Cold wind keened down the foothills, whining in the canyons surrounding the refugee camp that lay strung out along the road. It flattened Rudy’s little fire to thin yellow streamers that paralleled the ground and sent chill fingers through cloak and tunic and flesh, searching out his bones. The first hard, mealy, little flakes of snow had begun to fall.
Alde had not come.
Rudy knew why and was sorry. What had happened last night had changed things between them. That, too, was irrevocable; if she was not his lover, she could no longer be his friend, either. And, good daughter of the Church that she was, she would be no wizard’s woman.
He would miss Minalde. His body hurt for her, but the longing was deeper than that, a loneliness, a need for her company, for the sound of her soft voice. It brought home to him with a painful little stab that he was now an outsider, as he would be an outsider for the rest of his life. In this world, or in his own, he had cut himself off from all hope of communication with those who did not understand. It would be worse when he went home—that much he knew already. But having seen the center, the focus, the key of his own life, he knew there was no way he could not pursue it. Even when he left the peril-fraught world of the Dark and returned to the electric jungles of Southern California, he knew he would be driven to seek it there. And he knew that somehow, some way, seeking, he would find.
The wind stung his face, carrying with the snow the mourning of the wolves. Behind him he sensed the camp slipping into its dark sleep, and the endless road behind him, down the foothills and out onto the plains, marked on both sides by a broken chain of watch fires.
He cast his mind back to his interview with Ingold earlier in the evening, trying to recall that reflected glimpse he’d had of his own mind, or soul, or the center of his own being. The memory was hazy, like the memory of intense pain. He could recall seeing it, but could not call back clearly what it had been—only the grip, the cold, of Ingold’s thought on his, and the clear certainty, for the first time in his life, of knowing what he was.
He hadn’t known then that it would cost him Minalde. He hadn’t known it would cost him everything that he was, for that was what it amounted to. But if the question is the answer, it wouldn’t have mattered if I knew or not. He only knew that if he had turned away, he would always have been sure that he’d had it within his grip and let it go. He knew that he couldn’t have let it be taken from him a second time.
The fire crackled, the wood sighing as it broke and fell. Rudy took a stout branch and rearranged it. The shower of ascending sparks glittered like fireworks among the spitting snow. He huddled deeper into his cloak, then glanced back in the direction of the camp. By the renewed light of the fire he could see a dark figure walking toward him, wrapped from head to heel in fur. Her black cloud of hair blew about her in the wind, and the firelight, when she drew near him, laid blue and golden shadows across her violet eyes.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Be still. Let your mind be silent. See nothing but the flames.” The hypnotic smoothness of Ingold’s voice filled Rudy’s mind as he stared at the brightness of the Guards’ campfire by which he sat. He tried to push aside his own chasing thoughts, his fatigue and need for sleep, and his wondering about the White Raiders he thought he’d glimpsed, dogging the line of march. He tried to think of nothing but the fire, to see nothing but the little cluster of sticks, transfigured by the flames and heat. He found that the less he tried to think of something, the stronger it crowded back.
“Relax,” Ingold said softly. “Don’t worry about anything for the time being. Only look at the fire and breathe.”
The wizard turned away to speak to a middle-aged woman who’d appeared on the edge of the Guards’ encampment with a sickly-looking young boy in tow.
Doggedly, Rudy tried to obey his last instructions. The cold, overcast daylight was fading out of the sky again, the eighth day from Karst. Voices bickered distantly along the line of the road as thin rations were handed out. Far off he heard the castanet-click of wooden practice swords and the harsh bark of Gnift’s sarcasm blistering his exhausted students. Somewhere he heard Alde singing and Tir’s little crowing voice joining in, making baby sounds of joy. A feeling went through him such as he’d never known before, a desperate tangle of yearning and relief and affection, and it distracted him hopelessly from the matter at hand.
He glanced up. Ingold was sitting on his heels, looking gravely into the sick youngster’s dutifully opened mouth, then into his eyes and ears. The mother wore that harried, angry look so common in the refugee train now. She was looking away, pretending she hadn’t brought her son to an old excommunicate wizard; but her eyes slid back to the child, anxious and afraid. There were doctors in the West of the World who were not wizards, but few of them had survived the coming of the Dark. Those few who moved south with the convoy had their hands full, between sickness and exposure, fatigue and starvation; people were not as fastidious about going to a wizard for help as they had once been.
Ingold stood up and spoke briefly to the woman, his hand resting on the boy’s dark, ruffled hair. When they had gone, he turned back to Rudy and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
Rudy shrugged helplessly. “What am I supposed to be looking for?” he asked.
Ingold’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing. Just look at the fire. See how it shapes itself.”
“I have looked,” Rudy protested. “And all I see is fire.”
“And what,” Ingold asked tartly, “did you expect to see?”
“Uh—I mean—” Rudy was conscious of having missed the boat somewhere but wasn’t sure where. “I see you watch the fire every night and I know for sure you aren’t just watching wood burn.”
“No,” the wizard said. “And when you’ve been a wizard for fifty years, maybe you’ll see more than that, also. You must love things wholly for their own sake, Rudy, before they will give themselves to you.”
“Sometimes I just don’t understand,” Rudy said much later to Alde, when she’d slipped away from her wagon to sit in the warmth of their shared cloak. “I feel that I should understand all this stuff, but I don’t. I don’t even know what I don’t know—I feel as if I’ve been dumped in the ocean and I’m trying to swim, but it’s a million miles deep. I don’t even know how deep it is.” He shook his head. “It’s crazy. A month ago—” He broke off, unable to explain to this girl, who had grown up knowing kings and mages, that a month ago he would have laughed at anyone claiming to possess such powers.
Her body moved closer to him, her breath a little white mist in the air. Due to the narrowness of the canyons through which the road now wound, the lines of watch fires lay only a dozen paces from the edges of the sleeping convoy, hemmed in by the shoulders of the mountains whose heads were hidden behind towering promontories of granite, furred over with the black of the pine forest. Now and then that day, Rudy had been able to catch glimpses of the higher peaks of the Rampart Range of the Big Snowies gouging the clouds like broken teeth. But mostly he was conscious of the forerunners of that looming range, and the way they overlooked the turnings of the road and hid what lay beyond.
Alde’s voice was comforting. “If the water’s a million miles deep or only six feet, all you have to do is to keep your head above it,” she said. “For an outlander, you’re doing well.” And her arm tightened around his waist.