Stubborn broad, he thought. They’ll have to kill her before she’ll give it up.
Gnift yelled, “Attack him, you puling coward! Don’t make love to him!”
The big man swung, and the Icefalcon shifted back out of range. Exasperated, Gnift stepped forward under the arc of the wooden blade, grabbed the back of the captain’s black tunic, and shoved him into the fray. The result was bloody, painful, and exhausting for both combatants.
Rudy said thoughtfully, “One of these days somebody’s gonna take a poke at that little bastard.”
“Gnift?” Gil raised her split eyebrow in amused surprise. “Not bloody likely.” Rudy remembered seeing Gnift sparring with Tomec Tirkenson, the big landchief of Gettlesand, yesterday evening about this time, in the last of the daylight after the long march. Maybe Gil was right.
They watched for a time more, sitting side by side on the square of groundcloth just off the makeshift training floor. Around them, the camp was settling itself down for the night once again. It would soon be time to collect their meager rations and make for the watchfires. Rudy noticed that Gil looked drawn and exhausted, a thin, almost sexless shadow with a great straggling mane of black hair. He knew that in addition to marching and guard duty she was training this way nightly, on starvation rations, with the mess of her half-healed arm wound, as if deliberately driving herself to collapse.
Wind sneered down off the mountains and washed over the camp like incoming tide. The mountains loomed above them now, hugely close, blacking the western sky, a sheer wall, like the Rockies. That morning they had passed the crossroads, which were watched over by a crumbling stone cross, and set their feet on the great road that ran up to Sarda Pass. It was colder here in the shadows of the foothills and desolate of all habitation.
In the wan twilight before them, the Icefalcon was holding his own, retreating before the great swinging strokes of his opponent’s sword. Sweat bathed his face, white in the frame of ivory hair, and his pale eyes were desperate with exhaustion. Cursing, reviling, Gnift circled the fighters, finally stepping lightly up behind the captain and hooking his feet out from under him with a deft sweep of one leg. The Icefalcon went down, his opponent dropping on him like grim death from above. There was a confused blur of movement. The younger man came up under the arc of the longer sword with a clean slash across the big Guard’s belly and turned the end of the movement into a circle-throw that hurled his attacker over his head and flat on the Guard’s back in the mud. He got both swords and scrambled to his feet, gasping. The bigger man lay on the ground, puffing and cursing. Gnift yelled, “When you get your man down, do something, don’t just take his sword and stand there like a fool. If you did that … “
Rudy, who’d been tremendously impressed with this last maneuver, whispered, “Do all warriors have to do that? I mean, Alwir’s Guards and the Church troops?”
“The method is much the same,” Ingold’s mild voice remarked behind them. “Gnift is stricter than most, and the Guards have the reputation of having the best instruction in the West of the World. Methods differ in different modes of combat, of course. In Alketch, for instance, they train their famous cavalry by chaining a slave by one wrist to an iron post in the middle of the exercise hall, putting a sword in his free hand, and having the cavalry trainees practice their saber-charges on horseback against him.”
“What’s their budget for replacements?” Rudy wanted to know. “Somebody remind me never to visit Alketch.”
Gil glanced sideways, from the old shackle gall on the wizard’s wrist to his serene face, and said, “Somebody told me once that you used to be a slave in Alketch.”
“Did they?” Ingold’s eyes twinkled. “Well, I have been and done many things in the course of my misspent life. Rudy, if you could spare me a moment, I would like to talk with you in private.” He rose and led the way through the orange-lit confusion of the settling camp with Rudy tagging at his heels. At a distance they passed Alwir’s wagons, and Rudy recognized the sable standards of the House of Dare and knew that Minalde was there with her son.
He had hardly spoken to Alde during the day. She had turned away from him, silent and more shy than before, as if withdrawing herself after the shattering intimacy of last night. Rudy was puzzled but not surprised; they had taken each other in the passion that followed tension and terror; such things could change drastically come morning. It could be grief at Medda’s death, though she must have known, after the Guards led the poor, stumbling zombie who had been her oldest companion out of the camp, that there was no way to bring her along with the train. It could be shame, either at the act of sex itself or at its implicit betrayal of her dead King. Rudy wondered about that. Alde seldom spoke of Eldor and shied almost visibly at the mention of his name. It might be shame that she’d lain with a commoner—though from remarks about history that Gil had dropped in passing, that wasn’t something that seemed to bother female royalty much—or, more likely, fear and a kind of revulsion that she’d lain with a wizard. Alde was a good daughter of the Church. Rudy remembered the look in her eyes, awe and a wild kind of horror, staring into his across the new brightness of the flames.
But whatever her reasons, he sensed in her no anger toward him, only a terrible emotional confusion. And he knew, looking back at the square gray silhouette of the wagon top against the fading salmon of the sky, that he must bide his time. Rudy had been around enough to know that sleeping with someone once could happen to and with literally anybody. It was the second time, and those after, that had meaning. Impatient as he was to be with her again, he was aware that to rush her would be fatal. He knew Alde and knew that behind her deceptive gentleness lay a core of steel. For all her quiet diffidence, she was not a woman who could be bullied into bed.
And that would be fine, he thought, as his breathing suddenly constricted, if she were the only one involved.
He forced himself to turn his eyes away.
“Now.” Ingold halted on the grassy open ground that lay between the edge of the camp proper and the guard line where the watch fires were being kindled. Here they were alone, camp and lines both fading into the featureless gray of the evening. The wind blew the cold rain-smell down around them, surging through the grass and over the bare patches of stony ground beneath their feet. “You told me this morning how you called fire at need last night. Show me what you did.”
Rudy gathered a few sticks together that had been dropped from the making of the watch fires and found a patch of dry ground. With his thumbnail he peeled enough dry bark to make a little tinder and sat cross-legged beside that small pinch of wood, his cloak wrapped about him. He relaxed his body and mind, shutting out the smells of the camp, the smoke and scent of wet grass, and the lowing of the cattle. He saw only the twigs and the bark, and how the stuff would catch. Smokier than last night’s leaves, he thought. A little spot, like one made with a magnifying glass in the sun … a different smell from the leaves …
The fire came much more quickly than it had come before.
There was a hint of triumph mixed with anxiety in the glance Rudy gave Ingold. The older wizard watched the new flames impassively for a moment, then without moving put them out. He produced the stump of a candle from somewhere about his person and held it a few feet from Rudy’s eyes.
“Light the candle,” he instructed.
Rudy did.
Ingold blew it out thoughtfully and regarded him for a moment in silence through the whitish drift of the smoke. Then he set it aside. From a pouch in his belt he fished a piece of string with a dangling bit of lead on it like a fishing-sinker. He held the string before him and steadied the suspended weight to stillness with his free hand.