere between
The Philadelphia Story
and
The Lion in Winter
Ms. Hepburn had visited Hell.

The Bald Lady was still unshakably beautiful, descending the long obsidian stair through clouds of glowstone light; still wrapped in her night-colored cloak, her bald head held at a proud angle; still weeping, soundless, giving nothing away as she walked. They were deeper in the Keep this time. Stone tanks lined the walls of the crypt where Rudy stood, water casting a crystalline moiré on the ceilings and across the strangely angled metal faces of machines wrought of wire and glass and what looked like hanging threads of tiny jeweled beads. Unusual, for the stark rectilineal design of the Keep, there were niches let into the wall of this chamber,
four or five feet deep and the height of the tall ceiling; in a corner Rudy saw the black stone drum of a scrying table. Probably to read the tech manuals, he thought. She touched the machines, one by one, as she passed them, as if drinking in their soft-glowing power through her long fingers, crossed to trail her hand over the scrying table’s surface before turning toward the crypt’s inner door. There was pain and defeat in her shoulders, grief unbearable in the line of her back.