Mother of Winter (49 page)

“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 harm 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.”

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.